Deadspeak

by Brian Lumley

  Again Manolis’ shrug. “The Vrykoulakas apparently has his friends. Anyway, they are not actually digging in the ruins. Beyond the castle where it sits up on the crest, the cliff falls away very steeply. Down there are ledges, and caves. This is where they are digging. The villagers think they are the crazy men. What, treasure up there? Dust and rocks, and that’s all.”

  Darcy nodded. “But Janos knows better, eh? Let’s face it, if he buried it, he should know where to dig for it!”

  Manolis agreed. “As for the tourists: there are maybe thirty of them right now. They spend their time in the tavernas, on the beach, lazing around. They are on holiday, right? Some climb up to the castle, but never down the other side. And never at night.”

  “It feels weird,” said Darcy, after a while.

  “What does?”

  “We’re going up there to kill these things.”

  “Right,” Manolis answered. “But only if it’s necessary. I mean, only if they are things!”

  Darcy gave an involuntary shudder and glanced at the long, narrow wicker basket which lay between them. Inside it were spear guns, wooden stakes, Harry Keogh’s crossbow, and a gallon of petrol in a plastic container. “Oh, they are,” he said then, and offered a curt nod. “You can believe me, they are …”

  Fifteen minutes later Nikos brought his vehicle to a halt in a rising reentry. To the left, pathways which were little more than goat tracks led steeply up through the ruined streets of an ancient, long-deserted hill town; above the ruins stood a gleaming white monastery, apparently still in use; and higher still, on the almost sheer crown of the mountain itself—

  “The castle!” Manolis breathed.

  As Nikos and his wonderful three-wheel workhorse made an awkward turn and went rattling and jolting back down into the valley, Darcy shielded his eyes to gaze up at the ominous walls of the castle, standing guard there as it had through all the long centuries. “But … is there a way up?”

  “Yes.” Manolis nodded. “A goat track. Hairpins all the way, but quite safe. According to the fishermen, anywere.”

  Carrying the basket between them, they set out to climb. Beyond the monastery and before the real climbing could begin, they paused to look back. Across the valley, they could pick out the boundaries of long-forsaken fields and the shells of old houses, where olive groves and orchards had long run wild and returned to nature.

  “Sponges,” said Manolis, by way of explanation. “They were sponge fishermen, these people. But when the sponges ran out, so did the people. Now, as you see, it’s mainly ruins. Perhaps one day the tourists will bring it back to life again, eh?”

  Darcy had other things than life on his mind. “Let’s get on,” he said. “Already I don’t want to go any farther, and if we hang about much longer, I won’t want to go at all!”

  After that it was all ochre boulders, yellow outcrops, and winding goat tracks, and where there were gaps in the rocks, dizzying views which were almost vertiginous. But eventually they found themselves in the shadow of enormous walls and passed under a massive, sloping stone lintel into the ruin itself. The place was polyglot and Darcy had been right about its historic value. It was ancient Greek, Byzantine, and last but not least crusader. As they climbed up onto walls three to four feet thick, the view was fantastic, with all the coastlines of Halki and its neighbouring islands laid open to them.

  They clambered over heaps of stony debris in the shell of a crusader chapel whose walls still carried fading murals of saints wearing faded halos, and finally stood on the rim of the ruins looking down on the Bay of Trachia.

  “Down there,” said Manolis. “That’s where they are. Look: do you see those signs of excavation, where all of that rubble makes a dark streak on the weathered rocks? That’s them. Now we must find the track down to them. Darcy, are you all right? You have that look again!”

  Darcy was anything but all right. “They … they’re down there,” he said. “I feel rooted to the spot. Every step weighs like lead. Christ, my talent’s a coward!”

  “You want to rest here a moment?”

  “God, no! If I stop now, I’ll not get started again. Let’s get on.”

  There were several empty cigarette packets, scuff marks on the rocks, places where the sandy soil had been compacted by booted feet; the way down was neither hard to find nor difficult to negotiate. Soon they found a rusting wheelbarrow and a broken pick standing on the wide shelf of a natural ledge which had weathered out from the strata. And halfway along the ledge … that was where much of the stony debris had been excavated from the mouths of several gaping caves. Moving quietly, they approached the cave showing the most recent signs of work and paused at its entrance. And as they took out spear guns from their basket and loaded them, Manolis whispered, “You’re sure we’ll need these, yes?”

