by Brian Lumley
‘So I’ve missed them by… how much?’ Dolgikh put on a disappointed expression.
The curator shrugged again. ‘Oh, ten minutes, maybe. But at least I can tell you where they went.’
‘I would be very grateful, Comrade,’ Dolgikh told him, following him into his private rooms.
‘Comrade?’ The curator glanced at him, his eyes bright and seeming to bulge behind the dense glass of his spectacles. ‘We don’t hear that term too much down here on the border, so to speak. Might I inquire who you are?’
Dolgikh presented his KGB identification and said, ‘That makes it official. Now then, I’ve no more time to waste. So if you’ll just tell me what they were looking for and where they went.
The curator no longer beamed, no longer seemed happy. ‘Are they wanted, those men?’
‘No, just under observation.’
‘A shame. They seemed pleasant enough.’
‘One can’t be too careful these days,’ said Dolgikh. ‘What did they want?’
‘A location. They sought a place at the foot of the mountains called Moupho Aide Ferenc Yaborov.’
‘A mouthful!’ Dolgikh commented. ‘And you told them where to find it?’
‘No,’ the other shook his head. ‘Only where it used to be — and even then I can’t be sure. Look here.’ He showed Dolgikh a set of antique maps spread on a table. ‘Not accurate, by any means. The oldest is about four hundred and fifty years old. Copies, obviously, not the originals. But if you look there’ — he put his finger on one of the maps — ‘you’ll see Kolomyya. And here —,
‘Ferengi?’
The curator nodded. ‘One of the three — English, I believe — seemed to know exactly where to look. When he saw that ancient name on the map, “Ferengi”, he grew very excited. And shortly after that they left.’
Dolgikh nodded, studied the old map very carefully. ‘It’s west of here,’ he mused, ‘and a little north. Scale?’
‘Roughly one centimetre to five kilometres. But as I’ve said, the accuracy is very suspect.’
‘Something less than seventy kilometres, then,’ Dolgikh frowned. ‘At the foot of the mountains. Do you have a modern map?’
‘Oh, yes,’ the curator sighed. ‘If you’ll just come this way…’
Fifteen miles out of Kolomyya a new highway, still under construction, sped north for Ivano-Frankovsk, its tarmac surface making for a smooth ride. Certainly to Krakovitch, Quint and Gulharov the ride was a delightful respite, following in the wake of their bumpy, bruising journey from Bucharest, through Romania and Moldavia. To the west rose the Carpathians, dark, forested and brooding even in the morning sunlight, while to the east the plain fell gently away into grey-green distance and a far, hazy horizon.
Eighteen miles along this road, in the direction of Ivano-Frankovsk, they passed a fork off to the left which inclined upwards directly into misty foothills. Quint asked Gulharov to slow down and traced a line on a rough map he’d copied at the museum. ‘That could be our best route,’ he said.
‘The road has a barrier,’ Krakovitch pointed out, ‘and a sign forbidding entry. It’s disused, a dead end.’
‘And yet I sense that’s the way to go,’ Quint insisted.
Krakovitch could feel it too: something inside which warned that this was not the way to go, which probably meant that Quint was right and it was. ‘There’s grave danger there,’ he said.
‘Which is more or less what we expected,’ said Quint. ‘It’s what we’re here for.’
‘Very well.’ Krakovitch pursed his lips and nodded. He spoke to Gulharov, but the latter was already slowing down. Up ahead the twin lanes narrowed into one where a construction gang worked to widen the road. A steam roller flattened smoking tarmac in the wake of a tar spraying lorry. Gulharov turned the car about-face and, at Krakovitch’s command, brought it to a halt.
Krakovitch got out, went to find the ganger and speak to him. Quint called after him, ‘What’s up?’
‘Up? Oh! I mean to see if these people know anything about this area. Also, perhaps I am able to enlist their aid. Remember, when we find what we’re looking for, we still have to destroy it!’
Quint stayed in the car and watched Krakovitch stride towards the workmen and speak to them. They pointed along the deserted road to a construction shack. Krakovitch went that way. Ten minutes later he came back with a bearded giant of a man in faded overalls.
