Invaders

by Brian Lumley

  “They were thirty-two in number, half of them being soldiers who took up positions on the flanks as the rest formed into an unruly, excited, and chattering body. Then they marched for the great pass. Two of the soldiers rode noisy, wheeled engines that cut the darkness with beams of cold white light; they went ahead to pick a route through the many boulders that litter the area. Keeping still and silent in the shadows, we let them pass right through the various groups of our divided party.

  “Then it was that Malinari apprised us, These men are not like Nathan. They are like infants, with little or no knowledge of what they are about! Those on the outside—the soldiers—they have weapons. When we strike, we take them out first. Kill them with dispatch. They barely outnumber us and shouldn’t be a problem; this time the advantage of surprise is on our side. As for the central body: these are the minds behind the muscle … puny things by my reckoning, and not a mentalist among them. So be it; they are weaklings and we must take them alive for questioning. Now make ready—in the next few seconds your destiny may change beyond all recognition!

  “Which of course it did.

  “I cannot describe what next took place as ‘a battle,’ nor even a rout, for none of our victims had time to flee. Surprise was indeed on our side, and add to this our flowing, lightning-strike speed, and our vampire strength, equal in each of us to that of four or five strong men … the result was overwhelming. Hell-landers they were, but they had never seen hell such as we delivered that night.

  “There was some gunfire, soon silenced. We lost a lieutenant and three thralls. The Hell-landers lost everything—their so-called ‘fighting men,’ anyway. As for the two on their ‘motorcycles’: they returned to see what was the trouble and, having seen it, didn’t stop but headed out onto the barren boulder plains. We picked them off later.

  “The freshly dead were carried back to fuel our vats, the living were taken for questioning by Malinari. I can’t honestly say which group was least fortunate, the living or the dead … the living, I suspect. In the long run it would make no difference; the one group would join the other.

  “What my master learned, however—ah, but that made a big difference! Sufficient to excite Malinari and his Wamphyri colleagues beyond measure. And for me, it was the beginning of the end … .”

  Korath had fallen silent for a while. When next he spoke it was similar to a sigh in Jake Cutter’s sleeping mind, and deadspeak in the metaphysical Harry Keogh’s:

  The rest you know. In a while, when Malinari had extracted and assimilated all he could of knowledge from the minds of the ‘scientists’ and their military leader, it was time to take our leave of Starside.

  Before doing so, The Mind, Vavara, and Szwart made a great many lieutenants; they took them down into undeath, and brought them up again as burgeoning Wamphyri! And they divided between them all the remaining thralls, flyers and waxing warriors, and all territorial holdings, provisions, and so forth. It was done for spite, out of malice; if the three Great Vampires could not have SunsidelStarside for their own, then neither could Nathan and the Lidescis, nor the Szgany as a people—not without they fight for it for long and long, and pay for it in blood. And so you may be sure that even now there are new Lords in Starside, while in Sunside the blood flows as of yore … .

  Finally Korath was done, and Harry said, From all you have told us, your lot was not a happy one. And your end was unfair, to say the least.

  I am glad you finally agree! said the dead vampire. But:

  —From what you have told us, at least, said Harry. But I am more concerned with what you haven’t told us, which is probably more important than all the rest put together. The Wamphyri have been here in our world for some time, but it would seem they’ve achieved very little. What are they up to, Korath? What is their plan? You were one of theirs, and so you must know.

  Ahhhh! said the other slyly, in a tone that suggested the shake of an incorporeal head. And so to the crux of the matter. But no, what you ask is for me to know and for you to discover, or to guess at for a long, long time, until it is too late. For after all, it is my only remaining bargaining point—the last trick up a poor dead thing’s sleeve. And when you have that, I shall have nothing at all.

  “Bargaining point?” said Jake, just a little surprised by his own voice, after keeping so long silent. “But you’re a dead thing! What can you possibly bargain for—what can we give you—apart from a little companionship, a little cold comfort?”

  Well, that might be a start … .

