The Touch

by Brian Lumley

  Of course I remember, my Shania, her Khiff at once replied. Mordri thoughts lay heavily on the air, so that we feared to be discovered. And now? Would you go there again?

  If my localizer has retained sufficient power, yes. Shania held the device to her forehead, and in a moment:

  Three or four very short multiple-person trips remain possible before the localizer is spent, the Khiff at once reported.

  Shania’s face at once fell. Only three or four more trips? Are you sure? Is that all?

  At which Scott came in, “Now hold!” And looking completely baffled, frowning his confusion: “Shania, what’s going on here? I mean, for quite some time now you’ve been more than a little worried, concerned that your localizer is going to burn itself out—which has caused me to worry, too. Yet now you seem to be saying there’s still a handful of trips left in it? I mean, can we or can’t we trust the thing? Also, why is it I’ve been kept in the dark as to just exactly what the score is?”

  “Ah . . .” Her face fell farther yet. “Perhaps in my efforts to spare the localizer, perhaps in the interests of economy—”

  “—You’ve been a bit too economical with the facts of the matter?” Scott finished it for her, stood back from her, stared hard, and waited for her answer.

  “But if I had let you believe that the localizer was inexhaustible,” Shania began to protest, “you might have tempted me to use it more adventurously or recklessly, and in so doing put yourself in more danger! Also . . .” She paused.

  “Yes, also?”

  “Please remember that when all of the trips are used up—and when my localizer is utterly depleted—then my Khiff will also be . . . used up. Scott, I could never let it go that far. I have been trying—had to try—to keep something in reserve.”

  And remembering all that she had told him about her Khiff, about their lifelong relationship, he sighed, relaxed, and said, “Of course you’ve tried. I’m sorry I was so insensitive.”

  My Shania, time is wasting, said the Khiff. And in order to understand what is happening you still need to see the village from your lofty vantage point of old. Wherefore you should now note these coordinates . . .

  As Shania’s Khiff gave coordinates, Scott took Wolf under one arm. Then Shania wrapped her arms around his neck, her slim fingers moving deftly on her wrist device, and:

  There came darkness, and almost immediately a lesser gloom in which—

  —They stood in the faint light of the stars on a scree-littered hillside under Schloss Zonigen.

  “Look!” said Shania, her head tilted up at a sharp angle. Scott followed her rapt gaze, his eyes narrowing at the frenzy of coruscating lights—like so many Christmas tree illuminations blazing on and off but in no particular sequence—in the high walls of the cavern-riddled crag.

  “The Mordris are monstrously busy,” said Shania, a slight tremor in her voice. “They use—they misuse—their powers to threaten and chastise those who serve them. They feel the pressure. Obviously the work has not gone well, or it has gone too slowly and now they feel the need to hasten their workers. But oh, those poor people, their hostages!”

  “How do you know about them?” said Scott, now scanning the village hundreds of feet below.

  “What?” she said, looking at him. “But can’t you feel the horror seeping out of that place? I know you could if you would open your mind to it.”

  I feel it, said Wolf, trembling however slightly where he leaned against Scott’s legs. That is a very bad place. Then, as his gaze joined Scott’s on the village down below: And there go the hunters in their vehicles! Oh, I know their minds well, for I am a wolf of the wild who was once hunted. So if anyone knows them, I do. They are horrid killers!

  “Your minds must do as you see fit,” Scott told them. “Me, I’ve no time right now for horror, though I’m sure it’s coming. Instead I’m concentrating on what I can see: those three cars, for instance. Yes, Wolf, you’re right. First they were clearly in convoy; now they’re splitting up, moving apart as they come to a halt in the narrow side streets around that building with the small square in front. And now, see—they’ve dimmed their headlights.”

  Hunters, yes! said Wolf again. But they don’t hunt rabbits or chickens—they hunt men!

  “That place is . . . is a small Gasthaus,” said Shania, with her eyes closed and a hand to her forehead. “That is where your E-Branch people are trapped under siege.” And opening her eyes, glancing to one side: “Look there: another vehicle, bigger, and with yet more people—”

  More hunters! Wolf cut in.

  “—descending from Schloss Zonigen.”

