Avengers

by Brian Lumley

  Oh, really? But with only one exception, Goodly and Garvey had been similary armed. So what the hell had happened to them? And what was happening even now?

  It’s called fear, Mr. Trask, said Malinari in Trask’s mind. What you’re experiencing is fear. For you’ve now seen for yourself how we deal with opposition. And as for your talents, your E-Branch skills…surely you’ve realized by now that they are worthless against the Wamphyri?

  At the first icy word or thought—almost before the message had time to sink in—Trask gave a massive start, squirming as he jerked his head to look frantically in all directions. It was as if Malinari was actually there, crouched over him, talking to him in person and not just in his mind. And despite that no one else was present, no nightmare face staring back at him, still Trask knew that it was Malinari, for he’d felt those same icy thoughts before.

  But how…!? was his first involuntary thought or exclamation. Not a reply, merely an astonished reaction.

  How? The other’s mental voice mocked him. How? But am I not Nephran Malinari? Malinari the Mind? We’ve met once before, you and I, out in Australia. A brief meeting, it’s true, but I have remembered your psychic signature, which at this range is quite unmistakable. That’s how, Mr. Trask. But there’s also a why…because you’re in our way, and we haven’t time to waste arguing with you or your weapons. Wherefore—mind to mind, as it were, though your mind is scarcely a match for mine—I give you one last opportunity to remove and save yourselves, you and your E-Branch people, before we move against you. Or simply stay where you are, guarding the final shaft to the core, and meet up with your fate right there. The choice is yours.

  Unused to telepathy, except with Zek and Millie—and even then never having tried to converse in his own right—Trask’s mind betrayed him when, “without thinking,” he thought, Christ! This bastard knows it all! And:

  Oh, ha-ha-haaaa! Malinari’s laughter slammed home, but only for a moment. And then, So how’s it going to be? said the Great Vampire. But there was something in that cold, telepathic voice that he couldn’t quite hide: a sly eagerness, and the fact that he already knew how it was going to be. Now Trask’s talent came into its own, casting the vampire’s lie aside and revealing the truth. This was no “last opportunity,” just a delaying tactic.

  Trask shielded himself, and was surprised that he knew how; unless it was something that came natural to all vampires. He’d left it too late, of course, for now he recognized another grim truth: that just like the locator, poor Bernie Fletcher in Turkey, he himself had betrayed his location! It had been there in his mind, in his own treacherous thoughts—his hiding place in the magmass—“near the shaft to the core!” That was how Malinari had found him.

  And cold from head to toe—cold as this unmarked grave in this foreign land that he’d chosen for himself—Trask suddenly thought, My God—I’m a dead man!

  And despite that his psychic shields were in place, at this range—this point-blank range—he might as well have spoken the words out loud. For he was merely an amateur while Malinari was a master. And:

  Indeed you are a dead man, said that one. But not just yet. First you’ll be a hostage!

  A blanket of mist was gathering over the magmass and beginning to flow towards him, but Trask guessed there was something closer than that; “point-blank” indeed. And sure enough, he saw a lumpish black-cloaked figure—like a grounded, man-sized bat—making its weird, flopping approach over the twisted terrain.

  Trask gulped the stagnant, metallic-tasting air, swallowed hard and tried to moisten his bone-dry throat. His palsied fingers groped for a fragmentation grenade…and a deeper shadow fell on him in his magmass mould!

  He gasped, rolled over and looked up, and had barely enough time to see something furry and freakish clinging to the uneven magmass ceiling directly overhead. It took no more than a split second to realize what he was seeing, but in that same fraction of time a tentacle of mutant vampire protoplasm as thick as his forearm and hard as a rubber cosh whipped down and almost broke his wrist. The grenade was sent flying with its pin intact, and Trask’s numbed right arm and hand wouldn’t answer his commmands as he went to reach for his machine-pistol. But in any case the effort was wasted, for something black and viscous was descending, snatching the gun away.

  And as Szwart quickly extended himself down from the ceiling, touched bottom, thickened and grew up from the floor like the stem of an instantaneous stalagmite, so Malinari straightened from his crouch, threw back his cloak, and reached for his greatest human enemy with a hand as broad as a plate.

