The Mobius Murders

by Brian Lumley

  The thing grew; various parts began to interact; the mutations came faster and faster until, afraid of letting some small but significant detail slip past him, Harry slowed the process down. And finally the formula he had sensed at the scene of the crime and the structure he was building coincided, equation for equation and solution for solution—

  —And there it was, full-fleshed however malformed, inelegant: the Möbius murderer’s device!

  Freezing it in position, then conjuring into being his own formula alongside in order to compare them, Harry was now able to detect the structural differences and so determine the weapon’s abilities and limitations. He had already experienced and was aware of some of the former, and his dear Ma and the Great Majority had supplied at least one clue to the latter: the fact that the unknown monster’s victims—the so-called “whisperers”—all seemed to end up in more or less the same place. And now he could see why.

  While Harry’s own formula, his mathematical “spell,” was fit for purpose, offering him total control as an adept, there were several stipulations and unwieldy spatial regulations governing the other. One such variable, which at first sight appeared to fit the picture perfectly, in fact controlled inalienable space-time coordinates, vectors and distances. The formula would, and indeed had, created doors of a sort; but where Harry had previously illustrated its use by analogy, the motor car which he had envisaged was suddenly other than a blunt instrument: it was in fact a catapult! Not only was the car minus a steering wheel, it had no brakes, there were no internal handles on its doors, and as surmised it had only one fixed destination or “target.” Once aboard you couldn’t get out until the car’s sudden stop spilled you through a metaphorical windshield into space at that preordained, invariable location over the grey North Sea!

  But surely it wasn’t designed this way? Not even its creator could use it without suffering its constraints—not that he was ever likely to attempt such a thing! For even if he brought into being another door while hurtling down half a mile of thin air, still it could only return him to the selfsame place; such was its nature. Or…had it indeed been fashioned this way by the great leech with only one monstrous use in mind—as an aid to mathematical murder?

  Everything else that the Necroscope had pictured, building to his discovery of the weapon, was gone now from his thoughts, leaving only the device in question as he concentrated upon it, examining its structure ever more closely. Was it possible, he wondered, to redesign it? Could this “car” be customized?

  Harry had never before imagined himself as a creator, only as a rediscoverer of what was already known, that which August Ferdinand Möbius had already discovered. But now he found himself wondering: could he perhaps change this thing, shaping it anew? But why not? However exotic, it was only a flawed formula, and the ingredients (or components) of formulas are rarely immutable. They can be altered to either weaken or improve them; without which there would be no such thing as chemistry, no theoretical physicists, and indeed no sciences, except perhaps of the psychological and immaterial.

  The device was now fixed firmly and permanently in Harry’s mind, and as well as his own more perfectly functioning conjurations, he believed he should now be able to call this one into existence just as easily. To prove it he erased the thing, then at once recalled it into being—and its alien door along with it!

  With something of a shudder (Harry couldn’t help but remember the hellishly greedy and ruddy face of this thing’s author) he closed the door but held the formula in position, unwavering in his mind. There, no problem! But as for changing, rearranging it…

  He tweaked it: deleted an unnecessary equation here, added an infinitesimal fluxion there, came close to ruining the thing before just as quickly stabilizing it. It was flexible, if only within its own mathematical parameters. And as Harry worked, so the truth began to dawn on him: that this formula had been come upon in error or by accident; that its creator had perhaps inadvertently fashioned something of a Möbius door which, being its maker, he had then seen or sensed as whatever problem he’d been working on crystalized and the dimensional interface—the door itself—had materialized (or immaterialized?) into being for the first time.

  Which meant that the genetic mutation that made this loathsome killer the freakish vampire that he was had probably been accompanied and complemented by an intuitive grasp…an intuitive grasp of…of the power…the power of numbers!

