by Brian Lumley
The Texan put up a hand and slapped at the finger on his cheek, clawed at it. It climbed higher, with a life of its own, and gouged at the corner of his right eye. Armstrong howled as it dug in, dislodged the eyeball, and entered the socket. With his eye hanging on his cheek, he danced and screamed and clutched at his face; but he couldn’t dislodge the thing, which burrowed like an alien worm into his head.
“Jesus God!” he screamed, falling to his knees and tearing at the rim of the empty orbit. And: “J-J-Jesus G-G-God!” he gurgled again as he ripped the flopping eye loose and vampire flesh put out exploratory tendrils into his brain.
On his knees, he shuffled spastically, blindly towards the fire, and shuddered to a halt. He coughed and shuddered again, and toppled forward like a felled tree.
But the Vulpe anomaly stepped forward, caught his collar with its good hand, and swung him to one side, turning him onto his back. “Ah, no, Seth!” the thing said, standing over him. “Enough is enough. For if you burn, it will take time in the healing, and I would be up and gone from here.”
“Ge-o-o-orge!” the other coughed and gagged.
“No, no, my friend, no more of that,” said the monster, smiling hideously. “From now on you must call me Janos!”
More than five and a half years later … the balcony of a hotel room in Rhodes, overlooking a noisy, jostling, early-morning street only a stone’s throw from the harbour … salty-sweet air breezing in across the sea from Turkey, thinning out the clouds of blue exhaust smoke, the pungent miasma of the bakeries, the many odours of the breakfast bars, refuse collectors, and humanity in general in this, the nerve centre of the ancient Greek port.
It was the middle of May 1989, the tourist season only just beginning and already threatening to be a blockbuster, and the sun was a ball of fire one third of the way up the incredibly blue dome of the sky. A “dome” because you couldn’t take it in in its entirety but must close your eyes to a squint, thus rounding off the corners and turning your periphery of vision to a shadowy curve. That was how Trevor Jordan felt about it, anyway, who had thrown back maybe one or two Metaxas too many the night before. But it was early yet, just after 8:00 A.M., and he guessed he’d recover in a little while; though by the same token he knew the town would get a lot noisier, too.
Jordan had breakfasted on a boiled egg and single piece of toast and was now into his third cup of coffee—the British “instant” variety, not the dark brown sludge which the Greeks drank from thimble-sized cups—which he calculated was gradually diluting whatever brandy remained in his system. The trouble with Metaxa, as he’d discovered, was that it was extremely cheap and very, very drinkable. Especially while watching the nonstop belly-dancing floor show in a place called the Blue Lagoon on Trianta Bay.
He groaned and gently fingered his forehead for the fifth or sixth time in a half hour. “Sunglasses,” he said to the man who sat with him, similarly attired in dressing gown and flip-flops. “I have to buy a pair. Christ, this glare could take your eyes out!”
“Have mine,” Ken Layard told him, grinning as he passed a pair of cheap, plastic-framed shades across their tiny breakfast table. “And later you can buy me new ones.”
“Will you order more coffee?” Jordan groaned. “Say, a bucketful?”
“I thought you were knocking it back a bit last night,” the other answered. “Why didn’t you tell me you’d never been to the Greek islands before?” He leaned over the balcony rail, called down and attracted the attention of a waiter serving breakfast to other early risers on a terraced lower level, then lifted the empty coffeepot and jiggled it suggestively.
“How do you know that?” said Jordan.
“What, that this is new to you? No one who’s been here before drinks Metaxa like that—or ouzo for that matter!”
“Ah!” Jordan remembered. “We started off on ouzo!”
“You started off on ouzo,” Layard reminded him. “I was getting atmosphere, local colour. You were getting drunk.”
“Yes, but did I enjoy myself?”
Layard grinned again, shrugged, and said, “Well … you didn’t get us thrown out of anywhere.” He studied the other in his self-inflicted discomfort.
