It was as Molly had suspected it would be: beyond the Mobius doors she discovered the Supreme Darkness itself, that darkness which existed prior to the Big Bang.
It was not only the absence of light but the absence of everything. She might be at the core of a black hole, except a black hole has enormous gravity and this place had none. In one sense it was a metaphysical plane of existence, but in another it wasn't----because nothing existed here. It was just a "place," but a place in which no God as yet offered those wonderful words of evocation, "Let there be light!"
It was nowhere, and it was everywhere; it was external, and it was central. From here one might go anywhere, or go nowhere forever. And it would be forever, for in this timeless environment nothing ever aged or changed, except by force of will. Molly Stewart was therefore a foreign body, an unwanted mote in the eye of the Mobius continuum, and it must try to reject her. She felt matterless forces working on her even now, pushing at her and attempting to dislodge her from the unreal back into the real. Except she must not let herself be pushed.
There were doors she could conjure, certainly, a million million doors leading to all places and all times, but he knew that most of these places and all time, but he knew that most of these places and times would be totally lethal to him. No use, like Mobius, to emerge in some distant galaxy in deep space. Molly was not just a creature of mind but also of matter. She had no desire to freeze, or fry, or melt, or explode.
The problem, then, was, this: which door?
Molly's dive through Mobius's tombstone might have carried her a yard or a light-year, she might have been here for a minute or a month, when she felt the first tentative tug of a force other than the rejection forces of this hyperspace-time dimension. Not even a tug, as such, it was more a gentle pressure that seemed to want to guide her. She'd known something like it before, when she'd tracked her mother under the ice and come up in her pool beneath the overhanging bank. There seemed nothing of a threat in it, anyway.
Molly went with it, following and feeling it intensify, homing in on it as a blind person homes in on a friendly voice. Or a moth on the bright flame of a candle? No, for her intuition told her that whatever it was there was no harm in it. Stronger still the force bobbed her along this parallel space-time stream, and like seeing a light at the end of a tunnel, so he sensed the way ahead and began to will himself in that direction.
"Good!" said a distant voice in Molly's head. "Very good. Come to me, Molly Stewart, come to me...."
It was a female voice, but there was little of warmth in it. This, it keened like the wind in the Leipzig graveyard, and like the wind it was old as the ages.
"Who are you?" Molly asked.
"Your friend," came the answer, stronger now.
Molly continued to will herself toward the mental voice. She willed herself----that way. And there before her, a Mobius door. She reached for it, paused. "How do I know you're a friend? How do I know I can trust you?"
"I asked that same question once," said the voice, almost in her ear. "For I too had no way of knowing. But I trusted."
Molly willed the door open and passed through.
Stretched out in her original dive, she found herself suspended maybe three inches above the ground, and fell---then clung to the earth and hugged herself to it. The voice in her head chuckled. "There," it said. "You see? A friend....."
Dizzy and feeling sick, Molly gradually withdrew her fingers from loose, dry soil. She lifted her head a fraction, stared all about. Light and color struck almost physical blows on his reeling vision. Light and warmth. That was the first impression to really get through to her: how warm it was. The soil was warm under her prone body unseasonably warm where it shone on her hands. Where on God's Earth was she? Was she on Earth at all?
Slowly, still dizzy, she sat up. And gradually, as she felt gravity working on her, so things stopped revolving and she uttered a loud "Phew!" of relief.
Molly wasn't much traveled or she'd have recognized the terrain at once as being Mediterranean. The soil was a yellowy-brown and streaked with sand, the plants were those of scrubland, the sun's warmth in January told of her proximity to the equator. Certainly she was thousands of miles closer to it here than she'd been in Leipzig. In the distance a mountain range threw up low peaks; closer there were ruins, crumbling white walls and mounts of rubble, and overhead.....
A pair of jet fighter planes, like speeding silver darts against the pure blue of the sky, left vapor trails as they hastened towards the horizon. Their thunder rolled down over her, muted by distance.
Molly breathed easier, looked again towards the ruins. Middle-Eastern? Probably. Just some ancient village fallen victim to Nature's grand reclamation scheme. And again she wondered where she was.
"Endor," said the voice in her head. "That was its name when it had a name. It was my home."
Endor? That rang a bell. The biblical Endor? The place where Saul went on the night before his death on the slopes of Gilboa? Where he went to seek out----a witch?
"That was what they called me, yes," she chuckled dryly in her mind. "The Witch of Endor. But that was long and long ago, and there have been witches and witches. Mine was a great talent, but now a greater one is come into the world. In my long sleep I heard of her, this mighty wizard, and such were the rumors that they woke me up. The dead call her their friend and there are those among the living that fear her greatly. Yes, and I desired to speak with this one, who is already a legend among the tomb-legions. And lo!---I called and she came to me. And her name is Molly Stewart....."
Molly stared at the earth where she sat, put down her hands and pressed upon it. Her hands came away dusty and dry. "You're----here?" she said.
"I am one with the dust of the world," she answered. "My dust is here."
Molly nodded. Two thousand years is a long time. "Why did you help me?" she asked.
"Would you have me damned forever by all the teeming dead?" she answered immediately. "Why did I help you? Because they asked it of me! All of them! Your fame precedes you, Molly. 'Save this one!' they begged me, 'for she is beloved of us.'"
Again Molly nodded. "My mother," she said.
"Your mother is but one," answered the witch. "She is your chief advocate, certainly, but the dead are many. She pleaded with you, aye, and many a thousand with her."
Molly was astonished. "I don't know thousands," she said. "I know a dozen, two dozen at most."
