The Source

by Brian Lumley

  My face, said Kazimir with a sob. But not my eyes, Harry. And dead or alive, no man should be part of this thing.

  And then, while Harry continued to stare at the monstrosity, Kazimir told him all he knew about the Perchorsk Projekt, and of the events leading to his current predicament …

  Fifteen minutes later and a mere fifty yards away:

  Major Chingiz Khuv, KGB, came awake, sat up jerkily in his bed. He was hot, feverish. He’d been dreaming, nightmaring, but the dreams were quickly receding in the face of reality. Reality, as Khuv was well aware, was often far more nightmarish than any dream. Especially here in Perchorsk. But it was as if the unremembered dreams were premonitory; Khuv’s nerves were already jangling to the buzzing of his doorbell. He got up, threw on a dressing-gown and went to the door.

  It was Paul Savinkov, puffing and panting from his exertions, his fat hands fluttering.

  “What is it, Paul?” Khuv brushed sleep from the corners of his eyes.

  “We’re not sure, Major. But … Nik Slepak and I—”

  Khuv came fully awake on the instant. Savinkov and Slepak were both ESP sensitives; they could detect and recognize foreign telepathic sendings, psychic emanations, anything of a paranormal nature. And in the event of ESPionage, they were adept at intercepting and scrambling alien probes.

  “What is it, Paul?” Khuv demanded this time. “Are they spying on us again?”

  Savinkov gulped. “It could be worse than that,” he said. “We think … we think something is here!”

  Khuv’s jaw dropped. “You think something is—?” he grabbed the other’s arm. “Something from the Gate, do you mean?”

  Savinkov shook his head. His fat face was shiny, eyes very bright. “No, not from the Gate. Those things that come through the Gate, they leave a slimy trail in the mind. They’re alien—to this world, I mean. This thing we can sense here, it isn’t that sort of alien. It might even be a man; Nik Slepak thinks so. But it—he, whatever—has no right to be here. Two things we’re sure of: whatever it is, it’s powerful! And it is here.”

  “Where?” Khuv threw back the top half of his dressing-gown, thrust his left arm through the leather loop of a shoulder holster hanging from a peg inside the door. The holster contained Khuv’s KGB issue automatic. Belting his dressing-gown savagely about his waist, he shoved Savinkov ahead of him down the exterior corridor. “Where?” he shouted now. “What, are you deaf as well as queer? Has Slepak also been struck dumb?”

  “We don’t know where, Major,” the fat esper gasped. “We’ve got our locator on it, Leo Grenzel.” As he stuttered his apologies, so Slepak and Grenzel came hurrying round the bend of the corridor. They saw Khuv and Savinkov, hurried to meet them.

  “Well?” said Khuv to Grenzel, a small, sharp-featured East German.

  “Encounter Three,” Grenzel whispered. His eyes were an incredibly deep grey and very large in his small face. Never larger than right now.

  Khuv frowned at him. “The thing in the glass tank? What about it?”

  “That’s where he is,” Grenzel nodded. His face was pale, strangely serene, like the mask of a sleep-walker. His talent affected him that way.

  Khuv turned sharply to Savinkov. “You—hurry, get Vasily Agursky.” Savinkov made off down the corridor. “I said hurry!” Khuv called after him. “Meet us in the room of the creature, and make sure you’re both armed!”

  Harry had listened to Kazimir’s grim tale. He now knew about the fate of the old man’s family, especially Tassi. He knew a little about Chingiz Khuv, too, about his espers and handful of KGB thugs; but he still didn’t know the Projekt’s secret, which lay in the heart of the place. Kazimir had not been privy to that, had no knowledge of it.

  “This … thing,” said Harry. “Do you know what it is?”

  No, only that it’s horrible! Kazimir answered in Harry’s mind.

  “It’s a vampire,” Harry told him. “At least, I think it is. And you don’t know how it got here? Was it perhaps made here?”

  I know nothing about it.

  Harry nodded, chewed his lip. “About your daughter: do you know where she is? Show me a plan of this place in your mind. Or as much as you know of it.”

  Kazimir was glad to co-operate, said: She was in the cell next to mine.