‘This is Mikhail Volkonsky,’ he said, by way of introduction. Quint and Gulharov nodded. ‘Apparently you are right, Carl,’ Krakovitch continued. ‘He says that back there, up in the mountains, that’s the place of the gypsies.’
‘Da, da!’ Volkonsky growled and nodded his concurrence. He pointed westward. Quint got out of the car, Gulharov too. They looked where the ganger pointed. ‘Szgany!’ Volkonsky insisted. ‘Szgany Ferengi!’
Beyond the foothills, rising out of the thin morning mist, the blue smoke of a wood fire climbed almost vertically into the still air. ‘Their camp,’ said Krakovitch.
‘They… they still come.’ Quint shook his head in disbelief. ‘They still come!’
‘Their homage,’ Krakovitch nodded.
‘What now?’ asked Quint, after a moment’s silence.
‘Now Mikhail Volkonsky will show us the place,’ said Krakovitch. ‘That blocked off road we passed back there goes to within half a mile of the castle’s site. Volkonsky has actually seen the place.’
All three searchers got back into the car, the huge foreman with them, and Gulharov began to drive back the way they’d come.
Quint asked, ‘But where does the road go?’
‘Nowhere!’ Krakovitch answered. ‘It was meant to cut through the mountains to the railhead at Khust. But a year ago the pass was declared unworkable because of shale, sliding scree and badly fractured rock. To force it through would constitute a major engineering feat, and there’d be little real benefit to show from it. As an alternative, and to save face, the road will be driven through to Ivano-Frankovsk instead; that is, the existing road will be widened and improved. All on this side of the mountains. There is already a railway route, however tortuous, from Ivano-Frankovsk through the mountains. As for the fifteen miles of new road already built’ — he shrugged — ‘eventually there may be a town out there, industrial sites. It won’t have been a total waste. Very little is wasted in the Soviet Union.’
Quint smiled, however wryly.
Krakovitch saw it, said, ‘Yes, I know — dogma. It’s a disease we all seem to catch sooner or later. Now it appears I have it too. There is great waste, not least in the mass of words from which we build our excuses.
Gulharov stopped the car at the new road’s barrier; Volkonsky got out, swivelled the barrier to one side, waved them through. They picked him up again and headed up into the mountains.
No one noticed the battered old Fiat parked a half-mile down the road back towards Kolomyya, or the blue exhaust fumes and cloud of dust as it rumbled into life and followed in their tracks.
Guy Roberts had eaten two British Rail breakfasts, washed down with pints of coffee, and by the time his train pulled out of Grantham he was halfway through the day’s first packet of Marlborough Kings. He was huge, red eyed and whiskery, and no one bothered him much. He had his corner of the carriage all to himself. No one looking at him would ever have guessed he possessed the talent of some primal wizard, or that his mission was to slay a twentieth-century vampire. Indeed the thought might be amusing — if it wasn’t so very desperate. There were too many desperate things, too much to do, and no time to do it all. It was so very tiring.
Thinking back on the events of last night, he lay back in his seat and closed his eyes. He and Layard had stayed with it right through the night, and it had been one strange, strange night for both of them. Kyle, for instance, at the Château Bronnitsy. As the sky had brightened into dawn, so Layard had found it increasingly difficult to locate Alec Kyle. In his own words it had been like ‘the difference between findi
ng a live man and a dead one, with Kyle somewhere in between’. That didn’t bode at all well for INTESP’s Number One.
Roberts, too, had been unable to penetrate the Château’s mind blocks. He should have been able to ‘scry’ Kyle, but all he’d got on those few occasions when he had actually penetrated the mental defences of Bronnitsy’s espers had been… well, an echo of Kyle. A fast-fading image. Roberts didn’t know for sure what EBranch was doing to Kyle, and he didn’t much care to guess.
Then there’d been Yulian Bodescu; or rather, there hadn’t been him. For try as they might, Layard and Roberts hadn’t been able to relocate the vampire. It was as if he’d simply vanished off the face of the map. There was no ‘mind-smog’ in or around Birmingham, none anywhere in the whole country, so far as the British espers were able to discover. But after they’d thought about it for a little while, then the answer had seemed obvious. Bodescu knew they were tracking him, and he had talents, too. Somehow he was screening himself, making himself ‘disappear’ out of mindscan.
