by Brian Lumley
“Of course, the Necroscope had his own way of looking into matters of that sort, but … no need to go into that here.
“Well, just like last night, I blamed myself. Why hadn’t I seen it coming? What good is a talent that only reveals itself when it wants to? Why is the future so bloody devious? I blamed myself that I hadn’t foreseen it, while Ben was in hell for baving seen it! And the rest of the team, they were depressed that they’d had to confirm it. While at the Refuge, the mindsmog was rapidly dispersing … .
“After that, there was no holding Nathan. His father, Harry Keogh, had owed Zek favours. And Nathan himself was in her debt … not only was she a friend, one who had fought alongside him in Starside, but she’d even been involved with his discovery of the Möbius Continuum. No less than Ben, Nathan knew he wouldn’t rest until he—until they—were sure. Not sure that Zek was dead, for all of us knew that by then, but sure that she would never be undead.
“And so we armed ourselves, and Nathan took us to the Refuge. But a refuge no longer, for now it was a charnel house … .
“Ben, myself, Chung, and Lardis—huh! Try keeping the Old Lidesci out of it; he’d loved Zek dearly—Nathan took us along the Möbius Route to Radujevac. It was some two hours, maybe two and a half, since Ben came awake from his nightmare. More than enough time for the … the slaugbter of the staff and children. From what we saw, twenty minutes had been enough!
“Those poor kids, and the people who had looked after them; their torn, sometimes shrivelled bodies were already cold. They had been dead before Ben had driven his car even halfway in to the HQ. And I believe that seeing that for himself—that knowing there was nothing he could have done—was the only thing that kept him sane.
“There were no survivors. Thirty-six kids and eight staff, dead or … or disappeared. Gone from us, anyway. For you see, we knew only too well that the ones who weren’t there … that they weren’t survivors, either. And certainly they’d have been better off dead. For they were now undead, or if not now, then soon. There was no other explanation for their absence; unless they had simply been taken as food, for later. But if that was the case, why only adults, when the children had been murdered out of hand and left behind? Anyway:
“The missing staff, three of them—or rather two of them, since last night—were Denise Karalambos, a pediatrician from Athens, Andre Corner, a psychiatric specialist from London, and … and someone who isn’t any longer a problem: Bruce Trennier, the engineer. As for why they were singled out, there are theories but we can’t be sure. Trennier, as we’ve seen, found favour as a lieutenant. Perhaps the others are similarly situated. But anyone who feels sorry for them can forget it. They’d be better off dead—they’re going to be better off dead. At least, that has to be our point of view. Not to mention our intention.
“But about Zek—and excuse me if I seem offhanded; it’s simply that I find it best to be cold about certain things, for I’m sure my emotions would be just as fragile as anyone else’s if I were to forget myself and let them hold sway—Zek hadn’t suffered. When that blast hit the sump, she hadn’t felt a thing. Down in the basement, everything was askew. The reinforced concrete floor had buckled upwards; the turrets had been blown off their bases like popping a pair of corks; the cave of the resurgence … simply wasn’t there any more. The walls and roof were completely caved in, and it’s a wonder that the rear end of the Refuge hadn’t followed suit.
“The Wamphyri and their lieutenants must have felt it, too: that awesome blast. Indeed, any creature in that basement—any creature of normal flesh and blood—would have been stunned by the concussion or even killed by the shock of it. But then, the Wamphyri aren’t human, and in all probability it only served to enrage them further. Certainly they raged through the Refuge.
“The only good thing to come of it all, as far as I could tell, was that one of those bloody awful Gates was now well and truly closed. Oh, the Gate itself was still there, miles up the underground river, under the Carpathian foothills, but its single exit was finally blocked by two thousand tons of fractured concrete slabs and God only knows how much solid rock.
“So much for that, but what about the three creatures who had come through and were already in our world? What about them and their lieutenants, and now a trio of new thralls to aid and advise them in their Earthly ventures? And three very intelligent thralls, at that, who knew the ways of Earth?
