by Brian Lumley
Alec Kyle, another ex–Head of Branch: his brain drained of all knowledge by the Opposition’s scientists in their HQ at the Chateau Bronnitsy. Kyle was quite literally dead—kept “alive” on their machines—until the incorporeal Necroscope had stepped in and inhabited the man’s body, reanimating it. Trask remembered it well: there’d been those who had hinted that maybe Harry had taken advantage of the situation, but again Trask had denied it. It hadn’t been Harry’s fault; he’d been sucked in by the vacuum that was Kyle’s vacant head, without which the world would have been in dire straits a long time ago.
And on and on. Sandra Markham, a neophyte telepath who had been the love of Harry’s life during the time of the Janos Ferenczy affair. But Janos’s metalism may even have been as great as Nephran Malinari’s, and when he’d got into Sandra’s mind … that had been the end of that. The end of Sandra, too. The Necroscope himself had put the vampirized woman out of her misery, which only increased his own. But the list didn’t stop there …
The twice-dead Trevor Jordan, another telepath tangled in a vampire’s web of mentalism. Jordan had put a gun to his own head and pulled the trigger—at the “behest” of Janos Ferenczy. The Necroscope had brought Jordan back from the dead (God, that such things were or had been possible!) only to have E-Branch kill him a second time, believing that Jordan, too, must be a vampire. For when a man has died he should stay dead. Unless, of course, he’s undead.
And Ken Layard, a Branch locator who had located something best left undiscovered, whom certain of Harry Keogh’s “friends” from beyond the grave had been obliged to deal with in the Zarandului Mountains of Romania.
And Zek Foener, whose lost but beloved face had firmed up on the neck and shoulders of Millie Cleary. They were so different, those two, and yet in Trask’s affections alike in so many ways. Telepaths, for one thing, and loyal and true, for another. But Zek, poor Zek! Gone from him these three years and still unavenged: her eyes seemed to stare at him from Millie’s ever innocent face.
And finally the Necroscope—Harry Keogh himself—lost in time, space, and the Möbius Continuum. Dead, but not in the way we understand death. Gone … but not quite. Harry, wearing the face of Alec Kyle as he had worn it in life and somehow made it his own.
But here lay a problem, because Harry’s face simply floated on the eye of memory, drifting there and refusing to settle on anyone else’s shoulders. And then, as Trask searched through those suddenly real faces looking back at him, he knew why Harry’s face didn’t fit. It was because no one in his audience, in that small crowd of faces, would ever be able to accommodate it. And the one face he was searching for was missing.
With that realization the poignancy of Trask’s mood gradually turned to anger, a slow burn that began to twist his lips into a grimace—
—Until the door to the ops room quietly opened, and Jake Cutter and Liz Merrick stood there for a moment in the ominous, brooding silence and the knowledge that everyone’s eyes were on them. Especially on Jake.
Trask was scarcely surprised to note, in those same frozen seconds, that Harry Keogh’s phantom face fitted Jake to perfection. Which only served to make him more angry yet …
2
OF THE FUTURE
Trask’s thoughts, his reflections, had taken a few seconds. But they had felt like hours, and he coughed to cover his lapse—also to choke back some of his anger. For this was perfectly (imperfectly?) typical of Jake: insubordinate, contrary, and dilatory to the last. And he had Liz warming to him all the way, so that Trask was bound to think:
If we can’t change him, turn him, make him 100 percent ours, it won’t only be the waste of one man—one esper and all his incredible potential—but he’ll take Liz with him, too! And I’m still not absolutely sure of him. He looked good out in Australia, but ever since then … what is it with Jake? I mean What the hell is it?
Thoughts, that was all, but in this place, with people such as these, thoughts had weight no less than in the Möbius Continuum. And Liz Merrick was a neophyte telepath. She couldn’t send (unless it was to Jake, or to some other mentalist deliberately scanning her mind), but she was a damn good receiver. And despite E-Branch’s code of not PSling (or, as some might irreverently have it, “pissing”) on each other, she may have inadvertently picked up what Trask was thinking. Certainly her expression was cold where it turned aside his own burning gaze. And before Trask could actually say anything:
“We were practicing,” she blurted. And then, wryly: “Or at least we would have been, if I—”
“—She means we,” Jake cut in. “If we hadn’t lost it. But we have. It’s gone.” He shrugged, apparently unconcerned.
