Invaders

by Brian Lumley

  “Hell’s just about right,” Lardis grunted, creaking to his feet. He laid a hand on Jake’s shoulder. “But son, take my word for it: Ben’s not trying to drive you mad, and neither am I. It could be we say these things hoping you’ll recognize something, hoping you’ll perhaps remember.”

  There was something in Lardis’s gruff old voice that caused Jake finally to look at him. “But remember what?” he said.

  And it was as if they stared deep into each other’s souls. So that for a moment—just for a moment—it seemed that they had known each other, oh, for quite some time. Then Lardis nodded, and as though he had read Jake’s mind said: “Other times, maybe? Other places?”

  “Times and places?” Though Jake tried hard to understand, still it was beyond him. “Make sense, can’t you?” There was no anger now, just a need to know.

  “A time on Starside, perhaps,” Lardis said, still staring hard at Jake, “when a man and his changeling son laid waste to the aeries of the Wamphyri? Or a time when the same man lay in the arms of a wonderful woman, whose name was Nana Kiklu. Or a time when we met—met for the last time, that man and I—in the ruins of The Dweller’s garden, when it was already far too late for him … .”

  Lardis’s words conjured pictures that came and went. They meant something—Jake knew that much at least—but they were monochrome things; they flickered like the frames of some ancient silent movie … jerky scenes and twitching puppet figures. And despite that Jake thought he recognized some of them, still it was as if he saw them through someone else’s eyes:

  He looked down on a plain of boulders, lit silver-grey beneath a tumbling moon, where distant spires climbed to a sky of ice-chip stars. And that alien sky was alive with flying beasts whose weird shapes … ! God, those shapes! Designs not of Nature but of Nightmare!

  As quickly as it had come the scene was gone, disappeared, and another took its place.

  A garden—The garden?—where a younger Lardis stood by a wall and gazed upon a scene of desolation. A windmill’s crumpled vanes slumped all lopsided atop a skeletal, tottering timber tower; some of the roofs of low stone dwellings had fallen in; the trout pools were green with algae, and the greenhouses were tangles of shattered frames, leaning or fallen flat, with clumps of bolted vegetation sprouting through their torn plastic sheeting.

  The pictures continued to flicker and blur, and the oddly young Lardis turned jerkily to stare at Jake … or at the one gazing back at him through Jake’s eyes.

  But in this not-so-Old Lidesci’s eyes there was fear, and in his hands a shotgun that came swinging, frame by flickering frame—click, clickety-click—in Jake’s direction. And the look in Lardis’s eyes was no longer fear, or not entirely, but fear combined with deadly intent!

  Abruptly, the scene changed:

  To the straining face of a handsome woman. Handsome, yes, but by no means beautiful—yet beautiful, too, in her way. Her body was beautiful, certainly. And hands (Jake’s hands?) on her breasts where they lolled in his face. And her breath like fire in his (or some other’s?) flared nostrils, and the sweat of her passion as slippery and hot on his hands as the wet core of her womanhood where it sheathed his jerking flesh.

  Nana?

  “Nana!” Jake exclaimed, as the scene slipped from memory—but his memory? —and he found himself seated by the campfire, his hands before his face, perhaps to fondle (who? What was her name?) the handsome woman’s breasts, or perhaps to ward off Lardis Lidesci’s shotgun. Well, there was the old man, sure enough, but now more surely the “Old” Lidesci as Jake knew him; and he had no shotgun but a strange satisfied look on his face.

  “And it’s Nana, is it?” Lardis said, with a knowing nod, as Jake’s mind swam back into focus and he slowly lowered his trembling hands. “Took you back a ways, didn’t I, my young friend?”

  “What … what did you do to me?” Jake whispered, the words sighing out of him.

  “I have an ancestor’s seer’s blood in me,” Lardis answered. “It smells things out. And I think that it has smelled you out, too, Jake Cutter. For just as this art of my forebears has been passed down to me, so something has been passed to you. It’s in you, man! Not in your blood, as it was in Nestor’s and Nathan’s blood, but buried in your mind and your soul for sure!” And now the look on the Gypsy’s face was one of awe as much as anything else.

  “It’s in me, yes,” Jake agreed, knowing it was so. And then coming very close to desperation, “But what is it, Lardis? What is it?”

