by Brian Lumley
— Or to mess them up completely. I care for you more than you know, and a lot more than circumstances have let me show.
Please take care. Liz.
Jake read it through again. Korath? The name rang a bell, but it was a far and almost forgotten clamour. Something he’d dreamed? Well, that was what she was talking about, obviously: the fact that she’d been snooping on him again, when he slept. But so what? It was her job and he would simply have to learn to accept it — and Liz would have to learn to accept whatever she found in there, in his subconscious mind, like it or not.
His recurrent nightmare? Well that would explain yesterday’s coolness, certainly. But Korath…?
Again Jake heard the ringing of that distant bell — perhaps a warning bell? And this time more insistently — and he frowned as he tried to recall whatever it meant back into the focus of his memory. Was it something that he’d dreamed?
Jake had read a few things about dreams, and he knew that to many others they were of special significance. To him, however, dreams had usually been trivial, easily forgotten things, the scurf or sloughed-off skin of more fully fleshed-out ideas and concepts from his waking hours. And he wondered: How often does a man retain detailed memories of what he dreams, and for how long?
Nightmares were one thing (for they left lasting impressions, if only through the emotion of fear), but common or garden dreams? And again he thought: Korath? But this time it was a very deliberate thought, and unguarded.
And it was deadspeak.
Immediately there was someone — or some Thing — there in his mind. Shadows sprang into being, and It came with them.
You called! said a glutinous voice that was both surprised and pleased, causing Jake to start. And you remembered. But how much have you remembered? It’s all there, Jake, just waiting to come back to you. But I feel your sense of shock — the way you recoil from me — and I wonder, do you really remember? What is it, Jake? Why did you call out to me?
‘What in the name of…!?’ said Jake, and at once, instinctively, brought mental barriers crashing down to shut whatever it was — this thing, this Other, this Korath — out of his mind.
The other fled or was banished at once, and Jake heard him
go: his frustrated cry of rage, denial, as he disappeared into the deadspeak aether:
No, Jake, no! Don’t send me away! You’ll know soon enough how much you need me. And you must always remember: I have the numbers! I have the numbers, Jake, and I know the waaayyy!
Then he was gone…
‘Eh?’ said Lardis, staring hard at Jake, at a face turned pale and gaunt. ‘Eh, what? Is there something? You gave a start just then. You said something. And the way you look…’ But:
‘Shhh!’ Jake shook his head, concentrated, and remembered! Remembered it all, but most of all that he’d almost made a deal with a vampire. And he remembered something else: Harry Keogh’s warning, that even a dead vampire is a dangerous thing that you should never, ever, let into your mind!
‘You look peculiar,’ said the Old Lidesci.
Jake looked at him, swallowed hard, and slowly got a grip of himself. ‘It was… it was nothing,’ he said. ‘Nothing that I want to talk about now, anyway. Later, maybe — to Liz and Ben Trask — when tonight’s business is over.’
And between times… he dug out a ballpoint and began to make shaky notes on Liz’s scrap of paper.
For while he still hadn’t quite come to terms with everything that was happening to him, and whether or not this latest manifestation was some kind of daydream, mental quirk, evidence of a dual personality, or whatever, still Jake knew that it was something he must remember in detail, something that he really couldn’t afford to forget…
Chopper Two disembarked its task force in Gladstone and refuelled. Earlier that day, three SAS men had made the long drive up to Gladstone to check that all was in order with the coastguard vessel. Now the two units met up for a final briefing.
The attack on the island would be two-pronged. Along with WO II Joe Davis and four NCOs, Jake and Lardis Lidesci would be airborne; four more NCOs would be in the boat.
Zero Hour — the time scheduled for the launch of simultaneous attacks on both the Capricorn Group island and the mountain resort of Xanadu — had been set for 6:30 p.m. The weather was good and the sea flat calm, and with just ninety minutes to go to Zero Hour, the boat cast off.
