The beast’s taloned hands were reaching for the child in his cot. Little Harry had seen the lust in the monster’s eyes; he turned his small round head this way and that, seeking a Mobius door. A door had appeared, floating up out of his pillows. It was easy, instinct, in his genes. It had been there all along. His control over his mind was awesome; over his body, much less certain. But he’d been able to manage this much. Bunching inexpert muscles, he’d curled himself up, rolled into and through the Mobius door. The vampire’s hands and jaws had closed on thin air!
After that it had been all up for Yulian Bodescu. Harry had not called up the dead from the local graveyard, but his son had. For the dead had learned to love this child who talked to them, who had talked to them even from the womb! They loved him even as they loved and trusted his father; and if Harry Jnr was in trouble, that was all the incentive they needed to move limbs stiffened by death, to will back into pseudolife tissues and sinews long turned to leather and ravaged by the worm.
They had pinned the vampire down, staked him out between their own yawning graves, lopped his harshly screaming head from his body and burned him to ashes. And Harry Snr, no longer imprisoned but once more master of the Mobius Continuum, had watched them do it and instructed them when they faltered.
Later . . . Harry had discovered that his infant son had not only saved his own life but also removed his unconscious mother from danger. The child had used Mobius or Zollnerist metaphysics to move both himself and Brenda to a place of safety – indeed, to the safest possible place: E-Branch HQ in London! And Harry had been left to pursue his own destiny and inhabit the shell of the once-Alec Kyle.
This he had done, and in the process destroyed the KGB’s new toy, the Soviet ESPionage centre at the Chateau Bronnitsy.
After that… it should have been a time for relaxation, a time to pause and take stock, make adjustments, realign lives. But the staff of E-Branch, jubilant over their triple success – the elimination of Yulian Bodescu, the termination of residual vampire sources abroad, and the destruction of Russia’s KGB-corrupted esper corps -hadn’t fully appreciated the stresses Harry and his family had suffered. Now that the job was done they wanted the entire thing pegged out, mapped, recorded, studied and more fully understood; and the only man who understood all of it was Harry. For a month he gave them what they wanted, even considered taking on the job of Director of E-Branch; but over that same period of time it had become increasingly apparent that all was not well with Brenda. As Harry’s mother had so recently pointed out, there was hardly any mystery that anyone could attach to that; indeed Brenda’s breakdown was only to have been expected, might even have been anticipated.
After all, she’d only recently become a mother and was still recovering from an uncomfortable confinement and difficult birth. Indeed, for a little while the doctors had thought they’d lost her. Add to this the fact of her husband’s talent (that he was a Necroscope) which she had known and which had preyed on her mind for months; the fact that her infant child seemed to possess similar and even more frightening powers, so that even in the midst of E-Branch men, who were themselves ESP-endowed, he was looked upon as something of a freak; the fact that Harry was now (literally) a different person, a person who was Harry, with all of his past, his memories and mannerisms, but living in a total stranger’s body; the fact of the absolute terror she had endured through that night, face to face with the monster Yulian Bodescu, whose like she couldn’t possibly have imagined even in her worst nightmares . . .
Little wonder the poor girl’s mind had started to give way under the strain! On top of all of which she hated London and couldn’t return to Hartlepool; her old flat was poison to her now, where monstrous memories dwelled. And gradully, as her mental connections with the real world were eroded, so her visits to various specialists and psychiatric clinics increased – until one morning she and the baby . . .