  The other shook his head. “No, no. Ben wouldn’t want me to say any more. Indeed, He’d nag that I’ve already said too much! It will have to take its own good time, that’s all. But what’s in will out, of that you can be sure. And now, goodnight to you, Jake Cutter.” With which he backed off, and like the wild thing he was faded into the night … .

  Maybe Jake had been too tired to dream, or perhaps he had managed to fight it off this time. Whichever, he had slept deeply, soundly, and dreamlessly, and remembered coming awake only once, when he’d thought to hear a vehicle’s engine starting up. Then he’d eased his cramped body off the chair, zipped himself into a sleeping bag, and curled up right at the edge of the fire’s cooling embers—

  —And now came starting awake as the toe of a boot nudged him and Trask’s voice rasped, “Jake, get up. Have you seen anything of Miller? Obviously not. Well, the fat bastard’s run out on us, and in your bloody vehicle! Damn, I thought for a moment you’d gone with him!”

  Throwing back the mosquito net from his face, Jake unzipped the bag and struggled out of it. Now he remembered the engine starting up, dipped headlamps swinging faint beams out onto the road, and the cautious crunch of tires on dirt and pebbles. He had thought at the time that someone was being very careful not to awaken the camp … and he’d been only too right!

  “My vehicle?” he mumbled, but Trask had already moved on.

  The entire camp was coming awake, and overhead the shrill, pulsing whistle of a jet-copter cutting its thrusters; the whup whup whup of its vanes lowering it down from a sky in which the stars were only just beginning to fade. And the first faint nimbus of dawn silhouetting the treetops and shining on rising, writhing wisps of mist.

  “Hell’s teeth!” Lardis Lidesci groaned where he came stumbling from the direction of the big articulated ops vehicle. As he came, his trembling right hand gingerly explored a blackened patch of bloodied, matted hair on the left side of his head. It looked ugly, and was made to look worse by a flow of blood that had run down and congealed around his ear. “Damn the bloody man to hell!” he said.

  Meeting him halfway, Trask grunted: “Miller?”

  “Wouldn’t you just know it?” Lardis nodded, then groaned and held his head again. “I bedded down under the steps at the back of ops. And I heard something in the dead of night, something breaking. But these damned short nights of yours … my system’s all out of kilter with them … I’m used to sleeping, not these forty winks that you people take!”

  “You didn’t wake up till too late,” Trask grunted.

  “I’m not a damned watchdog!” Lardis snapped.

  Trask shook his head. “I’m not blaming you, Lardis. Hell, I didn’t think the crazy bastard had enough guts to make a run for it! So if it’s anyone’s fault it’s mine. I should have posted a guard on him.”

  Ian Goodly came loping, looking more than a little angry with himself. “The camp’s awake,” he said, sourly.

  Trask looked at him and growled, “You too? It seems we’re each and every one of us blaming himself.”

  “But I’m the precog,” Goodly chewed on his top lip.

  “Right,” Trask agreed, “but one man can’t foresee it all. And let’s face it, if you could anticipate everything that was coming …”

  “ … Then I would probably have killed myself a long time ago, yes,” Goodly nodded. “But damn it, I did see this one!”

  “You what?” Jake was wide awake now. “So why didn’t you do something?”
<
br />   “I saw it in my sleep,” the precog answered. “Saw it as a dream. Huh! When is a dream not a dream? When it’s a glimpse of the future! But even if I’d known what it was, how would I have woken myself up? When you’re asleep you’re asleep. And the future guards its secrets well.”

  “And I thought I was the only one who was having problems with his dreams!” Jake said. At which Trask looked at him very curiously … but only for a moment. There was too much to do.

  “Okay,” Trask said, “let’s forget it. I’m to blame, Lardis is to blame, Ian is to blame, and so is Jake—”

  “Me?” Jake raised an eyebrow.

  “For leaving the keys in your Rover,” Trask nodded. “Anyway, no one is really to blame. The problem is we’ve grown too used to dealing with the weird, the abnormal, the monstrous. I mean, if it’s mundane we tend to let it slide. And you couldn’t ask for anything more mundane than Mr. bloody Miller!”

  “I beg to differ,” said Goodly.

  “Eh?” Trask looked at him.