But at 6.30 in the morning, Layard had picked him up again. Very briefly he’d made contact with a reeking, writhing mind-smog, an evil something that had sensed him at once, snarling its mental defiance before disappearing once more. And Layard had located it somewhere in the vicinity of York.
That had been enough for Roberts. It had seemed to him that if there’d ever been any doubt as to where Bodescu was heading, his destination was now confirmed. Leaving INTESP HQ once more in the capable hands of John Grieve, the permanent Duty Officer, he’d prepared to head north.
It was only as he was actually making his exit from the HQ that word of Harvey Newton came in: how his car had been discovered in an overgrown ditch just off the motorway at Doncaster, and how his mutilated body had been found in the boot with a crossbow bolt transfixing the head. That had clinched it, not only for Roberts but for everyone else involved. They didn’t even consider that there might be some other explanation apart from Bodescu. From now on it would be outright warfare — no quarter asked and none given — until the fiend was staked, decapitated, burned and definitely dead!
At this juncture of Roberts’s reflections, someone ‘ahemmed’ and stepped over his outstretched feet. He opened his eyes briefly, saw a slim man in a hat and overcoat claiming the seat beside him. The stranger took off his hat, shrugged out of his coat and sat down. He produced a paperback book and Roberts saw that it was Dracula, by Bram Stoker. He couldn’t help but grimace.
The stranger saw his expression, shrugged almost apologetically. ‘A little fantasy doesn’t hurt,’ he said, in a thin, reedy voice.
‘No,’ Roberts growled his agreement before closing his eyes again. ‘Fantasy doesn’t hurt anyone.’ And to himself:
But the real thing is something else entirely!
*
It was 4.00 P.M. on the Russian side of the Carpathians, and Theo Dolgikh was weary as a man could be, but he drew strength from the sure knowledge that his job was almost done. After this he’d sleep for a week, then indulge himself in as many pleasurable diversions as he could manage before seeking a new assignment. Assuming, that was, that he hadn’t already been assigned some new task. But pleasure can take many forms, depending on the man, and Dolgikh’s work had its moments. His missions were often very… satisfying? Certainly he was going to enjoy the end of this one.
He looked out and down from his vantage point in a clump of pines on the north face of the mountainside where it wound back into the gorge, and trained his binoculars on the four men who climbed carefully along the last hundred yards of boulder-and scree-littered ledge weathered into the sheer cliff which formed the south face. They were less than three hundred yards away, but Dolgikh used his binoculars anyway.
He enjoyed close-up the strain in their sweating faces, imagined he could feel their aching muscles, tried to picture their thoughts as they headed one last time for the old creeper-grown ruins up there where the ravine bottle-necked and the stream rushed and gurgled unseen in the depths of the gorge. They’d be congratulating themselves that their quest — their mission — was almost concluded; ah, but they could hardly imagine that they themselves were also at an end!
This was the part that Dolgikh was going to enjoy:
bringing them to their conclusion, and letting them know that he was their executioner.
Most of the time the four moved in clear light, free of shadows: Krakovitch and his man, the British esper, and the big construction boss. But where the cliff overhung, there they merged with brown and green shade and black darkness. Dolgikh squinted into the sky. The sun was well past its zenith, sinking slowly beyond the looming mass of the Carpathians. In just two more hours it would be twilight, the Carpathian twilight, when the sun would abruptly slip down behind the peaks and ridges. And that was when the ‘accident’ would happen.
He trained his binoculars on them again. The huge Russian foreman carried a haversack with its strap across one shoulder. A T-shaped metal handle protruded: the firing box for gelignite charges. Dolgikh nodded to himself. Earlier in the day he’d watched them lay charges in and around the old ruins; now they were going to blow the place and whatever it contained — a fabulous weapon, according to that twisted dwarf Ivan Gerenko — to hell! So they thought, but that was what Dolgikh was here to prevent.
He put his binoculars away, waited impatiently until they were safely off the ledge and into the woods of the overgrown slope beyond, then quickly moved in pursuit — for the last time. The cat and mouse game was over and it was time for the kill. They were out of sight in the-trees now, with perhaps a mile to go to the ruins, and so Dolgikh must make haste.