  “We have to join up with E-Branch,” said Scott. “They knew about me, tried to help me. Now we have to help them.”

  “Yes of course.” Shania nodded. “We must.”

  Scott’s eyes narrowed as he trained them on the coach that negotiated the hairpins down from the high crag. Its motion had slowed to a creep where it approached a sharp bend with a sheer cliff face on one side and a drop of some five hundred feet on the other. And to Wolf: “Hunters? You’re sure?”

  They have weapons, that one growled in Scott’s mind. Their thoughts are full of blood. These are truly bad men!

  “Take us to that bend!” said Scott, hoisting Wolf with one hand and grabbing Shania with the other. “Can you do that?”

  “If I can see it,” she answered, her fingers on the localizer, “I can do it.”

  She did it, and they were there!

  The driver saw them in his headlights as he came around the bend: a man, a woman, and a dog, just standing there in the road. No, not just standing there. The dog was crouched, eyes aflame, snarling—and the ones he was with were aiming weapons!

  Squeezing her eyes tight shut and firing blindly, Shania jerked on both of her shotgun’s triggers. Twin blasts shattered one of the coach’s headlights, and the tire immediately beneath it disintegrated into chunks of rubber. The weapon’s recoil unbalanced Shania, causing her to fall backward on the road. The front of the coach lurched to one side, jolted against the face of the cliff and glanced off, but somehow the driver managed to retain partial control. And fighting the steering wheel, deliberately targeting the three figures on the road, he brought the coach trundling forward again.

  Knowing little or nothing about shotguns, still Scott had learned something from Shania’s mistake. Aiming at the driver’s window and squeezing off one barrel, he saw the man hurled backward in his seat, hands flying to a face mangled with shot and shards of glass. And without pause Scott aimed and fired at the other front tire.

  The coach came on, skidding on the rims of front wheels that threw off showers of white sparks. And as Scott moved to scoop Shania up from the road, with Wolf snarling and skittering this way and that, so the coach hit the safety rail, tore it loose, and tilted over into a void of night air. There were faces at the windows—pale, shrieking, terrified faces, their eyes and their mouths wide open, disbelieving—and then they were gone.

  It seemed a very long time before an explosion like a bomb going off sounded from below, its echoes bouncing from wall to wall of the valley, gradually fading.

  “So much death!” said Shania in Scott’s arms.

  “Yes, but less than a world of death,” he answered as he reloaded the shotguns with shells from his pockets. “And hell, all of those bastards together were less than Kelly!”

  “Yes, I agree.” Shania nodded. “Of course I do. But there are at least three more carloads of them down in the village, surrounding your friends. What do you think? Can we perhaps be of more help to E-Branch on the outside?”

  “I think you’re right,” said Scott. “Do you see that open space surrounded by trees—maybe a park or kids’ playground—just two side streets this side of the Gasthaus? I saw the last of those cars parking on the far side. If you can take us there so that we come up behind them, maybe we can do a lot more serious damage.”

  And no sooner said than done, they were there in th
e playground, creeping forward.

  I smell hunters up ahead! said Wolf.

  “Then go as quietly as you can,” Scott answered him in a whisper, forgetting for a moment that he was able to use Wolf’s own telepathic medium. But in the next moment he remembered and said, Take us to them. Point them out.

  With never a sound, quickly merging with the shadows, Wolf went on ahead . . .

  At that precise moment, in the foyer of the Gasthaus Alpenmann, Ben Trask, Ian Goodly, and David Chung were still emerging from their moments of shocked paralysis and Frank Robinson was lying on his back at the foot of the stairs, scrabbling away from the alien creature who bore inexorably down on him.

  As Guyler Schweitzer came, he cast aside the veritable caricature of the man that had been Norbert Hauser—now a loose-limbed, scarecrow thing with useless tentacle arms, welded lips, and tatters of clothing hanging from what had been a sturdy and entirely human frame. Set free, Hauser flopped in a heap on the stairs, then tumbled like a bundle of rags to the bottom.

  “Sh-sh-shoot that f-fucking thing!” Robinson was shouting, pointing a trembling finger at Mordri Three while digging out a spare magazine with his other hand and trying to fumble it into the housing of his weapon. “Jesus Christ, shoot it!”

