No, you don’t see, Harry, his mother contradicted him. He won’t be speaking to you because he won’t be there . . . I mean here. He, too, has somewhere else to go, or believes he has. Anyway, he talked about a lot of things I didn’t much understand: space and time, space-time, the cone-shaped universes of light? I think that covers everything. And he said your argument left one big question unanswered.
‘Oh?’
Yes. The question of the . . . ius Continuum itself. He said. . . thinks . . . knows what it is. He said. . . was . . . mind . . . She was breaking up, her deadspeak scattering, for the last time, Harry knew.
‘Ma?’ He was anxious.
Möbius . . . said . . . was . . . The Mind, Harry . . .
‘The Mind? Ma, did you say The Mind?’
She tried to answer but couldn’t quite make it. All that came back was the faintest of all far-distant, fading whispers.
Haarrry . . . Haaarrrry . . .
Then silence.
Paxton had read the Necroscope’s case-files and knew quite a lot about him. Most of it would seem unbelievable, to people of entirely mundane persuasions. But of course Paxton wasn’t one of them. On the far bank of the river, he watched Harry through a pair of binoculars and thought: The strange sod’s talking to his mother, a woman dead for quarter of a century and long since turned to slop! Jesus! And they say telepathy is weird!
Harry ‘heard’ him and knew that he’d been eavesdropping on his conversation with his mother; on Harry’s part of it, anyway. And suddenly he was furious, but coldly furious, not like the other night. And again Faéthor’s words of advice sprang to memory: ‘He would enter your mind. Enter his!’
Paxton saw the Necroscope step behind a bush and waited for him to come out on the other side. But he didn’t. Taking a leak? the esper wondered.
‘Actually, no,’ said Harry softly, from directly behind him. ‘But when I do I’d like to think it’s in private.’
‘Who – ?’ The mindspy whirled about, stumbled, staggered on the very rim of the river. Harry reached out easily and caught the front of his jacket, steadied him, grinned an utterly mirthless grin at him. He looked him up and down: a small, thin, withered-looking stick of a man in his middle to late twenties, with the face and eyes of a weasel. His telepathy must be Old Ma Nature’s way of making up for several sorts of deficiency.
‘Paxton,’ Harry said, his voice still dangerously soft, a hot breath squeezed out of burning bellows lungs, ‘you’re a scum-sucking little mind-flea. I reckon that when your father made you the best part leaked from a ruptured rubber down your Ma’s leg onto the floor of the brothel. You’re a scumbag bastard who has invaded my territory, stepped on my toes and is making me itch. And I have every right to do something about you. Don’t you agree?’
Paxton flapped his mouth like a landed fish, finally got his breath and his nerve back. ‘I … I’m doing my job, that’s all,’ he gasped, trying to free himself from Harry’s grip. But the Necroscope just held him there at arm’s length – held him that much tighter – with no real expenditure of energy at all.
‘Doing your job?’ He repeated Paxton’s words. ‘Who for, scumbag?’
‘That’s none of your busin – ‘ Paxton started to say.
Harry shook him, glared at him, and for the first time the esper noticed a flush of red light colouring the Necroscope’s gaunt cheeks where it escaped from behind the thick lenses of his dark glasses. An angry red light – from his eyes!
‘For E-Branch?’ Harry’s voice was lower still, a rumble, almost a growl.
‘Yes – no!’ Paxton blurted the words out. Soft as jelly, all he wanted now was to get away from here; to that end he’d say anything at all, the first thing that came to mind. Harry knew it, could read it in his pale face and trembling lips; but where lips may lie the mind usually tells the truth. He went inside, scanned it all and more, and got out again like squelching from the sucking quag of a sewer. Even through the acrid odour of Paxton’s fear, still he’d been able to smell the shit.