by Brian Lumley
Trask introduced himself to the heavily built, swarthy law officer, and said, “Yes, of course, we’ll help you all we can. But there’s something we should tell you right now. It’s possible we’ve seen the people who did this. We believe they were in that car that was leaving just as we arrived.”
Burdur nodded. “The black station wagon? I seeing it, too. Perhaps the driver eager to make room for us, and perhaps not. But…she was driving very fast.” Again he nodded, but very thoughtfully.
“She?” said Trask. “A woman? You saw her?”
“A pretty woman, yes, Mr. Trask. But now, maybe she has the troubles, eh? You are knowing this person?
“No,” said Trask as convincingly as possible—even though he hated lying. “We don’t know her. But…did you say she has troubles? What troubles?”
Burdur shook his head and said, “No more questions. Now we go, and quickly. Across the town is another fire.” He looked at Trask. “A black station wagon is burning in the square near the town theatre. Ah! I seeing your face—you understanding!”
“My God!” said Goodly, under his breath, his hand shaking like a leaf on Trask’s arm.
“We’ll follow right behind you,” said Trask grimly, as Ali Bey Burdur turned and made for his vehicle.
And then, speaking quietly to the pale, shuddering precog, Trask said, “This time, old friend, you can take it easy. I’ll be doing the driving…”
By the time they got to the open square where the black estate car was on fire nose to tail, a second ancient fire engine had arrived and was just beginning to pour water on the flames. In the car, sitting stiffly in a rear seat, his head lolling back on the headrest, a human figure blazed like a candle, his blue and yellow flames curling out through the heat-shattered window. It could only be Fletcher, for the precog had foreseen it. And in situations like this Ian Goodly was rarely wrong.
A small, mainly muted crowd had gathered despite the lateness of the hour, and Ali Bey Burdur quickly found himself an excited witness, an elderly man who worked at the shabby-looking theatre just across the road.
There followed a rapid-fire exchange in Turkish, to which the E-Branch people were not privy, and then Burdur turned to Trask and said, “This a very horrible thing. The old man working in the theatre. He working slow, cleaning up, makes locked the doors, comes out. He standing over there in the shadows in the doorway. The car comes. Three peoples get out. No one here but the old man. The peoples pour kero in the car and outside. The old man is afraid. He sees a man in the car. He wants cry out, but the three are very strange. One is woman—he thinking. Then they set fire and go away. Is nothing else…”
Trask shook his head, said nothing, let his haggard looks speak for him. But the precog was moaning, “Poor Bernie. Poor Bernie…”
“These peoples who making the fires,” said Burdur, staring hard at Trask. “Your enemies?”
“I’ve already told you,” said Trask, obliged to lie again. “We only just got here. We have no enemies here. Perhaps these people were thieves and this is how they cover their tracks.”
“And the one in the car, this poor dead man?”
“He’s our friend, we think. One of them. We can’t be sure. But he looked like a man called Bernie Fletcher.”
And Goodly sat down on the damp kerb of the little traffic island in the middle of the square, and said, “It is Fletcher, Ben. It is definitely Bernie Fletcher.” Distraught, the precog hadn’t realized that Trask was doing his best to extricate his people from all of this.
“The tall one he seem very sure,” said Burdur, frowning.
Trask took the Inspector’s arm, led him away from Goodly, leaving Millie and the others to “comfort” him, and said, “You don’t understand, Ali Bey. They were very good friends, Bernie and the tall one. This is a big shock to him. To all of us.”
“And this Bernie came here with—how many others?—to study the anti-tikkies?”
“With two other English,” said Trask. “Both men. They came to find a cheap place to stay, to use as a base.”
“Well, they finding it,” said Burdur. “But in wrong part of town. Now I must try to finding them, the others. You are helping, at the police station?”
“Of course,” said Trask.
“Good. And then we find you a place to stay—in right part of town, I thinking.”
“Lead on,” said Trask. “The sooner we get done the better. We’ve come a long way and we’re all very tired.”
