Necroscope IV: Deadspeak n-4

by Brian Lumley

  ‘But they have been watching us,’ said Zek. ‘I could feel them.’

  ‘And they are waiting for us up there,’ Jazz squinted at the rearing, dazzling white walls.

  ‘We’re skating on very thin ice,’ Darcy told the others. ‘I can feel my talent telling me that this far is far enough.’

  A shout echoed up to them from the beach. Looking back, they saw Ben Trask struggling up the incline after them. ‘Hold it!’ he yelled. ‘Wait!’

  He approached to within thirty or forty yards, then fell back against a boulder in the shade and rested a while. And when he had recovered: ‘I’ve been looking at the fortifications through my glasses,’ he yelled. ‘There’s something very wrong. The climb looks easy enough — up those ancient stone steps there — but it’s not. It’s a lie, a trap!’

  Jazz went back and met Ben halfway, and took the binoculars from him. ‘How do you mean, a trap?’

  ‘It’s like when I listen to a police interview with a suspect perp,’ Ben answered. ‘I can tell right off if he’s lying even if I don’t know what the lie is. So don’t ask me what’s wrong up there, just take my word for it that it is!’

  ‘OK,’ said Jazz. ‘Go on back down to the boat. From here on in we step wary.’

  When Ben had started back, Jazz looked through the binoculars at the zig-zagging, precipitous stone stairway from the base of the stack to the ancient walls. Close to the top, a jumble of boulders and shards of stone bulged from the gaping mouth of a cave, held back from the steps and the vertiginous edge by a barrier of heavy-duty wire mesh strung between deeply bedded iron staves. Cables, almost invisible, hung down from the ramparts and disappeared into the gloom of the cave. Jazz looked at these cables for long moments. Demolition wire? It could be.

  He rejoined the others where they waited. ‘I think we’re walking right into one,’ he said. ‘Or we will be if we start up those steps.’ He explained his meaning.

  Darcy took the binoculars from him, stuck his head out from under cover and double-checked the face of the looming rock. ‘You could be right… must be right! If Ben says it’s all wrong, it’s all wrong.’

  ‘No way we can cut those cables,’ Jazz said. “Those things up there have the advantage. They could spot a mouse trying to make it up those steps.’

  ‘Listen,’ said Manolis, who had also been studying the route up the rock. ‘Why don’t we play them at their own game? Let them think we’re falling for it, and make them waste their ambush.’

  ‘How?’ said Darcy.

  ‘We start on up,’ said Manolis, ‘but we are stringing it out a little, and one of us is staying well ahead of the rest. The path turns a corner just underneath the cave with the boulders. And just before the corner, there is this big hole — er, this concavity? — in the face of the cliff. So, one of us has already turned the corner, and the others look all set to follow him. The creatures up in the fort are in a quandary: do they press the button and get the one man for sure, or do they wait for the others to come round the corner? At this point the one in front, he goes faster, past the point of maximum danger, and the others pretend they are coming on! But they only just show themselves and don’t actually start on up that leg of the climb. The vampires can’t wait; they have missed one of us and so must try for the other three; they press the button. Boom!’

  Jazz took it up: ‘The three at the rear have now showed themselves around the corner, but unbeknown to the guys on top they’re expecting what happens next. As the charge blows those rocks out of the cave higher up, so the three skip back round the corner and into the scoop in the face of the cliff.’

  ‘Is how I see it,’ said Manolis, nodding, ‘yes.’

  ‘Or,’ said Darcy, his face suddenly pale, ‘we leave it till tonight, and — ‘

  ‘Is your guardian angel speaking?’ Manolis looked disgusted. ‘I have seen that look on your face before!’

  Darcy knew he was right and cursed under his breath. ‘So, who do you suggest bells the cat?’ he said.

  ‘Eh?’

  ‘Who goes first and risks getting blown the hell off the cliff?’

  Manolis shrugged. ‘But… who else? You, of course!’

  Jazz looked at Darcy and said: “This talent of yours, it really works?’

  ‘I’m a deflector, yes,’ Darcy nodded, and sighed.

  ‘So what’s the problem?’

