by Brian Lumley
“So what am I talking about? Well listen up, and I’ll tell you.
“When we first learned that we’d been invaded, we knew that Malinari and the other two monsters came out of the sump at the Refuge with three senior thralls, presumably lieutenants, which probably meant one lieutenant each. When we went out to Romania we discovered that they’d also recruited three of our people—not espers, no, but Refuge staff, personnel—to take with them wherever they were going, perhaps as sustenance—God!—but more likely as guides in this new world. And definitely as converts, recruits, vampires.
“One of the three was Bruce Trennier, who we don’t have to worry about anymore. But at the time, that made two Lords and a Lady of the Wamphyri, three lieutenants or Wamphyri aspirants, and three up-and-coming vampires who—depending on Starside’s laws of unnatural selection—might or might not make it into vampirism’s upper echelon.
“And those were the figures we fed to our extrap computers, along with several conjectural rates of transmission—of vampirism, that is. We were actually expecting an epidemic; we prepared for one, in the expectation that we’d find principal targets at three centres of maximum infection, and that then we’d be able to hit back in a massive military raid followed by the world’s longest cleanup period lasting maybe a hundred years! So we prepared, but we didn’t tell everyone. And by everyone I mean most of you.
“We didn’t tell you that the extraps had worked it all out in their mechanical minds and given us between a year and eighteen months, to a maximum of three years, until Armageddon; and that by then, as I’ve said, the remaining human half of the population would be at war with the vampire half and probably with each other.
“We didn’t tell you because first of all our Minister Responsible had forbidden it; you are human after all, and many of you have wives and families, and while we may be E-Branch, we’re just as prone to panic as anyone else in the face of the ultimate disaster. In short, we needed you here, not running off to take care of your kith and kin. And we also didn’t tell you because that doomsday scenario I painted a minute or so ago was just one of a handful of scenarios, and as the old saying goes, ‘Where there’s life …’
“But mainly we—myself and one or two others who were in the know—mainly we stayed silent because right from the beginning we’d seen signs of some kind of strategic cover-up, I mean by the Wamphyri. What they’d done to the Refuge, they’d made it look like vandalism on the grand scale. Maybe the three missing members of staff had gone crazy, wrecked the place and murdered everyone else before running off? Maybe that’s what they wanted us or the world to think. And in any case surely the last thing we would think—in a world that doesn’t believe in vampires—was that we had been invaded by them! And remember, only six of those Refuge kids had actually been … depleted, and even then they showed no external signs of vampirism. Even if some Romanian doctor had got there before we torched the place, it would have seemed ‘obvious’ that the children had been suffering from some form of pernicious anaemia. But pernicious? That isn’t the word for it. And those kids … my God, those poor kids!
“And here we see something of Malinari’s evil intelligence at work. He left no one alive to tell the tale, no one to alert the world to what had really happened. But after … after examining Zek, surely he would know that we—that E-Branch—would be on to him anyway?
“Well, I believe Malinari knew precisely what our world and its peoples are all about. I believe he’d got it all from General Mikhail Suvorov and his expeditionary force long before he ever set out to come here, and then that he’d had it corroborated by poor Zek and Bruce Trennier at the Refuge. He knew first from Suvorov that the people of our world didn’t believe in his kind, that vampires are considered a myth born of ignorance and ancient superstition. But while that is generally true, he also learned from Zek that certain people do have all or most of the facts, which of course would tend to make E-Branch and its espers his deadliest enemies.
“So now let’s look at it from his point of view, if that’s at all possible. If Malinari and the others commenced vampirising every human being with whom they came in contact, how long before we people who know the truth broke silence? And how long then before mankind in its entirety fought back—and with what terrible weapons?
“Malinari, Szwart, and Vavara, they were Wamphyri … they are Wamphyri! But they are only three. Three of them, and oh so many of us. And so much still to be learned about the Earth and its peoples, this very different world that they would conquer, with all its many diverse races.
