by Brian Lumley
Manolis didn’t think twice but shut off the motor, picked up a spear gun, and put a harpoon straight into the gagging vampire’s chest. The creature jerked once or twice, then lay still in the water. But still they couldn’t be sure. Zek looked away as they reeled him in to the side of the boat, tied lead weights to his ankles, and let him sink slowly out of sight.
“Deep water,” Manolis commented, without emotion. “Even a vampire is only flesh and blood. If he can’t breathe, he can’t live. Anyway, the floor of the sea is rocky here: there will be many big groupers down there. Even if life were possible, he can’t heal himself faster than they can eat him!”
Ben Trask was white and shaky but well in control of himself. His shoulder was all strapped up now. “What about the one I knocked overboard?” he said.
Manolis took the boat to the middle of the bay where the Lazarus had been moored, and Darcy gave a shout and pointed at something that splashed feebly in the water. Even shot, the vampire had made it halfway to land. They closed with him, speared him, and dragged him back out to sea, where they dealt with him as with the first one.
“And that’s the end of them,” Ben Trask grunted.
“Not quite,” Zek reminded him, pointing at the looming stack of white and yellow stone inland. “There are two more of them up there.” She put her hand to her brow, closed her eyes, and frowned. “Also … there may be something else. But I’m not sure what …”
Manolis beached the boat and took up his spear gun. He was happy with that and with his Beretta. Darcy had his SMG, which he considered enough to handle, and Zek took a second spear gun. Jazz was satisfied with Harry Keogh’s crossbow, with which he’d familarised himself during the voyage. They might have taken the other SMG, too, but Ben Trask was now out of it and they must leave the gun with him—just in case. His task: stay behind and look after the boat.
They waded ashore and started up the rocks. The trail was easy to follow where the thin soil had been compacted between boulders and where steps had been cut in the steeper places. Halfway to the stack, they paused to take a breather and look back. Ben was watching them through binoculars, and also watching the stack. So far there had been no sign of life in the place, but as they approached its base Jazz spied movement up in the ancient embrasures.
He immediately dragged Zek into cover and motioned Darcy and Manolis down among jumbled rocks. “If those creatures up there had rifles,” he explained, “they could pick us off like flies!”
“But they haven’t, or they would have already,” Manolis pointed out. “They could have got us as we beached the boat, or even as we engaged the Lazarus.”
“But they have been watching us,” said Zek. “I could feel them.”
“And they are waiting for us up there.” Jazz squinted at the rearing, dazzling white walls.
“We’re skating on very thin ice,” Darcy told the others. “I can feel my talent telling me that this far is far enough.”
A shout echoed up to them from the beach. Looking back, they saw Ben Trask struggling up the incline after them. “Hold it!” he yelled. “Wait!”
He approached to within thirty or forty yards, then fell back against a boulder in the shade and rested awhile. And when he had recovered: “I’ve been looking at the fortifications through my glasses,” he yelled. “There’s something very wrong. The climb looks easy enough—up those ancient stone steps there—but it’s not. It’s a lie, a trap!”
Jazz went back and met Ben halfway, and took the binoculars from him. “How do you mean, a trap?”
“It’s like when I listen to a police interview with a suspect perp,” Ben answered. “I can tell right off if he’s lying even if I don’t know what the lie is. So don’t ask me what’s wrong up there, just take my word for it that it is!”
“Okay,” said Jazz. “Go on back down to the boat. From here on in we step wary.”
When Ben had started back, Jazz looked through the binoculars at the zigzagging, precipitous stone stairway from the base of the stack to the ancient walls. Close to the top, a jumble of boulders and shards of stone bulged from the gaping mouth of a cave, held back from the steps and the vertiginous edge by a barrier of heavy-duty wire mesh strung between deeply bedded iron staves. Cables, almost invisible, hung down from the ramparts and disappeared into the gloom of the cave. Jazz looked at these cables for long moments. Demolition wire? It could be.
