by Brian Lumley
“It’s okay.” It was as much as Harry could bear. His voice was trembling, broken. “I know what then. You’ve said enough. I … I’ll go on what I have.”
Pamela was crying now, spilling out her poor mutilated soul, all of her defiance and resilience crushed and drained from her by the horror of what she’d forced herself to remember for the Necroscope.
He … he made my body ugly! she sobbed. He made holes in me! Before I was dead he was into me. And after I was dead I could still feel him grunting on me, hurting me. It’s not right that when you’re dead someone should still be able to hurt you, Harry.
“It’s okay, it’s okay,” was all Harry could say to comfort her. But even saying it he knew it wasn’t, knew it wouldn’t be until he himself had put this thing right.
She took this from his deadspeak, understood his resolve, reinforced his anger with her own. Get him for me, Harry! Get that dog’s bastard for me!
“And for myself,” he told her. “For if I don’t, I know he’ll always be there, clinging like slime to the walls of my mind. But, Pamela—”
Yes?
“Simply killing this one won’t be enough. I mean, it’s just not enough! But if you’re willing, there’s a way you can help me. You’re strong, Pamela, in death just as you were in life. And what I have in mind … I believe it’s something you would enjoy even more than you did in life.” He explained his meaning, and for a little while she was silent. Then:
I think I know now why the dead are afraid of you, Harry, she said wonderingly. And: Is it true that you’re a vampire?
“Yes … no!” he said. “Not like that. Not yet, anyway. And not here. But somewhere else I will be—or may be—one day.”
Yes—he sensed her nod—I think you must be—or will be—for nothing human could ever think the thought you thought just then. Nothing entirely human, anyway.
“But you’ll do it?”
Oh, yes, she answered him at last with a grim, emphatic deadspeak nod. Who or whatever you are, I’ll do anything you tell me, Harry Keogh, vampire, Necroscope. Anything, everything, and whatever it takes to get even. Whatever you ask and whenever you ask it. Anything …
Harry nodded. “So be it,” he said.
For the next thirty-odd hours the Necroscope was busy; not only him but E-Branch, too. And the next day, a warm evening in mid-May, the Minister Responsible caused the Branch emergency call-in system to be brought into play.
First, acting on disturbing information received from Geoffrey Paxton (concerning among other things the files Darcy Clarke had mailed to Harry Keogh), the Minister had relieved Clarke of all duties and placed him under what amounted to house arrest at Clarke’s own North London flat in Crouch End. Second, he must now attend the O-group briefing he’d called at E-Branch HQ. The espers would know, of course, that something big was in the offing: all available agents were to be present.
Paxton was there to meet the Minister on the ground floor. Even as they exchanged curt greetings Ben Trask, just back from a job, came in from the street through the swing doors. Trask looked drawn, even haggard. The Minister took him to one side where they conversed in lowered tones for a minute or two, and for once Paxton knew enough to keep his nose out. Then they all three took the elevator upstairs and went directly to the ops room.
The called-in agents were silent, seated, waiting for the Minister. He took the podium and his eyes swept the mainly ordinary-looking faces of the espers—Britain’s ESP-endowed mindspies—where they stared back at him. He knew them all from photographs in their files, but only Darcy Clarke and Ben Trask had ever met him. And Paxton, of course.
If Clarke had been here, perhaps he would have stood up as a sign of respect, and maybe the rest of them would have followed suit. Or then again maybe not. The trouble with this lot had always been that they thought they were special. But here the Minister knew he wasn’t fooling anybody, least of all himself. They were special, bloody special!
And looking at them, he felt as several before him must surely have felt. Physics and metaphysics, robots and romantics, gadgets and ghosts. Two sides of the same coin. Were they really? Science and parapsychology? The mundane and the supernatural? And he wondered what was the difference, anyway? Isn’t a telephone or radio magic? To speak with someone on the other side of the world, even on the moon? And has there ever been a more powerful, more monstrous spell or invocation than E = mc2?