“Ben!” came Millie’s cry of concern. Trask and Burdur came to a halt, looked back.
The car was a smoking, blackened wreck now, where very few flames continued to flicker, all on the inside. On the traffic island close by, Trask’s people were assisting Goodly who appeared to have collapsed.
Trask went to them, got down on one knee, helped raise the precog up. But before he got to his feet—as he glanced once again at the gutted car, the shrivelled silhouette within, and the last few flames that persisted in springing into life from the smouldering backseat—finally Trask saw what Goodly had seen, saw what the precog had seen twice:
Through the buckled, empty frames of the car’s windows, the advertisement over the theatre’s entrance—a poster seven feet high by fifteen wide—showing the current attraction: a troupe of scantily clad dancing girls made up as vampires, all of them laughing or smiling their sly vampire smiles, and “frozen,” of course, in the crude poses that the artist had given them!
But Trask knew differently, knew that in fact they weren’t “made up” at all. And they certainly weren’t posing…
Ben Trask dreamed.
In the last few moments before waking—which is often the case—he dreamed a kaleidoscopic flashback of all the events of the last twenty-four hours: of the journey to Turkey and Sirpsindigi by airplane and minibus, of the discovery of the blazing Hotel Tundźa, of Bernie Fletcher’s horrific cremation, and finally of sitting in the dreary police station with Inspector Ali Bey Burdur, preparing a laborious statement.
Mercifully his statement—just the one—had sufficed; in Burdur’s opinion the rest of the team had nothing of any great importance to add to what Trask had told him. Then the Inspector had spent a few minutes on the phone, found an hotel where the English party could stay for the night, given them directions and turned them loose. But he might want to question them again in the morning, and certainly he would want to tell them the results of the night’s investigations. So in any case they must not leave the hotel without first speaking to him.
In all, he’d been very helpful and considerate.
But throughout the dream that picture of the burning station wagon had kept surfacing, with Bernie Fletcher’s cindered silhouette picked out against crackling flames and a backdrop of dancing, laughing vampires. And Trask, knowing it must have meaning—that it was more than just a replay of a nightmarish event—had found himself striving to understand.
And in that final moment before springing awake, suddenly he did recognize and understand its inescapable “truth.” Then, jerking upright in his bed in a cold sweat, and thinking about it as all of those jumbled images except the one faded to background static in the face of waking reality, he was annoyed at himself that it hadn’t struck him sooner. For now that he had fathomed the thing…why, it was obvious!
The telephone had brought him awake. Of the old-fashioned, black Bakelite variety, its persistent ringing on the bedside table made a nerve-jarring clamour in the silence of the room. Yet Trask let it ring a little while longer, until finally he managed to get his thoughts in order. By then Millie had come out of the bathroom, and she picked it up first.
“It’s for you,” she said, passing Trask the handset as he propped himself up. “It’s that policeman.”
“Inspector?” he spoke into the phone. “This is Trask.”
“Ah, Mr. Trask,” came Burdur’s thick, guttural voice. “Bad news, I afraid. We finding human remains in the Tundźa hotel. Five bodies…well, five remains, yo
u understanding. One is downstairs, probably the owner, and four upstairs. As for the man in the car, he has the wallet. Outside burned, inside not so bad. There is a card in heat-resistant plastic. A restaurant card, for the eating place? It has his name: B. Fletcher. So, your Mr. Goodly he was right.”
“And the others?” Trask was pretty sure he knew who two of them would be, but there was still hope.
“Very badly burned,” said Burdur. “Also very dangerous. No sooner we, er, extracting the bodies, the floor collapse. Only way to check is with dental records. Those names you giving me—also that telephone number in London—they working on it. I expecting the fax. Is good you having connections with British police. They being incredibly helpful. Also they asking me please to be assisting you in any way.”
“I thought they might,” said Trask. “There are, er, quite a few policemen in our archaeological society.”
“Your society? Ah! The digging people. The ancient relics, and so on and so forth.”
“And historians, too,” said Trask.
