Necroscope 4: Deadspeak

by Brian Lumley

  “Then that must suffice,” said the other.

  “So be it!” said Janos …

  As the sun painted a crack of gold on the eastern horizon, Harry Keogh slept on. But in the Aegean Sea off Rhodes Darcy Clarke and his team were aboard a slightly larger, faster boat than last time, and already passing Tilos to port where they forged west for Sirna. Watching the sea slip by like blue silk sliced by the scissors prow, Darcy again went over the plans they’d made last night and looked for loopholes in their logic.

  He remembered how David Chung had sat at a table in their hotel rooms, while the rest ringed him about and watched his performance. Chung’s parents had been cocaine addicts; the drug had rotted their minds and bodies, killing both of them while he was still little more than a child. So that ever since joining the Branch he’d aimed his talent in that one specific direction: the destruction of everyone who trafficked in human misery. They had given the locator other tasks from time to time, but everyone in E-Branch knew that this was his forte.

  Last night he’d employed a little of the very substance he loathed, crouching over the smallest amount of snow white cocaine. Upon the table a large map of the Dodecanese, and upon the map the merest trickle of poisonous dust, lying on a flimsy brown cigarette paper to give it definition.

  Chung had called for silence, and for several minutes had sat there breathing deeply, occasionally wetting a finger to take up the white grains and touch them to his tongue. Then—

  —With a single sharp puff of air from his mouth he’d blown the cigarette paper and its poison away, and in the next moment stabbed the map with his forefinger. “There!” he’d said. “And an awful lot of it!”

  Manolis Papastamos and Jazz Simmons had applauded, but Zek, Darcy and Ben Trask had not seemed much surprised. They were impressed, of course, but ESP had been their business for many years. It wasn’t so strange to them.

  Then Manolis had looked more closely at the map, the place where Chung was pointing, and nodded. “Lazarides’s island,” he said. “So now we know where the Lazarus is hiding. And aboard her, all the shit that the Vrykoulakas stole from the old Samothraki.”

  After that, planning had been basic to minimal. Their aim: simply to get to the island in the hour after dawn, when the white ship’s vampire crew should be less inclined to activity, and to destroy the Lazarus, vampires and all, right there where she was anchored.

  David Chung was out of it now; his part had been played and the remainder of his time in the sun was his own; he wouldn’t see the rest of the team until the job was finished. And now indeed they were on their way to finish it.

  Manolis brought Darcy’s mind back to the present: “Another half-hour and we’re there. Do you want to go over it again?”

  Darcy shook his head. “No, you all know your jobs. As for me: this time I’m just a passenger—at least until we get onto the island and into Janos’s place.” He looked at his team.

  Zek was unzipping herself from her lightweight one-piece suit. Underneath she wore a yellow bathing costume consisting of very little and leaving nothing at all to the imagination. She scarcely looked her age but was sleek, tanned and stunning. With her blue eyes, her blonde hair flashing gold, and a smile like a white blaze, there wouldn’t be a man alive or undead who could keep his eyes off her!

  Her husband looked at her and grinned. “What’s so amusing?” she asked him, tossing her head.

  “I was thinking,” Jazz answered, “that we’d like to sink these blokes along with their ship. The idea isn’t that they should go diving in the water after you!”

  “This is something I learned from the Lady Karen on Starside,” she told him. “If I can distract them, then the rest of you will be able to do your jobs more safely and easily. Karen was an expert at distraction.”

  “Oh, they’ll be distracted, all right!” Manolis assured her.

  Ben Trask had meanwhile opened up a small compartmented suitcase and taken out four of six gleaming metal discs some two inches thick by seven across. The back of each disc was black, magnetic, and the obverse fitted with a safety switch and timer. Manolis looked at the limpet mines where Trask began fitting them to a pair of diving belts in place of the usual lead weights, and shook his head. “I still don’t know how you got them out of England,” he said.

  Trask shrugged. “In a diplomatic bag. We may be silent partners, but we’re still part of British Intelligence after all.”

  There’s a rock up ahead,” Zek shouted from where she now sat on a rubber mat on the narrow deck on top of the cabin and in front of the windshield. She pointed. “Manolis, is that it?”

