Defilers

by Brian Lumley

  “His man?”

  You may call him a man for now, said the other. His name is Garzia Nicosia, his master’s right-hand “man,” yes, but in fact they are both monsters. I saw their faces as they worked on me. At first they looked like men, but later … they didn’t.

  “Worked on you?” (Jake grimaced, for from the tone of Grusev’s voice he knew what kind of work that had been, and that it was the source of the Russian’s agony even now, so intense that Grusev continued to “feel” it even in death.) “To what end?”

  To discover Turchin’s reasons for sending me to spy on them. And Castellano also asked about you. But what could I tell him? Nothing, for I didn’t even know your name. He asked about someone called Harry Keogh, too, and Alec Kyle, and an organization called E-Branch. And if I had known anything at all, believe me I would have told him! But none of what he asked meant anything to me, so I told him nothing. Which only served to make him and Garzia Nicosia work with that much more … enthusiasm.

  “So in fact you died for me,” said Jake, with something of a catch in his throat. For it wasn’t too hard to guess what had happened. Ben Trask must have asked the Russian premier to find Castellano, and Turchin had sent Grusev here to verify the drug-runner’s whereabouts.

  Died for you? said Grusev. For you and those others I spoke of? Not really. I died because I didn’t know anything about you! I was only here to confirm Castellano’s whereabouts. But in any case, I’m fairly sure now that they would have tortured, mutilated, and murdered me anyway! It is their nature, after all. So let’s get on, for what’s done is done and can’t be changed. But it can and must be avenged! Since it can only be avenged by you, and since you seem to think you’re in my debt, I shall hold you to it.

  Grusev paused for a moment, and then continued: Through all my pain—which will abate, I think, as eventually I erase it from my memory—I have sensed you near, felt your warmth, and listened to your thoughts. And I know you seek vengeance for others as well as for yourself Ah, but you can’t ever know how many others, or how very close they are! Oh, they are silent; what else would you expect in a place such as this? But they remember only too well, Necroscope, and their loathing of Castellano is no less for all their silence. I tell you this so that you’ll know you’re not alone in this thing. Not at all. Take my word for it, Jake: once you start on this, you won’t be alone.

  Jake believed he understood. Grusev could only mean that he wouldn’t be alone in spirit—that all of Castellano’s previous victims would be willing him on to win—but he also knew that willpower wouldn’t be enough on its own.

  “Any solid information you can give me,” he said, “you know I’ll be glad to accept it.”

  And Georgi Grusev told him (told him some of it, at least): something of the layout of the house, its sprawling cellars and secrets, and gave him several coordinates he could use to good advantage. But he didn’t tell him all of it. For if he had—

  —Then Jake might never have gone to work at all …

  In Krassos it was 1:45 A.M. local time—the small hours of the morning—and Ben Trask was cold now; rather, his mind was icy cold following hours of feverish and incapacitating horror. The horror of knowledge, recognition, and acceptance, and of the contemplation of the unthinkable. But finally the fever was off him; Manolis’s plan of action was in place, and all Trask could do was wait and think. Think back on it all (but carefully) and try not to go out of his mind again.

  The trouble with Millie had been bad enough—no, much more than that, it had been hell on earth for Trask—but then, the rest of it … it had all been too much.

  The precog Ian Goodly had stepped in and taken over command when that message from E-Branch HQ had sunk into Trask’s brain: the fact that Millie Cleary’s escort had been attacked, knocked unconscious in the London underground, and the fact that Millie herself was missing. Missing? But that was only the half of it, for Trask had known in his heart of hearts that Millie was now with Lord Szwart!

  Yes, he’d gone a little mad, when his only thought had been to be out of there—to get the hell off Krassos and back to London, England, as quickly as possible, and join the search for Millie—but at last the other members of the team had managed to convince him that there was nothing he could do. Then, after he’d realized that he wasn’t any longer in any fit shape to run the show, he’d handed things over to the precog.