  Why of course! It was surely so! And the Necroscope was at once at odds with himself that he hadn’t immediately understood what was now so obvious to him: that the great leech was also a hugely talented mathematician! Or maybe he had been aware of it from the start (he made an effort to excuse himself) but was so engaged, so close to the case, that this yet more serious facet had failed to properly register: the fact that the Möbius monster was also a master of eccentric numbers!

  But since the fat man had obviously already experimented in this area with some success, what was to stop him from carrying on? What if he discovered a formula he could more readily control, one he could use as well as abuse? What if, eventually, he stumbled upon Harry’s, or more properly Möbius’ formula itself? And now Harry felt wholly justified in finding excuses for himself, for patently he had realized the full gravity of the case, quite apart from the need to identify a murderer and bring him to justice.

  Hadn’t he explained to Darcy Clarke why he couldn’t be more specific about the problem, that being because he hadn’t wanted to jeopardize his own special skills? Perhaps that oblique reference with its far greater significance had been indicative of his true appreciation of the situation. Not so much that he was being protective of his talents—though of course he was—but rather that he wouldn’t let them fall into the wrong hands; and especially not the fat and bloody hands of the Möbius murderer.

  For if that were to happen…

  …Now how in hell would one go about apprehending someone like that? Harry wondered, alarmed at the very concept. A human leech with the wild talents (at least some of them) of the Necroscope himself? A creature who could disappear into the Möbius Continuum at will, and return a moment later to suck one’s soul out and send one’s shrinking corpse on a one-way journey to the bottom of the deep blue (or grey) North Sea? And what’s more, a murderous mutant freak who wouldn’t hesitate to do so!

  The more Harry considered it, the more unsettled he became. But having imagined horrors that didn’t bear thinking about, he was now finding it hard to concentrate on anything else and was becoming physically and mentally weary. Yet despite feeling tired and disinclined, discouraged, he nevertheless returned to tweaking the still ungainly foreign formula.

  This wasn’t just another example of his usual tenacity, but something that was taking shape in the back of his subconscious mind: the itchy wriggling of a developing embryonic notion that might well prove to be very important. Call it a hunch, but the Necroscope was an advocate of hunches, oneiric predictions, and precognition. Indeed, there were at least two precogs among his former E-Branch colleagues, and on rare occasions Harry himself had experienced a small handful of vague, enigmatic glimpses of the future. Also, he knew the anecdotal story of the 19th century German chemist Kekule von Stradonitz, who allegedly deduced the structural formula for benzine while asleep! And ever since standing by the tomb of Möbius in Leipzig Harry had also been a confirmed adherent of extinct German scientists and their work. But with his esoteric talents, how could it be otherwise?

  Enough—suffice it to say he would never casually disregard any such concept, however unorthodox or unconventional. But in any case the current itch at the back of his mind was barely tactile, almost intangible. And yet…

  …And yet he sensed that it concerned that previously noted variable coefficient, the one that controlled space-time coordinates. With his head beginning to ache, he looked at it again. It was a variable; it could be altered to determine a fantastic number of coordinates; it just happened to be (but did not have to b
e) fixed upon just the one, that windblown window high over the North Sea with its terrible half-mile plunge to a premature oblivion.

  With regard to the formula’s misuse, however, as the principal tool in the Möbius monster’s modus operandi, it was possible that just a single location had been considered sufficient, at least for the time being. Or perhaps this malignant creature was not entirely aware of what he’d stumbled across here; maybe he had not, as yet, studied it to such an extent that he understood its full potential.

  And with that thought in mind the Necroscope was even more determined that the great leech must never be given the opportunity to explore the thing that far, or indeed any further…

  The sound of an approaching motorcycle, unusual in this more or less moribund, out of the way district—a sound terminating in a loud backfire—startled Harry from morbid introspection. He was at first surprised to find that the soft yellow glow of the table-lamp seemed suddenly to have strengthened; the result, he quickly realized, of the gloom that had not so suddenly descended. And a glance at his watch verified the fact that, entirely unaware of the passage of time, he’d been working on the heterogeneous formula for several hours!

