by Brian Lumley
‘In his own mind, yes. Like some innocent, cringing, terrified victim locked in a dungeon.’
‘A victim of what?’ Darcy wanted to know, slack-jawed as he gaped at her trembling in Harry’s arms.
‘Oh God! Oh God!’ she whispered, her trembling threatening to shake Harry, too, as her eyes went fearfully back to Trevor Jordan lolling there unconscious in his chair. And Darcy felt his blood stiffen to ice in the haunted light of her eyes, as finally she answered: ‘Of the monster who’s in there with him! Of that Thing who’s in there right now, talking to him, questioning him… about us!’
8. Undead!
Night was already drawing in, the early-break tourists promenading in their evening finery, and the town’s lights beginning to come on as the taxi sped the three to their villa. But in the front of the car with the driver, Manolis Papastamos was very quiet. Darcy supposed that the Greek felt out of things and probably considered he’d been snubbed, and he wondered how best to make up for it. There was still a lot Papastamos could do for them; indeed, without his co-operation they might find the going very difficult.
The villa stood in its own high-walled gardens of lemon, almond and olive trees, overlooking the sea on the Akti Canari promenade towards the airport. It was square and flat-roofed, had shuttered windows, squealing wrought-iron gates and a pebbled path to the main door, where a dim lamp glowed under the roof of a pine porch. The lamp had already attracted a cloud of moths, and they in their turn had lured several small green geckoes, which scattered across the wall as Papastamos turned the key gratingly in the door. And while the stubble-jawed, chain smoking taxi driver patiently waited, so the Greek policeman showed his three very odd foreign visitors around the place.
It wasn’t the best but it was private and gave easy access to the town; there were cooking facilities but the three would be well advised to eat at any one of the half-dozen excellent tavernas which stood within a stone’s throw; and there was a telephone, which came with a typed list of useful local numbers kept clean in a plastic folder. Downstairs were two bedrooms, both equipped with two single beds, bedside tables, reading lamps and built-in wardrobes. There was also a spacious sitting-or reading-room, with glass doors to a patio under a striped, wind-down canvas awning. And lastly a small toilet and bathroom; no bath as such but a tiled shower recess and all the rest of the amenities. Upstairs didn’t matter.
When Papastamos was through he automatically assumed he wouldn’t be needed any more that night; but when he went back out to the taxi Darcy followed him, saying, ‘Manolis, we really don’t know how to thank you. I mean, how do we pay for all of this? Oh, we can pay — of course we can — but you’ll have to tell us how, and how much, and… et cetera.’
The other shrugged. ‘It’s on the Greek government.’
‘That’s very kind,’ Darcy said. ‘We really would have been lost without you. Especially at a time like this, with so much on our minds. For Layard and Jordan, they really are — or were — two of our very closest friends.’
At last Papastamos turned to him. ‘My friends, too!’ he said, with a lot of feeling. ‘I only knew them for a day or two, but they were nice people! And I tell you, not everyone I meet is so nice!’
‘Then you must understand how we feel,’ Darcy answered, ‘who knew them a long time.’
Papastamos was quiet a moment then shrugged again, perhaps apologetically, and nodded. ‘Yes, of course I understand. Is there anything else I can do?’
‘Oh, indeed there is!’ Darcy knew it was all right between them now. ‘Like I said, we’d be lost without you. And that still goes. We’d like you to exert whatever pressure you can to get that autopsy over and done with, and then to have poor Ken Layard cremated as soon as possible. And that’s just for starters. You’ll also need to keep tabs on this gang of drug-smugglers, for right now you’re the only one who knows anything about them. We will eventually have some more people flying out, and you’ll also be required to brief them. And finally, if it’s at all possible… do you think you could arrange a car for us?’
‘No problem!’ said the other, expansive as ever. ‘It will be here tomorrow morning.’
‘Then that’s about it for now,’ Darcy smiled. ‘We’ll just trust you to see to your end of this thing, for after all, that’s what’s most important. And you must trust us to do the things we have to do. We’re all experts in our different ways, Manolis.’
Papastamos scribbled a number on a scrap of paper. ‘You can get me here any time,’ he said. ‘Or if not, you’ll get someone who knows where I am.’