And an hour later, with the light failing as the sun sank down behind the Great Dividing Range, Chopper Two got airborne again…
At the same time, at the Brisbane flying club, Chopper One was warming up ready to go. Ben Trask and the SAS Major, joint operational commanders, were in a hangar using a radio in one of the vehicles. The precog lan Goodly, Liz Merrick, and the rest of the SAS men were trooping out to the jetcopter, their combat suits fluttering in the bluster of disturbed night air that stank of hot exhaust fumes.
At 6:15 Trask transmitted: ‘Callsigns One, Two, and Three, signals — over?’
And the answers came back: ‘One, okay — over,’ (the locator David Chung’s voice, from the Xanadu approach road).
‘Two, okay — over,’ (Joe Davis’s voice from Chopper Two).
‘Three, okay — over,’ (the senior NCO on the boat).
‘Sitreps/ said Trask.
And three identical answers came back one after the other: ‘On schedule, and all systems are go.’
‘Synchronizing watches,’ said Trask, then waited a second. ‘Set your watches to 6:17. I say again figures sixer, one, seven. Counting down, I now have — three, two, one, zero — 6:17 precisely. Good hunting, and good luck. Over?’
‘Roger that, and out,’ (from the same three sources). And:
‘Let’s go,’ said Trask. He and the Major ran out under the gleaming vanes of the jetcopter and boarded her. Moments later she took off and headed south for Xanadu…
In Chopper One Trask had just minutes left to talk to Liz,
lan Goodly, and the Major. ‘I’m concerned/ he said. ‘There’s something wrong and I don’t know what it is. It’s a feeling that — I don’t know — that everything we’ve done or we’re trying to do is somehow misguided, as if we’re on the wrong track, or we’ve been misled, or there’s something we’ve overlooked.’
‘That sounds like your talent at work, Ben,’ said the precog. And then he sighed. ‘Well, I’m glad that someone’s talent is working!’
‘And you?’ Trask looked at him. ‘Nothing?’
‘Just trouble,’ Goodly sighed again. ‘Just problems, frustration, confusion. But as you know, I can’t force it; it comes when it comes. But in your case… is it anything specific?’
‘No,’ Trask shook his head. ‘So it seems we’re in the same boat — or airplane! It’s a.feeling, that’s all. I had it today up at the observation post on the mountain road. When I looked up the road, toward Xanadu… it was all so quiet, so normal. Perhaps too quiet, too normal.’
‘A lie?’
‘More like I was deceiving myself,’ said Trask. ‘This is a covert operation, but it didn’t feel like one. Especially after that incident with Liz’s watcher.’ He glanced at her — a guilty look, she thought — and said, ‘I should have paid more attention to you.’
‘But I wasn’t that sure myself,’ Liz said. ‘And anyway, I’m the new kid on the block; I could have been wrong.’
‘That’s what I mean/ said Trask. ‘We all have our talents, and I should have listened to yours. If we had turned back and I had seen that fellow, I would have known at once. But we didn’t, and I didn’t. I blame myself.’
At which the Major, looking more than a little concerned, came in with: ‘Miss, gentlemen, I have some difficulty following you — these skills of yours, you understand — but are you saying the operation is in jeopardy?’
Trask shook his head, then changed his mind and said: ‘Any operation concerning these creatures is hazardous. But we have to go in, no matter what. It’s all set up, and we mightn’t get a bett
er chance. But with our weapons, and providing everyone remembers the drills, I can’t see what can go wrong.’
Liz glanced at her watch. ‘Five minutes/ she said. And as at a signal the intercom began buzzing.
The pilot was on the earphones saying: ‘Message from Callsign One. The mindsmog has been “awake” but more or less static for some time. Now it’s on the move, but only locally. Callsign One is also mobile. His ETA the target area is five minutes.’
Trask answered, ‘Tell him roger that. We’ll see him there, and not to forget his nose-plugs.’ Then, turning to the bulk of the helicopter party, ‘And you mustn’t forget yours.’