  But the ex-Necroscope intervened and said: You have already had that, companionship and cold comfort, and probably too much of both. It isn’t a healthy thing to spend too much time in the company of vampires. No, there’s no bargain you can strike here, Koratb Mindsthrall. Also, I sense that your will is strong. You are dead, but your tenacity is very much alive! Jake, it’s time we were leaving.

  “I thought you’d never get to it,” Jake answered.

  I only hope you remember some of this, said Harry.

  “I’m still not a hundred percent sure I want to,” Jake vacillated.

  Well, get sure! said Harry, his fading deadspeak voice frustrated and angry. Your entire world depends upon it. And if you can’t remember anything else, do try to remember this:

  An incredible wall of numbers—tike a computer screen run riot—evolved in the eye of Jake’s mind, its symbols and equations marching and mutating until they reached a certain critical point … and formed a door. A Möbius door! And Jake knew without knowing how that all that remained of Harry was passing through it, moving on to another place, perhaps another time.

  “I … I’m supposed to remember that?” he said, as the door collapsed and left him on his own in the dank and gurgling sump of the once-Refuge. On his own, but not quite alone. For:

  Do not concern yourself, Jake Cutter, Korath Mindsthrall’s leering deadspeak voice came to him out of the sudden inky darkness that enveloped him and the sump and everything, a darkness that was prelude to the light of the waking world. No, for I am sure that we’ll be able to work something out—

  —Er, between us?

  Jake made no reply, or if he did it was left behind as he went spiralling up and up to the waiting light … .

  24

  SYNCHRONICITY

  Liz was leaning over him again. “Remember what?” she said.

  “Eh?” Jake blinked sleep out of his eyes, groped to brush grit from their corners.

  “You were rambling on about having to remember something,” she told him. And while he was ordering his thoughts to frame a reply, she quickly went on: “And before you ask—no, I wasn’t snooping on you. I came back here to give you a shake; you were mumbling, and I thought you were speaking to me.”

  Well, he hadn’t been, but he had been speaking to someone. Harry? Korath? But who the hell was Korath? The name, so familiar one minute, was already meaningless, slipping from the edge of his mind. So that now, just a moment later, Jake wasn’t sure it meant anything at all.

  Well, get sure! … get sure … get sure (Like an echo, fading in his memory.) And numbers—a swirl of numbers, equations, symbols, like a mathematician’s nightmare—all collapsing to a big Zero, nothing, where before they had meant something.

  “Numbers!” Jake croaked, forcing the word out of his dehydrated throat. Liz handed him a can of Coke that she was drinking from, and he sat up and swilled his mouth out, then let the fizzing liquid burn and cool and sting all the way down.

  “Numbers?” Liz repeated him. “What about them?”

  Awake now, he frowned at her. “Are you sure you weren’t in there with me?” Then seeing the look on her face: “Okay, okay! Just checking.” He took another swig, climbed unsteadily to his feet. “I think I was dreaming about—hell, I don’t know—all sorts of stuff.” He looked at his boots, then stooped to touch the bottoms of his jeans and wondered why he thought they might be wet. “I can’t remember. A damp place? Voices? Numbers?”

 
But Liz only shrugged. “You tell me,” she said, and turned away so that he wouldn’t see the look she flashed at the others up front. And over her shoulder she told him, “We’re on our way down. Brisbane next stop.”

  Ben Trask, Lardis, Goodly, and the others were looking at Jake where he worked the stiffness from his joints and followed Liz to her gunner’s chair. As she strapped herself in, he indicated the gun ports and asked, “Is it okay to open one of these up? And which side is Brisbane?”

  One of the technicians answered him. “Sure—you can open the doors. But you better hook yourself up first. Brisbane’s to port.” There were safety straps dangling from the ceiling. Jake pulled one down, hooked it to his belt, jerked on the port-side door’s handle, and slid the door open. Air blasted in, the downdraft from the big fan, and immediately the whup, whup, whup of the rotors was a deafening throb.

