Avengers

by Brian Lumley

  Jake didn’t quite follow. “And all of that without creating an international incident?”

  “But it won’t be for public consumption,” said Chung. “The evidence will be delivered to heads of state—including those in Russia’s military hierarchy who haven’t been quite as forthcoming as Gustav Turchin—and the ball will be firmly in their court. The Russians will then be given a time limit in which to clean up their act, and if they don’t the evidence against them will get a much wider release with very stiff sanctions brought to bear. And what with their ever-crumbling economy, that’s the one thing they can do without right now.”

  “All nice and political,” said Jake.

  “Yes,” Chung agreed. “And very effective. As for the actual ‘we’—the people involved in the operation—well, I’m the man they turn to when binoculars, radio, radar, spotter planes, and spy satellites don’t work. That’s because I have this long-time hate affaire with radioactive materials. My talent is that much better when I’m dealing with lethal radiations.”

  “I thought it was drugs?” said Jake.

  “That, too,” Chung shrugged. “Poppies and plutonium. Pretty much the same to me.”

  “And the others in your team?” Jake enquired.

  “Naval Intelligence,” said Chung, “Greenpeace, a couple of high-profile ecological types, a marine biologist, and an American nuclear physicist.”

  “So it’s that important,” said Jake.

  “Very important, yes.” Chung nodded.

  “You said ship ‘or ships.’ How many of these rogue vessels are there?”

  “Just the one,” the locator answered. “Or rather, just one on the surface—but it’s the one below the surface that we’re really interested in.”

  “You’ve lost me again,” said Jake.

  “They have a special ship done out like an oceanic survey vessel,” said Chung. “In the rear, twin booms angle down into the sea with a cradle slung between them. The sub sits in the cradle all unsuspected. When they reach the spot where they’re going to dump it, they scuttle the sub and release the cradle, ‘and down goes the baby, cradle and all.’” He made an attempt to sing the last few words.

  “And they told me Elvis was dead!” said Jake, grimacing.

  And Chung said, “Yes, I know: I should apologize, right? I never could sing worth a shit. As for Elvis: his music is just as popular as ever. You should talk to him some time, tell him we haven’t forgotten.”

  Jake put that aside, and serious again said, “Then there’s this Rockall.”

  “It’s a rock in the sea, a hundred and fifty miles west of Saint Kilda,” the locator answered. “But according to Turchin, it’s close to the route our wreckers will take. Rockall: maybe they named it that way deliberately, though personally I don’t know why they bothered. God knows there’s ‘rock all’ there.”

  Humour again, at a time when there was very little to laugh about. And now for the first time Jake got the feeling that the locator’s jokey attitude was hiding something else. Something a lot more serious. Behind that big grin he was nervous as a cat. And:

  “What’s going on, David?” said Jake, quietly. “I mean, you didn’t take time out from this important stuff you’re doing to come spend a couple of minutes cracking me up. So, why did you come? What’s wrong?”

  Chung looked at Jake, and gradually the nervous smile slid from his classically Chinese face. “I don’t know what’s wrong,” he said. “I hoped that by coming here I might find out.”

  “What’s on your mind, then?” said Jake.

  “You are,” said the locator. “And to the exclusion of just about everything else.”

  “Explain,” said Jake.

  “What’s to explain?” said Chung. “I mean—how to explain? It’s my talent, Jake—it keeps pointing me at you!”

  “At me?” Jake didn’t much like this at all. “Like I’m some kind of radioactive source, or maybe a heap of heroin? What do you mean, it’s pointing you at me?”

  “Just exactly like that,” said Chung. “And yet not. I mean you’re there, in the back of my mind, always. Like piece of me is an iron filing and you’re the biggest magnet in the world.”

  And now Jake’s eyes narrowed. “Mindsmog?” he said.

  Chung opened his mouth, closed it, looked away. Jake grabbed his arms, turned the other back again. And: “Mindsmog?” he growled. “Is that what you’re saying?”

  “No…yes…maybe,” said the other. “But that’s always been there, right from square one—the moment you let Korath into your mind.”

