ground when often as not his mind was under it. And superimposed even over this, a glowing picture or memory of his mother - radiant as any loving mother as visualized by her child: her soap and rose-petal scent, the sweet warmth of her sigh, a golden aura all around her, as if the sun had risen behind her to diffuse her brilliant silhouette - all too soon snuffed out by a maniac, who in his turn had been snuffed by Harry.
Which was always the point where the Necroscope's blue, poignant dreams turned a dark, vengeful red. For after Viktor Shukshin there'd been Thibor Ferenczy, Dragosani, Yulian Bodescu, Theo Dolgikh, Ivan Gerenko ... The list was a long one. And what of Faethor Ferenczy, that 'father' or grandfather of vampires? Faethor had been dead for a long time now, true ... but so had Thibor before him, and even a dead and buried vampire is a threat. Harry still couldn't be one hundred percent certain that the Old Ferenczy hadn't left other remnants (or revenants?) to fester in the earth like Thibor, waiting out their time until a grand return ...
Coloured by his fears and anxieties, the Necroscope's dream was quickly becoming confused. His mind was Harry Keogh's, but the brain that housed it had once belonged to Alec Kyle, a precog for E-Branch. Harry's truths - his thoughts, memories and emotions - dwelled now in those same vaults of complex, convolute cerebrum once Kyle's, where still the odd crevice or corner remained, not yet conforming to Harry's contours. Kyle's weird talent had been governed by the 'shape' of that brain; his precognitive glimpses had used to come to him during those vague, confused periods of mental hiatus between dream and waking proper, at that point in time where the conscious and subconscious minds separate, allowing a dreamer to surface to reality. Nothing was left of Alec Kyle now, but the shape of his brain had not yet changed entirely; perhaps some small part of his talent lingered on.
For on the point of waking, suddenly Harry's dreams underwent a rapid transformation, mutating into sheerest nightmare! And because precognition is the dubious art of seeing the future - and the future is not a dream but a series of as yet unrealized events - it was as if everything that the Necroscope experienced was real as life. And the difference between these two dream-states was ... electrifying! Most people, including Harry, 'know' that they are only dreaming, but on this occasion he didn't.
As before it was a kaleidoscope of scenes, fast-fleeting, over which he had no control. But where before he'd considered himself accustomed to strangeness ...
He stood in a place that wasn't of this world, at the rim of a desiccated plain of boulders that sprawled in one direction to an aurora-lit horizon, and in the other merged with foothills climbing steeply into mountains. Close by, a huge luminous dome was set in a walled crater like the eye of some fallen Cyclops in its buried skull, giving of a cold white light. The dome was like an alien pharos - but for what weird travellers? On high, the disc of a tumbling moon was lit half with the gold of an unseen sun, half with blue starshine; its surface pattern was in a state of flux, caused by the eccentricity of its orbit and rotation.
Clinging to what he knew of the geography of his own world, Harry's instinct told him that the aurora signalled north; odd, because that meant that the unseen sun lay far beyond the mountains in the south. But this was after all an alien world - To which he'd been sent... been sent by ... by Faethor?
Here his reasoning faltered. To see the future is dangerous enough, but to try to remember what is yet to be ...!
Yet for a moment Harry had known that Faethor Ferenczy had sent him here, that his being here had at least been advised or guided by that father of vampires, that Lord of Lies. And also ... fry Mobius? But for what reason? A quest, obviously - but why obviously? And if a quest, then for what, for whom?
He looked all about. The mountains on the one hand and the seemingly endless boulder plains on the other, and between them the enigmatic Gate, its cold white light flooding outwards to silhouette the scattered, menhir-like boulders, casting unevenly concentric rings of shadow out into the Starside night.
The Gate? Starside?