  He nodded. “That’s it. Darcy, can you take the wheel?”

  Darcy took control of the boat and throttled back a little. Manolis and Jazz stripped down to swimsuits, and went into the tiny cabin out of sight. In there, they tested aqualungs and checked their swimfins. Ben Trask took off his jacket and put on sunglasses and a straw hat. In his Hawaiian shirt he was just some rich tourist fool out for a day’s pleasure-boating. Darcy might easily be his brother.

  The island had swum up larger and Zek was seen to be right: it was little more than a big rock. There were a few shrubs, patches of thyme and coarse grass, and lots of rocks … and situated centrally, above coastal cliffs, a weathered yellow stack going up sheer for maybe one hundred and eighty feet.

  Zek looked at it and put her hand to her brow. “That’s a pigmy of an aerie,” she said, “but it gives me the shudders just the same. And there are men—no, vampires—on it. Two of them at least.”

  The boat rounded the point of a promontory and Darcy saw what lay ahead. But even if he hadn’t seen it, his talent had already forewarned him. “Stay down,” he called out to Manolis and Jazz in the cabin. “Draw those curtains. You two aren’t here. There are just the three of us.”

  They did as he told them.

  Zek stretched herself out luxuriously on the cabin’s roof and put on sunglasses; Trask lay back and hooked one leg idly over the boat’s rail; Darcy headed the boat directly across the mouth of a small bay. And there, anchored in the bay … the white ship, the Lazarus.

  Trask knocked the cap off a bottle of beer and tilted his head back, merely wetting his lips but studying what he could see of the island intently. That was part of his job, while Darcy and Zek, in their various ways, studied the Lazarus.

  The island consisted of a tiny beach inside a pair of bare spurs of rock extending oceanward, and an almost barren slope of rock climbing to the central stack. From this side, the top of the stack was seen to be a ruined fortification or pharos of some sort, with the remains of badly eroded steps still showing where they zig-zagged up to it. But half-way up the stack, a false, flat, extensive plateau seemed carved, as if in ages past the upper section had split down the centre and half had toppled over. With massive walls built around the plateau’s perimeter from one side of the needle rock to the other, the place had obviously been a Crusader stronghold. The old walls had long since fallen away in places, but it was seen that new walls were now under construction, and scaffolding was plainly visible clinging to both the stump and the surviving upper section of the stack.

  Darcy meanwhile considered the Lazarus. The white ship stood off from the beach in deep water central in the small bay. Her anchor-chain went down shimmering into the blue of the sea. On the deck under the black, scalloped awning, a man sat in one of several chairs. But as the motorboat came powering into view he stood up and took binoculars from around his neck. He wore a wide-brimmed floppy hat and sunglasses, and he kept fairly well to the shade as he put the binoculars to his eyes and trained them on the motorboat.

  Zek propped herself up on one elbow and waved excitedly, but the watcher on the deck ignored her—at first.

  Darcy throttled back and turned the boat in a wide circle about the white ship, and joined Zek in her waving. “Ahoy, there!” he put on an upper-class English accent. “Ahoy aboard the Lazarus!”

  The man went to t
he door of the lounge and leaned half-inside, then came back out. He now aimed his binoculars at Zek where she continued to wave; this was scarcely necessary for the circling boat was no more than forty or fifty feet away. She felt his gaze on her and shivered, despite the blazing heat of the sun. A second man, who might have been the twin of the first, joined him and they silently observed the circling boat—but mainly they observed Zek.

  Darcy throttled back more yet, and a third man came out of the white ship’s lounge. Ben Trask stood up and held up his bottle to them. “Care for a drink?” he shouted, imitating Darcy’s faked accent. “Maybe we can come aboard?”

  Like fuck! thought Darcy.

  Zek scanned the ship, not only above but also below decks. She counted six all told. Three sleeping. All of them vampires. Then …

  … One of the sleepers stirred, woke up. His mind was alert; it was more completely vampire than the others; before Zek could cover her telepathic spying, he had “seen” her!

  She stopped waving and told Darcy: “Let’s go. One of them read me. He didn’t see anything much, only that I’m more than I appear to be. But if they run off now we’ll lose them.”

