by Brian Lumley
His ghosts, yes: the talented men and women he controlled, the espers who were E-Branch.
The team’s makeup was dictated by the situation. With the addition of Millie and Paul Garvey (and despite the unavoidable exclusion of David Chung), it could even be considered stronger than the team Trask had used on Krassos. It might seem a little top-heavy in telepaths, but with good reason.
Trask had learned from experience in Australia and Krassos; he knew that up against a mind like Malinari the Mind, it would take exceptional mental shielding to maintain security. Liz and Millie worked well together, and Garvey’s shields might even be powerful enough to hide all three espers when they were working in tandem. Indeed, in the not-so-distant past there’d been several occasions when Trask would have liked to have Garvey working as a field agent, but Paul’s personal situation had always deterred him.
Tall, well-built, and athletically trim despite his fifty-six years, Garvey had been good-looking…he had been, before he’d gone up against one of Harry Keogh’s most dangerous adversaries, a psychotic necromancer and serial killer called Johnny Found, and lost the left side of his face. That had been twenty years ago; between times some of the world’s best plastic surgeons had worked on Paul until he looked half-decent, but a real face is more than just so much flesh scavenged from other parts of the body. His reconstructed features had been built from his own tissues, true, but the muscles on the left (what scraps had been left by Johnny Found) didn’t pull the same as those on the right, and after all these years, still the nerves weren’t connecting up too well. Paul could manage a “smile” with the right side of his face, but not the left; for which reason, and even though his colleagues were accustomed to it, he normally didn’t smile at all…and avoided all other facial expressions, too.
Since this was a purely physical condition, however, Paul’s disability hadn’t in any way affected his work with the Branch, and it wasn’t the reason why Trask had usually kept him back at the HQ in a rear-party role. The real reason was this:
That two years earlier Garvey had taken the plunge and married a blind girl, which had made them the ideal couple. Receptive of his telepathic skills, his wife had found a new lease of life in Paul; she could “see” through his eyes! And with her he needn’t any longer feel concerned about his looks; he had found an outlet for years of trapped emotions.
This was why “hard man” Trask had been protective of him…
But a week ago Paul’s younger wife had presented him with a baby daughter, and now both mother and child were doing well in the care of her parents who lived close to a blind school specializing in postnatal studies and practice. Since this would be the way of things for some months to come, it was time for Paul Garvey to get back in harness. And just in time, too, for Trask needed him.
There was of course one other member of the team whose name hadn’t come up on Trask’s list: the locator—or more properly human bloodhound—Bernie Fletcher himself, who was already in situ. Complemented by Garvey’s and the girls’ talents, Bernie’s lodestone probes would be enhanced to match the requirement…or so Trask hoped.
As for Goodly: the gaunt, stringbean precog had been having plenty of trouble with the future lately. This was nothing new, however, and Trask had frequently noted that when the going got tough, Ian Goodly usually got going. In his capacity as previewer of things to come, he’d rarely let Trask down.
That left Lardis Lidesci, and he was there…he was there because he was Lardis! That nose of his; his sensitivity to all things Wamphyri; his seer-ancestor’s blood, and his “invisibility”—the fact that he was able to “hide” within himself, like all of Sunside’s Travellers—when rampaging vampires came too close for comfort.
And finally the Brothers Androsov, Gustav Turchin’s men, of whom Trask had no previous knowledge, no way as yet of checking their credentials or psychic potential. They would seem to have had little difficulty in “locating” Fletcher…but was that a good thing or a bad thing? All well and good, as long as no one else located him. Trask could only hope that their shields were better than Bernie’s. He certainly couldn’t fault the fact that one of them, Venyamin, bore the Russian version of his own forename! And if the Androsovs worked out as well in Turkey as Manolis Papastamos and his men had done on Krassos—
—but that was for the future, and the future was the precog’s business…
Which took Trask looping back on himself, where he stood on the steps of a minibus in the street outside E-Branch HQ, checking his people on board prior to heading for the airport.
