by Brian Lumley
“Me?” Jake protested. “The way I heard it, most of the badmouthing was down to him! Anyway, I was only answering in kind, giving back as good as I got. ‘When in Rome,’ and all that.”
Among the Wamphyri, Korath said, invective is seldom used. Why warn an enemy by cursing him when swift and decisive action will speak far louder than any words? What purpose is served by swearing at an insubordinate thrall? Even the harshest of words will fly right over his head, for they are only words and he is a vampire! But if on the other hand his head should do the flying, when it is shorn from his shoulders—
“—Too late for him,” said Jake, “but the rest of the gang will get the message.”
Exactly, said Korath. Indeed, we have a saying: stakes and stones may break our bones, but calling—
“—Will not harm us?” Jake nodded. “We have much the same saying on this side of the Gate.”
So then, said Korath. Better to simply kill than to curse, don’t you agree?
“Which sounds about right for Starside,” said Jake, “but I don’t think it would go down too well here! As for swearwords: they’re used mainly for emphasis ; often as expletives, or where the user hasn’t got much of a ‘decent’ vocabulary. So Ben Trask says, anyway. But the Wamphyri don’t use bad language, eh?”
(Korath’s deadspeak shrug.) In order to goad an enemy into mindless, headlong action and so disadvantage him, perhaps. But as a matter of course, no.
“That could be worth remembering,” said Jake.
As you will (another shrug). And, after a moment: But all that is for the future, and as for right now: what’s next? Will you try to locate this “gibbering” Willie Stuker, or attempt to speak to the “incendiary” Frankie Reggio? Surely not the latter, for his language is almost sure to be (hah!) “inflammatory,” and his response of no value whatsoever. Your victims owe you nothing, Jake. Which means that there is only one among the teeming dead who does owe you, and even that is a dubious supposition.
“Natasha,” said Jake softly. And then, frowning: “But did you say dubious?”
Certainly. For haven’t you often thought it, and haven’t I seen it in your mind? Are you not in large part responsible for Natasha’s … for her current situation?
For some few seconds Jake was silent. Conscience, yes. And Korath had hit the nail right on the head: what was burning him up inside was as much down to himself as to anyone else. For if he hadn’t met Natasha in the first place …
… But he’d had this argument with himself a hundred times before, and it always came out the same: while he was partly to blame, others were far more so. Jake’s guilt lay in that he had loved Natasha, which caused her to love him; theirs lay in that they had killed her for it.
And if the only way to get back at them was through her—
—You will go to her, then. But where?
“The only place I know,” Jake answered, his voice breaking just a little, before he could catch it.
Korath saw it in his mind: the bridge near Riez, under the Alps of Provence. The broken wall, where Castellano’s thugs had rammed Jake’s car—with Jake and Natasha trapped inside—over the edge and into the torrential Verdon River.
“The river was in flood,” Jake told him. “I managed to get clear of the car—don’t ask me how, for we were both drugged. But I survived while Natasha … didn’t. I wasn’t strong enough to swim, let alone go back under for her! The next thing I knew was when I washed up on a bank downstream. The car wasn’t found for weeks, but when it was she was still in it. So I don’t know—can’t say for sure—but maybe it’s possible something of her has lingered on right there where she died.”
You don’t know where she’s buried?
“She was cremated,” said Jake. “I … I read about it. She went up in smoke, I can’t remember where. It seems I’ve blotted most of that out of my mind.”
But the bridge? The river?
“That’s a place I’ll never forget,” said Jake. “Its coordinates will be with me forever.”
Just along the alley, a uniformed gendarme in the recessed entrance to a store had been watching Jake for some time. There was something vaguely familiar about Jake’s face, and there was definitely something strange about his behaviour! He alternated between leaning on the wall and standing up straight, pacing to and fro and standing stock-still, holding his head cocked in an attitude of intent listening, and talking to himself. It wasn’t possible that he talked to anyone else, for he was quite alone.
