Defilers

by Brian Lumley

  “You’re carrying a lot of weight,” she said. “Stressed out, and no way to relieve the tension.”

  “You’d think that being an empath of a sort,” he answered, “I’d be able to figure that out for myself.”

  “Knowing it is one thing,” she told him. “But admitting it is something else. Once you admit it you can do something about fixing it. There are ways to let off steam, I’m told.”

  He looked at her—really looked at her—and said, “You were never married, were you, Millie?”

  Now it was her turn to sigh. “That’s one of the ways,” she said. And: “No, I never was. But you’ve known me almost as long as I’ve known me, so you know that. And you know why.”

  He nodded and said, “These so-called ‘talents’ of ours, of course. It’s the same for quite a few of us. Ian Goodly because he wouldn’t want to know in advance how things would work out—between himself and a woman, I mean—and he certainly wouldn’t want to know when harm was coming her way and there was nothing he could do to avoid it! The future, as he’s frequently wont to remind us, is a devious place.”

  “And so are other people’s minds,” Millie said. “I’ve been out with men, dated men, and behind the smiles all they’ve been worried about is how much my meal and the wine was costing, and what they’d get back for their investment. I’ve bedded men—oh yes, a few—who were mainly concerned about the size of their own egos.”

  “Only their egos?”

  And Millie shrugged. “That, too,” she said. “It seems that male egos and you-know-whats go hand in hand, er, and no double entendre intended! Oh yes, I know: that if I didn’t know things would be easier. But if I see a certain look in someone’s eyes, or maybe detect a certain tone of voice, then I’ve just got to know what’s going on in there. The temptation is irresistible. Any telepath who tells you different is a liar. We may not want to look, but we just can’t help ourselves.”

  “I know,” Trask told her ruefully. “I have problems of my own, remember?”

  “That thing of yours must be a real killer,” she said. “I mean, everybody has their little secrets. But the one you love really shouldn’t have. So how do you avoid getting hurt when a special someone slips up and tells you a lie, even a white lie, or simply covers up for something he or she promised and forgot to do, or—”

  “Or, or, or,” said Trask. “Precisely. But I’ve learned to differentiate between innocent and deliberate deceit. There are degrees of truth, you know? But yes, I know what you mean. It’s never easy.”

  “And yet you were married, and to a telepath at that.”

  Trask thought about that, and for the first time in a long time found himself able to talk about Zek. “She never lied,” he said. “If she couldn’t tell me the truth she said nothing.”

  “But she could read your mind.”

  Trask nodded. “Funnily enough, she never read anything she thought shouldn’t be in there. That’s what she told me, and I’m the one who would know it if she … if she didn’t mean it.”

  “Neither have I,” Millie said. “Read anything in your mind that shouldn’t be there, I mean.”

  “Am I that innocent?”

  “No, you’re just straight. It’s the other side of your talent, Ben. You give what you expect to get.”

  “Maybe it’s just that I’m careful where telepaths are concerned,” he said.

  “And maybe you shouldn’t be,” Millie answered. “I’m a big girl. I could stand the occasional shock, I think.”

  Then the waiter came …

  Everything was off except room-service fare; if Trask was anyone but Trask, they wouldn’t get served at all. “A little ham, mustard, sliced tomatoes, lettuce, and some fresh white bread,” he told the portly, fussy, pseudo-Italian waiter. “White wine for the lady and a large Wild Turkey for me, on the rocks. But do please remember, Mario: the ice is for cooling it down, not for diluting it.”

  “Of course, sir,” and then they were on their own again.

  “That Swiss bank has a list of these so-called charities,” Trask said. “They know who, or at least where, that money went to. Of course they do because they sent it.”

  “But getting it out of them could take time,” she said.

  “Probably more time than we’ve got.”

  “Even if we told them Manchester’s death was suspicious?”

  “They’d freeze his accounts,” Trask said. “Now that they know he’s dead they’ve probably already done so, but even with the Minister Responsible on the case I can’t see them giving in too easy. Why, they might even see it as their ‘duty’ to inform the charity that it’s under investigation—especially since Mr. Milan is/was Manchester’s ‘bona fide’ partner! And knowing that Jimmy Harvey has been into their files, they may even have done that already, too … or first thing in the morning, when their computer starts telling tales on us.”