  The problem is my talent doesn’t work in fits and starts,’ Darcy answered. ‘It’s working all the time. It makes a coward of me. Even knowing I’m protected, I’ll still use a taper to light a firework! You are saying: off you go, Darcy, get on up those steps.-But it is saying, run like hell, son — run like bloody hell!’

  ‘So what you have to ask yourself,’ said Jazz, ‘is who’s the boss, it or you?’

  Darcy offered a grim nod for answer, slapped a full magazine into the housing of his SMG and stepped out into view of who or whatever was watching from above. He made for the base of the stone steps and started up. The others looked at each other for a moment, then Manolis started after him. Jazz let him get out of earshot and said: ‘Zek, you stay here.’

  ‘What?’ she looked at him. ‘After Starside you’re telling me that I should let you do something like this on your own?’

  ‘I’m not on my own. And what good will you be anyway with only a speargun? We need you down here, Zek. If one of those things gets past us, you’re going to have to stop him.’

  “That’s just an excuse,’ she said. ‘You said it yourself: what good am I with only a speargun?’

  ‘Zek, I — ‘

  ‘All right!’ she said. And: ‘They’re waiting for you.’

  He kissed her and started after the other two. She let him get onto the steps and start upwards, then scrambled after. They could fight later…

  Just before the crucial corner, where the narrow stone steps angled left and climbed unevenly up the section of cliff face directly beneath the threatening cave with its potential barrage of boulders, Darcy paused to let the others catch up a little. His breathing was ragged and his legs felt like jelly: not because of the stiff climb but because he was fighting his talent every inch of the way.

  He looked back and, as Manolis and Jazz came into view, waved. And then he turned the corner and pushed on. But he remembered how, as he’d passed the sheltering hollow where the rest of the team would take cover, he’d been very tempted. Except he had known that once he stepped in there, it would take at least a stick of dynamite to get him out again!

  He craned his neck and glanced straight up, and winced. He could see the wire-netting holding back the bulging tangle of rocks not ten feet overhead. It was time to make his break for it. He put on speed and climbed out of the immediate danger area, then glanced back and saw Jazz and Manolis coming round the corner. At which precise moment a pebble slipped underfoot and sent him sprawling.

  Feeling his feet shoot out over the rim, Darcy grabbed at projecting rocks and in the same moment knew that it was going to happen. ‘Shit!’ he yelled, clinging to the cliff face and the steps, as a deafening explosion sounded close by and its shock wave threatened to hurl him into space. Then-

  — Fragments of rock were flying everywhere; it was like the entire stack was coming down; deaf and suffocating in choking dust and debris, Darcy could only cling and wait for the ringing to go out of his ears. A minute went by or maybe two, and the rumbling died away. Darcy looked back… and Jazz and Manolis were clambering dangerously up towards him across steps choked with rubble.

  But up ahead someone — two someones — were clambering dangerously down!

  As Darcy began pushing himself to his feet, he saw them: flame-eyed, snarling, coming to meet the stack’s invaders head on. One of them carried a pistol, the other had a nine-foot octopus pole with a barbed trident head. The tines must be all of eight inches long.

  Darcy’s SMG was trapped under rubble and stony debris. He yanked on the sling but it wouldn’t come. The vampire with the pistol had
paused and was taking aim. Something thrummed overhead and the creature aiming at Darcy dropped its pistol and staggered against the cliff face, its hands flying to the hardwood bolt skewering its chest. It gagged, gave a weird, hissing cry, fell to its knees and toppled into thin air.

  The other one came on, cursing and stabbing at Darcy with its terrible weapon. He somehow managed to turn the wicked trident head aside as Manolis arrived behind him. Then the Greek policeman yelled, ‘Get down!’ and Darcy threw himself flat again. He heard the crack! — crack! — crack! of Manolis’s Beretta, and the hissing of the vampire turn to shrieks of rage and agony. Shot three times at close range, the thing staggered there on the steps. Darcy yanked the octopus pole out of its hands, slammed the butt end into its chest. And over it went, mewling and yelping as it pinwheeled all the way down to the base of the stack.

  Jazz Simmons came up to the other two. ‘Up or down?’ he panted.