But his face … a picture in the wanted gallery, perhaps? The gendarme stepped out of the store doorway, started down the alley towards Jake.
Jake saw him coming and turned a corner out of sight.
Hah! The gendarme broke into a run, arrived at the corner and turned it … and skidded to an astonished halt. There were no more street corners in the vicinity, just blank walls for at least a hundred yards. And no open windows or doorways anywhere in sight. Not so strange in itself, except there was no sign of the fugitive, either! In fact there was nothing—
—Just the final swirl of a dust devil collapsing onto the sunbaked pavement. For Jake Cutter, reluctant and as yet unaccepted Necroscope, had doorways of his own … or almost of his own.
And until they were his own, if ever, his “colleague,” the dead but everavailable vampire, Korath-once-Mindsthrall, would be there to play the role of keeper of the keys …
Not too many miles inland of Marseilles, under the Alps of Provence, the weather was very different. Black clouds were rolling south off the peaks in what was promising to be the first storm of the season. High up in the foothills, the narrow road over a stone-built, humpbacked bridge was mainly deserted. Far below, on the road’s zigzagging asphalt ribbon, one or two cars crawled like bugs along the winding contours, their chrome fenders glinting with chitin facets where occasional beams of sunlight forced their way through the threatening thunderheads.
Jake stood by the low wall of the bridge, looked over and down, and shivered. He wasn’t cold but he shivered. The stones under his hands had been recently cemented in place; no lichen or moss had grown on them as yet; it was a very obvious repair to the eight-foot gap that Castellano’s thugs had created when they crashed his car through.
And down below, the water was a shallow, calm-seeming lake in the vast bowl that the river’s rush had cut in its rocky bed through all the centuries, a lake that narrowed to a bottleneck where the river speeded up toward its next white-water descent, and the one after that, and so on.
So that Jake wondered, “Did I really live through that? How many falls did I take before I washed up?”
Following the river’s course and rocky descent through his host’s eyes, Korath answered, If I did not know better, I would have said your first was surely your last!
“The river was in flood,” Jake answered, “and the lake was full to its brim and spilling over. Otherwise we’d have hit the bottom and solid rock. But as it was, we were no sooner through the wall than we were in the water. It would have been—what? Maybe twenty feet deep?” He shook his head. “Seemed a whole lot more than that at the time …”
You were very lucky.
“Yes, I was,” said Jake quietly, but with the emphasis on the I. And shielding his thoughts, keeping them to himself: But she wasn’t.
Except … which she was he thinking about? Standing there at the wall, suddenly Jake reeled—
—Reeled and sat down with a bump—on the grassy bank of a Scottish river! It felt as real as if he were actually there, and he wasn’t any longer Jake but someone else, the only one he could be in this place thinking these thoughts:
“Ma, are you there?”
But she wasn’t there. She’d moved on. Gone to join an even Greater Majority in a special place beyond the beyond. And poor little Harry (that was what she’d always called him) was on his own. “Ma?” he said again.
And Korath repeated him: Ma? Jake, who are it you are talking to? Your mother, here?
And as quickly as that he was back at the wall again, back in the Jake mind, the Jake reality.
Jake? (Korath’s voice again, and actually anxious!)
“It’s okay,” said Jake, still a little shaken. “It was the river, that’s all. It was like, I don’t know, a feeling of déjà vu, or something. See, Harry and I, we both lost someone in the same kind of way. Harry lost his Ma in the water, and I—”
—But as his thoughts returned to Natasha, they, too, were like an invocation.
Jake? Her voice, which he’d thought he would never hear again. Natasha’s voice, as if she whispered in his ear, causing Jake to gasp and wheel about … but in fact she only whispered in his mind.