  Again Harry’s nod, and: “Kazimir, you have my word that if I can find her, I’ll take her out of this. More than that, if I can find her mother I’ll reunite them in a safe place.”

  The old man’s mental sigh of relief was almost audible. If you can do that, then it’s enough. Don’t worry about me.

  “But I do. Kazimir, this thing isn’t you. You were dead when it … when you … you were already dead.”

  I feel part of it. I’m being absorbed by it.

  Harry chewed harder on his lip. He’d seen the room’s equipment. He had a plan but wasn’t sure if it would work. “What if I could kill this thing? You can’t die twice, Kazimir.”

  Destroy it and I’ll be free, I’m sure! Renewed hope rang in the old man’s mental voice. But … how can you destroy it?

  Harry knew how: the stake, the sword and the fire. If this creature had a vampire in it, then these things would kill it. So … why not skip the first two steps and go straight to the third?

  Outside, ringing faintly, running footsteps sounded. And somewhere an alarm bell had started to gong its raucous warning through the bowels of the subterranean complex.

  “They know I’m here,” Harry said. “This has to be quick.”

  He wheeled Agursky’s shock-box over to the tank. It was an electrical transformer on wheels, with a flexible heavy-duty cable to a wall socket. It had a pair of clamps on coiled extension leads, which Harry quickly made fast to terminals on the side of the tank. Watching him, the creature came to life, changing colour and shape as it began to work through several rapid metamorphoses. It knew what the shock-box was, knew what was coming. Or it thought it did.

  Harry didn’t have time to watch its contortions, and in any case he didn’t want to. Feeling slightly sick he turned on the current—and the thing at once went beserk!

  Harry wasted no time but turned the current up all the way. The clamps spluttered and issued blue sparks, smoke and a heavy ozone reek. The room’s lights flickered momentarily, then steadied and brightened again. High voltage current flowed through electrical cables in the glass walls of the tank, and the creature took the full charge. It became a writhing puppet of a man, small, with one tiny arm and hand and one huge one. It balled a massive fist, a fist almost as big as Harry’s head, and slammed it again and again at the glass wall of its prison—the wall of its incinerator.

  The thing was melting, mewling and melting. Steam poured off it as its liquids boiled. Its corrugated skin blistered, cracked open, blackened. Gusts of vile vapour escaped in jets from its rupturing pores. It screamed and screamed with old Kazimir’s face, through his mouth, but its voice wasn’t human. Then the glass shattered and its great black steaming fist came through—at which the thing curled up on itself and gave up the ghost.

  It collapsed, half-in, half-out of the shattered tank, became still. Then—

  The blackened, smoking flesh of its head split open like an overripe pomegranate. A cobra’s head writhed in the mush of boiling, steaming brains! The vampire! And it too died even as Harry watched.

  Free! said Kazimir. Free!!!

  Behind Harry the room’s great door sighed open. He conjured a door of his own and stepped through it …

  Chapter Seventeen

  Intruder

  KHUV, AGURSKY AND THE OTHERS REELED AS THEY ENTERED the room of the thing. In the swirl and reek of the dead, frying creature in the tank, they failed to see that man-shaped space where the smoke rushed in to fill a sudden gap. Harry had made his exit just in time.

  Agursky recovered first, leaped across the room and switched off the power. “Who has done this?” he demanded of no one in particular. “Who is responsible?” He clapped a hand to his bro
w, staggered toward the sputtering, smoking tank, where even now shards of glass were beginning to melt in the intense heat. Then, as the smoke began to clear, he saw the creature’s blackened remains hanging out through the shattered glass wall; saw, too, something else—something which he didn’t want anyone else to see. He ripped off his smock, quickly threw it over the monstrous remains.

  Khuv had meanwhile turned to Leo Grenzel, the locator. “You said he was here, an intruder. Well, someone has certainly been here—though I’m damned if I can see how! The door was locked, and there’s a guard outside. Oh, a half-asleep stupid guard, that’s true, but he’s not a complete idiot! So … just getting in here would be hard enough if not impossible—but as for getting out … ?” Then Khuv grasped Grenzel by the shoulders, stared hard at him. “Leo? Is there something else?”