Liz was the last to board. She was standing with Jake just inside the anonymous-looking private entrance that was reserved for E-Branch personnel only, where they said their goodbyes and all of the things that lovers say when life intervenes to force them apart—and, Trask sincerely hoped, where she was reminding the Necroscope to “keep an open mind” and be alert for any Mayday call she might make.
Seated at the front of the bus, Millie sensed Trask’s gathering impatience, put a hand on his arm and told him, “Let them be, Ben. We have a few minutes to spare. And now that you’re on Jake’s right side—well, it seems a good idea to stay on it.”
Glancing at her, Trask sighed, but in the next moment grinned, adopted a mock scowl, and in his old “accustomed” fashion growled, “God, that bloody man!”
While in the rear entrance to the hotel, Liz had just told Jake, “I’m pregnant!”
“You’re what?” He didn’t quite believe he’d heard her correctly.
Liz hadn’t meant to come out with it like that, but in the middle of both of them telling each other to take care, it had just popped out. “I think I have to be,” she said. “After last night, I mean.”
“But how can you possibly—?” he began. And:
“—I just do,” she cut him short. “I know.”
He looked at her for a long moment and finally said, “Well, you’re a healthy woman, and I have to admit that if you’re not pregnant—er, ‘after last night, ‘I mean—then I don’t know what it would take!”
They both laughed and clung to each other, but then he held her at arm’s length and was suddenly serious. “It’s all the more reason why you shouldn’t be going.”
She shook her head. “All the more reason why I should. It’s our world, Jake, and it’ll be his—or hers—too. That’s why we have to keep it that way, why we can’t give it over to invaders, defilers from a different, an alien world. It’s why we’ll avenge the pain they’ve caused, the damage they’ve already done and get rid of them for good.”
Jake knew she’d won the point—that there was no answer to her argument—and so said, “Then you’d better go. Just remember I love you, both of you, and bring yourselves back to me.”
“I’ll do better than that,” she said. “If it all works out, I’ll give you a call and you can bring us back!”
“And if it doesn’t work out?”
“Then you’ll be hearing from me anyway.”
“I will be hearing from you,” he said. “Let’s face it, you and the team will need weapons eventually. So, who else do you know who can smuggle them in like I can?”
“I hadn’t thought of that,” she said. “But I’m pretty sure Ben has. He said to be sure and remind you to listen for me.”
“As if I wouldn’t,” said Jake. “I’m already missing you—and you’re not even gone yet.”
“But time I was,” said Liz.
They kissed, Liz joined the team aboard the transport, and Jake waved to her until the minibus had rounded the corner and passed out of sight into the chilly London morning.
And he hadn’t been lying. The city was only just waking up, beginning to bustle, but already it felt empty…
Back inside the headquarters, Jake visited the archives—just a roomful of stacked shelves and filing cabinets—where, with John Grieve’s help, he chose an armful of the restricted “Keogh Files.” Grieve was the Duty Officer; he kept the electronic key to
the locked filing cabinets, and better than anyone else knew his way around the system.
Invaluable to the Branch by reason of his tele-telepathy—and with the better part of his life spent in employment within HQ’s four walls as a desk-jockey, where his talent had been put to its best use—Grieve’s many years of prowling the corridors of E-Branch, day and night through thousands of hours of duty shifts, made him the best of all possible authorities. And in his capacity as Duty Officer he also kept the key to Harry’s Room; but a real key this time, not a corneal scanner or microcoded ID tag but a piece of shaped metal that fitted the almost antique lock on the door of that very special room.
And letting Jake in, he said, “If you intend to sleep here, you’ll need sheets and blankets for the bed.”
