by Brian Lumley
As Trask ducked out under the tent’s awning, Liz took hold of Jake’s hand and said, “No one thinks badly of you, Jake. What you told us when you were under only serves to corroborate what Ben Trask has been hoping all along. But that’s for him to tell you, not me. And as for throwing you to the wolves … au contraire, Jake Cutter: on the contrary. But it could be his intention to throw you at them … .”
Ten minutes later, Trask had called his small nucleus of Branch people to him. And at the last moment he’d invited Liz and Jake into the briefing. Everyone was crowded into his tent.
Wasting no time, when all of his people had arrived, Trask said, “I won’t make a meal of this and as soon as we’re through here I want you to start packing up. I’d like to be out of here A.S.A.P. Ops truck and vehicles: strip them of everything important to us because we’re leaving them behind. Our next target is too far away to simply drive to. It was possible we might have stayed just as we are now, but something has come up. Our Aussie friends will have to follow on behind us, but as the brains behind the brawn, as it were, time is a luxury we’ve just run out of. So … what’s the big hurry, eh?
“Well, you all know about our Mr. Miller. But you don’t know all about him. To recap: Miller’s some kind of nut who believes in friendly aliens, and despite having seen the enemy pretty close up he thinks that we are the butchers. He thinks the work we did last night was a totally unjustified preemptive strike against a landing party of explorers from outer space, and that they only turned nasty in order to survive. He has even written books on the etiquette of first contact. So obviously, in Miller’s warped perceptions, we’re sadly lacking in manners.
“It doesn’t matter that our ‘aliens’ are stinking, murderous vampires from a parallel world; Miller’s mania would never accept that. He doesn’t believe a word I’ve said to him—probably doesn’t even believe they’re vampires—but he does think he can talk to them.
“Well, that in itself wouldn’t be a problem. His own people can look after him, lock him up or do whatever they deem necessary to make him look like an idiot—which he is—if Miller should start babbling his ‘crazy stories’ about our work to the press or other sensationalist outlets. So when I found out that he’d made a run for it, in a way I was pleased. At least he was out of my hair. Yes, but that was before I discovered what he’d taken with him.
“People, last night our locators at London HQ, headed up by David Chung, found us a new target: they detected a hitherto unsuspected patch of mindsmog on the other side of the Australian continent. It was only there for a moment—someone’s mental shield slipped, shall we say?—but it was the real thing, the unmistakable signature of a Lord of the Wamphyri. I’m talking about a Lord, yes. And what we have to remember is that the Thing we went up against last night, Bruce Trennier, that was a mere lieutenant—someone in thrall to a Lord—left behind by his maker and master for whatever reason.
“Okay, this mindsmog: it was detected at the same time—I mean precisely the same time—that we were dealing with Trennier. Now, we know that many of the Wamphyri had the power of telepathic contact with their thralls even over great distances, so it’s possible, indeed probable, that Trennier’s unknown master ‘felt’ his lieutenant’s death, and it so surprised or startled him that he let his guard down, if only for a moment. He might even have done it deliberately, tried to establish better contact with Trennier to find out what was happening. As for our people in London, they were lucky; someone happened to be looking in the right place at the right time, and that’s when they detected the evil ‘aura’ of a Great Vampire.
“Of course Chung forwarded this information to me, only to have it intercepted by Peter bloody Miller! And now I couldn’t give a damn about him speaking to the media or anyone else for that matter. But I do care that he might be on his way to deliver a warning to one of the worst threats our world has ever faced.
“A warning that we are on our way to destroy it!”
10
THE VAMPIRE FILE
When everyone with the exception of Jake and Liz was clear of his tent, Trask opened his briefcase and plumped a thin file down on the table.
“Read it,” he told Jake. “It will give you something to do for a while, for we may be here a little longer than I anticipated. I was forgetting that we’d have to fly Grahame back home again. Even though he’s on his way now, it will still be three to three and a half hours before the chopper gets back. But on the other hand, and since I’d like E-Branch to move as a unit, that’s probably just as well; it gives us more time to get our act together—our thoughts, too—for which I’m grateful. I hate starting something without being able to think it through first.”
