For at long last he felt he could afford to relax a little—or indeed a lot—and that he could now do so without feeling guilty. Because for Harry, where he closed his eyes, tilted his head back and sighed his relief as the clean water sluiced over him, simultaneously easing away his tension and steaming up the frosted glass door of his shower, the case of the Möbius murders was now as good as closed.
For Harry it was closed, over and done with, yes…
But not by a long shot for Gordon J. Hemmings.
Despite the excess of bodily fat that should have given the great leech excellent buoyancy, he was not a good swimmer. Also, he had swallowed a lot of water, which was causing him to choke and splutter where he foundered among the small waves. This was hardly conducive to “pure thought,” or to clear thinking of any kind; but with survival uppermost in his mind, having incredibly (however inexplicably) survived his own mantrap, the fat man could at least explore his situation from the viewpoint of someone who was obviously not destined to die just yet.
That being the case, sobbing and panting his relief without as yet wholly accepting the fact that he was indeed still alive, Hemmings trod water in an ungainly fashion, coughed up the rest of the brine that he’d taken in, and tried to catch his breath. And as the sting of salt ocean abated and his eyesight cleared, he scanned out across the mercifully calm night sea.
There was no sign of Harry Keogh; with any luck that infuriating, meddling necrophile had gone straight to the bottom…and good riddance to him! But, if Keogh was indeed as clever as Hemmings was only now beginning to accept he was, it might also be possible that he had somehow taken himself out of here, presumably via a parallel dimension; an option that was not available to Gordon J. Hemmings, whose conjured doors all led in the same lethal direction.
So what options were available to him?
At least he knew where he was: in the middle of the dumping ground for all those worthless dregs of humanity that Keogh had called his victims, several miles out at sea off the north-east coast of Scotland; which was the only place he could be, having arrived here through what he considered the “inalienable” mechanics of his own metaphysical mathematics. Inalienable, and unalterable, that is, at least until Harry Keogh had come along.
And as proof of the fat man’s whereabouts, if proof as such were required, there, no more than a mile or so away—but much too far to swim—the legs and platform of the Seagasso oil and gas rig reared up from the blackly glinting water like a freakishly angular, misted metal Poseidon. And cutting a swathe over the water from the rig’s upper decks, a lone beam of light, too faint at any appreciable distance to serve a purpose other than that of a warning beacon, revolved in an endless rota, like the single eye of some robotic Cyclops.
But it was when that beam passed over the water between the rig and Hemmings’ position that the means of his salvation—as the great leech at first reckoned it—became truly visible in the shape of that gently bobbing craft with its silent, silver-eyed rowers. Whoever they were, and whatever their purpose here on the night ocean, Hemmings’ great black heart issued a series of flabby but grateful beats as he raised an arm high and cried out for life-saving assistance.
This was an action that caused him to sink somewhat, blocking his breathing as his mouth and pipes filled with water; but dog-paddling desperately and forcing himself to the surface yet again, he saw the inflatable looming that much closer, and that several of its shadowy crew were leaning toward him, their arms outstretched. And choking, sputtering, fighting to stay afloat, the great leech expended the last ounce of his suddenly, shockingly, severely diminished strength, in reaching for and grasping those mutely proffered hands—
—Those wet, pulpy, and oh-so-slimy hands!
The silver glow of their dead but seeing eyes was bio-luminescence—the light of rotting fungi and moribund protoplasms—Hemmings saw that now. And their slippery hands and arms, where sheathing skin sloughed easily from soft, saturated flesh, left little doubt in his mind as to exactly what they were:
Dead men, and a dead girl…the dead people that the Necroscope cared for…Hemmings’ previous victims, despatched to the bottom of the ocean and now, albeit incredibly, impossibly, returned to the surface!
As for their purpose: that was all too obvious…
“No!” The fat man choked the word out, tried to snatch back his arms, and only then discovered that he had no strength. The dead ones were all gathering on his side of the inflatable now, tilting the craft a little with their combined wet weight. But where Hemmings was weak, they were strong and growing stronger, and the great leech knew why.
Cold as his magnetic, mutant aura was, it was no match for theirs. For theirs was the cold of ocean deeps, of loneliness, emptiness. What quanta of their souls had been spared the attack that killed them, what remnants of their defining essences they had been left with, such residues were cold as the spaces between the stars. And that was a cold that sucked on Hemmings more fiercely than he had ever sucked on them! What the Möbius monster had stolen from them, they were now taking back!
