Defilers

by Brian Lumley

  “Come closer?” Goodly looked more gaunt than ever. “But if they really are the future, that’s one thing that’s guaranteed. You see, the future never stands still but comes closer all the time …”

  When Trask was alone again he got on to the duty officer, asking him, “Paul, where’s Lardis Lidesci? I didn’t see him at my little pep talk.”

  “He’s where you sent him a week ago, presumably,” Paul Garvey answered. “Downstairs in the hotel with his wife. Or maybe they’re outdoors in the park. They miss the wild. Lardis was sitting on the desk when I relieved the night duty officer this morning. He said he wants to get back to work—any work! Says he thinks he’ll go mad doing nothing.”

  “What about the knock on the head that maniac Peter Miller gave him in Australia? And then the complication of that infection he picked up on our flight home?”

  “The infection has just about cleared up. A shot or two of penicillin was all it took. Lardis is lucky it wasn’t worse. We have infections here that they never even heard of in Sunside.”

  “True,” Trask nodded. “But they’ve got one I know of that’s a lot worse than all of ours put together! Anyway, send someone to find him will you? I never did find the time to ask him about that job in Greece. Also, while I’m waiting, could you tell Liz Merrick and Jake Cutter to come and see me? Thanks …”

  When Liz knocked on his door just a minute or so later, she was on her own. “Where’s Jake?” Trask asked her, as she took a seat.

  She had been told to keep an eye on Jake. He had a room at the HQ, but he didn’t know that Liz had the room adjacent, with access to his quarters from the back of her small office. Liz’s orders were simple: she was to listen in on Jake’s dreams. She should have been doing so ever since they got back from Australia, and reporting her findings back to Trask. It went against E-Branch’s code, Trask knew, but on this occasion he felt compelled. It was that important to find out what—or who (Harry Keogh, presumably)—was going on in Jake’s mind. So far, however, she hadn’t reported a thing.

  Similarly, during waking hours, she and Jake were supposed to be working together, improving their telepathic rapport, becoming a team. But again Trask remembered that look she’d given Jake in the Ops room, the one that said she was baffled and maybe a little hurt. By her inability to get through? Trask didn’t think so. No, it was far more likely obstinacy on his part.

  Damn the man! he thought, feeling his frustration bubble up again.

  “He said he’d made arrangements to meet Lardis Lidesci and Lissa in the park,” she answered. “Lardis had said he wanted to see the British Museum; Jake offered to give him a guided tour. Actually, I think Jake was only too happy to get away from the HQ for a few hours. I get the impression that he’s been feeling out of things here. He can’t seem to fit in.”

  “What?” Trask got to his feet in a fury. “He can’t seem to fit in? Well that’s because he doesn’t damn well try to fit in! I mean, what’s going on here, Liz? Everything seemed to be working just fine down under, and now this? Is he really such a petulant child? And don’t tell me I’m wrong. And don’t go covering for him—I saw that look you gave him in Ops. He’s obstructing you, right?”

  His anger wasn’t unexpected, but he’d blown up so suddenly that she was nevertheless taken aback. “I … I mean, I …”

  “Did you know I’d called the dogs off?” Trask thumped his desk. “Jake’s wanted for murder in Italy and for questioning in France, yet I’ve had our contacts in Interpol pull the files on him, albeit temporarily. His mug should be scowling at you from the front page of just about every newspaper in Europe, yet the lid’s on so tight he doesn’t even rate a half-inch of column on page six of the Daily Sport. That’s what I’ve done for him, and probably damaged my own reputation in the bargain! But for E-Branch, Jake Cutter couldn’t stick his nose outside this building without being arrested, and he shows his gratitude by going sightseeing with Lardis and Lissa to the British Museum? I just don’t believe this! Who in hell said he could leave the HQ anyway?”

  Liz’s mouth opened and closed but didn’t say anything, and Trask sat back down again with a thump and glared at her across his desk. “Well?” he snarled.

  And finally she found some words to say, and said them despite knowing they would probably set him off again. “He has things to work out … he has problems … something’s got him worried … that’s all I know.” And she sat there biting her lip.

  But Trask was much calmer now. Colder, too. “No, that isn’t all you know,” he said. “Because even if my talent doesn’t work on Jake anymore, it still works on you. And don’t accuse me of spying on you, because you know that I don’t control this thing of mine, it just is. It’s like any other sense. If you stick me with a pin I hurt, and if you lie to me I know—which in your case hurts just as much. You’ve changed just recently, Liz, and it isn’t for the better. Okay, so this is what you would call a white lie, correct? But it’s a lie just the same. And me, I’m only interested in the truth.”

  Trask sat back, took a deep breath, and finished off: “Now tell me, please, is he obstructing you?”

  Liz bit her lip again and said, “Yes, I think so. I think I could read him easily if he’d let me. And I think—in fact I know—that I could send to him. Let’s face it, I did it in Australia, and that was when he was three hundred miles away!”