Darcy thanked him again and said good night. And as the taxi drew away he went back in through the squeaking gates…
The three went out to eat, and to talk.
‘But why out?’ Darcy wanted to know, after they’d found a taverna fronting on a quiet street, with small stairways to private tables on internal balconies, out of earshot of other patrons. And when they were seated in just such privacy: ‘I mean, wasn’t the villa private enough?’
‘It could have been too private,’ Harry told him.
‘Too private?’ Sandra was still a little shaky from the brief mental contact she’d made with something unthinkable in the mind of Trevor Jordan.
‘There are people here,’ Harry tried to explain something he wasn’t himself sure of. ‘Other minds, other thoughts. A background blanket of mental activity. You two should understand that better than I do. I don’t want us to be found out, that’s all. You think you espers are clever? Well, and so you are — but the Wamphyri have powers, too.’
Wamphyri! It was a word Darcy Clarke couldn’t hear without remembering the Yulian Bodescu affair. And he felt a familiar shiver down his spine as he asked: ‘And you believe that’s what we’re up against, right? Another like Bodescu?’
‘Worse than that,’ Harry answered. ‘Bodescu was an open book compared to this. He didn’t know what was happening to him. He wasn’t an innocent himself — hadn’t even been innocent from a time before he was born — but he was an innocent in the ways of the Wamphyri. He was a beginner, a child learning how to run before he could walk. And he made mistakes, kept falling down. Until one of his falls was fatal. But this one isn’t like that.’
‘Harry,’ said Sandra, ‘how do you know these things? How do you know what we’re up against? Yes, I sensed a mind in there with Trevor’s, a powerful, totally evil mind… but couldn’t it have been another telepath? They were on a drugs job, Ken and Trevor. What if the big-league criminals have set up their own ESP-units? It could happen, couldn’t it?’
‘I doubt it,’ Harry answered. ‘From what I’ve seen of espers they don’t work for other people.’
‘What?’ Darcy was surprised. ‘But we all do. Ken, Trevor, Sandra, myself. And you, once upon a time.’
‘Worked for a cause,’ said Harry, ‘for an idea, a country, for revenge. Not for the gain of other people. Would you, if you were as powerful as the one Sandra sensed? Would you sell your talent to a gang of thugs who’d destroy you the moment they began to fear you — which they would, eventually?’
‘But what about Ivan Gerenko, who — ?’
‘A madman, a megalomaniac!’ Harry cut him off. ‘No, even the necromancer Dragosani was working for an ideal — the resurrection of old Wallachia. At least until his vampire took control. Listen: how many people know you have your talent, Darcy? And Sandra, how many people know you’re a telepath? I’ve only known it myself for a few hours. You didn’t go around advertising it, did you? Take it from me, the ones who do tell all are the fakes. Mediums and spoon-benders, mystics and gurus — fakes every one!’
Darcy snorted his derision. ‘So you’re saying that all of us espers are good guys, right?’
‘No such thing,’ Harry shook his head. ‘No, for there’s plenty of wickedness in the world, even among “all you espers”. But think about it: if you’re evil and you’ve mastered a special talent, why would you want to sell it to someone else? Wouldn’t
you use it — in secret — to make yourself mighty?’
‘The fact is,’ said Darcy, ‘I’ve often wondered why they don’t! The people in E-Branch, I mean.’
‘I’ve no doubt that some do,’ said Harry. ‘No, I’m not talking about E-Branch, but others, people we know nothing about. There must be many talents loose in the world. How do we know that so-called “business acumen” isn’t just another talent? Did this man make a million because he has a “knack” for wheeling and dealing, or was it because there’s a special something guiding his hand? Something which he himself might not even know about? Is the war hero really as brave as we believe him to be, or has he — like you, Darcy, or even like Gerenko
— got a guardian angel watching over him? Did you know that the casinos have a list of people they won’t let in, professional gamblers who have the winning “knack”, and that an awful lot of them are rich as Croesus?’
‘That’s all very well,’ said Darcy, reasonably, ‘but still you have no proof that this one is a vampire!’
‘Proof, not yet,’ Harry answered. ‘But evidence, plenty. Circumstantial, but still it’s there.’
