Avengers

by Brian Lumley

  “Me,” said Millie at once. “I volunteer. Szwart owes me.”

  Since they were running out of time Trask couldn’t waste it arguing with Millie. But still his heart skipped a beat when he answered, “Okay. And in any case we’ll be fairly close together down there, all of us.”

  He turned to the precog, but Goodly beat him to it, saying: “Vavara is mine, Ben. I nearly bought it in her labyrinth under Palataki, so now it’s my turn. Me and Paul, if he’s willing. We should make a pretty good team. While I try to glean what she’s going to do, Paul can perhaps get into her mind and corroborate what she’s doing.” He looked at Garvey, who said:

  “Sure. Why not? What can I lose…except my life!?”

  Finally Trask turned to the Old Lidesci. “Which leaves just you and me, old friend. You, me—”

  “—And Malinari,” Lardis grunted. “For Zekintha, aye.”

  “For all of us,” said Trask. “Everyone, everywhere.” And he looked at Jake. “That’s it. We’re ready.”

  “Two things before we go,” said the Necroscope. “There’s no power now in the complex, no lights. But we do have those three halogen lamps that we brought with us. They’ve got to go to the people who need them most. Millie, for one. If we get separated, the brilliant light from one of those lamps might be sufficient to back Szwart off. He can’t take strong light. That leaves one lamp for Paul and Ian, and one for Lardis. As for Gustav: he’ll have all the light he needs from the Gate itself.”

  “Good,” said Trask. “So what’s the other thing?”

  “Not so good,” said Jake. “Right now in Perchorsk, Malinari will be looking for someone who knows his way around the place. Which probably means just about any one of those ex-cons. He’ll drain his victim of his knowledge, and after that he’ll know as much about the complex as…as someone who has lived here for three years!”

  “You’re right, of course,” said Trask. “With Malinari leading them, those monsters won’t be blundering around down there. They’ll know exactly where they’re going. Our only advantage—that is, if we have one—lies in the fact that they don’t know we’re here. Not yet, anyway.”

  “Which leaves us with no room for error,” said the Necroscope. “And no time to spare.” He turned to Turchin. “You first, comrade.”

  And Turchin said, “What greater sacrifice, eh? The Russian Premier gives his all for his people, his country, his world!”

  “Right,” said Jake, moving close to him. “It’ll make great headlines in Izvestia—if we ever get out of this.”

  A moment later, Jake and Turchin vanished. Following which, it took only a few seconds to transport Trask and his team into Perchorsk’s leering lower levels…

  29

  The Final Battle…?

  BEYOND THE COMPLEX’S CAVERNOUS SERVICE bay, a tunnel lined with storage rooms led to a hatch which in turn opened on a junction of rock-hewn corridors. And from the junction onwards—right, left, and straight on—all routes except down were available. As for the latter: a boarded-over shaft in the solid rock floor was all that remained of a once-stairwell to the nether levels. Wrecked in the first terrifying moments of the Perchorsk Experiment, when shock-wave vibrations had caused bolts to shear and reduced the relatively flimsy structure to a heap of concertinaed scrap one hundred and ten feet down the shaft, it had never been rebuilt. Since there were several other routes to the core—and since in the aftermath of the disaster Perchorsk had been more or less written off, its funding cut to the bone—repairs hadn’t been deemed a priority.

  In the three horizontal corridors, Karl Galich had deployed six men including himself. Their instructions were simple: anything, but anything, that came through the hatch—an oval door five feet high set in a steel bulkhead—was to be cut to ribbons with concentrated gunfire. In Galich’s own words, “I’ve had more than enough of foreplay, now we fuck! And if these mothers so much as stick their noses in here I’ll have them in a crossfire. I want their blood and guts all over the walls and floor, in payment for what they spilled outside.”

  And now, from twenty-five feet away—with their electric torches and weapons lined up on the hatch—the six waited in ambush, never suspecting that just beyond the bulkhead, Malinari the Mind was listening to their very thoughts.