“I don’t intend to go that far,” Jake answered, dumping the files on the dusty console of an ancient computer. “I’ll use my own room for sleeping. It’s just that this place has—I don’t know—”
“A certain atmosphere?” Grieve nodded. “A weird ambiance? I know what you mean. We all know what you mean. Frankly, I think it would put me off. I don’t think I could concentrate too well in here. But it’s each to his own, and…” And there he paused, looking slightly uncomfortable.
“And this is my own?” said Jake. “Is that what you’re saying? Hey, don’t worry about it. Not too long ago, I might well have argued the point. But now…well, this place feels sort of familiar to me. And in fact it’s exactly the atmosphere that I need. Where better to get to know Harry Keogh than in a room that he once occupied?”
“You’re right, of course,” said Grieve. “It’s just that of all E-Branch’s ‘ghosts,’ this one was—and, as we’ve recently seen, probably still is—the most potent.”
Jake gave a little shiver and said, “It’s certainly cold in here.”
“Yes,” said the DO. “That’s as normal, or rather as usual. I could have an electric fire sent in, but I don’t think you’ll find it improves things very much.”
“No, everything’s fine,” said Jake. “And if I find that the place does bother me, I can always take the files to my room.”
“Suit yourself,” said Grieve. “As for the files: you’ve got stuff there that goes right back to the beginning…of Harry’s association with E-Branch, I mean. You even have the Dragosani file, including Alec Kyle’s first—er, shall we say, ‘interview’?—but in any case our first ‘meeting’ with Harry.”
“The first time he came here in the flesh?” Jake had just opened the file in question and glanced at its handwritten—or rather hand-scrawled—A-4 pages laminated in durable plastic sleeves.
“No,” said the DO, from where he now stood at the door. “I mean the first time he appeared here, without flesh! Harry was…incorporeal. He was dead. His first death, that is.”
Frowning, Jake turned to stare at Grieve, opened his mouth to say something—and closed it again. How does one reply to something like that? And before he could ask any further questions:
“If you need anything else,” said Grieve, “give me a call. There’s no intercom in here but the telephone is working. Oh, and incidentally, if you should bump into Premier Turchin anywhere in the HQ, please remember that those files are for your eyes only. While Turchin knows full well what the Necroscope—er, the first Necroscope—did to the Château Bronnitsy and to Gregor Borowitz’s Opposition, there’s really no need to supply him with documentary evidence. There are wounds enough, mainly healed now, so we don’t need to start rubbing salt in them.”
As Jake nodded his understanding, Grieve went out into the corridor and closed the door behind him…
The Keogh Files:
It was all here, everything that Harry had been, and maybe something of what he still was or what he had left behind. And the more Jake turned the yellowing pages and read, the more he became involved, the more he seemed to remember. Not real memories—of course not—but pseudomemories.
He would read a paragraph and know what was coming. It was as if he’d picked up a book from his childhood, recognized the stories and knew at the end of each chapter what was coming in the next. It gave new meaning to the terms “déjà vu” and “paramnesia”…which in turn gave Jake pause as he read of Harry Keogh’s reincarnations first in the mind of an infant son, and then in the brain-dead body of Alec Kyle.
And now…?
But no, Jake was past that stage; he no longer worried that Harry might be seeking permanent residence. For if that were so he’d had ample opportunity. No, there was only one man or creature intent on possessing his mind, and the way things stood at present it was the other way around: Jake’s mind possessed that creature!
And so he read on.
Of Harry’s psychic ancestry, his youth, his championing of dead causes (or rather, the causes of the dead.) Of his incredible battle with the Russian necromancer, Boris Dragosani, and of his all but total destruction of the Soviet E-Branch: first when he killed Dragosani, and again when the shrivelled maniac Ivan Gerenko was in command.
Jake read of the taint that Thibor Ferenczy had transfused into the foetal Yulian Bodescu, of the vampirism that developed in Yulian as a youth, and of his death at the hands of the teeming dead, risen from a local graveyard. He read of Janos Ferenczy, vampire bloodson of Faethor, returned to life from an urn of ashes only to be reduced to dust in a battle with the original Necroscope and a handful of centuried Thracian “friends.”
