by Brian Lumley
The precog was quiet now, saying nothing, but his alleged “concerns” hadn’t fooled Trask one bit. For in its way Goodly’s subterfuge had been a lie, a diversion to take Trask’s mind off his lost Zek and get it back on track, and of course Trask knew it. A lie, yes, but a white one. And:
“So thanks, anyway,” he finally continued, looking directly into the precog’s eyes, “but I think we can safely conclude that here …” he pointed a steady, resolute finger at the locations displayed on the wall screen, “ … that here be vampires!”
When no one had anything further to say, Trask finished up with: “Very well, and now we have plans to make.”
Later that evening, Jake was sitting on a bench in the cool of the garden, lost in his own strange, meditative thoughts, when Lardis found him and sat down beside him. After he had sniffed at the air for a while, the old man said, “Carypsu?”
Oddly enough, Jake understood. “Eucalyptus?” he answered. “It’s a tree, growing outside the wall.”
“Yes,” Lardis nodded. “Carypsu. We have them on Sunside.” And, after a moment or two’s thought: “May I ask a question?”
“What’s on your mind?” said Jake.
At which Lardis smiled. “But I might ask you the selfsame thing! What’s on, or what’s in, your mind?”
Jake frowned. “Some kind of word game?”
“No,” Lardis shook his head. “No word game. But I have to admit, I’m curious.”
“About what?”
“About you. About how you knew that in Starside in the old days a Lord of the Wamphyri might occasionally add ari to his father’s name, denoting that he was his father’s son.”
“You mean like Lord Malin was Malinari’s father?”
“Indeed. And now that you mention it … how you knew that, too?”
Jake frowned again, deeper this time. But then he relaxed, and shrugged. “You must have told me,” he said. “Or maybe I’ve read of it somewhere. In Ben Trask’s files, perhaps?” But:
“No,” Lardis shook his head, smiling in that knowing way of his. “No, I haven’t told you. I’ve had no reason to mention it to anyone. And as far as I know it isn’t written anywhere.”
Then, creaking to his feet, the old man yawned and said, “Well, goodnight, Jake. And pleasant dreams … .”
29
A DREAM AND A WORD-GAME
But in fact Jake’s dreams were anything but pleasant … .
It wasn’t so much what had happened, though that was bad enough, but that he had been made to watch it happening. More than anything else, that was what had preyed on his mind … until he’d made it up to put things right. Perhaps he’d hoped that by killing the cause he might kill the memories, too.
But such a lot of memories, burning like acid in his head, until he’d thought they would burn his brain out.
Memories, yes.
That fat, pallid, slimy-looking bastard—the second one of these pigs that Jake had got back at—the way he had taken Natasha in the classical or orthodox position, but scarcely an act of love. Rape, yes, and his long, slender grey dick in her rectum according to his taste.
Memories, those God-awful memories …
They’d piled pillows under her, raising her hips, and two of the others had held her legs under her knees, to allow this fat slug standing at the side of the bed to get into her. That had made it easy for him, because unconscious as she was—or between bouts of consciouness and unconsciousness—she’d been likely to flop and eject him. But holding her like that, Natasha had been a lot more accessible; accessible to viewing, too, for Jake had been tied to a chair where be could see all of the action. Of course, be could have closed his eyes, and from time to time he did just that, but he could still hear it even if he couldn’t see it.
That grunting pig! His dick like a long finger poking into her, in and out with the heaving and clenching of his fat backside. And this sweaty, grunting, slug-like slob—this giggling queer—oh, it was obvious why he liked it like this. With any normal woman in any natural act of intercourse he’d be lucky if that pencil penis of his touched the sides. But this way … at least he would get some satisfaction, however minimal. At least he would know be’d bad it into something.
And Jake had to watch, be had to, because long before that too-long night was over he’d known that if it was the very last thing he did be would avenge her.