  The complex was silent now. No humming from the motionless fans, no booted feet tramping the endless corridors, no voices echoing in the still, heavy air. But it was an ominous silence, like the dead calm that warns of a coming storm…

  The hatch’s locking wheel squealed as it was given a tentative turn. Then the wheel spun, the hatch cracked open, and was hurled back on its hinges. Torch beams stabbed at the darkness, and Galich’s men took up first pressures on their triggers. But nothing was moving in the frame of the hatch. Then—

  —It was mist, a corpse-white living mist that came crawling over the lower lip of the hatch, swirling into the complex. A vampire mist, coiling across the floor, and thickening as it came; until the hatch itself was obscured, its outline fading, swallowed up in the total opacity of the stuff.

  It took only a matter of seconds for Galich to realize what was happening here—exactly the same thing that had happened outside—and then he drew breath and yelled, “Open fire! Into the mist. Fire right into this…this whatever it is!”

  And his men needed no further urging. Sensing something of the alien otherness, as their skin began crawling, they were only too glad to oblige. And the clamour was deafening as they blasted away at the place where they believed the hatch to be; or rather, they hosed fire on an area which Vavara’s beguiling talent had told them was the hatch. But it wasn’t. And suddenly the four men in the corridors that angled to left and right of the hatch had adjusted their aim to target each other!

  The firing commenced…and as quickly ceased. And in its wake there was only the hot stench of cordite and fresh blood, slumping shadows and choked screams gurgling into silence.

  But in the straight-on corridor, Galich and his Second-in-Command were unhurt. And:

  “What the fuck is going on?” Galich whispered as he loaded a fresh magazine into his machine-pistol, his hands shaking so badly he could scarcely draw back the cocking lever.

  And his Second-in-Command said, “This mist is like…it’s like living slime. Karl, I can feel it crawling on me!”

  And in that same moment—from directly above them—Lord Szwart said, “Ahhhh!” as he came seeping down from the ceiling.

  Semisolid one moment, in the next Szwart was muscle, bone, chitin claws, and mantrap jaws; and wrenching their weapons from nerveless fingers, he hurled them aside and slammed the pair up against opposite walls. Half-stunned, they would have fallen…but Vavara and Lord Nephran Malinari were there, flowing out of the vampire mist, their eyes burning and their overly long arms reaching with irresistible strength. And:

  “This one,” said Malinari, sniffing at Galich with a wrinkled snout, his fingers writhing like snakes as they grasped the ex-convict’s head, “is mine! One of their leaders, he knows all the mazy ways of this place. He has learned them by heart. Now, in just a little while, I shall learn them, too.”

  Then, glancing at Vavara and Lord Szwart in an unaccustomed fashion—with his jaws gaping and his eyes madly ablaze—he said, “Allow me…allow me a moment or two before I take what we need. For I have worked my mind hard tonight, and I begin to feel…to feel the strain. So many voices shrieking their fear…my head aches with their thunder! How much may a single mind contain with impunity, I wonder, as often before I’ve wondered? How many thoughts—how much knowledge, what quantity of pain—before the brain succumbs?” And clutching Karl Galich’s head in one huge lily-pad hand, he used the other to mop his livid face and brow, shaking his head as if to clear it of all the babble.

  But then, seeing the way his companions were looking at him—sensing their curiosity at his apparent weakness—Malinari controlled himself and continued, “Meanwhile, before we go back for the girl, the pair of y
ou can do as you will with that one. Aye, for the sooner he stops thinking the better!”

  A death warrant on Galich’s Second-in-Command, which Szwart and Vavara wasted no time in serving…

  The approach route to the core. That was where Trask had determined to ambush the Wamphyri, and that was where Jake had taken the remaining members of the team after positioning Gustav Turchin in the bowl under the Gate with his deadly nuclear device. But while Trask and the precog had been here before—and Jake, too, insofar as he “remembered” it—the rest of the team were newcomers here, and as such they hadn’t known what to expect.

  Just as well. For in the nightmare scenario of their coming battle, the Gate’s close environs made for a “perfect” setting. Perfectly nightmarish.