“Temporarily gone, anyway,” Liz came back. “We were giving it one last try and we … sort of lost track of time.” She bit her lip, glanced at Jake accusingly and then away from him.
Trask looked at her and read disappointment, but not with him. She hadn’t “eavesdropped,” inadvertently or otherwise. Her coolness was frustration born of her failure, or more likely of Jake’s. Then, looking at Jake … Trask didn’t know what he was reading. Nothing, truth be told! And if this were a game of lie dice in some bar, Trask supposed he’d be buying the next round; Jake’s shields were that good. But if you’re telling the truth, why mess with shields? Or was this simply a by-product of Harry Keogh’s dart, some sort of self-regulating or intuitive protective device? Well, that wasn’t totally unanticipated; Trask was fairly certain that the original Necroscope had managed to dupe him once or twice, too.
But all that aside, their excuses weren’t good enough.
“All skills wax and wane,” Trask rasped. “No one’s talent is in top gear all the time. But there’s time for practice and there’s time for briefings, updates, staying in touch, knowing what’s going down. There’s no use being in tip-top shape if you don’t know what’s happening around you; no point in my posting a daily routine and calling O-groups if people like you simply ignore such obviously unimportant, insignificant little items! So, since you’ve already managed to hold things up for several minutes now, do take your time but eventually find a couple of chairs … and sit fucking down!”
Trask generally considered the indiscriminate use of curse words indicative of the lack of an adequate or “decent” vocabulary; he wasn’t much given to swearing. But, however rarely, even he was wont to slip up and curse under pressure or, like now, use bad language to signal his exasperation or displeasure. His espers recognized that fact and knew when to back off—most of them.
Liz’s face reddened but Jake merely shrugged—by no means apologetically—and continued to look disinterested. Then they separated; she took a seat at the back, Jake in the front, dead centre. Trask quite deliberately waited, his gaze tracking them to their seats …
Jake Cutter was thirtyish, but his looks hinted of life on the fast track and loaned him an extra seven or eight years. As Trask had once heard the country and western singer Johnny Cash explain it a quarter-century ago on one of his tours of England, “It isn’t the years but the mileage.” So with Jake: he had certainly burned a lot of rubber, not to mention candles.
He was tall, maybe six-two, long-legged, and with long arms to match. His hair was a deep brown like his eyes, and his face was lean, hollow-cheeked. In profile he had an altogether angular face. He looked as if a good meal wouldn’t hurt, but on the other hand the extra weight wouldn’t sit right on him; it would only serve to slow him down. His lips were thin and even cruel, and when he smiled you could never be sure there was any humour in it. But that could have been his background; he hadn’t had it easy, especially the last few years.
Jake’s hair was long as a lion’s mane at the back; he kept it swept back, braided into a pigtail. His jaw, like the rest of his face, was angular, lightly scarred on the left side, and his nose had been broken high on the bridge so that it slanted at a steep angle: hawklike, Trask thought. But despite his leanness, Jake’s chest was deep under shoulders broad and square
, and his sun-bronzed upper arms were corded with muscle. His jeans and T-shirt displayed his hard, fast body to its full advantage, and there was little or nothing of shyness, reticence, or uncertainty about him. If anything, Jake was too quick on the uptake, and arrogant with it.
Indeed, Trask thought, he has everything I would have liked to have when I was his age! Not jealousy, but simple frustration: that all of this could end up wasted. But not if Trask had anything to do with it.
As for Liz Merrick: well he wasn’t about to let her go to waste, either! As a telepath, she was just too valuable. Out in Australia, despite that her mentalism hadn’t fully matured yet, she’d worked well, had seemed a natural. So that if or when her talent came more fully into its own … well, Trask just wanted to see it happen, that was all …
Liz had settled into her seat, looked a little less flustered now. She was a very good-looking girl—no, a woman, Trask corrected himself. She was maybe five-seven, willow-waisted, and her figure was film-star stuff. Her hair, as black as night, was cut in a boyish bob, and when she smiled, her whole face lit up. A pity she didn’t do it more frequently, but working for E-Branch was a pretty serious occupation. Damn, but she’d used to smile a lot, before Jake Cutter. Trask looked at Cutter, sitting in the front row, just slumping there with his long legs stretched out in front as if he didn’t have a care in the world. The next Necroscope? Jake? Huh!
