by Brian Lumley
Just after 5:05 they set out to return to Rhodes …
That evening, coming in stiff, weary, and tanned by sun and sea spray, Darcy and Manolis found four people waiting for them in the lounge of their hotel. There were several moments of confusion. Darcy knew two of the arrivals well enough, for Ben Trask and David Chung were his own men; but Zekintha Föener (now Simmons), and her husband Michael or “Jazz” were strangers to him except by hearsay. Darcy had anticipated four and had booked accommodation accordingly, but of this specific group he had only expected two. On Harry Keogh’s advice he had tried to get a message to Zek and Jazz that they should stay out of it, but either it hadn’t reached them or they had chosen to ignore it. He would find out later. The two missing men were E-Branch operatives finalising a job in England, who would fly out here ASAP on completion of that task.
The four newcomers, having already dropped off their luggage in their rooms and introduced each other, were more or less ready to talk business. Darcy need only introduce Manolis and make known the Greek policeman’s role in things, then replay the action so far, and all systems would be go. Before that, however …
… Darcy and Manolis excused themselves and took invigorating showers before rejoining the E-Branch people where they waited for them. Then Manolis took them all to a rather expensive taverna on the other side of town which wasn’t likely to be swamped with tourists, and there arranged seating around a large secluded corner table with a view on the night ocean. Here Darcy quickly restated the introductions, this time detailing the various talents of his group.
There was the married couple, Zek and Jazz Simmons, who had been on Starside together with Harry Keogh. Zek was a telepath of outstanding ability and an authority on vampires. She was experienced as few before her, in that she had met up with the minds of the Real Thing, the Wamphyri themselves, in an entirely alien world. She was a very good-looker, about five-nine in height, slim, blond, and blue-eyed. Her Greek mother had named her after Zante (or Zakinthos), the island where she was born. Her father had been East German, a parapsychologist. Zek would be in her midthirties, maybe eighteen months to two years older than her husband.
Jazz Simmons had no extraordinary talents other than those with which an entirely mundane Mother Nature had endowed him, plus those in which British intelligence had expertly instructed him. After Starside, he had opted out of intelligence work to be with Zek in Greece and the Greek Islands. Just a fraction under six feet tall, Jazz had unruly red hair, a square jaw under slightly hollow cheeks, grey eyes, good strong teeth, hands that were hard for all that they were artistically tapered, and long arms that gave him something of a gangling, loose-limbed appearance. Lean, tanned, and athletic, he looked deceptively easygoing … was easygoing in normal circumstances and when there was little or no pressure. But no one should underestimate him. He’d been trained to a cutting edge in surveillance, close protection, escape and evasion, winter warfare, survival, weapons handling (to marksman), demolition, and unarmed combat. The only thing Jazz had lacked had been experience, and he’d got that in the best—or worst—of all possible places, on Starside.
Then there were the two men from E-Branch: David Chung, a locator and scryer, and Ben Trask, a human lie detector. Chung was twenty-six, a Chinese “cockney” tried and true. Born within the sound of Bow-bells, he had been with the branch for nearly six years and during that time had trained himself to a high degree in the extrasensory location of illegal drugs, especially cocaine. If not for the fact that he’d been working on a long-term case in London, then he and not Ken Layard might well have been out here in the first place.
Ben Trask was a blocky five feet ten, mousey-haired and green-eyed, overweight and slope-shouldered, and usually wore what could only be described as a lugubrious expression. His specialty was Truth: presented with a lie or deliberately falsified concept, Trask would spot it immediately. E-Branch loaned him out to the police authorities on priority jobs, and he was in great demand by Foreign Affairs to see through the political posturing of certain less than honest members of the international community. Ben Trask knew the ins and outs of London’s foreign embassies better than most people know the backs of their hands. Also, he’d played a part in the Yulian Bodescu affair and wasn’t likely to take anything too lightly.
While they waited for their meals, Darcy filled in all the missing pieces for his team and watched them tighten up as the full horror of the situation was brought home to them. Then he was interested to know why Jazz and Zek had invited themselves in on this thing.
