by Brian Lumley
Fess thrust forward his great head into the cave, glared into its depths and wrinkled his snoutlike nose. And, ‘Aye,’ he growled in a little while, ‘I sense it, too. And indeed this could well be a way in, for the cone’s master has guarded it with a bloodbeast.’
Shaithis nodded. ‘Or maybe with the bloodbeast?’
‘Eh?’ said Arkis.
‘Perhaps he has only the one creature,’ said Shaithis. ‘For if there were a pair, then Fess here might well have been taken at the same time as Volse.’
‘But what does that matter now?’ Fess shrugged. ‘Even on its own, this thing is a monster. Are you suggesting we might go against it? Madness! One of us would surely die — possibly two, even all of us — or at least end up sorely wounded before this thing succumbed. I saw it strike three times in as many seconds, unerringly, and ram Volse through and through like a fish on a Traveller’s spear. Why, he didn’t even know what hit him!’
But Shaithis shook his head. ‘No, I’m not proposing to take it on; quite the opposite. What I’m saying is this: if there’s only one such beast and it’s here, then we go in by some other route.’
‘What?’ Arkis scowled. ‘And they come thick and fast, these entrances and exits, do they?’
Shaithis shrugged. ‘So it would seem. The tunnel where Volse was taken. The cave you thought you saw back there on the lava-cliff. This dark entrance here before us. Now listen: the master of the cone sent a mist to confuse us, didn’t he? But not to keep us from this cave, not if this is where he’s stationed his sword-snout. So… perhaps there’s another entrance close by.’ He gave a sharp nod. ‘I say we continue to follow the ledge, a little way at least. Then, even if it comes to nothing, at least we’ll have explored this part of the face to the full.’
‘Fair enough,’ said the Ferenc. ‘No argument here. As long as you’re not asking me to go in there!’
Arkis growled, ‘Then let’s get on. We waste time with all this talk and conjecture.’ He started off, in the lead, and the Ferenc followed on. And now Shaithis brought up the rear.
Overhead the small cloud had snowed itself out; the aurora writhed and the stars gave the icy curve of the world’s horizon a blue sheen; Shaithis sensed the vampire awareness of his two ‘companions’ focused ahead, leaving him free to converse with Shaitan. And: There, he sent a tight-guarded thought. And how does this formation suit you? Also, what was the idea of the small snow storm? I thought you were eager for them, yet there you go trying to frighten them off.
The answer came back at once:
First, your formation suits both of us very well. Second, the snow served to confuse and distract them — especially the giant. Now listen and I’ll describe your route from this point forward. Very soon now you’ll come to a place where the rock is riven into deep crevices. One such crack has been filled in with lava which forms a floor. Follow this and it will lead you direct to my abode at the hollow core. As for your companions, alas their time runs very short. Indeed they haven’t enough of it to find their way here. Not on their feet anyway.
There was nothing of humour in Shaitan’s mental voice, only an icy resolve. Shaithis made no further comment; and anyway Arkis, heading the column, had come to a halt. Fess joined him, then Shaithis.
Before them the surface of the ledge and the near-vertical face of the cliff were split with deep fissures a full pace in width. Arkis looked at the others. ‘What now?’
‘We go on,’ said Shaithis.
Perhaps his reply had been too ready, or he had sounded too sure of himself, for the Ferenc looked at him for long moments. And at last the giant said, ‘But the way looks like a jumble of broken rock. Any cave we find will surely have collapsed in upon itself.’
‘We won’t know that until we look,’ Shaithis answered. ‘It’s just that I feel we’re very close now.’
The Ferenc narrowed his eyes. ‘It appears I’m not the only one whose awareness has been focused to a fault. But very well, we press on. Arkis, lead the way.’
The leper’s son, muttering darkly to himself, stepped out across the first crack, teetered a little on the far side and found his balance. And so they all proceeded.
Then, after negotiating a half-dozen more crevasses: ‘Ho!’ Arkis called back. ‘But this next crack has a floor, formed of a frozen river of rock.’
‘An ancient lava-run,’ said Fess, joining him.
Shaithis came last and looked at the cliff, riven where in olden times the flow had forced an exit. ‘Lava from the secret heart of the volcano,’ he said. ‘So perhaps we’ve found our way in after all.’