These were some of the Minister’s thoughts as he scanned the faces of E-Branch’s espers and put names to them:
Ben Trask, the human lie detector; blocky, overweight, mousey-haired and green-eyed, slope-shouldered and lugubrious. Possibly, Trask’s sad expression sprang from the knowledge that the whole world was a liar. Or if not all of it, a hell of a lot of it. It was Trask’s talent: to recognize whatever was false. Show him or tell him a lie and he would know it at once. He wouldn’t always know the truth of the thing, but he would always know that what was represented wasn’t so. No façade, however cleverly constructed, could ever fool him. The police used him a lot, to crack stone killers; also he came in handy in respect of international negotiations, when it was good to know if the cards on the table made a full deck.
David Chung: a young Londoner, a locator and scryer of the highest quality. He was slight, wiry, slant-eyed and yellow as they come. But he was British, loyal, and his talent was amazing. He tracked Soviet nuclear “stealth” subs, IRA units in the field, drug-runners. Especially the latter. Chung’s parents had been addicts, and their addiction had killed them. That’s where his talent had started, and it was still growing.
Anna Marie English was something else. (But weren’t they all?) Twenty-three, bespectacled, enervated, pallid, and dowdy, she was hardly an English rose! That was a direct result of her talent, for she was “as one with the Earth”: her way of defining it. She felt the rain forests being eaten away; she knew the extent of the ozone holes; when the deserts expanded she felt their desiccation, and the mass erosion of mountain soil made her physically sick. She was “ecologically aware” beyond the five senses of mundane mankind. Greenpeace could base their entire campaign on her, except no one would believe. The Branch did believe, and used her like it used David Chung: as a tracker. She tracked illicit nuclear waste, monitored pollution, warned of invasions of Colorado beetle and Dutch elm disease, cried aloud the extinction of whales, elephants, dolphins, other species. And she knew that the Earth was sick and growing sicker. She only had to look in the mirror each day to know that.
Then there was Geoffrey Paxton, a telepath, one of several. An unpleasant person, the Minister thought, but his talent was useful. And it takes all sorts to make a world. Paxton was ambitious, he wanted it all. Better to employ him where he too could be watched than have him turn to high-stakes blackmail or become the mind-spy agent of some foreign power. Later … Paxton’s would be a career worth following. And closely.
Sixteen of them gathered here, under one roof, and eleven more out in various parts of the world, guiding that world, or at least watching over it. They were paid according to their talents, handsomely! And they were worth every penny. It would cost a lot more if they ever decided to work for themselves …
Sixteen of them, and as the Minister’s eyes roved over them, so they studied him: a man who so far had kept himself to the shadows and would prefer to stay there, except that now some affairs of the utmost moment had lured him out. He was in his mid-forties, small and dapper, dark hair brushed back and plastered down. And he had no nerves to speak of, or none that were visible, anyway. He wore patent-leather black shoes, a dark blue suit and light blue tie. His brow had a few wrinkles but other than these his face was normally unlined, and his eyes were bright, clear, and blue. Right now, though, and especially since his conversation with Ben Trask, he was looking harried.
“Ladies, gentlemen” (he wasn’t one for preamble), “what I have to say would seem fantastic to almost anyone outside these walls, as would almost everything that goes on
within them. But I’ll try not to bore you with too many things you already know. Mainly, I’ve gathered you together to tell you we have one hell of a problem. First I’ll tell you how it came to be, and how it came to light. Then you’ll have to tell me how we’re going to deal with it, in which instance I know that even the least of you—if there is such a thing—has more practical experience than I have. In fact, you’re the only people with practical experience of these things, and so the only ones who can deal with the matter in hand.” He took a deep breath, then continued:
“Some time ago we appointed a traitor as head of E-Branch. I’m talking about Wellesley, yes. Well, he can’t do any more harm. But after him it was my job to make sure it couldn’t happen again. In short, we needed someone who was capable of spying on the spies. Now, I know you people have an unwritten code: you don’t spy on each other. So I couldn’t use one of you, not in situ, anyway. I had to take one of you out of the Branch and make him responsible to myself alone. And I had to do it before he could build up too many loyalties. So I chose Geoffrey Paxton, a relative newcomer, as my watcher over the watchers.”