“That, we believe, is the main reason why those three were spared … or cursed, depending on how you see it: because they could add to Malinari’s intelligence of this new and potentially dangerous world. And we also see something of his cunning—and of his ruthlessness, too—in the murder of the innocents. It was simply a matter of leaving no one behind to speak about what they had witnessed.
“For you see, only six of the victims appeared to have … to have been used. And where they had been fairly well drained, the rest of them were just dead. But horribly dead. For most of them it had been instantaneous: stiffened fingers with nails as hard and as sharp as chisels had chopped through their backs or into their chests, to break their spines or crush their hearts. The terrible strength of the Wamphyri! But others … we don’t think some of the others had it so, well, so ‘easy.’
“I said that certain corpses were shrivelled. But ‘shrivelled’ doesn’t say it all by any means. Lardis, when he saw those bodies, said it was Szwart’s work. It wasn’t simply a reduction of bodily fluids but of … I don’t know, of the substance, the essence—the soul?—of the victims. The destruction of what-ever it is that makes a person human, giving him shape, character, humanity, for Christ’s sake! These pitiful things, they no longer had any of that. Picture the last apple on the tree, all wrinkled and dried out by the sun, all fallen in, with the last of its juices fermented and sick inside it. When it falls or if you touch it, its skin splits, and deep in its core the pulp is rotten and black. That’s what they were like … .
“And there were others whose eyes were open, staring, quite empty, and for all that they were dead I couldn’t help but feel that they hadn’t known very much about it. Their bodies weren’t shrivelled like those of Szwart’s victims, no, but it seemed to me that their minds had been. And Lardis told us Malinari would have been responsible for that.
“As for the female victims: their pale dead faces were full of awe, amazement … rapture? Some kind of exquisite, delicious agony? It’s true that I don’t have the words for it, but I might have a name: Vavara.
“Well, enough. There are no words that can say how we felt. Appalled doesn’t nearly cover it. And nothing we could do about it, not then, not immediately. What, we should alert the authorities, shout it to the world, initiate total panic and put the fear of God and all the devils of hell into every mortal human being on the entire planet … if we were believed? We couldn’t do any of those things, and for obvious reasons. Can’t you just picture the witchhunts? God, but we’d be back in the Dark Ages! Witch-pricking and human bonfires, and licences to torture and kill handed out willy-nilly, free to anyone with a grudge.
“Medical research would stop, stop dead—or undead! The laboratories would search for cures, of course they would, and spread the thing faster than a plague. Blood donors? You think we’re short of blood now? Blood would become the most precious of commodities, and keeping it the first priority. People locked in their homes, making them impregnable fortresses, defending them with guns, silver, stakes, crossbows and whatever. And the filthy rich with their private armies, making the odd, eccentric hermit of, say, Howard Hughes’s meager stature seem like a high-profile socialite by comparison.
“Borders. In the last fifteen to twenty years we’ve seen them open up. Britain has been cagey about controls, passports and such, thank God—but Europe? Can’t you just imagine the panic, see the chaos as all the old rules and statutes were reinstated, the checkpoints rushed back into being, with armed guards at ports and airports, and not forgetting the reservoirs, farms, fisheries, and �
� and anywhere where food is processed? And how long before countries started blaming each other?
“When the shit—excuse me, the accusations—started flying, Russia and Romania would probably take the brunt of it, if only because the Gates are on their territory. But what about the U.K., Great Britain? We’ve known about the Gates for thirty-odd years! Or am I just talking about ‘we,’ the team, the organization—E-Branch itself, for God’s sake—and our involvement? As for our Minister Responsible, the ‘Invisible Man’ at the top: huh! But haven’t we all heard about this—er, how does it go?—this ‘culpable deniability,’ or some such gobbledygook? ‘Damage limitation,’ and the like? Does anyone care to guess what those things really mean? They’re just ways of carrying on lying to cover up unpalatable truths that weren’t told the first time around, that’s all. And folks, what that boils down to is, we would get crucified! The end of E-Branch … and who would look after the shop then?