  And just as well, for the worst hadn’t yet been. But it had been coming, and in short order. And now Ben Trask thought back on it all …

  Just after midnight, they had gone out in all three vehicles to carry out a final reconnaissance of Palataki and the monastery. To all intents and purposes the island had seemed dead; most of the late-break tourists had gone home, back to England and Germany or wherever, and the street and house lights in Skala Astris had been almost outnumbered by those of a small handful of fishing vessels on the wine-dark sea. Like the abandoned ghost town in some old Western movie, the last twenty-four hours had seen Krassos turn into a ghost island.

  In one way that was a good thing: with all the action that had been planned for tonight, they wouldn’t want too many observers—to many “innocent bystanders”—getting involved, which was why timings were so important. For it was all set to happen in the small hours of the morning, when Krassos was fast asleep and the undead were wide awake. It was important that they were all up and about, that none remained hidden away in some secret crypt or other where they might go undiscovered.

  The way Goodly saw it—and Trask, too, when he was better able to focus his mind between bouts of red rage—Malinari and Vavara had done a superb job of trapping themselves. The monastery stood on a jutting promontory, and likewise Palataki, with only one access route to each location and no other easily identified exits or escape routes. Both places faced outwards to the sea, looking down from sheer cliffs, and in fact the former had been built on the very edge and was surrounded by deep water on three of its four sides.

  The monastery, yes—when the tanker of avgas ripped out its guts, any survivors of the blast would have to come out through the wrecked gates to escape the inferno. There they’d come under fire from Trask (if at that time he felt up to it), along with Manolis, his man Stavros, and Lardis Lidesci.

  Meanwhile Andreas would have joined up with the second task force—consisting of Goodly, Chung, and Liz, who waited near the entrance to Palataki’s approach road—and would have shared with them his stolen dynamite and instructed them in its use. Then, when Manolis contacted them by mobile phone to order them to action, they would commence their assault on the Little Palace.

  This last had been calculated to take a lot longer than the grisly work at the monastery; Palataki had its vast underground system of mine tunnels, after all, and the wooded slopes of the elevated feature where it stood would offer cover to any man or thing trying to escape from the explosions and subsequent small-arms fire. But with any luck Manolis and his team would soon be finished with their business at the monastery, and able to join up with the second group to finish the job at Palataki.

  That had been their basic, almost rudimentary plan. But all of it still to come, still some two hours in the future, as the three groups had driven out with lowered lights from the Christos Studios a little after midnight, two of them to carry out a final recce of the target locations, and the third on a thieves’ mission to the airport and marble quarry. All of which had been one hour and forty-five minutes ago.

  But between then and now, disaster!

  And while Trask continued to think back on it, principally he thought of the one thing that no one had taken into account: that while their task seemed to have been made less complicated by virtue of the island’s rapidly dwindling number of tourists, so had their own eventual discovery. For if Vavara and/or Malinari suspected that E-Branch was here, it had now become a very easy thing to track them down using a simple system of elimination. Out of the few dozen remaining foreigners, Trask and his people were a c
ollective that would have been hard to miss.

  Therein had lain the seeds of his near collapse …

  Because Liz was a telepath, and this was a night reconnaissance when the mentalist Malinari might be expected to be active, she had been left behind at the Christos Studios. At any other time the precog Ian Goodly would have left someone with her, just to be on the safe side. This time, however, he couldn’t afford it. Every member of the two recce teams was vital to their success, and not a man of them could be spared. Trask was better off in the company of his closest colleagues; despite that he had been badly shaken, his lie-detector intelligence in such matters was invaluable. Lardis Lidesci was needed if only for his “sense of smell,” the fact that he could sniff out one of these creatures almost on sight. The locator’s talent was completely indispensable; Chung would know it at once if anything had changed since he’d last scanned the two areas of vampiric infestation … and so on. Manolis considered it important that he have a last look at the monastery, just to be sure in his own mind that his plan would work, and of course the precog Ian Goodly himself must be present on the off chance that his unpredictable temporal abilities would allow him a glimpse of whatever was to come.