  “That was under duress,” he nodded. “You were stressed out and it was your last chance for life: a telepathic shout, a psychic cry for help. But still, three hundred miles! And he heard you, he even ‘came’ to you. And then his subsequent jumps, into and out of Malinari’s bubble dome in the last seconds before it blew itself to hell. And finally he took an entire monorail car full of us—the whole damn car!—through the Möbius Continuum to our safe house in Brisbane. And now … now you can’t get through to him across a desk?”

  “I know,” she was biting her lip again. “And he can’t remember the numbers.”

  “Numbers?” Just for a moment Trask failed to connect, but then he remembered. “Harry’s formula? For the Continuum?”

  Liz nodded. “In his dreams, that’s all he does. It’s like a repetitive nightmare, like watching a computer screen processing an endless display of figures, fractions, decimals, algebraic equations and obscure mathematical symbols, and all of it scrolling and mutating down the screen of Jake’s mind while he searches for that one all-important formula. But he can never find it …”

  “And that’s all he dreams about?”

  “No,” Liz shook her head. “Sometimes he dreams about that Russian girl—her dead face looking at him through the window of a car as it sinks into night-black water—and sometimes he … sometimes he dreams about me.”

  Trask shrugged (he hoped not negligently). “He, er, ‘fancies’ you, right?”

  “No,” Liz said again, perhaps ruefully. “He rejects me, as if I’m some kind of intrusion. He rejects everything, and he’ll continue to do so until he’s solved his own problems.”

  “Castellano and the mob,” Trask said sourly.

  “That’s one of them.”

  “And the others?”

  “One other, I think. But I don’t know what it is. But I do know he’s frustrated, and it would help—”

  “Who isn’t frustrated?” Trask cut in, becoming heated once more. But having gone this far, Liz wasn’t about to be stopped.

  “—It would help, if he knew everything and had access to all the Keogh files, or better still if you personally told him all you know about his … well, his condition.”

  For a long moment Trask was silent, and then he said, “And is that it, the lot?”

  “That’s it.” And this time it was the truth. Or ninety percent of the truth, anyway. As for the other ten percent: that could be very personal, especially since she was in his dreams.

  And after a moment Trask sighed and said, “Liz, I’m really sorry I blew up on you. You’re not Jake’s keeper, after all. It isn’
t your fault that he has ‘problems.’ And in a way it isn’t his fault either. But believe me, I’m doing what I can to solve his problems, and I just wish we could get some mutual cooperation going, that’s all. It’s that important.”

  “I know it is,” she said, standing up.

  “Okay,” he nodded, “you can go. If you see him before I do, please let him know I want to speak to him.”

  “I will,” she said, and at the door turned and looked back. And yet again she was biting her lip. “Ben … ?”

  “Eh?” He looked at her. So what was this about: the other ten percent, perhaps?

  “I … I’m not sure about this,” she said. “But when he’s asleep and I’m in his mind, I get this weird feeling that someone’s watching. I feel—I don’t know—hooded eyes, burning on me. A strange image that retreats when I reach toward it.”

  Hooded eyes? Again? Trask remembered what Goodly had said. But this had to be different, surely. “Harry Keogh?” He took a stab at it. More than a stab, really, for to him it seemed perfectly obvious: some revenant of the ex-Necroscope was in there with Jake. But:

  “No,” Liz said. “I don’t think it’s Harry. I mean, I never knew him, but those who did always talk about his warmth. Well, this one isn’t warm. This one’s cold. Very.”

  “Maybe it’s the other side of Jake,” said Trask. “The dark side. The side that’s lusting after revenge.”

  She looked relieved. “You think that’s possible?”

  “I’m no psychologist,” he answered, “but I do know we have different levels of consciousness, and even when we’re awake we don’t always say what we’re thinking. Huh! And personally, well, I don’t always think what I’m saying—which, incidentally, is about as close as you’ll get to a real apology! So, maybe those eyes are one of Jake’s other levels, sensing an intruder.”

  “You’re probably right,” she said. “Because that’s usually when his shields go up and I get driven out.”

  “And now you’re out of here, too,” Trask told her, and actually managed to smile. “Because I’m busy. But stick to it, Liz, stick to it. And next time don’t hold back. You could have told me this stuff without all the agony.”

  “Except there wasn’t anything to tell,” she answered. “Not of any real importance.”

  “Even little things could be important.” He forced himself to smile again. “You’d be surprised.”

  But a moment later, as soon as the door closed behind her, the smile slipped from his face.

  Someone else in Jake’s mind? Someone other than Harry? The teeming dead, perhaps? The Great Majority? But if so, why would their eyes be hooded? Because Liz was an intruder, and only the Necroscope Jake Cutter could be trusted with the secrets of the dead? Huh! If he could be trusted. But right now Trask wouldn’t trust him as far as he could throw him.

  What was Jake hiding that he had to carry on with this deception, pre-tending he was just another empty vessel again?