Jazz answered for them. “It’s Harry, isn’t it? Harry Keogh? He gets our vote every time. If Harry has problems, it’s no use telling Zek and me to keep a low profile.”
“That’s very loyal of you,” Darcy told him, “but it was Harry himself who would have preferred to keep you out of it—for your own sakes. Not that I’m complaining … I’m short of a couple of good hands and you two probably fit the bill perfectly. Harry’s main concern was that Janos Ferenczy is one powerful mentalist. He has already killed Trevor Jordan and controls Ken Layard, so you can see why Harry was worried. He was mainly concerned about what would happen if Janos came up against you, Zek. However, since Janos is now in Romania—that is, to the best of our knowledge—and with Harry gone there to hunt him down …” Darcy shrugged. “Myself, I’m delighted to have you on the team!”
“So when does it all start—for us, I mean?” David Chung was eager to get into it.
“For you it starts tomorrow,” Darcy told him. “The ‘active service’ part of it, anyway. Tonight, back at the hotel after we’ve finished here, that will be the time for preparation and planning. That’s when we detail, as best we can, who will be doing what—and to whom!” He spied a waiter moving towards their table with a loaded trolley. “As for this very moment: I suggest we enjoy our food and relax as best we can. Because you’d better believe that tomorrow’s a busy day …”
While Darcy Clarke and his team thought forward to their next day, Harry Keogh was looking back on the one iust ended.
Harry’s flight to Athens had been uneventful. Aboard the plane for Budapest, however, when he’d closed his eyes even before takeoff and determined to catch an hour’s sleep …
… He’d felt them there the moment he began to drift into dreams: alien probes touching on his mind. And knowing they were there, he’d forced himself to stay awake and alert, while yet hiding that fact from the telepathic talents who had found him. “They” could only be Ken Layard and Sandra, but their ESP was cold now and tainted. Almost completely in thrall to Janos Ferenczy as they were, their tentative touches were slimy as the walls of a sewer, so that Harry must fight not to recoil from them. But he remembered what Faethor had told him, and strangely enough accepted that it was probably good advice:
Instead of shrinking back from him when you sense him near, seek him out! He would enter your mind? Enter his!
And as the vampire intelligences grew less apprehensive of discovery and avidly scanned him, so Harry in turn scanned them. Indeed he spoke to them in whispers, under his breath.
“Ken? Sandra? So he has your cooperation now. Well, and you’ve done a good job for him. But why so secretive about it, eh? I was expecting you. I knew that he would use you, that in fact he can’t do without you. What, him? Face-to-face and man-to-man? Not a chance. Your vampire superman is a coward! He fears I’ll creep up on him in the night. One man against him and everything he harbours up there in that pest hole in the mountains, and he’s afraid of me. You warned me he’d read the future and seen his victory there. Well, you can tell him from me that the future doesn’t always work out that way.”
Ahhh! He sensesss ussss! It was Sandra, hissing like a snake in Harry’s mind. He knows us. His thoughts are strong. His hidden strengths are surfacing.
She was right and Harry felt the strangeness of it. He was stronger, and didn’t know the source of his new vitality. Was it Faethor? he wondered. Possibly. But for the moment
there was nothing he could do about Faethor, and in a storm any port is better than none.
Ken Layard’s locator’s mind was fastened on Harry like a carrier beam. He let his own slide down it (but secretly) to its source, gazed out through Layard’s eyes.
It was as if Harry were there in the flesh … and he was, in Layard’s flesh! They were in the same subterranean room as before. Sandra sat opposite him (opposite Layard) at the table, and Janos furiously paced the pavings to and fro, to and fro. “Where is he? What is he thinking?” The monster’s eyes burned red where he turned them on Sandra. Plainly he was worried, but he tried to hide it behind a mask of fury.
“He is aboard a plane,” Sandra answered, “and he is coming.”
“So soon? He’s a madman! Doesn’t he know he’ll die? Can he not see that my plans for him go beyond death? What are his thoughts?”
“He hides them from me.”
Janos stopped pacing, thrust his half-handsome, half-hideous face at her. “He hides his thoughts? And you a mentalist, a thought thief? What, and do you seek to make a fool of me? And have I not warned you how it will go for you if you continue to place obstacles in my way. Now I ask you again: what—are—his—thoughts?”
The master vampire had come forward to lean upon the table with both hands, glaring into the frightened girl’s eyes from only inches away. His lips curled back like a leather muzzle shrivelling from the jagged teeth of some dead carnivore, threatening her all too graphically, but she had no answer for him except: “He … he is too strong for me!”
“Too strong for you?” Janos raged. “Too strong? Listen: in the bowels of this very castle lie the ashes of men like satyrs who in their day swarmed rampant across this land raping to the death women, men, and babes alike!” he told her. ‘‘Aye, and when they’d slain the lot, then even the beasts of the field were not beneath their lust! For two thousand years some of these creatures—whose loins are now dust, whose bones are turned to salts—have gone without. But I say this to you: do my bidding now before I’m tempted to raise them up and command them how to instruct you! An unending torment, Sandra, aye: for I would line them up against you, and as fast as they tore you, your vampire would repair the damage! Only picture it: your sweet flesh awash in all their filth, ruined and ruined again … and again … and again!”
Harry looked at him out of Layard’s eyes, drew phlegm up from Layard’s throat, and spat it into the vampire’s face. And as the monster went reeling, gurgling, and clawing at his face, Harry said to him with Layard’s voice, “Are you deaf as well as insane, Janos Ferenczy? She can’t see into my affairs—for I am right here, seeing into yours!”
Layard, shocked and astonished, sat clutching at his own throat; but for a few seconds more at least, Harry kept a grip on what he now commanded.
Janos staggered back to the table, his head cocked questioningly, disbelievingly on one side. “What?” He glared madly at Layard. “What?” He lifted a claw of a hand.
“Go on,” Harry taunted. “Strike! For it’s only your thrall you’ll hurt and not the one who commands him!”
Janos’s jaw fell open. He understood. “You?” he breathed.
Harry caused Layard’s face to split into a humourless grin. And: “You know,” he said, “this fascination of yours with my mind isn’t merely unhealthy and irksome, I suspect it’s also contagious. I had thought you would learn your lesson, Janos, but apparently I was wrong. Very well … so now let’s see what goes on in your head!”
“Release him!” Janos howled, clutching his head in talon hands and hurling himself away from the table. “Send the Necroscope out of here! I don’t want him in my mind!”
“Don’t worry,” Harry told him as Layard jerked and writhed where he sat. “Did you really think I would bathe myself in a sewer? Only remember this, Janos Ferenczy: you sought to discover my plans. Well, and now I’ll tell them to you. I’m coming for you, Janos. And as you now see, our powers are more or less equal.”
He withdrew from Layard’s mind and opened his eyes. The plane was off the ground, heading north and a little west for Budapest. And Harry was well satisfied. Back in Edinburgh, less than a week ago, he’d wondered at his precognitive glimpses of some vague and frightening future and felt that he stood on the threshold of strange new developments. Now he experienced a sense of justification: his Necroscope’s powers were growing, expanding to fill the gap created by Harry Jr.’s tampering.
That was Harry’s explanation, anyway …
Halfway into the flight—asleep in his seat and unafraid to be asleep—Harry reached out with his deadspeak and found Möbius resting in the Leipzig graveyard where he lay buried. Möbius knew him at once and said, Harry, I called out to you but got no answer. Actually, I’ve been half-afraid to contact you. That last time … it was frightening, Harry!
Harry nodded. So now you know what I’m up against. Well, at the moment I have him on the run; he’s not sure what I can do; but he knows whatever he plans against me will have to be more physical than mental. Physically, I’m still very vulnerable. That’s why I need the Mobius Continuum.
Möbius was at once willing. You want me to take it up where I left off?
Yes.