He struggled to be free of their gooey grasp…better to sink, drown, die quickly than fade to nothing and only then expire; but they wouldn’t let him go! Now that they had him they would drain him to nothing, to a husk, an empty gourd.
“An eye for an eye,”—or for many eyes, as Harry Keogh had had it. Words that were no longer his alone—if they ever had been—but were theirs too, now. Their maxim, which spoke however ineloquently of the very obvious intentions of the dead.
Eager now to drown himself, the fat man strove hard to push off from the wallowing craft and almost succeeded. But no, that wasn’t to be. For now there was another shape, a shaggy head, a face with pointed ears and luminous triangular eyes, glaring at him from the slithering silhouette of the dead ones gathered at the vessel’s side. Not a man’s face but that of a snarling animal: a dog’s face, tortured, with leprous white seaworms slopping from its gaping jaws, and small green crabs sidling through its glistening ruff.
Snapping shut on Hemmings’ right wrist, the teeth in those long jaws sank deep into his flesh, causing blood to spurt. He cried his horror out loud, and galvanized into one final effort tugged free of the inflatable and dragged the German Shepherd—or rather the front half of that poor creature—into the sea with him!
Black blood, bloated internal organs and ropes of uncoiling gut came with it, sliming the water, but the dead thing had him and wasn’t about to let go. And as bad if not worse the rotting crew of the rubber craft were still intent on reaching for him, their zombie arms at full stretch, jellied fingers twining, and black nails groping to take hold!
But while there was no escaping the inevitable, still Hemmings had a choice. It could end like this—which was unthinkable—or he could conjure his device and use it one last time. And letting everything else go, closing his eyes and laying his huge head back in the water, the great leech fashioned a portal between himself and the empty half-sack of what once was a dog; and feeling the suction of an alien dimension, the sudden swirling of the water, he slid headfirst into it along with several hundred litres of filthy water.
The Möbius murderer’s portal’s parameters were amorphous as those of his initial creation—indeed exactly the same, since Harry Keogh wasn’t here to change them and Hemmings didn’t know how—for this was the formula conceived in the fat man’s original precognitive von Stradonitz dream of parallel regions outside all human knowledge and experience. And as such, there was only one place it could take him.
Which it did, and immediately.
And half a mile over the rubber vessel’s momentarily disappointed crew, in an act not alone of suicide but also of purest irony, the continuum that the monster had created as a tool for murder now spat him out and down.
Unlike the Very lights he had used to put his device to the test, however, Hemmings’ gross body was never designed to drift gently to earth or ocean; and so, subject to gravity, he plum
meted ever faster to the waiting sea—
—And died only halfway there, when his flabby black heart finally gave out. Then:
Like a weird aerial bomb with trailing rags, his corpse hit water that might as well have been paved with garden slabs. For no longer the fat man but the flat man, the great leech’s frame at once burst open from groin to gullet and spread out over the sea like a ruptured bladder, a lumpy, nameless stain.
At which the dead people in the inflatable had slopped overboard to take hold of whatever they could find. And as the vileness submerged and the abyss took back its due, half a dog continued to chew on Hemmings silently shrieking face; while slowly but surely that most grisly patch of ocean discharged its poisons and was clean again.
And light as air, an empty rubber boat floated on a surface almost as flat as a millpond…
Bonnie Jean returned to the city. For a week of late nights and long mornings Harry comforted himself—in fact they comforted each other—in B.J.’s bed upstairs at the wine bar. He needed her to hold at bay the flashbacks that sometimes accompanied or followed his adventures, and she needed him because…because…actually, she didn’t know why! Her hypnotism helped to keep him in place, not subservient but governable, while his…his whatever it was that he had—this difference she sensed in him but couldn’t define—did the same for her, keeping B.J., beautiful she-wolf that she was, just a little in awe of him.
Thus in her bed, wrapped in each other’s arms, this disparate pair renewed the inexplicable bonds that tied, almost as if their separation had been a year instead of just a few days…
And then for another week or ten days Harry did very little but felt the seasons slowly changing as finally he put the last of several banefully vivid dreams and flashbacks from his mind. The trouble was that he, too, had been having his share of faux von Stradonitz moments, doubtless as a result of Hemmings’ last lecture. In the worst of the Necroscope’s dreams, however, there had been more than one great leech, indeed dozens of them, each with his own uniquely deadly take on conterminous continua! And for a while the Necroscope had been unable to shake off the notion that indeed there could be many more mathematical mutations out in the world. For after all, wasn’t he just such a creature himself?