  A shame that the precog’s talent wasn’t working at the time we set out, Trask thought. But there again, who could blame Ian Goodly? The future was like that, and there was no getting round it. And surely if anyone was to blame it was Trask himself. But at the time his mind hadn’t been focussed; his thoughts had been somewhere else; his lie-detecting talent had been knocked right out of sync by the devastating news from HQ. And so what he’d seen—the truth that he’d failed to recognize—hadn’t impressed itself upon him until it was much too late …

  He had been in the back of Manolis’s four-wheel-drive as it left the Christos Studios and drove down the side street to the main road through Skala Astris. As the last vehicle in the convoy of three, its dipped headlight beams had smoked where they cut through a fine haze of dust thrown up by the lead vehicles. And as Manolis had turned right onto the main road, then Trask had looked back through the rear window.

  His own window was wound down—as were they all, for the night had turned warm and airless again—and a cloud of dust and exhaust fumes had found its way inside. That was why Trask had turned his face away, to avoid the dust cloud. But as he had looked back through stinging watery eyes, so he had thought to see something: two of Skala Astris’s elder citizens (as he had then believed them to be), standing with their heads close together in a shop dooway. Two females, yes, in what looked like the standard black garb of Greek peasant women; they’d quickly turned their faces away and drawn back into the shadows of the doorway … possibly to avoid the same cloud of dust thrown up by the cars.

  And that had been that …

  Then the lead vehicle (containing Andreas and Stavros) had accelerated and pulled away, leaving the other two contingents to get on with their recce.

  In Trask’s vehicle, Lardis had sat up front beside Manolis; in the car in front, David Chung was the passenger with Goodly at the wheel (the idea being that the pair would probably work better in tandem, “hitching rides,” as it were, on each others’ incredible talents).

  And so they’d allowed a quarter-mile of distance to develop between the cars, driving first past the Little Palace standing almost unseen behind the pines on its gloomy knoll-like feature, then three miles farther along the coast road to the spot where Manolis had been forced into his precipitous dive into the sea, and finally on to the gauntly looming, shadow-shrouded monastery on its promontory jut, standing sentinel over its terrible secret and the deep dark ocean both.

  A mile beyond that Goodly had turned his vehicle around in a lay-by, stopped to get out and wave Manolis down, and the five men (or at least four of them) had put their heads together and spent a few minutes of precious time in voicing their opinions. The fifth man—Trask himself, lost in his own thoughts—had simply gone to the sheer side of the road, to stand looking out over the sea. As for the other four: David Chung, who was probably the most important of them all this time out, had led off:

  ‘Things have changed. Not drastically, but they’ve changed. Previously, when Liz and I looked at Palataki, we saw—I don’t know—a mindless, seething something; life of a sort, I suppose, but what kind of life I just can’t say. Maybe it’s one of those mushroom gardens, like the one under the Pleasure Dome in Xanadu. But the place did have a vampire caretaker, most likely Vavara’s lieutenant. Well, that was then and this is now. As we passed by Palataki tonight I was giving it everything I’ve got, my full concentration, and while that seething something hasn’t much changed, the lieutenant has. That is, he’s no longer there—but something else is. I detected a much stronger force, but only very briefly. It was there and it was gone—as if perhaps it had sensed my probe, withdrawn, shut itself down. Vavara? Or Malinari? It could have been either one. But I’m pretty certain that it was Wamphyri! As to whether or not there were thralls in attendance: I don’t know, can’t say. For this one’s aura was so strong it overshadowed everything else.”

  But as the locator had finished speaking, so Trask had come to his senses and rejoined the group. “Probably Vavara,” he had husked then. “Tending her garden. But that’s simply an educated guess and by no means a certainty. I’m not sure of the truth of anything anymore.”

  “But it’s a cleverly reasoned guess,” Goodly had joined in, “for what would Malinari be doing at Palataki? I can’t see that the territoriality of the Wamphyri would allow for that. But in any case there’s only one of them there, so it’s academic.”

