information was subsuming itself into his inner identity, into his subconscious mind. It wasn't for him, this information, but for some other. He was only the one who gathered it. He mustn't alow it to register. That part of his mind - or Bonnie Jean's part - was like her personal computer. What was in there would not be activated until she pressed the right keys.
Hearing the warning toot of a car's horn, Harry opened his eyes. He'd staggered out into the middle of the road, and a car was coming through the cuting.
Slowing to avoid him, it puled to a halt and the driver leaned out of his window and made some inquiry in Italian. Harry stumblingly apologized, shrugged, got out of the way. And the car roled forward, picked up speed and set off again down the mountainside.
Harry? }. Humphrey Jackson Jr caled again, a faint cry from a long, long way off as the Necroscope deliberately tried to shut him out entirely. He felt ill and didn't know why. Sunstroke? Possibly. But
suddenly his entire being seemed to reel like a drunkard. What in hell had happened - was happening - here? What was happening in his head?
He had felt this before, when that lunatic telepath 'wolfman' had invaded his mind. But that had been in London and this was Sicily. Was someone trying to get at him, or get through to him? Normally Harry could guard his thoughts to exclude whoever he wanted to. But something - some shock or other - must have thrown him out of kilter, off balance.
However temporarily, his mind was wide open.
And they came ...
... Whoooo? Whoo? Who? Who are you? Who? Yes, who? Who are you??? A dozen of them, al speaking at once.
Whooorrrr? A growl.
Who? A small, timid, pleading voice.
Whoooooooooo!? Like some young girl's shriek of agony.
Who? Who-ho-ho? Ha-ha-ha-haaa! A burst of crazed laughter, fired into the Necroscope's mind like a stream of bullets from a machine-gun.
And finally: WHO? ... WHAT? ... WHERE . . .? But unlike the previous voices - and despite that its source was the same -this one was utterly alien and totally menacing. And Harry felt himself reeling again from its sheer terror, from the touch of its mad blind groping in the innermost whorls of his brain.
Run! (The lesser voices whispered as one dead voice in his head). Oh, run, run, run!
NO! WAIT! Mad mental 'hands' were reaching, clutching for him. He clapped his own hands to his ears and ran!
His knees hit the crash barrier; his body pivoted; he toppled forward, and felt the air whistling in his clothes, plastering back his sweat-wet hair. Harry opened his eyes - saw the cliff and the sky and the distant sea, all revolving -and saw the rocks and rubble waiting for him below. In a moment, sanity returned, and in the next he conjured a Mobius door immediately beneath his falling body ... and fell through it.
The continuum! Safety! His co-ordinates! Paterno -
- He stumbled from the Mobius Continuum into his room at the Adrano, crumpled to his knees, and was at once sick in the middle of the beautifully carpeted floor ...
Harry must have been down for a couple of hours. When he awoke he remembered being sick but not what had caused it. Sunstroke, it could only be. He'd cleaned up the mess before collapsing on his bed; thank goodness he didn't have to face that! The room's air-conditioning had dispersed the stale smell.
But turning his mind to Le Manse Madonie ... he remembered everything Humph had told him, including the dead man's tale of a forbidden place with an electrified door deep in the bedrock, but nothing after that. No big deal; he knew where the strongroom was, the
Francezci treasury, and that was why he was here.
The only reason? The only reason, yes. So why was he shivering?
It was a momentary thing ... it came and it went... possibly, even probably, it was whatever had made him sick. Wel, probably. He shivered again, which triggered something else out of the past. Not what had made him sick but a scene of biterly cold wastelands, and a stony face carved on the stonier face of a mountain.
As quickly as that the Necroscope's computer mind - but a computer 'damaged' or 'diseased,' not only by Bonnie Jean's virus but also by Dr James Andersen's -had managed to switch drives and thrown him off what could easily have become a very dangerous programme