‘Poor little Harry,' she crooned at him in her soft northern dialect, an old, old ditty she'd learned from her own mother, who'd probably learned it from hers. ‘Got no Mammy, got no Daddy, born in a coal hole.'

Well, not quite as bad as all that, but bad enough, without Harry. And yet - . - occasionally Brenda felt pangs of guilt. It was less than nine months since she'd last seen him, and already she was over it. It all seemed so wrong, somehow. Wrong that she no longer cried, wrong that she never had cried a great deal, entirely wrong that he had gone to join that great majority who so loved him. The dead, long fallen into decay and dissolution.

Not necessarily morally wrong, but wrong conceptually, definitely. She didn't feel that he was dead. Perhaps if she'd seen his body it would be different. But she was glad that she hadn't seen it. Dead, it wouldn't have been Harry at all.

Enough of morbid thinking! She touched the baby's tiny button nose with the knuckle of her index finger.

‘Bonk!' she said, but very, very softly. For little Harry Keogh was asleep - -

Harry felt the infant's whirlpool suction ebb, felt the tiny mind relax its constraint, aimed himself into and through a trans-dimensional ‘door' and found himself adrift once more in the Ultimate Darkness of the Möbius continuum. Pure mind, he floated in the flux of the metaphysical, free of the distortions of mass and gravity, heat and cold. He revelled like a swimmer in that great black ocean which stretched from never to forever and nowhere to everywhere, where he could move into the past no less rapidly than into the future.

Harry could go any and everywhere — and everywhen —from here. It was simply a matter of knowing the right direction, of using the right ‘door'. He opened a time-door and saw the blue light of all Earth's living billions streaming into unimagined, ever-expanding futures. No, not that one. Harry selected another door. This time the myriad blue life-threads streamed away from him and contracted, narrowing down to a far-distant, dazzling, single blue point. It was the door to time past, to the very beginning of human life on Earth. And that wasn't what he wanted either. Actually, he had known that neither of these doors was the right one; he was simply exercising his talents, his powers, that was all.

For the fact was that if he didn't have a mission... but he did have one. It was almost identical with the mission which had cost him his corporeal life, and it was still unfinished. Harry put all other thoughts and considerations aside, used his unerring intuition to point himself in the right direction, calling out to that one he knew he would find there.

‘Thibor?' His call raced out into the black void. ‘Only answer me and I'll find you, and we can-talk.'

A moment passed. A second or a million years, it was all the same in the Möbius continuum. And it made no difference at all to the dead. Then:

Ahhhh! came back the answer. Is it you, Haarrry?

The mental voice of the old Thing in the ground was his beacon: he homed in on it, came up against a Mobius door, and passed through it.

It was midnight on the cruciform hills, and for two hundred miles in every direction, most of Romania lay asleep. No requirement for Harry and his infant simulacrum to materialise here, for there was no one to see them. But knowing that he could be seen there, if there were eyes to see, gave Harry a feeling of corporeality. Even as a will-o'-the-wisp he would feel that he was somebody, not merely a telepathic voice, a ghost. He hovered in the glade of stirless trees, above the tumbled slabs and close to the tottering entrance of what had been Thibor Ferenczy's tomb, and formed about his focus the merest nimbus of light. Then he turned his mind outwards, to the night and the darkness.

If he had had a body, Harry might have shivered a little. He would have felt a chill, but a purely physical chill and not one of the spirit. For the undead evil which had been buried here five hundred years ago was gone now, was no longer undead but truly dead. Which fact begged the question: had all of it been removed? Was it dead... entirely? For Harry Keogh had learned, and was learning still, of the vampire's monstrous tenacity as it clung to life.

‘Thibor,' said Harry, ‘I'm here. Against the advice of all the teeming dead, I've come again to talk to you.'

Ahhhh! Haaarrry — you are a comfort, my friend. Indeed, you are my only comfort. The dead whisper in their graves, talking of this and that, but me they shun. I alone am truly... alone! Without you there is only oblivion.

Truly alone? Harry doubted it. His sensitive ESP warned him that something else was here — something that held back, biding its time — something dangerous still. But he hid his suspicions from Thibor.

‘I made you a promise,' he said. ‘You tell me the things I want to know, and I in turn will not forget you. Even if it's only for a moment or two I'll find time now and then to come and talk to you.' -

Because you are good, Haaarrry. Because you are kind. While my own sort, the dead, they are unkind. They continue to hold this grudge!

Harry knew the old Thing in the ground's wiles: how he would avoid at all cost the issue of the moment, Harry's principal purpose in being here. For vampires are Satan's own kith and kin; they speak with his tongue, which speaks only lies and deceptions. Thus Thibor would attempt from the outset to turn the conversation, this time to his ‘unfair' treatment by the Great Majority. Harry would have none of it.

‘You have no complaint,' he told him. ‘They know you, Thibor. How many lives have you cut short in order to prolong or sustain your own? They are unforgiving, the dead, for they've lost that which was most precious to them. In your time you were the great stealer of life; not only did you bring death with you, but even on occasion undeath. You can't be surprised that they shun you.'

Thibor sighed. A soldier kills, he answered. But when he in turn dies, do they turn away from him? Of course not! He is welcomed into the fold. The executioner kills, also the maniac in his rage, and the cuckold when he discovers another in his bed. And are they shunned? Perhaps in life, some of them, but not after life is done. For then they move on into a new state. In my life I did what I had to do, and I paid for it in death. Must I go on paying?

‘Do you want me to plead your case for you?' Harry wasn't even half-serious.

But Thibor was quick-witted: I had not considered that. But now that you mention it —‘Ridiculous!' Harry cried. ‘You're playing with words —playing with me — and that's not why I'm here. There are a million others who genuinely desire to talk to me, and I waste my time with you. Ah, well, I've learned my lesson. I'll trouble you no more.'

Harry, wait! Panic was in Thibor Ferenczy's voice, which came to Harry quite literally from beyond the grave. Don't go, Harry! Who will talk to me if... there is no other necroscope!

‘That's a fact you'd do well to keep in mind.' Ahhh! Don't threaten me, Harry. What am I — what was I — after all, but an old creature entombed before his time? ff1 have seemed to be difficult, forgive me. Come now, tell me what it is that you want from me?

Harry allowed himself to be mollified. ‘Very well. It's this: I found your story very interesting.'

My story?

‘Your tale of how you came to be what you were. As I recall it, you had reached that stage where Faethor had trapped you in his dungeon, and transferred or deposited in you —‘

— His egg! Thibor cut him off. The pearly seed of the Wamphyri! Your memory serves you well, Harry Keogh. And so does mine. Too well... His voice was suddenly sour.

‘You don't wish to continue with that story?'

I wish I had never started it! But if that is what it takes to keep you here... Harry said nothing, simply waited, and after a moment or two: