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When Harry put his hand on her clay-cold brow she recoiled as from a serpent! Not physically, for she was dead, but her ed, shrank doithdrew into itself like the feathery fronds of soe sea anemone brushed by a swimmer The Necroscope felt his blood turn to ice and for ahe’d wanted was to frighten her still hts, in the warht! Don’t be afraid! I won’t hurt you! No one can ever hurt you again! It was as easy as that Without even trying, he’d told her that she was dead But in the next moment he saw that she had already known: KEEP OFF! Her deadspeak was a sobbing shriek of torment in Harry’s mind GET AWAY FROM ME, YOU FILTHY THING!

PROLOGUE

Resuh inherited the psychic skills of his randhts of parapsychological power He is a Necroscope: he talks to the dead like other hbours And indeed the teeht in their eternal darkness, their only contact with the world they have left behind

For the common perception of death is incorrect: the minds of the dead do not accoo on to explore the s which were unattainable in life The writers continue to ’write’ great works that can never be published; the architects design fabulous, near-perfect cities which will never be built; the mathematicians explore Pure Number to exponentials whose only boundary is infinity

As a boy Harry utilized his esoteric ’talent’ to help with his studies; since he himself did not appear academically inclined, certain of his deceased specialist friends were able to show him the short cuts around otherwise impossible classroom problems As a result of which he discovered his own affinity for instinctive or intuitive h was not the only one who ’talked’ to the dead In the USSR the Soviet E-Branch (ESP-Branch) osani, a necromancer, to tear the secrets of corpses from their violated bodies But where Harry was beloved of the Great Majority, they feared and loathed Dragosani The difference was this: where the Necroscopethe in return, the Russian necro been instructed in his obscene talent by a long-buried but still undead va could be hidden frouts, the very marrow of his victims’ bones In all other instances the dead can’t feel pain - but that was part of Dragosani’s talent, too For when he worked he made the nails; they knew and felt everything he did to them! It was never his way siht lie to him No, his as to rend them apart and then read the answers in torn skin and aments and tendons, in brain fluid and the mucus of eye and ear, and in the very texture of the dead tissue itself!

While avenging the cruel death of his h becaencies of East and West Recruited to the aid of British ESP-Intelligence in the secret ith Russia’s osani And now his intuitive ust Ferdinand M&ouained access to the M&ou parallel not only to the mundane four but to all other material planes He could now in effect ’teleport’ instantly to anywhere in the world, just as long as he had the mathematical co-ordinates or a dead friend in that location to act as a beacon In addition, he had discovered his terrible power to call up the dead froraves!

To rid the world of the vaosani, Harry used the Möbius Continuum to invade the Chateau Bronnitsy, Russia’s secluded E-Branch HQ There he called up from death an army of muround Dragosani was destroyed, and along with him many of the staff and ency

But Harry paid the price too, and his body was also destroyed Except

As the Necroscope kneell enough from personal experience, death is not the end

Incorporeal, pure mind, he escaped to the Möbius Continuum and later, by involuntary metempsychosis, came to ’inhabit’ the brain-dead body of a British esper By then, however, Harry had also come to realize the role he must play in the eradication of vanition of his purpose (his destiny?) cah the discovery of a va the pure blue life-threads of humanity where they permeate the past and future time-lanes of the Möbius Continuum

Yulian Bodescu, contaminated with vampirism by Thibor Ferenczy - the saosani - threatened both Harry’s life and the life of his baby son But this time it was Harry Jr who turned the tables and made possible Bodescu’s destruction; for he too was born a Necroscope, with talents the sareater than?) those possessed by his father

Following the Bodescu affair, Harry Jr vanished (apparently from the face of the Earth) and took his poor de far and wide for his wife and infant son, despaired of ever finding them: in the Möbius Continuum their life-threads disappeared mysteriously into some otherworldly place where even he could not follow

Harry quit British E-Branch and devoted himself to his search, which soon became an obsession Years passed and the Necroscope turned recluse, living in a rah

Then E-Branch contacted hiuessed he’d be reluctant, but there was also a carrot The Branch had a sione , not presu spy had disappeared into thin air The mindspies had reason to believe he was alive, but still they couldn’t find him Harry checked it out with the Great Majority, who denied that theman had joined their ranks And yet E-Branch swore that he wasn’t ’here’ on Earth Sowhere was he?

Could it be he was in the same place as the Necroscope’s wife and child?

Eventually Harry’s inquiries led him to the Perchorsk Projekt, a Russian experiment buried deep in a ravine under the Ural Mountains In an attempt to create a force-field barrier as a counter to the USA’s Star Wars scenario, the Soviets had accidentally blasted a ’wormhole’ out of this space-time di they had also discovered the ancient source of all vah the Perchorsk Gate into our world Unbelievable things - unbelievable except to the Necroscope and certain h his contacts with the dead, and especially with the assistance of August Ferdinand Möbius, Harry discovered a second Gate and used it to venture into the world of the Wahtmarish over all Starside, the world where the varo to a young man, but, alas, infected with vampirism!