  And Manolis had added, “Being separated may even have weakened them. I would rather take them on one at a time than both together.”

  Then Lardis Lidesci had turned to Chung. “David, what else did you sense? I mean, at the monastery. Maybe that’ll give us a clue as to who’s at Palataki. Myself, I could smell vampires in both places.”

  And he’d been right, for Chung had answered, “I sensed that same lying outer shield, the facade that we saw before. Perhaps it’s there as a permanent stamp of Vavara. But this time I knew what to expect and looked much deeper, and so saw that this so-called monastery is the pits of some weird sort of hell!”

  “And its women, once-nuns, are burning in hell!” the precog had nodded. “Just the way I saw them.”

  “Maybe they were,” Chung had continued. “Maybe some of them still are, but that’s not how it felt. It felt colder than deep space, and made my flesh creep. It was as if I’d located an ice-cold cesspit, and they were all wallowing in it. Think about it, if you dare. Everything those dedicated women have kept bottled up inside them all their lives—everything they’ve denied themselves—it’s all out now, and they’re revelling in it!”

  “Which is about what you’d expect,” Trask had nodded. “They are Vavara’s now, and there’s not one of them who we can save.”

  At which Chung had nodded his reluctant corroboration. “I’m sorry to have to say it, but I couldn’t detect a spark of human decency in the entire place.”

  Then Goodly had turned to Manolis. “How’s your plan looking now?”

  “It looks good, and it’s thee only plan we’ve got,” Manolis had answered. “That parking area in front of thee monastery, it allows plenty of manoeuvering space for thee big tanker. Anyway, it’s far too late to try to change anything now. By now Stavros is halfway to thee airport. Thee tanker is as good as his. When he meets up with Andreas before they return to us, then he will have thee fuse—a stick of dynamite—with which to light thee greater bomb!”

  “So that’s it,” the ever-gaunt Goodly had nodded his cadaverous head curtly. “Now we go back to the Christos Studios for Liz, deploy to our locations, and wait for Stavros and Andreas to meet up with us …” (A glance at his watch.) “Which they’re all set to do in just a little over an hour from now.”

  “And on the way back I’ll try scanning those places again,” Chung had tol
d them. “See if I can get a better reading.”

  So much for that final recce. Almost everything had seemed to be working as scheduled—at least until they’d returned to the Christos Studios …

  Trask shivered where he sat in the back of the car, back at the lay-by a mile east of the vampire-ridden monastery, and felt the shivers travel right through his body from head to toe. So maybe the cold wasn’t simply in his mind (and soul?) after all but also in his bones, a more natural, physical location. Which has to be good, he thought, for we’ll need to be cold—all of us, and in all our parts—if we’re to do what has to be done. But me especially. Burning myself up won’t do any good, but an ice-cold finger on the trigger may yet shoot a silver bullet or two through the hearts of these alien bastards!

  And thinking back on the rest of it—on the reason why he felt so cold in his body, his mind, and his soul—Trask knew he was right and that he must stay this way until this ugly business was brought to a close …

  They had returned to Skala Astris in reverse order: which is to say, Manolis had been first away, with Goodly following on half a mile behind. And this time Trask had sat in front beside Manolis, while Lardis occupied the backseat.

  But as Manolis had approached the monastery, so he’d slowed down on being met by a blaze of headlights that came from a car heading towards him. And it was only when the other vehicle had swung right off the road, after its headlights turned away from them, that they’d seen what sort of car it was and where it was going. Then, as it turned into the parking area in front of the monastery and kept going, Manolis had gasped:

  “Vavara’s limo! Thee car that rammed me into thee sea!”

  “It’s gone in through those great gates,” Lardis had cried, from where he gazed through the rear window. “Through the gates and into the monastery. But the windows in front were down, and I saw the driver and front-seat passenger. They were black-clad nuns, of course. Two of Vavara’s women …”