by Brian Lumley
Or perhaps not, for the scenes and sensations were at least as terrifying as what he’d just been through, because Jake knew they were part of Liz’s reality:
Fire and thunder, and the ground shaking underfoot as in an earthquake … a wild flight from searing liquid fire, followed by a dark confining space … and in the midst of all of this a terrible female face, as shrivelled and wrinkled as a prune and hideous as bell, glaring, glaring, glaring through crimson eyes in a demoniac mask of batred which even the devil himself would be proud to wear if he were a woman!
It came and it went, that telepathic cry for help, lost its coherency and dissolved away, as the threat that Liz faced overwhelmed her. But locked in Jake’s mind as if branded there, the coordinates remained. Then:
Ahhh! said Korath, who in those brief moments had been more “in sync” with his host than ever before. Jake! he cried. Jake! But surely I know this creature? Indeed, for in all the world—in two worlds—there could never be another such as this. Oh, I know her now. It is, it can only be … Vavaaara!
Fifteen minutes earlier, outside the monastery on Krassos:
The night was very still. From somewhere in the dark pines, a Greek owl declared his authority by hooting a single drop-of-silver note, and after some seconds was answered from more than a mile away by a neighbour who was likewise intent on defending his territory.
Nothing else moved or made a sound …
Then a low rumble, gradually growing louder, and in another moment the quiet and velvet darkness of the Mediterranean night was shattered by the revving of engines, as Manolis Papastamos hurled his four-wheel-drive off the road and onto the gravel of the parking area, aiming it at the forbidding monastery gates.
With full headlights blazing, the vehicle roared in a ruler-straight line across the open space, until at the last possible moment Manolis yanked the steering wheel hard over to the right, stood on the brakes, and almost turned the car over before skidding to a sideways halt in a cloud of dust some ten feet to the right of the gates. By no means a pointless display or exercise, the swath cut by the car’s headlight beams, along with the twin beacons of its red rear lights, had played the part of a laser beam guiding a bomb to its target.
The target was the monastery itself—in whose high windows a scattered handful of lights were now flickering into being—and the bomb was a tanker full of avgas, driven by Stavros!
Some fifty feet behind the lead vehicle, Stavros had driven off the road onto the parking lot’s hardstanding, straightened up his tanker on the correct “trajectory” as designated by Manolis in the smaller vehicle, and applied his airbrakes. And as the tanker hissed to a halt, so Manolis went running towards it. Lardis Lidesci and Ben Trask had also left the car and taken up positions on both sides of the gates. Anyone or thing who tried to come out through those gates now would have to fight its way past them. And they weren’t in any mood to let that happen.
Back at the tanker Manolis yelled up to Stavros leaning out of the cab window, “Ready?” And with a grim nod, Stavros revved the big engine to a coughing snarl. Yes, he was ready. Six feet from the rear of the powerfully throbbing vehicle, Manolis took out his cigarette lighter and touched fire to the short fuze of a stick of dynamite that was secured to the tanker’s fat belly. And then, to be doubly sure, he went to the back of the vehicle and spun the stopcock on the release valve.
Seeing the flare of the burning fuse in his rearview, Stavros rammed the tanker into first gear, drove it lurching towards the monastery’s huge gates. Rapidly accelerating and leaving a trail of highly volatile avgas in his wake, he waited until the last moment before throwing the gears into neutral, opening the cab’s door and jumping out. Rolling as he hit the dirt, he came to his feet and ran towards Trask, who had stationed himself at a safe distance from the inevitable impact.
As for Manolis: he was running as fast as he could, to join up with Lardis Lidesci in the lee of the massive wall, when the tanker smashed into the gates—
Smashed into them and through them in a deluge of shattered timbers, and roared on across the courtyard, gardens, and cloisters to a head-on collision with the monastery’s main structure midway between its rearing towers. The clamour was nerve-shredding as steel met stone, when for several long seconds all that was heard was the screech of rending metal, the howl of a motor gone mad, and the landslide rumble of dislodged masonry falling from on high; so that for a moment it seemed the mission was a failure.
