It was time for Jordan to leave Harry, and he knew it. To leave him for good and merge back into the mundane world of ordinary men. Oh, the telepath knew he could never more be truly mundane, for he had seen the other side and returned from it. But he could try. He could work at it, work into it, gradually forget that he had been – God, he couldn’t bear the thought of the word even now! – that he had not been alive, and eventually become just another man again, albeit one with a talent. And when Harry was well out of it and fled into that other world which Jordan could scarcely imagine, then he might even return to the Branch. If they would take him back. But of course they would want to be sure about him first. They would want to check that he was who and what he was supposed to be.
But the trouble was (and Jordan knew now that this must be the source of his nightmare) that he couldn’t be sure he would be the same person. For if Harry’s awful metamorphosis continued to accelerate . . .
Harry!
Jordan sucked air gaspingly as telepathic awareness of the Necroscope suddenly flooded his being. The sensation was like being doused with ice-water, causing his whole body to shudder violently. Harry, out there somewhere, across the river. Harry, listening to Jordan, to his thoughts. But how long had he been there?
Only a minute or two, in fact. And he had not been eavesdropping on Jordan but telepathically checking the vicinity of the house. He had detected something of Jordan’s fears, however, which did precious little to calm the beast which raged within him, denied expression when he’d fled from the two policemen watching Johnny Pound’s flat.
The reason Harry chose to emerge from the Möbius Continuum into the bushes on the far side of the river and not directly into the house was simple: when he’d read the minds of those plain-clothes policemen in Darlington, he’d plainly seen that they were expecting him. Indeed, someone had told the man with the gun that Harry might be dangerous. Obviously E-Branch must have alerted them to the possibility of him showing up. So … whatever Darcy Clarke had told the Branch about him, it hadn’t cut any ice. They weren’t having any.
And if they were looking out for him in Darlington, plainly it wouldn’t take long before they were doing it here, too. He’d scared off Paxton (for the moment, anyway) but Paxton was only one of them and untypical of the species. So from now on he would have to check locations very carefully before venturing into what were previously ‘safe’ places. It all went to reinforce the Necroscope’s feeling of claustrophobia, a doom-laden sensation of space – Möbius space included – narrowing down for him. To say nothing of time.
And now, to discover that Trevor Jordan was also afraid of him, of what Harry might do to him … it was too much.
The dead – even Möbius himself – had turned against him; his mother had become worn out and left him; there was no one in the world, neither alive nor dead, who had anything good to say on his behalf. And this was the world, and the race, which he had fought so long and so hard for. Not even his own race. Not any longer.
Harry stepped through a Möbius door into a dark corridor of the house across the river and silently commenced to climb the stairs to his own bedroom. Suddenly he was tired; his cares seemed too great; sleep would be curative, and … to hell with everything! Let the future care for itself.
But Jordan’s voice stopped him when he was only halfway up the first flight: ‘Harry?’ The telepath looked up at him from the foot of the stairs. Trevor Jordan, who could read the Necroscope’s mind as easily as Harry read his. ‘I … shouldn’t have been thinking those things.’
Harry nodded. ‘And I shouldn’t have overheard you. Anyway, don’t worry about it. You did your bit for me and did it well, and I’m grateful. And it won’t be so bad being alone, for I’ve been alone before. So if you want to go, then go – go now! For let’s face it, I’m losing more and more control to this thing, and leaving now might be the safest thing to do.’