He rejoined the others where they waited. “I think we’re walking right into one,” he said. “Or we will be if we start up those steps.” He explained his meaning.
Darcy took the binoculars from him, stuck his head out from under cover, and double-checked the face of the looming rock. “You could be right … must be right! If Ben says it’s all wrong, it’s all wrong.”
“No way we can cut those cables,” Jazz said. “Those things up there have the advantage. They could spot a mouse trying to make it up those steps.”
“Listen,” said Manolis, who had also been studying the route up the rock. “Why don’t we play them at their own game? Let them think we’re falling for it and make them waste their ambush?”
“How?” said Darcy.
“We start on up,” said Manolis. “But we are stringing it out a little, and one of us is staying well ahead of the rest. The path turns a corner just underneath the cave with the boulders. And just before the corner, there is this big hole—er, this concavity?—in the face of the cliff. So, one of us has already turned the corner, and the others look all set to follow him. The creatures up in the fort are in a quandary: do they press the button and get the one man for sure, or do they wait for the others to come round the corner? At this point the one in front, he goes faster, past the point of maximum danger, and the others pretend they are coming on! But they only just show themselves and don’t actually start on up that leg of the climb. The vampires can’t wait; they have missed one of us and so must try for the other three; they press the button. Boom!”
Jazz took it up: “The three at the rear have now showed themselves around the corner, but the guys on top don’t know they’re expecting what happens next! As the charge blows those rocks out of the cave higher up, so the three skip back round the corner and into the scoop in the face of the cliff.”
“Is how I see it,” said Manolis, nodding, “yes.”
“Or,” said Darcy, his face suddenly pale, “we leave it till tonight, and—”
“Is your guardian angel speaking.” Manolis looked disgusted. “I have seen that look on your face before!”
Darcy knew he was right and cursed under his breath. “So, who do you suggest bells the cat?” he said.
“Eh?”
“Who goes first and risks getting blown the hell off the cliff?”
Manolis shrugged. “But … who else? You, of course!”
Jazz looked at Darcy and said, “This talent of yours, it really works?”
“I’m a deflector, yes.” Darcy nodded and sighed.
“So what’s the problem?”
“The problem is my talent doesn’t work in fits and starts,” Darcy answered. “It’s working all the time. It makes a coward of me. Even knowing I’m protected, I’ll still use a taper to light a firework! You are saying: off you go, Darcy, get on up those steps. But it is saying, run like hell, son—run like bloody hell!”
“So what you have to ask yourself,” said Jazz, “is who’s the boss, it or you?”
Darcy offered a grim nod for answer, slapped a full magazine into the housing of his SMG, and stepped out into view of who or whatever was watching from above. He made for the base of the stone steps and started up. The others looked at each other for a moment, then Manolis started after him. Jazz let him get out of earshot and said, “Zek, you stay here.”
“What?” She looked at him. “After Starside you’re telling me that I should let you do something like this on your own?”
“I’m not on my own. And what good will you be anyway with only a spear gun? We need you down
here, Zek. If one of those things gets past us, you’re going to have to stop him.”
“That’s just an excuse,” she said. “You said it yourself: what good am I with only a spear gun?”
“Zek, I—”
“All right!” she said. And: “They’re waiting for you.”
He kissed her and started after the other two. She let him get onto the steps and start upwards, then scrambled after. They could fight later …
Just before the crucial corner, where the narrow stone steps angled left and climbed unevenly up the section of cliff face directly beneath the threatening cave with its potential barrage of boulders, Darcy paused to let the others catch up a little. His breathing was ragged and his legs felt like jelly: not because of the stiff climb but because he was fighting his talent every inch of the way.
He looked back and, as Manolis and Jazz came into view, waved. And then he turned the corner and pushed on. But he remembered how, as he’d passed the sheltering hollow where the rest of the team would take cover, he’d been very tempted. Except he had known that once he stepped in there, it would take a stick of dynamite to get him out again!
