experience, was missing. But not for long.
Brenda, attempting to protect her infant son from the incredible nightmare which was Yulian Bodescu, had been tossed aside by the vampire. Unconscious, she had not seen the final confrontation. Thinking back on that scene in the flat now, Harry remembered it as vividly as if it were yesterday:
The two Harrys had looked out through the infant's eyes into the face of terror itself, the face of Yulian Bodescu. Crouched over the baby's cot, the leering malignancy of his eyes spoke all too clearly of his intentions.
Finished! Harry had thought. All done, and it ends like this.
No, another voice, not his own, had spoken in his mind.
No, it doesn't. Through you I've learned what I had to learn. I don't need you that way any more. But I do still need you as a father. So go, save yourself.
It could only have been one person speaking to him, doing it now, for the first time, when there was no longer any time to question the hows and whys of it. Then… Harry had felt the child's restraints falling from him like broken chains, leaving him free again. Free to will his incorporeal mind into the safety of the Mobious Continuum. He could have gone, right there and then, leaving his son to face whatever was coming. He could have gone — but he couldn't!
Bodescu's jaws had yawned open like a pit, revealing a snake's tongue flickering behind gleaming dagger teeth.
Go! little Harry had said again, with more urgency.
You're my son! Harry had cried. Damn you, I can't go! I can't leave you to this!
Leave me to this? It had been as if the infant couldn't follow his reasoning. But then he had, and said: But did you think I was going to stay here?
The beast's taloned hands were reaching for the child in his cot. Little Harry had seen the lust in the monster's eyes; he turned his small round head this way and that, seeking a Mobius door. A door had appeared, floating up out of his pillows. It was easy, instinct, in his genes. It had been there all along. His control over his mind was awesome; over his body, much less certain. But he'd been able to manage this much. Bunching inexpert muscles, he'd curled himself up, rolled into and through the Mobius door. The vampire's hands and jaws had closed on thin air!
After that it had been all up for Yulian Bodescu. Harry had not called up the dead from the local graveyard, but his son had. For the dead had learned to love this child who talked to them, who had talked to them even from the womb! They loved him even as they loved and trusted his father; and if Harry Jnr was in trouble, that was all the incentive they needed to move limbs stiffened by death, to will back into pseudolife tissues and sinews long turned to leather and ravaged by the worm.
They had pinned the vampire down, staked him out between their own yawning graves, lopped his harshly screaming head from his body and burned him to ashes. And Harry Snr, no longer imprisoned but once more master of the Mobius Continuum, had watched them do it and instructed them when they faltered.
Later… Harry had discovered that his infant son had not only saved his own life but also removed his unconscious mother from danger. The child had used Mobius or Zollnerist metaphysics to move both himself and Brenda to a place of safety — indeed, to the safest possible place: E-Branch HQ in London! And Harry had been left to pursue his own destiny and inhabit the shell of the once-Alec Kyle.
This he had done, and in the process destroyed the KGB's new toy, the Soviet ESPionage centre at the Chateau Bronnitsy.
After that… it should have been a time for relaxation, a time to pause and take stock, make adjustments, realign lives. But the staff of E-Branch, jubilant over their triple success — the elimination of Yulian Bodescu, the termination of residual vampire sources abroad, and the destruction of Russia's KGB-corrupted esper corps — hadn't fully appreciated the stresses Harry and his family had suffered. Now that the job was done they wanted the entire thing pegged out, mapped, recorded, studied and more fully understood; and the only man who understood all of it was Harry. For a month he gave them what they wanted, even considered taking on the job of Director of E-Branch; but over that same period of time it had become increasingly apparent that all was not well with Brenda. As Harry's mother had so recently pointed out, there was hardly any mystery that anyone could attach to that; indeed Brenda's breakdown was only to have been expected, might even have been anticipated.