He looked pointedly at Jake. “That file is your chance to think things through, too. You see, I don’t want anyone in the Branch who doesn’t fit or doesn’t want to be here. However, in the event you do decide to move on, you needn’t worry about my handing you over to the law. That’s not my way. I would simply wash my hands of you. But if you stay, then you’re with us all the way. I have no time for quitters, and in that case I would assist the law in any way possible.”
“Huh!” Jake answered. “And just when I thought you’d begun to appreciate me. Okay, do you want my answer right now?”
“Read the file first,” said Trask curtly, “then ask Lardis to tell you about Sunside/Starside. After that I’ll fill you in on some of our history, bring you up to date on the current situation, and how we got here, and generally try to explain where you fit in the grand scheme of things. Oh, you’ll find it lots of fun, Jake, I can guarantee that.” But despite his guarantee. Trask’s words were dry as dust; he was deadly serious, his face utterly devoid of humour.
“Oh, good” said the other, just as drily and seemingly unimpressed. “I can’t wait.”
“God, why him?” Trask asked under his breath, of no one in particular, as he went stamping from the tent. It was a question he would be asking himself for quite some time to come … .
“So why are you still here?” Jake asked Liz.
“Because I’m good company,” she answered testily. “Or maybe I’m maintaining some kind of balance: my good and pleasant aura versus your miserable, messed-up, self-pitying—”
“—I don’t pity myself,” Jake cut in, scowling.
“Then have pity on me and leave it out!” she told him. And abruptly, angrily starting to her feet: “Very well, do it your way. Who needs you, anyway?”
“Wait,” Jake said. “Sit down. I may need you—to help me with this.” He waved a dismissive hand at Trask’s file.
Liz took a very deep breath, but despite her annoyance she sat down, folded her arms, said nothing.
And after a while Jake said, “You know why I’m pissy, even with you?” That “even” told Liz something at least … mainly that she was special, different in his perception. But she remained cool towards him and simply said, “Go on.”
“Ben Trask, Goodly, Lardis,” he said, “especially Lardis!—he can give you bad dreams, that one—it’s as if they were all waiting for something to happen.” And he thumbed himself in the chest. “To happen to me!”
“Or waiting for you to do something,” she said.
“Exactly,” Jake narrowed his eyes at her. “And you, too?”
“Well, and weren’t we justified in that?” she countered. “I mean, we’ve seen one of the things you can do. The way you move … without moving.”
“But I thought that was agreed.” His frustration was mounting. “I’ve already told you that’s not me!”
“Maybe it’s trying to be you,” she said—and at once bit her lip.
Jake nodded, and his voice was harder when he accused: “So you are in on it.”
“Jake,” Liz told him, “if you were to learn everything all in one go, it might be too much for you. I can understand that even if you can’t. Ben Trask and the other espers, they’ve recognized a germ in you. But maybe it’s more than a germ. Espec
ially after last night, and again this morning with McGilchrist. Anyway, they would like it to grow; they don’t want to kill it off with the shock of sudden awareness. That’s why they’ll let you in on it slowly, gradually. That way, when it all becomes clear to you, you’ll be ready for it.”
Jake looked at her and saw only truth in her eyes. Then he looked at the file again. “So reading this stuff is like Trask said: just another step in my gradual education, right?”
“I think so, yes,” she answered.
“Huh!” And muttering darkly to himself, Jake picked up the file. It had a yellow plastic jacket with a red diagonal stripe stamped with the word COSMIC. A once-white, well-thumbed label gummed in the top right-hand corner bore a scrawled legend in india ink: VAMPIRES AND THE WAMPHYRI—BASIC.
But as Jake Cutter was about to discover, there was little or nothing basic about them … .
