Wamphyri

Dave Collins, looking on, sighed and said, An hour ago I was a policeman, and now it seems I'm to be an executioner.

It's a unanimous verdict, Dave, Harry reminded him.

And like the Grim Reaper himself, so Dave Collins advanced and took Yulian's hideous head as cleanly as possible, even though he had to strike more than once or twice. After that it was Guy Roberts's turn; he worked on the now silent vampire with roaring, gouting, blistering, cleansing fire until there was really nothing much left of him at all. And he didn't stop until his tanks were empty. By then the dead were dispersing, back to their riven graves.

It was time for Harry to move on. The wind had blown Yulian's fog away, the stench of putrefaction, too, and stars were shining in the night sky. Harry's work was finished here, but elsewhere there was still a great deal to be done.

He thanked the dead, one and all, and found a Möbius door.

Harry was almost used to the Möbius continuum now, but he suspected that most human minds would find it unendurable. For it was always nowhere and nowhen on the space-time Möbius strip; but a man with the right equations, the right sort of mind, could use it to ride anywhere and everywhen. Before that, of course, he would need to conquer his fear of the dark.

For in the physical universe there are degrees of darkness, and Nature seems to abhor all of them much as she abhors a vacuum. The metaphysical Möbius continuum, however, is made of darkness. That is all it consists of. Beyond the Möbius doors lies the very Primal Darkness itself, which existed before the material universe began.

Harry might be at the core of a black hole, except a black hole has enormous gravity and this place had none. It had no gravity because it contained no mass; it was immaterial as thought itself, yet like thought it was a force. It had powers which reacted to Harry's presence and worked to expel him, like a mote caught in its eye. He was a foreign body, which the Möbius continuum must reject.

At least, that was how it had used to be. But this time Harry sensed that things were different.

Previously there had always been this sensation of matterless forces pushing at him, attempting to dislodge him from the unreal back into the real. And he had never dared to let that happen except where or when he desired it to happen, else he might well emerge in a place or time totally untenable. But now: now it seemed to him that those same forces were bending a little, perhaps even jostling each other to accommodate him. And in Harry's unfettered, incorporeal mind, he believed he knew why. Intuition told him that this was his — yes, his metamorphosis!

From real to unreal, from a flesh and blood being to an immaterial awareness, from a living person to — a ghost? Harry had always refused to accept that premise, that he was in fact dead, but now he began to fear that it might indeed be so. And mightn't that explain why the dead loved him so? The fact that he was one of theirs?

He rejected the idea angrily. Angry with himself. No, for the dead had loved him before this, when he was still a man full-fleshed. And that was a thought which also angered him. I still am a man! he told himself, but with far less authority. For now that he'd conjured it, the idea of a subtle metamorphosis was growing in him.

Something less than a year ago he had argued with August Ferdinand Möbius about a possible relationship between the physical and metaphysical universes. Möbius, in his grave in a Leipzig cemetery, had insisted that the two were entirely separate, unable to impose themselves in any way one upon the other. They might occasionally rub up against each other, the action producing reaction on both sides — such as ‘ghosts' or ‘psychic experiences' on the physical plane — but they could never overlap and never run concurrent.

And as for jumping from one to the other and back again.

But Harry had been the anomaly, the fly in Möbius's ointment, the spa

All of that, however, had been when he had form, when he was corporeal. And now? Perhaps now the rule was at last asserting itself, ironing out the discrepancy. Harry belonged here; he was no longer physical but metaphysical, and so should remain here. Here forever, riding the unimaginable and scientifically impossible flux of forces in the abstract Möbius continuum. Perhaps he was becoming one with the place.

Word association: force-flux — force fields — lines of force — lines of life. The bright blue lines of life extending forward beyond the doors to future time! And suddenly Harry remembered something and wondered how it could possibly have slipped so far to the back of his mind. The Möbius strip couldn't claim him, not yet, anyway, because ‘he had a future. Hadn't he seen it for himself?

He could even witness it again if he wished, by simply finding a future-time door. Or perhaps this time it wouldn't be so simple. What if the Möbius continuum should claim him while he traversed time? That was an unbearable thought: to hurtle into the future forever! But no need to take the risk, for Harry could remember it well enough:

The scarlet life-line drifting closer, angling in towards his own and Harry junior's blue threads. Yulian Bodescu, surely?

And then the infant's life-thread abruptly veering away from his father's, racing off at a tangent. That must have been his escape from the vampire, the moment when he'd first used the Möbius continuum in his own right. After that — then there'd been that impossible collision:

That strange blue life-thread, dimming, crumbling, disintegrating, converging with Harry's own thread out of nowhere. The two had seemed to bend towards each other as by some mutual attraction, before slamming together in a neon blaze and speeding on as one thread. Briefly Harry had felt the presence — or the faint, fading echo — of another mind: but then it was gone, extinct, and his thread rushing on alone.

Yes, and he had recognised that dying echo of a mind! Now he knew for sure where he must go, who he must

seek out. And with something less than his usual dexterity, he found his way to INTESP HO in London.

The top floor — self-contained suites of offices, labs, private quarters and a communal recreation room — which comprised INTESP HO were in turmoil. Fifteen minutes ago something had occurred which, despite the nature of the HO and the various talents of its perso

‘It' had been the arrival of Harry Keogh Jnr and his mother.

The first INTESP had known of it was when all the security alarms went off simultaneously. Indicators had shown that the intruder was in the top office, Alec Kyle's control room. No one but John Grieve had been in that room since Kyle flew to Italy, and the place was now secured. There couldn't possibly be anybody in there.

It could be a fault in the alarm system, of course, but and then had come the first real intimations of what was happening. All of INTESP's espers had felt it at the same time: a powerful presence, a mental giant in their midst, here at HO. Harry Keogh?

Finally they'd got the door to Kyle's office open — and found mother and child curled up together in the middle of the office carpet. Nothing physical had ever manifested itself in this way before; not here at INTESP, anyway. When Keogh himself had visited Kyle here, he had been incorporeal, without substance, a mere impression of the man Keogh had been. But these people were real, solid, alive and breathing. They had been teleported here.