by Brian Lumley
“Why not ask the pilot?” Jake grumbled. “How am I to know what something is?” But loosening his belt, he stood up, leaned across, and looked anyway.
Ian Goodly was seated in front of Lardis. Feeling the movements, he looked back, saw where the others were looking.
They were on the return trip, covering different mountains than on the outward-bound leg. A thousand feet below, a massive geological “wrinkle” in the Macpherson Range had left a tightly angled dog-leg fold. In the westfacing lee of the fold, a saddle or roughly oblong-shaped false plateau maybe two and a half by four acres in extent stood out in stark contrast to the surrounding heights. For it wasn’t naked rock. Anything but.
At an elevation of almost three thousand feet, someone had built … a small town? No, not a town but a complex of sorts: with gardens, pools, fountains, a monorail, tennis courts, bowling greens, even a small ski-slope up against the mountainside, and terraced chalets to house the guests. The walkways between concentric rows of red-tiled chalet accommodations radiated out from a roughly central location: a circular garden surrounding a great, silver-shining bubble of a structure, with windows on three levels and a smaller dome on top.
Lardis was lost for words; he found it too fantastic. But Jake only grunted and said, “You should see Las Vegas!” While in his own mind he wondered: A holiday camp? A fantastic hotel complex for the jet-setters and beautiful people? Or maybe—
“An aerie!” sighed Lardis. “Now wouldn’t that make a wonderful aerie? Er, without all this sunlight, of course.”
The precog was still wearing his headset, and he had been conversing with the pilot. Now he put a hand over the mike and said, “Xanadu, and the centrepiece there … why, that can only be Kubla Khan’s pleasure dome! Put on your headsets. The pilot knows some stuff.”
Jake and Lardis complied, heard the pilot tail off:
“ … There were some private homes here, hence the road up the mountain. But after the fire some kind of tycoon bought up the land and built this place. He’s a philanthropist, uses the money from this for other ‘good works,’ allegedly. Huh! A typical tax gimmick, if you ask me. All of these fat-cat rich bastards are the same. Xanadu, yeah, that’s what it’s called. The dome’s a casino, all three floors of it.”
“The fire?” said Goodly. “You mean the Brisbane Fire?”
“Nah, not the Great Fire,” said the other. “This was back in ’97, an earlier El Niño. The place was a tinderbox, and the fire must have started in one of the weekend homes. They were simple timber cabins, holiday homes, you know? Went up like so much kindling.”
“Take her lower, can you?” The precog was plainly interested.
“So what’s on your mind, boss?” With a chuckle, the pilot leaned his machine into a descending spiral. “You want to wave at the girlies around those pools?”
“Er, something like that,” said Goodly.
And certainly the girlies were there, and sun-bronzed fellows, too. There were three pools situated equidistant from the central dome; they glittered like dazzling blue jewels in Mediterranean settings, and were surrounded by low windbreak walls and mosaic-paved sundecks. The sundecks were dotted with chairs and sunbeds. And sure enough, as the chopper circled lower, the girls were sitting up, tilting their mirror-shades at the furnace sky, waving lazy arms at their imagined aerial “admirers.”
“That’s low enough,” Lardis muttered, nervously. “The next thing you know, I’ll be swimming!”
And the major said, “Mightn’t we attract a little too much attention?” He was on the headset and the pilot heard him.
“So what’s the problem?” he inquired. “Are you worried the people who run the place will complain? Nah! It’s good free advertising, and we do this all the time. Tourists who can afford it sometimes take time out after they’ve seen it to come up for a few days’ relaxation—though how anyone with red blood in his veins could relax up here is beyond me!”
Then the precog said, “That … that’s enough. We’d better get on our way now.” And there was a certain edge to his voice that had Jake looking at him across the aisle.
He saw that Goodly’s face was suddenly drawn, and noticed how his hands gripped the armrests of his seat.
