by Brian Lumley
“I quickly covered up. ‘Ferenczy is a name that’s not uncommon in Romania, which is where you’re headed,’ I said. ‘Why, I think there may even be a Ferenczy or two in my own ancestry, which is why I was startled to hear you speak it.’ The last was a damned lie, of course, but not the first; for as you yourself have told me, Ben, the Ferenczys are an ancient, honoured, established line in old Romania, as are many old family names out of Sunside.
“But Vladi had soured of our conversation; now he sat silently glooming on me, until my escort reappeared with bad news.
“‘There are strangers in the woods!’ that one reported to his chief, the while looking me up and down, with suspicion in his narrow brown eyes.
“‘Ah!’ said I. ‘But they’ll be my colleagues, who brought me here to see you. They’re not Szgany, so I didn’t bring them with me into your camp.’
“‘So they’re friends of yours, are they?’ My young escort hissed, gripping my elbow. ‘Reporters? Newspaper men, perhaps?’
“And old Vladi, he looked at me and grunted: ‘Eh? Eh?’
“‘No,’ I shook my head. “They’re English, visitors to this country. Didn’t I tell you I came from afar?”
“Then my escort held me more tightly yet, saying, ‘The men are waiting on your word, Vladi. First Maria goes down with the blood curse, then those newspaper people show up with their cameras and notebooks, and those so-called Sisters of Mercy, poking their noses in. What with that doctor from Kavála, and the police, we’ve had enough! Now I think we should bloody this one up a little, him and these English friends of his. I think they are spies and we should fling them in a thorn thicket for their trouble!’
“But Vladi shook his head and said, ‘Spies? But what would they be spying on? We have nothing to hide! So let it be. There is trouble enough in our wake. And anyway, this Lardis has spoken to me in an ancient tongue that my grandfather knew, and he may be of our blood.’ But having said his piece, then he turned to me.
“‘You,’ he said. ‘I’ve seen enough of you, Lardis Lidesci. I’ll accept what you’ve said, but I can’t accept that you came among us in a sly fashion. Go, and take your secretive friends with you. I don’t want to see you again.’
“And so I went.
“Bernie had turned the car around. My minders met me halfway, and I rather fancy that for all they were burly lads, they were glad to be out of there, too. The Szgany are fearsome in a fight and can hurl their knives with awesome accuracy. Aye, and we could feel Ferengi eyes on us all the way out of the woods.
“In Eleshnitsa, at noon, Bernie contacted the HQ as usual. There was a message ordering our return, along with your instructions for me to join you in Australia.
“And that’s it. I’ve told it all …”
5
OF THE NIGHT
Trask poured another brandy into Lardis’s glass, and for a little while remained silent while he pondered over what he’d been told. Then he said, “I think that maybe I should have spoken to you sooner.”
“Eh? Something in it, you mean?” Lardis seemed surprised.
“You sensed nothing out of the ordinary?” Trask, too, was puzzled. Why had Lardis found nothing suspicious in what he’d seen and heard? “But the way you told it, there was a definite air of mystery about these people.”
“Aye, but there’s that about all the Szgany!” Lardis protested. “Now listen:
“They had been through a lot. They’d had sickness in their company, and when it was time for them to move on, they’d taken this girl of theirs from a hospital by force and without permission. That was stupid—or more likely stubborn—of them, yes, I agree, but such is their nature. Then they’d aroused old superstitions in Skotousa by burying her with silver on her eyes, which is probably a custom of theirs, just as it is among various Szgany clans in Sunside. And from the time of their leaving Kavála, all of these newspaper people had been following after them, not to mention the police. Then that poor lass was dug up again; perhaps by the Skotousa villagers, I don’t know, but someone saw fit to put a stake in her, for sure! And after her grave had been opened yet again, by that pathol-, er, that doctor from the hospital, I mean—and after he’d cut her open and what have you … well, can’t you just see how upset these people must have been?”