  “Except it’s worse now, right?” said Jake.

  “Perhaps it is,” the locator gasped, straining to free himself. “I can’t be sure. But it isn’t just the mindsmog, Jake.”

  “Then what?” Jake released him, flopped backwards onto his bed. “If it’s not ‘just’ the mindsmog, what else?”

  “Listen,” said Chung. “When I first met you—the day you appeared here, right here in Harry’s Room, for the first time—I knew what you were, knew that something of Harry was here. It was the same with Nathan. There’s a certain something about all three of you, as if you have your own psychic signatures, different again from anything else I ever detected. I mean, Trask’s aura is scarcely noticeable, only to those who know what he can do. Telepathic signatures are pretty much alike; Millie is like Liz is like Paul is very much the same as John Grieve. And it’s the same for locators. Any disturbance I cause in the so-called psychic aether will be very similar to what…well, to what Bernie Fletcher used to cause. The only difference being that I was better at shielding myself. But you—”

  “Yes?” said Jake. “What about me?”

  And Chung shook his head in a puzzled fashion. “Yours isn’t just a signature, Jake. Not any longer. I mean, it’s been growing. You know, I had an old hairbrush of Harry’s. It was just a wooden oval full of hog bristles.” He reached into a pocket and produced a four-inch sliver of wood with a few bristles attached, and said, “This is all that’s left of it. During the course of the last day or two, it’s vibrated itself to pieces.”

  “Vibrated…?” said Jake. But sure enough, the broken fragment of hairbrush was thrumming in Chung’s hand, shaking like a rattler’s tail.

  “It’s my talent,” the locator explained. “In the Dark Ages they would have called it sympathetic magic. It’s something of yours that connects me to you, lets me know where and how you are. When I take it in hand, this is what it does. It’s like a water-diviner’s hazel fork.” He put the thing away.

  “But it isn’t mine,” said Jake. “It never has been.”

  “That’s right,” Chung nodded. “But it was Harry Keogh’s.”

  “His influence over me is growing? Is that what you’re saying? Huh!” Jake snorted. “I could have told you that much without all of this.”

  But the locator shook his head. “I don’t think it’s so much his influence over you as your strength as a Necroscope. You’ve become so much more than you were, Jake. And the reason why the hairbrush shook itself to bits? Because every time I thought of you I couldn’t stop from touching it—that’s how much you were on my mind. And that’s why I came back…to see if everything was alright with you.”

  Jake stood up, sipped coffee that was starting to go cold, and said, “Everything…is not all right with me. I’m worried—I’m very worried about me—and I think all of you should be, too.”

  Chung looked at him standing there, tall as (and perhaps even taller than?) he remembered. And his hair, white at the temples now and swept wolfishly back. His hawkish nose, and his lips so thin and cold. But Jake’s eyes, as penetrating as they were…thank God they were still a deep brown!

  “Jake,” said Chung then. “If anything has happened to you, it wasn’t your fault but ours. When you first…arrived here, we could have let you go, but it seemed you’d be such an asset that—”

  “—That Trask recruited me,” Jake growled. “Now that I’ve been invol
ved and seen what we’re all up against, I don’t blame him. Nothing that has happened was his, your, or my fault but Harry Keogh’s. He got me into this, and he’ll get me out.”

  “Listen,” said Chung, backing toward the door. “When Harry knew it was all over, he did the right thing.” And before Jake could answer he dipped into his pocket, brought out the broken fragment of hairbrush, lobbed it across the room.

  Jake snatched it from the air and said, “I’m not quitting, David.”

  “I know you’re not,” the locator shook his head. “Not without you’re made to. But you’re like a dynamo, Jake, and you’re humming faster and faster, louder and louder. I won’t need the hairbrush to find you from now on. But—”

  “—But?”

  “You may need it to find me. I’ve had that old brush since Harry left. It bears my signature now. If you just think of me I’m sure I’ll know it.” Opening the door behind him, he sidled out into the corridor.

  “Why would I need you?” Jake watched him go.