“Zek, my Zek, was the real key. She was a powerful mentalist, a telepath who knew others with stranger powers still. She knew E-Branch, and she knew—or she had known—other vampires before Malinari. And I can’t help but wonder: when he locked on to Zek, did he see Harry Keogh in her mind? Did he perhaps glimpse the Necroscope in her memories? Ah, but just think how that would have given him pause: to have fled from one such in Starside, only to discover that there were, or had been, another or others of a like kind here! And so he must play this world with extreme caution, in the knowledge that he might call down metaphysical powers at least as great and possibly greater than his own …
“All of this is entirely conjectural, guesswork of course, but our experience of events—and nonevents—has shown it to be near to the mark. Malinari and the others, they have kept low profiles while they prepare to do … whatever. And the extraps’ eighteen months are past, and likewise the maximum three years to Armageddon … yet until we got that whiff of mindsmog it was as if nothing was happening. So what has been happening, and what have they been up to?
“Well, in Australia we found a number of clues. But first the clear evidence, which hit us right between the eyes: Malinari, for one, hasn’t been hiding himself away in a ruined castle in the Carpathians! Indeed, he was where we might least expect to find him. Which begs the question, what of the others, Vavara and Szwart? Are they, too, in residence in places where we wouldn’t dream of finding them?
“Okay, I see what you’re thinking: that this isn’t so much what they are doing as where they are doing it. But there might yet be answers to both questions in what we found under Xanadu. We—and by that I mean Liz and Jake Cutter—found a midnight garden, a mushroom farm of sorts, a breeding place for vampires. And while the rest of us didn’t see it, Jake formed the opinion that Malinari had ‘planted’ his lieutenant out of Starside down there to fester in the earth. That’s not such a wild notion; he would probably have been the only one of The Mind’s retinue who was ‘matured’ or rotten enough to produce spores. And again according to Jake and Liz, the cave where they found this monstrosity was full of that filthy spawn.
“Worse, our Gibson Desert liaison person—someone called Peter Miller, who for his own crazy reasons had run off on us—was also down there. He’d been vampirized and … and something had been done to him. He had metamorphosed; he’d been converted, reduced to a mass of nutrients for black, sporeproducing, vampiric fungi. And all of that loathsome corruption in the earth, it was feeding off his juices. Ugh!” Trask’s shudder was by no means faked.
“Anyway, Jake torched the place and everything in it …
“But the point is, Xanadu was a spawning ground, literally. What if Malinari had cropped all of those spores, released them into the casino’s air-conditioning or ventilation system? What? Legionnaires’ disease wouldn’t have a look-in! Forget it! But in fact we can’t forget it because I might just have it right. And Xanadu wasn’t The Mind’s only place in Australia.
“Anyway, that’s a job for the next Australian team, so maybe they’re not the lucky ones after all. Malinari’s ‘bolt-holes’ may have been more than just places to escape to. We’ve really no notion what may be hidden away, breeding and waiting out its time, down in that old mine in the Gibson Desert. So we’ll have to open it up again. As for Jethro Manchester’s Capricorn Group island: we burned what was on the surface, but who can say what may have be
en—and what might still be—underneath?
“Let’s for the moment just suppose that these three Great Vampires were preparing to seed the world with spores. Okay, so we’ve delayed the scheme for one of them, but what of the other two? That’s why now, after three years of nothing, there’s this sudden urgency. Or rather, that is why I’m bringing the urgency home to you, for it’s been with me all of that time! And if you don’t believe me, well just take a look at my hair!” There was no humor this time, faked or for real, in Trask’s tone.
“Oh, I know how hard you’ve all been working,” he continued, “using every possible means to track these creatures down; we’ve put every spare moment into it, and we’ve frequently neglected other tasks to stay focussed on this one job. So when I say ‘three years of nothing’ it’s not to belittle anyone but to point up my own frustration. But now it’s more than just frustration, and a whole lot more than simple anxiety for the world at large. For now I’m also anxious—deadly afraid—for you, me, us.
