Free Necroscope: The Mobius Murders by Brian Lumley Page B

remain of them: their dregs, if you’ll forgive me for putting it that way. And that’s the kind of creature I think I’m up against.”
    A very terrible man! she said then. A monster! Some kind of hideous mutation!
    “That’s right,” the Necroscope agreed. “Even as the Mongolian Max Batu was a mutation, with his evil eye; and as I myself am a mutation…well, of a sort. It’s a matter of genetics, I suppose.”
    You have my genes, Harry , she answered at once, but you are not a monster! You must never think that way!
    “Oh, I don’t!” he replied. “Not for a moment…but it’s a safe bet there are plenty of people who would think that way if ever I was found out! I mean, I talk to dead people, Ma!”
    Yes, and as I’ve said, we would do almost anything for you. You’re the one light in our darkness, Harry! But now you should go and do whatever you can to put this thing right.
    Knowing she would sense it, he nodded and said: “Thanks for all your help, Ma. Just talking to you helps sort things out—and we’ll definitely talk later.”
    With which he stepped back into the cover of the tall hedge bordering the river path and conjured a door, and just a moment later was gone from that place…
     

     
    …Back into his living room, which doubled as his study despite the lack of clutter and disorder such offices all too frequently display. There was a desk and chair, plus Harry’s easy chair; a shelf with a handful of books: an illustrated Atlas of The World too tall for the shelf and therefore laid flat; a fat Webster’s Dictionary and updated Thesaurus ; three leather-bound mathematical treatises, which the Necroscope had discovered and bought cheaply in an Edinburgh used bookshop just off the Royal Mile, and various bits and pieces of bric-a-brac: a large conch here, an hourglass whose sands had long since solidified there, but that was all. Simply a drab and rather dusty room, (for the Necroscope wasn’t much good at housekeeping) but still a familiar room, containing nothing much to distract or preoccupy him, where he could relax and think things through, work things out.

With heavy curtains drawn across the glazed patio doors, in the pool of yellow light cast by a table-lamp’s circular shade, Harry slumped down in his chair, gradually immersing himself in that which any normal mentality must surely consider a drifting maze of abstruse and esoteric numbers—but not merely numbers, not as ordinary men are given to understand such.
    With his eyes half shut, it was as if Harry floated through some vast and cosmic brain’s neural pathways, a labyrinth whose walls and whorls were composed of continuously evolving symbols and equations, ciphers and numerals, algebraic and decimal permutations, logarithmic computations and complex calculuses that strove to explain and manipulate all of the constantly changing quantities. In effect and in mathematical terms, the Necroscope was adrift in an as yet incomplete interpretation of the entire space-time universe! But he knew that these were patterns—the very DNA of existence—which only God Himself could ever bring to a conclusion or summation, because God alone was the author, the Ultimate Mathematician.
    August Ferdinand Möbius had been here before Harry, it went without saying; but even Möbius, Harry’s mentor, would not have been able to interpret one quarter of what was hidden or hinted at here. Unlocking the formula to the Möbius Continuum had been his greatest achievement, but even so he’d been obliged to wait until he was dead. For death had set his mind free to solve the many problems that had eluded him in life. And he was out there even now, Harry felt sure, still working on his Grand Theory of Everything.
    But that’s how it was with the Great Majority: what so many of them had done during worthwhile lives they continued to do in death or until they moved on…and perhaps even then. But the Necroscope was very much alive, and he’d