  Locator Chung and precog Goodly, closer than Trask to the stairwell, needed no second bidding. Triggering their weapons, they blasted off single shots that would have stopped any ordinary person dead in his tracks, heard the splat! splat! splat! sounds that punctuated each shot, sounds of hot metal impacting on flesh. Schweitzer staggered a little as an uneven pattern of dark holes appeared in the chest and trunk of his white kaftan; he staggered, yes, but scarcely seemed concerned. And with his long arms reaching, he continued to bear down on Robinson.

  The spotter had reloaded, but his weapon had jammed! Somehow struggling to his feet, he threw the SMG at Schweitzer, who simply batted it aside in midair. Then, as Chung’s and Goodly’s magazines emptied and their gunfire stuttered to a halt, so the alien spoke, his voice booming in the ringing, cordite-tainted air:

  “We were curious to see who threatened us,” his words rang out. “For we thought to discern something new and different—a Presence in the psychosphere—and we wondered if perhaps some god had come to the aid of your loathsome, degenerate planet in these its final hours. But no, your gods are false gods, as are all gods, and you are only men, albeit cleverer than the majority. But these talents of yours: they are nothing; neither your talents nor your weapons. Compared to the Shing’t, or perhaps I should say the Mordri Three, you yourselves are nothing! Ignorant god-lovers and ‘true believers,’ your flesh is weak, and so very, very . . . malleable.” Smiling monstrously, he came on.

  Babbling to himself, completely unmanned, Robinson had managed to back off out of Schweitzer’s way. But now the alien was moving faster, his spindly arms reaching for Chung and Goodly.

  “Don’t let him touch you!” Robinson screamed at them. “For God’s sake don’t! He touched Hauser and I saw what happened. We didn’t see him come—maybe I sensed him at the last moment—but he was suddenly there behind us. He took hold of Hauser for just a few seconds, and . . . and . . .”

  “And this!” said Schweitzer, his neck outstretched and his spidery hands descending eagerly toward Chung and Goodly.

  But then Ben Trask was there, shouldering the pair aside, one hand on the grip of Hauser’s flamethrower, the other on its trigger; and the weapon’s pilot light flaring, hissing a chemical threat. “So if bullets don’t impress you,” Trask grated the words out, “how about this?”

  Mordri Three jerked to a halt, his arms seeming to shrink back as if they were elastic, as fire roared from the nozzle of Trask’s terrible weapon. The long flame was blue in its sheath, white in the middle, invisible in its core, which was where its heat was concentrated. Trask spilled liquid fire on Schweitzer, setting his kaftan ablaze and sending the stick-like figure who wore it reeling toward the stairs, his arms thrashing, beating uselessly at the flames. A stench was at once apparent: that of roasting flesh. And Mordri Three was shrieking!

  When Trask took his finger off the trigger, he and the men with him saw a pillar of fire, the last of Schweitzer’s kaftan, blazing to the ceiling, while the creature it had covered continued to shriek and back away like a seared slug. Its flesh on one thin flank was black and visibly shrivelling, and its head jerked to and fro in an agonized frenzy. Finally, with a shriek that was louder and shriller yet, it fumbled its long hands together and in the next moment appeared to implode!

  The flames at once went out, and Trask and his people were left staggering, coughing in the smoke and the stink. And there was no sign of Mordri Three.

  “What the hell . . . ?” said Trask when he could speak. “Where did he go?” Then, turning to Robinson, “Frank, what happened up there?”

  “I . . . I don’t know,” Robinson answered, from where he was backed into a corner of the room. “He, it, that bloody thing—whatever it was—came out of nowhere. It just appeared out of nowhere, behind us in that room! I barely had time to sense its presence before it was standing there. And it was strong! Damn, it knocked that gun out of my hands like it was a toy and I had to scramble for it! But I saw it touch Hauser, and then . . . and then he . . . he started to change!”

  Trask put down the flamethrower on the reception desk, ran at Robinson, and grabbed his lapels. “Frank, listen,” he snarled. “I need you to get a grip on yourself, and now! Okay, so things are happening that we don’t understand, things that are outside our previous experience; but isn’t that what we’re all about? I need you, Frank, so start acting like a fucking man!”