“Is funny,” said Burdur, with just a hint of sarcasm in his voice. “In my country the policeman is interested in the crime. He has little time for the hobbies.”
“Exactly,” said Trask, thinking quickly. “And we are interested in crime: the crimes of, er, ancient invaders.” Which was pretty much the truth.
For a moment there was silence at the other end, until Ali Bey Burdur said, “Well, is all outside my, er—”
“—Your sphere of interest?”
“Exactly.” And then: “So, Mr. Trask, I keeping you informed. You may going in the town if you wishing, but please to telling the desk where you going.”
“And how long will you expect us to remain in Sirpsindigi?”
“Oh, only a day or so.”
“Thanks for your help,” said Trask.
“Thinking nothings of it,” said the other. And then, before he broke the connection, “Mr. Trask, are you also the policeman? Some kind of policeman? The investigator, eh?”
“Only in connection with…well, with strange old things,” Trask answered. “Things out of distant places and times.” And:
“Of course,” said the other, and Trask thought he sensed a nod of feigned understanding, and also the narrowing of suspicious brown eyes. “You are meaning the anti-tikkies, yes?”
“Yes,” said Trask, “the antiquities.” And when there was no answer he put the phone down…
20
Tracking the Wamphyri—the Horror at the Crossing
BY 8:45 A.M. ALL THE MEMBERS OF THE E-BRANCH team were down in the three-star hotel’s dining room for breakfast. The food was mainly acceptable; the alleged “continental” breakfast consisted of croissants, cheese, preserves, and coffee or tea. But the tea wasn’t to Millie’s liking and the coffee was a cross between the murky Turkish variety and an inferior instant brand.
“The granules,” Paul Garvey commented, with his normal lack of facial expression, which made it difficult to tell if he was joking or not, “don’t melt. They just turn to mud in the bottom of the cup.” But he probably wasn’t joking because it was true, and also because no one was in the mood for humour anyway.
“But at least it’s hot,” said Liz. “And with a little sugar it’s even sweet.”
“I’m sorry about last night,” said Ian Goodly. “This talent of mine…sometimes I hate it! And what with Bernie and all, I just wasn’t myself.”
“Try to forget it,” Trask told him. “And I’m not being callous, but going on about it won’t help. Also, if you’re feeling bad about Fletcher, well, think how I feel. I sent him and those Special Branch fellows out here. And while it’s no consolation, at least we know he was dead before they torched the car.”
“Yes,” the precog answered. “I am positive about that. When I first saw him—I mean, when we were at the Tundźa—I knew he was dead. But I don’t understand why there were two separate attacks. What was Bernie doing out on his own?”
“I don’t think he was out on his own,” said Trask. “I think they killed him at the Tundźa along with his minders and Gustav Turchin’s men, then took him to that Kino place deliberately.”
“The dancing girls?” said Millie, reading his mind without even trying.
“The troupe off the Evening Star, yes,” Trask nodded. “Vavara’s creatures now. Property of the Wamphyri.”
“Malinari knew we would find that estate car and Fletcher,” said Paul Garvey, “and then that we’d see the billboard. Is that what you mean?”
And again Trask nodded. “He’s so sure of himself—so sure he’s going to win this one—that he’s leading us on. I’ll give you odds that when we check it out we’ll discover that the show has moved on. Malinari wants us to follow him, to go where he’s going. Him and those other two freaks, and those poor girls. As to why: I can only think that he intends to trap us. But Bernie was only one man and we’re many, and forewarned is forearmed.”
“Which raises the question,” said Lardis Lidesci, “forearmed with what—a little garlic, a little knowledge? Which in turn raises the question: should we be doing what he wants? Should we be pursuing them?”