He at once held up his hands, as if to ward off protests, though none were forthcoming—as yet. “None of you, and I do mean none of you, were suspect in any way. But after Wellesley I couldn’t take any chances. Still, I’d like to have it understood that your personal lives are still yours, and no tampering. Paxton has always been under the strictest instructions not to interfere or pry into anything extraneous, but to confine himself solely to Branch business. Which is to say, Branch security.
“A few weeks ago we had some business in the Mediterranean. Two of our members, Layard and Jordan, had come up against … unpleasant opposition. It was the worst sort of business, but not without precedent. The head of E-Branch, Darcy Clarke, went out there with Harry Keogh and Sandra Markham to see what could be done. Later, Trask and Chung joined them, and they also had help from other quarters. As for qualifications: Clarke and Trask both had experience of that sort of thing, and Keogh … well, Keogh is Keogh. If he could be reactivated, get his talents back, that would be a wonderful bonus for the Branch. But initially, he went out as an observer and adviser, for no one knew more about vampirism than he did …” (And here he paused, perhaps significantly.)
“Now, we still don’t know exactly what happened out there in Rhodes, the Greek islands, Romania, but we do know that we lost Trevor Jordan, Ken Layard, and Sandra Markham. I mean lost them dead! So it can be seen they had a real problem, one which Darcy Clarke would have us believe is now … resolved? Harry Keogh, of course, could tell us everything, but so far he’s chosen to tell us very little.”
By now the breathing of the Minister’s audience was quite audible, perhaps even heavy, impatient; and he saw that someone had stood up. Since the light was on the podium he had to squint to see who it was on his feet back there in the shadows, but in a little while he made it out to be the very tall, skeletally thin hunchman or prognosticator Ian Goodly. “Yes, Mr. Goodly?”
“Minister,” Goodly answered, his high-pitched voice shrill but not unnaturally or unusually so, “I know you won’t be offended by any sort of imagined implication when I say that so far every word you’ve said has been spoken with absolute honesty and integrity. It came straight from the heart, was told the way you see it and with the best of intentions. I don’t think anyone here doubts that, or that it takes a brave sort of man to come in here and try to tell us anything, especially in the knowledge that there are people here who could pick your mind clean in a moment.”
The Minister nodded. “I don’t know about the bravery bit, but everything else is correct. What’s more, it puts any sort of subterfuge right out of the question; it can be seen—you people can surely see—that I have no axe to grind. So … are you making a point, Mr. Goodly?”
“The point is that I do have an axe to grind, sir,” Goodly answered quietly. “We all do. And the way this briefing is going, it strikes me as likely we could have several axes to grind before you’re through. Not with you, you understand. That would be pointless, anyway, for my talent tells me that you’re going to be our Minister Responsible for a long time to come. So … not with what you’ve said or what you think, but maybe with what you’ve done and plan to do. Or plan to ask us to do. Unless, of course, there are some damn good reasons.”
“Do you mind explaining?” The Minister’s confusion was mounting. “But briefly, because I really do have to get on, and—”
“Explanations are easy.” Someone else was on his—no, her—feet: Millicent Cleary, a pretty little telepath whose talent was as yet embryonic. She merely glanced at the Minister but scowled furiously at the back of Paxton’s head where he sat in the first row of seats. “Some explanations, anyway. I mean, it was inevitable we’d be monitored eventually, but … by that?” And still scowling, she tossed her head to give the final word extra emphasis. She was pointing at Paxton.
“Miss, er—?” In his confusion the Minister had forgotten her name. He prided himself on not forgetting names. He looked at her, looked at Paxton.
“Cleary,” she said. “Millicent …” And she breathlessly continued: “Paxton didn’t follow your instructions. He simply ignored your orders. Branch security? Branch business? Oh, that was the handy excuse you gave him—which he scarcely needed—but other people’s business, more like! And his nose right in it!”