  Liz hooked up, joined him at the door. “Have you been here before?” she inquired, but her words were whipped away. It made no difference; he “heard” her anyway. And answered:

  No, I haven’t. And you’re getting good at that.

  She only looked at him and said, But I’m not a natural—not at sending, not yet anyway—so maybe you’re the one who’s getting good at it.

  No. He shook his head to give his thoughts emphasis. It’s all you, Liz. It’s your talent, getting stronger all the time. And maybe some kind of rapport we seem to be developing. Which was the closest he had yet come to admitting any kind of serious involvement.

  Their eyes met, locked just for a moment, and each of them knew that the same thought was in the other’s mind: that out of the blue Jake was accepting telepathy that much more easily—as if he’d been getting some practice. And they both knew where he had been getting it. It was as he’d explained to Lardis: sleep, the subconscious mind, was a strange thing. And dreams could be stranger yet. Sometimes they could even be more than dreams.

  Then they looked down on a small airfield six hundred feet directly below them, and, two or three miles to the east, central Brisbane.

  Brisbane was big and sprawling, but it didn’t lack order. On the contrary, if anything it was too symmetrical, ultramodern. Its streets were too broad, with too many parks, pools, green areas. It should have looked as cool and fresh as an oasis, which in all this heat, when even the downdraft of the rotors felt as hot as hell, would have seemed very welcoming. But the river, instead of being a fat, winding, silver eel, was more a thin, snakelike whiplash. Most of the pools were empty down to their liners, and all of the green places had yellow tints.

  Jake frowned and might have commented, but the horizon was rapidly rising. As they watched, Brisbane came up level and finally disappeared behind the airport buildings. And just a moment or two later they bumped down.

  When the rotors went into braking mode, their whine became unbearable. Grimacing, Jake slammed the door to shut it out … .

  The small airport—more an airstrip, really—belonged to a private flying club for well-to-do members of Brisbane society. The chopper’s pilot had been directed to it by air traffic control, who in turn had taken their orders from higher authority. It might look odd if a paramilitary jet-copter were to land at a main international airport … especially carrying the E-Branch contingent, whose members were by now beginning to look something less than reputable.

  Trask had radioed ahead before decamping on the other side of the continent; discreet arrangements had been made while the chopper was still in the air; met by a pair of clean-cut, immaculately-uniformed “chauffeurs,” the drivers of limos with one-way-glass windows, Trask and his people were soon on their way into the city.

  As they left the airport heading for a main arterial road, they passed a small parking lot. Sitting on the hood of a battered, blue-grey, range-roverstyled vehicle, a tall, angular male figure in jeans, open-necked shirt, and broad-brimmed hat gazed intently into the sky over the airport through a pair of binoculars. With his hat shading his face, his features were blankly anonymous under the brilliance of the mid-afternoon sunlight.

  There seemed nothing special about him—except to Liz. She’d seen how, at the last minute, before the car threw up a screen of dust in their wake, the man had turned his binoculars on the two vehicles. Now, with a frown, she tapped Trask on the shoulder where he sat in front of her.

  “That man back there,” she said, hurriedly. They were negotiating a bend and the parking lot was already disappearing in the driver’s rearview. Trask turned his head, looked back where Liz was indicating; he saw nothing but a dust plume and a distant shimmer of heat haze.

  “A man?” he said. “What about him?”

  The intercom was on, and the chauffeur—a special agent—asked, “Something suspicious, miss? A man, did you say? Back there? What was he doing?”

  “Sitting on a car,” Liz answered. “He was watching the sky through binoculars.”

  “A plane-spotter?” Through the plate-glass screen that divided them, they saw the driver shrug. “A wannabe fly-boy member of the club. Huh! Some hope. Flying is for rich folks.”

  But Liz leaned forward and quietly, right in Trask’s ear, said, “The last thing I saw, he was looking at us.”