Again her chuckle, long, dry, mirthless. "But they know you! And how my I ignore my brothers and sisters in the earth?"
"You wish to help me?"
"Yes."
"Do you know what I have to do?"
"Others have informed me, yes."
"Then give me whatever aid you can---if you can. Frankly, and while I don't wish to seem ungrateful, I don't see how there's a lot you can do."
"Oh? But I controlled some of these same powers you control two thousand years ago. And are my arts forgotten? A king came to me for help, Molly Stewart!"
"Saul? Little good it did him," said Molly, but not unkindly.
"He asked me to show him his future," she answered defensively, "and I showed him."
"And you can show me mine?"
"Your future?" She was quiet for a moment. Then: "I have already looked upon your future, Molly, but of that ask me not."
"That bad, huh?"
"There are deeds to be performed," she answered, "and wrongs to be righted. If I were to show you what will be, it would not make you strong for the task ahead. Like Saul, maybe you too would faint away upon the earth."
"I'm going to lose?" Molly's heart sank.
"Something of you will be lost."
Molly shook her head. "I don't like the sound of that. Can't you say more?"
"I will say no more."
"Then maybe you'll help me with the Mobius dimension. I mean, how may I find my way about in it? I don't know what I'd have done if you hadn't grabbed me out of there."
"But I know nothing of this thing," she answered, obviously puzzled. "I called to you and you heard me. Why not let them also guide you who love you?"
Was that possible? Molly thought it probably was. "At least that's something," she said. "I can give it a try. Now, how else can you help me?"
"For Saul the king," she answered, "I called up Samuel. Now there are also some who would speak to you. Let me be the medium of your messages."
"But it's self-evident I can speak to the dead for myself!" she said.
"But not to these three," she answered, "for you know them not."
"Very well, let me speak to them."
"Molly Stewart," a new voice now whispered in her head, a soft voice that belied the once-cruelty of its master. "I saw you one time and you saw me. My name is Sam Tabur."
Molly gasped, spat her disgust onto the sand. "Sam Tabur? You're no friend of mine," she scowled. "You killed Arthur Gerrard!" Then she thought about whom she was speaking to. "But you? Dead? I don't understand."
"Dragan killed me," the other told her. "He did it to steal my talent with his necromancy. He slit my throat and gutted me, and left my body to rot. Now he has the evil eye. I make no pretense of being your friend, Molly Stewart, but I'm much less a friend of his. I tell you this because it might help you to kill him---before he kills you. It is my revenge!"
And as Sam Tabur's voice faded, another took its place.
"I was Thago Benedek," it said, its timbre sad and soulful. "I could have lived forever. I was a vampire, Molly Stewart, but Dragan destroyed me. I was undead; now I am merely dead."
A vampire! Just such a creature had cropped up in Gerrard's and Moradian's word-association game. Moradian had seen a vampire in Molly's future. But: "I can hardly condemn Dragan for killing a vampire!" he'd said.
"I don't want you to condemn him," the voice grew harsh in a moment, shedding its sorrow like a worn-out snakeskin. "I want you it kill him! I want the lying, cheating, illegitimate necromantic dog dead, dead, dead!----like me! And I know he will be dead---I know you will kill him---but only with my help. Only if you'll----bargain with me?"
"Do not, Molly!" the Witch of Endor warned her. "Satan himself is no match for a vampire where lies and deceit are concerned."
"No bargains," Molly took her point.
"But it is such a small thing I want!" Thago protested, his mental voice growing into a whine.
"How small?"
"Only promise me that now and then----once in a while, be it ever so long---when you have the time, then that you'll speak to me. For there are none so lonely as I am now, Molly Stewart."
"All right, I promise."
The ex-vampire sighed his relief. "Good! And now I know why the dead love you. Now know this, Molly; Dragan has a vampire in him! The creature is still immature, but it grows fast and learns even faster. And do you know how to kill a vampire?"
"A wooden stake?"
"That is only to pin him down. But then you must behead him!"
"I'll remember that," Molly nodded, nervously licking dry lips.
"And remember too your promise," said Thago, his voice fading into nothing. For a moment then it was quiet and Molly was left to think about the awesome nature of this composite creature she'd pitted herself against; but then, out of the silence, she heard the voice of the third and final informer:
"Molly Stewart," growled his last visitation, "you don't know me, but Sir Arthur Gerrard may have told you something of me. I was Katin Semnyonovich. Now I am no more. Dragan killed me with Sam Tabur's evil eye. I am dead in my prime, by treachery!"
"So you too seek revenge," said Molly. "Had he no friends, this Dragan? Not even one?"
"Yes, he had me. I had plans for Dragan, great plans. Ah, but the bastard had plans of his own! And I wasn't part of them. He killed me for my knowledge of E-Branch, so that he can control what I created. But it goes farther than that. I think he wants---everything! I mean literally everything under the sun. And if he lives he might very well get everything, eventually."
"Eventually?"
There came a great mental shudder from Semnyonovich. "You see, he's not finished with me yet. My body lies in my dacha where he left it, but sooner or later it'll be delivered into his hands, and then he'll deal with me as he dealt with Sam Tabur. I don't want that, Molly. I don't want that scum wading through my guts in search of my secrets!"
Something of the horror transmitted itself to Molly, but still the Mollyscope could feel no pity for him. "I understand your motivation," she said, "but if she hadn't killed you I would have. If I could. For my mother, for Arthur Gerrard, for everyone you've hurt or would hurt."