The Minister was frowning. He looked harder at Paxton. “Can you be more specific, Miss Cleary?”
But she wouldn’t. She could but wouldn’t. What, and tell everyone here that during Paxton’s first month with the Branch she’d caught the shriveled little scumbag in her mind one night playing with himself to the purr of her vibrator and the tingling of her senses?
“He looked at all of us.” Someone else saved her, his voice strong and gravelly. “He looked at the juicy bits, which like it or not we each and every one of us have, and he was doing it before you gave him his brief! Since then, why … by now he’s probably looked at your juicy bits, too!”
And back to the gangling Goodly again: “Minister, if you hadn’t taken Paxton out of the organization, we would have. He’s about as trustworthy as a defective contraceptive. If AIDS was a psychic disease, all our brains would be shrivelling to shit right now! All of them!” He paused to let that sink in, and after a moment:
“So it seems to us that what you’ve done is to take away the one man we all trust, while at the same time giving us a watchdog who snaps at his keepers. Yes, and you’ve chosen one hell of a time to do it.” That was twice he’d cursed, and it wasn’t Goodly’s style to swear at all, not even mildly.
Paxton had been cleaning his fingernails, apparently unconcerned, but now his ears reddened up a little. He stood up and turned round, glared at the others where they all stared at him in silent accusation. “My talent is … unruly!” he snapped. “Also it’s eager, full of all the enthusiasm which you jealous bastards have lost! I’m still finding out about it, still experimenting. It isn’t some bloody bonsai tree you can just force into any old shape!”
Almost as one person they shook their heads: they were the last people he should ever try to convince; his pallid, lame excuses wouldn’t work on them. Each and every one of them, they had it in for Paxton. Finally, Ben Trask spoke up, giving their single unified thought shape and substance. “You’re a liar, Paxton,” he said quite simply. And because Trask was what he was, he didn’t have to enlarge upon his accusation.
The Minister felt like he’d bumped into a hornet’s nest and for his pains (or by them) was being driven off course, which he really couldn’t afford to let happen. He held up his hands, took on a harder, more authoritative tone of voice. “For God’s sake, put your feuding and personal feelings aside!” he cried. “At least for the moment, or for as long as it takes. Whatever else any one of you is or isn’t, there’s one thing we can at least be sure of: you’re all human!”
Which hit them like a truck. Seeing t
hat he now had their attention, and while he retained the upper hand, the Minister turned pleadingly to Ben Trask. “Mr. Trask—but level-headed, if you please—will you repeat what you told me downstairs?”
Trask looked at him grudgingly but nodded. “Only first let me finish telling them what you started. They already know most of it and have probably guessed the rest, so I’ll get straight to it. And it just might come easier if they hear it from me.”
“Very well,” the Minister replied, sighing his relief.
And Trask began:
“Zek Föener gave us a helping hand in the Greek islands,” he said. “You’ll know who she is from the Keogh files, what happened at Perchorsk and on Starside, etcetera. She’s a powerful telepath, one of the world’s best. But like the Necroscope himself she’s opted out of cloak and daggery.
“Anyway, it was dodgy out there in the Med. We were killing vampires, and plenty of times when they nearly killed us. But Harry took the brunt of it and went up against the Big One, Janos Ferenczy himself—and I know I don’t have to tell you about the Ferenczys. When Harry was in Romania that last time, just before the end, Zek tried to get in touch with him to see how things were going. But telepathy over great distances isn’t easy and she didn’t get too much. At least that’s what she told us, but we could see that what she did get shocked her rigid.
“I know Darcy Clarke has been worried stiff about it, for the fact is Darcy thinks the Necroscope’s the best thing since sliced bread. I know several of you also think so, and hell, so do I! Or I used to …
“So … we did the job and came back, and as far as we know, Harry was successful, too. It seems he made a great job of it. Except he’s been a bit cagey about what actually happened up in the Carpathians. Now me, I haven’t read too much into that. Nor has Darcy Clarke. For after all, Harry did lose Sandra Markham out there. So Darcy was going to let him get it off his chest in his own good time.