But as the four cringing, crouching men outside the monastery’s walls began to straighten up, then the dynamite exploded. And the dynamite was only the detonator for the real thing …
Liz remembered answering the door back at the Christos Studios, then nothing else until she’d woken up in the back of the black limo, to find them dragging her out of the car into the monastery’s courtyard; “them” being a pair of incredibly strong women in the garb of nuns. Indeed they were, or had been nuns, and as Liz had shuttered her eyes and feigned unconsciousness, putting out a brief telepathic probe to confirm her suspicions, finally she’d known where she was.
Those terrible thoughts—of lust and bloodlust—coming at her from every direction, and in the heart of it all a brightly flaring candle of innocence, purity … but one whose cold calculating glow she’d seen before and knew for a lie!
And so Liz had lain still—which wasn’t easy because her neck was stiff and aching where she’d been rabbit-punched—and let them carry her into darkness, into the now unholy monastery, up two flights of winding stairs where their heels clattered on cold stone, and finally into the presence of the awful luminosity, the lying light of Vavara.
There she had been put down on a low bed or pallet, where she’d groaned, turned on her side, and made sure she faced the wall. And when she’d felt a seemingly gentle hand on her shoulder, shaking her, then she’d groaned again—but oh-so-softly—and continued to feign unconsciousness. Until:
“Smelling salts,” a sweet but authoritative voice had said, the voice of the lying luminosity speaking to her thralls. “Go, fetch smelling saits—no, wait! One of you stay, tell me about her: who she was with, how many, and where they are now.”
And when Vavara had heard the details—or as much of them as her informant knew—then: “So. It must be this E-Branch of which Malinari spoke. Malinari the Mind, aye—the treacherous, lying dog! No wonder he up and ran! And I was right: he knew they were here, and so ran off, leaving me to fend for myself. But they are only seven now and I have this one. Will they dare attack me, knowing that she is mine? I think so, for Malinari warned me that even as we are ruthless, so is this E-Branch … in which case I must prepare. So go now, and gather the women down to the cloisters, where I shall speak to all of you together.”
Then, as Vavara’s thrall had hurried out and her footsteps came echoing back from the stairwell, that hand again on Liz’s shoulder, but no longer gentle—whose touch had been as much a lie as Vavara’s bell-like tones—and the vampire’s coarsely whispered, “And as for you, my pretty, my oh-so-pretty: when I return we’ll talk. For pain is such a wonderful stimulant, and I know that it will loosen your tongue … but only loosen it, mind you, letting you keep it awhile longer at least. Ah, but while a tongue is requisite to coherent conversation, lips are not. What midnight lover will want you then, I wonder, when in the dark his lips meet nothing but gums and teeth and hardened scar tissue?”
Then she’d moved away; Liz had heard the door closing and a key grating in the lock, and for the first time since regaining consciousness she’d been able to relax the mental shields that, in close proximity with Vavara, she’d kept firmly in place.
After that, she had been up and about in a moment. From the barred window she had looked down on the courtyard, where after what seemed an age she’d seen flitting shapes emerging from the central and tower structures, gathering in the cloistered areas under laden fig trees and flowering bougainvillaes. A beautiful setting for a hideous congregation. And Vavara’s vo
ice—like a chime of small bells—floating up on the night air.
She had told them what to expect: no mercy, and had gone on to describe their duties if they desired to survive—how they must kill, slake their thirst, take no prisoners, destroy their enemies to a man. “Which is what they’re intent on doing to you—and to me!” she had finished. “I for one don’t intend to let it happen. But you … must make your own decisions and fend for yourselves. As for when it will be: soon, I fancy. For that dog Malinari has stolen one of mine and fled. Aye, and he was eager to be away.”