And paradoxically, because this was Natasha, Jake found it far less believable, far less acceptable, than when he’d talked to Harry, Zek, Korath, or even Jean Daniel. For Natasha had been as real to him as life itsetf—no, she had been real to him in life itself! Jake had known her—the warm, living, breathing, sadly smiling, oh-so-real Natasha, and people who you know just don’t talk to you when they’re dead.
Well, and hadn’t the Frenchman been real, too? But despite Jean Daniel’s reality—his three-dimensional status in Jake’s mind—still he’d been a stranger, a cardboard figure, a target on a shooting range. Yes, a target, all shot to pieces now. And therein lay the paradox.
Jean Daniel and the others, they simply didn’t matter, but Natasha was still real in Jake’s memory. And hearing her voice, for all that it was a deadspeak voice, brought it all back in a flood of emotion. And:
“God!” he said. “Oh God! I let you down! I let you drown!”
Jake, Jake, Jake, she said with a voice like the sea in a seashell. Stop punishing yourself. You didn’t let me drown. No way! You just couldn’t stop it, that’s all. And Jake, something you should know: I never felt a thing. I didn’t wake up, didn’t know, didn’t suffer.
“And yet you’re suffering now,” he said. “Your voice: it’s so faint. So weak.”
But that’s not because I’m suffering, Jake. You see, I was cremated, which is how I’d asked for it to be, in a will I made a long time ago. Cremated and my asbes scattered on the wind. I bad always fancied myself a free one—even when I wasn’t, even when I was trapped—for it was my way of escaping from things. So now I am free, flying on the wind. I’m in the storm clouds on the mountains there, and I’m falling in rain on the forests and into the seas. I’m thinning out as I go, spreading myself fine, you might say. But that’s okay because the less there is of me, the greater my freedom.
“And yet you’re here, too?”
Because I had to be. It’s all a matter of will, Jake. When I heard about you—
“—About me? But how did you hear about me?” (Jake’s voice was beginning to break now.)
The Great Majority talked about you, she answered. So many of them, Jake: it was like a shout going up! They felt how warm you were, and at first thought you were someone else. Then they saw that you weren’t—and how they argued then! They’re arguing still, because as yet many of them daren’t trust themselves into your care.
“Daren’t trust themselves?” Jake shook his head; he didn’t understand. “But who do they think I am, the angel Gabriel?”
Ah, but they might, they just might! Natasha answered. And before he could query her meaning, she went on: Jake, listen. I can’t stay here—it’s an effort just being here. But I thought you might come back some time, and I was right.
Now Jake was ashamed, because he hadn’t come simply to see Natasha—not just to talk to her or commiserate—but to ask her about Castellano. He could see how selfish, how thoughtless that was now. But even so, over and above any feelings of self-reproach, he could sense something else: an irresistible force, driving him on.
And for the first time Jake knew for sure, without knowing how he knew, that this wasn’t simply a matter of revenge. There was unfinished business here; something that someone else might have started, but that he must see through to the end. And his thoughts were deadspeak, of course.
Castellano? Natasha said. You feel guilty because you came here to find out about him, and not just to talk to me? But you don’t know how much easier that makes all of this, Jake!
“Easier?” For a moment Jake thought that she was trying to take some of the weight off his shoulders; but no, for he could actually feel the wave of relief that flowed out from her! “But … how does it make things easier?”
Because I have guilty feelings, too! She told him. Guilty, yes—for all those hoops I put you through …
“Hoops?” Jake shook his head. “But I don’t know what—”
But you do know what! Haven’t I told you I’d always wanted to be free? You were that freedom, Jake. In the real world, the world of the living, you were that freedom—or you would have been.
It took a while to sink in, until:
“I was your way out,” he said, feeling suddenly empty. “I was your passport out of a terrible situation …” But following the emptiness, replacing it, gathering in him until he expelled it in a sigh … as much and perhaps more relief than he’d felt in Natasha! Which was also wrong, surely? Or was it?
She heard that last, and answered:
I played at being in love, for my own ends. And you joined in the game: you got caught up in it. But it’s all right, Jake, and it’s worked out flne. Because now we’re both free.
