by Brian Lumley
But how periodic? Frequently, infrequently, or what? And what to do or to look for when he went there? What, should he fondle the rounded bellies of Drakesh’s enforced whores? Compliment them on their successful couplings with that creature? But no, nothing about these things, just that he should visit. Hah!
Oh, Chang Lun knew the problem well enough: lack of self-discipline and organization in a largely civilian, self-managing, covert and “experimental” branch of the military. It was that this … this so-called “Colonel,” Tsi-Hong, in Chungking—this dreary, dreaming metaphysician—did not himself know what to do with or about Drakesh and his alleged sect. But on the other hand, it might also mean that Tsi-Hong didn’t trust him, or was himself suspicious. In which case Chang Lun might read his orders very differently. Such as:
“Spy on the walled city. See what you can find out about it. But whatever you do, do it carefully, for we’ve spent time and money here and we don’t wish to alienate this foreign charlatan in case he really does have something we can use.” Chang Lun would know exactly how to interpret such orders as these. Much as he was interpreting them now.
He and his driver had come out from Xigaze a little after 10:00 P.M. The weather forecast had been good; bitterly cold, of course, but clear with little or no wind, and no snow forecast. Chang Lun’s official visits (he had been obliged to devise his own roster) took place once every six weeks. This was not one of those.
The driver he used was his usual man, a Corporal, whose name didn’t matter. But he knew every crevasse and boulder en route, and that was important. Over terrain as rugged as this, and at night, it would be only too easy to make a fatal mistake. Some of the cracks in the earth around here seemed to go down forever! But the snow-cat had given them no trouble, and they had got here safely a few minutes after midnight.
“Here” was a spot in the lee of outcropping rocks on the south-facing slope of a hillside to the west of the old walled city. As an observation point, the place was ideal. A climb of two hundred feet from where they’d secured and camouflaged the cat, and snug behind a wall of rocks they’d built during previous visits, Chang Lun and his driver could even brew up army-rations tea on a disposable stove, slice canned meat or cheese onto bread, and make a meal of sorts. And from here a man with a good pair of nitesites could keep watch not only on the ancient city, its gates and wall, but even the leering facade of the Drakesh Monastery three miles away across the valley.
The one drawback was the awesome cold. Even the best winter warfare clothing couldn’t keep it out. It would find a way into your bones, and chew on them like a bad cramp. The strong tea helped, but not much. So that time and again Chang Lun had told himself to hell with this! This would be the last time he came out here, no matter his hatred for the unnatural, perverted bastard who ran the monastery.
Hatred: a strong word, and one that Chang Lun didn’t use lightly. But he had hated Daham Drakesh from the first time he saw him and all the time since. And being Tsi-Hong’s messenger, as it were, he’d had more than enough contact with the man. But to call him a man … well, as far as Chang Lun was concerned, even that was a matter for conjecture. And he remembered Drakesh as he had seen him on some four or five (but still far too many) previous occasions.
The physical appearance—the very presence of Drakesh—had never failed to impress Chang Lun, but never favourably. It wasn’t just his height (six and a half feet, as compared to the Major’s sixty-eight inches), but an over-all sense of something alien about him, complemented by grotesque distortions of human shape and proportion. Thin to the point of emaciation, he nevertheless managed to convey the impression that his pipestem body contained an awesome strength. His hands and feet were freakishly long and tapering, their sharply pointed digits tipped with thick yellow nails hooked into claws. His shaven skull was thin at the front and lantern jawed, long at the back and bulbous as the head of an insect on his scrawny neck.