Then Vavara had lifted her chin, angling her head until her hypnotic gaze locked on the high barred window where Liz stood looking down. And as that flock of once-holy women, now vampire thralls, had begun to disperse, so their mistress had turned in a swirl of black cloak and vanished back into the building …
Terrified, then galvanized by the look that Vavara had cast at the high window of her prison, Liz had determined to fight, defend herself when that “Lady” returned. But whatever Vavara’s business was below it had taken her some little time, until Liz had begun to hope that she’d been forgotten. Not so, for that was when she’d sensed Vavara’s presence and heard once more the key grating in the lock. Then:
The door thrown open! … Liz standing there, with a wooden stool in her hands, raised high … she had struck with all her strength—at nothing!
Seeming to melt aside, Vavara had reached out, snatched the stool from midair, hurled it away. And: “Would you hurt me, my pretty?” She’d said, making Liz feel so ashamed that she had even tried! What—to brain so lovely a thing, so gorgeous a creature? Even to think it had been a sin! And Vavara standing there, all aglow with a beauty that hurt, a hypnotic simulation of purity and irresistible warmth.
Irresistible?
No, I am deceived! Liz had drawn back, sending a telepathic probe to corroborate the truth of it—
—And at once recoiling from the horror at the heart of all that false beauty, the shrivelled, bloodsucking Thing that was Vavara!
Vavara had known she was discovered; relaxing her guise and turning to a hag, she’d advanced on Liz, showing her a gleaming sickle-shaped knife.
“For you,” that twisted, pitted, leathery-black monstrosity had croaked then. “For your face and beautiful body. But before that—or during—you’ll tell me all.”
At which there had sounded an angry growling of motors, the shriek of tortured brakes, and a startled flutter and squawking from the nuns down in the courtyard and cloisters. And how Vavara had thrown herself at the high barred window then, croaking her fury and stamping her feet at what she saw.
But her rage had lasted only a moment or so before the survival instinct of the Wamphyri took over. Then, turning from the window—silent now but more deadly than ever—she had fallen upon Liz and aimed a stunning blow at the side of her head! And as Liz had blacked out, so she had thought to hear the sound of more, heavier revving, and a great crashing … and whatever it was that was happening down there, it was for now the saving of her natural beauty, probably her soul, and almost certainly her sanity …
Ben Trask straightened, stepped away from the four-wheel-drive, which had been partly sheltering him, was aiming his 9 mm Browning forward and edging toward the ruined gates, when the tanker went up and threw him back against the car again. Not the blast, for the wall protected him, but the sheer ferocity of the sound, the rush of light and heat spilling out from the gates, expanding across the parking area, and the ground lurching under his feet.
And falling backwards like that he saw a weird thing: behind the wall, like the blooming of some cosmic orchid, a boiling dome of brilliant orange that rose higher than the wall itself, sending volcanic firebomb streamers spiralling upwards and outwards in every direction, in the grandest, most terrible fireworks display that Trask had ever seen. And the weird thing was this: silhouetted against that searing fireball, a flock of great black tattered birds was rising on the thermals, tumbling where they flew, with their blazing pinions outspread, like so many phoenixes reborn in that great inferno! And who could say, perhaps they were born again—or at least renewed, their souls if nothing else—for they were nuns in their habits, and their aerial acrobatics were not sustained …
Stavros had been quicker off the mark than Trask. Shouting at the older man to run like hell, he was already in their car, spinning its wheels and kicking up gravel as he made a run from what was happening—
—a wave of molten fire, spilling through the gates and up over the wall!
Trask ran, made a headlong dive, and with his legs sticking out from the passenger’s door was carried to safety.
On the other side of the gates the wall was higher. Manolis Papastamos and Lardis had backed off with their hands up before their eyes to shield them from the crisping heat, but they were safe where at last they turned and ran for it, Manolis dragging the Old Lidesci after him. And as Stavros brought the car skidding to a halt, Trask got out and looked back.
To think he’d thought it possible that something might have tried to escape from that! Yet even now, as the fireball shrank back and the monastery blazed, a handful of staggering, burning figures emerged from the gates like human candles in the night. And Trask might have fallen to his knees and prayed for his own soul—forgiveness for what he’d been a party to—if he hadn’t first seen them praying for theirs!