  There came a knocking at the back door of the house.

  Harry’s orientation, his sense of place to the contrary, he had always considered his living-room in the quarter of the old house that faced the river to be at the front, and the opposite elevation, bordered by a crumbling pavement in a short deserted street of sorts, to be the rear. Now, with everything mathematical banished temporarily from his mind, he got up and made his way through the house along a wide, dark corridor to the “back” door, opening it to a helmeted, uniformed policeman—a courier—whose motorcycle now stood idle at the kerb.

  “Mr. Harry Keogh?” inquired that one, mispronouncing Keogh and, without waiting for a reply, handing Harry a stiff-backed, slightly larger than A4 manila envelope with neither an address nor any return address.

  Harry took it, checked both blank sides, and said, “From?”

  “I’ve no idea, sir.” The other shrugged apologetically. “I just deliver stuff, that’s all—but important stuff, usually. I can tell you this much: it was wired in from London about an hour-and-a-half ago, and could only be handled by a senior officer—which is why it’s taken so long to reach you. It arrived at the Bonnyrig police post, and we had to call someone in from the city.”

  “Ah, yes!” said Harry. “I think I know what this is. Thanks a lot.”

  “You’re very welcome, sir.” With which the courier returned to his motorcycle, kick-started it, made a tight turn, and rode off along the bumpy potholed street, back the way he’d come and into the deepening dusk.

  From E-Branch, Harry nodded to himself, taking the envelope back to his study and switching on the main light. Darcy Clarke with my list…and from its weight not much of a one at that.

  Seated at the table, he opened the envelope and removed the A4 envelope that was inside it. This one bore his name and address plus a red “For Your Eyes Only” sticker. Inside there were five sheets of paper covered with an alphabetical list of names, some of them only forenames, nicknames, or aliases, each of the latter identified by a “pseudo” prefix and highlighted in luminous yellow. There were some eight or nine names to a sheet, all with approximate ages, sketchy descriptions, previous haunts or workplaces, “last seen ats”…and etcetera. Similarly accented in yellow, the particulars of those persons missing from the Edinburgh region were brought at once to Harry’s attention despite the alphabetical system.

  It appeared Darcy Clarke had done a thorough job here, and the Necroscope was obliged to reconsider his initial impression that this wasn’t going to be much of a list. If anything it was too much of a list, but at least the illuminated sections would make searching through it a lot easier. That would have to wait until a good night’s sleep had brought him back up to scratch.

  Before that, however with E-Branch and Darcy fresh in mind, Harry called the HQ in London. In answer to his call, the Night Duty Officer informed him that “the boss” had shut up shop for the day and gone home.

  “I’ll try again tomorrow,” Harry told him, then changed his mind, called Darcy’s home number and got him on the second ring.

  “Harry, is that you?”

  “How did you know?” he asked, knowing full well the answer. “What, another nervous twinge? That has to be very off-putting, but in your line of work I imagine it happens a lot.”

  “Yes, far too often,” the other replied ruefully. “And when you are involved, always!”

  Harry couldn’t help but laugh, but sympathetically. “Maybe you should consider yourself lucky I got out of E-Branch when I did,” he said. “Or I’d be there most of the time and you’d find your guardian angel keeping an even closer eye on you!”

  “Ah!” Darcy answered, much too eagerly. “That’s an entirely different matter, Harry! And as I’ve said before, and recently, any time you want my job, or you just want to freelance for us, all you have to do is—”

  “Forget it,” the Necroscope cut him off, shaking his head. “Nothing’s changed, Darcy, or not much. I’ve still got problems of my own. At least one problem, anyway—the same big problem as before—which is why I’m calling you again.”

  “Oh!” Darcy replied, his disappointed tone implying a great deal more than that one small exclamation. “I supposed it might be so, but you can’t blame me for trying.”

