store?' The look on Harry's face was now entirely grim.
Grieve took Darcy and Harry to the Ops Room, punched up a street map of London onto the big screen. He showed the Necroscope the exact location of the store.
Harry said, 'Okay, now I have something to do.' Then, to John Grieve: 'I won't be gone long, but in the meantime Darcy might like to tell you about the case we're on.' And to Darcy: 'I hope this thing with Brenda has nothing to do with our werewolf, but ever since we got back here -1 don't know, I can't be sure - but I think I've been experiencing the same sort of mental invasion that Banks and the others described.'
'Christ!' Darcy gasped as the meaning, or a possible meaning, of what the Necroscope had said sank in. 'But if he knows you're on to him ... do you think he'd take hostages?'
Harry held up his hands in a helpless gesture, but a moment later gave a grim shake of his head. 'No, I don't think my son would let him! Let's hope it's just a coincidence. But one thing for sure, I daren't waste tonight. So while I'm gone perhaps you'd like to call in Trevor Jordan? Better still, let me have his address and tell him to wait there for me. It's something Sir Keenan Gormley recommended ... "
Using several co-ordinates that he knew, the Necroscope went to the store in Knightsbridge where he entered the premises using the Mobius Continuum. His arrival at once set off the store's alarms, but that didn't bother him; in the event that his plan worked, he wasn't going to be here very long.
In Harry's incorporeal days, before his 'repossession' of Alec Kyle, he had been able to travel into the past and 'immaterialize' there: he'd been able to manifest a ghostly semblance of himself on any bygone event horizon. Now, embodied and fully corporeal once more, this was no longer possible; it would create unthinkable paradoxes and perhaps even damage the temporal flux itself. He could still travel in time, but while doing so must never attempt to leave the Mobius Continuum for the real world.
Transferring back to the Continuum, he found a past-time door and floated for a moment on the threshold, gazing on time past. This was a sight that never failed to awe him: the myriad blue life-threads of mankind, twisting and twining in the metaphysical 'vacuum' of a previously conjectural fourth dimension; those neon filaments that might best be likened to the 'retinal memories' of time, the trails of human lives that had travelled here; or if not here, in the mundane world on the other side of the Mobius Continuum.
And way back there in the past, the blue haze of Man's origins, that supernova of human life, from which these streamers had hurled themselves into the ever-expanding future. It seemed to Harry that he heard an orchestrated, sighing Ahhhhhhh sound, like a single, pure note from some other-worldly instrument, or the massed voices of a magnificent chorus in a sounding cathedral; but in fact he knew that all was silence, that it was only the effect of his stunned mind. For if any man were to actually hear the tumult of the past, that would be a sound to blast his brain and deafen him forever.
Almost reluctantly, the Necroscope brought himself back to the task in hand. This was the place where his wife and son had disappeared just a few hours ago. Well, he had his own theories about what had happened to them; and now, one way or the other, he intended to prove them. And without further ado he launched himself down the past time-stream.
But here a curious and paradoxical thing. Because he had never existed in this particular space-time, Harry had no past life-thread to follow but must simply let himself plummet, and because this region of the past was now his present, (and even his future!) his true life-line extended behind him and seemed to unwind from him like cotton from a bobbin back to the past-time door. And Harry found the knowledge that he could return to his point of entry via that thread very reassuring ...
In a little while he had reached his destination, arriving at a point in past time where it would be proved eventually that his son, the infant Harry, had contrived to bring about an amazing, almost unique occurrence. But that was for the future, not