But his eyes … ah, his eyes! They were the worst or perhaps strangest of Drakesh’s features. In daylight—what little ever filtered through into the monastery—they looked glassy, even transparent, as if all natural colour had been leeched out of them. But in the dark or semi-dark of the monastery’s corridors and caverns, they were as luminous and yellow as molten sulphur. Their gaze was literally penetrating; turned upon a man, they seemed to stare right through him, as if their target were more ephemeral than Drakesh himself. And when they smiled …
… Chang Lun shuddered where he leaned on the low wall of piled stones and gazed through his night-vision binoculars. He was cold outside from the sub-zero temperature, but colder in his soul from letting himself dwell too long on Daham Drakesh. Even the simple mechanical act of focusing his glasses on the monastery’s leering-face façade, to bring it closer, seemed in a way to draw Drakesh closer, too. And Chang Lun knew this sensation—this feeling of dread—that in keeping watch on Drakesh he had given the man power to keep watch on him. Almost as if his binoculars worked in both directions, so that while he looked out, some unseen Other looked in …
“That yak,” said Chang Lun’s driver, causing the Major to start. “He’s noisy all of a sudden.” The Corporal’s binoculars were trained on the city.
Chang Lun thought to reprimand the man (mainly because he had been caused to start, not because his driver had forgotten the usual courtesies, the privileges of rank) but let it pass. And in any case, it was too cold for all that customary bowing and scraping. Back in the barracks they were Major and non-commissioned officer—“Sir,” and, “You! Get your arse over here!”—but out here they were just two men in the cold waste.
“The cold,” Chang Lun replied. “Tethered out there in the place of bones, full in the face of the wind blowing round the base of the township’s wall, you would cry out, too!”
“Why have they put him there?” The Corporal wondered out loud. “Simply to die in the cold?”
The Major shrugged, kept his glasses focused on the monastery. Was that some kind of motion on the roof of the place? White smoke or steam going up? And was that a twig-like figure up there, obscured in a swirl of—well, whatever it was? For all the cold, still Chang Lun’s skin crawled. Absentmindedly, he answered his driver’s question:
“Maybe the animal was diseased, infectious. They’ve separated it from the herd, that’s all. Obviously it’s what they do with all suspect beasts: tether them in the boneyard to die.”
“Well, it’s true there has been some disease in the local animals,” the Corporal agreed, “but I was one of the drivers on several of the details when those animals were driven out here. They all seemed healthy enough to me—not that I’m an expert. But they were the best for many miles around. They always are. Only the best for the Drakesh townsip …”
“Sir!” the Major snapped, suddenly irritated. “Call me ‘sir’ when you speak to me.”
“Yes, sir!”
But what he had said was true, and it had been an inordinately large number of animals at that. All for the fifty women in the ancient city? Well, possibly, since half of them were pregnant and well on their way to spawning. When Chang Lun thought of Drakesh siring children—especially out of criminals such as those women he’d been given—“spawning” was the only word that came readily to mind.
As for “the boneyard,” the name that the Major’s driver had given that place outside the city wall, when they’d first discovered it on a previous visit, it was simply that: a pile of bones littered around a tethering post. There had been one occasion when some of the women were out gathering the grisly remains, to grind them down for fertilizer, Chang Lun suspected. The thin soil of their farm could use the sustenance.
“But he—I mean the yak—is very noisy now.” the Corporal uneasily, unnecessarily stated. For Chang Lun could hear it well enough for himself: the neighing bleat of an animal in distress. “He’s kicking, jumping, trying to free himself!”
Silently cursing his gloved hands, Chang Lun focused his own binoculars
just a fraction more—not on the city but the monastery—and suddenly his view of the domed roof, the carved skull, sprang up in much clearer definition. And there was a figure up there, yes, antlike at this distance but very definitely there. But doing what? The stick-figure’s arms seemed raised in … supplication? Or invocation? Then Chang Lun felt his mouth go dry at the thought that he knew that figure, that he had recognized the skeletal frame of Drakesh himself.
And as for the cloud of “smoke” (not smoke at all, as the Major now saw, but something else, something a lot more solid): its spiral around the distant figure on the roof of the monastery was rising, widening, behaving far more sentiently, as its members headed in a certain direction—straight for the ancient city, its walls, possibly this very vantage point!
The yak’s nerve-rending shrieks had now risen to an almost human pitch. And the Corporal gasped, “That creature must soon strangle itself! See how it leaps, kicks, hauls on its tether. Surely you were right, sir. The thing is mad or diseased—or something is tormenting it, driving it out of its mind!”
