by Brian Lumley
In the kitchen Clarke waited until Harry brought the coffee to the large wooden kitchen table and seated himself, then started to take up the story again. 'As I was saying, they shot this thing down over the Hudson Bay. Now-'
'Wait,' said Harry. 'OK, I accept that you're going to tell it your own way. That being the case, I'd better know the bits round the edges, too. Like how your lot got interested in Perchorsk in the first place?'
'Actually, by accident,' Clarke answered. 'We don't automatically get called in on everything, you know. We're still very much the "silent partner", as it were, when it comes to the country's security. No more than half-a-dozen of Her Majesty's lads in Whitehall — and one lady, of course — know that we even exist. And that's how we prefer to keep it. As always, it makes funding difficult, not to mention the acquisition of new technology toys, but we get by. Gadgets and ghosts, that's always been the way of it. We're a meeting point — but only just — between super-science and the so-called supernatural, and that's how we're likely to stay for quite some little time.
'But since the Bodescu affair things have been relatively quiet. Our psychics get called in a lot to help the police; indeed, they're relying up on us more and more all the time. We find stolen gold, art treasures, arms caches; we even supplied a warning about that mess at Brighton, and a couple of our lads were actually on their way down there when it happened. But by and large we're still very much low-key. So we don't tell everything, and alas we don't get told everything. Even the people who do know about us have difficulty seeing how computerized probability patterns can work alongside precognition. We've come a long way, but let's face it, telepathy isn't nearly as accurate as the telephone!'
'Isn't it?' Harry's sort — with the dead — was one hundred per cent accurate.
'Not if the other side knows you're listening in, no.'
'But it is more secret,' Harry pointed out, and Clarke sensed the acid in his tone. 'So how did you "accidentally" learn about Perchorsk?'
'We got to know about it because our "Comrades" at Perchorsk didn't want us to! I'll explain: do you remember Ken Layard?'
The locator? Of course I remember him,' Harry answered.
'Well, it was as simple as that. Ken was checking up on a bit of Russian military activity in the Urals — covert troop movements and what-not — and he met with resistance. There were opposed minds there, Soviet espers who were deliberately smothering the place in mental smog!'
Now a degree of animation showed in Harry's pale face, especially in his eyes, which seemed to brighten appreciably. So his old friends the Russian espers had regrouped, had they? He nodded grimly. 'Soviet E-Branch is back in business, eh?'
'Obviously,' said Clarke. 'Oh, we've known about them for some time. But after what you did to the Chateau Bronnitsy they've not been taking any chances. They've been even more low-key than we are! They have two centres now: one in Moscow, right next door to the biological research laboratories on Protze Prospekt, and the other in Mogocha near the Chinese border, mainly keeping a wary eye on the Yellow Peril.' "And this lot at Perchorsk,' Harry reminded him. 'A small section,' Clarke nodded, 'established there purely to keep us out! As far as we can tell, anyway. But what on earth can the Soviets be doing there that rates so high on their security list, eh? After Pill, we decided we'd better find out.
The MI branches owed us favours; we learned that they were trying to put one of their agents — a man called Michael J. Simmons — in there; and so we, well, we sort of hitched a lift.'
'You got to him?' Harry raised an eyebrow. 'How?
And more to the point, since he's one of ours anyway, why?'
'Quite simply because we didn't want him to know!' Clarke seemed surprised that Harry hadn't fathomed it for himself. 'What, with Soviet espers crawling all over the place, we should openly establish a telepathic link with him or something? No, we couldn't do that, for their psychics would be onto him in a flash — so we sort of bugged him instead. And since he was in the dark about it, we decided not to tell his bosses at MIS either! Let's face it, you can't talk about what you don't know about, now can you?'
Harry gave a snort. 'No, of course not!' he said. 'And after all, why should the left hand tell the right one what it's doing, eh?'