The Ferenc stepped under the cliff’s overhang, into the shadow of the cleft. ‘Let me scan it.’
Arkis went after him, with Shaithis bringing up the rear, and they all three sniffed the air, probing the way ahead with keen vampire senses. Until at last Arkis ventured: ‘I sense… nothing!’
‘Likewise,’ said Shaithis, relieved that the small-talented Diredeath had discovered no threat (where in fact he found the place menacing and uninviting in the extreme). The Ferenc, however, seemed of a similar mind to Shaithis; except he was perfectly, and honestly, willing to voice it.
‘I don’t like it,’ he gave his opinion, ‘for it smells too much like the cave where Volse got his.’
‘You’ve let Volse’s death prey on your mind,’ Shaithis told him. ‘And anyway — and as has been said before — forewarned is forearmed. Also, there are three of us this time. Arkis and I, we have our mighty gauntlets, and you have your even mightier talons. And in any case we’re already decided that the bloodbeast was hidden in that first cave. Myself,’ (he paused to sniff the cave’s air again), ‘I think it likely that the cone’s master has worked some beguilement here: he has gloomed on this place and left the smell of death here. But a smell is only a smell, and I smell success! I’m for going in.’ He looked from Fess to Arkis.
Arkis shrugged. ‘If this so-called “cone’s master” has comforts in there, then I’m with you, Shaithis. I’ve had it to the tusks with hardship! I could use some rich red blood in my belly, and a woman in my bed. D’you suppose it’s a harem he guards so jealously?’
Shaithis’s turn to shrug. ‘I’ve never been a one for the histories,’ he said, ‘but I’ve heard it said that some of the banished Lords took their concubines with them. We can’t say what we’ll find until we find it.’
‘Comforts, aye,’ said the Ferenc, licking his lips. ‘I could use some of those myself. Very well, we go on.’
Shaithis put on a scowl and said, ‘And how’s this for a turn of events? Are you suddenly our leader? It seems you like having the last word, Fess Ferenc. “Arkis, you lead the way.” And, “Very well, we go on.”’
‘Bah? was Fess’s retort. ‘If no one ever made a decision, then we’d be here for ever. Here, let me lead the way…’
Which was exactly what Shaithis had wanted.
The darkness of the interior was like daylight to the vampire Lords, indeed it was preferable to the auroral light and the blue sheen cast by the stars. The Ferenc strode where the way was obvious and unobstructed, inched along where it was made obscure by jumbles, or where the uneven ceiling came down low, or where blisters of lava had burst to form jagged-rimmed, circular cusps of rock like small craters in the almost corrugated texture of the floor. And where other natural fissures or blowholes radiated from the main run, he steadfastly followed the ancient lava flow.
Arkis stayed a pace or so to the Ferenc’s rear, followed immediately by Shaithis. As they progressed so the oppressive sensation of ominous expectancy or foreboding lifted a little, which (to Diredeath and the Ferenc, at least) lent credence to Shaithis’s ‘theory’ that the volcano’s dweller had deliberately set a fearful aura over the mouth of the run to dissuade any would-be explorers.
Shaithis stayed very much on the alert, kept his thoughts fully guarded, would have liked to contact Shaitan but dared not, not with Fess and Arkis probing in all directions with their minds
, their Wamphyri awareness sharp for the smallest hint of mental activity. And always they moved deeper into the heart of the rock.
Eventually the Ferenc called a halt, whispering, ‘We must be halfway in at least. Time to take stock.’
‘Of what?’ Arkis grunted. His blunt query sounded like an avalanche, echoing out and back in slowly decreasing waves of sound.
‘Dolt!’ Fess whispered again when he could be heard. ‘What use to have the senses of bats, to be able to smell out the way ahead like wolves and keep our minds tuned for the thoughts of others, when at every opportunity all you can do is make great noise! Would you alert our enemy to our presence?’
Abashed, Arkis kept his answer low: ‘Hell, if he’s at home, surely by now he knows we’re coming!’
‘Perhaps,’ Shaithis intervened, ‘but in any case, let’s keep it quiet.’