  “I know a thousand locations,” Chung told him. “That’s because I’m a locator. They’re as fixed in my mind as your coordinates are in yours. Who can say, the time might come when you want to go…somewhere else?”

  “Why would you do this?” Jake looked out into the corridor after him.

  And Chung called back, “We all loved Harry, Jake. But only Ben Trask had the opportunity to help him. So now, in the event things don’t work out, I’d like the chance to do my bit.”

  “For me or for Harry?” said Jake, as the locator headed for the Duty Officer’s room.

  “What’s the difference?” said Chung, without looking back. And finally, “Best of luck, Necroscope…”

  A few miles west of Karnobat in the Močurica Hills, Lord Malinari of the Wamphyri stood in the dusty gloom of a circular room and looked out eastwards through a broken window. The shadow of his tall, crumbling refuge—his, Vavara’s, and Lord Szwart’s—fell like a finger on the land outside. A finger pointing east.

  “What are you looking at?” Vavara was curious where she sat huddled in a dark corner, away from the lances of sunlight that came slanting through knotholes in the west-facing wall.

  “I’m thinking,” he answered. “I’m considering our route out of all this.”

  “What? But as far as I can see, there is only one way out,” she said. “And that’s the same way we came in. So then, are you worried that we’re trapped here?”

  He shook his head. “This place is our trap, Vavara. And I’m not thinking of our immediate exit but the one we shall be taking from Burgas.”

  “Ah, yes,” she said, her eyes flaring in the semidarkness. “Your great plan.” Her sarcasm dripped like acid.

  “At least it won’t get us seared half to death!” he snarled. “Unlike yours, which saw us adrift in an open boat, unprotected when the sun came up!”

  “The caïque had a canopy,” she said. “We were mainly in the shade.”

  “Oh, really?” Malinari answered, sneeringly. “Mainly in the shade, you say? Well, as I recall we suffered grievously. And in another hour or so—if that vessel hadn’t rescued us—there would have been precious little left to shade. Indeed, we would have been shades, lost in the land of shades, burned to cinders in a mutual true death…and a very painful death at that!”

  “Well, we survived,” she said. “Our work has gone for nothing—thanks mainly to you—but we ourselves survived. And I for one have learned a lesson from all of this. Several lessons. One: never to trust Nephran Malinari. Two: never to let another Great Vampire into my manse, not even of his own free will. And three: never to form alliances but stay on my own, even if it’s the death of me. Hah! I would have been better off in Starside, but I let you talk me into coming here. Well, I find this world loathsome—all this sunlight, and the nights so short. If this plan of yours works I shall be very glad to see Starside again, and overjoyed to see the back of you!”

  “The feeling is mutual, I assure you,” said Malinari, scowling as he turned from the window and set the badly gapped floorboards groaning under his feet.

  At which, up in the rafters, something stirred.

  “Now see,” said Vavara quietly, putting up a hand to shield her crimson eyes from a trickle of dust. “You’ve disturbed Lord Szwart.”

  And as if to prove it:

  “Why waste your time in argument?” came that wheezing, ruptured-bellows voice from roughly, recently fashioned lungs and vocal chords as malleable as mud. “The sun is up, and we should be down. But Vavara, I have to agree with you: this world is an abomination. It is the light, the terrible light. There’s altogether too much of it.” And:

  “There, then,” said Vavara under her breath. “Are you listening, Malinari? You should be. For when one abomination condemns another, you’ve simply got to take his word for it.”

  “Huh!” Malinari grunted.

  “Go to sleep, both of you,” Szwart wheezed. “Wake me again, when the sun is down.” And up there on a platform where rafters came together under the turret roof, an oddly shaped, flattened thing adjusted its outline to suit the space, letting a flap of doughy, protoplasmic matter hang like a sack over one edge. For a moment, a crimson eye formed and blinked open in the bulge of the sack, stared down into the loft’s dusty interior, then shuttered itself and dissolved away.

  “He’s right,” said Vavara in lowered tones. “We should take respite.”

  “Then why don’t you?” said Malinari.

