Defilers

by Brian Lumley

  “Her masters the Francezcis were ageless, my mother said. They were their own fathers … they were even their own grandfathers! Now I ask you, Garzia, what was a child of five or six tender years to make of that? And despite that they had powers, and for all their wealth and servants and great house, Le Manse Madonie, still they were afraid of the sunlight! And so saying, as if to prove or disprove some lunatic theory, she would even drag me into the light!

  “Well, not so mad after all, as it turns out. But fifteen years to go before the sun would begin seething on my flesh …

  “And I must watch myself very carefully, she said, and be ever on my guard to ensure my goodness and worthiness, so that I would make a benevolent man, pure in my thoughts and ‘humane’ in my heart. At least, I thought that she said humane, but she may simply have meant human.

  “And time and time over she warned me not to look too far ahead, but to leave the future well alone. I remember she said that to me—to a mere child who never in all his waking hours looked beyond tomorrow or the day after that—as if somehow I might think to hatch some kind of plan against the future! Not in my waking hours, no. Yet in my dreams … ah, but they were something else!

  “I dreamed of my own business; I saw myself as the head of a demolition and construction company right here in Sicily. But I was too young as yet to even understand my dreams! This thing of mine—my ability to see into the future, in dreams—it has a name; it’s called oneiromancy. My mother mentioned it by name one time, and said, ‘That is where they get their power: from a living monster in a pit in Le Manse Madonie, a Thing that looks afar, even into the future. It, he, the Thing, is oneiromantic, and the Francezcis are of its blood. And you, Luigi … you are of their blood … and when she said things like that to me, my mother would shudder …

  “I dreamed of us, Garzia, you and I, and our coming adventures in America. It was no great surprise to me when my ‘aunt’ died and my babbling uncle was taken into care, and your guardian adopted me and took both of us with him to America to seek a better future. No, for I had already seen what my future was to be. Something of it, anyway. But while my dreams invariably came to pass, I could never say how they would come about.

  “For example: in recurrent nightmares that used to bring me screaming awake, I dreamed of blood! But I never told anyone what was in those dreams; not my ‘aunt’ or her babbling son and most definitely not my mother, no! For even as a child, as yet only slightly precocious, I was somehow aware that if she knew for certain what was in me, and what was making its presence felt even then, it would not have gone well with me. Poor woman, I’m sure that she would have killed me out of hand, in the belief that she was doing me a favour.

  “But while I suspected that I was different, I could never in a hundred years have guessed how different, eh?

  “Dreams of blood, yes. Blood to drown in, like a river in flood. Dreams of myself, awash in blood—red, rich, slippery blood—which covered me head to toe! Obviously I was bleeding to death; I actually felt close to death in those dreams! That was why I would come screaming awake in the dead of night. How was I to know that it wasn’t my blood, Garzia, and that it wasn’t death but life … ?

  “In America, I dreamed of excavating treasures out of the earth of my homeland. But the earth was bloody, as if my sharp and shining spade was biting through the bodies of people! And there I stood under frowning cliffs, in a vast chasm or quarry, ankle-deep in earth and gore, with the shrill voices of all of these buried people shrieking at me, cursing me for disturbing their unquiet graves. But mainly they cursed my forebears, for putting them down there in the first place.

  “And that, too, was prophetic, speaking not alone of what had been but also of what would be. In short, it would come to pass. For if not precisely as I had dreamed it, still the vast treasures that the Francezcis had salted away would be brought up again—by me: Luigi Castellano by name, but a Francezci by birth and by blood! And indeed those great treasures have been and are being brought up even now. If proof should be required, only look about this study …

  “Also in America, where now we were youths, I dreamed of a great war and saw its waves washing over Sicily. And knowing it was time we came home, I convinced you that our place was here. We returned and the war came; it brought with it our so-called allies the Axis troops, and finally the Seventh Army and our American ‘liberators.’

  “As for the rest of the story—our story, from here on—it becomes far easier to relate. Except, Garzia, we’ve still not dealt with ‘the accident,’ as you have always preferred to call it. Perhaps you would like to tell that part?”

  Garzia nodded. “The part I remember best, yes. After two-thirds of a century, many events seem to flow together and get distorted by time. But that event has always remained clear in my mind. It was like this:

  “The war was over, and you had built up your construction company out of our profits from the American occupation forces and from other ventures. Many of our towns and cities had been battered. In Catania, Palermo, Messina, and many other places, ruins sprawled in every direction. Terrible for some, but work for us. Castellano’s Construction Company grew rich from demolition work alone, without that we ever ‘constructed’ a single building!

  “But in Palermo a new don was coming into prominence: Don Pietro Alcamo, son of Carlo! And Don Carlo’s death three years earlier had been your responsibility. Pietro was well aware of that, and despite that we were now accepted by the rest of the Mafia heads—for whom the construction company was supplying a ‘legitimate’ money-laundering outlet, converting the profits of more ‘orthodox’ mob businesses such as extortion, prostitution and the postwar black market into readily available funds—still Pietro vowed to avenge his father’s death.