  Catching Trask by the back of the neck, and drawing him to his feet, he hissed, “As for the rest of my plan, Mr. Trask—why, with the girl and yourself as my hostages, that should be the very simplest of things. Simplicity itself.”

  But Szwart had noticed something, and now in a voice that rattled and wheezed like a pair of ruptured bellows, he enquired, “Nephran, do you see what I see?” Then, leaning closer to Trask and staring at his face, he formed a member that closely resembled a hand and drew Trask’s dark glasses from the breast pocket of his parka.

  “Indeed I do,” Malinari answered. “The feral yellow of his eyes? Yes, and I suspect the same of the girl. And what of the rest? If their powers are enhanced it answers several puzzling questions: such as how they’ve followed us so closely, seeming almost to anticipate our every move, and why they’ve proved so hard to detect and their shields so difficult to penetrate…even for me. It’s true, I needed them to follow us, but not so hot on our heels! So then, it appears your garden under London met with a measure of success after all, Lord Szwart.”

  “Then all is not lost,” Szwart wheezed. “If or when I have need to come back here, I might find this world darker and far more to my liking!” He laughed, a sound almost as awful as his looks, and stood there shaking in all his near-formless horror.

  Then he pressed Trask’s sunglasses to his own lumpish face, and even Malinari grimaced at what next took place, which would be self-mutilation in any other: the soft squelching sound, and the slow drip of morbid fluids, as Szwart forced the sunglasses back until the six-inch shafts sank right into his black protoflesh. Behind the dark lenses, the fire of his eyes was at once reduced to the glow of hot embers.

  And Szwart said, “Well then, what do you think?”

  “More than merely cosmetic, eh, my friend?” said Malinari.

  “Indeed!” the other wheezed. “I suffered the Gate’s brightness when first we came here, but the pain should be less going back!” And he laughed again.

  While Malinari’s only thought—kept shielded, of course—was this: Don’t laugh too loud, misshapen fool. For I sense the Necroscope close by, and talents such as his were threat enough without any help from you and your fungus garden…

  30

  Or Merely the First of Many?

  IN PERCHORSK’S CORE, THE THIRD TEAM, JAKE and Millie, had also heard Goodly’s and Garvey’s gunfire. That had been but a moment ago, and as its echoes died away Jake said, “It’s started. This is the best possible place for you, Millie, with your thumbs on the firing studs of this Katushev! The only thing is, you can’t use it until I’ve got Liz back. And so—”

  “—And so you’ll position yourself just inside the mouth of the shaft,” said Millie, reading it straight out of his mind.

  “Correct,” Jake answered. “The Gate’s dazzle should give me a small advantage at least, and with a bit of luck I’ll be able to snatch Liz and get her out of here. Then you can use…you can use the Katushev…?” Seeing a certain look on her face, he frowned, stumbled to a halt, and asked. “Did I say something?”

  “Yes,” she answered. “You seem to be assuming they’re going to get this far, that’s all.”

  And it was true, Jake had been assuming exactly that; which translated into an assumption that maybe Ben Trask and the rest of the team—

  “—Aren’t going to make it?” Her eyes looked right through him.

/>   “I’m just trying to cover every angle.” Jake tried to reassure her, failed, and went on: “Right now, though, I think it’s a good idea you should get that armoured canopy up. Then if you do have to shoot, and if anything shoots back, you’re covered.”

  He went to turn away, and something squirmed in his pocket, stabbing his thigh right through his trousers.

  “What the—?” Jake fumbled with his parka to thrust a hand deep in his pocket, came out with the fragment of Harry Keogh’s hairbrush that David Chung had given him. There was a little of his blood on the splintered end, and the thing was vibrating in his hand.

  “Chung!” said Millie immediately.

  “A problem?” Jake wondered out loud.

  “Should I try to reach him?” said Millie.

  “No need,” the Necroscope answered her, lifting his head as if he were listening to something. “I’ve got him. This piece of old hairbrush is both compass and range finder. I can go to him right now…but hell, he could have chosen a better time!”