  Harry appreciated the fact that the Head-of-Branch would do almost anything to have him back; but since that was out of the question, he changed the subject and said: “Anyway, I think you can ignore your twinges because just like before this shouldn’t involve you personally, or not that much. Okay?”

  “Go ahead,” said the other.

  “Okay, this is what I want you—er, what I would like you—to do for me.” He paused to give it a moment’s thought, then went on: “You see, Darcy, things have moved on, started to come together since I asked you for this list; which just got here a couple of minutes ago, by the way, and thanks for that. But now there’s more. Perhaps you can get on to somebody at the Branch, get him working on it overnight…a job for the Duty Officer, maybe?”

  “I’ll see what I can do. But what is it you need, Harry?”

  “This murderer I’m looking for…maybe I can describe him for you, at least something of a description. He’s a fairly big man, maybe five eleven, and he’s bulky, even fat. He has a piggish, somehow greedy face, small eyes, and reddish hair. He’d be somewhere between thirty-five, forty-fiveish. Oh, and most importantly, he has to be some kind of intellectual—a scientist, maybe?—and a mathematician, definitely! His IQ has to be way beyond the reach of your average schoolmaster! And that’s about it, Darcy. For the time being, there’s nothing more you need to know, nothing more I can tell you…”

  For a few moments the other was silent, then said: “I suppose you’re aware that this, too, is something of a tall order, Harry? I mean, a heavy-set, pig-faced scientist or mathematician? It’s a bit vague, don’t you reckon? Why, if memory serves I might have had one of those myself, during my last few years in allegedly higher education. Not that it got me any higher!”

  The Necroscope sighed and said, “Yes, I know it’s not much to go on. But I do have someone, or ones, other than the Branch searching for this beast, and I still have a couple of ideas of my own to work on. But I can’t overemphasize just how important this is, Darcy, and not only to me and his victim or victims. If I don’t find and stop him soon, he’ll pose a terrible threat to everyone eventually…and I do mean everyone! Look at it this way: can you imagine how bad things could get if I were some kind of murdering psychopath? That should give you some idea of the kind of power this creature could end up controlling. Which really is all I want to say about it at this time…”

  There was another brief pause before Darcy replied: “You’ve already said more than enough, Harry…in fact you’ve just now put some very ter
rible pictures in my head, sufficient that I’m going to get right on it! So any kind of help we can give you—anything at all—as of right now you know you’ve only got to ask and you’ll get it.”

  “Yes, I’m sure of that, Darcy,” said Harry. “I always have been.” And he put the ’phone down…

  Harry glanced at the list again, just glanced at it, then took a couple of aspirins, showered, and went to bed. It wasn’t very late, but he was tired and apart from his headache his mind was already full of information he’d be perfectly happy to do without; except he knew he had to retain it, because it was invaluable.

  He tossed and turned for a while; turned things over in his head, too, as the ache slowly subsided, and finally fell asleep—at which it was just like last night all over again, with the added aggravation of an endless series of mathematical (or more properly kabbalistic) incantations or invocations, calling into being a phantasmagoria of improbable formulae. And behind these myriad numerical evolutions—like some vast and burning screen on which the equations danced—the great leech’s fat red devilish face grinned repulsively, while his evil eyes seemed fixed on the invisible Necroscope as if sensing him there!

  And even asleep and nightmaring, Harry thought:

  When I find him and we meet, it won’t come as a surprise to him, or not a very big one, and I won’t have much of an advantage. He’s seen me before, albeit fleetingly, but actually meeting me, seeing me in the flesh, has got to set alarm bells ringing. He’ll remember me! And then, if he has his way…then it will be my turn!

  As is prevalent in unruly dreams, such thoughts as that can work as invocations in their own right. This time they conjured up an all-too-familiar alien door, through which Harry tumbled, immediately finding himself back in the Möbius Continuum, shrivelling to a mummy and already three-quarters dead as he hurtled toward his doom half-a-mile over the grey North Sea!