Jake had, of course, been briefed prior to last night’s foray: a very sparse—even a brief briefing—before being “thrown in at the deep end,” as he had had it. He’d seen a jerky old black and white film from a place called Perchorsk in the Ural Mountains, which at first he’d thought was a clip from some old horror movie that a sensitive twentieth century film censor had refused to pass for general viewing. It was just too graphic, too real, too horrific. And its special effects had been … well, something else.
But the rest of the footage (of the underground Perchorsk Complex, which was obviously real, and of an incredible, nightmarish flying creature that two USAF fighters had sent to hell over the Hudson Bay all of thirty years ago, coupled with Ben Trask’s matter-of-fact, voice-over commentary) had finally served to convince Jake of its authenticity … well, almost. But still not quite with it, and at that time not really wanting to be, he had allowed himself to arrive at his own incorrect conclusion:
That all those years ago Soviet scientists had been breeding something—probably biologically engineered soldiers—in subterranean laboratories in the Urals, and that an unspecified number of genetically mutated monsters, not to mention several “altered” human beings, had somehow escaped … which even now seemed a far more acceptable explanation than the fantastic story he was beginning to piece together from the notes in Trask’s file.
“WAMPHYRI,” (Jake read the heading again): “The following notes result from Harry and Nathan Keogh debriefs. The Keoghs, father and son(s), were mainly responsible for the destruction of the Wamphyri. This file should be read in conjunction with 278, HARRY KEOGH, 279, NECROSCOPE, and 311, NATHAN.”
And then he started on the text:
The Wamphyri are the original vampires of “myth” and legend. For the last two thousand years vampires have been periodically “banished” from their own world into ours. Prior to that time it seems possible that several of them found their own way to Earth via a “wormhole” situated in Starside, having its exit in a subterranean cave under the foothills of the Carpatii Meridionali, the Transylvanian Alps. This is obviously the reason why, even to this day, that region is associated with vampires and vampirism. It is the source of the so-called “myth.”
But the Wamphyri are not a myth. They are the inhabitants of an Earth-type world lying parallel to Earth in a “universe” on “the other side” of our familiar space-time continuum; and but for the fact that the wormhole enters our world deep underground on a watercourse subject to flash flooding, it is quite feasible that by now the human race would have been conquered, converted, and enslaved by vampires.
However, and whatever might have been Mankind’s fate, one thing is certain : there will be no more vampires in this world. The only means of entry have been closed. In 2007, the Russian premier, Gustav Turchin, diverted hydroelectric dam waters from the Urals Pass into the subterranean complex at Perchorsk, thus drowning the singularity or “Gate” in the heart of the complex. This action served to preserve the integrity of both worlds and guaranteed the future safety of at least one of them, ours. For further reading see 262, PERCHORSK, and 297, THE REFUGE.
STAGES OF VAMPIRISM—the Vampire Life-Cycle (in large part speculative):
In the east and west of Sunside/Starside lie swamps which are always gloomy under rolling banks of fog. In a time immemorial to Sunside’s Szgany (nomadic humans), the first vampires came out of these swamps.
The morphology or evolution of the Wamphyri would make for a fascinating study in its own right. (But we must consider any clinical, laboratory, or experimental study of ANY PHASE of vampires and vampirism far too dangerous.) Cyclical, it frequently involves forms other than human. Vampire DNA is unique in being mutative within a single life-cycle without the benefit of generation. Like any disease, but almost sentiently aggressive, it invades non-vampire tissues to infect them. But instead of destroying the contaminated body it passes on its mutant DNA causing the host to adapt—and indeed to mutate—within its own span. Since longevity is invariably a result of vampirism, and barring accidental death or fatal diseases, the lifespan of the victim, then a vampire in his own right, might easily extend to many hundreds and perhaps even thousands of years.
First Phase:
In the vampire swamps of Sunside/Starside, the first (or final) phase of the cycle may be found. It is a black mushroom that ripens to give off red spores. SPECULATIVE: The spores are the genesis of vampiric life and carry the as yet “blank” form of vampire DNA. Breathed in, the spores attach to animal lungs and commence leaking their “poison” into the bloodstream along with oxygen. Then the mutation quickens, the victim falls ill, and following a period of some three days emerges as a vampire in his own right. In Transylvania, the illness would occasionally appear fatal and the victim dead. Hence the legend of the vampire rising from his grave after three days in the earth.