An experienced but variable telepath, Jordan could be forceful when he needed to be; usually, though, he was easygoing, transparent, an open book. It was as if he personally would like to be as readable as other people’s minds were to him, as if he were trying to make some sort of physical compensation for his metaphysical talent. His face reflected this attitude: it was fresh, oval, open, almost boyish. With thinning fair hair falling forward above grey eyes and a crooked mouth which straightened out and tightened whenever he was worried or annoyed, everyone who knew Trevor Jordan liked him. Having the advantage of knowing about it when people didn’t like him, he simply avoided them. But Jordan was rangy-limbed and athletic despite his forty-four years, and his sensitivity should not be misread; there was plenty of determination in him, too.
They were old friends, these two, who went back a long way. They could clown with each other now because of their past, in which there’d been times when there was little or no room for clowning; times and events, in fact, so outré even in their weird world that they’d receded now to mere phantoms of mind and memory. Like bad dreams or tragedies (or even drunken nights), best forgotten.
There was nothing so deadly strange in their current mission—though certainly it was serious enough—but still Jordan realised he’d been in error the previous night. He put on the sunglasses, frowned, and sat up straighter in his cane chair. “I didn’t draw attention to us or anything stupid like that?”
“Lord, no,” said the other. “And anyway I wouldn’t have let you. You were just a tourist having himself a good time, that’s all. Too much sun during the day, and too much booze through the night. And what the hell, there were plenty of other Brits around who made you look positively sober!”
“And Manolis Papastamos?” Jordan was rueful now. “He must have thought me an idiot!”
Papastamos was their local liaison man, second-in-command of the Athens narcotics squad, who had come across to Rhodes by hydrofoil to get to know the pair personally and see if there was anything he could do to simplify their task. But he’d also proved to be something of a hell-raiser, even a liability.
“No.” Layard shook his head. “In fact he was more under the influence than you were! He said he’d join us on the harbour wall at ten-thirty to see the Samothraki dock—but I doubt it. When we dropped him off at his hotel, he looked like hell. On the other hand … they do have remarkable constitutions, these Greeks. But in any case we’ll be better off without him. He knows who we are but not what we are. As far as he’s concerned we’re part of customs and excise, or maybe New Scotland Yard. It would be hard to concentrate with Manolis around making conversation and creating a mental racket. I hope to God he stays in bed!”
Jordan was looking and feeling a little healthier; the sunglasses had helped somewhat; fresh coffee arrived and Layard poured. Jordan watched his easy movements and thought, Just like a big brother. He looks after me like I was a snot-nosed kid. He always has, thank God!
Layard was a locator, a scryer without a crystal ball. He didn’t need one; a map would do just as well, or an inkling of his quarry’s location. A year older than Jordan, he stood a blocky seventy inches tall, with a square face, dark hair and complexion, expressive, active eyebrows and mouth. Under a forehead lined from accumulated years of concentration, his eyes were very keen and (of course) far-seeing, and so darkly brown as to border on black.
As he looked at Layard through and in the privacy of dark lenses, Jordan’s thoughts went back twelve years to Harkley House in Devon, England, where he and the locator had formed their first real partnership and worked as a team for the very first time. Then as now they’d been members of E-Branch, that most secret of all the Secret Services, whose work was known only to a handful of “top people.” Unlike now, however, their work on
that occasion had been far less mundane. Indeed, there had been nothing at all mundane about the Yulian Bodescu affair.
Memories, deliberately suppressed for more than a decade, sprang once more into being, full-fleshed and fantastic in Jordan’s ESP-endowed mind. Once more he held the crossbow in his hand, chest-high and aimed dead ahead, as he listened to the hiss of jetting water and the girl’s voice humming that tuneless melody from beyond the closed door, and wondered if this were a trap. Then—
He kicked open the door to the shower cubicle—and stood riveted to the spot! Helen Lake, Yulian Bodescu’s cousin, was utterly beautiful and quite naked. Standing sideways on, her body gleamed in the streaming water. She jerked her head round to stare at Jordan, her eyes wide in terror where she fell back against the shower’s wall. Her knees began to buckle and her eyelids fluttered.
But this is just a frightened girl! he told himself—in the moment before her thoughts branded themselves on his telepathic mind.