PART FOUR
THE HELL OF IT
28
HERE BE VAMPIRES
That evening at the safe house, when Trask’s people had eaten, he got them together in the ops room to debrief them and start them working on the correlation of their findings. For he knew by then that they had been partially successful—or at least that they’d detected something out of the ordinary—and that a lot might soon depend on their observations.
For instance, the military contingent: it was most likely that the siting of the SAS backup teams would be based on the as yet unproven suspicions or “hunches” of Trask’s espers. And in just two days’ time those men and vehicles would start arriving and moving into harbour areas whose locations were as yet undecided. Time was of the essence.
After Trask had settled his people down, David Chung described his temporary contact with something during the landing at Gladstone, and went on to talk about the system of triangulation that they had devised.
“Taking Gladstone as the centre of a clock face,” the locator said, “the first reading would see the minute hand at some thirteen minutes past the hour, or a few degrees north of east. As for the second reading, over Sandy Cape, that would be about twelve and a half minutes before the hour, or north-west.”
Chung stood before an illuminated wall map of the area and used his index finger to point out the coordinates, then traced the directional lines to their junction some sixty miles out in the open sea. “Which puts it—whatever it is—right there,” he said. But staring at the map, he could only offer a baffled shrug. “The last place on Earth that we’d expect to find a vampire or vampires. Right in the middle of an ocean, with nothing but water and lots, I mean lots of sunlight, for miles around!”
“But you got readings,” said Trask. “You got mindsmog. So, how do you explain it?”
The locator looked at him, frowned and said. “Explain it? But if it wasn’t for Liz here I’d probably simply ignore it! A glitch, something out of kilter in my head … a headache? The evidence of the map, the location, it’s all against us. I mean, what would a vampire be doing out there? Also, we know that in the past we’ve puzzled over similar effects from other espers, from talents outside E-Branch giving off vibes they don’t even know they’ve got! So but for Liz I’d probably settle for someone on a ship out there—maybe a cruise liner?—using precognition to place bets in the casino, or maybe telekinesis to drop the ball on his numbers at roulette. Someone who’s extraordinarily ‘lucky,’ who doesn’t even know he has a skill—who thinks he has a ‘system’—but who’s nevertheless been banned from half a dozen mainland casinos. That’s what I’d be tempted to think, except …” He paused and looked at Liz. “Liz doesn’t think so. But there again, no matter what anyone thinks, nothing can change the fact that it’s sixty miles out to sea.”
Trask said, “But so were those Russian nuclear submarines, and you haven’t been wrong about those. And I remember the time when a certain Jianni Lazarides had just such a ship, The Lazarus, out on the Mediterranean. Yes, but his real name was Janos Ferenczy! He was Wamphyri, too, one of the very worst. And remember: just because there’s a lot of sunlight, it doesn’t mean our man has to go out in it.”
He turned to Liz. “David says it might be nothing. But he also says you don’t think so. So what do you think?”
Liz looked anxiously from face to face, bit her lip, and said, “Ben, are we right to place this much faith in my talent right now? I mean, at that kind of range, riding David’s probe … I could easily be mistaken. I’m not really sure that—”
“No, no, no!” Trask cut in, waving his hand dismissively, impatiently. “Just tell us what you got and let us try to figure it out. It isn’t the first time we’ve done this,
Liz. And it isn’t as if we’re vying with one another to see who will be first to find these damned things! But while no shame attaches to being in error, still we do have to find them. Which means anything is better than nothing. So whatever it was you sensed out there, let’s have it.”
Liz, Trask, and Chung were on their feet; the rest of the team was seated. And now Liz sat down, too, and thought about it for a moment. Casting her mind back, she asked herself exactly what it was that she had experienced when the locator took his second reading from the helicopter as it circled high over Sandy Cape.
Chung’s face—his slightly damp skin gleaming a pale yellow, his nostrils pinched, eyes slanted more than usual in deep concentration—gazing out of his window, northwest at the distant curve of the world, the borizon, the sea’s wide expanse.
Then his gaze becoming a vacant stare, and his eyes almost glazing over as his mind as his mind went out!