  ‘Down,’ said Darcy at once. ‘And don’t worry, it isn’t my talent playing up. It’s just that I know how hard those things are to kill!’ He looked beyond his two friends. ‘Where’s Zek?’

  ‘Down below,’ said Jazz.

  ‘All the more reason to get back down,’ said Darcy. ‘After we’ve burned those two, then we’ll see what else is up here.’

  But Zek wasn’t down below, she was just that moment coming round the corner. And when she saw that they were all in one piece… her sigh of relief said more than any number of spoken words.

  They brought petrol from the boat and burned the two badly broken vampires, then rested a while before going up into the old fortifications. Up there Janos had been preparing a spacious, spartan retreat; not quite an aerie of the Wamphyri as Zek remembered such, but a place almost equally sinister and foreboding.

  Letting her telepathic talent guide her through piles of tumbled masonry and openings in half-constructed walls, and past deep embrasure windows opening on fantastic views of the ocean’s curved horizon, she led the others to a trapdoor concealed under tarpaulins and timbers. They opened it up and saw ages-hollowed stone steps leading down into a Crusader dungeon. Rigging torches, the men followed the stairwell down into the reeking heart of the stack, and Zek followed the men. Down there they foupd the low-walled rims of a pair of covered wells which plunged even deeper into darkness, but that was when Zek gasped and lay back against nitrous walls, shivering.

  ‘What is it?’ Jazz’s voice echoed in the leaping torchlight.

  ‘In the wells,’ she gasped, one hand held tremblingly to her throat. ‘There were places like this in the aeries on Starside. Places where the Wamphyri kept their… beasts!’

  The wells were covered with lids fashioned from planking; Manolis put his ear to one of the covers and listened, but could hear nothing. ‘Something in the wells?’ he said, frowning.

  Zek nodded. “They’re silent now, afraid, waiting. Their thoughts are dull, vacuous. They could be siphoneers, or gas-beasts, or anything. And they don’t know who we are. But they fear we might be Janos! These are… things of Janos, grown out of him.’

  Darcy gave a shudder and said: ‘Like the creature Yulian Bodescu kept in his cellar. But… it has to be safe to look, at least. Because if it wasn’t I’d know.’

  Manolis and Jazz lifted the cover from one of the wells and stood it on its edge by the low wall. They looked down into Stygian darkness but could see nothing. Jazz looked at the others, shrugged, held out his torch over the mouth of the well and let it fall.

  And it was like all hell had been let loose!

  Such a howling and roaring, a mewling and spitting and frenzied clamour. For a moment — only a moment — the flaring torch as it fell lit up the monstrosity at the bottom of the dry well. They saw eyes, a great many, gaping jaws and teeth, a huge lashing of rubbery limbs. Something terrible beyond words crashed about down there, leaped and gibbered. In the next moment the torch went out, which was as well for they’d seen enough. And as the hideous tumult continued, Jazz and Manolis replaced the cover over the awful shaft.

  On their way back up the steps, Manolis said: ‘We shall need all the fuel we can spare.’

  ‘And plenty of this building timber,’ Jazz added.

  ‘And after that those other limpet mines,’ said Darcy, ‘so we can be sure we’ve blocked those wells up forever. It’s time things were put back to rights here.’

  As they reached the open air, Zek clutched Jazz’s arm and said, ‘But if this is a measure of what Janos can do here, even in the limited time he’s had, just think what he might have done up in those Transylvanian mountains.’

  Darcy looked at his friends and his face was still gaunt and ashen. His throat was dry as he voiced his own thoughts: ‘God, I wouldn’t be in Harry Keogh’s shoes for… for anything!’

  Harry woke up to the sure knowledge that something had happened, something far away and terrible. Inhuman screams rang in his ears, and a roaring fire blazed before his eyes. But then, starting upright in his bed, he realized that the screams were only the morning cries of cockerels, and that the fire was the blaze of the sun striking through his east-facing windows.

  Now that he was awake there were other sounds and sensations: breakfast sounds from downstairs, and food smells rising from the kitchen.

