by Brian Lumley
“Be offensive,” she said, bitterly. “They’re bastards!”
“Tell me,” said Jazz, following her as she started off again, “why were you heading for the sphere in the first place?”
She glanced at him briefly. “When you’ve been here as long as I have you won’t need to ask. I came in that way, and it’s the only Gate I know. I keep dreaming about being able to get out that way. I wake up thinking it’s changed, that the poles have reversed and the flow lies in the other direction. So I was going there to try it. At sunup, of course, which is now. One chance and only one, and if I didn’t make it through, then I wouldn’t be making it back to Sunside, either.”
Jazz frowned. “Reversed poles and all that—is that scientific stuff? Is it supposed to mean something?”
She shook her head. “Just my fantasy,” she said, “but it was worth one last shot …”
They walked in silence for a while, with the great wolf loping between them. There were a million questions Jazz wanted to ask, but he didn’t want to exhaust her. Eventually he said: “Where the hell is everybody? Where are the animals, birds? I mean, it’s nature’s way that where there are trees there are animals to chew on them. Also, I saw things at Perchorsk that made me think my coming would be like rolling a snowball into hell! And yet I haven’t seen—”
“You wouldn’t,” she cut him short. “Not on Starside, not at sunup. Now we’re down toward Sunside you’ll start to see animals and birds; on the other side of the range you’ll see plenty of them. But not on Starside. Believe me, Michael—er, Jazz?—you really wouldn’t want to see anything of what lives on Starside.” She shivered, hugged her elbows.
“Starside and Sunside,” he mused. “The pole is back there, the mountains run east and west, and the sun is south.”
“Yes,” she nodded her head, “that’s the way it is—always.” She stumbled, said: “Oh!” and went to one knee; Jazz reached out and caught her elbow, stopped her from toppling over. This time Wolf made no protest. Jazz helped Zek to her feet, guided her to a flat rock. He shrugged a pack from his shoulder, took out a twenty-four hour manpack: food for one man for one day. Then he dumped the pack onto the rock and made Zek sit on it.
“You’re weak from hunger!” he said, pulling the ring on a tiny can of concentrated fruit juice. He took a sip at the juice to clean his mouth, handed her the can and said, “Finish it.” She did, with relish. Wolf stood close by, wagging his tail for all the world like a low-slung Alsation. His great tongue was beaded with saliva. Jazz broke a cube off a block of Russian chocolate concentrate and tossed it. Before it could hit the ground Wolf’s jaws closed on it crunchingly.
“It’s mainly my feet,” Zek said. Jazz looked at them. She wore rough leather sandals, but he could see caked blood between the toes where they projected. The mist had cleared from the sun a little, and now Jazz could take in the rest of her. True colours were still difficult, but outlines, shadows and silhouettes made readable contrasts. Her one-piece was ragged at the elbows and knees, patched at the backside. She carried only a slim roll, hooked to her harness. A sleeping-bag, Jazz correctly supposed.
“They’re no kind of footgear for this terrain,” he said.
“I know it now,” Zek answered, “but I’d forgotten. Sunside is bad enough, but this pass is worse. And Starside is sheer hell. I had boots when I came here, like you. They don’t last. Your feet harden quickly, you’ll see, but some of these pebbles and rocks are sharp as knives.”
He gave her chocolate, which she almost snatched. “Maybe we should rest right here,” he said.
“Safe enough, with the sun on us,” she answered, “but I’d prefer to keep moving. Since we can’t use the sphere, and we can’t stay Starside, it’s best we get back to Sunside as soon as we can.” Her tone was ominous.
“Any special reason?” Jazz was sure he wouldn’t like the answer.
“Lots of them,” she told him, “and they all live back there.” She nodded back the way they’d come.
“Do you feel like telling me about—them?” Jazz unhooked one of his kidney-packs; he knew it contained, among other things, a very basic first-aid kit. He took out gauze bandages, a tube of ointment, plasters. And as Zek talked he kneeled and carefully slipped the sandals off her feet, began to work on her wounds.