‘Such as?’ said Sandra.
Perhaps exasperated, he turned to her. ‘Sandra, the closest you’ve been to a vampire is in reading my case file. I take it you have read it? It’s a standard text in E-Branch, as a guard against “the next time”. But I do know what I’m talking about, and so does Darcy. So while I don’t want to be hurtful, still I think you’d best just sit still and listen. Especially you, for we don’t yet know that when you saw him — whoever he is — in Trevor’s mind, he didn’t see you!’
She gasped and sat up straighter, and Harry reached across to pat her hand. ‘I’m sorry, but now maybe you can see what’s worrying me. Some of it, anyway. Me? — I’ve been here before, or at least in a similar position. But you? — God, I don’t want anything to happen to you!’
Darcy said: ‘But you did mention evidence.’
Before Harry could answer, a waiter came to take their order. Darcy ordered a full meal, Sandra a salad and sweet, but Harry only asked for a portion of chicken and plenty of coffee. ‘A full stomach always makes me sleepy,’ he explained, ‘and alcohol is worse still. And I intend that you understand how deadly serious I am about this thing. But if you really want to drink that brandy, just go ahead, Darcy.’
Darcy looked at his brandy glass and the large measure of golden liquid it contained, and put it aside.
‘Evidence, then,’ said Harry. ‘For more than four years the dead haven’t attempted to contact me. Or if they have, I haven’t been aware of it. Oh, my mother may well have come to me in my dreams; in fact I’m sure she has, for that’s her nature. And yet now, suddenly, they’ve placed me in jeopardy. All right, the fact of them attacking Wellesley was circumstantial: they just happened to be there when he’d planned to murder me. But they were there, delivering a message. And they were doing it, possibly (a) for my mother, or (b) for themselves, out of their concern for me, or (c) for Ken and Trevor, who had been trying to reach me in my dreams.’
Darcy frowned. ‘They’d been trying to reach you, telepathically? I didn’t know that.’
‘Neither did I, until Ken Layard woke up and saw us, and spoke. A mental voice sounds just like the real thing to me, Darcy, and back in Scotland I’d been dreaming that people were trying to reach me, but I didn’t know who they were. As soon as I heard Ken’s real voice, then I recognized it. As to how they did it: Ken’s a locator, he found me. And Trevor’s a telepath, he helped send the message. Why me? Because I’m the so-called “expert” on what they both knew they were dealing with. And so they should know, because they too were in on the Bodescu affair.’
Darcy nodded, licked his dry lips. He lifted his brandy and took the merest sip, dampening his mouth with it. ‘All right — what other evidence?’
‘The evidence of my own senses,’ said Harry, ‘which, like yours, number more than five.’
‘Not any longer,’ Sandra pointed out — and at once bit her tongue, hoping he wouldn’t take it the wrong way.
Harry didn’t. Smiling, however wryly, he said: ‘I don’t have to be able to talk to the dead to know the difference between a corpse and a live man.’
Again Darcy frowned. ‘So what does that mean?’ he asked. ‘The same goes for any one of us!’
‘Have you ever walked down a silent, empty alley at night?’ Harry asked him. ‘And all of a sudden you’re certain someone is there? And sure enough, you see the flare of a match in a dark corner where someone is lighting a cigarette? Have you ever played hide-and-seek where you’re it, and when you’re searching for the other kids you get this feeling right between the shoulder blades that someone is watching you? And when you look round, again one of them is there? I mean, not the sixth sense which you already know you possess, but just a sort of gut feeling?’
Darcy nodded, and Harry continued: ‘Well, just as you sense the presence of living people, so I sense the dead. I know when I’m in the company of dead men. Which is why I can tell you definitely that Ken Layard isn’t! Even if I could still speak to the dead, I couldn’t have spoken to Ken. For he’s not dead. Oh, he’s not alive either, but something in between. He’s undead, in thrall to some other, and he’ll rise up again as a vampire unless we make sure he’s put down forever. That’s what he was saying to me in my dream, what he was begging me to do: find him, finish him, put him down.’
Again Darcy nodded. ‘And when he and Trevor couldn’t get through to you, the real dead relayed their message, right?’
