Necroscope: The Mobius Murders Read Free Page A

Almost tempted to believe it, but not quite. For there were subtle differences.
    Harry knew instinctively that unless he found time to study this new formula more closely, he might well be hard pressed to pin these differences down; but right now, sensing that a door was about to open, there was little or no time for that!
    As best he was able, before the foreign formula took effect and shrank back into whichever mind had conjured it, Harry took mental note of its apparent irregularities and attempted to fix them in the back of his own mind. Hopefully he would be able to recall these anomalies as and when required. But now the door—an “alien” door, as he considered it—was warping into existence to one side of him and almost within touching distance.
    It formed into being, an interface between the “real” world of three dimensions and the Continuum’s time-streams, but by no means any kind of exit. And anyway, Harry would never attempt a departure from a previous time into the real world, for if that were at all possible it would mean duplicating and perhaps annihilating one or both of himselves! But he believed he might be able to use such a door more properly as a window on times past, which was precisely why he had taken such pains to be here. And in another moment it became apparent that he was not mistaken.
    Beyond the door, as viewed through a tenuous mist, the Necroscope saw two male figures, the closest with his back to the door—as if unaware that it was there—and the other facing the door but somewhat obscured by the first figure, whose owner was perhaps physically disadvantaged; he was leaning heavily to the right, and shuffling from side to side in order to keep his balance. Small and slim, this one’s rather ragged clothing appeared to hang loosely on him. The other was tall, fat and pale-faced, with red, receding hair and flabby chin; his plumpish fingers were visible where they grasped the seemingly disabled figure’s slumped shoulders, apparently holding him steady.
    They were engaged in conversation; the fat man’s lips were moving, but Harry could hear nothing. He took note, however, of a poster on the corner of a brick wall directly behind the disparate pair: an advertisement for the Edinburgh festival, which was due to commence in a week’s time. All of which was seen but dimly, made vague and nebulous by the flux of time on the Necroscope’s side of the door; whereas on the far side time ran true.
    But as Harry narrowed his eyes, to focus more surely on the scene beyond the door, what happened next was anything but nebulous and he saw it all too clearly.
    The fat man wasn’t holding the other steady after all; his fingers suddenly tightened on the thin man’s threadbare jacket, taking a firmer, preparatory grip on him—and without further warning those fat hands pushed!
    In no way suicide, but murder most foul!
    As the disabled man staggered backwards through the Möbius door, he instantly morphed from a human figure to a blue luminescence, his parallel life-thread in the time-streams: a thread that was already fading, pulsating and wavering, and—but what the hell was this?—even shrivelling , as it began to die out!
    There in the silence of past time Harry could hear nothing at all, not even a thought. But as the doomed man’s life-thread went plummeting from sight, snatched off into a brief, terrible future by the time-stream, he recalled only too well the whimpering and sobbing he had heard previously in the Möbius Continuum proper, and his blood ran cold…
    At that moment the Necroscope could have let go, could have stopped holding his position in time and followed on behind, if only out of pity…which would have changed nothing, achieved nothing, since he had already been there and the immutable past was over and done with. But now that his view of this fat murderer and the scene of his crime was no longer obscured—except by the mistiness caused by the temporal tide on