“Yes, I can see all of that readily enough,” Trask agreed. “That doesn’t bother me too much—or it does, the entire sequence of events, and the events themselves: the girl’s sickness, and what have you—it’s all bothering me! But not specifically, not at this stage. I mean, I accept your explanation of the facts as we know them. Leukaemia, anaemia, various blood infections, they’re all killers. And I believe that in certain Greek islands and certainly in Romania they still bury people who die that way with silver coins on their eyelids. I’m not disputing that old customs die hard, Lardis, or that what we’ve seen here isn’t perfectly normal practice among the Szgany. But there are other things that you mentioned which complicate matters …”
“Such as?”
“This old chief, er, Vladi Ferengi?”
“Yes, what of him?”
Trask sat chin in hand, fingering his lip, staring across his desk at the Old Lidesci. “Some five and a half years ago,” he eventually said, “we had another visitor from Sunside … a human visitor, that is. I’m talking about Nathan Keogh when he came through the Gate into Perchorsk—if not exactly ‘of his own free will …’” He paused musingly.
“Of course he didn’t,” Lardis nodded. “He was thrown into the Starside Gate by his vampire brother, Nestor of the Wamphyri! Or rather, by Nestor’s first lieutenant, Zahar. Later, in this world, Nathan learned the secrets of the Mobius Continuum and brought you, your people, and your weapons back to Sunside with him to help us fight Vormulac Unsleep and Devetaki Skullguise. Huh! But that’s old news. What of it?”
“When Nathan escaped from Perchorsk,” Trask continued, as much to himself as to Lardis, “he was helped by a band of Travellers. Strangely—or even incredibly—they were journeying that far north despite that it was winter! And as for what this Vladi hinted to you about these ‘strange places …’”
“Yes?”
“Well, I never did have the entire story from Nathan—it wasn’t considered relevant at the time—but if I remember correctly, he had much the same conversation with the chief of the band that helped him. Also, that chief’s description as I recall it was identical to this Vladi’s.”
“His name, this chief?” Lardis was fascinated now.
“I never learned it,” Trask shook his head. “But I do remember Nathan saying that these people were descendants of Wamphyri supplicants who must have come through the Gate with their masters millennia ago. Their name alone would have told us that much. He also said they believed that one day their masters … that they would return.”
“And the strange places?”
“Well, it’s pure speculation, of course,” said Trask, “but couldn’t the strange places be those regions to which these masters would return, or in which they were scheduled to reappear? For instance, the Gate under the Carpathians, upriver from the resurgence at Radujevac? They frequently had Szgany visitors in the neighbourhood of the Refuge. Then there’s the old Moldavian Khorvaty; Faethor Ferenczy had a castle there, oh, fifteen hundred years ago. And Romania in the region of Halmagiu under the Zarandului Mountains, where Faethor held sway, and more recently his bloodson, Janos. We might even consider Perchorsk, which this Vladi might have sniffed out with that talented ‘old beak’ of his. It’s by no means impossible, Lardis. Why, you yourself are fey in your Szgany fashion, and—”
“—And there’d be far more of the Wamphyri taint in their supplicant blood than in mine, that’s for sure!” the other nodded.
“I’ll give you odds that these are the same people,” Trask said.
“Except I’m not taking you on!” said Lardis. “But … what does it all mean?”
“I don’t know,” Trask answered. “I’m n
ot sure. But what I would like to know is this: where had these Szgany Ferengi been before that poor girl went down with her weird disorder, her so-called anaemia? And what was this Gypsy band doing in that part of Greece anyway?”
“To which I’ve no answers.” Lardis shook his head.
“Nor have I, not yet,” said Trask. “But if this Vladi Ferengi has the power to sniff out the strange places, as he calls them, the places where in olden times the Wamphyri came through from Starside, or where they then established themselves in our world … mightn’t he also sense their presence in the here and now?”
“I begin to see what you’re getting at,” Lardis growled.