‘Taking stock, yes,’ said the Ferenc. ‘Going first all this way has taken the edge of my awareness. Arkis, you can spell me.’
‘No problem.’ The other took the lead, glad for the chance to make amends. But after moving on only a dozen or so paces: ‘Now hold!’ Arkis said. ‘Something’s weird!’
They had all felt it at the same time: a sensory void, a region vacant of all vibrancies, whether for good or evil, a place stagnant as some stirless, sunless subterranean lake. And they likewise knew what that meant: that the place had been made sterile, for even darkness and cold stone have a feel to them. Someone wanted them to believe that there was nothing, absolutely nothing, here… because there was something here.
Shaithis’s flesh tingled and he knew the others must be feeling the same sensation. Arkis, in the lead, stood rooted to the spot, gurgling inarticulately; but it was much too late for gurgling anything. Shaithis felt the heavy mental curtain deliberately ripped open — felt fear and horror springing into being behind it and rushing to burst through its tattered drapes — then saw the blur of leprous grey which was to be the end of Arkis Leperson, called Diredeath. And indeed his death was dire!
Where the Thing came from would be hard to say — a niche in the wall of the place, a side-tunnel, a hiding place in the lee of some bulge of lava — but it came at great speed and with fell intent. And it was exactly as the Ferenc had described it. Patched white and grey, mottled like veined marble, it seemed to uncoil or erupt into being, as if some massive boulder half-buried in the floor had come to life and reshaped itself. Its legs were a blur, claws scrabbling as it reared before Arkis; its fishlike head bore a bone lance tapered to a sharp point and equipped with thorns or hooks all along its length; its eyes were like saucers, fixing its victim with their emotionless glare.
Arkis’s gauntlet was on his hand, ready; but as he raised his arm the Thing struck at him in a move too fast to follow. Its lance gashed his short, squat neck as it sawed past, and its needle-toothed jaws closed on his gauntlet arm. The arm was severed, swallowed at a gulp. In drawing back, the Thing sawed at Arkis’s neck again and sliced into his whistling air-pipe; in the next moment its lance was rammed forward a second time, directly into him, piercing his squat body to the heart. He jerked and throbbed where he was held upright on the bone blade, and his tusks chomped on thin air, turning red as he coughed up a spray of blood.
Fess whirled away from the scene (Shaithis thought to run) and his eyes were huge and scarlet. But a lot more than simple fear lit them: there was fury, too! The giant grabbed Shaithis with one taloned hand and drew back the other like a bunch of black-gleaming scythes. ‘Treacherous bastard!’ he snarled. ‘Your father’s egg was rotten, and the pus is still in you!’
‘What?’ Shaithis forced the metamorphic flesh of his hand to expand within his gauntlet. ‘Are you mad?’
‘In trusting you? I must be!’ The Ferenc readied himself to thrust at Shaithis: to punch in through his ribs with his taloned hand, grasp his living heart and wrench it out. But something stopped him. Something he had seen behind Shaithis.
Shaitan was the colour and texture of black lava. Only his movement against the rock-splash wall had given him away, and only then because he wanted to be seen. Fess saw him, and his jaw fell open. He took a great gulp of air and forgot to strike at Shaithis, who rewarded him by crashing his clenched gauntlet into the side of his head. Then-
— Shaithis’s immemorial ancestor brushed him aside, out of the Ferenc’s suddenly loose grasp, and wrapped the stunned giant in a nest of lashing tentacles. With his arm locked to his sides, Fess was helpless, but in any case Shaitan allowed no time for any sort of recovery. With a sound like tearing leather, his elastic mouth flowed over and closed upon the Ferenc’s entire face and head!
Shaithis, stumbling blindly away, struck stony debris and tripped. And suddenly nerveless — even Shaithis, nerveless — he crashed down on to the lava floor. To one side Shaitan’s nightmarish ingurgitor hissed and bubbled as it drained off the last of Arkis’s fluids, and to the other Fess Ferenc’s ‘invincible’ body pulsed and vibrated in the primal vampire’s coils where Shaitan crushed and devoured his head. And Shaithis thought: If there’s a hell, then I stand at its gate!
