The Mobius Murders

by Brian Lumley

  Necroscope®: The Möbius Murders Copyright © 2013

  by Brian Lumley. All rights reserved.

  Dust jacket and interior illustrations Copyright © 2013

  by Bob Eggleton. All rights reserved.

  Print version interior design Copyright © 2013 by Desert Isle Design, LLC.

  All rights reserved.

  Electronic Edition

  ISBN

  978-1-59606-657-1

  Subterranean Press

  PO Box 190106

  Burton, MI 48519

  www.subterraneanpress.com

  Returning from Las Vegas and his adventure with Dead Eddy, the Necroscope Harry Keogh experienced a disturbing, extraordinary thing. Most extraordinary, even for the likes of Harry Keogh.

  The metaphysical Möbius Continuum was Harry’s, or so he had always thought; the fact of its existence and the means of calling it into being, into use, belonged to him exclusively…at least among living men. For to be more precise it also belonged to the man who had first discovered and used it—after he had died: the brilliant German mathematician and astronomer, August Ferdinand Möbius, whose name Harry had seen fit to bestow upon it and who, for several years now, had used it to go…elsewhere, probably exploring alien galaxies! And in addition there had been a brief period when the Continuum belonged to at least one other, a mere child…but that is a tale already told.

  Yet now—in the space of a few “moments” that only seemed to pass in the otherwise timeless Continuum—as the Necroscope sped between Vegas and Edinburgh in silence, impenetrable darkness, and utter weightlessness—now it appeared that someone else had discovered a means of invading Harry’s domain.

  The vague figure that went hurtling momentarily across his path emitted a blue glow, the pure blue of a human being; which in itself wasn’t bad, despite that Harry’s being able to see it was a strange new experience. Had it been red, that would have been very bad! It would have indicated the presence of a dreadful creature in the Möbius Continuum: a vampire, and as such a deadly foe!

  Previously, Harry had not been aware of this ability: to be able to discern another’s passage through the Continuum. He had known that he gave off a faint blue radiance in what to him was the more familiar region of this mathematical dimension, but except for his irregular visits to parallel but entirely separate Möbius time-streams he had not realized he would be able to observe the presence of anyone else; at least, not at a distance. And the reason for this was simply because the opportunity, or contingency, had never before arisen.

  But that aside, this interloper had been in a hurry. His or her headlong rush had managed to convey not only the impression of great haste but also a pin-wheeling and impotent flailing of spastic limbs; so that his panic-flight had seemed entirely uncontrolled. And such was Harry’s astonishment, the abrupt shock of this unheard-of invasion of his territory, that for a moment (where there were no moments except in his own mind,) thrown into confusion by what he had seen, he simply continued along his way. And by the time, the merest blink of an eye, it had taken him to appreciate the fact of this unique occurrence, the anomaly had passed beyond his visual range and disappeared: a blue meteorite across the ultimate, infinite void of the Continuum.

  Also and stranger still, there had been sound: a snuffling, a whimpering, a soft sobbing. As if the interloper had not been aware that in the Continuum the softest whisper has volume, and even thoughts have weight that makes them “audible.” As for the latter, however: the Necroscope had “heard” nothing—though it now dawned on him that he had sensed, however briefly, a nerve-tingling rush of terror! For this strange traveller in what was an even stranger metaphysical medium, he or she had been totally terrified!

  Harry willed a change in direction, tried to match the path of the unknown other, went plunging after him or her, whomever. But no use; the unhappy, possibly helpless interloper had gone. And on the furthest rim of the Necroscope’s awareness he sensed the blue glow extinguished, a human life appearing to blink out as its owner departed from the Continuum and returned to normal space-time.

  Then, on the off-chance that he might be able to follow it to an earthly destination, the Necroscope brought himself to an abrupt halt at coordinates calculated as being as close as possible to the location of the disappearance, where he also exited from the Continuum—

  —To emerge into grey daylight and bitter winds that whipped at his clothing somewhere over the drab North Sea, where in the near-distance but far below the mist- and rain-blurred outlines of an oil rig’s legs reared their platform from a choppy ocean!

  Obviously Harry had miscalculated; he was either completely mistaken or the unknown other had been bent on self-destruction, suicide! Half a mile high but instantly falling, spinning face-down in classical sky-diver mode, the Necroscope half-shuttered his eyes against the sting of damp rushing air and scanned what lay below him: nothing but low scudding clouds and a thin mist on the turbulent sea.

  The Necroscope let himself fall—through clouds and mist both—until the waves were clearly visible and their jostling audible. A wasted effort; all he saw was the vast sprawl of the bitter ocean with neither living being nor floating corpse anywhere in sight, though it was barely possible that in his singular mind he sensed the chill silence of a watery grave…

  That last however was unlikely. For normally there would be at least an echo of bewilderment and even disbelief, until finally the reality of a continuation of sorts—even after death—formed in the incorporeal mind of someone suddenly no longer alive.