But Chang Lun only thought: Or the yak knows, senses, is somehow aware, of something that we can’t possibly understand. Or maybe the Major did understand. And trying to hold his binoculars more firmly in suddenly trembling hands, he followed the line of flight of the weirdly purposeful cloud; not heading his way at all, or only roughly so. But very definitely heading for the boneyard.
“Kill the stove,” he husked at once, as he felt the short hairs stiffening at the back of his neck.
“Eh?” The Corporal didn’t move; fascinated by the frantic activity of the yak, he couldn’t look away.
“I said kill the fucking stove!” the Major elbowed him in the ribs. “Put the fire out. And do it quietly—do everything very quietly!” His last few words were a hiss, as he fixed his line of sight on the leading flyers. And without knowing why—or not exactly why—Chang Lun found himself terrified. Not of the flyers so much as the fact of them, that they were here at all, and the fact that Daham Drakesh had … what, called them up? Up from the depths of his blasphemous monastery.
Flyers, yes: great bats! The way they swooped and flitted, they could only be. But white bats, albinos, and by the Major’s lights far larger than any bat has a right to be. With or without binoculars, these things were just too damn big! Chang Lun knew something about zoology, was fairly sure that these monsters were way out of place here. They were like the giant Desmodus bats of middle and South America, and …
… And Desmodus was a bloodsucker, wasn’t he? A damned vampire, yes!
Meanwhile, the Corporal had killed the stove’s chemical fire. A final wisp of smoke—real smoke—went up, which he dispersed by flapping his arms. Then he returned to his place at the wall of stones, took up his glasses, and quickly focused them on the tethered yak. But in a hoarse, uneven whisper Chang Lun warned him: “It seems to me you’re a sensitive man. That being so, don’t watch.” “Don’t watch, sir?” What could the Major mean?
Chang Lun himself didn’t know just what he meant. But he had this idea in his head and it wouldn’t go away. He would do anything if it would, but it wouldn’t.
And now the Corporal was training his binoculars in the other direction, to see if he could spot whatever it was that Chang Lun was concerned about. The Major felt him give a jerk as he too saw the bats. “What the devil … ?”
And Chang Lun nodded and answered. “The devil, indeed!”
Both men shrank down, huddling low behind their wall of stones, staring a moment at each other, wide-eyed and fearful. And as their eyes went back to the yak, each felt his own private pang of relief to note that the poor animal had given up the ghost; or if it wasn’t dead, that it had collapsed in exhaustion. And as the stream of great albinos flew overhead not too far away, for a moment they heard the leathery flutter of membrane wings.
While in the ancient city …
… Lights were coming on. Dim lanterns were being lit in windows in the walls and towers, and pale faces were flitting as eerily as the bats themselves from window to window. Drakesh’s women had come to … to what?
“They’re watching!” The Corporal whispered, as if in answer to the Major’s unspoken question. “Those women are going to watch!” He was omitting his “sirs” again, but his superior officer no longer cared. Chang Lun knew that no less than himself, his driver had guessed what was about to happen. Anywhere else, it would be … unthinkable to even think such things, but not in this place. Here in this place—which both men had come to loathe—it seemed the only thing to think.
And those women: they way they ghosted about the city smiling their sick smiles. But what could they have to smile about in a place like this? Oh, they were under their master’s spell, no doubt about it. But what sort of spell? Criminals, convicts they might well be, but what could have happened to them—to their spirit, their humanity—that they could watch something like this?
The column of great bats spiralled down, plummeted out of the night sky to their unprotesting target, fell as forcefully as stones and clamped like leeches to the head, neck, body and limbs of the yak where it lay shuddering on its bony deathbed. They clustered to it, turned the grey mass of it white … and then red!
Red in a moment! From the blood that escaped their ravenous mouths, or spurted from arteries bitten through!
“Sir!” the Corporal choked, turning his glasses away.