  “We’ll see you later,” Ben Trask called out as Darcy turned the boat away and sped for the tip of the far promontory.

  Passing from the view of the watchers on the Lazarus, he throttled right down and allowed the boat to cruise close up to a flat-topped, weed-grown rock barely sticking up out of the sea. Jazz and Manolis came out of the cabin, put on their masks and adjusted their demand valves, and as Darcy cut the engine they stepped from the boat to the rock and so into the sea.

  “Jazz,” Zek called down, “be careful!”

  He might have heard her and he might not; his head went down and a stream of bubbles came up; the swimmers submerged to fifteen feet and headed back towards the Lazarus.

  “More distraction,” said Darcy, grimly, as he throttled up and turned back out to sea.

  “Darcy,” Zek called to him, “keep just a little more distant this time. They’ll be wary, I’m sure.”

  As Darcy headed straight out to sea and the Lazarus came back into view, so Ben Trask got down on his knees and took a sterling sub-machine gun out of its bag under the seat. He extended the butt and slapped a curved magazine of 9 mm rounds into the housing, then lay the gun between his feet and covered it with the bag.

  Half a mile out, Darcy turned to port and came speeding back towards the white ship. There was activity aboard now, where the three on the deck hurried round the rail, pausing every few paces to look over into the water. Jazz and Manolis would be there any time now. Darcy piled on the speed and Zek commenced waving as before. The men on the deck came together at one point at the rail and again Zek felt binoculars trained on her almost naked body. But this time the interest was other than sexual.

  Then, as Darcy leaned the boat over on her side and recommenced his circling, they heard the rattle of the Lazarus’s anchor-chain as it was drawn up, and the throbbing cough of her engines starting into life. And now a fourth man came ducking out of the lounge onto the deck … cradling a stubby, squat-bodied machine-gun in his arms!

  “Jesus!” Ben Trask yelled. And it might have been that his shout of warning was a signal to let the battle commence.

  The man with the machine-gun opened up, standing there on the deck of the Lazarus with his legs braced, hosing the smaller craft with lead. Zek had scrambled down off the cabin roof; as she ducked into the tiny cabin the windshield flew into shards and Darcy felt the whip of hot lead flying all around. Then Trask stood up and returned fire, and the gunner on the Lazarus was thrown back as if he’d been hit by a pile-driver. He bounced off a stanchion on the deck, came toppling over the rail and splashed down into the water. And another crewman ran to retrieve his gun.

  Darcy was round the white ship now and putting distance between them as he forged for the open sea; but as Zek came back out of the cabin, she grabbed the wheel and yanked it hard over, shouting: “Look! Oh, look!”

  Darcy let her have the wheel and looked. The man with the gun on the deck of the Lazarus was firing down into the water, shooting at something which drew slowly away from the white ship’s flank. It could only be Jazz or Manolis, or both of them.

  “You handle her!” Darcy yelled, and he moved to where Trask was still firing and drew out a second bag from under the seating. But as he loaded up the second SMG there came more of the angry wasp-buzzing of sprayed bullets, and Trask cried out and staggered back, only just managing to prevent himself going over the side. The upper muscle of Trask’s left arm had a neat hole punched clean through, which turned scarlet and spilled over with blood in the next moment. Then Darcy was up on his feet, returning fire.

  But the Lazarus was moving; she reversed out of the bay and began to turn slowly on her own axis, and the water boiled furiously where her propellers churned. They couldn’t stop her now and so let her go, and Zek went to Trask to see if there was anything she could do. He grimaced but told her: “I’ll be OK. Just wrap it up, that’s all.”

  Heads broke the surface of the water as Zek tore Trask’s shirt from his back to make a bandage and sling. Darcy throttled right back and drew alongside Jazz where he slipped out of his lung’s harness and trod water, then helped him clamber aboard, and Manolis came knifing in in an expert flurry of flippers. In another moment he, too, had been dragged up into the boat—at which point the motor gave a gurgling cough and stopped dead.

  “Flooded!” Darcy cried.

  But Ben Trask was pointing out to sea and yelling, “Jesus, Je-sus!”