“And didn’t he say that this time his old beak had let him down, suggesting that he and his people had been—I don’t know—on some kind of mission, maybe searching for something?”
“For something or someone,” said Lardis. “Aye, someone … though I think you’re right and I, too, prefer something! Something … which had perhaps only recently arrived here?”
“Exactly!” Trask nodded.
“Huh!” Lardis grunted. And: “Am I blind, then? Why haven’t I made this connection?”
“You didn’t have all the facts,” Trask told him. “And anyway, two heads are better than one.” He sat up straighter. “And four or five heads are better yet. We have a think tank tomorrow. Good, for now I can give them something to think about. But right now—” He paused to stifle a yawn.
And Lardis said, “You’re tired, Ben, and so am I. I fancy it’s partly this good brandy’s fault.”
“No,” Trask shook his head. “Maybe that’s what does it for you, but for me it’s this job. I need a good night’s sleep, let things work themselves out in my head while my body rests. It’s too late tonight to do anything more anyway. I feel the need to work at it, of course, but can’t see us achieving anything more right now than we’ll get through in a single hour tomorrow morning.”
“I’ll be on my way, then,” said Lardis, easing himself upright in a creaking of old bones. But:
“Wait!” Trask stopped him, frowning.
“Oh?”
“There’s something else in what you told me, which doesn’t seem to fit in anywhere.”
“You’ll have to remind me.”
“Something about Sisters of Mercy? Your escort listed them among his concerns when he was trying to have Vladi punish you. So who were they? Nuns? But who would complain about nuns ‘poking their noses in’? I mean, poking their noses into what?”
“I didn’t have time to question further,” said Lardis ruefully. “For as I ex-plained, I was ushered out of there in a bit of a hurry!”
Trask gave a shrug. “Well, not to concern yourself. Greece has a great many monasteries and such. If the Gypsies were seen as poor itinerants, these Sisters of Mercy might have made themselves available for … I don’t know, whatever reason. To help them over their grief, perhaps?”
“Perhaps,” said Lardis. “But all of the Szgany I ever knew were solitary people in that respect. Any grieving there was to be done, they did it alone. Aye, for in Sunside in the old days—and perhaps right now, for all I know—that was as often as not the only way …”
After Lardis had left, Trask pondered things for a few minutes more, until he remembered that he had to call the Minister Responsible. By then it was well after eleven.
Ah, well, he thought, reaching for the phone. Why should I be the only one who works late?
But in fact Trask wasn’t the only one who was working late.
In her temporary secret accommodation adjacent to Jake Cutter’s quarters, Liz Merrick had fallen asleep while waiting for him to return from his unau-thorized outing with Lardis and Lissa Lidesci. It had been the sound of him slamming his door, and then his preparations for steep—his occasional mutter-ing and his toilet flushing, the liquid hiss of his shower, and finally the low hum of his fan—that had brought her awake just forty- five minutes ago. Of course she couldn’t have a fan, in case he heard it. And if she needed the toilet—which she had, but had to wait until he was bumping around in his bed before using the “back door” and tiptoeing through E-Branch HQ’s night corridors to the ladies’—well, that was just too bad.
But in fact these things weren’t Liz’s main concerns. She only got angry over these lesser details to cover for her impotence in the larger scheme of things: namely, the fact that she had to sneak around like this in the first place, and especially that she had to sneak around in Jake’s mind.
Impotent, yes, because she couldn’t do anything about it; she knew that Ben Trask was right and this was all-important-that Jake himself was all-important, and not only to the Branch and its work and the world in general. He was very important to Liz, too, and if he caught her spying on him like this (again), well, that wouldn’t much help her case either!
By the time she’d returned from the toilet to what she had come to think of as her hidy-hole, Jake was on the verge of sleep. And when Liz extended her first, tentative probe in his direction, she received vague, swirling impressions that she at once recognized of old:
A dreamy wandering—indeed, a mental somnambulism—his mind’s subconscious searching for a direction in which it might take itself … undecipherable anxieties … a nervous shifting of mental patterns … the lure of an incredible swirl of numbers, equations, caculi—a veritable wall of numbers, enclosing Jake and shutting him in, yet hovering just beyond his reach—like some elusive, sentient cyclone.