Standing there in a semicircle, with their arms held up and open, looking to God in their final moments and hoping He would see them, the nuns prayed—or simply acknowledged, whichever—crumpled, and fell. But in the moment of their going down, even as the feral light went out of their eyes, Trask could swear he saw their smoke shimmering into haloes where it rose up, before a second tongue of fire roared out through the gates to devour them.
The monastery lit the coastal road for half a mile in both directions; a twintowered torch, it stood tall on its promontory and burned with a vengeance. Within its walls the place was surely a seething cauldron by now. But Trask saw only the nuns where they lay crumpled, their smoke rising up. The precog had foreseen it and as always he’d been right: the future will out, no matter what. Yet, as it now seemed, not quite always. And:
“Damn you, Ian Goodly!” Trask sobbed like a child where he leaned against the car to avoid collapsing. “Damn you and your talent and the lying, bitching future to hell!” The last thing he had asked the precog to do, before they’d split up and gone their separate ways tonight, was to look into the future seeking evidence of Liz. Was she alive in time yet to come, or was she gone?
And the gaunt and grey-faced Goodly had answered him, “Ben, I can’t be sure. But I think—and ! I hope and pray—that maybe she’ll survive. But where Liz is now, surely the most important question is will you want her to survive? And worse still, will you allow her to?”
Trask had heard, understood, and shuddered to his soul. But hope springs eternal, and echoing in his mind the key words had been, “I think maybe she’ll survive.” Those were the words that had kept him going.
Until now …
Manolis and Lardis had arrived; as the latter got into the back of the car, Manolis saw Trask’s face. “There’s no time for that now, Ben,” he said. “We’ve got to move on. This isn’t over yet. Thee Little Palace, Palataki, is still waiting for us.”
Trask looked one more time at the monastery … and Manolis saw him give a massive start as his bottom jaw gaped open. Then the Greek policeman followed Trask’s gaze and understood why. A big black limo—Vavara’s limo—had come crashing out through the blazing wreckage of the gates and was careening towards the four-wheel-drive!
Three of the limo’s wheels were burning. Its roof and hood were badly dented, shedding rubble and large chunks of masonry. Its nearside windows had been blasted out, and a front door was hanging from a single hinge, striking sparks from flints in the gravel where it jounced and clattered. The rear doors were both open, flapping like a bat’s wings. And looking something li
ke a monster in its own right—seeming hell-bent on a head-on collision with the stationary car—the vehicle came fishtailing across the parking area.
But no, throwing up a stinging spray of gravel as Trask and Manolis hurled themselves aside, passing so close that its near-side rear door was torn off on the back of the four-wheel-drive, the limo raced on, heading for the road.
“She got out!” Trask gasped. “God damn her, Vavara got out! That can only be the witch herself … I know it’s her!” And as the big black car went slewing onto the road and the front door tore loose, they all saw that indeed it was her: that nightmare hag crouched over the wheel, her great jaws gaping and her crimson eyes glaring at them. Vavara, alone in that blasted, shellshocked wreck of a car. She alone had escaped.
“Get after her!” Trask yelled, his hatred buoying him up as he piled into the car. And as Manolis got into the front passenger seat alongside Stavros, Trask grabbed his shoulder and told him: “Now its your turn. This is the selfsame vampire bitch who drove you off the road and killed your pathologist friend. Very well, now let’s give her a taste of her own bloody medicine!”
What Trask hadn’t seen and couldn’t know because no one had suggested it might be so, was that Liz was in the limo’s trunk, and that yet again Ian Goodly had been right: if only by virtue of Wamphyri tenacity—the fact that Liz had been indoors with Vavara, who like most vampires maintained a bolt-hole or escape route—she had survived.
This far at least …
Having heard and understood Trask’s harsh, vengeful comment to Manolis, Stavros needed no further urging. Screaming their protest, the gears meshed and the vehicle’s tyres churned dust and gravel as he fishtailed it out onto the road, straightened up, and went hurtling after Vavara’s black limo.