They hadn’t forgotten. Aerosol sprays were hissing; a fine garlic mist filled the air, settling on everyone’s clothing; it was almost a pleasure to insert filter plugs like fat cigarette tips deep into their nostrils…
In Xanadu, from a position some two hundred feet up the almost sheer rock wall of the mountainside, Lord Malinari of the Wamphyri looked down on the sprawling dark cobweb of the deserted resort, and at the single road that wound its serpentine route up the steep mountain contours to Xanadu’s gates.
Malinari’s vantage point was a roughly-hewn ‘room’ carved from the solid rock at the head of a natural chimney. When Xanadu was being built, it had been Jethro Manchester’s intention to create a special entertainment here. There was to have been a ski-lift or cable-car from the gardens up to this point, and a series of aquachutes back down to the pools. The chimney had been fitted with a spiralling service-and/or emergency-staircase behind a facade constructed to match the flanking cliffs, so disguising the chimney’s vertical fault, and work had commenced on this room or landing stage. At which point technical difficulties had caused the project to be abandoned.
Now the chimney was Lord Malinari’s bolthole from Xanadu. From this window he would fly out on the night
wind, and glide down to a place in which he had long since secreted a cache of clothing, money and other necessaries to speed him on his way to his next venture. But not before he ensured that the chase ended here, and that this E-Branch had suffered such losses as to finish it forever, or at least slow it down until his, Vavara’s, and Szwart’s greater scheme was brought into play…
Malinari looked down on Xanadu and smiled a hideous smile. If only he could be down there to see the mayhem. But that way he might find himself caught up in all of the destruction, and that was out of the question. As for Xanadu itself:
Oh, he might bemoan a very little the waste of this place… but not for very long. For the world was a wider place far, and his plans of conquest of far greater scope.
A shame that his ‘garden’ with its special ‘crop’ must be discovered — especially now that it had been nourished so recently. Or then again, perhaps it would not be found; for it was after all hidden away, in the subterranean darkness that suited it so very well. In which case it would lie there, all unattended and dormant for now, only to flourish later in its own good time. For what Malinari had seeded would not die unless it were put down, deliberately and utterly destroyed. Ah, the tenacity of the Great Vampire, and of his works!
As for the last of Malinari’s human watchdogs: the spiderlike, gangling Garth Santeson was by now no more. He had served his purpose the moment he warned of E-Branch’s arrival here, an intrusion that Malinari had been expecting ever since his lieutenant Bruce Trennier died the true death some few days ago far in the western desert, and of which he’d had warning apart from and since Trennier’s demise, not alone from Garth Santeson.
A warning, aye, and delivered by a seeming idiot! But even an idiot may have his uses. Malinari had certainly found a good use for that one…
But poor Trennier, the manner of his passing. Malinari remembered it well, those last few moments of the man’s miserable life: the faithful servant crying his agonies, and Malinari the Mind, the master, feeling something of those agonies even here, in Xanadu:
The/ire! That awesome, all-consuming, withering fire that melted even metamorphic flesh, exploded bone, liquefied sinew, and reduced all to ashes! It had lasted a while — the pain, too, Trennier’s pain — until Malinari had been obliged to shut it out of his mind. But through the jet of blistering heat that stripped Trennier’s flesh from his body and finally blinded and destroyed him, Malinari had recognized some of the faces of his lieutenant’s tormentors. The face of Ben Trask, remembered from the mind ofZek Foener, and that of lan Goodly, yet another man of weird talents…
But if only Malinari had had longer with the Foener woman. There had been so much more that he might have learned (such as the nature of their skills, these men of esoteric talents), and so very much more that he would have enjoyed… of that beautiful woman herself, perhaps, and not only her mind.
Well, too late for that now — too late from the moment he hurled her down that shaft into oblivion — but at least he had fathomed something of the dangers of this world. Especially the greatest danger of all, which was E-Branch.
And now they had found him… as he had known they would, against which inevitability he’d long since taken ingenious and even marvellous precautions.
On a board bolted to the wall close to Malinari’s ‘window’ (which was simply a large hole in the moulded concrete facade), a master switch stood in the ‘off position beside a series of smaller electrical switches set in a roughly oblong array. The array was a precise match for Xanadu itself, its concentric pattern of switches duplicating the cobweb design of the resort in the gloom of the mountain saddle.
