by Brian Lumley
The binoculars slipped from George’s fingers. He staggered, almost fell, flopped down heavily on his bed. On their bed, his and Anne’s. Willing party… had to
be. The words kept repeating in his whirling head. He couldn’t believe what he’d seen, but he had to believe. And she was a willing party. Had to be.
How long he sat there in a daze he couldn’t tell: five minutes, ten? But finally he came out of it. He came out of it, shook himself, knew what he must do. All those stories from Yulian’s school: they must be true. The bastard was a pervert! But Anne, what of Anne?
Could she be drunk? Or drugged? That was it! Yulian must have given her something.
George stood up. He was cold now, cold as ice. His blood boiled but his mind was a white snowfield, with the track he must take clearly delineated. He looked at his hands and felt the strength of both God and the devil flowing in them. He would tear out the black, soulless eyes of that swine; he would eat his rotten heart!
He staggered downstairs, through the empty house, reeled drunkenly, murderously towards the copse. And he found Anne’s hat and dress exactly where he’d seen them. But no Anne, no Yulian. Blood pounded in George’s temples; hate like acid corroded his mind, peeling away every layer of rationality. Still reeling, he scrambled his way through low brambles to the gravel drive, glared his loathing at the house. Then something told him to look behind. Back there, at the gates, Vlad stood watching, then started forward uncertainly.
Something of sanity returned. George hated Yulian now, intended to kill him if he could, but he still feared the dog. There’d always been something about dogs, and especially this one. He ran back towards the house, and coming round a screen of bushes saw Yulian striding through the shrubbery towards the rear of the building. Towards the entrance to the cellars.
‘Yulian!’ George tried to yell, but the word came out as a gasping croak. He didn’t try again. Why warn the perverted little sod? Behind him, Vlad put on a little speed, began to lope.
At the corner of the house George paused for a moment, gulped air desperately. He was out of condition. Then he saw a rusty old mattock leaning against the wall and snatched it up. A glance over his shoulder told him that Vlad was coming, his strides stretching now, ears flat to — his head. George wasted no more time but plunged through the low shrubbery to the entrance to the vaults. And there stood Yulian at the open door. He heard George coming, turned his head and cast a startled glance his way.
‘Ah, George!’ He smiled a sickly smile. ‘I was just wondering if perhaps you’d like to see the cellars?’ Then he saw George’s expression, the mattock in his white-knuckled hands.
‘The cellars?’ George choked, almost entirely deranged with hatred. ‘Yes I fucking would!’ He swung his pick-like weapon. Yulian put up an arm to shield his face, turned away. The sharper, rustier blade of the heavy tool took him in the back of his right shoulder, crunched through the lower part of the scapula and buried itself to the haft in his body.
Thrown forward, Yulian went toppling down the central ramp, the mattock still sticking in him. As he fell he said, ‘Ah! Ah!’ — in no way a scream, more an expression of surprise, shock. George followed, arms reaching, lips drawn back from his teeth. He pursued Yulian, and Vlad pursued him.
Yulian lay face down at the bottom of the steps beside the open door to the vaults. He moaned, moved awkwardly. George slammed a foot down in the middle of his back, levered the mattock out of him. ‘Ah! Ah!’ again Yulian gave his peculiar, sighing cry. George lifted the mattock — and heard Vlad’s rumbling growl close behind.
He turned, swung the mattock in a deadly arc. The dog was stopped in mid-flight as the mattock smacked flatly against the side of its head. It crumpled to the concrete floor, groaned like a man. George panted hoarsely, lifted his weapon again — but there was no sign of consciousness in the animal. Its sides heaved but it lay still, tongue protruding. Out like a light.
And now there was only Yulian.
George turned, saw Yulian staggering into the vault’s unknown darkness. Unbelievable! With his injury, still the bastard kept going. George followed, kept Yulian’s stumbling figure visible in the gloom. The cellars were extensive, rooms and alcoves and midnight corridors, but George didn’t let his quarry out of sight for a single moment. Then — a light!
George peered through an arched entrance into a dimly illumined room. A single dusty bulb, shaded, hung from a vaulted ceiling of stone blocks. George had momentarily lost sight of Yulian in the darkness surrounding the cone of light; but then the youth staggered between him and the light source, and George picked him up again and advanced. Yulian saw him, swung an arm wildly at the light in an attempt to put it out of commission. Injured, he missed his aim, setting the lamp and shade dancing and swinging on their flex.