He checked his blunt, blued-steel, standard issue Malatukov automatic, shoved home the clip of snub-nosed rounds and reholstered the heavy weapon under his arm. Then he stepped out from cover. Directly opposite his position, across the narrow gorge, the new road came to an abrupt end. This was the point at which someone had decided it wouldn’t be cost effective to proceed further. Rubble from the blasted cliff filled the depression, forming a dam for the mountain stream. A small lake lay smooth as a mirror behind it. Beneath the dam the water had forced a route, erupting in a torrent where the much reduced stream continued its course down towards the plain.
Dolgikh scrambled down to the jumbled debris which formed the bridge of the dam and nimbly made his way across and up on to the road. A minute more and he’d left the tarmac behind for the narrow, treacherous surface of the scree-littered ledge. And without further pause he followed in the tracks of his quarry. As he went, he thought back on the events of the day.
This morning he’d followed them when they first came up here. Finding their car parked on the road, he’d hidden his Fiat in a dense clump of bushes and tracked them on foot along this very ledge. Then, at the apex of the gorge where the two sides almost came together, they’d entered crumbling old ruins and searched through them. Dolgikh had observed, keeping well back. For maybe two hours they’d busied themselves digging in the ruins. By the time they were ready to leave they all seemed much subdued. Dolgikh didn’t know what they’d found, or failed to find, but in any case he’d been told that it was probably dangerous and warned to steer clear.
Seeing them about to leave, he’d quickly hurried back to his car, waited for them to show up. And in passing, so as to be on the safe side, he’d fitted their vehicle with a magnetic bug. They’d driven back into Kolomyya then, with Dolgikh close behind but keeping just out of sight. He’d almost caught up with them where they stopped, halfway back along the new road, to talk with a party of gypsies in their encampment. But in a few minutes they’d been on their way again, and still they hadn’t seen him.
Kolomyya was a railhead and meeting point for four tracks, from Khust, Ivano-Frankovsk, Chernovtsy and Gorodenka; every other building seemed to be a warehouse or storage depot. It wasn’t hard to find one’s way about; the industrial and commercial sides of the town were distinctly separate. The four men Dolgikh
followed had driven to the town’s main telephone exchange, parked outside and gone in.
Dolgikh parked his Fiat, stopped a passerby and asked about public call boxes. ‘Three!’ the man told him, obviously disgusted. ‘Only three public telephones in a town as big as this! And all of them constantly in use. So if you’re in a hurry you’d best make your call here, at the exchange. They’ll put you through quick as a flash.’
In about ten minutes Krakovitch and his party had left the exchange, got into their car and driven off. Their tracker had been torn two ways: to follow them, or find out who they’d contacted and why. Since their car was bugged and he could always find them later, he’d decided on the latter course. Inside the small but busy exchange he’d wasted no time but asked for the manager. His KGB ID had guaranteed immediate co-operation. It turned out that Krakovitch had called Moscow — but not a number Dolgikh was familiar with. It seemed that the head of EBranch had required higher authorisation for something or other; there had been some talk of blasting, and the big man in overalls had been very much involved. Krakovitch had allowed him also to use the phone. That was as much as anyone at the exchange knew of the matter. Dolgikh had then asked to be put through to Gerenko at the Château Bronnitsy, to whom he’d passed on all that he had learned.
At first Gerenko had seemed confused, but then:
‘They’re working directly through Brezhnev’s contact!’ he’d snapped. ‘Not through me. Which can only mean that they suspect! Theo, make sure you get them all. Yes, including that construction foreman. And when it’s done let me know at once.’
Tracking the bug he’d planted, Dolgikh had arrived at the depot of a local civil engineering firm in the town just in time to see Gulharov and Volkonsky loading a box of explosives into the boot of their car while Krakovitch and Quint looked on. Obviously the big Russian foreman was now a member of their team. Equally obvious, their contact in Moscow had cleared the use of materials for blasting. While Dolgikh still did not know what they intended to destroy, he did have an idea where it was. And what was more, that was as good a place as any for them to die.