  “Oh, yes.” Darcy nodded, his face ashen.

  Manolis took a step into the echoing mouth of the cave.

  “Wait!” Darcy gasped, his Adam’s apple working. “It would be safer to call them out.”

  “And let them know we’re here?”

  “In the sunlight, we’ll have the advantage,” Darcy gulped. “And anyway, my urge to get the fuck out of here just climbed the scale by several big notches. Which probably means they already know we’re here!”

  He was right. A shadow stepped forward out of the cave’s darker shadows, moving carefully towards them where they stood in the entrance. They looked at each other with widening eyes, and together thumbed the safeties off their weapons and lifted them warningly. The man in the cave kept coming, but turned his shoulder side on and went into something of a forward leaning crouch.

  Manolis spat out a stream of gabbled Greek curses, snatched his Beretta from its shoulder holster, and transferred the spear gun to his left hand. The man, thing, vampire was still coming at them out of the dark, but they saw him more clearly now. He was tall, slim, strangely ragged looking in silhouette. He wore a wide-brimmed hat, baggy trousers, a shirt whose unbuttoned sleeves flapped loosely at the wrists. He looked for all the world like a scarecrow let down off his pole. But it wasn’t crows he was scaring.

  “Only … one of them?” Darcy gasped—and felt his hair stand on end as he heard pebbles sliding and clattering on the ledge behind them!

  The man in the cave lunged forward; Manolis’ gun flashed blindingly, deafeningly; Darcy looked back and saw a second—creature? —bearing down on them. But this one was much closer! Like his colleague in the cave, he wore a floppy hat, and in its shade his eyes were yellow, viciously feral. Worse, he held a pickax slantingly overhead, and his face was twisted in a snarl where he aimed it at Darcy’s back!

  Darcy—or perhaps his talent—turned himself to meet the attack, aimed point-blank, squeezed the trigger of his spear gun. The harpoon flew straight to its target in the vampire’s chest. The impact brought him to a halt; he dropped his pickax, clutched at the spear where it transfixed him, staggered back against the wall of the cliff. Darcy, frozen for a moment, could only watch him lurching and mewling there, coughing up blood.

  In the cave, Manolis cursed and fired his gun again—and yet again—as he followed his target deeper into the darkness. Then … Darcy heard an inhuman shriek followed by the slither of silver on steel, and finally the meaty thwack of Manolis’ harpoon entering flesh. The sounds brought him out of his shock as he realised that both his and Manolis’ weapons were now empty. He leaned to grab a harpoon from the open basket, and the man on the ledge staggered forward and kicked the whole thing, basket and contents, right off the rim!

  “Jesus!” Darcy yelled, his throat hoarse and dry as sandpaper as again the flame-eyed thing turned towards him. Then the vampire paused, looked about, and saw its pickax where it lay close to the rising cliff. It moved to pick it up, and Darcy moved, too. His talent told him to run, run, run! But he yelled, “Fuck you!” and flew like a madman at the stooping vampire. He bowled the thing over, and himself snatched up the pick. The tool was heavy, but suc
h was Darcy’s terror that it felt like a toy in his hands.

  Manolis came unsteadily out of the cave in time to see Darcy swing his weapon in a deadly arc and punch the wider point of its dual-purpose head into his undead opponent’s forehead. The creature made gurgling, gagging sounds and sank to its knees, then slumped against the cliff face.

  “Petrol,” Manolis gasped.

  “Over the edge,” Darcy told him, his voice a croak.

  Manolis looked over the rim. Farther down the mountain, maybe fifty feet lower, the wicker basket was jammed in the base of a rocky outcrop, where debris from the diggings had piled up to form a scree slide. The lid was open and several items lay scattered about. “You stay, keep watch, and I’ll get it,” Manolis said.

  He gave Darcy his gun and started to clamber down. Darcy kept one eye on the vampire with the pickax in his head, and the other on the leering mouth of the cave. The creature he had dealt with—a man, yes, but a creature, too—was not “dead.” It should be, but of course it was undead. The small percentage of its system which was vampire protoplasm was working in it even now, desperately healing its wounds. Even as Darcy watched, it shuddered and its yellow eyes opened, and its hand crept shakily towards the harpoon in its chest.