'They wouldn't have believed us, anyway,' Clarke shrugged off the other's sarcasm. They only understand one sort of bugging. They couldn't possibly have understood ours. We borrowed something belonging to Simmons for a little while, that's all, and gave it to one of our new lads, David Chung, to work on.' 'A Chinaman?' Again the raised eyebrow. 'Chinese, yes, but a Cockney, actually,' Clarke chuckled. 'Born and raised in London. He's a locator and scryer, and damned good at it. So we took a cross Simmons wears and gave it to Chung. Simmons thought he'd mislaid it, and we arranged for him to find it again. Meanwhile David Chung had developed a "sympathetic link" with the cross, so that he would "know" where it was at any given time and even be able to see or scry through it, like using a crystal ball. It worked, too — for a while, anyway.'
'Oh?' Harry's interest was waning again. He never had thought much of espionage, and had considered ESPionage the lowest of all its many forms. Yet another reason why he'd left E-Branch. Deep down inside he thought of espers who used their talents that way as psychic voyeurs. On the other hand he knew it was better that they worked for the common good than against it. As for his own talent: that was different. The dead didn't consider him a peeping Tom but a friend, and they respected him as such.
'The other thing we did,' Clarke continued, 'was this: we convinced Simmons's bosses that he shouldn't have a D-cap.'
'A what?' Harry wrinkled his nose. That sounds like some sort of family planning tackle to me!'
'Ah, sorry!' said Clarke. 'You weren't with us long enough to learn about that sort of thing, were you? A D-capsuIe is a quick way out of trouble. A man can find himself in a situation where it's a lot better to be dead. When he's suffering under torture, for instance, or when he knows that one wrong answer (or right answer) will compromise a lot of good friends. Simmons's mission was that kind of job. We have our sleepers in Redland, as you know. Just as they have theirs over here; your stepfather was one of them. Well, Simmons would be working through a group of sleepers who'd been activated; if he was caught… maybe he wouldn't want to jeopardize them. The initiative to use his death capsule would be Simmons's own, of course. The capsule goes inside a tooth; all a man has to do is bite down hard on it and…'
Harry pulled a face. 'As if there aren't enough of the dead already!'
Clarke felt he was losing Harry, that he was driving him further from the fold. He speeded up:
'Anyway, we convinced his bosses that they should give him a fake D-cap, a capsule containing complex but harmless chemicals, knock-out drops at the worst.'
Harry frowned. 'Then why give him one at all?'
'Incentive,' said Clarke. 'He wouldn't know it was a fake. It would be there as a reminder to watch his step!'
'God, the minds of you people!' Harry felt genuine disgust.
And Clarke actually agreed. He nodded glumly. 'You haven't heard the worst of it. We told them that our prognosticators had given him a high success rating: he was going to come back with the goods. Except…'
'Yes?' Harry narrowed his eyes.
'Well, the fact is we'd given him no chance at all; we knew he was going to be picked up!'
Harry jumped up, slammed his fist down on the table so hard that he made it jump. 'In that case it was criminal even to let them send him!' he shouted. 'He'd get picked up, spill the beans under pressure, drop the people who'd helped him right in it — to say nothing of himself! What the hell's been happening in E-Branch over the last eight years? I'm damned sure Sir Keenan Gormley wouldn't have stood for any of this in his day!'
Clarke was dead white in the face. The corner of his mouth twitched but he remained seated. 'Oh, yes he would have, Harry. This time he really would have.' Clarke made an effort to relax, said: 'Anyway, it
isn't as black as I've painted it. See, Chung is so good that he'd know the minute Simmons was taken. He did know, and as soon as he said so we passed it on. As far as we're aware MIS has alerted all Simmons's contacts over there and they've taken action to cover their tracks or even get the hell out of it.'
Harry sat down again, but he was still coldly furious. 'I've just about had it with this,' he said. 'I can see now that you've got yourself in a hole and you've come to ask me to dig you out. Well, if that's the case, then the rest of what you have to tell me had better be good because…frankly, this whole mess pisses me off! OK, let's recap. Even knowing Simmons would get picked up, you fixed him up with a dummy D-cap and let him get himself sent on an impossible mission. Also — '
'Wait,' said Clarke. 'You still haven't got it right. As far as we were concerned, that was his mission: to get picked up! We knew he was going to be anyway.' His expression was as cold as Harry's but without the other's fury.