  “Can I put you fully in the picture now?” the precog said. And when Trask nodded: “Miller’s a strange one,” Goodly continued. “When finally I woke up I was worried about my dream. So I went to see if everything was okay. I missed Lardis where Miller must have pushed him back out of sight behind the trailer’s steps, but I found the duty officer. He’s going to be okay, but he, too, had been bashed on the head. He was lying in the corridor outside Miller’s bunk with the door on top of him. They’re pretty flimsy, those doors. The hinges had been worked loose.

  “I wasn’t sure how long the D.O.’d lain there, so I checked that he was okay then went to see if the ops room was safe. The place was working as normal … incoming, that is. Several messages, waiting for answers, and situation reports coiling up on the floor. There was some Cosmic Secret stuff that the D.O. must have been processing when Miller attracted his attention. Quite a bit of it had been decoded. Then I remembered how you’d asked for background information on Miller. That was there, too, coming out of the printer even as I got there. But there was stuff that should have been there and wasn’t … like a lot of Cosmic Secret stuff from HQ? The printouts had been ripped through and some of the serials were missing. We’ll need to get them duplicated, find out what was on them.

  “Anyway, I grabbed the stuff on Miller, then began to wake people up. Now they’re all awake, though I don’t see what they can do to help. Oh yes, and here’s all the background information on Miller … .” He thrust some sheets of printout at Trask.

  But before Trask could even begin reading, Goodly went on. “Miller isn’t as mundane as you think, Ben. But he is an obsessive nut, and the black sheep of the family. His uncle was big in Western Australian politics, got him work as a minor official in a job where he didn’t have a lot to do but could indulge his thirst for power—in however small a way. Why else do you suppose he’s the guardian of a million square miles of nothing? To keep him out of the way, that’s why. Good grief, and we had to get lumbered with him! Come to think of it, it’s likely that that, too, came about as a result of his uncle’s influence.

  “Okay, his obsessions. Anything! I mean it: this fellow can get hooked on literally anything! An obsessive personality, it’s as simple—or not as simple—as that. But guess what? Back in the late 1970s, early ’80s, he saw Close Encounters and E.T.—well, who didn’t? But this is Peter Miller we’re talking about. He joined a wacky UFO group, of which he’s still a member, and wrote two ‘Friendly Aliens Are Here’ books that didn’t get published. Need I say more? No way you could have convinced this bloke that we were in the right last night, Ben. No way at all.”

  “I see,” said Trask. And, after he had given it a moment’s thought, “Do we have any idea how long he’s been gone?”

  “Judging by the D.O.’s signatures in the message log, maybe three, three and a half hours,” Goodly answered.

  Trask nodded. “Then he could be anywhere by now. Two hundred and more miles away, for all we know! So no good our trying to chase him. Very well, here are the priorities. I want Lardis and the D.O. taken care of as best possible. And I want a man—you, Ian—in the ops chair sending out wanted notices to all the police authorities in a two hundred miles radius … better make it three hundred miles … or better still, all of Western Australia!” But on second thought: “No wait, send out just one, to the Internal Security people in Perth. He’s their man, after all, so let them go after him. Oh, and check that they have his profile, too, which ought to scotch any ‘wild stories’ that Miller may be circulating. And finally, I want to know what was on those missing printouts.”

  Trask paused, shrugged, and eventually continued. “Anyway, there’s one good thing come out of all this: I won’t be wasting half a day handing Miller over to the I.S. people in Perth. And as for right now … I’m hungry.” He headed for the trench with the back-burner, which someone had fired up. “I’m going to have breakfast.”

  By which time an agent was tending to Lardis, and all over the camp sleepy-looking people were on the move. The jet-copter had landed, and Phillips the pilot was leading a tall, grizzled stranger—strange to Jake, anyway—through the grey predawn light between the trees into the camp’s clearing. Trask spotted them as they came striding through thinning ground mist; waving to attract their attention, he diverted his steps in their direction. Jake followed on behind him.

  “Grahame.” Trask smiled a greeting. “If it’s no the laird himself. It’s been quite a few years now.” But while Jake might wonder at Trask’s assumed accent, the stranger’s seemed perfectly in keeping and went well with the swing of his kilt:

  “Aye, that it has,” he rumbled through the full grey beard that gave him his grizzled aspect, grinning to display a bar of strong, square teeth. “What, twelve years? How goes it with you, Benjamin? You and yere bleddy gadgets!”