No, not his mind but a probe. And Liz Merrick a part of it—riding it like a carrier wave—sharing telepathically in the emptiness of the locator’s search, his far-flung probing of the psychic void … or what should be a void!
But there was something there—faint, so very faint, but definitely there—and she felt it like … like an emotion as opposed to a conversation. Like something spiritual, or lacking in spirit. For it was shivery cold, this thing, where it walked on her spine with icy feet. And now she knew its name.
“Well?” Trask was leaning over her. And:
“Fear!” Liz blurted it out. “I felt fear!”
The look on her face; her great green eyes wide in sudden knowledge where they stared into his … and Trask took a pace back from her. “You were afraid?”
“Not me, no,” Liz shook her head. “He, they—whoever they were—were afraid. That’s what it was, Ben: terror, gnawing at them, eating their hearts out.”
“Them?”
“More than one, I’m sure.”
“Uncertain a moment ago, and now you’re sure?”
She shook her head. “I just wasn’t willing to believe that there could ever be such hopelessness, such utterly black despair. I suppose I thought it was the emptiness, the psychic void before David’s probe found—well, whoever they are—and that the fear was in fact mine. But now …”
“Yes?”
Again she shook her head, searched for words. “I know that I, personally, have never been that afraid—that I couldn’t be that afraid—unless something happened to cause me to lose all hope, all faith.”
Trask nodded grimly. “In short, unless you’d been vampirized!”
“I … I don’t know. I imagine so.”
But now Trask took a different tack. “Or could it possibly have been fear of discovery? Had someone detected David’s probe and reacted to it?”
Liz shook her head. “No, I don’t think so. It was simply—or not so simply—an aura of overwhelming doom.”
“Good!” Trask grunted. “And on both counts. One, that you weren’t detected. And two, that therefore whoever it was couldn’t have been afraid of you. But they were afraid, and I think we can all imagine of what.”
He looked up from Liz, from face to face around the room, and paused at Lardis Lidesci.
And Lardis said, “Thralls. These were thralls, and fairly recent. Thralls who don’t have much contact with their master, but who know he’s there nevertheless. Aye, and they have every right to fear him!”
“Another nest,” Trask nodded. “Why not? It’s entirely possible. Then he frowned.”But out at sea?”
“My point exactly,” said Chung.
“Maps,” Trask said, turning to Jimmy Harvey where he sat at a keyboard. “Jimmy, see if the computer has an even smaller-scale map of that area, and blow it up on the wall there.”
“I’ve been working on it,” said the other, tapping a key. “Consider it done.”
The wall screen turned blue, if not entirely blue. For in the specified area they now saw the dotted outlines of reefs and other irregular shapes: islands or islets, and a legend identifying them as Heron Island and the Bunker and Capricorn groups, the latter because they lay on or close to the Tropic of Capricorn. Other lettering at the top of the map said that this was The Capricornia Section of the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park.
And very quietly, Trask said, “So, not necessarily a ship after all.”
But looking sick, the locator David Chung could only shake his head and remark, “What a fool he is who has no faith in his own God-given skills!”
Trask might have denied it, but Ian Goodly beat him to it. “Not at all,” the precog said. “When we use talents like these, it’s against nature. I mean, even we appreciate that what we’re doing isn’t, well, mundane. Is it any wonder we’re skeptical of our results? Or that we occasionally fail to see their significance?”
And then Trask said, “You’re right, Ian, and I was on the point of making much the same remark. But as I’ve already said, this isn’t a skills contest. How we get there doesn’t matter a damn, only that we get there. Where these monsters are concerned, the end always justifies the means. Any means.”
“Huh!” said Lardis. “And in Starside, whenever a man ascends to a vampire Lord and becomes Wamphyri, they have much the same saying—it’s not the route but the getting there. In that respect, and except that their evil has been made ten times as great, these monsters are much like men, you know.”