After all, she'd only recently become a mother and was still recovering from an uncomfortable confinement and difficult birth. Indeed, for a little while the doctors had thought they'd lost her. Add to this the fact of her husband's talent (that he was a Necroscope) which she had known and which had preyed on her mind for months; the fact that her infant child seemed to possess similar and even more frightening powers, so that even in the midst of E-Branch men, who were themselves ESP-endowed, he was looked upon as something of a freak; the fact that Harry was now (literally) a different person, a person who was Harry, with all of his past, his memories and mannerisms, but living in a total stranger's body; the fact of the absolute terror she had endured through that night, face to face with the monster Yulian Bodescu, whose like she couldn't possibly have imagined even in her worst nightmares…
Little wonder the poor girl's mind had started to give way under the strain! On top of all of which she hated London and couldn't return to Hartlepool; her old flat was poison to her now, where monstrous memories dwelled. And gradully, as her mental connections with the real world were eroded, so her visits to various specialists and psychiatric clinics increased — until one morning she and the baby…
They'd gone!' Harry said it out loud. 'They weren't there. They weren't anywhere that I've been able to discover. And what gets to me most is that there was no warning, no hint. He simply up and took her… somewhere. And you know, he never spoke to me? After that first time in the flat, when Yulian Bodescu almost had us, he never once spoke to me! He could have; he'd look at me in that way babies have, and I knew he could have spoken to me. But he never did.' Harry sighed, shrugged. 'So maybe he blamed me, too. Maybe they both did. And who can say they weren't right to blame me? If I hadn't been the way I was — '
'Oh?' his mother was angry now. She didn't like the tone of self-pity which had started to creep into Harry's voice. Where was all that quiet strength he'd used to have? 'If you hadn't been what you were? And Boris Dragosani still alive in Russia? And Yulian Bodescu, spreading heaven-only-knows what evil through the world? And the myriad dead, cast off and forgotten, lost and lonely, thinking their dead thoughts forever in the cold earth and never knowing that they weren't really alone at all? But you've changed all that, Harry. And there's no way back. Hah! If you weren't what you are, indeed!'
He nodded to himself, thinking that of course she was right, then picked up a pebble and tossed it in the water so that its ripples shivered his image into ribbons. 'Still,' he said as his face slowly reformed. 'I'd like to know where they went. I'd like to be sure they're OK. Are you certain, Ma, that you haven't heard anything?'
'From the dead? Harry, there's not one of us who doesn't want to help. Believe me, if Brenda and little Harry were… with us, you'd be the first to know of it. Wherever they are, they're alive, son. You can rely on that.'
He frowned and tiredly rubbed at his forehead. 'You know, Ma, I can't figure it out. If anyone could find them it has to be me. And I haven't even found a trace of them! When they disappeared, I got those people at E-Branch on it. They couldn't find them. A couple of them even approached me cautiously with the idea — and with a little sensitivity, you understand — that maybe Brenda and the baby were dead. By the time I handed the job over to Darcy Clarke six months later, everyone seemed sure they were dead.
'Now E-Branch has people who could find anybody anywhere — spotters who can pick up psychic emanations on the other side of the world — but they couldn't find my son. And little Harry's talent was far and away greater than mine. But your people,' (he was talking about the Great Majority, the countless dead) 'they say they're alive, that they have to be alive because they don't number amongst the dead. And I know that none of you would ever lie to me. So I think to myself: if they're not dead, and they're not here where I can find them — then where the hell are they? That's what's eating away at me.'
He could sense her nod, feel how sad she was for him. 'I know, son, I know.'
'And as for physically searching for them — ' he went on, as if he hadn't heard her, ' — is there anywhere in this world where I didn't look? But if E-Branch couldn't find them, what chance did I stand?'
Harry's mother had heard all of this before. It was his obsession now, his one passion in life. He was like a gambler hooked on roulette, whose one dream is to find 'the system' where none exists. He'd spent almost five years searching, and nearly three more planning the various stages of the search. To no avail. She had tried to help him every step of the way, but so far it had been a long, bitterly disappointing road.