  The Lazarus had turned round and was coming back. The throb of her engines was louder, faster as she bore down on the smaller vessel, and her intention was obvious. Manolis, working furiously to get the motor restarted, glanced at the waterproof watch on his wrist. “She should have gone up by now!” he yelled. “The limpets, they should have —”

  And when the Lazarus was something less than fifty yards away, then the mines did go off. Not in one unified explosion, but in four.

  The first two exploded near the stern of the white ship, with only a second or so between them, which had the effect of first throwing the stern one way and then the other, and also of lifting it up out of the water. Slewing and wallowing as the engines seized up, the Lazarus was still advancing under something of her former impetus; but then the third and fourth limpets went off where they’d been placed towards the stem, and that changed the whole picture. With the stern already low in the water from massive flooding, now the prow was pushed up on the crest of white-foaming waters, and as her nose slapped back to the tossing ocean so the engines exploded. The back of the boat was at once split open in gouting fire and ruin, and hot, buckled metal was hurled aloft in a fireball of igniting fuel.

  As the glare of the fireball diminished and a huge smoke ring climbed skyward on the last hot gasp of the ship, so she gave up the ghost, settled down in the water and sank. Scraps of burning awning fluttered back to the tossing ocean and the drifting smoke cleared; the sea belched hugely and offered up clouds of steam; the gurgling and boiling of the waters continued for a few seconds longer, before falling silent …

  “Gone!” said Darcy, when he could draw breath.

  “Right,” Jazz Simmons nodded. “But let’s make sure she’s all gone. And her crew with her.”

  Manolis got the motor going and they chugged over to where the Lazarus had gone down. An oil slick lay on the water, where bubbles surfaced and made spreading rainbow colours. Then, even as they watched, a head and shoulders came bobbing up, lolled over backwards, and the lower part of the blackened body slowly rotated into view. He lay there in the water as if crucified, with his arms spreadeagled and great yellow blisters bursting on his neck, shoulders and thighs. But as they continued to stare aghast, so his eyes opened and glared at them, and he coughed up phlegm, blood and salt water.

  Manolis didn’t think twice but shut off the motor, picked up a speargun and put
a harpoon straight into the gagging vampire’s chest. The creature jerked once or twice, then lay still in the water. But still they couldn’t be sure. Zek looked away as they reeled him in to the side of the boat, tied lead weights to his ankles and let him sink slowly out of sight.

  “Deep water,” Manolis commented, without emotion.

  “Even a vampire is only flesh and blood. If he can’t breathe he can’t live. Anyway, the floor of the sea is rocky here: there will be many big groupers down there. Even if life were possible, he can’t heal himself faster than they can eat him!”

  Ben Trask was white and shaky but well in control of himself. His shoulder was all strapped up now. “What about the one I knocked overboard?” he said.

  Manolis took the boat to the middle of the bay where the Lazarus had been moored, and Darcy gave a shout and pointed at something that splashed feebly in the water. Even shot, the vampire had made it half-way to land. They closed with him, speared him and dragged him back out to sea, where they dealt with him as with the first one.

  “And that’s the end of them,” Ben Trask grunted.

  “Not quite,” Zek reminded him, pointing at the looming stack of white and yellow stone inland. There are two more of them up there.” She put her hand to her brow and closed her eyes, and frowned. “Also … there may be something else. But I’m not sure what.”

  Manolis beached the boat and took up his speargun. He was happy with that and with his Beretta. Darcy had his SMG, which he considered enough to handle, and Zek took a second speargun. Jazz was satisfied with Harry Keogh’s crossbow, with which he’d familiarized himself during the voyage. They might have taken the other SMG, too, but Ben Trask was now out of it and they must leave the gun with him—just in case. His task: stay behind and look after the boat.

  They waded ashore and started up the rocks. The trail was easy to follow where the thin soil had been compacted between boulders, and where steps had been cut in the steeper places. Half-way to the stack they paused to take a breather and look back. Ben was watching them through binoculars, and also watching the stack. So far there had been no sign of life in the place, but as they approached its base Jazz spied movement up in the ancient embrasures.