  “One night in Palermo, after we’d eaten and as we made our way back to the car, he struck, the upstart Pietro and three of his soldiers. They were waiting in ambush in a dark, bombed-out alleyway. But having learned this part of our business in America, we were scarcely strangers to it; and, moreover, the night was always our friend … and more especially yours.

  “You sensed them there, Luigi! What is more, you had seen it coming; your strange dreams had forecast something of how it would go down. We foiled the attack; their knives, pistols, and garottes stood no chance against the sawn-off shotguns that we carried under our American army greatcoats!

  “But in fact this was the first time that we had actually killed with our own hands. Oh, we had been involved in our fair share of gangland wars and murders in America, and we’d ordered punishments or corrections here in Sicily which sometimes went wrong and resulted in death; but we, ourselves … we had kept our hands ‘clean’ until that night. And you had always managed to contain or hold at bay whatever it was in your ancestry, in that ‘tainted’ Francezci blood of yours, that your poor mother had so often tried to warn you about …”

  “Until that night, yessss!” Castellano hissed, for he was no longer able to resist taking the story up again. “But you’ve made it sound so much easier than it was, Garzia. To think that someone or ones who were destined to live as long as you and I, possibly forever, immortal, should have come so close to death! Today … why even the idea of such a threat infuriates me. But of course we didn’t know—

  “—Until that night, when two of Pietro Alcamo’s bullets found their way to you. The one shattered your left knee, while its twin passed right through your neck and very nearly severed an artery. It did puncture the arterial wall, however, so that by the time I got you to the car you had lost a lot of blood.

  “Indeed, I had your blood all over me; I was scarlet from its drench! Yet while I despaired for you, Garzia, I exulted in the knowledge that Pietro Alcamo and his men were lying in that alleyway, all crumpled and bloodied and dead. For when they had fallen I had gone to them, standing over them where they lay on the hard cobbles, letting them see me while yet they were able. And watching them suck air through the froth and bloody bubbles
of their pain, I had reloaded my double-barrelled weapon, fired it, reloaded again, and so blown their fucking heads off!

  “But what a release, what a rush, what a joy! Ah, and what a waste, eh, Garzia? For if I’d known then what I know now; all of that good blood and fresh red meat … but there again, from swine like that it would probably have choked me!

  “Instead it freed me, broke the chains of my humanity. For in fact I had been shackled by my facade, by the physical shell that designated me a man. And I was far more than a man. A creature of myth? Well, no longer. I was a reality. I was real and I existed. I had killed. There was blood on my hands, and blood in my eyes; it lit the night for me like a lamp! I could see in the dark! And I could smell my victims a hundred yards away, in that alley where I’d left them to rot.

  “As I carried you to the car—bore you on my back with a strength I’d never before known—all of these sensations came to me, reinforcing yet again the knowledge that I was different. As yet I had no name for it, I didn’t know what to call myself, but I knew that I was as different from other men as night from day.

  “And it was your blood, Garzia—your blood was the final catalyst, ‘the accident’—that at long last gave me that name.

  “At my place in Palermo you were more dead than alive, but I knew what to do. Out of nowhere the knowledge came to me. You were my friend (in those days we still spoke of such things, of friendship and such), and you were in need—but so was I! The events of the night had roused me up. At last I knew what I was missing, the final piece in the puzzle that would make me complete.

  “You bled from the bullet hole in your neck. But while the blood was pumping out of you in ugly jets, matching the urgent beating of your heart, I could see that the spurts were faltering, and your pulse was growing weaker second by second. I felt panicked—yet at the same time was filled with an overwhelming urge. I bit my lip watching you as you gradually succumbed, and the taste of my own blood filled my head like roaring laughter, telling me what to do!

  “And so you see, it was no accident, Garzia, when my mouth closed on your neck, to take from you and to give of myself. No accident but destiny. I knew that you wouldn’t die but would be with me for long and long. And at last I knew what to call this thing that was in me, which now was transfused in you.”

  “You were a vampire!” Garzia sighed, his feral eyes aglow and his mouth falling open to display the gleam of razor teeth.

  “I was and am just such a vampire!” Castellano nodded his affirmation. “But I suspect that I am more than just a vampire. Your recovery took three days, three short days for your wounds to heal and for you to rise up, but from that day to this—”

  “—I have been the same as you!” said Garzia.

  “Well, perhaps not quite that,” Castellano gloomed at him, “but a vampire, certainly.”

  At which point footsteps sounded, and in a moment a man in coarse peasant’s clothing, with a rifle slung on his back and a bandolier across his chest, appeared in the arched entrance.

  “Sir,” he said to Castellano, “a Russian gentleman is here to … he’s here to see … to s-see …” But seeing the eyes of his masters fade from their feral luminosity to shiny black, he stammered to a halt and stepped back a pace.

  Briefly then—as yet not fully recovered from the passion induced by memories of his awakening—Castellano leaned towards the messenger in that weirdly menacing way of his. Then he spun on his heel and told Garzia: “Please see to our visitor, this … this ‘Russian gentleman,’ will you? Frisk him well and see him in. But Garzia, make sure he enters of his own free will.”