Then, by that wildly gyrating light, George saw the rest of the room. In intermittent flashes of light and darkness, he picked out the details of the hell he’d walked into.
Light… and in one corner a glimpse of piled wooden racks and cobwebbed shelving. Darkness… and Yulian an even darker shape that crouched uncertainly in the centre of the room. Light — and along one wall Georgina, seated in an old cane chair, her eyes bulging but vacant and her mouth and flaring nostrils wide as yawning caverns. Darkness — and a movement close by, so that George put up the mattock to defend himself. Insane light — and to his right a huge copper vat, six feet across and seated on copper legs; with Helen slumped in a dining chair on one side, her back to the nitre-streaked wall, and Anne, naked, likewise positioned on the other side. Their inner arms dangling inside the rim of the bowl, and something in the bowl itself seeming to move restlessly, throwing up ropes of doughy matter. Flickering darkness — out of which came Yulian’s laughter: the clotted, sick laughter of someone warped irreparably. Then light again — which found George’s eyes fixed on the great vat, or more properly on the women. And the picture searing itself indelibly into his brain.
Helen’s clothing ripped down the front and pulled back, and the girl lolling there like a slut with her legs sprawled open, everything displayed. Anne likewise; but both of them grimacing, their faces working hideously, showing alternating joy and total horror; their arms in the vat, and the nameless slime crawling on their arms to their shoulders, pulsating from its unknown source!
Merciful darkness — and the thought in George’s tottering mind: God! It’s feeding on them, and it’s feeding itself to them! And Yulian so close now that he could hear his rasping breathing. Light again, as the lamp settled to a jerky jitterbug — and the mattock wrenched from George’s nerveless fingers and hurled away. And George finally face to visage with the man he’d intended to kill, who now he discovered to be hardly a man at all but something out of his very worst nightmares.
Fingers of rubber with the strength of steel gripped his shoulder and propelled him effortlessly, irresistibly towards the vat. ‘George,’ the nightmare gurgled almost conversationally, ‘I want you to meet something…’
Chapter Six
Alec Kyle’s knuckles were white where his hands gripped the rim of his desk. ‘God in heaven, Harry!’ he cried, staring aghast at the Keogh apparition where bands of soft light flowed through it from the window’s blinds. ‘Are you trying to scare the shit out of me before we even get started?’
I’m telling it as I know it. That’s what you asked me to do, isn’t it? Keogh was unrepentant. Remember, Alec, you’re getting it secondhand. I got it straight from them, from the dead — the horse’s mouth, as it were — and believe me I’ve watered it down for you!
Kyle gulped, shook his head, got a grip of himself. Then something Keogh had said got through to him. ‘You got it from “them”? Suddenly I have this feeling you don’t just mean Thibor Ferenczy and George Lake.’
No, i’ve spoken to the Reverend Pollock, too. From Yulian’s christening?
‘Oh, yes.’ Kyle wiped his brow. ‘I see that now. Of course.’
Alec! Keogh’s soft
voice was sharper now. We have to hurry. Harry’s beginning to stir.
And not only the real child, three hundred and fifty miles away in Hartlepool, but also its ethereal image where it languidly turned, superimposed over and within Keogh’s midriff. It too was stirring, slowly stretching from its foetal position, its baby mouth opening in a yawn. The Keogh manifestation began to waver like smoke, like the heat haze over a summer road.
‘Before you go!’ Kyle was desperate. ‘Where do I start?’
He was answered by the faint but very definite wail of a waking infant. Keogh’s eyes opened wide. He tried to take a pace forward, towards Kyle. But the blue shimmer was breaking down, like a television image going wrong. In another moment it snapped into a single vertical line, like a tube of electric blue light, shortened to a point of blinding blue fire at eye-level — and blinked out.
But coming to Kyle as from a million miles away: Get in touch with Krakovitch. Tell him what you know. Some of it, anyway. You’re going to need his help.
‘The Russians? But Harry —, Goodbye, Alec. I’ll get… back… to… you.
And the room was completely still, felt somehow empty. The central heating made a loud click as it switched itself off.