“Them,” she echoed him, making the word sound sour; and again a shudder ran through her. “The Wamphyri, do you mean? Oh, they’re the main problem, it’s true, but there are other things on Starside almost as bad. Did you see Agursky’s ‘pet,’ the thing in the tank at Perchorsk?”
Jazz looked up, nodded. “I saw it. Telling you exactly what I saw would be a different matter!” He tore off a strip of gauze, soaked it in water from his flask, gently wiped away the caked blood from her toes. She sighed her appreciation as he squeezed ointment from its tube and rubbed it into the splits under her toes and the pads of her feet.
“That thing you saw was what happens when a vampire egg gets into a species of local fauna,” she told him. She said it as simply as that, her voice quite neutral.
Jazz stopped working on her feet, looked her straight in the eye, slowly nodded. “A vampire egg, eh? That is what you said, isn’t it?” She stared at him, obstinately, until he had to look away. “OK, a vampire egg,” he shrugged, began wrapping her feet in gauze. “So you’re telling me that the Wamphyri are oviparous? They’re egg-layers, right?”
She shook her head, changed her mind and nodded. “Yes and no,” she said. “The Wamphyri are what happens when a vampire egg gets into a man—or a woman.”
Jazz put her sandals on. They’d been a little loose, tending to cause bums and blisters. Now they were tighter, stopping her feet from sliding about too much. “Is that better?” he asked. He thought about what she’d just told him, decided to let her tell it all in her own time, her own way.
“That feels good,” she said. “Thanks.” She stood up, helped him get his packs hooked up, and they set off toward the sun again.
“Listen,” he said, when they were underway. “Why don’t I just listen and let you tell me everything that’s happened to you while you’ve been here? All you’ve seen, learned, everything you know. So far as I can tell we’ve got plenty of time on our hands. Vision’s good, and we don’t seem in any sort of immediate danger. The sun’s up ahead, and we have some good moonlight …”
“Have we?” Zek answered. Jazz craned his neck, looked at the moon. It had crossed the pass and already its rim touched the eastern peaks. A few more minutes and it would be gone. “The planetary rotation period is incredibly slow,” she began to explain. “But on the other hand the moon’s orbit is closer and much faster. A ‘day’ here is about a week on Earth. Oh, and incidentally, this place is ‘Earth.’ That’s what they call it. It isn’t our Earth, of course not, but it’s theirs. I thought it was strange at first, but then I thought: what else would they call it?
“Anyway, this planet rotates westward very slowly, and its poles are not quite lined up on the sun. So it’s like the planet has a wobble. The sun is seen to revolve west to east—anti-clockwise, if you like—in a slow, small circle. Now I’m not an astronomer or a space scientist of any sort so don’t ask me the whys and wherefores, but how it works out is like this:
“On Sunside we get a ‘morning’ of about twenty-five hours’ duration, a ‘day’ of maybe seventy-five hours’ duration, an ‘evening’ of twenty-five hours and a ‘night’ of about forty. Midday or thereabouts is sunup, and all of the night is sundown.”
Jazz looked up again, saw the moon halved now by the sharp rim of the mountains. Even as he watched its glow lessened as it prepared to slip from sight. “I’m no astronomer either,” he said, “but still it’s very plain we have something of a fast-moving moon up there!”
“That’s right,” she answered. “It has a rapid spin, too, and unlike the old moon shows both its face and its backside.”
Jazz nodded. “Not shy, eh?”
She snorted.
“In some ways you remind me of another Englishman I once knew,” she said. “He seemed sort of naive, too, and yet in reality he was anything but naive!”
“Oh?” Jazz looked at her. “Who was this lucky man?”
“He wasn’t that lucky,” she said, tilting her head a little. Jazz looked at her in profile in the last rays of moonlight, decided he liked her. A lot.
“So who was he?” he asked again.
“He was a member—maybe even the head—of your British E-Branch,” she answered. “His name was Harry Keogh. And he had a special talent. I have a talent, too, but his was … different. I don’t even know if you could call it ESP. That’s how different it was.”
