Necroscope: The Mobius Murders Read Free

beginning. And with those countless living souls (for that is what they were) approaching the past-time door, passing it by and hurtling on out of sight, the Necroscope felt a certain disorientation, as if he was falling into the heart of some alien galaxy.
    His jaw had fallen open as he gazed and listened. There was nothing of actual sound, but yet he listened ! It was like standing on a dark hill on a warm summer night, miles from the light pollution of town or city, watching meteorites “sizzling” across the sky. They didn’t actually sizzle—of course not, at least not audibly—but only seemed to; for the hiss of their blazing destruction, occurring in the uppermost atmosphere, was all in the mind.
    Similarly and mercifully, these speeding souls were silent; even the thought of the deafening babble of all the voices that had gone before was terrifying! But just like the imagined hiss of the aerolites, so they seemed to emit a certain almost mystical sound—the sighing resonance of an angelic chorus, an interminable, orchestrated Ahhhhhhhhhh!— whose single continuous note existed solely in the Necroscope’s fertile imagination and sounded only in his metaphysical mind…
     

     
    After a brief yet timeless moment, recovering from the spell of the incredible swarming vista that lay before him, Harry concentrated on the task in hand. One of the blue life-threads beyond the past-time door was his own: the trail he had left and continued to leave in times past. It was also the trail he would be obliged to follow—which he couldn’t possibly leave because it was him, his immutable past—if he was intent upon time-travel. Which of course he was.
    He launched himself through the door, mentally reeling himself in along his past-time thread, knowing that what he’d seen in the Möbius Continuum some few minutes less than an hour ago would be mirrored here. And in a few short moments of reversed time there it was, emerging as if out of nowhere on the rim of the Necroscope’s perceptions. That was where the stranger (for Harry no longer considered him an interloper) where his thread had faded and died in the moment before he vacated the Continuum high over the North Sea. But now, reversing that occurrence, the thread came alive in a faintly azure glow.
    This was not the pure, shining, somehow innocent blue of a newly born child; it was the dull, washed-out blue of a fading soul, an expiring life. Yet here it appeared to gain something of colour as it extended itself and sped further back in time. And as Harry controlled his velocity in an effort to match the other’s, so the stranger’s thread became yet more recognizable by virtue of its skittering, irregular, even hag-ridden flight: by analogy, a “mirror-image” of its performance as witnessed by the Necroscope in the Möbius Continuum proper.
    Then with a huge effort of will—and enormous faith in his own extramundane skills—Harry achieved something which he had never before so much as attempted: he flexed his own past life-thread, wielding it like a living whip across the skein of time past and laying it down parallel with the erratic track of the other! And now he sped forward (or rather backward!) and barely “in time” caught up with the whirling thread at the coordinates where its corporeal counterpart had entered the Continuum. This was precisely what Harry had desired to discover: where, and if possible how, such an entry had occurred.
    At which moment something else happened, something he might even have anticipated, when entirely unbidden mutating mathematical equations began scrolling down the screen of his innermost mind: fluxional symbols that duplicated almost exactly the Necroscope’s own formula for calling into existence a Möbius door! Indeed, the formulae were so similar that he was almost tempted to believe that somehow, however involuntarily, subconsciously, he had brought these continuously mutating equations into being himself!