  Grenzel’s face was pale again; his grey eyes were deep as deep space; he swayed where Khuv held him upright. “Still here,” he finally said. “He’s still here!”

  Khuv stared all about the room, as did the others. Black smoke boiling from the mess under Agursky’s smock, and the crackle of cooked, alien flesh starting to cool; but no sign of any intruder. “Here? Where, here?”

  “The girl,” Grenzel swayed. “The prisoner …”

  “Taschenka Kirescu?”

  “Yes,” Grenzel’s nod.

  Khuv whirled on Savinkov and Slepak. “How can this be?” he asked. But already his mind was working; memories of reports he’d read flashed before his mind’s eye; it was something from before his time, but weren’t the British supposed to have a man who could do this sort of thing? Harry Keogh was said to have been one such, and after him Alec Kyle. Keogh was dead but—but they never had found Kyle’s body after the mess at the Chateau Bronnitsy.

  “How can it be?” Savinkov repeated his KGB master. “It can’t be!” He was definite. But:

  “Oh, it can,” Grenzel’s far-away voice contradicted him. “It is!”

  “Quickly!” Khuv rasped. “The cells. I want to know what the hell is happening here!”

  They ran out of the room, left Grenzel swaying there, his face slack and vacant, but his eyes seeing, seeing. And Agursky, bundling up the dead creature and its dead parasite in his smock, trembling in his eagerness to get it back to his private quarters and away from any threat of inspection by others. For he now knew what had controlled this nameless thing, and he wanted to examine that controller most minutely.

  Indeed, to Vasily Agursky there was nothing more important in the entire world but that he examine the thing’s parasite—whose egg had been deposited and was even now maturing inside Agursky himself!

  Tassi’s nightmare—of the key grating in the lock on her cell door, and of Khuv entering, dark-eyed and evil—had kept her awake. It was that sort of nightmare, the sort you suffer when you’re awake. It was doubtful if she would have slept anyway; she hadn’t since … since the horror Khuv had shown her in the room of the thing. She couldn’t sleep, for the face of her father kept smiling at her from the darkness behind her eyelids whenever she closed her eyes; her father’s face—on the body of a beast.

  She kept her cell light on, and lay warm on her cot but shivering, drained of energy, waiting for Khuv. For her time was up, and she knew he would soon be coming for her. That had been his threat, and Major Chingiz Khuv didn’t make idle threats. If only there was something she could tell him, but she didn’t know anything. Only that she was the most wretched, unhappiest girl in the world.

  When Harry stepped out of the Möbius Continuum, Tassi had just turned on her side, turned her face away from his re-entry point into this universe. A quick glance about the cell told Harry they were alone; he took a single pace to the metal bed, put a hand round Tassi’s face and over her mouth, cautioned her in Russian: “Shhh! Be quiet. Don’t shout or do anything stupid. I’m going to get you out of here.”

  He kept his hand clamped to her face but let her turn her head to look at him. And with his hand still in place, he helped her to sit up. Then: “OK?” he asked.

  Tassi nodded, but she was trembling in every limb. Her eyes looked like saucers above her nose and the bands of Harry’s fingers. He slowly took his hand away, gently urged her to her feet. She looked at the door, then at Harry, said: “Who?—How?—I don’t …”

  “It’s OK,” Harry put a finger to his lips.

  “But how did you get in here? I didn’t hear you come. Was I asleep?” Then her hand flew to her mouth. “Did the Major send you? But I’ve told him: I don’t know anything! Oh, please don’t hurt me!”

  “No one’s going to hurt you, Tassi,” Harry told her. And then he made his mistake: “Your father sent me.” Seeing her expression, he could have bitten his tongue through.

  She shook her head and backed away from him. There were tears in her eyes now. “My father’s dead,” she wept. “He’s dead! He couldn’t have sent you …” And accusingly: “What are you going to do to me?”

  “I’ve told you,” Harry answered, an edge of desperation in his tone, “I’m going to take you out of this place. Do you hear those alarms?”

  She listened, and indeed she could hear the klaxons, sounding from deep down in the heart of the place. “Well,” Harry continued, “I’m what those alarms are all about. They’re looking for me, and pretty soon they’ll be looking in here. So now I’m asking you to trust me.”