  He got up, washed, shaved and quickly dressed. But as he was about to go downstairs he heard a strangely familiar jingling, a creaking, and the easy clatter of hooves from out in the road. He went to look down, and was surprised to feel the heat of the sun on his arms where he leaned out of the window. He frowned. The hot yellow sunlight irritated him, made him itchy.

  Down there in the road, horse-drawn caravans rolled single file, four or five of them all in a line. Gypsies, Travellers, they were heading for the distant mountains; and Harry felt a sudden kinship, for that was his destination, too. Would they cross the border, he wondered? Would they even be allowed to? Strange if they were, for Ceausescu didn’t have a lot of time for Gypsies.

  Harry watched them pass by, and saw that the last in line was decked in wreaths and oddly-shaped funeral garlands woven from vines and garlic flowers. The caravan’s tiny windows were tightly curtained; women walked beside it, all in black, heads bowed, silently grieving. The caravan was a hearse, and its occupant only recently dead.

  Harry felt sympathy, reached out with his deadspeak. ‘Are you OK?’

  The unknown other’s thoughts were calm, uncluttered, but still he started a little at Harry’s intrusion. And: Don’t you think that’s rude of you? he said. Breaking in on me like that?

  Harry was at once apologetic. ‘I’m sorry,’ he answered, ‘but I was concerned for you. It’s obviously recent and… not all of the dead are so stoical about it.’

  About death? Ah, but I’ve been expecting it for a long time. You must be the Necroscope?

  ‘You’ve heard about me? In that case you’ll know I didn’t mean to be rude. But I hadn’t realized that my name had reached the travelling folk. I’ve always thought of you as a race apart. I mean, you have your ways, which don’t always fit in too well with…no, that’s not what I meant, either! Perhaps you’re right and I am rude.’

  The other chuckled. / know what you mean well enough. But the dead are the dead, Harry, and now that they’ve learned how to talk to each other, they talk! Mainly they reminisce, with no real contact with the living — except for you, of course. Which makes you yourself a talking point. Oh, yes, I’ve heard about you.

  ‘You’re a learned man,’ said Harry, ‘and very wise, I can tell. So you won’t find death so hard. How you were in life, that’s how you’ll be in death. All the things you wondered about when you were living, but which you could never quite resolve, you’ll work them all out now that you’re dead.’

  You’re trying to make me feel better about it, and I appreciate that, the other answered, but there’s really no need. I was getting old and my bones were weary; I was ready for it, I suppose. By now I’ll be on my way to my place under the mountains
, where my Traveller forebears will welcome me. They, too, were Gypsy kings in their time, as am I… or as I was. I look forward to hearing the history of our race at first hand. I suppose I have you to thank for that, for without you they’d all be lying there like ancient, desiccated seeds in a desert, full of potential, shape and colour but unable to give them form. To the dead, you have been rain in the desert.

  Harry leaned far out of his window to watch the caravan hearse out of sight around a bend in the dusty road. ‘It was nice meeting you,’ he said. ‘And if I’d known you were a king, be sure my approach would have been more respectful.’

  Harry — the other’s deadspeak thoughts drifted back to the Necroscope, and he sensed that they were a little troubled now, — you seem to me to be a very rare person: good, compassionate and wise in your own right, for all that you are young. And you say that you have recognized an older wisdom in me. Very well, so now I would ask you to accept some sensible advice from a wise old Traveller king. Go anywhere else but where you are going. Do anything else but that which you have set out to do!

  Harry was puzzled, and not a little worried. Gypsies have strange talents, and the dead — even the recently dead — are not without theirs. How then a dead Gypsy king? ‘Are you telling my fortune? It’s a long time since I crossed a Traveller’s palm with silver.’

  The other vseized upon that: With silver, aye! My palms shall never know its feel again — but be sure my eyes are weighted with it! No, cross yourself with silver, Harry, cross yourself!

  Now Harry wasn’t merely puzzled but suspicious, too. What did this dead old man know? What could he possibly know, and what was he trying to say? Harry’s thoughts weren’t shielded; the Gypsy king picked them up and answered:

  / have said too much already. Some would consider me a traitor. Well, let them think it. For you are right: I’m old and I’m dead, and so can afford one last indulgence. But you have been kind, and death has put me beyond forfeiture.