He craned his neck, glanced straight up, and winced. He could see the wire netting holding back the bulging tangle of rocks not ten feet overhead. It was time to make his break for it. He put on speed and climbed out of the immediate danger area, then glanced back and saw Jazz and Manolis coming round the corner. At which precise moment a pebble slipped underfoot and sent him sprawling!
Feeling his feet shoot out over the rim, Darcy grabbed at projecting rocks and in the same moment knew that it was going to happen. “Shit!” he yelled, clinging to the cliff face and the steps as a deafening explosion sounded close by and its shock wave threatened to hurl him into space. Then—
Fragments of rock were flying everywhere; it was like the entire stack was coming down; deaf and suffocating in choking dust and debris, Darcy could only cling and wait for the ringing to go out of his ears. A minute went by or maybe two, and the rumbling died away. Darcy looked back … and Jazz and Manolis were clambering dangerously up towards him across steps choked with rubble.
But up ahead someone—two someones—were clambering dangerously down!
As Darcy began pushing himself to his feet, he saw them: flame-eyed, snarling, coming to meet the stack’s invaders head-on. One of them carried a pistol, the other had a nine-foot octopus pole with a barbed trident head. The tines must be all of eight inches long!
Darcy’s SMG was trapped under rubble and stony debris. He yanked on the sling but it wouldn’t come. The vampire with the pistol had paused and was taking aim. Something thrummed overhead and the creature aiming at Darcy dropped its pistol and staggered against the cliff face, its hands flying to the hardwood bolt skewering its chest. It gagged, gave a weird, hissing cry, fell to its knees, and toppled into thin air.
The other one came on, cursing and stabbing at Darcy with its terrible weapon. He somehow managed to turn the wicked trident head aside as Manolis arrived behind him. Then the Greek policeman yelled, “Get down!” and Darcy threw himself flat again. He heard the crack!—crack!—crack! of Manolis’ Beretta, and the hissing of the vampire turn to shrieks of rage and agony. Shot three times at close range, the thing staggered there on the steps. Darcy yanked the octopus pole out of its hands, slammed the butt end into its chest. And over it went, mewling and yelping as it pinwheeled all the way down to the base of the stack.
Jazz Simmons came up to the other two. “Up or down?” he panted.
“Down,” said Darcy at once. “And don’t worry, it isn’t my talent playing up. It’s just that I know how hard those things are to kill!” He looked beyond his two friends. “Where’s Zek?”
“Down below,” said Jazz.
“All the more reason to get back down,” said Darcy. “After we’ve burned those two, then we’ll see what else is up here.”
But Zek wasn’t down below, she was just that moment coming round the corner. And when she saw that they were all in one piece … her sigh of relief said more than any number of spoken words …
They brought petrol from the boat and burned the two badly broken vampires, then rested awhile before going up into the old fortifications. Up there Janos had been preparing a spacious, spartan retreat; not quite an aerie of the Wamphyri as Zek remembered such, but a place almost equally sinister and foreboding.
Letting her telepathic talent guide her through piles of tumbled masonry and openings in half-constructed walls, and past deep embrasure windows opening on fantastic views of the ocean’s curved horizon, she led the others to a trapdoor concealed under tarpaulins and timbers. They opened it up and saw ages-hollowed stone steps leading down into a crusader dungeon. Rigging torches, the men followed the stairwell down into the reeking heart of the stack, and Zek followed the men. Down there they found the low-walled rims of a pair of covered wells which plunged even deeper into darkness, but that was when Zek gasped and lay back against nitrous walls, shivering.
“What is it?” Jazz’s voice echoed in the leaping torchlight.
“In the wells,” she gasped, one hand held tremblingly to her throat. “There were places like this in the aeries on Starside. Places where the Wamphyri kept their … beasts!”
The wells were covered with lids cut from planks; Manolis put his ear to one of the covers and listened, but could hear nothing. “Something in the wells?” he said, frowning.