Jake spent a moment thinking it through, then said: “Could it ever have worked for us, do you think? I mean, could it have become more than just a game?”
Both of us had lives before we met, she reminded him, and we were both carrying too much excess baggage. Some things that I have done … I can’t say for sure, but I might have found any normal sort of lifestyle tame by comparison! And maybe I’m mistaken, but I sensed that it was the same for you. No use trying to guess what the future might have brought, Jake, or even what your own future might yet bring. Best to face it as it comes.
“I know,” he nodded. “The future is like shit: it happens. Or as some people might say, it’s a devious thing.”
Not for me, she answered. My future’s here, blowing in the wind. But now that we’ve talked, surely you’ll see that there’s no longer any need for revenge against Castellano, and—
“Oh but there is!” Jake cut in, as once again he felt that driving force, that need to finish unfinished business. “Not so much vengeance now, but a need, definitely. Will you help me? I want to know his power base, and what I’ll be going up against, and where to look for him.”
And it’s not just for me? (Her deadspeak voice was anxious again.) Are you sure of that? I don’t want you putting yourself in harm’s way, endangering yourself for a lost cause.
“I can’t be sure about the cause,” he answered truthfully. “Isn’t simple justice enough? But since I’ll be going after him anyway, the main danger will lie in being unprepared.”
Following which she told him what he wanted to know: Luigi Castellano’s power base, his possible whereabouts, the strength of the soldiers with which he surrounded himself.
But it seemed she had barely enough time. Her voice was in the wind and was rapidly blowing away; she finished with a sigh and what might have been a kiss, the touch of a single raindrop against Jake’s gaunt, unshaven cheek. And then she was gone.
Or he thought that she was …
But as soon as Jake (and Korath, too) had also left that place—as the first real rain came lashing out of the darkening sky, and the wind began gusting with the force of a storm—then:
Thank you, Natasha, said Zek Foener, the merest whisper in the metaphysical deadspeak aether. Both for giving him peace of mind, and for helping
him to find the way ahead. That must have been hard for you, clearing bis conscience like that.
Not really, said the other, even less of a whisper. For it was at least half-true: Jake really was going to be my passport out of that mess.
Then I won’t ask if you actually loved him, said Zek.
And I won’t tell you, said the other. But Jake’s free now, and bas bis own life to live. My memory is one piece of excess baggage that be no longer has to take with him along the way.
Then let me thank you for myself, said Zek. For your selfless attitude. You see, I’ve had my problems, too, which you’ve resolved. For you’re right, Natasha: freedom is everything. And there’s someone I would set free, too, if only I knew how.
And as the storm gathered force, and lightning lit the sky over that empty bridge under the Alps of Provence, their voices faded and drifted apart; Zek returning to her mission on behalf of the new Necroscope, and Natasha intent on going her own way, the way she had chosen, in search of freedom absolute.
She at least would have her way, for all the world’s winds were waiting for her …
Twenty-four hours later:
In a dusty room floored with roughly hewn hexagonal stone flags, in the extensive cellars under Luigi Castellano’s villa near Bagheria, the master of the house and his second-in-command took a brief respite from grisly labours and talked.
“You did well,” said Castellano, the red flaring of flambeaux reflecting in his scarlet gaze, as he gloomed sardonically on the tools that Garzia had used to question a certain “Russian gentleman,” their visitor from Moscow. Garzia’s tools lay upon a stone table where he had thrown them: hammers with leaden heads coated in rubber; a joined pair of metal cups the size of large hen’s eggs, which could be tightened on a man’s tenderest parts by turning knurled screws; a metal headband, with more projecting screws so positioned as to be over the eyes and ears of the wearer, knurled on the outside and filed to sharp points on the inside; thumbscrews, tongs, and spoon-shaped gouges, and so on. A torturer’s museum.