Come on, my sweet! she thought. Ah, just touch me, hold me! Just a little closer, my sweet …
Then, jerking back away from her, he saw the carving knife in her hand and the insane glare in her demonic eyes! As she drew him effortlessly towards her and lifted her knife in a gleaming arc, so he pulled the crossbow’s trigger. It was an automatic thing, his life or hers.
God! The bolt nailed her to the tiled wall; she screamed like the damned soul she was and jerked herself free of splintering tiles and plaster, staggering to and fro in the shower’s shallow well. But she still had the knife, and Jordan could do nothing but stand there with his eyes bulging, mouthing meaningless prayers, as she advanced on him yet again … !
… Until Ken Layard shouldered him aside—Layard with his flamethrower—whose nozzle he directed into the shower to turn it into a blistering, steaming pressure cooker!
“God help us!” Jordan gasped now, as he’d gasped it then. He blotted the unbearable memories out, came reeling back to the present. In the wake of mental conflict, crisis, his hangover seemed twice as bad. He breathed deeply, used the tips of his fingers to massage the top of his head where it felt split, and wondered out loud, “Christ, what brought that on?”
Layard’s eyes were wide; he bent forward across the table and grasped Jordan’s forearm. “You too?” he said.
Jordan broke an unspoken rule among E-Branch espers: he glanced into Layard’s mind. Receding, he felt the echoes of similar memories and at once broke the contact. “Yes, me too,” he said.
“I could tell by your face,” Layard told him. “I’ve never seen you look like that since … that time. Maybe it’s because we’re working together again?”
“We’ve worked together plenty.” Jordan flopped back in his chair, suddenly felt exhausted. “No, I think it’s just something that was squeezed up in there and had to be out. Well, it took its time—but it’s out now and gone forever, I hope!”
“Me too,” Layard agreed. “But both of us at the same time? And why now? We couldn’t be farther away in time and space than we are right now from Harkley House.”
Jordan sighed and reached for his coffee. His hand trembled a little. “Maybe we picked it up from each other and amplified it. You know what they say about great minds thinking alike?”
Layard relaxed and nodded. “Especially minds like ours, eh?” He nodded again, if a little uncertainly. “Well, maybe you’re right …”
By 9:45 the two were down on the northern harbour wall, seated on a wooden bench which gave them a splendid view right across the Mandraki shallows and harbour to the Fort of St. Nikolas. To their left the Bank of Greece stood on its raised promontory, its white-banded walls and blue windows reflected in the still water, while on their right and to the rear of the promenade sprawled Rhodes New Town. Mandraki, being mainly a shallow-water mooring, was not the commercial harbour; that lay a quarter mile south in the bay of the historic, picturesque and Crusader-fortified Old Town, beyond the great mole with the fort at its tip. But their information was that the drug runners moored up in Mandraki, taking on water and some small provisions there, before proceeding to Crete, Italy, Sardinia, and Spain.
A little cannabis resin would be dropped off here, by night (probably swum ashore by a crewman in swim trunks and fins), and likewise in various ports of call along the way. But the great mass of the stuff—and the main cargo, which was cocaine—was destined for Valencia, Spain. From where, eventually, a lot of it would find its way to England. Such had been its route and destination in the past. Meanwhile the E-Branch agents had the task of determining (a) how much of the white powder was aboard; and (b) if the amount was small, would a preemptive bust simply serve to tip their hands to the drug barons; and (c) where was the stuff kept if it was aboard.
Only a few months ago a boat had been stripped to the bones in Larnaca, Cyprus, and nothing had been found. But of course, that one had been handled by the Greek Cypriot police, whose “expertise” perhaps lacked that little something extra—like coordination or even intelligence! This time it would be a combined effort, terminating in Valencia before the bulk of the stuff could be off-loaded. And this time, too, the boat—a wallowing, wooden, round-bottomed barrel of an old Greek thing called the Samothraki—would be stripped not just to her bones but to the very marrow. And in the interim Jordan and Layard would shadow her along her route.