Jazz remembered what Khuv had told him about her. That sort of stuff was so much baloney as far as he was concerned, but best not to let her see his scepticism. “Oh, yes, that’s right,” he said. “You’re a mentalist, right? You read minds. So what was this Keogh’s talent, eh?”
“He was a Necroscope,” she said, her voice suddenly cold.
“A what?”
“He could talk to the dead!” she said; and coming to a sudden, angry halt, she drew apart from Jazz.
He looked at her stubborn, bad-tempered stance, and at the great wolf standing between them, staring yellow-eyed from one to the other. “Did I do something?”
“You thought something!” she snapped. “You thought, ‘what a load of—’”
“Christ!” said Jazz. Because that was exactly what he’d thought.
“Listen,” she said. “Do you know how many years I’ve been hiding the truth of my telepathy? Knowing I was better than anything else they had but not wanting to work for them? Not daring to work for them, because I knew if I did then sooner or later I’d come up against Harry Keogh again? I’ve suffered for my telepathy, Jazz, and yet now—here where it doesn’t matter much any more—the moment I admit the truth of it …”
“Show me!” he said, cutting her off. “OK, I can see how we won’t get anywhere if we’ve no faith in each other. But we won’t get far by lying or misleading each other either. If you say you can do it I have to accept it, right—certainly I know there are those who do believe you have this talent. But isn’t there any way you can show me? You have to admit, Zek, it would have been easy just now to take a guess at what I was thinking. Not only about your telepathy but also about this Keogh bloke—about what you say he can do! Don’t tell me you haven’t met up with scepticism before, not with a gift most people would consider supernatural!”
“You’re tempting me?” her eyes flashed fire. “Humouring me? Taunting me? Get thee behind me, Satan!”
“Oh, it’s godlike, this talent of yours, is it?” Jazz couldn’t quite conceal his sneer. “Well, if you’re that good, how come you didn’t know who it was coming up the pass? If telepathy and ESP in general are real, why didn’t Khuv know I’d hidden away a magazine for my SMG, which is how I came to get the chance to drag that goon Vyotsky in here with me?”
Wolf gave a low whine and his ears went flat.
“You’re annoying him,” Zek said, “and you’re annoying me, too. Also you’ve missed my point. Big macho man! I say: ‘I’m a telepath,’ and you say ‘prove it.’ The next thing, you’re asking me to prove I’m a woman!”
Jazz nodded, pulled a sour face. “You rate yourself pretty damned high, don’t you? God knows what sort of men you’re used to, but I—”
“All right!” she snapped. “Watch …”
She looked at Wolf, the merest glance, then turned and tossed her head, walked on toward the sun. She went maybe a hundred yards, and Jazz and the wolf stood still watching her. Then she stopped and looked back. “Now I’m not going to say anything,” she called out. “So see what you think of what happens next.”
Jazz frowned, thought What the—? But in the next moment Wolf showed him what the. The huge creature loped closer, took the sleeve of Jazz’s one-piece in his great jaws—but gently—and began to tug Jazz in Zek’s direction. Jazz stumbled to keep up, and the faster he went the faster the Wolf ran, until both of them were flying full tilt toward the girl where she waited. Only then did the wolf let go, when both of them drew level with her.
“Well?” she said, as Jazz came to a panting, stumbling halt.
He sucked the hole in his jaw where two teeth had once been, put up a hand and scratched his nose. “Well,” he started, “I—”
“You’re thinking I’m an animal trainer,” she cut in. “But if you say it out loud, that’s it. We go our separate ways. I’ve survived so far without you and I can keep right on doing it.” Wolf went and stood beside her.
“Two to one,” Jazz grinned, however ruefully “And since I’ve always believed in the democratic process … OK, there’s no option but to believe you. You’re a telepath.” They carried on walking, but slightly more apart now. “So why didn’t you know it was me coming up the pass? How come you challenged me as Vyotsky?”
“You saw the castle back there, the keep?”
“Yes.”
“That’s why.”
Jazz glanced back. The cliff-hugging castle must be miles back by now. “But it was empty, deserted.”