"Yes, yes, of course you would," said Semnyonovich without enmity, "if you could. I was a soldier before I was a schemer, Molly Stewart. I understood honor even if Dragan doesn't. It's because of all these things that I want to help you."
"I accept your reasons," said Molly. "How can you help me?"
"First I can tell you all I know about the Castillo Mikhailov; its design and layout, the people who work there. Here, take it all," and he quickly imparted to Molly all the knowledge of the place and the ESPers who worked there. "And then I can tell you something else, something which you, with your special talent, can use to good advantage. I've said I was first a soldier. So I was, and my knowledge of warfare was second to none. I had studied the whole history of warfare from Man's beginnings. I had traced his wars right across the face of the planet, and knew all the old battlefields immediately. You ask you I can help you? Well listen and I'll tell you."
Molly listened, and slowly her strange eyes widened and a grim smile spread itself across her face. She had been weary until now, burdened. But now a massive weight was lifted from her shoulders. She (and her unborn child) did have a chance after all. Finally Semnyonovich was finished.
"Well, we were enemies," said Molly then, "even though we never met in the flesh. But I thank you anyway. You know of course that I intend to destroy your organization as well as Dragan?"
"No more than he'd destroy it," the other growled. "Anyway, I must go now. There's someone else I want to find, if I can....." And his voice, too, faded into silence.
Molly looked at the rugged terrain all around and saw how the sun dipped lower in the sky. Dust devils raced along a ridge. Kites wheeled in the sky as the day turned towards evening. And for a long while, as the shadows lengthened, she sat there on the sand and pebbles with her chin in her hands, just thinking.
At least she said, "They all want to help me."
"Because you bring them hope," the Witch of Endor told her. "For centuries, indeed since time itself began, the dead have lain still in their graves and that was that. But now they stir, they seek each other out, they talk to each other in a manner you have taught them. They have found a champion. Only ask of them, Molly Stewart, and they will obey....."
Molly stood up, gazed all around, felt the chill of evening beginning to creep. "I see no reason to stay here any longer," she said. "As for you, old lady, I don't know how to say thanks."
"I have all the thanks I want," she answered. "The teeming dead thank me."
Molly nodded. "Yes, and there are some of them I want to speak to---first."
"Go then," she answered. "The future waits for you as it waits for all people."
Molly said no more but conjured the Mobius doors, chose one and walked through it.
She went first to her mother, finding her way to her without difficulty; then to "Sergeant" Max Anderson at Harden, including a quick jump of only fifty yards or so to the grave of Sebastian Scott May; then to a Garden of Repose in Kensington, where Arthur Gerrard's ashes had been scattered, but where Gerrard himself remained; and finally to Katin Semnyonovich's dacha in Dechny. She spent ten to fifteen minutes in each location with the exception of the last. It was one thing to talk to dead people in their graves but quite another to talk to one who sat there and looked at you with glassy, pus-dripping eyes.
In any case, by the time Molly was through she was satisfied that she knew her business, that she could now safely negotiate the intricacies of the Mobius continuum; and by then there was only one place left to go. But first she took down a double-barreled shotgun from the wall and filled her pockets with cartridges from a drawer.
It was just 6:30 P.M. (East European time) when she started to ride the Mobius strip from Dechny to the Castillo Mikhailov. Along the way she became aware that someone rode the strip with her, knew she wasn't alone in the Mobius continuum. "Who's there?" she called out with her mind in the ultimate darkness of the journey.
"Just another dead person," came the answer, but in a wry, humorless voice. "When I was alive, I read the future, but I had to die to understand and finally realize the full extent of my talent. Strangely, in your 'now' I am still alive, but I shall be dead shortly."
"I don't understand," said Molly.
"It's not possible for you to understand immediately. That's why I'm here: to explain. My name is Boleslaw Yuriev. I worked for Semnyonovich. I made the mistake of reading my own future, my own death. That will happen two days from your 'now,' as a result of Vladimir Dragan's ordering it. But after death I will go on to explore my own potential. What I did in life I will do even better in death. If I wanted to I could see backwards to the beginning of time, or go forward to its end---if time had a beginning and an end. But of course it has neither; it is all part of the Mobius continuum, an endlessly twisting loop containing all space and time. Let me show you."
And he showed Molly the doors into the future and the past, and Molly stood on their thresholds and viewed time that had been and time still to come; except that she could not understand what she saw. For beyond the future-time door all was a chaos of millions of lines of blue light, and one of these streamed form her own being out through the door and into the future---her future. Likewise beyond the past-time door: the same blue light pouring out of her and fading into the past---her past---along with the light of countless millions of others. And such was the dazzling blue brilliance of all those life-threads that she was almost blinded by it.
"But no light shines from you," she said to Boleslaw Yuriev. "Why's that?"
"Because my light has been extinguished. Now I am like Mobius: pure mind. And where space holds no secrets for him, time holds none for me."
Molly thought about it, said: "I want to see my life-thread again." And again she stood on the threshold of the door to the future. She looked into the bright blue furnace of the future and saw her life-thread shimmering into it like a neon ribbon, and she could see it clearly where it curved away into future time. But even as she watched, so the end of her thread of life came into view; and then it seemed to her that the blue life-light of her body was not flowing out of her but flowing in! The thread was being eaten up by her as she approached her own end! And now that end was plainly visible, speeding towards her like a meteor out of the future!
Quickly, in terror of the Unknown, she stepped back from the door and once again into darkness. "Am I going to live to at least give birth to my baby?" she asked then. "Is that what you're telling me, showing me?"
"Yes..." said the time-traveling mind of Boleslaw Yuriev ".....and no."
Again Molly failed to understand. "I'm about to pass through a Mobius door to the Castillo Mikhailov," she said. "If the warning on my headstone was wrong, and I'm going to die there and not in hospital giving birth, I'd like to know it. The Witch of Endor told me that I would lose 'something' of myself. Now I've seen the end of my life-thread." She gave a nervous mental shrug. "It seems I'm coming to the end of my tether. My baby will never be born....."
In answer he sensed the nod. "Yes it will," said Boleslaw, "first use the future-time door to return to England---alive. Then use it again to go beyond the end of your threat---to where your life begins again!"
"Begins again?" Molly was baffled. "Are you saying I'm going to give birth and live again?"
"There is a second thread which is also you, Molly. It will live nine months from now. All it needs is a mind." And Boleslaw explained his meaning; he read Molly's future for her, just as he once read Vladimir Dragan's. Except that where Molly had a future, Dragan had but a past. And now, at least, Molly had all the answers.
"I owe you my thanks," she told Boleslaw then.
"You owe me nothing," said Boleslaw.
"But you came to me just in time," Molly insisted, little realizing the significance of her words.
"Time is relative," the other shrugged and chuckled. "What will be, has been!"
"Thanks, anyway," said Molly, and passed through the door to the Castillo Mikhailov.
At 6:31 P.M. exactly, Dragan's telephone came jinglingly alive, causing him to start.
Outside it was dark now, made darker by snow falling heavily from a black sky. Searchlights in the Castillo's outer walls and towers swept the ground between the complex itself and the perimeter wall, as they had swept it since the fall of dark, but now their beams were reduced to mere swaths of gray light whose poor penetration was of little or no importance.
Dragan found it annoying that visibility should be so reduced, but the Castillo's defenses had more going for them than human eyesight alone; there were sensitive tripwires out there, the latest electronic detection devices, even a belt of antipersonnel mines in a circle just beyond the outbuilding pillboxes.
None of which gave Dragan any real sensation of security; Boleslaw Yuriev's predictions had ignored all such protections. In any case, the call did not come from the pillboxes or the fortified perimeter: the men in their defensive positions were all equipped with hand radios. This call was either external or it came from a department inside the Castillo itself.
Dragan snatched the handset from its cradle, snapped, "Yes, what is it?"
"Vsevolod Frolov," a trembling voice answered. "I'm down in my lab. Comrade Dragan, there's----something!" Dragan knew the man: a seer, a minor prognosticator. His talent wasn't up to Boleslaw's standard by a longshot, but neither was it to be ignored----not on this of all nights.
"Something?" Dragan's nostrils flared. The man had put an eerie emphasis on the word. "Make sense, Frolov! What's wrong?"
"I don't know, Comrade. It's just that---something's coming. Something terrible. No, it's here. It's here now!"
"What's 'here'?" Dragan snarled into the phone. "Where, 'here'?"
"Out there in the snow. Andreeff feels it, too."
"Andeeff?" Yegor Andreeff was a telepath, and a good one over short distances. Semnyonovich had often used him at foreign embassy parties, picking up what he could from the minds of his hosts. "Is Andreeff there with you now? Put him on."
Andreeff was asthmatic. His voice was always soft and gasping, his sentences invariably short. Right now they were even more so: "He's right, Comrade," he gasped. "There's a mind out there----a powerful mind!"
Stewart! It had to be her. "Just one?" Dragan's once-sensitive lips curled back from a mouthful of white daggers. His red eyes seemed to light from within. How Stewart had come here he couldn't say, but if she was alone she was a dead woman---and to hell with that traitor Boleslaw's predictions!
On the other end of the line, Andreeff fought for air, struggled to find a means of expression.
"Well," Dragan hastened him.
"I----I'm not sure," said Andreeff. "I thought there was only one, but now....."
"Yes," Dragan almost shouted. "Dammit to hell!----am I surrounded by assholes?! What is it, Andreeff? What's out there?"
Andreeff panted into the phone at his end and gasped. "She's----calling. She's some kind of telepath herself, and she's calling!"
"To whom? You?" Dragan's brows knitted in baffled frustration. His great nostrils sniffed suspiciously, anxiously, as if to draw the answer from the air itself.
"No, not to me. She's calling to---to others. Oh, God---and they're answering her!!!"
"Who's answering her?" Dragan barked. "What's wrong with you, Andreeff? Are there traitors here in the Castillo?"
There came a clattering from the other end---a low moan and a thudding sound----then Frolov again: "He's fainted, Comrade!"
"What?!" Dragan couldn't believe his ears. "Andreeff fainted? What the hell.....?"
Lights were beginning to flicker on the call-sign panel of the radio Dragan had had moved in her from the DO's control cell. A number of men with handsets were trying to contact him from their defensive positions. Next door Semnyonovich's secretary, Felix Vladislavski, sat nervously behind his desk, twitching as he listened to Dragan's raging. And now the necromancer began bellowing for him.
"Vladislavski, are you deaf? Get in here. I need help!"
At the moment the DO burst in from the landing in the central stairwell. He carried weapons: stubby machine-pistols. As Vladislavski started to his feet he said: "You sit there. I'll go in."
Without pause for knocking he almost ran into the other room, pulled up short, gasping, as he saw Dragan crouched over the radio's panel of blinking lights. Dragan had removed his glasses. Snarling without sound at the radio, he seemed more like some hunched-over, half-mad beast than a man.
Still staring in shock at the necromancer's face, his horrible eyes, the DO dumped an armful of weapons onto a chair; as he did so, Dragan said: "Stop gawping!" He reached out a great hand and grabbed the DO's shoulder, dragged him effortlessly towards the radio. "Do you know how to operate this damned thing?"
"Yes, Dragan," the DO gulped, finding his voice. "They're trying to speak to you!"
"I see that, you fool!" Dragan snapped. "Well then, talk to them. Find out what they want!"
The DO perched himself on the edge of a steel chair in front of the radio. He took up the handset, flipped switches, said "This is Strange Magic. All call-signs acknowledge, over."
The replies came in sharp, staccato succession: "Danno, OK, over."
"Mazda, OK, over."
"Crusher, OK, over." And so on rapidly through fifteen call-signs. The voices were tinny and there was a little static, but over and above that they all seemed a little too shrill, all contained a ragged edge of barely controlled panic.
"Strange Magic for call-sign Danno, send your message, over," said the DO.
"Danno: there are things out in the snow!" the answer came back at once, Danno's voice crackling with static and mounting excitement. "They're closing on my position! Request permission to open fire, over."
"Strange Magic to Danno: wait, out!" snapped the DO. He looked at Dragan. The necromancer's red eyes were open wide, like blood clots frozen in his inhuman face.
"No!" he snarled. "First I want to know what we're dealing with. Tell him to hold his fire and give me a running commentary."
White-faced, the DO nodded, passed on Dragan's order, was glad that he wasn't stuck out there in a pillbox in the snow---but on the other hand, could that be any worse than being stuck in here with the madman Dragan?
"Danno to Strange Magic!" Danno's voice crackled out of the radio, almost hysterical with excitement now. "They're coming in a semicircle out of the snow. In a minute they'll hit the mines. But they move so----so slowly! There! One of them stepped on a mine! It blew him to bits---but the others keep coming! They're thin, ragged---they don't make any noise. Some of them have----swords?!"
"Strange Magic to Danno: you keep calling them 'things.' Aren't they men?"
Danno's radio procedure went right out the window. "Men?" His voice was totally hysterical. "Maybe they are men, or were---once. I think I'm going crazy! This is unbelievable!" He tried to get a hold of himself. "Strange Magic, we're alone here and there are----many of them. I request permission to open fire. I beg you! I must defend myself....."
A white foam started to gather at the corners of Dragan's gaping mouth as he stared at a wall-chart, checking Danno's location. It was an outbuilding pillbox, directly below the command tower but fifty yards out from the Castillo itself. Occasionally as the snow swirled he could see its low, squat dark outline through the bulletproof bay windows, but as yet no sign of the unknown invaders. He stared out into the snow again, and at that exact moment saw a blaze of orange fire erupt to throw the outbuilding into brief silhouette----and this time there came a low crump of an explosion as another mine was ripped.
The DO looked to him for instructions.
"Tell him to describe these-----things!" Dragan snapped.
Before the DO could obey, another call sign came up unbidden: "Strange Magic, this is Relief. Fuck Danno! These bastards are all over the place! If we don't open fire now they'll be crawling all over us. You want to know what they are? I'll tell you: they're corpses!"
That was it. It was what Dragan had feared. Stewart was here, definitely, and she was calling up the dead! But where from?
"Tell them to fire at will," he coughed the words out in a spray of froth. "Tell them to cut the bastards down---whatever they are!"
The DO passed on his orders. But already, from every quarter, dull explosions were starting to pound all around the Castillo; the harsh clatter of machine-gun fire, too. The defenders had finally used their own initiative, had commenced firing almost point-blank on a zombie army that came marching inexorably through the snow.
Katin Semnyonovich had not lied. He had indeed known his History of Warfare, and especially in his native land. In 1579 Moscow had been sacked by Tartars from the Crimea; there had been arguments about the division of the loot from the city; a would-be Khan had challenged the authority of his superiors; he and his splinter-group of three hundred horsemen had been stripped of loot, rank, most of their weapons, and whipped out of the city. Disgraced and scavenging where they could, they had ridden south. It'd rained heavily and they had bogged down in a marshy triangle of forest where rivers overflowed their banks. There a five-hundred strong Russian force riding to the relief of the beleaguered city had come across them in the mist and rain and cut them down to a man. Their bodies had gone down in mud and mire, never to be seen again---until now!325Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡiPTg5TjfTr
Nor had they needed much persuasion from Molly Stewart; indeed they'd seemed merely to be waiting for her, ready at a moment's notice to fight their way free of the bitter earth where they had lain for four hundred years. Bone by bone, tatter by leathery tatter they had come up, some of them still bearing the rusted arms of yesteryear, and at Molly's command they'd moved on the Castillo Mikhailov.
Molly had stepped out of the Mobius continuum inside the perimeter walls; the defenders of those walls, gazing outward, hadn't even seen her or the agonizing emergence of her long-dead army. Moreover, the machine-gun emplacements on the outer walls were pointing the wrong way; which all combined with the night and the snow to give her excellent cover.
But then there had been the tripwires and other intruder detection devices, and now there was the minefield and the inner ring of disguised pillboxes.
For Molly none of these obstacles was any great problem: they weren't even obstacles when at will she could just step out of this universe and back into it a moment later in any room in the Castillo where she chose to reappear. But first she wanted to see how her backup force was making out: she wanted the Castillo's defenders fully engaged in the business of protecting their own lives, not the life of Vladimir Dragan.
At the moment he was down on her belly in a shallow depression, huddled behind a headless bone-and-leather thing which a moment ago had marched ahead of her towards the pillbox outbuilding where callsign Danno and his machine-gunner second in command sat and gibbered through their viewing slits, firing long bursts into the wall of death which slowly bore down on them. A large percentage of Molly's army---about half of her three hundred---had emerged from the earth in this sector, and the mines were quickly taking an unfair toll of them. Even now the-pillbox and its chattering gun were dealing Molly's army terrific blows.
She decided to take out the pillbox, broke open Katin Semnyonovich's shotgun and slipped shells into the double breach.
"Take me with you," begged the Tartar who shielded her. "I helped loot a city once, and this is but a palace." His skull head had been taken off by shrapnel from a landmine, but that hadn't seemed to matter much. He still held up a massive, battered iron and bronze shield, its rim dug into the cold earth, upright in the snow, using his own bones and the shield to give Molly as much cover as possible.
"No," said Molly, shaking her head. "There won't be much room in there and I'll need to get in and get it over with. But I'd be obliged for the use of your shield."
"Take it, milady," said the corpse, releasing the heavy plate from fingers of crusted bone. "May it serve you well."
A mine went off somewhere to the right, its flash turning the falling snow orange for a moment and its thunder shaking the earth. In the momentary burst of light, Molly had seen an arc of skeletal figures stumbling ever so closer to the dark huddled shape of the pillbox; so had the men inside. Armor-piercing machine-gun bullets screamed in the air, blowing apart Tartar remains and coming dangerously close. For all that Molly's ancient shield was heavy, still it was rotten with rust and decay; she knew it wouldn't stop a direct hit.
"Go now!" urged the dead thing where it struggled to its bony feet and lurched forward heedlessly. "Kill some of them for me."
Molly narrowed her eyes one final time through flurries of snow and fixed the location of the fire-spewing outbuilding in her mind, then rolled sideways through a Mobius door---and into the pillbox.
No time for thinking in there, and little or no room for movement. What had looked from outside like an old cowshed was in fact a cramped nest of steel plates and concrete blocks, slate-gray gunmetal and shining ammunition-belts. Gray light fought its way in through arc-of-fire and viewing slits, turning the cordite and sweat-smelling interior to a drifting smog in which call-sign Danno and his second in command coughed and spluttered where they worked furiously and feverishly.
Molly emerged in the tight space behind them, dropping her shield to the concrete floor as she swung up the loaded shotgun.
Hearing the clatter as the shield fell, both Russians turned in their steel-backed swivel chairs. They saw a white-faced young woman in an overcoat cradling a shotgun, her eyes bright points of light above pinched nostrils and the grim, tight line of her mouth.
"Who----?" gasped Danno. He looked like some strange, startled, waspish alien in his Castillo uniform, with his headset for antennae above goggling eyes.
"How---?" said his second-in-command, his fingers automatically completing the task of fitting a new belt to the machine-gun.
Then call-sign Danno was scrabbling to snatch a pistol from his holster, and his second in command was coming to his feet, cursing.
Molly felt no pity for them. It was them or her. And there were plenty of others just like them to welcome them where they were going. She pulled the triggers: one for Danno, two for his second in command, and blew them screaming into the arms of death. The stench of hot blood quickly mingled with acid cordite and the reek of sweat and fear, causing Molly's eyes to water. She blinked them furiously, broke open the shotgun and reloaded, found another Mobius door.
The next pillbox was the same, and the one after that. Six of them in all, they were all the same. Molly took them out in two minutes flat.
In the final one, when it was done she found the chaotic mind of one of the fresh dead defenders and calmed him. "It's over for you now," she said, "but the one who brought all this about is still alive. You'd be home with your family tonight if it weren't for him. And so would I. Now, where's Dragan?"
"In Semnyonovich's office, in the tower," said the other. "He's turned it into the control room. There'll be others with him."
"I expect there will be," said Molly, staring into the Russian's shattered, smoking, unrecognizable face. "Thanks."
And then there was only one thing left to do, but Molly fancied she'd need a little help to do it.
She snapped open the clamps that held the machine-gun in place on its swiveling base, took up the heavy gun and hurled it down to the hard floor, then lifted it and threw it down again. After being dashed to the concrete three or four times the hard wooden stock splintered lengthwise, allowing Molly to break off a jagged stake with a flat base and a sharp, hardwood point.
She reached for her cartridges and found only one left, gritted her teeth and loaded the single cartridge into her shotgun. It would have to be sufficient. Then she pulled open the pillbox door and stepped out into the swirling snow.
In the near distance, softened by night and the fast-falling snow, the Castillo blazed with light, its searchlight beams cutting back and forth in search of targets. Most of Molly's army---what was left of it---was already at the walls of the Castillo itself, however, from which the staccato yammering of machine-guns now sounded unceasingly. The remaining defenders were trying to kill dead men, and they were finding it hard.
Molly looked about, saw a group of latecomers leaning into the snow as they plodded towards the beleaguered building. Eerie figures they were, gaunt scarecrow men, creaking past her in monstrous animation. But death held no fears for Molly Stewart. She stopped two of them, a pair of mummified cadavers a little less ravaged than the rest, and offered one the hardwood stake. "For Dragan," she said.
The other Tartar carried a great curving sword all scabbed with rust; Molly reckoned he'd used it in his day to devastating effect. Well, and now---with any justice----he'd use it again. She pointed to the sword, nodded, said: "That, too, is for Dragan---for the vampire in him."
Then she opened a Mobius door, and guiding her two sere companions stepped through it.