  Harry might have tried to make contact—to see if in fact there was someone there, sinking in the depths of the sea—but with mere seconds to spare he was obliged instead to conjure a Möbius door directly beneath his hurtling body. Darkness formed and he fell into it, through it, and back into the Continuum.

  And then, perplexed and disturbed as rarely before, he took the shortest route back to his lonely house west of the City of Edinburgh…

  Several years ago, at a time when Harry had been a mere novice in Möbius matters, when defending himself against the agents of a foreign power who had intended to capture or kill him, he had consigned an evil man to an eternity of hell in the Möbius Continuum. Well perhaps not to eternity, which is a very long time as men understand it; but in the Möbius Continuum time—if it exists at all—is of an entirely different order. And if that unfortunate Counter Espionage Agent of the East German Grenzpolizei, if he yet remained in the Möbius Continuum—if it hadn’t rejected and ejected him, like an especially injurious irritant from the mind of a god—then by now he must surely be a raving madman in his impossibly vast, dark and empty and utterly incomprehensible cell.

  But…the Mind of God? Since that time Harry had frequently pondered that question. Was the Möbius Continuum the region in which God had ordained light—the Big Bang, perhaps?—at the beginning of space, time and an ever expanding universe? If so, then in the Continuum itself time had remained conjectural. Perhaps the genius Albert Einstein had sensed something akin to this when he remarked that “The distinction between past, present, and future is an illusion, although a persistent one.”

  The Mind of God.… And now Harry pondered it again.

  Was the very subject blasphemous, he wondered? Surely not, for if it was then why was he allowed entry, with his esoteric, open sesame mathematics? Still, and remaining on the safe side, while he often thought about it he had always left the thought unspoken. And anyway, who can control his thoughts?

  But all of that was when the Necroscope was unique, before his infant son had inherited the Continuum, finally using it to steal away with Harry’s lost love, Brenda, the wife who couldn’t abide the transition that Harry had suffered; also before thi
s latest occurrence: the coming—and going—of some possibly suicidal or misadventuring interloper.

  And now Harry’s mind was back on track.

  But this was how it was with him: always, in confrontations with the weird and mysterious, the Necroscope’s mind would spin off in every direction in search of hidden answers. And he knew that this time it would be the same, that this was important, a mystery he must either solve or suffer for long and long—and not being much for suffering, already he was impatient…

  Harry called Bonnie Jean Mirlu, his love of loves—a beautiful moon-child or werewolf—at her wine bar in Edinburgh. For she would probably be expecting to see him tonight and he might not be available.

  “Bonnie Jean,” he said, when finally she answered the telephone. “It’s Harry, and I’m sorry to disturb your beauty sleep. Not that you need it.”

  “Flatterer!” she at once replied. “And anyway, I’m just up. We’ve a party tonight in B.J.’s. A private party—after hours, ye ken—and there’s stuff I should be attendin’ tae.”

  A private party? Harry breathed a quiet sigh of relief. She didn’t like him around when they had a party going. He believed he knew why…but that was a line of thought he couldn’t continue—could never investigate—because a deep-rooted post-hypnotic command, implanted by the she-wolf herself, always got in the way. And anyway there were things he really did not want to know; or so he told himself, blind to the fact that his easy acceptance was also a part of what she’d put in his head.

  “Well then,” he replied, “that works for me because there’s business I must attend to also.”

  “Oh aye? And what sort o’ business would that be, Harry?”

  “Just business.” He shrugged and knew she would sense it.

  “Wi’ they special friends o’ yours in London, perhaps?”

  “Possibly. I’m looking for the answers to something—but nothing you need worry about.”

  “A clue tae the whereabouts o’ yere wife and child, maybe?”

  “No, B.J.” He shook his head, knowing she would sense that, too. “I’m tired of searching for them. Oh, I would if there was anything promising to go on, but there isn’t. And you know, the only reason I look for them at all is that I can’t help feeling responsible. I just want to know that they’re okay, that’s all, and not in need of anything. The baby is mine, after all.”

  “Yes, I know.” B.J. dropped the Edinburghian accent and her low, husky voice took on a more sober and serious tone. “You’re a very responsible man, Harry. So then, when should I expect to see you?”

  “Oh, soon, I’m sure!” he at once replied. “Possibly as soon as tomorrow night…that’s always assuming you won’t be at it again. Partying, I mean.”