“And that’s not the end of it. Hell, I’ve barely started! Sooner or later the world would find out that the Russians had actually made the Gate at Perchorsk, an experiment that didn’t work out. And the same world would demand that they destroy it. Too damned late, of course, but destroy it anyway. Oh, really? What, with Mikhail Suvorov’s henchmen in Moscow still waiting for it to pay off? They should shut down a potential goldmine just because the gold-greedy West couldn’t stand the competition? And can’t you just see the old Iron Curtain slamming shut again, and that old red flag flying as before?
“Oh, they might get the message eventually—when nights turned to nightmares—and then they’d destroy it quick enough. But how? As they were ready to do it the last time around, with nukes? For just like the rest of us the Soviets have made ‘progress’ in the last quarter-century, and I really don’t care to speculate about what they might do now … but I will, if only to make the point and get this over and done with:
“Nuclear, biological, and chemical weapons; missiles with multiple warheads, launched through the Gate at Perchorsk. The total devastation of a world—Nathan’s world—and Nathan and all his people, all the Szgany, with it. Neutron bombs, yes, so that all life would die but the gold would still be there, with no one and nothing to deny its plundering, its massive, planetwide tomb-looting! Which is fine, or not, except we don’t even know if neutron radiation will kill the Wamphyri. Only that it will kill everything else.
“And meanwhile the vampires would be raging on this world. Because if we killed a couple of thralls, the Lords would make more. Survival, people: the damned survival of the damned! And how long before total embargoes—in effect sieges—were laid on entire islands, nations, continents, as the terror overtook them one by one? And how long then before the missiles and the neutron bombs were flying again, this time on our world? We’ve had ‘final solutions’ before, but there are holocausts and holocausts.
“I mentioned the Dark Ages, but I think we could probably be sent back, oh, a couple of centuries earlier than that … .
“ … So you see, we couldn’t tell anyone. It was our baby, and we’d just have to handle it ourselves. But … if we handled it our way—E-Branch’s way, the right way—then we might have a chance. And in fact, there were several clues that indeed we had a chance.
“It was a question of thinking it all through, then using our combined talents to check on our conclusions. Very well, so why had Vavara, Szwart, and Malinari left Starside to come venturing in our world? Where were the benefits for them? What was wrong with Sunside that they’d left it to their lieutenants and burgeoning vampire army in favour of Earth?
“But they were known on Sunside, indeed they were figures from legend there, and the Szgany knew how to fight them; fight them with alien weapons and the incredible skills of the Necroscope, Nathan Keogh. Also, these vampires were ambitious beyond the bloodiest dreams of almost any other Lords or Ladies of the Wamphyri before them. Perhaps the world of Sunside/Starside was too limiting in its scope. But Earth …
“They’d learned of Earth from Mikhail Suvorov and his ill-fated team of explorer-prospectors. They knew us: that without our weapons we were softer far than the Szgany of Sunside. And there were millions, indeed billions of us, spread out in many different nations across a world that was as wide as its horizons. Not merely a single strip of habitable woodlands between barrier mountains and burning deserts, but a huge and thriving termite’s nest of sprawling humanity! A land of milk and honey—and blood, of course—stretching out forever.
“Better far, we didn’t believe in vampires! In our world a vampire was a fiction, a creature in a book, a myth out of our superstitious past. Even in Romania, Hungary, or the Greek Islands, you’d have trouble finding more than a handful who truly believe in vampires today. In E-Branch, however, we have known for a long time that they never were a myth, that indeed there were vampires in our world once before and maybe more than once.
“And Zek, she knew it, too, and knew it better than most. She had actually lived in the Lady Karen’s aerie on Starside! So perhaps the mentalist Lord Malinari took something from her after all, the fact that earlier invaders had learned an important lesson: in this world longevity is synonymous with anonymity. But having faced—or having sent their thralls to face—Mikhail Suvorov’s firepower on Starside, maybe they’d known that before they set out.