Trask felt his temperature beginning to rise, got off Jake, and looked at Liz again:
Her green eyes, looking back at him from under that fringe of jet-black hair. A pert nose—the only way to describe it, really—that could very quickly tilt when she was annoyed. Her full mouth, with lips so naturally red they needed only a daily dab of moistening colour, sitting slightly aslant over a small, determined chin that was wont to set like a rock when her mind was made up.
Still very young, Liz was full of life and character, and the fact was that Trask found it a damn shame that she had ever got mixed up with this lot—with his lot, yes—in the first place. For unless she was very fortunate, or one of a kind, the job was bound to age her, he knew. But what the—? That was no way to be thinking! In fact she was the very stuff of E-Branch, and the Branch always came first.
Trask knew that it came first with Liz, too, knew that she fitted in here almost as if born to it, and wanted nothing more than to be a member of the team. Or at least, that was what she had wanted; her eager smile and readiness to join in had always said so. So, what had changed now? For as Trask had so recently observed, Liz wasn’t much given to smiling. Not any longer.
It could be that he had put too much on her out in Australia, that she’d “grown up” too fast out there, seen too much and come too close, until she’d realized just how rough, dirty, and dangerous the work could get. Or it could be that her so-called rapport with Jake was breaking down, and that maybe a different kind of rapport was developing.
As for that kind: E-Branch could do without such complications. But the two of them—developing and working in unison—what a force for good they might make! Would make, if Ben Trask had his way …
“Right,” he let his gaze rove over his audience and began again. “Now that we’re all here, maybe we can get on. Those of you who weren’t with us out in the Gibson Desert, and later in the Macpherson Mountains resort and Jethro Manchester’s island, will by now have read up on the initial report. Well, as reports go it isn’t a bad one, but it was very quickly prepared and obviously doesn’t tell the entire story; that will come later and I won’t waste time on it here. So this isn’t so much a debrief as my opportunity to reiterate, to tell you what we’ve achieved and what we failed to achieve, what little we learned and a lot more that we can only ‘guess’ at—though usually our guesswork is closer to the mark than most.
“First what we did:
“With all credit to David Chung—for picking up the first whiff of mind-smog—we successfully located and destroyed Nephran Malinari’s bolt-hole in the Gibson Desert. We also took out one of his lieutenants, the engineer Bruce Trennier, who Malinari had recruited at the Romanian Refuge. He had only had Trennier for three years, but he’d done a good job on him: that one was … nasty! There’s no question in my mind that Trennier was well on his way to becoming Wamphyri! This time the credit goes to Liz Merrick; she challenged Trennier—called on him to draw, as it were—lured him from his hole, and faced him down. And we, the rest of the team, finished it off, cut him down, and burned the poor bastard to a black, smoking crisp!” Trask took a deep breath, grunted his satisfaction, and continued:
“We also took out his thralls, an entire nest of them well gone into vampirism. But as you are all well aware, there isn’t any point of no return for victims of vampirism; even part-gone is way too far gone. So we did them a favour, for there was no hope for any of them.
“But Trennier and Malinari were linked telepathically. In the moments of Trennier’s dying he contacted his master, which David Chung likewise picked up; a momentary contact, which nevertheless led us to Brisbane and the Macpherson Range, and also to a second bolt-hole.
“Malinari had taken control of Jethro Manchester’s Xanadu, a holiday resort in the Macphersons. The place was an up-market aerie, somewhat removed from any manse that he’d ever inhabited in Starside! In fact, his seat was a luxurious bubble apartment over Xanadu’s central ‘Pleasure Dome’ … would you believe, a casino? Now, if we were cynics—which I know we sometimes are, by virtue of our talents—that sort of thing might even give us pause about Las Vegas, right?”