“Because they were men,” said Trask. “And God knows we’re none of us pure. Very well, now let’s get on—but as soon as we’re done here I want the duty officer to contact our aide in Prime Minister Blackmore’s office. We need authority for liaison with someone high in the administration of the reef marine park. We need to know who or what is out there on those islets in the Bunker and Capricorn groups … .” A moment’s pause and he turned to Goodly: “Ian, you and Lardis were in the other chopper party. And just like David here I know you, too, have a concern. Time now to have it out in the open.”
The precog stood up, tossed a pamphlet attached to a tourist map onto the table. “I picked this up at the Skytours helipad,” he said. “It’s a freebie: a give-away route map into the Macpherson Mountains, and a colour brochure describing the wonders and benefits of the Xanadu health and pleasure resort. But that’s not all I picked up. There was—or I should say there may have been—something else, when we flew over the place.”
Sitting at the table (feeling more than a little useless, and wondering what he was doing here), Jake remembered the odd, strained look on the precog’s face—the way his hands gripped his seat’s armrests—after they’d descended to have a closer look at the resort. And now his interest focussed more definitely on Goodly as he saw once again the same nervous tension in the man’s face and attitude.
“The thing is,” Goodly went on, “I have precisely the same problem as David. The location: all that unhampered sunlight. I just can’t see how the kind of creature we’re looking for could exist up there … if that’s what it was about.” Seeing Trask’s face, he held up a hand placatingly. “Yes, all right, I promise I will get on with it. But there are complications … .
“First: as we were descending toward the place so that we could get a better look at it, our pilot/tour-guide mentioned a fire that occurred during the El Niño back in 1997. And I found some of his descriptions vivid and perhaps evocative: the place was like a tinderbox … it went up like so much kindling, et cetera.
“Also, while we’ve been here I’ve heard quite a lot of talk about the Great Fire of Brisbane, and what with this awful heat and all—”
“You saw a fire?” Trask cut in.
Goodly nodded. “But I didn’t see its cause, and I couldn’t tell when it was happening. I mean, it could have been a mental response to what the pilot had said. For example, when someone says, ‘do you remember’ this or that other thing, you are made automatically to see it, relive it, in your mind’s eye. Do you see? It could be that our pilot had evoked just such a response
in me. And Ben, if this was one of my things, then it was only the very briefest glimpse. Smoke, and leaping flames … gouts of yellow fire roiling to a night sky, and a full moon hanging there … and someone shouting, ‘To me, to me!’”
Listening to him, Trask displayed a kind of amazement, as if he’d only just realized something that should have been obvious for a long time. “How long have I known you?” he said. “It sometimes seems that I’ve known you forever. And yet I’ve never thought to ask you—do you sometimes see the past?”
The precog raised an eyebrow, said, “I remember the past, just like anyone else.” And then a wry chuckle. “It’s just that I sometimes remember the future, too!” But he was serious again in a moment. “That’s what we have to consider, Ben. The future. And we know just how devious that can be—or is it perhaps my talent that’s devious? I’ve never been able to figure it out.”
“Okay,” said the other, “so you don’t know whether it was the past or the future. It’s just one of those times when your talent leaves you in doubt. But there’s one clue, at least.”
“Oh?” Again Goodly’s eyebrow.
“You said it was night time when Xanadu went up in flames, and—”
“Not Xanadu,” Goodly stopped him. “Just a handful of weekend or holiday homes, on the false plateau where Xanadu stands now.”
“Whatever,” Trask waved a hand. “But you did say there was a full moon?”
“Yes.”
“Well that … is one hell of a clue!” He turned to Harvey where he sat at the computer keyboard. “Jimmy, can you get into the local libraries on that thing?”
Harvey looked up from where he was working and smiled. But before he could say anything Trask said, “I know, don’t say it: you’re way ahead of me. The newspapers? For the fires of ‘97?”
Harvey nodded toward the wall screen. “On the screen, just about any time … now!”
Gadgets and ghosts! thought Jake, as headlines sprang into life on the big screen, and Harvey brought the small print into focus. The location, date, and time—everything was there, written into the report. And Trask said, “Good! Now then, Jimmy, can you cross-reference that date with phases of the moon?”