All of these things, and something else. The very weirdest of weird sensations: that he wasn’t alone in there …
Well, and he wasn’t alone, not any longer. But was it Liz herself, an echo of her intrusion reflecting from Jake’s mainly relaxed shields, or was it something else? Was it perhaps something that the Necroscope, Harry Keogh, had left in Jake’s mind to watch over him? But if so, why did he seem to shy from it?
Liz’s questions were inward-directed, of course, but they were also intense, and as a telepath she should have known better. Thoughts are thoughts, and telepathy is telepathy. A sensitive person, whether a mentalist or not, may sometimes detect the uninvited interest of a talented Other (usually as a prickling at the back of the neck, a warning that someone is watching), and Jake Cutter was a lot more than merely sensitive.
His mental shields immediately strengthened—and Liz as quickly backed off! Fortunately she hadn’t been detected, or if she had then her probe had been perceived much as a fly: an irritation momentarily sensed, brushed away, and otherwise ignored in the face of some other, more serious intrusion. Which caused her to wonder: if Jake’s shields hadn’t gone up on her account, then on whose?
And as on several occasions before Liz shuddered uncontrollably at the thought of what Jake was, and of what he could do, albeit subconsciously. For the moment subconsciously, anyway.
But in any case it would be prudent to play safe, she supposed, and keep her mind to herself until she was sure Jake was asleep. The trouble with that was that Liz, too, was tired. And as she finally drifted back into sleep she missed the deadspeak conversation that took place in the room beyond her cell’s thin walls.
Not that she would have heard it anyway, though she might have sensed something of it—might have detected the swing of Jake’s emotions, made guesses at his denials or rejections, his heated assertiveness—but that would be all. For only the dead are fully receptive of deadspeak.
And only a Necroscope can hear them when they answer …
You are being obstinate. Moreover, you would shirk your duty to your commitment, our agreement, the pact we swore! Korath, once Korath Mindsthrall, made guttural protest, his dead voice welling up from the darkness of Jake Cutter’s sleeping mind.
And because Jake could no longer pretend to ignore him, as he did when awake, he answered, “Yes, I want out of it! Because your interpretation of our ‘agreement’—this ‘pact’ you say we swore—in no way agrees with mine!”
I saved your life!
Korath continued. But for my intervention, you and your friends—especially your woman friend—were dead in Malinari’s inferno in Xanadu. Except before being rendered to her fats, sweet Liz would have suffered even worse torments in The Mind’s garden of metamorphosis. Have you forgotten the thing with the not-so-vacant eyes, which once was Demetrakis Mindsthrall? Demetrakis, of the drooling mouths and swollen penises? They were for seeing, those eyes, or at least for gauging distance and direction, and the mouths were for eating, for reducing sweet Liz to mulch for Malinari’s mushrooms. What, and do you suppose the penises were for nothing? Well let me inform you that Demetrakis was once an extremely lusty man who made no less a lusty vampire! What little of him remained in Malinari’s garden … ah, but you may believe it when I tell you that that would have known what to do with your sweet Liz!
And then, when Jake made no answer:
Now bear me out, Korath went on. You can’t dispute that in your hour of greatest need I showed good faith. Since when, for payment, you’ve betrayed or thought to betray me at every turn. And you dare to inquire what is that for a pact? Hah! What, indeed! But surely I should be the one doing the asking!
“I’ve asked no such thing,” said Jake.
But you have thought it, implied it.
“Damn right!” the other exploded. “That ‘pact’ you devised was sheer hogwash! Nothing but a ploy to give you unlimited access to my mind. Harry Keogh was right when he warned me to have no truck with vampires, dead or alive. Would you like me to remind you of how it was supposed to be, this alleged arrangement or agreement of ours?”