Now, waiting there in his secret bolthole, Malinari threw the master switch. There was a low, answering hum of power, but nothing more. And his slender fingers were impatient where they fluttered over the smaller switches — those electrical messengers of instantaneous death — as he gloatingly rehearsed a certain sequence:
‘First the outer chalets, to close them in. Then the inner structures, to catch them where they run. And when finally they think they have me “trapped” in my night-dark dome…’ His hand trembled with pent anticipation over the central switch.
‘A pleasure dome, aye. But for my pleasure, not theirs!’
He laughed a coughing laugh, long and low… then paused abruptly. Down there, coming into view along the approach road toward Xanadu’s gates: a vehicle. The night was dark now — but night and darkness were Malinari’s greatest allies — and that vehicle with its lowered, carefully probing lights; the coiled-spring tension in its vengeful passengers!
Malinari sensed it, their human bloodlust — or what passed for bloodlust in men — and laughed again. Bloodlust? Why, Nephran Malinari had pissed thicker blood than coursed through the veins of whelps such as these!
And with his telepathic probes concentrating on the vehicle, he felt what its occupants felt:
Fear, of the Great Unknown that was Malinari. Oh, he recognized and relished it! Primal fear of the night and what the night might bring, its roots burrowing like worms in every human fibre, revenant of cavern-dwelling ancestors. Fear in the face of an alien threat, the menace of the blood-beast!
But tempering the fear, holding it at bay, there was also a wall of grim determination. And bolstering that blind determination, the sure knowledge of vastly superiorfirepower.
Oh, really…?
And again Malinari laughed, but a second later hissed and grimaced, and clasped his handsomely alien head in wildly trembling hands. It was the pain — those lightning-flashes of terrible pain which ever accompanied any excessive use of his mentalism — the pain that came from searching out or listening to the thoughts of so many others, and of suffering the tumult of their massed emotions, their thronging dreams and fancies. For weirdly mutated minds were gathering here now, and the greater their talents the more piercing the pain in his head.
Cursing vividly, in the tongue of Starside, Malinari swiftly withdrew his probes. And as the pain receded, so he relaxed a little and gave vent once more to strained, broken laughter.
But st
rained? And broken?
He had thought often enough about that before — even Malinari — finding cause to wonder: The laughter of a madman? Well, perhaps it was at that, though he preferred to think of himself as merely… eccentric? And anyway, what of it? When a man is unique, surely he has a right to such small idiosyncrasies…
Drawing him back from his musing, the fading pounding in Malinari’s temples was suddenly matched by a stuttering in the sky: the mechanical throbbing of jets, as their power diverted to whirling, fanlike vanes. And though momentarily startled — sufficiently so that he lifted his crimson gaze to the dragonfly shape that blurred the stars — still he felt no real concern or threat. His plans were laid, and every eventuality had been anticipated. Even this one.
Down in the gardens, in front of the casino, that was the most obvious of the few places where the jetcopter could land. But it was also one of the many places that Malinari had mined. And:
Hah! So be it! he thought. Now let this game commence.
The car at the gate issued a single man; equipped with a heavy, deadly automatic weapon, he crouched low and ran to the small, open-fronted chalet that housed reception. A rearguard, of course; also a guard against anyone trying to escape. These guileless fools! No one would be trying to ‘escape’ from Xanadu — well, except for these ridiculous invaders themselves! As for Malinari quitting the place… but that was the plan! And in any case, what would it serve to stay? When this was all over, there would be nothing left to stay for.
And now the flying machine was settling towards the garden, its searchlight beams flickering over the dark casino, the chalets, the pools. And suddenly the car’s lights were blazing bright, lighting the way as it sped to its rendezvous.
Its rendezvous with certain death… but not just yet.
First let Trask and these E-Branch people taste something of what they had brought down on themselves when, of their own free will, they had chosen to pursue Nephran Malinari.
Lord Malinari, aye, of the Wamphyyrrriiii!