Dressed in tourist-trade “American” caps with hugely projecting peaks, bright, open-necked, short-sleeved shirts, cool slacks, and leather sandals, and equipped with binoculars, they now awaited the arrival of their quarry. Since they went allegedly incognito, their mode of dress might seem almost outlandish, but by comparison with the more lurid tourist groups they could easily be too conservative. And that was to be avoided.
They had been silent for some time; there was something of a mood on both of them; Jordan blamed the Metaxa and Layard said it was “bad gut” brought on by greasy food. Whichever, it interfered a little with their ESP.
“It’s … cloudy,” Jordan complained, frowning. Then he shrugged. “But you don’t know what I mean, do you?”
“Sure I do,” Layard answered. “We called it mindsmog in the old days, remember? A kind of dull mental static, distorting or blocking the pictures? Or obscuring them in a sort of … well, almost in a damp, reeking fog! When I reach out and search for the Samothraki, I can feel it there like a welling mist in my mind. A dampness, a darkness, a smog. But how to explain it in a place like this? It’s weird. And it doesn’t come from the boat especially but—I don’t know—from everywhere!”
Jordan looked at him. “How long since we came up against other espers?”
“In our work, you mean? Just about every time we do an embassy job, I suppose. What are you getting at?”
“You don’t think it’s likely there are other agents on the same job? Russians, maybe, or the French?”
“It’s possible.” It was Layard’s turn to frown. “The USSR’s narcotics problem is growing every day, and France has been in the shit for years! But I was thinking: what if they’re on the other side? I mean, what if the runners themselves are using espers? They could well afford to, and that’s a fact!”
Jordan put his binoculars to his eyes, turned his head, and scanned the coastline from the fort on the mole all the way to the heart of the Old Town where it rose behind massive walls. “Have you tried tracking it?” he said. “I mean, after all’s said and done, you’re the locator. But me, I’ve a feeling the source is somewhere in there.”
Layard’s keen eyes followed the aim of Jordan’s binoculars. A big, white, expensive-looking motor cruiser lolled at anchor in Mandraki’s narrow, deep-water channel; beyond that a handful of caiques were moored inshore, or came and went, most of them full to the gunnels with tourists; a farther quarter mile and the Old Town’s markets and streets were a hive, literally buzzing where the hill rose in a mass of churches and white and yellow houses, burning in the morning sunlight. Except that all was in motion, he might well have
been looking at a picture postcard. The scene was that perfect.
Layard stared for long moments, then snapped his fingers, sat back, and grinned. “That’s it!” he finally said. “You got it first time.”
“Eh?” Jordan looked at him.
“And of course it would have to be worse for you than for me. For I only find things. I don’t read minds.”
“Do you want to explain?”
“What’s to explain?” Layard looked smug. “Your tourist’s map of the Old Town is the same as mine. Except you probably haven’t read it. Okay, I’ll put you out of your misery. There’s an insane asylum on the hill.”
“Wha-?” Jordan started, then put down his binoculars and slapped his knee. “That has to be it!” he said. “We’re getting the echoes of all of those poor sick bastards locked up in that place!”
“It looks like it.” Layard nodded. “So now that we know what it is, we should try to screen it out, concentrate on the job in hand.” He looked out to sea through the mouth of the harbour and became serious in a moment. “Especially since it appears the Samothraki’s just a wee bit on the early side!”
“She’s out there?” Jordan was immediately attentive.
“Five or ten minutes at the most.” Layard nodded. “I just picked her up. And I’ll give you odds she’s in and dropping anchor by quarter past the hour.”
Both men now took to watching the entrance to the harbour, so missing a sudden burst of activity aboard the big, privately owned motor cruiser. A canopied caique ferried out a small party from steps in the harbour wall; two men went aboard the sleek white ship, which soon weighed anchor; powerful engines throbbed as she turned almost on her own axis and nosed idly back along the deep-water channel. Black awnings with fancy scalloped trims gave her foredeck shade, where a black-clad figure now lounged in one of several reclining deck chairs. A tall man in white stood at the rail, looking towards the harbour mouth. He wore a black eyepatch over his right eye.