  “And that’s my fault,” she said, looking downcast. “Fools rush in, and like that. So maybe you should speak to the Minister Responsible tonight?”

  “That’s not a should but a must,” Trask said. “I’ll do it when we’ve eaten. Maybe he can pull some strings, do something we haven’t thought of.”

  “It makes me wish I were a bank robber!” she said.

  “Well, you’ve made a very good start to your new career!” Trask told her without a trace of humour. “Damn it all, but if we had Jake Cutter up and running we wouldn’t need to break in. He could simply … well, go there, take Jimmy Harvey with him, be in and out like a couple of ghosts, and to hell with all the Bürger Finanz Gruppe’s gadgets!”

  She looked at him. “So that stuff I’ve been hearing about Jake—the stuff you left out of your initial report—is for real? He really did do his thing out there in Australia?”

  “If he hadn’t,” Trask answered, “you’d be talking to yourself right now. And incidentally, since I hadn’t planned on making it general knowledge until he had it down pat, until it was routine, where did you ‘hear’ about it anyway?” He already knew the answer to that one.

  Millie nodded. “I am what I am,” she said, and fell silent while their meal was delivered …

  But while they ate:

  “Something else you mentioned during your pep talk,” Millie said. “That you were pretty sure Malinari had fled from Australia. I accept that because you say so—also because we know his ‘charity’ isn’t in Australia—but what made you so sure?”

  “We saw Malinari in Xanadu,” Trask told her, “Manchester’s casino resort in the mountains. But ‘saw’ is probably the wrong word for it: rather, we glimpsed him as he passed overhead. But you can’t know what it’s like, Millie, until you’ve seen it for yourself. A man shape, yes, but only roughly. A bat, an aerial manta, a pterosaur—any of those things, or all of them. It’s a fearful concept in its own right: that the Wamphyri have such power over their flesh. They’re metamorphs, shape-changers. And we’re just men and women, merely human …

  “Anyway, he ‘spoke’ to us. To me mainly, but since I’m not a telepath he really drove his message home, had to in order to get it through my thick skull. He spoke of us meeting again, in a different place, a different country. Myself, I only felt the threat, but Liz Merrick got a deal more. Malinari was there and he was gone—it was over in a flash—but Liz received various impressions. He would go to one of his former colleagues, Vavara or Szwart, and lair with her or him while starting afresh.”

  “You said ‘various’ impressions,” Millie said. “Like what, for instance? What else, I mean?”

  “Opposites,” Trask answered. “Like light and dark: a burst of sunlight on the one hand, and midnight in a mineshaft on the other.”

  “In other words like Vavara and Szwart themselves,” Millie said, and nodded. “Vavara the gleaming jewel, albeit evil, and Szwart the heart of darkness, the Lord of Night.”

  “Maybe,” Trask shrugged. “But it was fast, as I told you, and Liz is still thinking it through, trying t
o remember exactly what she saw in that monster’s mind before he shut her out.”

  “Hmmm!” said Millie, and: “I think perhaps I’m jealous. In all these years you never sent me—or took me—on any field assignments! So maybe this kid-sister status of mine isn’t getting me very far.”

  No, but it is keeping you safe, Trask thought—and hoped she wasn’t listening …

  They had finished eating, were almost ready to leave, when Lardis Lidesci joined them at their table.

  “Been looking for you,” he grunted at Trask, and sat down. “They said you wanted to see me.”

  “If you’d been a little earlier you could have eaten with us,” Trask told him. And then, remembering that he was supposed to be angry: “And anyway, where the hell have you been? No, let me guess … you’ve been out with Jake Cutter, right?”

  “Jake’s not bad company,” Lardis answered, momentarily surprised by Trask’s tone. But then he recovered and snapped, “And he doesn’t shout at me! What’s more, it seems to me he’s as out of place here as I am! So what else can I tell you?”