“Maybe, and maybe not. The Wamphyri want me—badly. They’re not stupid, anything but. They know I came in through the sphere, the Gate, and they’ve surely guessed that sooner or later I’d try to get out again that way. At least, I credit them with that much intelligence. It would have been easy for them during the last sundown—during any one of many sundowns—to put a creature in there. There’ll be plenty of rooms and corners in there that the sun never touches.”
Jazz shook his head, held up a restraining hand. “Even if I understood all you just said, which I don’t, still I wouldn’t know what it has to do with me,” he said.
“In this world,” she answered, “you’re careful how you use ESP. The Wamphyri have it—in many diverse forms—and so to a lesser degree do most of the animals. Only the true men are without it.”
“You mean, if the Wamphyri left something in that castle back there—a creature?—it would have heard your thoughts?” Again Jazz was close to incredulous.
“It might have heard my directed thoughts, yes,” she nodded.
“But that’s—” he stilled his tongue before it could offend her.
“Wolf can hear them,” she said, simply.
“And me?” Jazz gave a snort. “Does that make me an idiot or something, because I can’t hear them?”
“No,” she shook her head. “Not an idiot, just a true man. You’re not an esper. Listen, when I came up this way I heard your thoughts, distant and strange and a little confused. But I didn’t dare concentrate on you and check out your identity in case that allowed something else to pick out and identify me! Now that we’re in the light of the sun, the pressure’s off; but the closer I got to Starside the more careful I had to be. And because I couldn’t be sure you weren’t Vyotsky, so I challenged you. You said he’d probably have killed me. Maybe he would and maybe not. But then he’d have had to kill Wolf, too, which wouldn’t be so easy. And if he had killed me, then he really would be on his own. It was a chance I had to take …”
This time Jazz accepted all she told him; he had to start somewhere, and it seemed the best way to go. “Listen,” he said. “Even though I like to think I’m fairly quick on the uptake, still there’s a lot you’ll need to explain about what you’ve already told me. But before that there’s one thing I’d better know right now: do I need to guard my thoughts?”
“Here in the sunlight? No. On Starside, yes—all the time—but with a bit of luck we’ll never see Starside again.”
“OK,” Jazz nodded. “Now let’s get to more immediate things. Where’s this cave you told me about? I really think we should rest up. And at the same time I can do a better job on your feet. Also, you look like you could use a more substantial meal.”
She smiled at him, the first time she’d done it. Jazz wished he could see her in good old down-
to-earth daylight. “I’ll tell you something,” she said. “I long ago learned not to listen in on people’s thoughts—they can be nice, I’ll grant you, but when they’re not nice they can be very unpleasant indeed. We sometimes think things we could never express in words. Me, too. Among espers it was a general rule that we observe each other’s privacy. But I’ve been lonely a long time—for a mind I could relate to, I mean. A mind from my own world. So while I’ve been hearing you talking, well, I’ve been hearing other things, too. When I’ve grown used to you, then I’ll make an effort not to intrude. I’m trying even now, but … I can’t help scanning you.”
Jazz frowned. “So what was I thinking?” he said. “I mean, I only said we should rest up.”
“But you meant I should rest up. Me, Zek Föener. That’s nice of you, and if I really needed it I’d accept. But you’ve come quite a long way yourself. And anyway, I’d prefer to keep moving until we’re right out of the pass. Another four miles or so and we’re out of it. But as you can see, the sun is just about to touch the eastern wall. It’s a slow process, but in something less than an hour and a half the pass will be in darkness again. On Sunside it’s still sunup for, oh, twenty-five hours yet, and the evening is just as long. After that … then we’ll be holed up somewhere.” She shivered.
Jazz knew nothing about ESP, but he did read people very well. “You’re a hell of a brave woman,” he said; and then he wondered why, for passing compliments was something he wasn’t good at and didn’t usually do. But he knew he’d meant it. So did she, but she didn’t agree with him.
“No, I’m not,” she said seriously. “I think I maybe used to be, but now I’m a dreadful coward. You’ll find out why soon enough.”