  They shook hands … but in the next moment the stranger’s searching eyes, those oh so dark eyes of his, transferred their gaze to Jake. “And this’ll be the subject, is it no?”

  “It is,” Trask nodded. “As for the gadgets—like the one that flew you here in a matter of hours—well, they’re improving all the time, if that in itself can be considered an improvement. But to be truthful, which I always am, I find it harder and harder to keep up. Future shock or something. Anyway, it’s not that side of the equation that concerns us, not this time.”

  “Then if it’s no the gadgets, it must be the ghosts,” said the other, still staring at Jake.

  And Trask nodded. “One ghost, anyway,” he said.

  PART TWO

  THE WHY OF IT

  9

  REGRESSION

  As they seated themselves at a folding table, to a breakfast of black coffee in plastic mugs, and bacon and eggs on paper plates, Trask made belated introductions. “Jake Cutter, mah guid friend here is Grahame McGilchrist, Laird o’ Kinlochry … .” But then he ahemmed his embarrassment, and went on, “Who, despite my atrociously false and corny accent, is the genuine article.”

  Shaking hands with the big Scotsman across the table, Jake said, “A Scottish laird, living on the other side of the world? There has to be something of a story in that.”

  “No much o’ a one,” the other rumbled. “It’s simply a matter o’ choice. See, the McGilchrist estate went broke all o’ a hundred years ago. Oh, ah had mah crumblin’ old castle, but in truth Ah wiz a figurehead in the local community, and that wiz a’. But Ah still had mah pride. So, when a cousin o’ mine pegged it out here in Oz and left me his wee place in Carnarvon, Ah came out and took over. That was some nine years ago.”

  “That ‘wee place’ Grahame’s talking about,” Trask cut in, “is two and a half thousand acres of well watered farmland east of Carnarvon. If he wanted to sell up he could go back home and be a proper laird again.”

  “But Ah willnae do it,” McGilchrist said. “Ah have lads tae tend mah land and animals, while Ah have mah own interests.”

  “He has a
practice in Carnarvon,” Trask explained. “His own special slant on psychiatry.”

  “Aye, and there ye have the other reason why Ah made mahsel scarce frae they so-called ‘British’ Isles.” McGilchrist cocked his head, frowned at Trask, and winked at Jake. “Tae escape frae these bleddy E-Branch types!”

  “He worked for us awhile,” Trask said.

  But Jake had been quick to latch onto something else. “Psychiatry?” he said, suspiciously. “And I’m the subject?”

  Liz Merrick appeared out of nowhere, looking great in black slacks, cowboy boots, and a frilly white blouse. Seating herself beside Jake, she said, “And a suitable subject at that!”

  “Thanks,” Jake told her sourly, while he waited for Trask’s or McGilchrist’s explanation. And:

  “Hypnotic regression,” Trask said without further preamble. “That’s Grahame’s speciality. It’s not a ‘talent’ as recognized by E-Branch—that is, it isn’t some strange parapsychological ability, though the way it works for Grahame it might well be—but it does come in useful in cases like yours.”

  “Cases like mine?” Again Jake waited.

  “Where the subject has subconsciously deleted some part of his memory,” Trask said. “Or something else has blocked it—”

  “—Or he has simply forgotten it,” McGilchrist finished it for him. “Ye’re no a nut case, if that’s what’s bothering ye.”

  “You don’t know him yet,” said Liz, and Jake scowled.

  McGilchrist grinned at Liz across the table and said, “Will one o’ ye kind gentleman no introduce me tae this beautiful wee thing? Oh, Ah ken Ah’m a mite late—a mite too old, maybe?—but still Ah’d like tae be in wi’ a chance!”

  “Too late?” Liz blushed at his words. But McGilchrist simply looked at Jake, smiled, and went on eating … .

  Jake had been studying the Scotsman, and despite his apprehension he discovered that he liked him. McGilchrist seemed as open as a book. The hypnotist was tall, yes, but with his huge chest and massive girth looked almost stocky. Jake could well picture him tossing a caber, and for that matter he could probably toss big men around as well. Except, Jake reckoned, that wouldn’t be in his nature. He was the salt of Scottish soil, the hard flint of wooded mountains, however far removed; but there was a kindness—an understanding of nature, human nature, especially—in those dark eyes of his, however deeply they might probe.