  Lardis was Szgany: a Sunsider, a Traveller, a Gypsy. These terms all meant much the same thing, but he was a Gypsy from an alien parallel dimension, the vampire world of Sunside/Starside—homeworld of the Wamphyri!

  He was shortish, maybe five foot six or seven, barrel-bodied, and almost apelike in the length of his powerful arms. His lank black hair, beginning to grey, framed a leathery, weather-beaten face with a flattened nose that sat uncomfortably over a mouth that was missing too many teeth. As for the ones that remained: they were uneven and as stained as old ivory. But under shaggy eyebrows his dark-brown eyes glittered his mind’s agility, denying the encroaching infirmities of his body.

  Seeming to jingle when he walked—clearly a Gypsy, even in jeans, a modern shirt, and Western boots, and perhaps especially in the latter—still there was something about the Old Lidesci that commanded respect. Rightly so, for Lardis had been a leader of his people for a very long time; he would be again, when things were put right in Sunside. If things were put right in Sunside …

  “Huh!” Trask grunted. “First Millie, and now you. It seems I’ve been shouting all day long!”

  Lardis shrugged and said, “Don’t apol—er, apolo—er …”

  “Apologize,” said Millie.

  “That’s right!” said Lardis, who still wasn’t too comfortable with the language. “It’s inact-, er, inactivity—that’s all. I feel it, too. But my being here isn’t anyone’s fault, so I’ve no right to be shouting either. Indeed, I should be grateful, if only for Lissa’s sake. Huh!—but she frets, too! About what might or mightn’t be happening in Sunside.”

  “But it’s almost ten at night,” Trask said. “And I’ve been wanting to talk to you all day.”

  “You should have let me know!” said the other. “You can’t expect me to just wander round looking for something useful to do. I saw my name on one of your pieces of paper on the notice board; at least I’ve learned to read that much! I thought someone was sure to tell me if it was important. 1 wasn’t about to show my ignorance by asking. No one mentioned it, so I figured it didn’t matter. As for where we’ve been: we were in the park, the British Museum, the cinema!”

  “The cinema?” Trask shook his head in disbelief. “Watching a movie with Jake?” And angrily: “Then he should have told you—except he probably doesn’t go much on reading orders either!”

  “With Lissa and with Jake Cutter, aye,” Lardis nodded his grizzly head. “Lissa and I, we’ve been here three of your years, Ben Trask, one hundred and fifty Sunside sunups, and never been to a cinema! Anyway, I enjoyed it. A classic, Jake says, that’s doing the rounds again, whatever that means. Anyway, it’s about a ship that sinks and drowns a lot of people. The story’s true, but some of the people were imag-, er, imag-?”

  “Imaginary?” Trask helped him out.

  “Aye, that’s it. The imaginary hero dies in the cold after saving his beloved. Now I ask you, what kind of a story is that, where after all his troubles the hero sinks into the cold, cold water? Huh! It made my Lissa cry!”

  “Titanic,” said Trask, wearily now.

  “That’s it!” said Lardis. And after a moment: “So, why did you want to see me? And what is it that’s annoying you so?”

  An innocent, Trask thought. No, a barbarian. A larger than life roughneck illegal immigrant from a parallel dimension. And yet an innocent, too. For no blame attaches to Lardis Lidesci.

  While out loud:

  “I had a meeting, a talk with everyone this afternoon,” he answered. “Everyone except you, that is. Timings were posted. I had hoped you would be there, so that I could speak to you when I’d finished with the others. We haven’t had time to talk about that Greek job I sent you on. And you’re quite right—I should have ensured that you were told, or told you personally. But in any case I’m sure that if you had found anything suspicious you would have reported it by now.”

  “The Greek thing you sent me on?” Lardis said. “I think it was what you would call, er, routine? Anyway, wasn’t it you who called me off it? You sent for me, brought me out to Australia. And I’m glad you did. I wouldn’t have missed the action for the world—for anyone’s world, that is! Hah! But Greece? Too damn hot for my liking. And those Travelling folk weren’t much to my liking either.” He frowned, and his bushy eyebrows tangled over his nose.