Inside the Castillo Mikhailov it had been all hell let loose almost from the beginning. The place had been built two hundred and thirty years ago on an ancient battlefield; the building itself was a mausoleum for a dozen of the fiercest of all the Tartar warriors. And its protection had kept the peaty ground pliant, so that the bodies which had lain there were more truly mummies than fleshless corpses.325Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡRW2pMtUg2Y
Also, Dragan had ordered the great stone flags in the cellars lifted and floorboards ripped out in his search for the signs of sabotage; and so, at Molly Stewart's first call, there had been little to deter these re-animated Tartars as they'd struggled up from their centuries graves to answer the command and prowl the Castillo's corridors, laboratories and conservatories. And wherever they found ESPers or defenders, they had simply put them down out of hand.
Now all that remained were the fortified machine-gun positions in the Castillo's own walls, which allowed the men within them no egress, no means of escape. The machine-gun posts could only be entered from within the Castillo; there were no exterior doors, no way out. The voice of one such call-sign trapped in his fortified positon told Dragan the whole story in every gory detail where he raged and frothed in his tower control room:
"Comrade, this is madness, madness!" the voice moaned over Dragan's control radio, blocking all other traffic---if any remained to be blocked! "They are----zombies, dead men! And how may we kill dead men? They come---and my gunner cuts them down and shoots them to pieces----and then the pieces come! Outside, a pile of pieces wriggles and kicks and builds itself into a wall against the wall of the Castillo. Trunks, legs, arms, hands----even the smaller pieces and the naked bones themselves! Soon they'll pour in through the gun slits and what then?"
Dragan snarled, more animal now than ever, and shook his fists at the night and the drifting snow beyond the tower's windows. "Stewart!" he raged. "I know you're there, Stewart. So come if you're coming and let's be done with it."
"They're inside the Castillo, too!" the voice on the radio sobbed. "We're trapped in here. My gunner is a madman now. He raves even as he works his gun. I've jammed the steel door shut but something continues to batter at it, trying to get in. I know what it is, for I saw it; it stuck a leathery claw inside before I could slam the door on its wrist; now the hand----oh God, the hand!---claws at my legs and tries to climb. I kick it away but it always comes back. See, see? Again! Again!" And his voice tapered off into static and a crackling peel of laughter.
Simultaneous with the idiotic sounds from the radio, suddenly Felix Vladislavski cried out in terror from his anteroom office. "The stairs! They're coming up the stairs!" His voice was as shrill as a girl's; he had no experience of fighting; he was a clerk and a secretary. And in any case, who had experience such as this?
The DO had been standing at the window, white-faced, trembling, but now he snatched up a machine-pistol and rushed through to Vladislavski where he backed away from the outer door to the landing. On his way he grabbed blast grenades from Dragan's desk. At least he is a man! thought Dragan, grudgingly.
Then came the DO's yelp of horror, his cursing, the chatter of his machine-pistol, finally the tearing explosion of grenades where he aimed them and dropped them down the stairwell. And coming immediately after the thunder of the explosives, the final message from the unknown call-sign:
"No! No! Mother in heaven! My gunner has shot himself and now they're coming through one of the gun slits! Hands without arms! Heads without bodies! I think I shall have to follow my gunner, for he is out of all this now. But these----remains! They crawl among the grenades! No---stop that!" There came the distinct ch-ching of a grenade armed, more screaming and gibbering and sounds of chaos, and finally a massive burst of static following which---nothing.
The radio sat and hissed background static at itself. And suddenly the Castillo Mikhailov seemed very quiet...
It was a quiet that couldn't last. As the DO backed into Vladislavski's office from the landing, where smoke and cordite stench curled up acridly from below, so Molly Stewart and her Tartar companions emerged from the Mobius continuum. They were there, in the anteroom, as though someone had suddenly switched them on.
The DO heard Vladislavski's wail of abject terror and disbelief, whirled in a half-circle---and saw what Vladislavski had seen: a grim, smoke-grimed young man flanked by menacing mummy-things of black leather and gleaming white bone. The sight of them alone---right here, in this room with him---was almost sufficient to freeze him, unman him. But not quite. Life was dear.
Lips drawn back in a rictus of desperation and fear, the DO gurgled something meaningless and swung up his machine-pistol----only to be lifted off his feet and thrown back out onto the landing, his face turning to raw pulp as Molly discharged her final cartridge at point-blank range.
In another moment Molly's companions had turned their attention to Vladislavski, where he gibbered and groveled in a corner behind his desk, and Molly had stepped through into what was once Katin Semnyonovich's inner sanctum. Dragan, in the act of hurling the extinct radio from its table, turned and saw her. His great jaws gaped his shock; pointing an unsteady hand, he hissed like a snake, his red eyes blazing. And for the merest moment the two faced each other.
There had been dramatic changes in both men, but in Dragan the differences could only be likened to a complete metamorphosis. Molly recognized him, yes, but in any other situation she could hardly have known him. As for Molly herself: little of her former personality or identity remained. She had inherited a great sum of talents and now surely transcended Homo sapiens. Indeed, the man and the woman were alien beings, and in that frozen moment as they stared at each other they knew it. Then----
Dragan saw the shotgun in Molly's hands but couldn't know it was useless. Hissing his hatred and expecting at any moment to hear the weapon's blast, he bounded to Semnyonovich's great oak desk and fumbled for a machine-pistol. Molly reversed the shotgun, stepped forward and dealt the necromancer a crashing blow to the head and neck where he scrabbled at the desk. Dragan was knocked flying, the machine-pistol thudding to the carpeted floor. He collided with a wall and for a moment stood there spread-eagled, then went into a crouch. And now he saw that the shotgun in Molly's hands was broken where the stock joined the barrels, saw Molly's eyes frantically searching the room for another weapon, saw that he had the upper hand and needed to weapon made by men to finish this she-monster.