  She chuckled, and her accent immediately returned. “No, not tomorrow, Harry. Not unless we do some partyin’ o’ our own, you and me, once the bar’s closed and my girls are off home.”

  “Is that a promise?” He allowed himself a rare grin.

  “Be sure it is,” she answered , her voice a low growl. “More than a promise, it’s a guarantee! After the nicht the moon will be on the wane, and I’ll be mainly free o’ all urges. Well, except for that yin: yere pale sweet body entwined wi’ mine. Then we’ll ride like the wild wind ’til we’re spent, so we will!”

  Harry’s voice was likewise husky when he replied: “I’m sure of that. But B.J., watch what you say, else I’ll be getting off this phone with a hard-on!”

  “Oh, aye?” she laughed. “Well just leave yeresel’ alone, ye hear? Save it for me, Harry. Save it for yere Bonnie Jean…”

  It was just past midday, and the Necroscope sat in an old easy chair looking out through open patio doors into his wildly overgrown garden. Beyond the garden gate a path, also rank, and beyond that a bank over the swirls and eddies of a gently flowing river. The scene was serene, but it hadn’t always been that way. For this was the river which had taken Harry’s dear Ma, drowned under the bitter ice at the hands of a maddened Russian husband, murdered by Harry’s stepfather.

  Harry had been a child then, but as a man he’d returned and evened the score. His first kill, which hadn’t seemed like murder at all. Since when there had been—oh, many kills, perhaps too many—of men and monsters, and by men and monsters alike. But suicides? Never a one that he could remember. And certainly not in or by way of the Möbius Continuum. If it was suicide.

  But if not suicide, what then? Misadventure? Somehow Harry didn’t think so. Neither suicide nor misadventure.

  He thought back on the sighting:

  It had been so very brief, and yet had seemed to convey so much more than its brevity allowed for to Harry’s metaphysical mind. The flailing of useless spastic limbs; the soft sobbing; the gradual dimming like a flame guttering, before finally going out, dying. And now at last he remembered: that indeed the blue glow of the stranger’s track across the infinite vault of the Möbius Continuum had been a fading one, so much so that at the point of egress it had actually blinked out, died!

  And its owner with it…?

  The Necroscope had often seen just such darkenings or dimmings before; not in the more familiar Continuum, as previously explained, but along the parallel Möbius time-streams. And what were those myriad, incorporeal blue threads flowing and expanding along the future time-stream? Nothing less than the psychic echoes of people in the “real world,” which inevitably blinked out where they terminated in accidental death, fatal diseases, war fatalities, or simple old age—

  —Or suicide, or murder, of course.

  It might be considered morbid, Harry supposed, to be secretly privy to the aging and decline and passing of so many fellow members of humanity. But maintaining a balance, the Möbius time-streams were even more filled with beginnings. He had witnessed the blindingly brilliant blue star-bursts of thousands of brand new lives in the births of future generations. And suddenly inspired, uplifted by that thought—also with an idea in mind—he determined there and then to pay another visit to the Möbius time-streams.

  Getting up from his chair he stepped out through the patio doors into the afternoon garden, and for a moment bathed in the wan sunlight. It was good to feel Sol’s warmth on his face, for the sun and its softly glancing beams were his friends; but the moon and the night were even moreso. So the Necroscope had come to believe since meeting and falling for B.J. Mirlu. It was all part of her allure, of course, similarly implanted in his mind. For the moment, however, he must put thoughts of her aside. She had her own agenda, always, and right now so did Harry.

  The making of Möbius doors—of bringing such into being, unseen or acknowledged by anyone but himself—had long since become a matter of utter simplicity, no longer an effort worth mentioning. The Continuum’s esoteric and to anyone else highly conjectural mathematical formulae were ever there, barely submerged in the Necroscope’s percipience, as if just waiting for him to summon them up.

  Summoning them now, he opened a hole in the otherwise impenetrable surface of the four-dimensional universe, and without further pause stepped through it.

  Darkness—timelessness—weightlessness! But to Harry it was simply familiar. And fearless, he sensed it surrounding him and felt entirely at ease. The Möbius Continuum was his and his alone among living men. Or rather, it had used to be.

  Eager to get on with his investigations, he called into being a door to the past time-stream, and just for a moment gazed out through it before entering. And once again, as ever before, as the Necroscope floated on the threshold of the open door, he was transfixed by the awesome wonder and beauty of what lay beyond it—

  —The dazzling, brilliant evolution of all humanity, lit by myriad blue life-threads: a vast whirlpool of light, narrowing down in its centre, distantly and finally (or originally?) converging, coming together maybe two-and-a-half-million years ago in a sapphire core that was mankind’s beginning. And with those countless living souls (for that is what they were) approaching the past-time door, passing it by a
nd 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.