Necroscope 9: The Lost Years by Brian Lumley Page B

taunted him - but al in silence, like some hideous form of mime - while the fire ate at Harry’s lower trunk. It was perhaps the cruelest thing that the dream-Harry had ever seen or could ever have imagined.
    Perhaps too cruel -for even as an observer he was beginning to feel his own future agony!
    Events speeded up, became a blur - a fury of fear, fire, arid frenzied flesh! - and light! Blinding light!
    The Gate was its source: a bal of silently expanding but al-consuming light. It ate Shaithis, Karen, the Necroscope - the entire scene - and it sent the dream-Harry …
    … Elsewhen.
     

    Again Harry and his future-self - the one a dreamer, and the other a physical if future reality - were in the metaphysical Mobius Continuum, hurtling down a past-timestream, rushing back through times that were long gone and forgoten, among the myriad blue, green and red life-threads of Sunside-Starside, into their remote beginnings.
    And again the dream-Harry was the observer, who couldn’t help but observe that his future self was dead. Neither asleep nor undead but dead, truly dead (in this manifestation any way), and gone forever … or going. Going where no one would ever be able to find him, into the far past of an alien, paralel vampire world. But being the Necroscope, the dream-Harry knew that it wasn’t like that: the body of his future self was dead, yes, but the mind would go on. Except this time … wel, who could say where it would go to? Or perhaps this was the very end of the road, albeit right back at the beginning. A paradox - but wasn’t everything?
    Horrified, because he knew that this was or would be him, the dream-Harry watched his own future-corpse where it tumbled head over heels into past time.
    Fire-blackened and smouldering - with its arms flung wide and its steaming head thrown back in the final agony of death -it was the one grim anomaly in a darkness shot through with the thin neon bars or ribbons of blue, green and red life-threads; for where they sped forwards in time, the dead Harry fell back. Then …
    … An astonishing thing! For as that burned caricature of himself fell away from him - in the space it left behind as it tumbled from view - a glorious bomb-burst of golden splinters, like sentient spears of sunlight, breaking up and speeding out of this place into …
    … Into a hundred diferent worlds and times!
    Hary knew it without knowing how he knew: that while the Necroscope was gone, still he had gone on. Knew that he - the dream-Harry himself - would go on!
    But as for now:
    Stil plunging headlong down the timestream - a dreamer, incorporeal
    - he went only into the past. But… the future-Harry’s past? Which of course could only lead to his own present! Even by a dream’s standards, it was confusing…
    The present, the now, his now. (Or if not now, then the immediate future. For of course his dream was precognitive). And this time Harry was himself. Not merely part of - or an observer of himself - but actualy himself. And the action was happening to him.
    The immediacy of the thing stood his hair on end, caused a cold sweat to break out on his face and neck. This was real, and he was … the victim? So far, in almost everything he had been alowed to see - in each phase of it
    - there had been a victim. And Harry suspected that the same general theme would apply here, too. Or more than suspected; it was just the feel of Brian Lumley
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    Necroscope: The Lost Years - Vol. I
    37
     
    everything, enough in itself to bring on these symptoms of extreme anxiety.
    Very well: a victim. Probably. But of what? He could only wait and see.
    As to his location:
    It was subterranean, a great cave, but not too far underground. Beams or curtains of light, however dim, filtered down from several diverse sources, seting disturbed clouds of dust glowing like smal silver galaxies in their faint searchlight rays.
    Harry was in motion; he moved with purpose if a little uncertainly through the gloom of the cavern,