  “Still, you have to go,” said Millie. “Who knows, it may be something that’s important to us.”

  “That’s true,” said Jake, “but I would go anyway, because I know Chung would help me if it was the other way round. Now get that canopy up. And don’t worry—I’ll be back.”

  And a moment later he was gone…

  Guided by instinct and the wooden shard in his hand, Jake used the Möbius Continuum and went to David Chung’s coordinates. But when he got there—which took no time at all—he found something new and very odd. His Möbius door formed readily enough, but it wouldn’t hold still!

  This wasn’t the warping effect he’d experienced upon arriving in the core; the door was firm enough and stable in itself, but it moved up and down, shifted from side to side, constantly changed its Möbius space-time location. And then the Necroscope realized why: it must be that the locator’s location was changing, and Jake was locked on to Chung. It was Chung’s transport, the helicopter that was moving, but very erratically!

  In a moment when the door held relatively still, Jake stepped out of the Continuum into normal space, and at once lurched as the floor shifted under his feet. He staggered, saw a safety strap swaying there, grabbed at it and held on. And in the next moment three or four voices began shouting a chorus of exclamations:

  “What the hell—?”

  “Who—!?”

  “Christ! What’s going on here?”

  And then Chung’s voice, saying, “It’s okay. He’s a…he’s a friend!”

  They were seated, belted in, in the helicopter’s passenger cabin, three on one side and two on the other. The seat next to Chung was empty, and as the aircraft lurched again, Jake let go of the strap and aimed himself in that direction. Chung grabbed at him, helped to locate him as he toppled into the seat, said: “Jake, we’ve got a problem.”

  “You, me, Trask, and all the rest of us,” Jake answered him, breathlessly. “And we don’t have a lot of time. So what’s up?”

  “Who is this person?” someone yelled above the shrilling of the chopper’s engine and a bansheee howling from outside.

  And another insisted, “Will someone please tell me what the hell is—?”

  “Shut the fuck up!” Chung shouted at them. “All of you! You want to live? This is the man who’ll save you. But if you don’t want to live, just keep mouthing off…!”

  And when their mouths snapped shut he turned again to Jake. “We were okay until about half an hour ago. Then the storm came in. The weather forecast said it was going to be unsettled, but this is ridiculous! The wind is from the east, coming down from Norway, and it’s getting worse by the minute. We’re heading for the Outer Hebrides, but now anywhere will do—Northern Ireland, dry land—anywhere! But we’re burning fuel fighting the wind, and the pilot says we may not make it.”

  Jake got up, grabbed a strap, leaned to look out through a window. The chopper’s searchlight scanned a heaving sea, where massive waves smashed this way and that, foaming white against the black of bottomless ocean. Moonlight struggled to find its way through clouds that roared across the sky, and to the east there was nothing but inky blackness.

  “How long have you got?” said Jake, stumbling back into his seat.

  “Maybe twenty, twenty-five minutes,” Chung told him.

  Jake nodded. “If it gets tight, give me another call. Incidentally, you did call me, right?”

  “I tried to locate you,” said Chung.

  “You got Harry’s hairbrush,” said Jake.

  Chung shrugged, managed a smile and said, “Same difference, Necroscope.”

  “And one other thing,” said Jake. “Did you find that Russki ship?”

  “Not yet,” Chung answered, “but I know where she is. As you know, I have this thing for radioactive materials. Well, all of our worst suspicions are proven. I keep picking up this signal, Jake, and it’s a bad one. We’re moving toward it right now. But a shipload? Hell, it’s a whole shitload! And not a thing we can do about it, not in this storm.”

  “I have to go,” said Jake, conjuring a door.

  “So how are things at your end?” Chung asked anxiously, as the Necroscope lurched to his feet.

  “If you call me and I don’t answer,” Jake replied, “that’ll tell you how things are at my end.”

  And as the chopper lurched again he was gone…

  Moving cautiously, Malinari led the way into the shaft’s unnatural dazzle, the light from the Gate. Along the glaring catwalk he went, with Vavara and Szwart following on behind. Vavara was carrying a barely conscious Liz, while Szwart propelled a helpless Trask. But Malinari himself was for the moment unburdened, which was how he preferred it.