  First to be deployed, Goodly and Garvey found themselves on opposite sides of a wide, heavily timbered, badly scorched catwalk that descended through a region of sheer fantasy. Now they formed a part of that fantasy—or more properly that horror—for they looked up at the catwalk from a grotesquely humped bed of magmass that stretched away into the dim recesses of a weird chaos, a great disorder, an utterly alien landscape.

  No light here but what little came filtering up from below, from the Gate itself. For even when electricity had been freely available, it had never been routed through here. This had been the unanimous decision of various overseers over the years: that this was a region best kept unlit, which no sane eye would ever want to look at.

  Yet now the telepath and the precog were very nearly a part of it, kept separate only by their clothes and the thickness of their skins. And despite that Goodly had been here once before, still he wished his skin was thicker. As for what the telepath, Paul Garvey, thought of this place…in fact he tried not to.

  Sprawling in deep, man-shaped moulds or depressions in the magmass—finding cover in these human templates, these matrices of men who had been trapped in the backfire from the failed Perchorsk Experiment, men who had died here—Goodly and Garvey tried to avert their eyes from their surreal surroundings, only to find it impossible. For wherever they looked the magmass was there.

  The precog’s eyes were fixed on the catwalk, following its descent through an awesome maze of fused stone, crumpled metal, and warped plastic extrusions, where on all sides those smooth-bored energy channels wound and twisted like wormholes in soft earth, except these holes were cut through bedrock, solidified lava, and buckled steel girders. The hideous magmass, yes.

  Paul Garvey was rather more successful in his mental avoidance of the magmass:

  In the alien—terrain?—on the other side of the catwalk, the telepath was attempting to concentrate his attention in the other direction, up the sloping vista, where the wooden catwalk emerged from a shaft in a solid rock wall. His powerful halogen lamp was located within easy reach in the burst bubble of a magmass cyst. It was switched off for the time being, but its beam had been tested and was focussed on the night-dark shaft. If or when anyone or -thing appeared in that opening, Garvey’s brilliant beam would reach out to define, startle, and blind it…or so he hoped.

  So the pair were situated, and so they waited, the telepath probing for mindsmog—however warily—and the precog praying for a glimpse of the future. And both of them fearing what they might discover. They were armed, of course, with sidearms, and grenades. But neither esper felt in any way superior or even equal to what they must surely face here. Both of them were well aware of the tenacity, the audacity, of their enemy. The best they could hope for was that Paul’s lamp, their protective garlic sprays, and their firepower would drive Malinari and his monstrous companions straight along the catwalk to their next confrontation. And on the way, the men from E-Branch would focus their fire on Vavara, trying to remove her from the final equation.

  But why Vavara? Why the female and presumably the “weakest” of this awesome species first?

  For one, because it was unlikely that she would be carrying Liz. And two, because Vavara could turn the minds of men. Trask and the others, they had to be sure that if they fired at something it was what they actually saw and not what they were made to see.

  These were reasons enough. The witch must go first.

  And there in the place of the magmass, the precog looked to the future and saw nothing, and the telepath searched for mindsmog—

  —And found it rushing headlong, down through the tortured bowels of Perchorsk toward the core! And only himself, Goodly, and their E-Branch colleagues to halt its charge…

  Ben Trask and the Old Lidesci were next in line. A little less than one hundred feet deeper in the heart of the complex, where the magmass was relatively free of those twisted and frequently inverted human templates—those hideous reminders of the agonies once suffered here—they’d taken up positions at the foot of a “cliff” of black, fused rock close to the perfectly circular mouth of the downward slanting tunnel that led to the core.

  But for all its lack of gargoyle figures and mutant moulds, still the magmass was magmass and unearthly; so that once again the thought occurred to Trask, just as it had when first he saw this place, that the Perchorsk accident—if “accident” it had been and not a form of higher retribution—had resulted in the release of alien forces utterly outside Man’s knowledge, forces that defied Earthly science.

  He lay on his front behind what looked like a frozen black wave in a potholed or whirlpooled lake of magmass, and couldn’t help wondering what it had looked like in flow at the moment of meltdown…and how he would have felt to be trapped in it. But since that simply didn’t bear thinking about, he quickly redirected his thoughts to the Old Lidesci and wondered what he was making of all this.