  “Christ! Oh, Christ!” said the other, his face like death where Trask held him upright against the wall. “But you weren’t there . . . you didn’t see!”

  Trask might have struck Robinson then, but from out in the night came new sounds that drew him back to the shattered circular windows. They were dully booming blasts that came from the near-distance, but by no means automatic or semi-automatic gunfire. “What?” said Trask, squinting out into the darkness from one side of his window. “Shotguns? Do I hear shotguns? But how can that be? Four shots in short order, almost simultaneously?”

  “Shotguns, definitely,” said Chung, feeling psychic vibrations and the sudden unnatural warmth of a certain heavy object in his pocket. “Two of them, and double-barrelled. So if these people haven’t started fighting themselves, it has to be Scott St. John and his girlfriend. There’s no longer any doubt in my mind. I know that it’s them—and they’re here!”

  Even as he spoke two more booming explosions sounded, but closer this time. And out in the night there were cries, curses, shocked shouting, and screams of pain. But in the darkest corner of the room Frank Robinson was still babbling to himself:

  “I can feel them, sense them. Two more of them, maybe even three. They’re close and coming closer all the time, and one of them’s a real power! Oh, God, he’s a real power!”

  “Get these lights back on,” Trask snapped. “We have to be able to see what we’re doing.” The precog found the switch and flooded the room with light, and Trask went on, “As for Frank: it seems to me he’s out of it. But on the other hand we should take heed of what he says. He’s hypersensitive to psychics, so if he says they’re coming, then—”

  At which the door to the dining room creaked open!

  Millie Cleary stood there looking out at three armed men, and all of their weapons trained on her! Blinking in the light, she said, “What?” And Trask breathed a sigh of relief.

  “Millie.” He moved toward her. “What are you doing here?”

  “I keep asking myself that same question,” she said, shakily. “I just had a message, that’s all.”

  “You what? A message?” Trask knew she spoke the truth but failed to understand. And frowning he asked, “What do you mean, ‘that’s all’? From whom?”

  “A woman, I think,” said Millie. “But her tel
epathy . . . I never experienced anything like it. It was as if she were standing right beside me! Anyway, she says to hold your fire.”

  “They’re coming!” Robinson screamed from where he crouched in the corner. “Oh, Jesus, they’re coming now!”

  Even as he spoke the three sets of chandelier lights went berserk, almost strobing as they flashed on and off, while the chandeliers themselves danced on their cables and fixings!

  Then in a sudden rush of displaced air, three more beings were in the foyer—and Chung, Millie, and Scott St. John were shouting in unison, “Hold your fire! Hold your fire!”

  In the silence that followed the locator David Chung shook his head dazedly and murmured, “Good God, but just a moment ago I could have sworn that it . . . I mean it felt just like . . . like it was Harry Keogh himself coming in!” Then, as his almond eyes opened wider: “No, it’s him, Scott St. John. He feels just like Harry!”

  And Trask, knowing Chung spoke the truth or what he saw as the truth, stepped forward and asked Scott outright, “Is it so? I mean, impossible or no—in whatever shape, form, or reincarnation—are you the Necroscope, Harry Keogh?”

  Scott shook his head and crouched down to let Wolf off his shoulders. “Not a bit of it,” he said. “I’m just me.”

  But then his companion stuck out a grimy hand to Trask and said, “Well actually, it’s possible that he’s just a little bit more than him. Myself, I’m Shania, and I’m very pleased to meet you . . .”

  39

  Almost without thinking, Ben Trask took Shania’s hand, released it just as quickly, then stared hard at her and her companions: Shania and Scott St. John . . . and Wolf of course. But where the latter looked fairly pristine—a handsome animal, and far more wolf than dog—the two human figures were anything but. Clad in black track suits (Shania had thought well ahead), carrying sawn-off, double-barrelled shotguns and wearing determined expressions on faces smeared with greasy soot from the fireplace in Scott’s living room, there could be no doubt but that these were soldiers on a mission. And it was Ben Trask’s instinct as much as his talent that told him they were his allies.