Zek nodded. “They’re silent now, afraid, waiting. Their thoughts are dull, vacuous. They could be siphoneers, or gas beasts, or anything. And they don’t know who we are. But they fear we might be Janos! These are … things of Janos, grown out of him.”
Darcy gave a shudder and said, “Like the creature Yulian Bodescu kept in his cellar. But … it has to be safe to look, at least. Because if it wasn’t, I’d know.”
Manolis and Jazz lifted the cover from one of the wells and stood it on its edge by the low wall. They looked down into Stygian darkness but could see nothing. Jazz looked at the others, shrugged, held out his torch over the mouth of the well, and let it fall.
And it was like all hell had been let loose!
Such a howling and roaring, a mewling and spitting and frenzied clamour. For a moment—only a moment—the flaring torch as it fell lit up the monstrosity at the bottom of the dry well. They saw eyes, a great many, gaping jaws and teeth, a huge lashing of rubbery limbs. Something terrible beyond words crashed about down there, leaped, and gibbered. In the next moment the torch went out, which was as well, for they’d seen enough. And as the hideous tumult continued, Jazz and Manolis replaced the cover over the awful shaft.
On their way back up the steps, Manolis said, “We shall need all the fuel we can spare.”
“And plenty of this building timber,” Jazz added.
“And after that those other limpet mines,” said Darcy, “so we can be sure we’ve blocked those wells up forever. It’s time things were put back to rights here …”
As they reached the open air, Zek clutched Jazz’s arm and said, “But if this is a measure of what Janos can do here, even in the limited time he’s had, just think what he might have done up in those Transylvanian mountains …” Darcy looked at his friends and his face was still gaunt and ashen. His throat was dry as he voiced his own thoughts: “God, I wouldn’t be in Harry Keogh’s shoes for … for anything!”
Harry woke up to the sure knowledge that something had happened, something far away and terrible. Inhuman screams rang in his ears, and a roaring fire blazed before his eyes. But then, starting upright in his bed, he realised that the screams were only the morning cries of cockerels, and that the fire was the blaze of the sun striking through his east-facing windows.
Now that he was awake there were other sounds and sensations: breakfast sounds from downstairs, and food smells rising from the kitchen.
He got up, washed, shaved, and quickly dressed. But as he was about to go downstairs he heard a strangely familiar jingling,
a creaking, and the easy clatter of hooves from out in the road. He went to look down and was surprised to feel the heat of the sun on his arms where he leaned out of the window. He frowned. The hot yellow sunlight irritated him, made him itchy.
Down there in the road, horse-drawn caravans rolled single file, four or five of them all in a line. Gypsies, Travellers, they were heading for the distant mountains; and Harry felt a sudden kinship, for that was his destination, too. Would they cross the border? he wondered. Would they even be allowed to? Strange if they were, for Ceausescu didn’t have a lot of time for Gypsies.
Harry watched them pass by and saw that the last in line was decked in wreaths and oddly shaped funeral garlands woven from vines and garlic flowers. The caravan’s tiny windows were tightly curtained; women walked beside it, all in black, heads bowed, silently grieving. The caravan was a hearse, and its occupant only recently dead.
Harry felt sympathy, reached out with his deadspeak. “Are you okay?”
The unknown other’s thoughts were calm, uncluttered, but still he started a little at Harry’s intrusion. And: Don’t you think that’s rude of you? he said. Breaking in on me like that?
Harry was at once apologetic. “I’m sorry,” he answered, “but I was concerned for you. It’s obviously recent and … not all of the dead are so stoical about it.”
About death? Ah, but I’ve been expecting it for a long time. You must be the Necroscope?
“You’ve heard about me? In that case you’ll know I didn’t mean .to be rude. But I hadn’t realised that my name had reached the Travelling Folk. I’ve always thought of you as a race apart. I mean, you have your ways, which don’t always fit in too well with … no, that’s not what I meant, either! Perhaps you’re right and I am rude.”