Shaitan’s eyes glowed red out of the darkness which was his crushing, grinding, metamorphic head. And his reply, in Shaithis’s staggered mind, was this: Aye, a hell of sorts, where we are the Lords. For it is our hell, son of my sons, which one day we’ll take with us to Starside, and then to all the worlds beyond!
Part Three
1 The Hunters and the Hunted
Harry Keogh, Necroscope and would-be avenger, had thought at first that it would not be especially difficult to track down his quarry: a young driver working for Frigis Express, who also happened to be a necromancer, sex monster, and the insane serial killer of (to date) six young women. But he’d soon discovered that it wouldn’t be nearly as simple as he’d thought. Frigis had a dozen branches up and down the country, with a like number of warehouses and freezer depots, and over two hundred trucks of which fifty per cent were on the roads at any given hour of the day or night. The firm must therefore employ quite a few drivers who would fit the vague description in Harry’s possession; (vague, yes, for he suspected that the bloated, lusting creature he’d been shown was more a figure of terrified imagination than of the real man). Also, it seemed likely that Frigis would use casual labour, and it could be that Harry’s man was one of these; but somewhere there should be a list of regular employees at least. Harry hoped to find that list, and also that the John or ‘Johnny’ he was looking for would be on it.
On the third Wednesday in May at 3:30 in the morning, he paid a visit to Frigis’s main office in London to have a look at the company’s books. He went there via the Möbius Continuum, making several stops at well-known exit points before finally emerging in a shop doorway in Oxford Street. At that hour the normally polluted air was almost wholly free of traffic fumes and even bracing, and the night-lighting loaned the street a certain alien luminosity. Large, lethargically flapping pages from a discarded, dismembered newspaper fluttered like strange slow birds on buffets of blustery air along the gutters.
The offices Harry was looking for were directly opposite; no lights showed within the building; he hoped there’d be no night watchman to complicate matters. And there wasn’t.
Entering the building by the Möbius route, Harry let his burgeoning vampire instincts guide him to the correct floor and then to the records office. Locked doors were no trouble at all to the Necroscope, who used numbers to conjure doors of his own out of the thin air. But twice, purely out of habit, he went to switch on lights before realizing that he no longer had need of them; and once he came face to face with a full-length mirror, which both shocked and fascinated him with its picture of a gaunt-faced man with luminous, red-tinged eyes. He had known of course that the change was taking place in him, but only then realized how quickly it was happening. It filled him with mixed emotions and alien longings; it was the night and the mystery, and the going in strange places, as if in search of prey. Well, and so he w
as. Except there is prey and there is prey…
The records office was dirty and untidy, and smelled of strong coffee and stale cigarette smoke. It had an antiquated system of filing cabinets, all open for Harry’s inspection. He quickly turned up a list of branch and depot managers, but no information on rank-and-file employees. There was, however, a list of addresses and telephone numbers of all Frigis Express’s subsidiary offices, which Harry pocketed. That should save him a little time, at least. But that was all there was, which was hardly satisfactory.
Disgruntled, Harry pondered over his next move: presumably to start at the top of the list of branches and work down it. But then, out of nowhere, he found himself wondering if maybe Trevor Jordan was up and about. He could use a cup of coffee, a little companionship and friendly conversation, someone… to be with — briefly, anyway — if only to work the weirdness out of his system.
It was unlikely Jordan would be awake, but just on the off chance Harry reached out with his telepathic mind and searched for him — and immediately found him.
Harry? Jordan’s unmistakable ‘voice’ sounded in Harry’s mind as clearly as if he’d whispered the words in his ear. Is that you?
Harry found telepathy similar to and yet quite different from deadspeak. He had used something like it before — a sort of reverse deadspeak, he supposed — but that had been quite a few years ago in his incorporeal days and also very different. Telepathy was therefore new to him. Even so, still it struck him as being… more natural? Well, and he supposed it was more natural. For after all, almost anything in the world would be. But telepathy: it was something like a telephone conversation, even down to the hiss and crackle of psychic ‘static’; whereas deadspeak was the wind whistling eerily down a bleak desert canyon under a full, floating moon. In short, it was the difference between talking mind-to-mind with living people, and conversing metaphysically with dead ones.