chance after all... (/there was still time.
Panting, sweating, cursing, he ran towards the group on the traffic island and, pivoting like a discus-thrower, whirled the holdall. Which was when he saw Harry Keogh. Harry had come forward onto the road, putting himself between his friends and Sean Milligan. Still pivoting, preparing to release his deadly missile, Sean let rip with a burst of wild fire from his gun.
Harry had guessed how the other would react; he'd already conjured a Mobius door between himself and Milligan.
Stray bullets ripped past him, but Scan's arc of fire was restricted by the door, which no one else but the Necroscope could see. The main stream of bullets crossed the threshold and passed right out of this universe. While up on the roof, the sniper finally had Milligan in his sights and fired one hurried shot.
Hit in the hip, the IRA man tripped and went flying. Him and his holdall both, flying right in through Harry's door!
And the Necroscope knew what he must do. If he simply collapsed the door there'd be questions, because people just don't vanish into thin air like that. But Harry had a picture in his mind that he couldn't shift, which told him how it must be. And with only three seconds to go, he tilted the door on its side.
His mind wrestled with the alien, metaphysical math of the thing ... and won! And as if the invisible door's top edge were hinged, it swung upwards through ninety degrees into the horizontal. And the Necroscope hurled himself backwards away from it as it blew!
Fifteen pounds of semtex in the Mobius Continuum, a place where even thoughts have weight, and a spoken word can be deafening. And only the frail however savage shell of a human body to take the blast. With one exception it was exactly as it had been during that split-second of precognition in Darcy's Clarke's office; the exception was sound. For even though the Continuum acted as a baffle, still there came the subdued roar of the explosion, as the immaterial frame of the door buckled and warped and finally blinked out of existence.
But not before the Continuum had rid itself of a hideous contamination, and a jet of wet red stinking human debris had erupted like a volcano, flinging the guts and brains and shit and shattered bones of a man up and outwards against the high walls and windows of the street.
And then the slimy, spattering rain, that smelled of cordite and copper and many a crime corrected ...
It was over but as yet the street was still and strangely silent. Street-cleaning vehicles had been ordered-up and were on their way; somewhere in the near-distance police and ambulance sirens wailed their unmistakable dirges; a handful of unfortunate uniformed officers were picking up ... whatever pieces were large enough to be gathered off the street. A man, staggering and bloody, was being led away from a shattered store window, where the rear of his car stuck up at an odd angle.
'You,' one of the police inspectors said to Harry, with a hand on his shoulder, 'are a hell of a lucky man. You were the closest to it when that bomb went off.' But suddenly his voice was very quiet. 'What did you . . . see? I mean exactly what was it that happened there?' Carefully, he dabbed specks of blood and other matter from his forehead.
Darcy Clarke was fully recovered. Breaking into the conversation with what he hoped would be a useful lie, he said, 'I saw everything. When Sean was shot he fell on top of his hold-all. Then there came the explosion. His body muffled the sound but took the full force of the blast. He just... flew apart.'
Harry nodded. 'Something like that,' he said. 'Actually, I was looking away from it.'
As luck would have it, most of them had been looking away from it. But behind the parapet wall of a tall building, white-faced and wondering, a police marksman examined his weapon and thought, what the hell...? For it was one thing to shoot at a man, but quite another to hit him and see him fall - and then watch him disappear right out of this world!
Not fifty feet away from the group on the traffic island, Harry's
Krishna types huddled in a shop doorway. For once immobilized, they stared at the scene of what could have been an enormous disaster. Harry saw them looking.
Their sandals might have been stilled