On the third Wednesday in May at 3:30 in the morning, he paid a visit to Frigis’s main office in London to have a look at the company’s books. He went there via the Möbius Continuum, making several stops at well-known exit points before finally emerging in a shop doorway in Oxford Street. At that hour the normally polluted air was almost wholly free of traffic fumes and even bracing, and the night-lighting loaned the street a certain alien luminosity. Large, lethargically flapping pages from a discarded, dismembered newspaper fluttered like strange slow birds on buffets of blustery air along the gutters.
The offices Harry was looking for were directly opposite; no lights showed within the building; he hoped there’d be no night watchman to complicate matters. And there wasn’t.
Entering the building by the Möbius route, Harry let his burgeoning vampire instincts guide him to the correct floor and then to the records office. Locked doors were no trouble at all to the Necroscope, who used numbers to conjure doors of his own out of the thin air. But twice, purely out of habit, he went to switch on lights before realizing that he no longer had need of them; and once he came face to face with a full-length mirror, which both shocked and fascinated him with its picture of a gaunt-faced man with luminous, red-tinged eyes. He had known of course that the change was taking place in him, but only then realized how quickly it was happening. It filled him with mixed emotions and alien longings; it was the night and the mystery, and the going in strange places, as if in search of prey. Well, and so he was. Except there is prey and there is prey . . .
The records office was dirty and untidy, and smelled of strong coffee and stale cigarette smoke. It had an antiquated system of filing cabinets, all open for Harry’s inspection. He quickly turned up a list of branch and depot managers, but no information on rank-and-file employees. There was, however, a list of addresses and telephone numbers of all Frigis Express’s subsidiary offices, which Harry pocketed. That should save him a little time, at least. But that was all there was, which was hardly satisfactory.
Disgruntled, Harry pondered over his next move: presumably to start at the top of the list of branches and work down it. But then, out of nowhere, he found himself wondering if maybe Trevor Jordan was up and about. He could use a cup of coffee, a little companionship and friendly conversation, someone . . . to be with – briefly, anyway – if only to work the weirdness out of his system.
It was unlikely Jordan would be awake, but just on the off chance Harry reached out with his telepathic mind and searched for him – and immediately found him.
Harry? Jordan’s unmistakable ‘voice’ sounded in Harry’s mind as clearly as if he’d whispered the words in his ear. Is that you?
Harry found telepathy similar to and yet quite different from deadspeak. He had used something like it before – a sort of reverse deadspeak, he supposed – but that had been quite a few years ago in his incorporeal days and also very different. Telepathy was therefore new to him. Even so, still it struck him as being . . . more natural? Well, and he supposed it was more natural. For after all, almost anything in the world would be. But telepathy: it was something like a telephone conversation, even down to the hiss and crackle of psychic ‘static’; whereas dead-speak was the wind whistling eerily down a bleak desert canyon under a full, floating moon. In short, it was the difference between talking mind-to-mind with living people, and conversing metaphysically with dead ones.
And yet Jordan had seemed wary, unsure of Harry’s identity and even unwilling to reveal his own. Just why that should be the Necroscope couldn’t guess. He frowned and asked, Who else would it be, Trevor?
And hearing his voice, Jordan knew him at once. But his mind-sigh (of relief?) warned Harry that something was very wrong. Likewise what he said next: Harry, you know my old place in Barnet? That’s where I am. But I can’t say for how long. I’d like to get out of here. I don’t want to explain right now – it mightn’t even be safe to – but do you think you could get round here? I mean, like now?