Kyle sat there a long time, sweating a little, breathing deeply. Then he noticed the lights blinking on his desk communications, heard the gentle, almost timid rapping on his office door. ‘Alec?’ a voice queried from outside. It was Carl Quint’s voice. ‘It…t’s gone now. But I suppose you know that. Are you all right in there?’
Kyle took a deep breath, pressed the command button. ‘It’s finished for now,’ he told the breathless, waiting HQ. ‘You’d all better come in and see me. There’s time for an ‘O’-group before we knock it on the head for the day. There’ll be things you’re wanting to know, and things we have to talk about.’ He released the button, said to himself: ‘And I do mean “things”.’
The Russian response was immediate, faster than Kyle might ever have believed. He didn’t know that Leonid Brezhnev would soon be wanting all the answers, and that Felix Krakovitch had only four months left of his year’s borrowed time.
They were to meet on the first Friday in September, these two heads of ESPionage, on neutral ground. The venue was Genoa, Italy, a seedy bar called Frankie’s Franchise lost in a labyrinth of alleys down in the guts of the city, less than two hundred yards from the waterfront.
Kyle and Quint got into Genoa’s surprisingly ramshackle Christopher Columbus airport on Thursday eve-fling; their minder from British Intelligence (whom they hadn’t met and probably wouldn’t) was there twelve hours earlier. They’d made no reservations but had no problems getting adjoining rooms at the Hotel Genovese, where they freshened up and had a meal before retiring to the bar. The bar was quiet, almost subdued, where half-a-dozen Italians, two German businessmen, and an American tourist and his wife sat at small tables or at the bar with their drinks. One of the Italians who sat apart, on his own, wasn’t Italian at all; he was Russian, KGB, but Kyle and Quint had no way of knowing that. He had no ESP talent or Quint would have spotted him at once. They didn’t spot him taking photographs of them with a tiny camera, either. But the Russian had not gone entirely undetected. Earlier he’d been seen entering the hotel and booking a room.
Kyle and Quint were in a corner of the bar, on their third Vecchia Romagnas, and talking in lowered tones about their business with Krakovitch tomorrow, when the bar telephone tinkled. ‘For me!’ Kyle said at once, starting upright on his barstool. His talent always had that effect on him: it startled him like a mild electric shock.
The bartender answered the phone, looked up. ‘Signor — ‘he began.
‘Kyle?’ said Kyle, holding out his hand.
The bartender smiled, nodded, handed him the phone. ‘Kyle?’ he said again into the mouthpiece.
‘Brown here,’ said a soft voice. ‘Mr Kyle, try not to act surprised or anything, and don’t look up or go all furtive. One of the people in the bar with you is a Russian. I won’t describe him because then you’d act differently and he’d notice it. But I’ve been on to London and put him through our computer. He’s dressed Eyetie but he’s definitely KGB, name of Theo Dolgikh. He’s a top field agent for Andropov. Just thought you’d like to know. There wasn’t supposed to be any of this stuff, was there?’
‘No,’ said Kyle, ‘there wasn’t.’
‘Tut-tut!’ said Brown. ‘I should be a bit sharp with your man when you meet him tomorrow, if I were you. It really isn’t good enough. And just for your peace of mind, if anything were to happen to you — which I consider unlikely — be sure Dolgikh’s a goner too, OK?’
‘That’s very reassuring,’ said Kyle grimly. He gave the phone back to the barman.
‘Problems?’ Quint raised an eyebrow.
‘Finish your drink and we’ll talk about it in our rooms,’ said Kyle ‘Just act naturally. I think we’re on Candid Camera.’ He forced a smile, swallowed his brandy at a gulp, stood up. Quint followed suit; they left the bar unhurriedly and went up to their rooms; in Kyle’s room they checked for electronic bugs. This was as much a job for their psychic sensitivity as for their five mundane senses, but the room was clean.
Kyle told Quint about the call in the bar. Quint was an extremely wiry man of about thirty-five, prematurely balding, soft-spoken but often aggressive, and very quick thinking. ‘Not a very auspicious start,’ he growled. ‘Still, I suppose we should have expected it. This is what your common-or-garden secret agent comes up against all the time, I’m told.’
‘Well, it’s not on!’ Kyle was angry. ‘This was supposed to be a meeting of minds, not muscle.’