  “Because when you are awake, I like to be awake,” she answered.

  “Then you must learn to trust me,” he said. “Indeed, for I need you—yes, and Szwart, too—as much as both of you need me. We’re all in this together, Vavara. But when it’s over, by all means let’s be enemies again.”

  “In it together, aye,” she answered, sullenly. “And all of us working to the same plan…your plan. That’s what I don’t like about it, Nephran Malinari: that we’re all following this scheme of yours, but only you know the details. So then, let’s be sure I have it right. Explain it once again, if you will.”

  “Ah, Vavara,” Malinari sighed. “You may not be tired, but I am. I’m tired of our cold war, of running away from my enemies, even of this Earth which but for E-Branch could have been—oh, a most wonderful place. As for your distrust: well, I’m especially tired of that. And when we are done here—for yes, I will explain it to you yet again—then I at least shall take this opportunity to catch up on some sleep. But I’m also hungry, and so I’ll curl me up with those women down below—perhaps sip a little here, thrust a little there, take a little and give some back, you know?—and so slip off into pleasant dreams.”

  “As you will,” said Vavara. “What is that to me? What were they but sluts in the first place, kicking their legs and showing their breasts and buttocks? And you a horny old vampire. So go ahead, be my guest…‘suck what you must and fuck out your lust,’ as that old Starside saying goes. But first—”

  “Yes, I know,” Malinari nodded, and sighed again. “First my plan. Very well, now listen:

  “The psychic aether is still now. That means they are doing what we should be doing, sleeping. Very wise of them: they conserve their energies. And a while ago I sent out a probe—but a very gentle, tentative probe—to see if I might spy on their dreams without alerting them to my presence. What dreams I discovered, while yet they were vague, were fraught with all kinds of terrors, all manner of doubts and suspicions…the much of which concerned ourselves, of course. Other than that they were unclear, muddied…well, all except for the girl’s, Liz. She who was so very nearly yours on Krassos.

  “Her dreams were fresh as a breeze off Sunside, come drifting over the Barrier Mountains. Ahhhh! How very sweet and even intoxicating! For she dreamed of her lover, this Jake Cutter.

  “Now, Vavara, I know how it must pain you that she escaped your clutches on that island, but in the end it’s for the best. She shall be the lure. For this Jake, he is a Power!
He’s like that one in Sunside, that Szgany bastard who wrecked our every effort among the ruins of the old aeries. For all we know he’s still there, doing battle with all that unpleasantness we left behind us, our lieutenants, our thralls, and various monsters. And so I ask you, what good to return to a fight we can’t win? A fight we fled while the going was good? No use at all—not unless we return with superior weapons. And what greater weapons than the ones this Nathan brought to bear against us, eh?

  “So then, this man—yes, a mere man, however unthinkable that may be—this man who destroyed my garden under the Pleasure Dome in Xanadu, saved his companions from the funeral pyre I had prepared for them there, and turned up yet again to ruin Szwart’s plans under London—he is vulnerable! He has a weak spot called Liz, Vavara. When she called for him in Xanadu, he came. Ben Trask is E-Branch’s leader, yes, but Jake Cutter is his mainstay.

  “Do you need proof of what I say? Do you think I have some ulterior motive? Do you doubt that this Jake is the Power that I have named him? If so, then ask yourself how this ‘mere man’ invaded Lord Szwart’s underworld, which Szwart himself thought impregnable? And not only did he invade that secret place, but he survived the explosion that destroyed it, the sabotage that he brought about. Ah, but he comes and goes in the blink of an eye, this one. He is there and he is gone, just like Nathan of the Szgany. And who can say what other skills he possesses?

  “We can say, once we have him. And when we return to Starside, his secrets will go with us, stolen from his mind by me, Nephran Malinari. And each of us, Vavara—you, me, and Szwart alike—all three of us with the zest and strength and tenacity of the Wamphyri, plus powers to match and outmatch Nathan of the Szgany. Just picture it. We were losing the last bloodwar, our battle with Sunside, but this time…?” He paused abruptly, letting the question hang there.