Very well, open your mind to me.
Harry did as he was instructed, said, Enter of your own free will, and a moment later felt Möbius timid in the labyrinth vaults of his mind.
You’re an open book, said Möbius. I could read you, if I wished it.
Find the pages that are stuck down, Harry told him. Unglue them for me. That’s the part of me that I’ve lost. Only unlock those doors and I’ll have access to my best shot.
Möbius went deeper, into yawning caverns of extramun-dane mind. And: Locked? he said then. I’ll say they have been—and by an expert! But Harry, these are no ordinary locks and bolts and bars. I’m within the threshold of your knowledge, where an entire section has been closed off. This is indeed the source of your instinctive math, but it is sealed with symbols I don’t even recognise! Who did it … was a genius!
Harry offered a grim nod. Yes, he was. But Faethor Ferenczy, and his son Janos, they were both able to open those doors by sheer force of will.
Möbius was realistic. They were Wamphyri, Harry. And I was only a man. I was a determined man, and I was patient. But I was not a giant!
You can’t do it? Harry held his breath.
Not by force of will. By reason, perhaps.
Then do what you can. Harry breathed again.
I may need your help.
How can I help you?
While I work, you can study.
Study what?
Your numbers, said Möbius, surprised. What else?
But I know less than a backward child! Harry protested. Why, to me the very word “numbers” suggests only a vague and troublesome concept.
Study them anyway, Mobius told him, and lit up a screen before his inner eye. Simple additions awaited solutions, and incomplete multiplication tables glared at Harry with empty white spaces for eyes, waiting for him to print the answers on their pupils.
I … I don’t know the fucking answers! Harry groaned.
Then work them out, Möbius growled. For he had problems enough of his own …
Four rows of seats in front of Harry, across the central aisle, someone turned to glance back at his pale, troubled, sleeping face. The man was girl-slender and effeminate in his mannerisms. He smoked a Marlboro in a cigarette holder, and his heavy-lidded, deep-set eyes were dark as his thoughts.
Nikolai Zharov had fouled up very badly in England and this was his punishment. Where Norman Harold Wellesley and Romania’s Securitatea had failed, now it was Zharov’s turn. His superiors had spelled it out to him: go to Greece and kill Keogh yourself. And if you fail … don’t bother to come back.
Well, Greece was way back there somewhere now, but Zharov didn’t suppose it mattered much. Greece, Hungary, Romania—who would care where he died? No one at all—
�
��Just as long as he died …
By 6:30 P.M. Harry Keogh, tourist, had been out of Budapest airport and onto a train heading east for a place called Mezobereny. That had been the end of the line for him, the halt at which he’d disembarked. Past Mezobereny the tracks turned southward for Arad, which was too far out of his way. From now on Harry would go by bus, taxi, cart, on foot—whatever it took.
On the outskirts of Mezobereny he found a small family hotel called the Sarkad after the district, where he took a room for the night. He’d chosen the Sarkad for the old-world graveyard which stood guarded by tall, shady trees in a few acres just across the dusty village road. If there were to be night visitations—dreams influenced by his enemies, maybe, or perhaps more physical visitors—Harry wanted the dead on his side. Which was why, before he settled down for the night, he stood by his window and sent his deadspeak thoughts out across the road to the dead in their graves.
They had heard of the Necroscope, of course, but could scarcely believe that he was actually here; full of questions, they kept him busy until late. But as the midnight hour slipped by, Harry was obliged to tell them that he was tired, and that he really must rest in preparation for the day ahead. And getting into bed he thought to himself, What a masterpiece of understatement!
Harry was no spy in the normal sense of the word. If he had been, then he might have noticed the man who’d followed him from the railway station to the Sarkad and taken the room next door.
Earlier, Nikolai Zharov had listened to the Necroscope moving about in his room, and when Harry had gone to his window, so had the Russian. The light from the rooms had fallen on the road, casting Harry’s shadow where he stood looking out. Zharov had moved back, put out his light, then approached the window again. And he’d looked where Harry was looking.