  12

  DEAD SILENCE … NATASHA … DEATH OF A RUSSIAN GENTLEMAN …

  Twenty-four hours earlier, in Marseilles, Jake Cutter, assisted by the incorporeal wraith, revenant, or evil essence of Korath-once-Mindsthrall, had tried talking to the dead. Or, to be more specific, for the first time in his waking hours he’d attempted to contact one of them—the Frenchman called Jean Daniel, who had been the first casualty in Jake’s war with the drug-dealing mob boss, Luigi Castellano.

  “This is where the skinny bastard died,” Jake explained to Korath, “right here in this alley. So if I’m likely to find him anywhere, this place is probably my best bet.” And because deadspeak frequently conveys more than is actually said, Korath saw it all as it had happened, in vivid if kaleidoscopic detail, in Jake’s mind and memory:

  A rainy night two and a half years ago; a tall, pale, thin man with thinning, slickedback hair, leaving a bar in the wee, small hours and getting into his car; the door slamming … and Jake wincing a little where he stood in the shadows just twenty-five yards away. But no, the shock or vibration of the car door being slammed hadn’t been sufficient to do the job—which was good, because Jake wanted Jean Daniel to know what had happened and who was responsible for it.

  Then Jake coming into view, stepping out into the middle of the shining, rain-slick alley as the car’s headlights came blazing alive; standing there with his legs slightly apart, like an invitation—like some gunfighter out of the Old West—as his angular figure was silhouetted in the headlight beams. But Jake was no gunslinger, and the only weapon was the car itself—

  —Its wipers sluicing drizzle from the windscreen, and Jean Daniel twitching, jerking, as he leaned forward to peer through his window, down the alley at lake. To peer at him, and then to recognize him! For Jake was waving at him and beginning to walk casually forward, head-on towards the car.

  A moment later:

  The Frenchman turning the key in the ignition … and Jake knowing exactly what he was thinking: that he was going to run this fucking idiot English asshole down! He thought so, anyway. Then Jake hitting the deck as the explosion ripped the darkness and a few glass fragments flew overhead.

  And Jean Daniel sitting there in the smoking car—pinned to his backrest by the steel core of the steering column, which the blast of three ounces of plastique had driven clean through his guts—probably realizing but not yet fully believing that the terrible pain he felt was death. Death in the shape of Jake Cutter, looking in at him through his blast-shattered window.

  And the Frenchman’s mouth falling open, slopping blood as Jake reminded him of what had amounted to a challenge, but one which now had been answered in full:

  “So now you know who hits the hardest …”

  “Jesus!” Jake groaned, feeling sick, dizzy, disoriented where he reached out a hand and leaned against the wall of the alley. “Jesus Christ—I did that! No good kidding myself it was just a nightmare. I actually did it—that and worse. And right now I’m planning to do more of it!” But:

  Most excellent! said Korath. And such a fitting punishment. The rapist raped, gutted on the single thrust of a most awesome iron penis. Why, I believe that I myself could not have devised a more—hah!—“ironic” ending for such as him. The only pity: that he didn’t live long enough to repent his evil deeds.

  This from a vampire! Jake thought. While out loud: “Oh, I think he’s repented them,” he answered, steadying up again. “If not then, by now for sure. But that still doesn’t absolve me.”

  Then, frowning, he wondered: So what the hell’s wrong with me now? Absolution? I’m not a Catholic … I’m not an anything! Should I really be sorry for what I’ve done? Should I really be asking for forgiveness? Perhaps it isn’t me who’s asking. Maybe it’s this other guy, the one who left all sorts of his personal luggage in my head …

  Bah! said Korath. Jake, there is this weakness in you. And its name is conscience. These brutal men raped and drowned your woman, and they would have drowned you. And as for Jean Daniel: he would have run you down, crushed you to pulp under the metal body of his vehicle. So tell me now, how is it you feel ashamed that you struck him down? An eye for an eye, remember?

  “Shame?” said Jake, with a shake of his head. “But I’m not sure it is shame. As for conscience: well, it’s that, certainty—but that’s not all it is. Korath, I murdered that m
an, these men. Whether they deserved it or not, I did it. Okay, so I know I’m not an especially religious type, but until I can make life what gives me the right to take it away? And that’s it, part of my paradox, my dilemma. On the one hand I know that I had to do it—and that I’d do it again, will do it again, with your help—but on the other I feel sick that I have to live with it, the fact that I’ll probably be having nightmares about these things for the rest of my life. But the greatest paradox is that I did these things to purge myself, to cleanse my spirit of the utter hatred I felt for these bastards … and that now I’m beginning to wonder what good it’s done if I only end up hating myself?”

  Fortunately, said the other in a little while, such mixed emotions are beyond me. Indeed, most feelings of love, pity, and self-doubt are beyond me. I recognize them in you because I can still vaguely remember something of them in myself: my years as a boy and a youth in Sunside, until Malinari’s bite freed me of all such weaknesses.

  “Weaknesses?” Again Jake shook his head. “I think you have it backwards. These are our strengths—human strengths—lacking which we’d be no better than …”

  … Than the Wamphyri? Korath had seen it in his mind. But if that’s true, why do strong men such as Trask fear them so?

  And as Jake searched for an answer to that: