for where they sped forwards in time, the dead Harry fell back. Then ...
... An astonishing thing! For as that burned caricature of himself fell away from him - in the space it left behind as it tumbled from view - a glorious bomb-burst of golden splinters, like sentient spears of sunlight, breaking up and speeding out of this place into ...
... Into a hundred diferent worlds and times!
Hary knew it without knowing how he knew: that while the Necroscope was gone, still he had gone on. Knew that he - the dream-Harry himself - would go on!
But as for now:
Stil plunging headlong down the timestream - a dreamer, incorporeal he went only into the past. But... the future-Harry's past? Which of course could only lead to his own present! Even by a dream's standards, it was confusing...
The present, the now, his now. (Or if not now, then the immediate future. For of course his dream was precognitive). And this time Harry was himself. Not merely part of - or an observer of himself - but actualy himself. And the action was happening to him.
The immediacy of the thing stood his hair on end, caused a cold sweat to break out on his face and neck. This was real, and he was ... the victim? So far, in almost everything he had been alowed to see - in each phase of it there had been a victim. And Harry suspected that the same general theme would apply here, too. Or more than suspected; it was just the feel of everything, enough in itself to bring on these symptoms of extreme anxiety.
Very well: a victim. Probably. But of what? He could only wait and see.
As to his location:
It was subterranean, a great cave, but not too far underground. Beams or curtains of light, however dim, filtered down from several diverse sources, seting disturbed clouds of dust glowing like smal silver galaxies in their faint searchlight rays.
Harry was in motion; he moved with purpose if a little uncertainly through the gloom of the cavern, to a spot where the light was stronger. Looking up, he saw a rough-contoured ceiling of unusual stratification, as if the pressured bedrock had been tilted almost on end. Up there, like rows of jagged teeth set in the closed jaws of the ceiling, several harder, impervious layers projected downwards where softer strata had falen away. Higher still, where even more loose stone had weathered out, narrow, uneven gaps reached up to daylight - or as Harry now saw, to starlight. These crevasses, filled with mainly unwinking stars on a backdrop of diamond-sprinkled sky, were the light-source. The lack of scintillation could be caused by the Necroscope's subterranean viewpoint, or by a thin atmosphere, or both. He was loath to hazard a guess.
Still sweating (despite that he sensed the coldness of the place), Harry looked around on his own level. And now that his eyes were more accustomed to the smoky gloom, he could make out massively slanting columns, wals and chimneys of rock that climbed from floor to ceiling, and slabs of falen rock tumbled into tiers and tangles in every direction. The cave was a veritable labyrinth of upended, mainly fractured strata; a geological freak whose ceiling seemed held aloft only by those mighty columns formed of harder layers. While around and through this Giant's Causeway of natural, angular supports - glooming over the rubble of shatered rock like empty, stony eye-sockets - a network of fissures, leaning lintels and gaping crevices formed doorways to uninviting, unknown routes through a forbidding and probably treacherous maze of doubtful extent. In a nutshel, it would be an easy place to get lost in.
Except... Harry seemed to know where he was going. Certainly he did; for if this was a precognitive glimpse, then he had already been here -but in some near-distant future time. Not so strange; for time, as the Necroscope was wel aware, is relative. But in any event he had no time to ponder it, for he was moving on. On through the jumble, seeming to drift in his dream-state over the debris of falen ceiling stones which had been deliberately rearranged, laid in a rough-and-ready crazy-paving style to form a pathway or ways through the great maze. And because it seemed the safest way to go, Harry folowed the main pathway.
And suddenly he was there, at his destination ... his rendezvous? A place where the tiers of falen slabs and columns of rock formed a