'I can't see this improving,' said Harry in a little while. 'In fact it gets worse and worse! And all of this to get a man inside the Perchorsk Projekt, so that your scryer Chung could spy through him. But… didn't it dawn on you that the Soviet espers would pick Chung up, too? His ESP?'
'Eventually they would, yes,' Clarke nodded. 'Even though Chung would use his talent in the shortest possible bursts, they'd crack him eventually — and in fact we believe they have. Except we'd hoped that by that time we'd know exactly what was going on in there. We'd have proof, one way or the other, about what the Soviets were making — or breeding — down there!'
'Breeding — ?' Harry's mouth slowly formed an 'O'. And now his tone was very much quieter. 'What the hell are you trying to tell me, Darcy?'
'The thing they shot down over the Hudson Bay,' Clarke said, very slowly and very clearly, 'was one hellish thing, Harry. Can't you guess?'
Harry felt his scalp tingling again. 'You'd better tell me,' he said.
Clarke nodded and stood up. He put his knuckles on the table-top and leaned forward. 'You remember that thing Yulian Bodescu grew and kept in his cellar? Well, that's what it was, Harry, but big enough to make Bodescu's creature look tiny by comparison! And now you know why we need you. You see, it was the biggest, bloodiest vampire anybody could possibly imagine — and it came out of Perchorsk!'
After a long, long moment Harry Keogh said: 'If this were someone's idea of a joke, it would be just too gross to-'
'No joke, Harry,' Clarke cut in. 'Down at HQ we have film of the thing, shot from an AWACS before the fighters got it and burned it out of the sky. If it wasn't a vampire — or at least made of the stuff of vampires — then I'm in the wrong business. But our people who survived that raid on Bodescu's place, Harkley House in Devon, they're a lot more qualified than I am; and they all say that it was exactly like that, which to my mind means there's only one thing it could possibly be.'
'You think the Russians may be experimenting, making them — designing them — as weapons?' It was plain that the Necroscope found it incredible.
'Didn't that lunatic Gerenko have exactly that in mind before you… dealt with him?' Clarke was persistent.
Harry shook his head. 'I didn't kill Gerenko,' he said. 'Faethor Ferenczy did it for me.' He fingered his chin, glanced again at Clarke, and said, 'But you've made your point.'
Harry put his head down, clasped his hands behind him, walked slowly back through the brooding house to his study. Clarke followed him, trying to contain himself and not show his impatience. But time was wasting and he desperately needed Keogh's help.
It was mid-afternoon and streamers of late autumn sunlight were filtering in through the windows, highlighting the thin layer of dust that lay everywhere. Harry seemed to notice it for the first time; he trailed his finger along a dusty shelf, then paused to consider the accumulation of dark, gritty fluff on his fingertip. Finally he turned to Clarke and said: 'So really, there was no "parallel case" after all. That was just to make sure I'd listen to you, hear you out?'
Clarke shook his head. 'Harry, if there's one person in the world I would never lie to, you're it! Because I know you hate it, and because we need you. There's a parallel case, right enough. You see, I remembered how you put it that time eight years ago when your wife and child disappeared — before you quit E-Branch. You said: "They're not dead, and yet they're not here — so where are they?" I remembered it because it seems the same thing has happened again.'
'Someone has disappeared? In the same way?' Harry frowned, made a stab at it: 'Simmons, do you mean?'
'Jazz Simmons has disappeared, yes, in the same way,' Clarke answered. 'They caught him something less than a month ago and he was taken into Perchorsk. After that contact was difficult, very nearly impossible. David Chung reckoned it was (a) because the complex is at the foot of a ravine; the sheer bulk of matter blocks the psychic view; (b) because it's protected by a dense lead shield, which has the same effect; and (c) mainly because there are Soviet espers mind-blocking the place. Even so, Chung was able to get through on occasion. What he has seen or "scried" in there isn't reassuring.'
'Go on,' said Harry, his interest waxing again.
'Well,' Clarke continued, and immediately paused and sighed. 'This isn't easy, Harry. I mean, even Chung found it difficult to explain, and I'm only repeating him. But… he's seen something in a glass tank. He says he can't describe it better than that because it never seems to be the same. No, don't ask me,' he quickly held up his hands, shook his head. 'Personally I haven't the foggiest idea. Or if I have an idea then I don't much care to voice it.'