“Why? Well, let’s go back to square one:
“Malinari knows about us. He knows now for sure that we’ve been looking for him all this time, and that we’re not going to stop. And if he’s in contact with the others, they know it, too. But if you’ve read the files on the Yulian Bodescu business all of thirty-odd years ago—and if you haven’t, I suggest you do it now—you’ll know what that means. It may well be that from now on the Wamphyri won’t be so happy just sitting around waiting for us to come looking for them, but instead may come looking for us!
“I’m just about finished. But starting right here and now, I want extra effort, people. I want daily think-tanks, and more time spent at your machines and in your minds. Put your gadgets to their full use, and likewise your ghost talents. We have to find Malinari again, and Vavara and Szwart, and we have to find them soon, before those extrap computers are shown to have been correct. For remember, our three years are up!
“And one last thing. I want extra vigilance from everyone. Not for me but for you. And especially in the dead of night …”
As the espers filed out into the corridor and on to their workplaces, and the techs went back to their viewscreens and computers, Trask stood in the doorway and stopped his joint Seconds-in-Command, Ian Goodly and David Chung, telling them, “Come and talk to me in my office.”
And when they were there: “I’ve pretty much left you alone since we got back,” he told them. “No duties, and no additional pressures. That’s because of all our people you two have enough on your plates already. David, although I have two other locators—Bernie Fletcher being the better of the two—with all due respect, they can’t hold a candle to you. And Ian, our other precogs are precogs in name only. Mainly hunchmen, they’re good at making clever guesses, at seeing how things are going to add up. But since we have machines that can do that, their only advantage is they don’t require programming. So as usual, you two are my main men. Our telepaths aren’t in short supply; it seems to me Liz Merrick is coming along just fine, and that’s despite this sudden ‘setback’ with Jake Cutter, which—”
“Which you’re not buying?” Ian Goodly, tall and skeletally thin, and looking like nothing so much as an out-of-work undertaker, raised a thinly etched, questioning eyebrow.
Trask shook his head. “No, I’m not. Liz: I read her like a book—and I also read some of the looks she was giving Jake in the Ops room. She thinks he’s been stalling, keeping her out of his mind. And as for Jake: well, I can’t any longer read him at all! So it’s like I suspected: he doesn’t intend on making it easy for us. And hardest of all for Liz, for I think she’s got something of a crush on him.”
“A crush?” (Again Goodly’s raised eyebrow, lifting higher yet.) “Now you’re really showing your age! ‘Fancies him,’ would be more in tune with the times, I think. Or perhaps, ‘she’d like to get into his pants?’ Good grief!”
“Whatever,” said Trask, shrugging.
“But he is going to stay with us,” Goodly declared with a quiet certainty that Trask knew of old.
“You’ve seen that?”
“I see lots of Jake, in the future. No great detail, nothing definite, but he’s there.”
“With us, or getting in our way?”
“I can’t say. Maybe both.”
“Huh!” Trask grunted, and took a deep breath before going on: “Anyway, and as I was saying, you are the top men and it’s up to you to motivate, activate, and galvanize the others while continuing to do your own things to the best of your abilities in the current circumstances. Meaning, I know it’s not easy for you to work under duress. Your skills aren’t like that. They’re more or less free agents in their own right.”
“Exactly,” said Chung. “And where Jake Cutter’s concerned, my talent has never been freer. Anything that once belonged to Harry Keogh—such as that old hairbrush—it just comes alive when Jake’s in the vicinity. So he can kid us all he wants that he’s ‘lost it’ or it’s ‘gone away,’ but I know better. Whatever it is that he got from Harry, he’s got it in spades!”