‘Right,’ said Harry. “They tried to spell it out for me, in stone, right there in my garden.’
Sandra shuddered. ‘God, but I just might have defied Wellesley, Harry! I might have been there with you when he came after you. Also when They came after him!’ She shook her head. ‘I don’t think I could bear it… to have seen those things.’
He reached out to clasp her hand across the table. ‘They’re not just things,’ he said. They were living people, once. And now they’re dead people. Why, most of the soil and sand and sky and sea oh or covering this entire planet was alive one time or another! It’s the nature of things, and life’s a stage we go through. But the dead think enough of me to transcend the natural order of things.’
‘And transcending the natural makes them… supernatural?’ This from Darcy.
‘I suppose it does,’ said Harry, turning his soulful eyes on him. ‘But didn’t we think of vampires as being supernatural, once upon a time?’ And at last he allowed himself a genuine smile, however wan. ‘You know, Darcy, for the head of E-Branch you’re hellish sceptical! I mean, isn’t this what it’s always been about? Gadgets and ghosts? The physical and the metaphysical? The natural and the supernatural?’
‘I’m not sceptical,’ said Darcy, ‘for I’ve seen too much for that. It’s just that I like things sorted out, that’s all.’
‘And have I sorted things out for you?’
‘I suppose you have. So… where do we go from here?’
‘We go nowhere. We examine what we know, take a stab at what we don’t know. And we try to prepare for what’s coming. But frankly, if I were you two, I’d simply back right out of it.’
‘What?’ Darcy wondered if his hearing was all right.
‘You and Sandra. You should climb right aboard the next flight for home, go back to E-Branch and utilize whatever powers are available to you from that end. We should play it like we played the Bodescu business: low-key, until we know what we’re dealing with.’
Darcy shook his head. ‘We’re in it together. I can get the Branch jacked-up from right here. Maybe I’d better remind you: falling in harm’s way isn’t a habit of mine. My guardian angel? And anyway, what can you do on your own? Sandra was right, Harry. You’re an ex-Necroscope. You don’t have it any more. Where talents are concerned, you no longer figure. And as you yourself pointed out, what happened in Bonnyrig was entirely coincidental: the dea
d won’t be there to help you out every time. So let’s face it, of the three of us you’re the weakest. It isn’t that you don’t need us, more that we don’t need you.’
Harry stared at him. ‘You need my expertise,’ he said. ‘And I’ve already stated the possible danger to Sandra. She really shouldn’t be anywhere near me, and…’ And abruptly, he paused. But too late, for the damage was done. He never had been much good at subterfuge.
‘Near you?’ she said. ‘What does that mean, Harry?’ It was her turn to trap his hand.
He sighed, looked away, finally said: ‘Look, we have a vampire here. Possibly of the old guard, but in any case not too far removed from the original strain, the Wamphyri themselves. And like I keep telling you, if only you’d listen, the Wamphyri have powers! Sandra, you looked in Jordan’s head and there was this thing in there torturing him, questioning him — specifically about us. By now he probably knows all there is to know about E-Branch, and how we dealt with what Thibor Ferenczy left behind, and Yulian Bodescu, and… hell, anything he wants to know! But more especially he’ll know about me. If not now, soon. And then he’ll come for me. He can’t afford not to, for he’ll know his cover’s blown. I’m Harry Keogh, the Necroscope, and I’m dangerous. I’ve killed vampires; I’ve caused vampire sources to be rooted out and destroyed; and locked away in my brain somewhere I have the secrets of dead speak and the Möbius Continuum. Of course he’ll come for me. And for you two, if you’re with me. Now Darcy… OK, you have your talent, which protects you. But you’re still a man, flesh and blood. You were born and you can die. And remember, this thing knows about your talent! If there’s a way to dispose of you — or even better, to use you — he’ll find it.’
‘But surely that’s my big advantage?’ Darcy argued. ‘I already know how to kill him!’
‘Oh?’ said Harry. ‘And how will you find him? And if and when you do, do you think he’ll lie still for you to stake him out? Man, he won’t wait for you to find him — he’ll come looking for you! For us! Look, I’ll say it again: compared to this, Yulian Bodescu was a bumbling amateur.’