'Go ahead,' said Harry. 'Voice it.'
'I don't have to,' Clarke shook his head. 'I'm sure you know what I mean…'
Harry nodded. 'OK. Is there anything else?'
'Only this: Chung says he sensed fear, that the complex was full of dread, living in terror. Everyone in the place was desperately afraid of something, he said. But again, we don't know what. So that was how things stood until just three days ago. Then — '
'Yes?'
'Then no more contact. And not just Soviet "static" either — literally no contact! Simmons's cross, and presumably Simmons himself, were — well, no longer there. No longer anywhere, in fact.'
'Dead?' Harry's face was grim.
But Clarke shook his head. 'No,' he said, 'and that's what I meant when I called it a parallel case. It's so like your wife and child. Chung himself can't explain it. He says he knows the cross still exists — that it hasn't been broken up or melted down or in any other way destroyed — and he believes that Simmons still has it. But he doesn't know where it is. It defies his talent to find it. And he's angry about it, and frustrated. In fact his feelings are probably a lot like yours: he's come up against something he doesn't understand and can't figure out, and he's blaming himself. He even started to lose faith in his scrying, but we've tested that and it's OK.'
Harry nodded and said, 'I can understand the way he must feel. That's exactly what it's like. He knows that the cross is still extant, and Simmons still alive, but he doesn't know where they are.'
'Right,' Clarke nodded. But he does know where the cross isn't. It isn't on this earth! Not according to David Chung, anyway.'
Lines of concentration etched themselves in Harry's brow. He turned his back on Clarke and stared out of a window. 'Of course,' he said, 'I can very quickly discover if Simmons is dead or not. Quite simply, I can check with the dead. If an Englishman called Michael "Jazz" Simmons has died recently in the upper Urals, they'll be able to tell me in… why, in no time at all! It's not that I doubt your man Chung is good — not if you say he is — but I'd like to be sure.'
'So go ahead, ask them,' Clarke answered. But he couldn't suppress a shiver at the matter-of-fact way the Necroscope talked about it.
Harry turned to face his visitor and smiled a strange, wan smile. His brown eyes had turned dark and very bright, but even as Clarke looked at them their colour seemed to lighten. 'I just did ask them,' he said. They'll let m
e know as soon as they have the answer…'
That answer wasn't long in coming: maybe half an hour, during which time Harry sat deep in his own thoughts (and who else's thoughts? Clarke wondered) while the man from E-Branch paced the floor of the study to and fro. The sun's light began to fade, and an old clock ticked dustily in a corner. Then -
'He's not with the dead!' Harry breathed the words like a sigh.
Clarke said nothing. He held his breath and strained his ears to hear the dead speaking to Harry — and dreaded to hear them — but there was nothing. Nothing to hear or see or feel, but Clarke knew that Harry Keogh had indeed received his message from beyond the grave. Clarke waited.
Harry got up from behind his desk, came and stood close. 'Well,' he said, 'it looks like I'm recruited — again.'
'Again?' Clarke spoke to cover the feeling of relief he felt must be emanating from his every pore in tangible streams.
Harry nodded. 'Last time it was Sir Keenan Gormley who came to get me. And this time it's you. Maybe you should take warning from that.'
Clarke knew what he meant. Gormley had been eviscerated by Boris Dragosani, the Soviet necromancer. Dragosani had gutted him to steal his secrets. 'No,' Clarke shook his head, 'that doesn't really apply. Not to me. My talent's a coward called Serf-Preservation: first sign of anything nasty, and whether I want to or not my legs turn me about-face and run me the hell out of there! Anyway, I'll take my chances.'
'Will you?' The question meant something.
'What's on your mind?'
'I left stuff of mine at E-Branch,' Harry said. 'Clothes, shaving kit, various bits and pieces. Are they still there?'
Clarke nodded. 'Your room hasn't been touched except to clean it. We always hoped you'd come back.'
'Then I won't need to bring anything from here with me. I'm ready when you are.' He closed the door to the patio.