But the worst thing was when it was over, and the fat bastard zipped his fly and waddled over to Jake, saying, “A shame she wasn’t awake, eh, English? It would have been so sweet to know she’d felt that last big bang, and to feel her guts spasm as I greased her dirt chute! Ah well, there’s time yet. Ob, ha, ha, ha!”
He had a strong German accent, and when be laughed he put his face close enough to Jake’s to cause him to recoil from the stench of cigar smoke and senf, hot German mustard. …
But Jake didn’t even know the pig’s name—didn’t know any of their names—except Castellano’s and Jean Daniel’s.
Well, Jean Daniel was dead now, of an unequal argument between his soft guts and the alloy core of a plastique-propelled steering column.
And the fat faggot had been number two … .
Jake had known the route the fat man took from Castellano’s place on the northern outskirts of Marseille to a gay bar on the Rue de Carpiagne which he visited regularly on Friday nights. He knew, too, that the fat swine was a little shy to admit openly of his predilections (that it didn’t sit too well with him that he was both a hoodlum and a pervert), which was why he invariably approached Le Jockey Club down a narrow side street.
It was raining on the night in question, and Jake had parked his car so as to block off one side of the rain-slick, cobbled alley on the fat man’s approach route. The other side was liberally sprinkled with inch-and-a-half spikes which Jake had laid down with malice aforethought and in great deliberation.
Jake was waiting in a recessed doorway when the fat man’s fat tyres blew, and he was quickly into the alley as the expensive Fiat slewed to a halt and its cursing driver slammed open his door, got out, and creased his belly as he bent to hear the front nearside’s last gasp. A moment more and Jake was standing over him.
The fat man was suddenly aware of him; he had time to say, “Uh? Bitte? Was ist?” before Jake sapped him behind the ear … .
In a deserted copse on a wooded hillside over the motorway near St. Antoine, Jake wafted a small bottle of smelling salts under his victim’s nose until he twitched, moaned, and came out of it with a series of useless, spastic jerks. Useless because he was tied up—literally tied up—and spastic because he was tied by his ankles and wrists, so that all he could do was shake and shiver like a great, globular white spider in its web.
Jake had woken him up because in his position, upside down, the fat Kraut might easily die without ever regaining consciousness of his own accord. And that was the last thing Jake wanted … that he should die easily.
The man’s legs were spread wide; at a height of about seven feet, his ankles were roped to a pair of springy saplings which were just strong enough to hold him in position. His wrists were likewise tied to the bases of the twin trees, which formed his body into a fat, totally naked X. He was gagged with his own underpants, tied off at the back of his neck, and the rest of his clothing lay in a neat pile close by.
At first the fat man struggled a little, but since that was pointless he quickly gave up and hung still, watching Jake pour a hip flask of fiery Asbach Uralt brandy over his heaped clothing.
“A waste of good German liquor, eh?” Jake said. “But that’s not the only German thing I’ll be wasting tonight.” Then, stepping closer: “You don’t remember me, do you?”
The fat white spider had begun to shake its web again, however hopelessly, but now it paused to say, “Umph? Uh-umph?”
“But I’ll bet you remember the girl. That night at Castellano’s place? The Russian girl, Natasha?” Hearing that name, and finally recognizing his tormento
r, the fat man commenced yanking on his ropes with a vengeance, his eyes blinking rapidly in a face as round as the moon, all bloated with pooling blood.
“Oh, sure, you remember her,” Jake said, as he got to work.
Though it had stopped raining, he was still wearing a lightweight raincoat. From one side pocket he took out a small paper parcel, and from the other several indeterminate items. The fat man, being inverted, couldn’t make out what they were; but perhaps he recognized a certain marzipan smell when Jake unwrapped the stained paper parcel and weighed a blob of grey, doughlike stuff in his hand. At any rate he began shaking the trees furiously, and did a lot more serious umph-umphing.
