Necroscope

Quickly, in terror of the Unknown, he stepped back from the door and once more into darkness. 'Am I going to die?' he asked then. 'Is that what you're telling me, showing me?'

'Yes - ' said the time-travelling mind of Igor Vlady ' -and no.'

Again Harry failed to understand. 'I'm about to pass through a Mobius door to the Chateau Bro

In answer he sensed a nod. 'But if you were to use the future-time door,' said Vlady, 'you could go on beyond the end of your thread - to where it begins again!'

'Begins again?' Harry was baffled. 'Are you saying I'm to live again?'

'There's a second thread which is also you, Harry. It lives even now. All it lacks is mind.' And Vlady explained his meaning; he read Harry's future for him, just as he once read Boris Dragosani's. Except that where Harry had a future, Dragosani had only a past. And now, at last, Harry had all the answers.

'I owe you my thanks,' he told Vlady then.

'You owe me nothing,' said Vlady.

'But you came to me just in time,' Harry insisted, little realising the significance of his words.

'Time is relative,' the other shrugged, and chuckled. 'What will be, has been!'

'Thanks, anyway,' said Harry, and passed through the door to the Chateau Bro

At 6:31 p.m. exactly, Dragosani's telephone came janglingly alive, causing him to start.

Outside it was dark now, made darker by snow falling heavily from a black sky. Searchlights in the Chateau's outer walls and towers swept the ground between the complex itself and the perimeter wall, as they had swept it since the fall of dark, but now their beams were reduced to mere swaths of grey light whose poor penetration was of little or no consequence,

Dragosani found it a

None of which gave Dragosani any real sensation of security; Igor Vlady's predictions had ignored all such protections. In any case, the call did not come from the pill-boxes or the fortified perimeter: the men in their defensive positions were all equipped with hand radios. This call was either external or it came from a department within the Chateau itself.

Dragosani snatched the handset from its cradle, snapped, 'Yes, what is it?'

'Felix Krakovitch,' a trembling voice answered. 'I'm down in my lab. Comrade Dragosani, there's... some­thing!' Dragosani knew the man: a seer, a minor prognosticator. His talent wasn't up to Vlady's standard by a long

shot, but neither was it to be ignored - not on this of all nights.

'Something?' Dragosani's nostrils flared. The man had put an eerie emphasis on the word. 'Make sense, Krakovitch! What's wrong?'

'I don't know, Comrade. It's just that... something's coming. Something terrible. No, it's here. It's here now!'

'What's "here"?' Dragosani snarled into the phone. 'Where, "here"?'

'Out there, in the snow. Belov feels it, too.'

'Belov?' Karl Belov was a telepath, and a good one over short distances. Borowitz had often used him at foreign embassy parties, picking up what he could from the minds of his hosts. 'Is Belov there with you now? Put him on.'

Belov was asthmatic. His voice was always soft and gasping, his sentences invariably short. Right now they were even more so: 'He's right, Comrade,' he gasped. 'There's a mind out there - a powerful mind!'

Keogh! It had to be him. 'Just one?' Dragosani's once-sensitive lips curled back from a mouthful of white daggers. His red eyes seemed to light from within. How Keogh had come here he couldn't say, but if he was alone he was a dead man - and to hell with that traitor Vlady's predictions!

On the other end of the line, Belov fought for air, struggled to find a means of expression.

'Well?' Dragosani hastened him.

'I ... I'm not sure,' said Belov. 'I thought there was only one, but now -'

'Yes?' Dragosani almost shouted. 'Damn it all! - am I surrounded by idiots? What is it, Belov? What's out there?'

Belov panted into the phone at his end, gasped, 'He's... calling. He's some sort of telepath himself, and he's calling.'

To you?' Dragosani's brows knitted in baffled frus­tration. His great nostrils sniffed suspiciously, anxiously, as if to draw the answer from the air itself.

'No, not to me. He's calling to ... to others. Oh, God - and they're begi