  “It’s time I heard all about it,” Trask told him. “But not here. Mario is getting ready to shut up shop, so we’ll go up to my office. I can offer you a glass of brandy to settle you down for the night. What do you say?”

  “I say it’s a deal,” said Lardis, smacking his lips. “That stuff of yours has a lot more kick than anything we ever brewed on Sunside, that’s for sure!”

  When they stood up, neither man noticed that Millie Cleary was looking just a little disappointed. Her plans for the night—or at least her hopes—had just flown out the window.

  But there was always tomorrow …

  Lardis sprawled in a chair in Trask’s office. Nursing his brandy in its bowl, he stretched his stumpy legs, sighed his pleasure, and said, “It’s good stuff. I can’t taste the little green plums, but there’s something in there that bites!”

  “Not plums,” Trask shook his head. “Grapes … I think.”

  “You don’t know?”

  “There are plenty of things I don’t know,” Trask answered. “Your world’s a lot simpler than mine. That is, there’s a great deal less to know.” Which in a way was true, and in others not. “Anyway, tell me about that Greek job.”

  The “Greek job” was something he had sent Lardis on mainly to give him something to do. The Old Lidesci had not been exaggerating about the inactivity ; he was seriously missing the ebb and flow of life—and the ever-present threat of death, or undeath—on Sunside/Starside. Lardis knew that even with Nathan fighting the war there, still it must be a terrible war for Sunside’s Szgany. For Necroscope that Nathan Kiklu was—messenger of the dead and master of the metaphysical Möbius Continuum—still one man couldn’t be everywhere at once. The Wamphyri were raiding on Sunside again as of old, and Lardis felt guilty that he wasn’t there to lead his people in the fighting, not even in an advisory capacity.

  But Nathan had offered to bring him and Lissa to safety in Ben Trask’s world, and Lissa would hear no argument against it. “Old man,” she’d told Lardis, “this fighting is for the young ones. It’s for them to learn the way. For if you do it for them again, now, then who among them will know how to do it when you are gone? Trial and error taught you—and an amount of skill, I’ll grant you, and some luck—but your legs can’t run so fast these days, and your lungs are like bellows with holes in them. So come with me and Nathan now, and no more swearing and stamping your feet, or I’m off to find a younger, more agreeable man in the world beyond the Gate.”

  Her threat had meant nothing; her love meant everything in the world—in two worlds—to Lardis. And he�
��d known that she was right. His fighting days were over and younger men must now shoulder that burden. And who better than the Necroscope Nathan Kiklu, called Keogh in this world? But at least here in Trask’s world Lardis could continue his fight against the Wamphyri, and not only in an advisory capacity. He and his trusty machete had been of indispensable use out in Australia …

  But before Australia, when Trask had sent Lardis out to the Greek mainland, it wasn’t simply a wild-goose chase, a subterfuge to keep him employed. There had been legitimate reasons, too.

  Ever since the covert “invasion” of the Wamphyri, E-Branch had been on the lookout for signs of vampire infestations. Millie Cleary—nicknamed “Current Affairs” by her esper colleagues, and sometimes “the Reference Library,” because she had the ability to log all sorts of mundane, day-to-day minutiae in her extraordinary brain—had been the one to bring a certain item of interest to Trask’s attention.

  Commuting in to the HQ on the tube one morning (one of the few lines still operating after the system’s almost total collapse following the Great Flood of 2007), Millie had chanced to pick up a discarded copy of one of the more sensationalist newspapers. This was scarcely Reuters-quality reporting—it wasn’t the sort of thing that Trask’s sources would bring automatically to his notice—but a page-four headline had caught Millie’s eye:

  Vampires!—Folklore or Fact?

  Also, there had been a picture of a girl with silver coins stuck to her eyelids, being lowered into her grave in a coffin somewhere in Greece …

  But the story had been oddly atypical in this kind of publication; not at all lurid or sensational (certainly not in Millie’s eyes, with her E-Branch background and inside knowledge), but a straightforward steal or direct transcript from an original Greek newspaper report, done without recourse to this dubious rag’s usually hysterical attempts at dramatization.