But Jake wasn’t listening; he wasn’t the least bit interested in his victim’s complaints. Stretching a pair of thin surgical gloves onto his hands, he stepped closer and began molding plastic explosive into the fat man’s anal cavity. And:
“I might have expected it,” he said, finishing the job as quickly as possible, “that a fat, ugly thing like you would have a hole like a horse’s collar. You’ve done your fair share of time in the barrel, right? But this time—I mean this last time—it’s a little different, eh?”
He showed the fat man a small brass cylinder the size of a pencil-slim torch battery with copper wires protruding from one end, said, “Detonator,” and rammed it home. And connecting the wires to a miniature timer, he said, “Which gives you maybe, oh, fifty seconds? As of right … now!” And he pressed a tiny button.
Then, in no special hurry, he stepped to the neatly piled clothing, stooped and applied the flame of his cigarette lighter. The pile caught with a small whoosh! and blue flames flickered on the hillside.
And starting to count, “Five, six, seven …” Jake set off through the damp undergrowth, down the uneven, wooded slope to where his car was parked on a rutted farm track.
“Twenty, twenty-one, twenty-two …” He looked back up the slope. Thirty or thirty-five yards away, the fat white spider-thing vibrated in its web, looking luminous in the darkness of the wooded hillside. And Jake—who had fairly danced down the slope, his face fixed in a mad grin as he counted off the seconds through clenched teeth—suddenly Jake felt nauseated.
But at a count of thirty-two he realized he was probably too close and couldn’t afford to be sick. It had been his intention to stand there and shout back up the slope, remind that poor fat sod of what he’d said that night: something about Natasha feeling the last big bang? And her guts going into spasm? But there wasn’t enough time left—and maybe not enough hatred left—for any of that now. Or could it be simply that he didn’t want his car covered with … with whatever?
Feeling his gorge rising, but still counting, he started up the car and nosed off down the track. “Thirty-eight, thirty-nine, forty …” And when he was on the level, heading for the motorway, he applied the brakes and looked back—felt obliged to look back—like the night when he had looked without wanting to at something else. Looked back because this was what he thought was needed to burn that memory out of him.
“Forty-six, forty-seven, forty—” But that was as far as he got. Obviously he’d been counting just a little too slowly.
Jake saw the ball of fire leap up and out from the trees on the hillside, pictured in his mind’s eye a hideous rending, and then heard the bang The only mercy was that the fat queer himself couldn’t possibly have heard it, and there had been no time at all for a spasm … .
Then for a time Jake just sat there in his car, until the sweat began to turn cold on him. But damn it to hell, the horror and the hatred were already creeping back, sated for a while but by no means done with. And Jake knew that they always would be there, until he tracked down the rest of those bastards and finished what they had started.
He gave himself a shake, put the car back in gear, and made for the motorway. But—
—something was obscuring his interior mirror, something that had got itself stuck to the rear window.
Something round, that once was fat but now was flat, dripping scarlet from its ripped rim. And its eyes hanging out, and its mouth still stuffed with its own underpants!
A face. But just a face!
Jesus God!
Jesus—
“—God!”
Jake came awake with a small cry and a massive start, the sweat still dripping, and that mask of a face still printed on the darkness but fading as he realized it was only that awful nightmare again—and that while the rest of it was all too horrifyingly real, the last part had never happened except in the dream. It always happened in the dream. Every time.
But then, while he sat there trembling, his heart hammering in his chest, utterly alone in the darkness of his cubicle, someone very close quite clearly said:
Ahhhhh! What stuff you are made of, Jake! And what a host you would make! But together we’ll make a very fine pair, you and I … .
Jake recognized the voice at once—only this time he was awake, had been shocked awake—and the knowledge saw him fumbling for his bedside light switch with rubbery fingers as the damp short hairs at the back of his neck stiffened into spikes.
But as the light came on so that evil, chuckling deadspeak voice was already receding, was being driven away. Because acting instinctively—almost without knowing he had done it, and certainly without knowing how—Jake had erected mental shields against intruders, blocking them from his mind. For as well as Korath Mindsthrall, he had sensed someone else there, and possibly many someones, listening to his thoughts.
