‘But I did know him.’ Scanlon shrank down in his seat. ‘He was my friend. It will be like murder!’
‘A Pyrrhic killing, yes.’ Kellway put it his way. ‘But is it really? You have to remember: Harry Keogh, Jordan and their kind . . . they could murder our entire world!’
‘Yes.’ Scanlon nodded. ‘That’s what I keep telling myself. That’s what I have to keep telling myself.’
In the Möbius Continuum, Johnny Pound’s unthinkable knife was like a lodestone: it pointed in Pound’s direction. Rather, Harry’s locator talent pointed the knife, and he simply followed where it led.
Penny clung to him with her eyes closed; she had looked once, but that had been enough. The darkness of the Möbius Continuum seemed solid. That was because of the absence of everything material, the absence even of time. Where there is NOTHING, however, even thoughts have weight.
It’s a kind of magic, she whispered, as much to herself as to anyone.
No, the Necroscope answered, but you can be forgiven for thinking it. After all, Pythagoras thought it, too. At which point, expert in the ways of the Möbius Continuum that he was, Harry sensed a cessation of motion and knew he’d found Found.
Forming a Möbius door and looking through, he saw a hedgerow paralleling a ribbon road that stretched into the distance straight as a ruler. Vehicles thundered by on the metalled surface, their lights strobing the bushes of the hedgerow into a flickering kaleidoscope of yellow, green and black. And even as Harry watched, so the Frigis Express truck whoofed by.
A short Möbius jump took them a mile farther down the road, where they exited inside a catwalk spanning the Al’s multiple lane system. And a minute later Harry said: ‘Here he comes.’
They gazed down through the walkway’s windows, watched the Frigis Express truck thunder by beneath them to rumble on down the road. As its lights diminished and merged with those of the rest of the night traffic, Penny asked, ‘What now?’
Harry shrugged and checked their location. ‘Borough-bridge is a mile or two further south,’ he said. ‘Johnny might stop there or might not. In any case, I don’t intend to monitor his progress mile by mile; but I do know that somewhere along the line he’ll call a halt, probably at an all-night diner. That’s his modus operandi, right? It’s his venue, the hunting ground where he finds his victims; women, on their own, in the dead of night. Except … I don’t have to tell you that, do I?’
Penny shuddered. ‘No, you don’t have to tell me that.’
They looked around. On one side of the road was a petrol station, on the other, a diner. Harry said, ‘I’m happy now that I can find Johnny any time I want him. So let’s take a break for a coffee, OK? And I can maybe explain something of how I want to play it.’
She nodded and even managed a shaky smile. ‘OK.’
They headed along the walkway towards steps leading down to the cafeteria. People were coming up the steps, heading down to the petrol station and its car park. Before they could climb up to the walkway’s level, Penny grabbed Harry’s arm. ‘Your eyes!’ she hissed.
Harry put on his dark glasses, then took her hand. ‘Lead me,’ he said. ‘You know, like I was a blind man?’ It wasn’t a bad idea. From then on, in the cafeteria where a handful of travellers were eating, people only looked at them once and quickly looked away.
It’s a funny thing, Harry thought, but people don’t much look at someone with an affliction. Or if they do, they look sideways. Hah! They’d jump sideways if they knew the nature of my affliction!
But they didn’t.
Not all of them, anyway . . .
On the bank of the river some little way from Bonnyrig, Ben Trask and Geoffrey Paxton stood in the dark of the night under the moon and stars and listened to the gurgle of blackly swirling waters. They ‘listened’ for other things, too, but heard nothing. And they watched.
They watched the old house across the water – the house of the Necroscope, with all its lights ablaze – watched it for movement behind the open, ground-floor patio doors, for shadows falling on the fabric of the curtains in the upper windows, for any sign of life … or absence of life, undeath. And watching it they fingered their weapons: Trask his sub-machine-gun, with a magazine of thirty 9mm rounds seated firmly in its blued-steel housing, and Paxton his metal crossbow, loaded with a hardwood bolt under pressure sufficient to hammer through a man like a nail into softwood.