“You know we must,” said Trask. “You know that this is one trail we’ve got to follow, because we’re the only ones who can. Okay, by now in the UK the Minister Responsible will be on it. Him and the civilian authorities, all of the security services…hell, and for all I know the Army, too! They’ll be finding and confining sleepers—that’s if there are any more, and we must hope there aren’t—but if there are they’ll be watching them and checking them out. At Porton Down the microbiologists and, oh, a whole gaggle of boffins, will be doing their thing, looking for answers. You see, it simply isn’t enough that this new bubonic plague out of China will kill the Wamphyri. Out of the six and a quarter billion people on this planet, some four billion haven’t even come in contact with the plague, and it’s already waning, dying out. And at least half the population of the poorer countries haven’t even had shots. So there’s—God!—food enough for these beasts. What’s more, and as I believe I’ve said before, it’s possible that they’ll know who they can or can’t eat.”
“Pheromones,” said Liz.
“Something like that,” Trask nodded. “Or perhaps common or uncommon sense. Wamphyri senses are vastly superior to those of ordinary people. I’m sorry if it offends at table and what have you, but would you kiss a man with breath like a sewer, a sunken nose, and scabby lips? Or put it another way: don’t you know when a piece of raw meat has overstayed its welcome in your refrigerator? It’s not at all unlikely they can smell the plague, these bloody creatures!”
“In which case,” said Garvey, “well, at least we know they won’t be biting us. We’ve had our jabs. We’re tainted meat.”
“That may be true,” said Lardis. “They won’t be biting us, but it won’t stop them from tearing our arms and legs off!”
“What I’m trying to say,” said Trask, “is that what’s happening back home doesn’t apply elsewhere. Of course, the Minister Responsible will have passed all of this on to our friends in Australia, and with good old Manolis Papastamos on the case in Greece…who knows? Maybe the Greek authorities will listen and take some kind of covert action to isolate Krassos. We must hope so, anyway, for after what’s happened back home—if it’s as serious as we suppose, and I for one think it is—we just don’t know what else is loose out there anymore.”
“But we do know the source,” said Millie.
“Right,” said Trask. “And we also know that it was out and about its filthy work right here in Sirpsindigi last night. So since right now we can’t tell the majority of the world’s population what’s happening—”
“—The job’s ours,” said Ian Goodly, his strange deep eyes afire now, blazing as never before. “Because we have the knowledge that almost everyone else lacks, we’re it.” He looked at the Old Lidesci. “We’re the avengers, Lardis. Does that answer your question ‘should
we be going?’ If not us, who else? Malinari, Vavara, and Szwart, they’ve thrown down the gauntlet. I say we pick it up and ram it right down their bloody throats!”
Which, coming from the thin, grimacing lips of the precog, sounded that much more impressive. And:
“Well, then,” Lardis growled. “That appears to be that! For if what you just said wasn’t a vow, then I’ve never heard one. So you, Ian Goodly, may now consider yourself an honorary member of the Szgany Lidesci, and I’m glad to have you. As for my question: but that’s all it was. I was just very interested to know how everyone else felt about it, that’s all. Also, and with regard to my own feelings: I don’t know why we’re sitting around doing sweet bugger all when we’ve come so very close to tracking these bastards down!”
“Sweet bugger all?” said Trask, frowning at Lardis.
“Jake Cutter,” Lardis growled. “I heard him say it several times, when he was out of sorts in the HQ. Is it offensive?”
Trask shook his head. “Explicit, that’s all. And as to why we’re doing sweet bugger all, it’s because we’re stuck in this place until Inspector Ali Bey Burdur says we can go. But we’re allowed out into the town, which means there is work we can be getting on with. For one thing, we can find out if my theory’s right and those girls from the Evening Star have moved on to their next venue.”
“God!” said Liz. “But what a trio of roadies they have!”
“And then there’s Lardis’s other point,” said Millie. “We don’t as yet have any weapons. When we do finally catch up to these monsters, I don’t want to find myself in the same situation as last time. What, face-to-face with a thing like Lord Szwart, and completely vulnerable? That doesn’t bear thinking about.” She hugged herself and shivered.
“I had intended to weapon up as soon as we got settled in out here,” said Trask. “There’s more than enough of everything we need back in the armoury at the HQ. It’s all been set aside by now, bagged up and ready to go as soon as I give the word.”