Meanwhile, the Chateau’s emergency call-in system had worked well. Dragosani had all the men he had asked for and half-a-dozen more. They manned machine-gun posts on the outer walls, similar batteries in the outbuildings, also the fortified pill-boxes built into the buttresses of the Chateau itself. ESPers ‘worked’ down below in the laboratories, in surroundings best suited to their various abilities and talents, and Dragosani had turned Borowitz’s offices into his tactical HQ.
The Chateau had been searched, as per his orders, top to bottom; but as soon as he had learned of Keogh’s escape he had called a halt to that; he had known where the trouble must originate. By then the lower vaults of the place had been explored to the full, floorboards and centuried flagstones had been ripped up in the older buildings, the foundations of the place had been laid bare almost down to the earth itself. Three dozen men can do a lot of damage in three hours, particularly when they’ve been told that their lives may well depend upon it.
But what enraged Dragosani most of all was the thought that all of this was on account of just one man, Harry Keogh, and that utter chaos had been forecast in his name. Which meant quite simply that Keogh wielded an awesome power of destruction. But what was it? Dragosani knew he was a necroscope – so what? Also, he had
seen a dead thing rise up from a river and come to his aid. But that had been his mother and the location had been Scotland, thousands of miles away. There was no one here to fight Keogh’s battles for him.
Of course, if Dragosani was so worried by all of this he could always flee the place (the trouble was scheduled for the Chateau Bronnitsy and nowhere else), but that just wouldn’t be in his own interest. Not only would it smack of utter cowardice, it wouldn’t fulfill Igor Vlady’s prediction – his prediction that the vampire in Dragosani would die this night. And that was one prediction Boris Dragosani desired fulfilled above all others. Indeed it was his ambition, while his mind was still his own to crave for it!
As for Vlady himself – the call-in squad had found a note at his place which explained his absence, a note intended for his fiancée. Vlady would call for her soon, the note said, from the West. Dragosani had been delighted to put out the traitor’s description to all relevant points of egress. Nor had he given him any quarter: he was to be shot on sight, in the name of the security of the mighty USSR.
So much for Vlady, and yet … would he have fared any better here? Dragosani wondered about that. Had he, Dragosani, terrified Vlady that much, or had it been something else he’d fled from?
Something he’d seen approaching, perhaps, out of the very near future.
Chapter Sixteen
It was as Harry had suspected it would be: beyond the Mobius doors he discovered the Primal Darkness itself, that darkness which existed before the universe began.
It was not only the absence of light but the absence of everything. He might be at the core of a black hole, except a black hole has enormous gravity and this place had none. In one sense it was a metaphysical plane of existence, but in another it was not – because nothing existed here. It was simply a ‘place’, but a place in which no God as yet had uttered those wonderful words of evocation, ‘Let there be light!’
It was nowhere, and it was everywhere; it was both central and external. From here one might go anywhere, or go nowhere for ever. And it would be for ever, for in this timeless environment nothing ever aged or changed, except by force of will. Harry Keogh was therefore a foreign body, an unwanted mote in the eye of the Mobius continuum, and it must try to reject him. He felt matter-less forces working on him even now, pushing at him and attempting to dislodge him from the unreal back into the real. Except he must not let himself be pushed.