‘Do you know which one of them it was?’ Quint was practical about it. ‘I think I can remember all of their faces. I’d know any one of them again if we should bump into him.’
‘Forget it,’ said Kyle. ‘Brown doesn’t want a confrontation. He’s geared to get nasty, though, if things go wrong for us.’
‘Charmed, I’m sure!’ said Quint.
‘My reaction exactly,’ Kyle agreed.
Then they checked Quint’s room for bugs and, finding nothing, called it a day.
Kyle took a shower, got into bed. It was uncomfortably warm so he pushed his blankets on to the floor. The air was humid, oppressive. It felt like rain, and if a storm blew up it would probably be a dandy. Kyle knew Genoa in the autumn, also knew that it has some of the worst storms imaginable.
He left his bedside light burning, settled down to sleep. A door, unlocked, stood between the two rooms. Quint was right next door, probably asleep by now. The city’s traffic was giving it hell out beyond the louvered window shutters. London was a tomb by comparison. Tombs hardly seemed a fitting subject to go to sleep on, but.
Kyle closed his eyes; he felt sleep pulling him down, soft as a woman’s arms; and he felt —
— something else pulling him awake!
His lamp was still on, its shade forming a pool of yellow light on the mahogany bedside table. But there was now a second source of illumination, and it was blue! Kyle snatched himself back from sleep, sat bolt upright in his bed. It was Harry Keogh, of course.
Carl Quint came bounding through the joining door, dressed only in his pyjama bottoms. He pulled up short, backed off a pace. ‘Oh my God!’ he said, his mouth hanging open. The Keogh apparition — man, sleeping child and all — turned through ninety degrees to face him.
Don’t be alarmed, said Keogh.
‘Can you see him?’ Kyle wasn’t quite awake yet.
‘Lord, yes,’ Quint breathed, nodding. ‘And hear him, too. But even if I couldn’t, I’d still know he was here.’
A psychic sensitive, said Keogh. Well, that helps.
Kyle swung his legs out of bed, switched off the lamp. Keogh stood out so much better in the darkness, like a hologram of infinitely fine neon wires. ‘Carl Quint,’ Kyle said, his skin prickling with the sheer weirdness of this thing he’d never get used to, ‘meet Harry Keogh.’
Quint stumblingly found a chair close to Kyle’s bed and flopped into it. Kyle was wide awake now, fully in control. He realised how insubstantial it must sound, how hollow and commonplace when he asked: ‘Harry, what are you doing here?’
And Quint almost laughed, however hysterically, when the apparition answered: I’ve. been talking to Thibor Ferenczy, using my time to my best advantage — for there’s precious little of it to waste. Every waking hour makes Harry jar stronger and me less able to resist him. It’s his body and I’m being subsumed, even absorbed. His little brain is filling up with its own stuff, squeezing me out or maybe compacting me. Pretty soon I’ll have to leave him, and then I don’t know if I’ll ever be corporeal again. So on the way back from Thibor, I thought I’d drop in on you.
Kyle could almost feel Quint’s near-hysteria; he glanced warningly at him in the light of the soft blue glow. ‘You’ve been talking to the old Thing in the ground?’ he repeated. ‘But why, Harry? What is it you want from him?’
He’s one of them, a vampire, or he was. The dead aren’t much bothered with him. He’s a pariah among the dead. In me he has, well, if not a friend, at least someone to talk to. So we trade: I converse with him, and he tells me things I want to know. But nothing’s easy with Thibor Ferenczy. Even dead he has a devious mind. He knows that the longer he strings it out, the sooner I’ll be back. He used the same tactics with Dragosani, remember?
‘Oh, yes,’ Kyle nodded. ‘And I also remember what happened to Dragosani. You should be careful, Harry.’
Thibor’s dead, Alec, Keogh reminded him. He can do no more harm. But what he left behind might.
‘What he left behind? You mean Yulian Bodescu? I’ve got men watching the place in Devon until I’m ready for him. When we’re sure of his patterns, when we’ve assessed everything you’ve told us, then we’ll move in.’
I didn’t exactly mean Yulian, though certainly he’s part of it. But are you telling me you’ve put espers on the job? Keogh seemed alarmed. Do they know what they might have to deal with if they’re marked? Are they fully in the picture?
