‘And Brenda? Sandra? Penny? Am I cursed or blessed . . .?
‘I had a million friends, which would be fine except they were all dead! They “lived” in a dimension beyond life, where I could still talk to them and they could still remember what it was to have been alive.
‘There are many dimensions, planes of existence without number, worlds without end. The myriad cone-shaped universes of light. And I know how they came about. And Möbius knew it before me. Pythagoras might have guessed something of it, but Möbius and I know\
‘Let there be . . .’ (He screwed up his tightly closed eyes.) ‘Let there be . . .’ (Great slugs of sweat oozed out of his shuddering lead-grey body.) ‘Let there be . . .’
Until Karen could stand his pain – for this could only be pain – no longer. And clutching him where he writhed upon her bed, she begged him: ‘Let there be what, Harry?’
‘Light!’ he growled, and his furious eyes shot open, aglow with their own heat.
‘Light?’ she repeated him, her voice full of wonder.
He struggled to sit up, gave in and let himself sink down into her arms. And he looked at her, nodded and said, ‘Yes, the Primal Light, which shone out of His mind.’
Harry’s eyes had always been weird, even before his vampire stained them with blood, but now they were changing from moment to moment. Karen saw the fury go out of them, then the fear, and watched fascinated as all alien vitality – even the very passion of the Wamphyri -died in them. For with only one exception the Necroscope was the first of his sort to know and believe.
‘His mind?’ Karen repeated him at last, wondering at the softness of his face, which was that of a child.
‘The mind of … God?’ Even now Harry couldn’t be absolutely certain. But near enough. ‘Of a God, anyway,’ he finally told her, smiling. ‘A creator!’
And inside him, instinctively aware of looming defeat, his vampire shrank down and was small, and perhaps bemoaned its fate: to be one with a man who desired only to be … a man.
6
Sky Fight!
From then on the Necroscope had been different; his parasite’s ascendancy had been reversed; once again his humanity had the upper hand. Karen to the contrary: she tried to insist that he accompany her on raids into Sunside to ‘blood’ himself. Naturally he would hear nothing of it, and she would be furious.
‘But you’re not blooded!’ she’d growl at him as they made love. ‘There’s a frenzy in the Wamphyri which only blood will release, for the blood is the life! Unless you take, you may not partake in your fullness. You must fuel yourself for the fight, can’t you see that? How may I explain?’
But in fact there was no need for explanations; Harry knew well enough what she meant. He’d seen it in his own world. In boxers, the moment they draw blood: how the first sight and smell of it inspires them to greater effort, so that they go at their opponents with even more determination, and always hammering away at the same wet, red-gleaming spot. He’d seen it in cats large and small: the first splash of mouse-blood which turns a kitten to a hunter, or drives the hunter to a frenzy. And as for sharks: nothing else in all the unexplored span of their lives has half so much meaning for them!
But: ‘I’ve eaten well,’ he would answer.
And: Hah! he would hear her mental snort of derision. Of what? The flesh of pigs, and roasted? What’s that for fuel?’
‘It fuels me well enough.’ ‘And your vampire not at all!’
‘Then let the bastard starve!’ But he would never allow himself the luxury of greater anger than that.
Sometimes, he would try to explain:
‘What’s coming is coming,’ he told her. ‘Didn’t we see it in the Möbius Continuum, in future time? Of all the lessons of my life, Karen, this is the one I’ve learned the best: never try to change or avoid what’s written in the future, for it is written. All we can hope for is a better understanding of the writing, that’s all.’