Trask looked at Chung—a Chinese “Cockney” in his late forties, slight in figure but awesome in his abilities as a scryer and locator—and nodded. “We’re agreed on that … we saw it in action out in Australia … we’d all have been dead without it! But having something, and being willing to explore it or put it to good use—to our use, the world’s use—are entirely different things …
“Anyway, enough of Jake for the moment. When we’re through here I’ll speak to him and Liz both, see if I can find out what he’s playing at.” Trask went behind his desk, sat down, and continued:
“Meanwhile, how are things going with you two? We’ve been home more than a week now, gentlemen, and I haven’t heard a peep out of you. David, what about the Wamphyri battle gauntlet that our Australian major found in underground Xanadu? It could only have belonged to Malinari, or maybe to the lieutenant Jake says he used as fertilizer. Anything on that? Anything at all?”
Chung shook his head. “Right now, nothing,” he said. “Malinari seems to have gone to earth. Nothing strange in that. For three years he hid himself away and we didn’t get a sniff. He’s so in control he never shows a trace of mindsmog. And remember, it wasn’t him who gave the show away in the first place; it was Trennier’s nest in the Gibson Desert that let him down. Even in Xanadu, I had to be that close before I located him! If it wasn’t for Jethro Manchester and those others out in the Capricorn Group, we still might not have found him. So it’s my guess that if or when we get our break it will be his thralls that let him down, not Nephran Malinari himself. And the same thing goes for the others, too.”
Trask tightened his lips, growled, “Well stay on it. We’ll set up a separate maps room away from Ops, give you more space, lots of privacy. You can sleep in there if you have to, you and that gauntlet! But we have to get results …”
He turned to the precog. “Ian, how’s the future looking?”
Goodly’s expression was, as usual, mournful as he answered, “My problems are the same as always. The future is a hell of a devious thing. And the more I force it, the less it works. You know that old saying: more haste, less speed? Well, that’s what it’s like. Like when you’re given a Chinese wood puzzle, a jumble of geometric shapes, which in the correct positions all fit perfectly into a square box. If you’re allowed to work at it in your own time you can do it. But the moment there’s a time restriction your fingers turn to thumbs, and bits of wood go skittering in all directions. You may not have been pressuring me, Ben, but I have. And the future doesn’t much like it.”
“You’ve seen nothing?” Trask was obviously disappointed.
But the precog was chewing his top lip as he answered, “I have seen … things. Glimpses, flashes, daydreams—call them what you will—but I’m reluctant to call them the future. I’m as prone to déjà vu feelings, dreaming, and paramnesia as anyone else, and that could be all these things are. They haven’t been those very
definite scenes that send me reeling, the ones that can’t be anything else but the future, and usually a dangerous future. So naturally I’m reluctant to send anyone off on a wild goose chase. Not when we might need all of the manpower we’ve got … and not that I’d know where to send him anyway.”
“You’d better explain,” said Trask. “Just exactly what are these things that you’ve been seeing. Anything has to be better than nothing.”
“Not necessarily,” Goodly sighed. “But, if you insist:
“I’ve seen—I don’t know—shapes, figures. Black-robed figures, drifting or floating. And I’ve seen something sinking, deeper and deeper into groaning abysses of water. I’ve seen … a warren of tunnels and burrows, like gigantic wormholes in the earth, all filled with loathsomeness … morbid mucus in a cosmic sinus. I’ve seen hooded eyes, watching, and a weird shadow approaching, getting closer every time I see it … .”
The precog fell silent. He gave a sharp, involuntary shudder and blinked eyes that had seemed momentarily blind or vacant, until they refocussed on Trask. And:
“That’s it,” he said. “That’s what I’ve seen …”
But Trask had fallen under the spell of the other’s words, so that he, too, had to give himself a shake before he could say, “And you call that nothing?”
“Nothing we can do anything with,” the precog answered. “I mean, it has no application.”
“But it’s not nothing,” said Trask. “It’s something, and I want you to write it down. And from now on you and David—and you can pull in one of our telepaths, but not Liz—I want you working together. In a special map room, yes. And then if these things—especially these eyes, or this shadow—if they come any closer, perhaps you’ll see them that much more clearly.”
