row. Three, yes. But B.J. knew there should be four!
Oh, she'd weaned him on, all right, this oh-so-talented Harry Keogh, this 'mysterious' Mr Keogh! And the longer she knew him the more talented and mysterious he got to be ...
It wasn't quite a month before Harry was back; in fact, it was twenty-five days. And B.J. needn't have worried about weaning him off her wine - Radu's wine, actually - for Harry had been doing that, or trying to do it for himself, and fairly successfully. A single shot on a night, before sleeping, was all he'd allowed himself. And he'd tried tempering the stuff with other brews. Jack Daniel's Old No. 7 had been one such: a top-quality liquor whose potency should leave any mere wine standing at the post. But that stuff of B.J.'s was definitely ... oh, something else! It was very much to Harry's taste - or Alec Kyle's taste, whichever. Its only drawback was what it did to him: his stinging eyes, dry throat, fluffy head; all the symptoms of a heavy cold, for which it seemed to be the only cure! There was a word for it: addiction, which Harry realized well enough. It was why he would only take it on a night, and then only one small shot.
Even so, it interfered with his search. Except (as he had come to realize by the end of his three weeks and four days in Seattle, Washington, USA), his 'search' was a joke. And a joke that he was playing on himself.
Of course, with the Mobius Continuum at his fingertips - his to command - he hadn't needed to stay in Seattle. He could come and go as he wished; spend every night at home in Bonnyrig if he so desired. But he hadn't desired.
Truth to tell, the old house where his beloved Ma had died and his murdering black-hearted bastard of a stepfather, Viktor Shukshin, had continued to live - until his past and Harry had caught up with him, at least - was a cheerless sort of place, ominous and full of evil memories.
It would be a long time, if ever, before the Necroscope could think of it as 'home' in the truest sense of the word.
Which was why he'd hired a so-called 'house'-boat down on the waterfront in Seattle, paying a month's rent in advance for far less comfort and only half the space he'd been used to even in his and Brenda's tiny garret flat in Hartlepool, in the ... in the old days. But the flat had worse memories than the house in Bonnyrig, which was one of the reasons he had got rid of it. He'd thought about taking a hotel room, or a suite. Why not? He could easily stay at the city's finest, if he fancied; and just as easily skip out without paying the bill when it was time to Mobius on. Except hotels weren't him.
But, 'the old days?' Funny, that it seemed so long ago! Funny, yes ... for a man whose incorporeal, metaphysical mind had once had access to all of the past, and all of the future, and as much of space as he or any man could live in or explore even in an eternity of lifetimes!
And the funniest thing of all - or the most ironic - was that he still had it but couldn't use it. Not to its, or his, best advantage. Not until he'd found Brenda and the baby.
The past? That was over and done. There was nothing there to help him now, even if he had access to it. Which he didn't; and that, too, was funny. Incorporeal, he'd been able to 'immaterialize' in the past. But now if he went there, he'd be like a toy man on a toy train that went in a circle - or figure-of-eight loop? - and never stopped; with all the stations passing him by, but never able to get off.
And as for space - which in this case meant the total of all the places, the geographic locations, in the world - well, he had access to those, certainly. But there were millions of them, and Brenda and the baby were only in one of them.
Which one was anybody's guess. The Great Majority couldn't help him, because they had no contact with the living except Harry himself. And the living ... ?
Of all living people, the E-Branch specialists - Darcy Clarke's espers - should have been able to tell