  Gritting his teeth, Darcy stepped closer to it. His guardian angel howled at him, poured adrenaline into his veins, and yelled run, run! But he shut out all warnings, grasped the end of the spear, and yanked it this way and that in the vampire’s flesh, until the thing gnashed its teeth and coughed up blood, then flopped back and lay still again.

  Darcy stepped back from it on legs that trembled like jelly—and gave a mighty, heart-stopping start as something grasped his ankle!

  He glanced back and down and saw the one from the cave where he’d come crawling, his iron hand clasping Darcy’s foot. There was a spear through his throat just under the Adam’s apple, and the right side of the thing’s face had been shot half away, but still he was mobile and one mad eye continued to glare from a black orbit set in a mess of red flesh. Darcy might easily have fainted then; instead he fell backwards away from the undead thing and sat down with a bump on the ledge. And aiming directly between his feet, he emptied Manolis’ gun right into the grimacing half face.

  At that point Manolis returned. He hauled the basket up behind him, ripped open its lid, and yanked out Harry Keogh’s crossbow. A moment later he was loading up, and just in time … for the one on the ledge had torn the pickax from its head and was now working to pull out the harpoon from its chest!

  “Jesus! Oh, Jesus!” Manolis croaked. He stepped close to the blood-frothing horror, aimed his weapon from less than three feet away, fired the wooden bolt straight into its heart.

  Darcy had meanwhile scrambled backwards away from the other creature. Manolis caught hold of him and hauled him to his feet, said, “Let’s finish it while we still can.”

  They dragged the vampires back inside the cave, as far back as they dared, then hurried back out into sunlight. But Darcy was finished; he could do no more; his talent was freezing him right out of it. “Is okay.” Manolis understood. “I can do it.”

  Darcy crawled away along the ledge and sat there shivering while Manolis took up the petrol and again entered the cave. A moment later and he reappeared, leaving a thin trail of petrol behind him. He’d liberally dosed everything in the cave and the container was almost empty. He backed away towards Darcy, sprinkling the last few drops, then tossed the container far out into empty air and took out a cigarette lighter. Striking the flint, he held the naked flame to the trail of petrol.

  Blue fire so faint as to be almost invisible raced back along the ledge and into the mouth of the cave. There came a whoosh and a tongue of fire like some giant’s blowtorch—followed in the next moment by a terrific explosion that blew out the mouth of the cave in chunks of shattered rock and brought loose scree and pebbles avalanching down from above. The shock of it was sufficient to cause Manolis to stumble and sit down beside Darcy.

  They looked at each other and Darcy said, “What the … ?”

  Manolis’ jaw hung loosely open. Then he licked dry lips and said, “Their explosives. They must have kept their explosive charges in there!”

  They got up and went shakily back to the blocked mouth of the cave. Down below, boulders were still bounding down the mountain’s steep contours to the sea. Hundreds of tons of rock had come crushingly down, sealing the diggings off. And it was plain that nothing alive—but nothing—was ever going to come out of there.

  “It’s done,” said Manolis, and Darcy found strength to nod his agreement.

  As they turned away, Darcy saw something gleaming yellow in the rubble. Next door to the collapsed cave another, smaller opening was still issuing puffs of dust and a little smoke. The stone wall between the two excavations had been shattered, spilling fractured rock onto the ledge. But among the debris lay a lot more than just rocks.

  Darcy and Manolis stepped among the rubble and looked more closely at what had been unearthed. There in that broken wall, carefully packed in and sealed behind cleverly shaped blocks of stone, had lain the treasure for which Jianni Lazarides—alias Janos Ferenczy—had searched. That same treasure he himself had laid down all those centuries ago. Only the changing contours of the mountain, carved and fretted by nature in storms and earthquakes, had confused and foiled him. The old crusader castle had been his landmark, but even that massive silhouette had crumbled and changed through the long years. Still, he’d missed his mark by no more than two or three feet.