  What he was saying was impossible. It was either a trick of Khuv’s or else this man was insane. No one could get out of this place, Tassi was sure. But on the other hand, how had he got in? “Do you have keys?” she asked.

  Harry could see he was making an impression. “Keys?” he grinned, however tightly. “I have an entire door! Lots of doors!”

  He was mad, surely. But he was different from the others here, totally different. “I don’t understand,” she said, still backing away. Her legs struck the edge of her bed and she flopped down on it again.

  Running footsteps sounded, and the tight grin slipped from Harry’s face. “They’re coming,” he said. “Get up.” The sudden authority in his voice had her on her feet again in a moment.

  There was shouting outside, the jangle of keys, Khuv’s voice hoarsely commanding: “Open it! Open it!”

  Harry grabbed Tassi by the waist. “Put your arms round my neck,” he said. “Quickly, girl. No arguments, now!” She did it. She had no reason to trust him, but she had no reason not to. “Close your eyes,” he said. “And keep them closed.” Tightening one arm around her narrow waist, he grunted as he lifted her feet from the floor.

  She heard the cell door grating open, then silence—but such absolute silence.

  “Wha—?” she commenced a question she couldn’t finish, and shrank from the booming of her own voice. Startled, she opened her eyes for a moment—but only for a moment. Then she snapped them tightly shut again.

  “There,” said Harry, and he lowered her feet on a solid floor. “You can open your eyes now.”

  She did, the merest slit … then opened them wide, wider—and sagged against him. Her eyes rolled up and she began to slide down his body.

  Harry caught her up, lifted her, laid her on the Duty Officer’s desk. Behind his newspaper, the D.O. had just this moment realized that he had visitors. Then the girl’s arm and hand flopped into view under his open newspaper and he reared up and back with an inarticulate cry: “G-yahhh!”

  “It’s OK,” said Harry, who was growing accustomed to excusing himself. “It’s only me, and the friend of a friend of mine.”

  “Jesus! Jesus!—oh, sweet Jesus!” the D.O. clutched at his desk for support. Of all people, it was Darcy Clarke. Harry nodded the very briefest of greetings, began to massage the unconscious girl’s hands …

  It had been 1:15 A.M. when Harry arrived at E-Branch HQ, and it was almost an hour later when he left. In between times he passed on some information, told Clarke all he had learned, and in return received a little information from the other. His instructions for the welfare of
Tassi Kirescu were these:

  She was to be given refuge, comforted as best the staff of E-Branch knew how, offered permanent political asylum. A Russian interpreter was to be provided for her, and she should be de-briefed (but with a great deal of care and sensitivity) with regard to the Perchorsk Projekt. For the present she was to keep a low profile: her presence here in the West should be kept secret, and when she was released it must be with a new identity. Lastly, E-Branch was to use such usual and paranormal means as were required to discover the whereabouts in the USSR of her mother. Harry had made Kazimir Kirescu a promise and it was one he intended to keep—eventually.

  As for the information Darcy Clarke had for Harry:

  “It’s Zek Föener,” he had told the Necroscope.

  “Zek? What about her?” The last time Harry had seen Zek was eight years ago. She had been a telepath at the Château Bronnitsy, the USSR’s equivalent of E-Branch HQ, which had made her an enemy, but a reluctant one. Harry could have destroyed her, but he’d sensed a deep-rooted decency in her, a desire to be free of her KGB masters. All she had wanted was to return to Greece. He had suspected she would. But … he had warned her not to come up against him again.

  “She may be part of this,” Clarke had told him.

  “How do you mean? Part of Perchorsk?” Was Zek the one who’d betrayed his presence there? She would have known his mind at once, as soon as he materialized in the place. Of course, there was also Khuv’s detachment of espers; they could have picked him up just as easily. For the moment Harry preferred to believe the latter. At least he hoped so.

  “Part of Perchorsk, yes. A cog in the wheel of the place. We’ve kept an eye on her ever since the Bodescu affair. She was doing time at a forced labour camp; not especially hard stuff, but not pleasant either. Then they sent her to Perchorsk. This was some months ago and we’ve just had news of it. We can only assume she’s working for Soviet E-Branch again. And for the KGB …”