Vladislavski's bubbling screams from the anteroom were suddenly cut off. Molly backed towards the half-open door. Dragan wasn't about to let her go. He leaped forward, grabbed her by the shoulder and held her effortless with one hand at arm's length.
Hypnotized by the sheer horror of the man's face, Molly found it impossible to look away. She panted for air, felt herself squeezed dry by the awesome power of this creature.
"Aye, pant," growled Dragan. "Pant like a dog, Molly Stewart----and die like one!" And he bayed a laugh like nothing Molly had ever heard before.
Still holding his victim, now the necromancer crouched down into himself and his jaws opened wide. Needle teeth dripped slime and something moved in his gaping mouth which wasn't exactly a tongue. His nose seemed to flatten to his face and grew rigid, like the convoluted snout of a bat, and one scarlet eye bulged hideously while the other narrowed to a mere slit. Molly stared directly into hell and couldn't look away.
And knowing he'd one, finally Dragan hurled his bolt of mental horror----at which precise moment the door behind Molly crashed open and threw her from the necromancer's grip. The door gave her cover where she fell to the floor, while at the same time another stepped creakingly into the room to take the full force of Dragan's blast. And seeing what had entered, too late Dragan remembered Sam Tabur's warning: how one must never curse the dead, for the dead can't die twice!
The bolt was deflected, reflected, turned upon Dragan himself. In Tabur's story a man had been shriveled by just such a blast, but in Dragan's case it wasn't as bad as that---or maybe it was worse.
He seemed picked up in some giant's fished and hurled across the room. Bones snapped in his legs where they hit the desk, and he was set spinning by his own momentum. The wall brought him up short again, but this time he crumpled to the floor. And clawing himself up into a seated position, he screamed continuously in a voice like a giant's chalk on slate. His broken legs flopped on the floor as though made of rubber, and he flailed his arms spastically, blindly in the air before his face.
Blindly, yes, for that was where his own mind blast had struck home: his eyes!
Coming from behind the shielding door Molly saw the necromancer sitting there and gasped. It was as if Dragan's eyes had exploded from within. Their centers were craters in his face, with threads of crimson gristle hanging down on to his hollow cheeks. Molly knew it was over then and the shock of it all caught up with her. Sickened, she turned away from Dragan, saw her henchmen waiting.
"Finish it," she told them. And they creakingly advanced on the stricken monster.
Dragan was quite blind now, and so too the vampire inside him, which had seen with his eyes. But immature though the creature was, still its alien senses were sufficiently developed to recognized the inexorable approach of black, permanent oblivion. It sensed the stake held in the mummified claw, knew that a rusted sword was even now raised high. Ruined shell that he was, Dragan was no use to the vampire now. And evil spirit that it was, it came out of him as if exorcised.
He stopped screaming, choked, clawed at his throat. Froth and blood flew as his jaws opened impossibly wide and he began to shake his grotesque head frantically back and forth. His entire body was going into convulsions, beginning to vibrate as the pain within grew greater than that of ruptured eyes and broken bones. Any other must surely have died then and there, but Dragan was no other.
His neck grew fat and his gray face turned first red, then blue. The vampire withdrew itself from his brain, uncoiled from his vital organs, tore itself loose from nerves and spinal cord. It formed barbs, used them to drag itself out head-firs up the column of his throat and out of him. Slopping blood and mucus, he coughed the thing endlessly onto his chest. And there it coiled, a great leech, its flat head swaying like that of a cobra, scarlet with the blood of its host.
And there the stake pinned it, passed through the vampire's pulsating body and into Dragan, driven home by hands that shed small bones even as they secured the horror in its place. And a single stroke from the second Tartar's whistling sword completed the job, striking its flat, loathsome head free from its madly whipping body.
Emptied, tortured, very nearly mindless, Dragan lay there, his arms flopping. And as Molly Stewart said: "And now finish him," so the necromancer's twitching hand found the machine-pistol where it had fallen to the carpeted floor. Somewhere in his burning brain he had recognized Stewart's voice, and even knowing he was dying, still his even and vengeful nature surfaced one final time. Yes, he was going---but he would not go alone. The weapon in his crab-like hands coughed once, stuttered briefly, then chattered a continuous stream of mechanical obscenities until its vocabulary and magazine were empty---which was maybe half a second after an ancient Tartar sword had split Dragan's monstrous skull open from ear to earl.
Pain! Searing pain! And death! For both of them!
Yet the bullets never found her, for in the nick of time she had found a Mobius door and leaped through it feet first. And as she entered the Mobius continuum, so she reached out and guided, dragged the necromancer's mind with her. Now the pain was finished, and Dragan's first thought was: "Where am I?"
"Where I want you," Molly told him. She found the door to past-time and opened it. From Dragan's mind a thin red light streamed out amidst the blue brilliance. It was the trail of his vampire-ridden past. "Follow that," said Molly, expelling Dragan through the door. Falling into the past, Dragan clung to his past-life thread and was drawn back, back. And he couldn't leave that scarlet thread even if he wanted to, for it was him.
Molly watched the scarlet thread winding back on itself, taking Dragan with it, then searched out and found the door to the future. Somewhere out there her life-thread would break, then begin again and continue. All she had to do was find the point in time in which she would die giving birth to her successor.
And so she hurled herself into the blue infinity of tomorrow.....
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