Or was it all a bad dream? For now that they were gone, he couldn’t even be sure that his intruders had ever been there in the first place. And Jake flopped panting, back onto his pillow, wondering if perhaps it had only been a part of his dream after all. One of those dreams that crashes the barrier of consciousness, however momentarily, to cross over into the waking world.
He wondered about it, but was by no means certain … .
. While just a few feet away, trying desperately hard to keep still as a mouse, Liz Merrick crouched shivering and shuddering on her bed, in the farthest corner of her cubicle, with a sheet drawn up under her chin. She hung on tightly to that sheet, and even more so to her thoughts (so as to keep them to herself, but in any case as far away from Jake as possible), and tried to forget what she had seen. But much like Jake himself that night at Castellano’s place, gripped by some kind of morbid fascination, voyeurism of a sort, she’d found herself unable to “look away” … until now.
Damn Ben Trask that he had ordered this surveillance! But it wasn’t only Trask, for Liz, too, had “had” to know.
Well, and now she knew. She had seen—she’d even “experienced” Jake’s passion, his hatred, and the resultant nightmare—and knew how far he would go in his vendetta, and exactly what he was capable of (literally anything), in his craving for justice. Or for a kind of justice, at least.
But such justice!
On the other hand, perhaps that was why Harry had chosen him: because an eye for an eye had always been the Necroscope’s motto. The eye, yes: that most vital and vulnerable part of the body. An eye for an eye. Why, the thought itself was horrific! But now, as Liz was witness—and as it had been brought forcefully home to her—she realized that other parts of the body could be just as vulnerable, and their use or misuse even more horrific … .
Jake hadn’t thought he would sleep again, but after tossing and turning for an hour—and listening, though for what he wasn’t quite sure—he did in fact sleep.
And as he relaxed his shields—a natural, necessary relaxation borne of mental fatigue, from listening so intently for an unidentified something—so Korath Mindsthrall was alert and waiting for him. Jake felt the ex-vampire’s gradual insinuation like a slimy, creeping mist, or a damp shroud settling over his mind. But at the same time he also sensed something of urgency, a desire to speak, to communicate with him. And if for no other reason than his own curiosity, he allowed it.
“I know you’re there,” Jake sai
d, as the other’s hesitancy, his too-cautious approach began to irritate him. “So why do you hold back? If you’ve got something to say, get it said.”
For answer there came a sensed “sigh” of relief, and: But I thought that you would shut me out, send me away. I thought you would reject me, Korath said.
“That didn’t stop you the last time,” Jake said. “When you spoke to me after my nightmare? You seemed to have enjoyed spying on me, as if you approved of what you had seen, of what I’d done. Or perhaps you got carried away and broke your silence in error, when I wasn’t supposed to know you were there?”
I was in fact … well, speaking to myself, said the other, defensively. We might even say that you eavesdropped on me!
“Speaking to yourself?” Jake answered. “Deadspeak? In which case you’re as new to it as I am. For a thought is just as good as the spoken word, Korath, to such as you and I.”
And to all of the teeming dead, said the other. Which makes you the odd man out.
“But as for eavesdropping …” Jake continued, “it sometimes has its uses. What was it you said? That together we would make a very fine pair? What exactly did you mean by that? That we’re alike in certain ways? No, I don’t think so. Or did you perhaps mean that you’d like to team up with me?”
But that is precisely what I meant! Korath answered, just a little too eagerly. For after all, if you’re intent on tracking down and destroying the treacherous Malinari, who could possibly be of greater assistance than one who was as close to him as Korath Mindsthrall
“So close that he killed you?” Jake’s sarcasm dripped.
Exactly! And I know what you are thinking: that the Necroscope Harry Keogh found it peculiar that The Mind should murder his first lieutenant out of hand, as if it were nothing to him. But it was in fact … something.