  Lardis had taken cover behind a once-stanchion that was now bent over in the form of a stylized magnet, and he was so quiet that if Trask had not seen him locate himself there he would be certain that he was alone. This was a Szgany survival mechanism, Trask knew, which Sunside’s tribes had evolved through immemorial centuries of Wamphyri predation. In the old days—and some not so old—when the vampires were wont to come raiding out of Starside on their manta flyers, the Szgany had fled into hiding and willed themselves out of existence. They hadn’t moved, they hadn’t spoken, they hadn’t thought—and they certainly hadn’t used garlic to protect themselves! That would have been a “dead giveaway,” for only cut or crushed garlic has the strong scent, and garlic can’t crush itself.

  Lardis was employing the same mechanisms now. He was here, and he wasn’t here. When the Wamphyri came down the stairs from the catwalk and followed the base of the cliffs to the illumination from the core, they wouldn’t—or shouldn’t—detect him. Similarly, Trask was also protected; his talent was by no means common, and unlike telepathy and the skills of the locators, it did not disturb the psychic aether or cause him to “glow in the dark.” If he could manage to keep himself to himself—“shield himself,” as his espers would have it—he might remain undetected in a clump of magmass stalagmites until the last possible moment. And that would be the moment when he and Lardis Lidesci opened up on Lord Nephran Malinari.

  Malinari! The name burned in Trask’s mind like acid; it was a pain on his nerve-endings, a torment in his heart. Zek’s loss was something that wouldn’t, couldn’t, ever be eradicated—but it could be avenged. At least the pain could be salved, the torment eased, and the burning part-quenched. But not until Malinari, or Trask himself—one or the other—was dead. And only the true death would suffice.

  That was why he was here and that was what he would do. For if Trask had considered himself tenacious and determined in the pursuit of this Great Vampire before, there was now that in his blood—in his no longer entirely human system—which made him far more so. And if he should be the one to die…well, so be it. His future along with the world’s was in any case uncertain now, and his only regret would be in losing Millie, too.

  But then again, perhaps she was already lost—Millie, Liz, the Necroscope, and Trask, too: all of them lost—to what conti
nued to consume them, and consumed them ever faster, even as they waited to confront it at its source…

  The third and last party consisted of Millie and Jake.

  There in the core, Jake helped his partner settle down into the bucket seat of a twin-mounted Katushev cannon. For they had realized shortly after Trask deployed them—as soon as Millie had seen the Gate, that ball of brilliant white light suspended in the centre of the core—that she would scarcely be needing her halogen lamp! Even wearing her sunglasses she couldn’t look at the singularity for more than a few seconds. But that worked to everyone’s advantage: the lamp could now go to Trask or the precog, who were more in need of it. And in any case, the Katushev was a far more devastating weapon, and its lethal effects more permanent.

  The only problem now was that Jake didn’t know how to operate the thing…but he believed he knew how to find out. That would involve deadspeak, but since his every unshielded thought was deadspeak it required no great effort on his part.

  There has to be someone down here, he said, who understands the workings of these weapons. You Russians—you soldiers who died here doing your duty, way back in Perchorsk’s early days—I could use a little help.

  Long seconds ticked by, and no answer. But then—

  Let me speak to them, said Penny. You see, Necroscope, even down here the Great Majority have had something of a voice, and the comrades here were warned off long ago. But if there really are other places beyond death, and if that bomb of yours really is a different kind of Gate—

  Eh? A coarse, cold voice cut her off, that of an ex-Russian soldier, which Jake understood because it was deadspeak: mental communication which, like telepathy, knows no language barrier. Do you think that’s possible, Necroscope?

  I don’t know, Jake could only shrug. If I said yes, absolutely, I’d be lying. But then again, I lived a full life without knowing there was this place—never guessing that the dead go on—so what do I know? The only thing I do know for sure, the original Necroscope died in the atomic blast of a weapon on the far side of the Gate, a weapon fired through the Gate from this very spot. And yes, I can definitely guarantee that he went on, for I’m the living proof.