  They were turning onto the main road and picking up speed. “Let it go,” Trask told her. “It may have been nothing, and in any case it’s too late now. If we’ve been made we’ve been made. But if we’ve been made, then obviously someone was sent to make us—sent by someone. Now all we have to do is find out who and where.”

  Liz nodded, said: “And … he was wondering about us.”

  “That’s all you got?”

  “Yes.”

  Trask shrugged, but not negligently. “Maybe he was simply curious. But by the same token maybe this wasn’t as discreet as it might have been. Two chauffeur-driven limos, doing reception at a small, private airport? I mean, turn the situation around and I might be curious myself. Do you think you’d recognize him again?”

  “Probably,” she answered. “There was something unpleasant, spidery about him.”

  “Well, if you do see him let me know,” said Trask. “Once is coincidence. Twice … this spider might need stepping on.” And the cars sped for the near-distant city … .

  Back at the parking lot, the long thin man got into his car and called a number on his portaphone. A disinterested female voice said, “Xanadu; reception.”

  “I want to speak to Milan,” the thin man told her.

  There was a pause and she said, “Your identification?” Now she was a little more animated.

  “Mind your business,” the thin man replied, with the emphasis on “mind,” but with nothing of rebuke or unpleasantness in his voice. It was simply a code.

  “Just a moment, sir,” said the girl. And the phone played some indifferent Muzak.

  While he waited, the thin man coughed to clear his throat, mopped sweat from his brow, got his thoughts in order. His employer—Mr. Milan, to whom he was about to make report—had a liking for ordered minds; he much preferred to hear and understand things clearly and precisely the first time around. And in a little while:

  “Milan speaking,” a deep, accented, seemingly cultured yet vaguely threatening male voice replaced the Muzak. “What do you want?”

  And the thin man told his employer what he had seen of the jet-copter, gave him brief descriptions of the people he’d seen getting into limos outside the flying club’s main building, and closed by saying: “They drove off towards Brisbane.”

  There was a brief pause before the other queried: “And you didn’t follow them?”

  “It was the chauffeurs,” the thin man answered. “They were too good to be true. No one looks as neat, tidy, and as cool as they looked—not in this weather—without they’re trying real hard. They looked like government men. And if they were, they’d be on me like flies on shit as soon as they spotted me in their rearviews.”

  “I see,” said the foreign, Mediterranean-sounding voice of Mr. Milan. And in a m
oment: “Would you know these people again?”

  “Sure.”

  “Good. I think this may be what I’ve been waiting for. You can call your other observers off, Mr. Santeson. Let them report to you in Xanadu. From now on I think you will find your duties more to your liking up here at the resort. Just be sure to come and see me as soon as you get in.”

  “I’m on it,” the thin man said. And under his breath, when the phone went dead: “What are you—some kind of mind-reader? But anyway, you’re right—that’s just exactly what I wanted to hear after a day spent sweltering in all this heat, sweating my balls off, watching, waiting, and trying not to look suspicious. Shitty work, in weather like this. But up there at the Pleasure Dome …”

  … Up at the Pleasure Dome, he thought, putting the car in first and turning out of the parking lot, life is sheer luxury! The pools, the broads in their bikinis, the good food and drink—even the casino, huh!—where I can spend my money almost as fast, or faster, than Mr. fucking Milan pays me! And he grinned.

  But on the other hand, no one could call Milan mean. Garth Santeson, a private investigator for twenty years and then some, had never had it so good. What? Milan, mean? No way! Shady, definitely—how else would you describe a guy who only ever comes out at night? But never mean—hell, no! The way Aristotle Milan throws money around, it’s like … like tomorrow there’ll be no use for it!

  Never knowing just how close he had come to the truth, and in more respects than one, Santeson headed his battered vehicle for the ring-road south around Brisbane. Then he would look for the signpost for the town of Beaudesert, which would put him on a heading for the Macpherson Range right on the border with New South Wales. Eighty miles of good road, and he’d be up into the mountains, yes.

  And finally, Xanadu …

  On the way into town, Jake said, “Now I remember!”