Trask appeared to have lightened up a little; his audience appreciated it, and there were even one or two wry smiles, nodding heads. “But hey, let’s not go into that!” he jokingly went on. “Lord knows that place has always had its bloodsuckers!”
(Some muted laughter now, from Trask’s audience.)
But as they settled down again, the smile was gone from his face as if it had never been there. He’d simply been setting them up. And now the punch line:
“Xanadu is in ruins, gutted like a fish!” Trask rasped, no slightest trace of humour in his sandpaper voice. “Gutted, yes, which wasn’t down to us but to Malinari. He did it to us, or he tried to, and we were damned lucky he didn’t pull it off!
“Likewise on Jethro Manchester’s island: his thralls there knew we were coming, even though they weren’t any too well prepared. But then again, maybe they hadn’t wanted to be ready for us, for after all, they were just people, dupes, victims.
“So what I’m telling you is this: that Nephran Malinari—this bloody vampire, this Lord of the Wamphyri—that he knows about us! He probably got quite a lot from … from poor Zek, a little from Trennier, and God only knows how much from us—when we were out there in such close proximity to him. He’s a telepath; no, more properly a mentalist, a fabulously talented creature with vast reserves of what we call ESP, and he’s our deadliest enemy since … well, since the day we caused the vampire world to turn on its axis and destroyed Devetaki Skullguise and her brood in Starside. That’s how dangerous he is.
“And he escaped, got clean away … where to, we don’t yet know, though we have evidence that suggests he’s no longer down under in Australia. But wherever he is, one thing seems certain: finding and dealing with Malinari isn’t going to get any easier the next time around … .
“Okay, he got away. But his people—or those poor damned souls who were once people—they didn’t. We can at least congratulate ourselves that we got that right. So we’re now satisfied about as far as we can be that the Australian continent is free of contamination. Naturally we’d like to keep it that way, and to be absolutely sure I’ll be detailing a locator, a couple of spotters, and maybe a telepath to go back out there and pick it up where we left off. There were clues we didn’t get the opportunity to look into, and other stuff that still needs tracking down. So those of you who’ll be involved: I’m sorry for the short notice, but time is of the essence. We can no longer afford to sit around d
oing nothing while three Great Vampires out of Starside are on the loose preparing God only knows what mayhem and madness for our world.
“Very well, we’ll know who’s going within the next twenty-four hours, and after that the lucky ones will have just enough time to pack before they’re heading down under …”
Trask paused to glance at his notes, then nodded and said, “A moment ago I posed something of a question. And it’s a question that has to be in everyone’s mind. Just what are Malinari, Szwart, and Vavara up to in our world? Just what is it they’re doing or planning to do? Well, we know what they’re not doing. They’re not recruiting, not taking thralls or making vampires; or if they are, it’s a small, localized, and tightly controlled industry. What I mean is, they’re not spreading it around. Not yet, anyway.
“But surely that’s what they do. It’s their way of life—hah! Ask any vampire and he’ll tell you, that the blood is the life!” (Trask seemed galvanized now, his eyes blazing in a suddenly ravaged face.) “They ‘live’ by taking thralls, by leeching on the blood of their servitors and victims, and by spreading death and undeath. So, why hasn’t the plague come among us? I know that time isn’t of any real consequence to the Wamphyri, but they’ve had three years! By now the great nations should be at war … even with each other! Half the population armed with crossbows and wooden stakes, and the other half with eyes dripping sulphur, hiding in the dark, waiting for the night. Cheap silver crucifixes selling for twice the price of gold. Noonday bonfires in every town centre, and the sickening stench of burning vampire flesh. And by night, the ever-growing ranks of the thirsty ones, raping, ravaging, and making more, hunting for new souls to toss on their bonfires—the ones that burn in hell!”
Again Trask paused to let all that he’d said sink in, and in a far more controlled, regulated voice went on: “If I seemed to go a little over the top just then it was mainly to wake you up, spur you on, give you something of an incentive—not that you need one, I’m sure. But it’s been three long years, people, and all that time I’ve sweated over information which you weren’t privy to. And now … I think it’s time you were. A burden shared, and all that …