  The two men scuffed among the dust and broken rocks, their excitement dulled to anticlimax after the horror of their too recent experience. They saw a treasure out of time: Thracian gold! Small bowls and lidded cups … gold rhytons spilling rings, necklaces, and arm clasps … a bronze helmet stuffed to brimming with earrings, belt clasps, and pectorals … even a buckled breastplate of solid gold!

  Their find eventually got through to Manolis. “But what do we do with it?”

  “We leave it here.” Darcy straightened up. “It belongs to the ghosts. We don’t know what it cost Janos to bring it here and bury it, or where—or how—he got it in the first place. But there’s blood on it, be sure. Eventually someone will come looking for those two and find this instead. Let the authorities handle it. I don’t even want to touch it.”

  “You are right,” said Manolis, and they climbed back up to the castle …

  By 12:30 the two were back down into the village, where Manolis refuelled the boat for the trip to Karpathos. While he worked, his fishermen friends came over and asked how were the diggers. “They were blasting,” Manolis answered after a moment, “so we didn’t disturb them. Anyway, the cliffs are very steep and a man could easily fall.”

  “Snotty buggers anyway,” one of the fishermen commented. “They don’t bother with us and we don’t bother with them!”

  Finished with his fuelling, Manolis bought a litre of ouzo and they all sat around tables in an open taverna and killed the bottle dead. Later, as their boat pulled away from the stone jetty, the Greek said, “I needed that.”

  Darcy sighed and agreed, “Me too. It’s nasty, thirsty work.”

  Manolis looked at him and nodded. “And a lot more of it to come before we’re through, my friend. It is perhaps the good job ouzo is cheap, eh? Just think, with all of that gold we left up there, we could have bought the distillery!”

  Darcy looked back and watched the hump of rock which was Halki slowly sinking on the horizon, and thought: Yes, and maybe we’ll wish we had …

  Halki to Karpathos was a little more than sixty miles by the route Manolis chose; he preferred to stay in sight of land as far as possible, and to cruise rather than race his engine. When the rocks Ktenia and Karavolas were behind them, then he set a course more nearly southwest and left Rhodes behind for Karpathos proper.

  That meant the open sea, and now Darcy’s stomach began to play him up a little. It was a purely physical thing and not too bad;
after what he’d faced already he wasn’t going to throw up now. At least his talent wasn’t warning against shipwrecks or anything!

  To take Darcy’s mind off his misery, Manolis told him a few details about Karpathos.

  “Second biggest of the Dodecanese Islands,” he said. “She lies just about halfway between Rhodes and Crete. Where Halki goes east to west, Karpathos she goes north to south. Maybe fifty kilometers long but only seven or eight wide. Just the crest of submarine mountains, that’s all. Not the big place, really, and not many peoples. But she has known the turbulent history!”

  “Is that right?” said Darcy, scarcely listening.

  “Oh, yes! Just about everyone ruled or owned or was the governor of Karpathos at one time or another. The Arabs, Italian pirates out of Genoa, the Venetians, Crusaders of the Knights of St. John, Turks, Russians—even the British! Huh! It took seven centuries for us Greeks to get it back!”

  And when there was no answer: “Darcy? Are you all right?”

  “Only just. How long before we’re there?”

  “We’re almost halfway there already, my friend. Another hour, or not much more, and we’ll be rounding the point just under the landing strip. That’s where we should find the Lazarus. We can take a look at her, but that’s all. Maybe we can hail someone—or something—on board, and see what we think of him.”

  “Right now I don’t think much of anybody,” said Darcy …

  But, as it happened, Manolis was wrong and the Lazarus was not there. They searched the small bays at the southern extreme of the island, but found no sign of the white ship. Manolis’ patience was soon exhausted. In a little while, when it became obvious that their searching was in vain, he headed north for the sandy shallow-water beach at Amoupi and anchored there where they could wade ashore. They ate a Greek salad at the beach taverna and drank a small bottle of retsina between them. When Darcy fell asleep in his chair under the taverna’s split-bamboo awning, Manolis sighed, sat back, and lit a cigarette. He smoked several, admired the tanned, bouncing breasts of English girls where they played in the sea, drank another bottle of retsina before it was time to wake Darcy up.