All of which disquieting thoughts he had finally set aside, discharged for now. For if in fact there were others like Hemmings out there, then it was entirely possible he’d meet up with them all in good time; and if there weren’t he wouldn’t. Whichever was the case, he wasn’t about to go looking for them. Live and let live—at least for the moment—which had seemed the only rational way to deal with it…
Harry visited the riverbank and spoke to his Ma. Knowing him as well or better than he knew himself, she made no mention of his tardiness. For after all, what was a mere fortnight to her? But as for herself: she had been far from idle.
In contact with so many exanimate people with regard to the onerous tasks that Harry invariably set himself on their behalf, she was able to confirm that the general consensus of the Great Majority—in total agreement with her own appreciation of the situation—was that the Necroscope, while conducting the case equitably and necessarily, had put himself in too much personal danger!
Harry accepted their criticism with a wry smile, especially his Ma’s. But of course she would think so—didn’t she always think so?—she was his mother! As for the rest of the teeming dead: while there was indeed a Great Majority of them there was only one Necroscope, one last thread connecting them to a world and its inhabitants now left behind, one bright-gleaming pharos in what might otherwise seem the endless dark of death. And the very last thing they wanted was to lose him!
Harry asked after the drowned ones; he had tried to contact them himself and failed. But the ocean was like that: one stays where one is put in the earth, but the sea moves things around. People go with the tides, or with fishes that bit by bit nibble them away. But not Gordon J. Hemmings’ victims—their bodies, yes, but not them.
They had moved on, Harry’s mother told him. For along with the essence they had recovered from the great leech—and with what they’d taken of his essence, dividing it between them in a paroxysm of transmigration that had been nothing if not just—their spiritual energy had returned. And since souls are mainly helpless or at best ineffectual in themselves, governed “solely” by the characters and emotions of their hosts, in that evulsion Hemmings’ life-force had been purified. But of the monster himself, body and soul, nothing worth mentioning remained…
And among the living—finally Harry had spoken to Darcy Clarke at E-Branch HQ. He didn’t have much to tell the Head of Branch; the fact that it was Harry’s voice on the telephone and that he was obviously alive and well, in effect told the story for him. In return, Darcy had only one thing he considered of major importance to tell him.
And so:
That same day, a grey and dreary afternoon with a thin mist that wasn’t quite a drizzle forming droplets of dew on his overcoat, Harry stood with his collar up and head bowed—mainly to keep the moisture out of his eyes—before a grave in the well tended grounds of a Garden of Repose, a cemetery in Kensington, London.
Good of you to come, Harry, said the one he was visiting. I wasn’t expecting you so soon, if at all! By which I mean I know how busy you often are; and anyway, I’ve barely had time to…well, to settle in, as it were. So if you had come any earlier, conversation might have been, you know, a bit awkward? I wasn’t making too much sense for a while! I mean, just look at me! I’m gibbering enough as it is!
“What, on my behalf?” said the Necroscope, shaking his head. “Because I came? But there’s no need. If I had known sooner I’d have come sooner, because we’re friends.” And changing the subject, looking at a simple marker yet more simply inscribed with only Geoff Lambert’s name and dates, he continued:
“Can I take it they’ve all made you welcome?”
My goodness, yes! the other answered. I used to think I had friends on your side of…of…but I’ve a lot more here!
Harry nodded. “And it’s not just that old ‘my enemy’s enemy is my friend’ thing either. If the Great Majority think they’re in your debt they’ll pay you back all they can. And they are in your debt, Geoff—me too. Which is why I’m here: to thank you yet again.”
It was my pleasure, Harry. And…maybe it can be again?
“Oh?”
Why yes! You see, a great deal of knowledge—much of which has been lost to the world of the living—remains extant down here. Using your authority I can speak to its owners while they are still here…I can perhaps gain access to their knowledge before they move on and take it with them. I can be your encyclopedia, Harry, and maybe give your dear mother a break!
“I don’t see why not,” said Harry, with a shrug. “So if you really want it, the job’s yours—well, subject to my Ma’s approval. But I’ll speak to her, definitely…”
Then for a while the pair communed in silence, by no means as strange an activity as it sounds. Until Harry said: “I suppose I should be going. I’m…I’m getting wet up here!”
Of course, said Geoff Lambert. But from now on you’ll know where I am.
Harry nodded. “Contact me any time,” he said.
Oh, don’t worry! the other replied. But I won’t be a pest, I promise.
Following which:
There was no one there to see the damp leaves spiralling a little in the empty space where the Necroscope had been standing. And as for Harry Keogh himself, he was no longer there…
Brian Lumley, Necroscope: The Mobius Murders
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