- A garden in a fertile valley between ruggedly-weathered spurs, where dusty beams of sunlight came slanting through the high passes during the long daylight hours, and the stars glittered like frosted jewels at night, or ice-shards suspended in the warp and weave of ghostly auroras ...
Was Brenda there?
Just thinking of the place, weird co-ordinates surfaced on the screen of Harry's mind. Weird, yes, like nothing he'd ever seen before. So strange that he was given to wonder: were they real, or were they simply the co-ordinates of fantasy, the ephemera of dreams? Was that it, wishful thinking? Had he wished or dreamed too hard of an unatainable location somewhere over the rainbow?
Wel, the Necroscope didn't have any ruby slippers, but he did have the Mobius Continuum.
Finaly the maid was finished. With many nods, smiles, and a mouthful of unintelligible pidgin-English, she backed out of the room and was gone. Harry waited no longer but conjured his Mobius door, and in the primal darkness of the Mobius Continuum he pictured the esoteric symbols, the weird equation that would signpost his destination, and went... nowhere.
It had been after al a dream, a wish, a forlorn hope. And the co-ordinates had failed because they, too, were an invention of his wishful imagination and meant nothing.
He was wrong, of course, but had been perfectly correct to think of the co-ordinates as alien. For in a paralel dimension beyond space as we know it, Harry's 'weird' co-ordinates would have taken him directly to his target. There was nothing wrong with them at al ... except that they were alien.
Enough of experimentation, discovery and disappointment; right now, despite that he had rested, still Harry was tired. He was emotion-lagged, time-lagged, even Mobius- or spacetime-lagged. But later tonight he would need his wits about him, need to be physicaly and mentaly fit for the job in hand. He had al the information he needed about Le Manse Madonie; his new knowledge with regard to the inhabitants of that place had sunk into and locked itself away in post-hypnotic vaults of the Necroscope's mind; it would remain there, beyond recal until some other - Bonnie Jean, or Radu Lykan - pressed the right butons. As for conscious apprehensions: they were natural enough considering his mission. So he told himself.
He slept like a smal child, for once undisturbed by the whispering of the dead in their graves. If they were talking, they were very quiet about it. But this was Sicily after al ...
Waking about six in the evening, Harry felt a moment's disorientation before his mind cleared. It was still broad daylight, would be for another two to three hours.
Showering to shake off the last effects of dul sloth, he made a desultory meal in the hotel restaurant - a 'something' Genovese - and at once returned to his room.
Now the Necroscope was just about ready and it was only a mater of time. Now, too, he realized how little he knew about Le Manse Madonie, its occupants and staff... Like how many of them, for instance, and what their duties were. But in a place like that - a fortress in its own right - there would be little or no requirement for security in
the form of guards. A night watch, possibly, but on the perimeter. Even then it seemed unlikely that there would be too many people up and about in the wee smal hours.
Oh, really? (Harry frowned to himself, at the niggling litle voice in the back of his mind).
Wel, if they were up and about, his plan was designed to take care of that. They would be buzzing like wasps once he'd set the thing in motion, but on the outside. A distraction was what they required, something to divert them from their normal routine.
And a distraction was what he intended to deliver.
As for the vault doors: they were combination-locked. He wasn't an expert safe-breaker, but he was an expert at getting into places without going through doors. Or rather, he was the only one with the combination to his doors. In fact it worked very much in Harry's favour, that Humph's steel vault doors - two of them - took time to open; he'd be out of there before anyone else could get in! Why, they might not even try to get in; probably wouldn't, because Humph's doors were alarmed. And Harry wasn't going to set off any alarms - not on the outside, anyway.
It was time he checked out his