He read of all of these—people?—and things, oh, and a host of others—and discovered to his amazement that he merely reacquainted himself, as with that old book read as a child.
As he turned the pages the hours flew, and as he became accustomed to (or less physically aware of) the room, so its ambiance seemed to adjust to him. And for the first time in a great many years it was no longer cold in Harry’s Room.
Lunchtime came…and went, but while Jake recognized the need for sustenance he no longer had the time for it, not right now. While he was absorbed in his reading—whether learning or “remembering”—his stomach must bide its time. The late autumn day grew brighter outside, then dimmed, and the files gradually transferred from one area of the old computer console’s surface to another. So that when the telephone buzzed and John Grieve’s voice asked if everything was all right, “suddenly” it was 5 P.M.
Jake told the DO, “I’m going out to eat. I’ll be maybe an hour. I don’t suppose we’ve heard anything from the team?”
“No,” Grieve answered. “We know their flight suffered something of a delay—actually a long one—but they did get off around one-thirty P.M. But now they’ll be in at the other end. We can’t expect to hear anything for a while yet; maybe when they arrive at Bernie Fletcher’s location. But that could be hours yet, and even then Trask might decide that the situation doesn’t warrant his contacting the HQ. By my reckoning, it will be late tonight or maybe even tomorrow morning before we hear anything…well, unless you hear something first.”
“So then, we’ll just have to wait and see,” said Jake.
“I’m afraid so,” Grieve answered. “Here at HQ, the name of the game is patience. But there was one piece of information that came in from the Minister Responsible. I was able to pass it on to Trask at the airport just before they left.”
“Oh?” said Jake.
“Yes. It’s a police report. It appears a body turned up in a disused conduit under a platform at Waterloo Railway Station. As you’ll know, that’s the starting gate for the Eurostar, the Channel Tunnel, and Paris. Anyway, the body was so badly shrivelled it was almost a mummy; it seemed to have been down there a long time. Which is very odd because dental records identify it—or rather him—as a businessman who went missing only a little while ago. Actually, the night after you brought Millicent Cleary up out of the underworld.”
“Szwart!” said Jake.
“Our conclusion, too,” said Grieve. “Police investigations have shown that this gentleman was on his way to Paris, but he never made
it. Oh, and another thing: he was naked, and everything he’d had with him had been taken…including his Eurostar ticket for the night train, of course.”
“That bloody thing could be anywhere by now,” said Jake.
“Indeed,” said the DO. “He could even be in Turkey…”
Jake turned it over in his mind—thought about it, didn’t like it—but couldn’t see anything that he could do about it. So changing the subject, he said, “Right now I’m feeling starved. I haven’t eaten all day. How about you?”
“I’ve eaten,” said Grieve. “And by the way—have we given you a Branch card for the hotel diner?”
“Yes,” Jake answered. “But I think I prefer a little place in the Latin Quarter.”
And after a moment’s silence: “In Paris?” (Grieve stuck to E-Branch protocols and didn’t read minds over the phone unless there was a good reason for it.)
“Where else?” said Jake.
And after another almost imperceptible pause: “I shall be off duty when you return,” said the DO, in a tone typical of his upper-class English restraint (as if what Jake had told him wasn’t at all out of the ordinary). “I’ll still be here in the HQ, probably asleep in my room, I should think. But one of the techs, Jimmy Harvey, will be standing in for me. I come on again at one A.M. If you need anything at that time, give me a call.”
“They really know how to get good value out of a man, don’t they?” said Jake.
He sensed the other’s shrug, as Grieve replied, “I suppose they do. But on the other hand, they’re the ones who are doing the real work, while as rear-party I’m comparatively safe here in the HQ.” And then, snatching a breath and hastily following up on what he obviously considered a gaffe: “Please understand, Jake—that wasn’t intended as a reflection on your own stance or status.”