“There’s evidence of that last, too. Suvorov’s party went through from Perchorsk, emerging into Starside through the surface Gate. But the Wamphyri chose the other route, the original or natural Gate into our world, probably because they knew that Perchorsk was once again a semi-military base and defended, and all of its weapons concentrated in one spot, the Perchorsk Gate itself. Hardly a good place to commence a covert infiltration!
“But the best evidence that Malinari and the others intended to keep their presence secret, at least for the time being, lay with those poor dead kids and murdered staff. For they had not been vampirized! No vampire essence—nothing of that sort—had been allowed to get into them. So plainly it wasn’t the intention of the Wamphyri to start a plague. Not yet, anyway.
“But people had been killed, murdered by vampires, and the Old Lidesci wouldn’t be satisfied until the bodies were burned. While he had found no trace of infection in them—not even in the six who’d been used, drained—still he was insistent. And since no one in this world has Lardis’s experience in such matters, the experience of so many years, no one argued the point.
“What was more, the … the cremation that Lardis insisted upon fitted perfectly with a plan we were shaping, however gradually. For not only were we unable to bring the presence of the Wamphyri into the open, but we must actually disguise it, cover it up, assist them in their efforts to remain secret! Secret to the world in general, at least, but not to us, not to E-Branch. No, for we knew our enemy of old.
“There was fuel oil, plenty of it, at the Refuge. Ben saw to it that the entire contents of a fifty gallon drum went down the wrecked inspection ducts, then we punctured the rest of the drums and let the fuel leak through all the ground floor rooms. And finally we stood off while Nathan struck a match. That one match was all it took.
“It could only be the act of a maniac or group of maniacs, some kind of crazed sect. Or perhaps sabotage, the work of some anti-British terrorist organization. Or maybe a band of utterly ruthless criminals, determined to cover up their crime. At any rate, that was how it would look … .
“Well, Romanian rescue services are notoriously slow, and where the Refuge stood across the Danube from Radujevac … it wasn’t the most populated or accessible region. The Danube itself was the most frequented route through the countryside. Fortunately for us there were no landing stages, wharves, or docks on the Romanian side, and the nearest fire engine was all of a hundred miles away!
“So we watched the Refuge burn, and eventually Nathan took us home again. But back in London we took our time before calling the authorities in Belgrade, Sofia, Bucharest, to tell them we’d had an SOS, a
Mayday, from the Refuge, that a gang of raiders was sacking the place. It took them a couple of days to get back to us with their condolences; their security forces would do all they could to bring the unknown marauders to justice, of course, but since the Refuge had been gutted there was precious little to go on … .
“And meanwhile, we were busy. I was busy, bending all my efforts to scan the future as never before. But … the simple fact is I can’t force what I do, can’t control it. I see what I see when I see it, and that’s it. And our locators were busy, none more so than David Chung. But where to look? There was no more mindsmog, and there were no borders in continental Europe. The three invaders, their lieutenants out of Starside and their ‘raw’ recruits, they could be anywhere. They could have crossed the river west into Yugoslavia, gone east into Bulgaria, headed north into the Carpathians, or caught a boat upriver for Hungary. In daylight hours they’d go to earth, or to any dark, safe place. But at night … no one travels as fast as the Wamphyri.
“Nathan suggested returning to Sunside for Anna Marie English, but to what purpose? The invaders were leaving no ‘blight’ behind them. As yet, they weren’t vampirising anyone. Murders? But there are always murders, and there are always missing persons. No, we couldn’t hope to track them that way. In any case, Anna Marie wouldn’t have come back; she had dedicated her life to the orphans of the bloodwars, and to her man in Sunside.
“The mindsmog thing puzzled us a while: the lack of it. For where there are vampires, and especially Lords of the Wamphyri, there is usually mindsmog: a tainted, impenetrable cloud on the psychic aether … unless that was something else that Malinari had stolen from Zek’s mind? But of course it was! He had also been about to learn something of E-Branch from her—until she had deliberately shortened his interrogation by showing him his intended doom, which had precipitated and mercifully shortened her own.