The spores do not discriminate; they infect who or whatever breathes them in. An infected fox or dog would have vampire instincts. But the true vampire has instincts of its own.
Second Phase (in part, speculative):
Within an infected host, certain special strands join up to take on a separate, parasitic identity. This may take a few years, decades, or even centuries; the reason for these variations are as yet undetermined. But the symbiotic creature that results is the true vampire: a semi-protoplasmic leech clinging to the spine of the host and extending its own nervous and sensory systems into his brain, literally possessing his mind. It is him, and he is it. And the parasite or symbiont’s appetite is for blood. It feeds on the source of life itself: the blood of its host’s future victims. Indeed, “the blood is the life.”
The symbiont is not necessarily “faithful” to an original host; in Sunside, should a dog or fox host come in contact with a human being, a wholesale transfer of leech from the animal to the human is possible, especially if the animal is stricken and dying. In other words the leech will seek a continued existence—or even better, a higher tife-form—in its new host. Among the Szgany of Sunside, the tenacity of the leech is a legend in its own right.
Third Phase—Wamphyri:
Not only has the symbiont become an integral part of its host’s body, but the host’s being—even his thought processes, his personality, and of course his DNA—have been altered forever. Just as strands of that DNA have mutated into the leech, so the host’s flesh has become in itself mutative. His flesh is now metamorphic: he can within certain limits bring about physical alterations in his shape and form. He is Wamphyri.
Fourth Phase—Back to the Origin (speculative):
In the event of death the symbiont leech (and even the host’s “dead” flesh) may attempt a secondary existence by way of reconstitution. Essential fats and amino acids—the building blocks of life—may seek to escape into the earth, there to develop into mushroom spawn that lies dormant until a time of maximum opportunity. How the “vampire essence” or mushroom germs recognize this one opportune moment remains unknown. In Transylvanian legends as in those of Sunside, certain vampire Lords store native soil and sleep upon it-clear evidence of the i
nstinct for survival. And once again, immemorial Sunside myths have it that the Drakuls—an especially infamous line of Lords—kept loam from Starside’s swamps for the same purpose, against just such an eventuality.
Final Phase—The True Death:
Decapitated, a vampire dies. (There is no brain for the leech to control to its own ends—but the symbiont itself may still attempt to escape its host’s termination). However, the bulk of a symbiont is located mainly on the left or heart side of its host’s spine, and a stake driven through the heart will usually suffice to pin the creature there for a time at least. A stake soaked in garlic will certainly do the job, for garlic like silver is a quick-acting poison to vampire flesh. But the only sure way to kill a vampire is to burn it to ashes. Wherefore Sunside’s Szgany stake, decapitate, and burn all vampire manifestations wherever possible. Only then can they be certain that the vampire has died the “True Death.”
There exists one other phase in the vampire life-cycle (see “Egg-son” or “-daughter” in the next section following).
VAMPIRISM: Infection, Deliberate and Accidental.
By a bite. The virulence of a vampire’s bite, which is usually delivered in the act of feeding, would seem to differ from vampire to vampire. But a Lord of the Wamphyri’s bite is especially infectious. It can cause delirium and death, though not necessarily the True Death. When a Lord (or Lady) seeks to “recruit” a vampire thrall or servitor, the bite isn’t usually deep and little blood is taken. In this case the bite has been used to transmit vampire DNA, but only in an amount sufficient to bring about the first phase of the change. It may then take years for a leech to develop and the servitor—or, later, the “lieutenant”—to “ascend” and become Wamphyri.
But when a Lord or Lady’s bite is excessive and too much plasma is taken—and a commensurate amount of vampire essence transfused—then the result may be “death” of a sort, lasting the specified three days. Then, too, when the victim ascends it will be with the germ of a leech established and growing within him.