“Didn’t I tell you so?” Chang Lun growled. “That bastard in his bloody nightmarish ‘monastery,’ he breeds things. Even as he’s breeding things now, in those hellish women. I suspect he even bred these bats! And for no good purpose, you can stake your life on it.” With which it suddenly dawned on him that in being here they may already have staked their lives on it.
But no, that hideous travesty of a man on the roof of the monastery didn’t know they were here, didn’t know what they had seen. Viciously, the Major swung his glasses back to their original angle and quickly realigned them on the dome of the carved skull. The stick-figure was still there, and Chang Lun supposed he’d be looking in this direction. And:
You can’t see me, Chang Lun thought to himself, but I can see you. And I promise you this, Daham Drakesh: that if the day ever dawns when I can bring you down, then I’ll do it. And with pleasure!
Then … the air was suddenly electric! In the next moment Chang Lun remembered that earlier feeling: that weird sensation of some Other peering back at him through his own glasses. Utterly impossible, of course, and yet—
It was as if the figure on the dome of the monastery grew large in a split-second, as if Drakesh expanded in Chang Lun’s binoculars—and in his mind—to a giant! They stood face to face, and Drakesh’s eyes were blood red, fuelled in their pupils by the molten-sulphur fires of hell.
Aha! said a voice in the Major’s mind, and there could be no denying that he recognized it immediately and knew its owner. And so you spy on me. A mistake, Chang Lun, for I too have my spies, my watchdogs; but greedy dogs, such as they are, and ever hungry. Eh? What? You think I am threatening you? Ah, no! For my dogs are obedient and would never harm you—not without my permission. Indeed I shall have them see you home, back to Xigaze. And when you report the result of this, your latest mission, to Tsi-Hong in Chungking, be sure to give him my best regards … With which Drakesh’s sinister, sibilant telepathic “voice” rapidly devolved to a peal of fading laughter, and was gone. Likewise the spindly red-robed figure on the dome of the carved skull.
“Sir … sir!”
Chang Lun snapped out of it, and knew his driver had been yelling in his ear for several long seconds. He closed his gaping mouth, blinked his eyes and said, “Eh? What?”
“Sir, a wind is coming up, blowing stronger now. It might bring a little snow. And those bats are on the move.”
The Major scarcely needed his binoculars to know that the Corporal was right. He could feel the wind and see the albinos rising up in a spiral from their feast. Also, the dim
lanterns in the windows of the ancient city had been smothered, put out, so that now the place resembled nothing so much as some vast, sprawling necropolis; in which instinctive or automatic analogy Chang Lun was very nearly correct, except a necropolis is a city of the truly dead.
“Quickly now,” the Major husked. “It’s time we were gone from here.”
The Corporal needed no urging; he was on his feet, making to collect up the stove and any other evidence of their having been here. But: “Leave it be,” Chang Lun told him. “It doesn’t make any difference. They’ll know we’ve been here anyway.” And the moment he’d said it he knew it was so, that he hadn’t just been dreaming it when he’d heard Drakesh speaking in his mind. What was more, he knew that Drakesh’s “threat”—to have him escorted back to Xigaze—hadn’t been an idle one.
“Those bats,” the Major’s driver muttered. He was directly ahead of Chang Lun where they went sliding and bumping down the frozen slope of the hillside. “They seemed to be heading—”
“—This way,” the Major cut him short. “I know.”
And then they both knew, for certain, as the air overhead thrummed with the whup, whup, whup of leathery wings.
“Oh mother! Dear father!” Fearfully, the Corporal looked skywards, tripped, went tumbling head over heels to the bottom. But by the time Chang Lun was down he was up on his feet again, stripping the camouflaged canopy from the snow-cat.
“Easy! Easy!” Chang Lun told him, with a lot more bravado than he felt, as his driver yanked again and again on the starter. “Don’t flood the fucking thing!”
But soon the cat was ticking over, then purring into life, and the two men were clambering aboard as if the vehicle were a life-raft and their ship was going down behind them.
“The bats! The bats!” The Corporal moaned, and slewed the cat dangerously, tiltingly, as he turned her about.