The first thing that had impressed itself upon him was the clutter. Privately, Jazz Simmons had been a very untidy man. Maybe it was his way of relaxing. When you're trained to a knife-edge you have to have a place where you can sheathe yourself now and then, or else you might cut yourself. This had been Jazz's unwinding place.
The 'clutter' consisted of books and magazines dropped any and everywhere, more off the bookshelves than on them. Spy-thrillers (not unnaturally, Harry supposed) lay alongside piles of foreign language publications, most of the latter being Russian. There was also, beside Jazz's bed, a dusty, foot-thick stack of Pravdos - topped by a copy of the latest Playboy. Harry had had to smile: hardly the most compatible meeting of ideologies!
Also in the bedroom were dust-free framed photographs of Jazz's father and mother; on the wall a life-size Marilyn Monroe poster; a cabinet standing close to the window, containing cups won in various ski events; and again affixed to the wall a battered pair of bright yellow skis and sticks which must be of some special significance. A recessed cupboard in a narrow passageway had showered Harry with an accumulation of skiing requisites, and beside Jazz's video cassette recorder were haphazardly stacked films of all the main winter athletics for the last five years. While Jazz hadn't been available to participate, still he hadn't been willing to miss out entirely.
There were photographs of girls, too, quite a pile of them, in one corner of a bedroom drawer; a scrap-book contained a photographic record of Jazz's military term; perhaps significantly, a second album carefully wrapped in an old pullover consisted of faded letters to Jazz from his father.
Harry had let the feel of all of these things sink in. He'd slept in Jazz's bed, used his kitchen and bathroom, even his dressing-gown. He discovered several phone numbers of old girlfriends, called them and asked about Jazz, discovered them to be a mixed bunch with little in common except their obvious intelligence, and the fact that one and all they thought Jazz was 'a very nice guy'. Harry was starting to think so, too; and where before Michael J. Simmons had been merely a means to an end - hopefully to the discovery of Harry's family - now he had become something of an issue in his own right. In short, the horizon of Harry's obsession was expanding beyond purely personal interests.
At this stage, too, Harry had felt that he now must get a little closer to Simmons himself. Or if not the real man, then at least his metaphysical echo. Simmons no longer existed in this universe, but he had once existed in the past...
In Harry's incorporeal days he had been able to travel into the past and 'immaterialize' there: he'd been able to manifest a ghostly semblance of himself on the bygone event screen. Now, embodied and fully corporeal once more, this was no longer possible; it would create unthinkable paradoxes, perhaps even damage the structure of time itself. He could still travel in time, but while doing so he must never attempt to leave the metaphysical Mobius Continuum for the real world.
Not that this was a necessity; to achieve his aim on this occasion, time-travel itself should suffice. And so he entered the Mobius Continuum, found a past-time door and journeyed back a little way, less than two years into the past. In doing so Harry had altered his position in time but not in space; he still 'occupied' Jazz Simmons's flat. And so, when as he judged it he had journeyed far enough and reversed his direction to head once more for 'the future', he knew beyond a reasonable doubt that the strong blue life-thread which travelled parallel to his own must be that of Simmons. For after all, he'd picked it up in Simmons's flat. And following that life-thread into the future, he also knew that he was now about to prove one way or the other any similarity between Simmons's -transference? - and those of his wife and son.
The proof wasn't long in coming, and temporaneously it agreed exactly with the time Darcy Clarke had specified in defining Simmons's exit point. Although he expected it, still Harry didn't see it coming, just an eyeball-searing blaze of white light; following which ... he journeyed on alone. Jazz Simmons had gone - elsewhere! The same elsewhere, presumably, as Harry Jnr and Brenda before him.
Harry didn't need to go back and play it all over again; he'd seen the same thing plenty of times before, and it was always the same. There was nothing new here, the only difference being that Simmons had gone in a single white instantaneous blaze, while the departure of Harry Jnr and his mother had been accompanied by twin bomb-bursts. As for what those terminal flares signified, Harry was at a complete loss. He only knew that before the white dazzle blue life-threads raced for the future, and that after it those life-threads no longer existed. Not in this universe, anyway.
Which led to his next line of enquiry: Mobius himself.
August Ferdinand Mobius (1790-1868), a German mathematician and astronomer, lay in his grave in a Leipzig cemetery. His dust was there, anyway, which to Harry Keogh, Necroscope, was one and the same thing. Harry had been to see Mobius before, to discover the secret of the Mobius Continuum. In life Mobius had invented it (though he personally had denied that, telling Harry that in fact he'd merely 'noticed' it) and in death he'd gone on to develop his theories into precise sciences, albeit sciences no living person would ever comprehend. None, that is, except Harry Keogh himself. And Harry's son, of course.
The last time Harry was here he'd come by rather more conventional means: by air to Berlin, then through Check-Point Charlie to the east - as a tourist! But mundane as his arrival had been, his exit from Leipzig had been along an entirely different route - through a Mobius door. That had been Harry's first experience of the Mobius Continuum, since when he'd become an expert in his own right.
But there had been far more than that to Harry's visit, and even now he might not have discovered the correct mental formulae but for the spur he'd received at that time. Harry had been on the 'wanted' list of the Soviet E-Branch. The emerging vampire Boris Dragosani, a member of that branch, had wanted to take Harry - alive if possible - and draw from him the secret of his weird talents. Dragosani was a necromancer who ripped the private thoughts of the dead out of their ravaged bodies, who read their secrets in brain fluids and torn ligaments, in ruptured organs and eviscerated guts. It would be so much easier if he could simply talk to the dead, like Harry. They might not respect him as they did Harry, but the threat of defilement should suffice to open them up. If not... well, there was always the other way.
Dragosani had issued a detention warrant, ordering the East German Grenzpolizei to pick Harry up on trumped-up charges. They had tried, and out of necessity Harry had solved the final equation of Mobius's metaphysical space-time dimension, with which he could summon 'doors' on the entire space-time universe. Barely in time, Harry had used one of these doors. Ironically, perhaps, it had floated into view (but only Harry's view) across the face of Mobius's headstone!
From then on Harry's invasion of the Soviet E-Branch and the destruction of Dragosani had been an inexorable process, in the course of which his own body had been destroyed and abandoned as once more he escaped to the Mobius Continuum. There, as an incorporeal being, a bodiless mind and soul, eventually he had discovered and entered into the drained shell of Alec Kyle. This had been an almost involuntary event - Kyle's body, a living vacuum, had seemed to reach out and suck Harry in - but it had given him a place among men again and ended what was otherwise an interminable existence in the matterless Mobius Continuum.