There were doors he could conjure, certainly, a million million doors leading to all places and all times, but he knew that most of these places and times would be totally lethal to him. No use, like Mobius, to emerge in some distant galaxy in deep space. Harry was not merely a creature of mind but also of matter. He had no desire to freeze, or fry, or melt, or explode.
The problem, then, was this: which door?
Harry’s dive through Mobius’ tombstone might have
carried him a yard or a light-year, he might have been here for a minute or a month, when he felt the first tentative tug of a force other than the rejection forces of this hyperspace-time dimension. Not even a tug, as such, it was more a gentle pressure that seemed to want to guide him. He’d known something like it before, when he’d tracked his mother under the ice and come up in her pool beneath the overhanging bank. There seemed nothing of a threat in it, anyway.
Harry went with it, following it and feeling it intensify, homing in on it as a blind man homes in on a friendly voice. Or a moth on the bright flame of a candle? No, for his intuition told him that whatever it was there was no harm in it. Stronger still the force bobbed him along this parallel space-time stream, and like seeing a light at the end of a tunnel, so he sensed the way ahead and began to will himself in that direction.
‘Good!’ said a distant voice in Harry’s head. ‘Very good. Come to me, Harry Keogh, come to me . . .’
It was a female voice, but there was little of warmth in it. Thin, it keened like the wind in the Leipzig graveyard, and like the wind it was old as the ages.
‘Who are you?’ Harry asked.
‘A friend,’ came the answer, stronger now.
Harry continued to will himself towards the mental voice. He willed himself . . .that way. And there before him, a Mobius door. He reached for it, paused. ‘How do I know you’re a friend? How do I know I can trust you?’
‘I asked that same question once,’ said the voice, almost in his ear. ‘For I too had no way of knowing. But I trusted.’
Harry willed the door open and passed through.
Stretched out in his original dive, he found himself suspended maybe three inches above the ground, and fell – then clung to the earth and hugged himself to it. The
voice in his head chuckled. ‘There,’ it said. ‘You see? A friend . . .’
Dizzy and feeling sick, Harry gradually withdrew his fingers from loose, dry soil. He lifted his head a fraction, stared all about. Light and colour struck almost physical blows on his reeling vision. Light and warmth. That was the first impression to really get through to him: how warm it was. The soil was warm under his prone body, the sun unseasonally warm where it shone on his neck and his hands. Where on God’s earth was he? Was he on Earth at all?
Slowly, still dizzy, he sat up. And gradually, as he felt gravity working on him, so things stopped revolving and he uttered a loud ‘Phew!’ of relief.
Harry wasn’t much travelled or he’d have recognised the terrain at once as being Mediterranean. The soil was a yellowy-brown and streaked with sand, the plants were those of scrubland, the sun’s warmth in January told of his proximity to the equator. Certainly he was thousands of miles closer to it here than he’d been in Leipzig. In the distance a mountain range threw up low peaks; closer there were ruins, crumbling white walls and mounds of rubble; and overhead –
A pair of jet fighter planes, like speeding silver darts against the pure blue of the sky, left vapour trails as they hastened towards the horizon. Their thunder rolled down over him, muted by distance.
Harry breathed easier, looked again towards the ruins. Middle-Eastern? Probably. Just some ancient village fallen victim to Nature’s grand reclamation scheme. And again he wondered where he was.