The mathematician’s words and their delivery had riveted Harry. And I can do the same? Is that what you’re saying?
I’m saying that the other places are like levels, some of which are higher and some lower. And what we do here determines the next step. We go up or down.
Heaven or Hell?
Möbius shrugged again. If it helps you to think of it like that.
You mean that when I move on, I can leave my dark side – maybe even my vampire – behind me?
While there’s a difference, yes.
A difference?
While we may still distinguish between you.
You mean if I don’t succumb?
I have to go now, said Möbius.
But I have to know more! Harry was desperate.
I was allowed to come back, Möbius said, simply. But I am not allowed to stay. My new place is higher, Harry. I really can’t afford to lose it.
Wait! Harry tried to stir himself, sit up and take hold of Möbius’s wrist. But he couldn’t move and anyway, it would be like trying to grasp smoke. And like a set of his own esoteric formulae, the great man mutated into nothingness and was gone . . .
If anything Möbius’s visit had wearied Harry even more than before. He drifted deeper into sleep. But his vampire-influenced mind was full of a certain name, which tormented him and wouldn’t let him be. And the name was Johnny Found.
Harry was a telepath; he had a quest, a task which he must finish; and he had a vampire in him. When he had gone to face Faéthor Ferenczy’s bloodson Janos in the mountains of Transylvania, the Ferenczy had warned him that only one of them would come out of it alive, and that the winner would be a creature of incredible power. Janos had read the future, seen the same thing, known he couldn’t lose. Except . . . one should never try to understand the future. Read it if you must, but don’t try to understand it. Harry had been the one who came down out of the mountains. And though he didn’t yet have the measure of his powers – especially his most recent acquisition, telepathy – still they were incredible. They had been incredible before, but now, with the booster which was his vampire . . .
Dreaming, he no longer had control over his talents, which were active nevertheless. Dreams are the clearinghouses of the mind, where the balance is kept, the cutting-room where all the junk and trivia of life are discarded and the meaningful set in order. That is the function of men’s dreams. That and wish fulfilment. And also, for anyone with a conscience, the elevation of suppressed guilt. Which is why men sometimes nightmare.
Harry had his share of guilt, and more than sufficient of desires requiring fulfilment. And what he himself had failed to put in order during his waking hours, his subconscious self – and the vampire which was part of it – would try to put in order while he slept.
His enhanced awareness spread outwards from him to form a telepathic probe which, in a moment, unerringly, leaped all the miles to its target in Darlington. For that target was the sleeping mind of Johnny Found, a mind with a talent as weird as it was warped. Which Harry desired to know about.
And with the sinister guile of the vampire, he need only hint, suggest, propose, strike this chord or maybe that, and with any luck at all Johnny Found would tell him.
All of it …
Johnny was dreaming, too, of his childhood. This wasn’t something he would do voluntarily, but a night spectre kept rapping on the door of childhood memories and demanding that he open it.
Childhood memories? Oh, he had them, but he wouldn’t say they were worth remembering or dreaming about. Which was why he didn’t. Usually.
He tossed a little in his bed; his subconscious mind moaned and went to take up a hammer to nail shut the door to his past; something pushed the hammer aside, beyond his reach, and Johnny could only watch helplessly as the door creaked open. Inside, all the Bad Things of yesterday were waiting for him: the many small crimes he had committed, and the range of punishments and penalties he’d been made to pay for them. But he’d been a child then and innocent (so they said) and would soon grow out of it; and only Johnny himself had known he wouldn’t ever grow out of it, and that they’d never be able to find punishments severe enough to fit his crimes.