  Back there in the magmass, he could have sworn that someone else, other than Trask, was hiding nearby. His mentalist probes had discovered no one, however, not in the magmass…but Jake Cutter’s presence elsewhere had been more than apparent.

  Then for a while the Necroscope had disappeared from Malinari’s mental register, but now he was back. Indeed his return, just a few moments ago, had felt like some kind of energy surge in the psychosphere. And now, despite that he had shielded himself, his shields were so strong they betrayed him in their own right. He was in the core, guarding the Gate itself while waiting to take back his woman. And that was exactly where Malinari wanted him.

  Vavara had demanded to know why she should be burdened with Liz, and Malinari’s excuse for letting her do the work was very simple…and simply a lie: he needed to have his hands free in order to handle the Necroscope. The real reason, however, while it certainly had to do with Jake Cutter, was in fact very different: Lord Malinari knew that whoever was in charge of Liz was liable to deadly attack from the moment he—or she—stepped from the shaft into the core. Then, indeed, Malinari would need a free hand.

  For the girl meant nothing, neither the girl nor Trask, but the Necroscope was everything. With powers such as his Malinari knew he could take back Starside, Sunside—even this parallel Earth in its entirety—eventually. But when next he came he’d be leading a vast vampire army of his own, and no need then for this pair of grotesque mental midges who had been nothing but a hindrance. No, for between times he would have seen to them. As for Vavara—would-be Mother of a vampire horde—he would see to her right now, if an easy means were to present itself!

  And so, having first ensured that his “colleagues” followed close behind, Malinari stepped out onto the railed walkway that hugged the wall of the core around its perimeter. But even wearing a pair of disposable cardboard sunshields that he’d picked up from a container at the entrance to the shaft, still he must put a hand up against the glare until his eyes had adjusted.

  For there it was, the portal itself—shining no less dazzlingly than the natural Gate on Starside—and once across its threshold Malinari knew that he would soon be home in his Vampire World. Ah, but with what wild talents at his command? That remained to be seen.

  Now he
held back a little, scanned left and right, not only with eyes narrowed to slits but also with his mind, and at once detected Millie and the Necroscope. At this range their psychic signatures were unmistakable. The latter was crouched in a sort of sentry box or observation post maybe ten paces to the right, while to the left, at three times that distance, the female was hiding under the tinted-glass turret of a heavy-duty weapon. Or could it be that she was actually manning the thing? Whichever, it was time that Malinari took charge of Liz.

  “Vavara,” he said, letting the witch come up alongside him, and starting off across the fish-scale steel plates towards the Gate, “let me assist you with the girl.”

  “I need no such assistance,” she grunted. “For I have seen through you, oh Lord of Lies! What? Did you think that you were the only one with powers? I feel them here, too—and more especially him!—but then, who could fail to detect him, eh? This is the third and last stage of their ambush. And this girl will provide a shield against whatever force of weapons they intend to use against us. So fuck you, Nephran Malinari!”

  “Eh? What?” Szwart wheezed, stumbling where he followed. He now used one “hand” to hold Trask, and the other to protect his eyes from the glare. For even with Trask’s sunglasses, still he could feel the light on him, revealing every hideous contour.

  “The bitch Vavara would ruin our plans for her own safety!” cried Malinari. “And that is something we can’t allow!”

  Turning on Vavara he crouched down a little, and rising up drove the heel of a hammer hand up under her chin. Every single ounce of Malinari’s prodigious vampire strength—not to mention his pent hatred of the hag—was behind that blow. And as she cried out, flailed her arms, and toppled backwards, Malinari caught up Liz.

  Vavara spat blood and shattered scythelike teeth where she sprawled, and Lord Szwart stumbled this way and that, wheezing, “Eh? What? Nephran, what are you doing?”

  Malinari made no answer but instead began to drag Liz—who was suddenly wide awake and struggling, however weakly—across the fish-scale steel plates towards the Gate. If the Necroscope was after all a great coward and failed to attempt a rescue, at least Malinari would not be leaving this world empty-handed.