  It was baffling, a mystery within a mystery.

  And Trask had more than enough of those already …

  3

  OF THE PRESENT

  Fifteen hundred hours in London, but 1,400 miles to the east it was five in the afternoon, and the small Greek island of Krassos in the Aegean was coming awake from its siesta to the blazing heat of an El Niño evening. The last time it had been this dry was following a previous El Niño, the summer of ‘98. Then fires had swept across the Greek mainland no less than in the Philippines, Mexico, Florida, and South Western Australia. And the Greeks, along with everyone else, had learned from the experience.

  Now, in every village and on every beach, there were warning signs in four languages, and apart from the native Greek it seemed likely that all the others read as badly as the English:

  NO FIRES!

  NO BARBEKU! SMOKERS:

  PLEASE EXTINGUISH CIGARETE

  BEFORE YOU THROWING AWAY!

  But everyone got the message, and it gave the sun-scorched English tourists something to chuckle over other than the translations in the taverna bills of fare.

  On the other hand, there was an item in the Greek newspapers that no one was chuckling over … especially not the Greek Islands Tourist Board in Athens. A woman’s body had been washed ashore near the village of Limari. It couldn’t as yet be called a murder, because the circumstances of her death were a mystery and her identity was unknown. The way she’d been found (the condition of the body, which had been in the sea for a week to ten days) left no clues as to what had befallen her. But there were several anomalies that at least suggested foul play: namely the fact that most of her face was missing, which included her upper teeth and entire lower jawbone. She wasn’t going to be identified by use of any dental records, that much was certain. Of course, she could have been hit in the water by some boat’s propeller, but how did she get in the water? Swimming? What, in the nude? There were nude beaches in the islands, true, but not on Krassos. Nor was the rest of her body intact; her nipples were gone (probably nibbled by crabs or fishes), her eyes were eaten away, and her ears had been shorn off close to the skull—accidentally or deliberately was similarly conjectural. And strangest of all, no one had been reported missing.

  Detective Inspector Manolis Papastamos, an expert on Greek island life, lore, and legend, had come over by ferry from Kavála in answer to a request for help by the island’s constabulary, which consisted of one fat old sergeant and four mainly untried village policemen. This kind of investigation fell well outside their scope on an island that was less than sixty miles around, where tourism—the sun, the sand, and the clear blue sea—was the principal industry. But tourism had been suffering for more than fifteen years now, and at a time when the drachma was only very shaky this sort of thing made for extremely bad publicity.

  The body had been in cold storage for twenty-four hours by the time Papastamos and Eleni Barbouris, a forensic pathologist who had come over with him from Kavála, got to see it where it lay under a crisp white sheet and a light dusting of frost in a commandeered ice-cream chest in the back room of a whitewashed, bare-necessities police post at Limari.

  Manolis Papastamos was small and slender, yet gave the impression of great inner strength. All sinew, suntan, and shiny-black, wavy hair, he was very Greek with one noticeable exception: in addition to the fierce passions of his homeland, he was also quick off the mark in his thinking, reflexes, and movements. In short there was nothing dilatory about him, and his mind was inquiring to a fault. In his mid-fifties, Manolis looked dapper in his charcoal-grey lightweight suit, white open-necked shirt, and grey shoes. And despite the weathered-leather look that was beginning to line his face, he was still handsome in the classical Greek arrangement of his features: his straight nose, high brow, flat cheeks, and rounded, slightly cleft chin.

  Twenty-odd years ago he had been full of fire and zest—also ouzo, and Metaxa!—but then something had happened that changed him, turned his life around. He was a lot more serious now, far more studious and thoughtful. But if his hard-bitten, down-to-earth police colleagues in Athens knew what he studied, and what Manolis researched almost to obsession in what little spare time his duties allowed him … well, they might find it peculiar, to say the least.

  “We should get her out of there, onto a table,” Eleni Barbouris told him, after removing the sheet. “She’s not so cold I can’t cut. In fact the cold should help keep down the odours. You see the swollen abdomen, all bloated from immersion? There will be gasses …”

  He knew what she meant. As a boy in Phaestos on Crete, he had seen a dead dolphin washed up on the beach. A large animal, seven feet long by four wide (because it was so badly swollen), it had been too heavy to move. Local firemen wanted to burn it, but they had thought it must be full of salt water, which would only hinder the burning. Best to let the water out first.

  But then, when one of the men pierced the dolphin’s belly with the pick end of his fireman’s axe—

  The creature liter
ally exploded! With a great hissing, farting and shuddering—a veritable vibration of dead, rubbery flesh—the thing had split open like an overripe melon, showering every onlooker, including the young Manolis and his village friends, with a geyser of rotten vileness! The awful stench had seemed to last for days, and his mother hadn’t been able to wash it out of his clothes …

  “You’ll perform an autopsy?” he said, backing off a pace.

  “You’ve seen plenty of them before, I’m sure,” Eleni answered. “Or is it that people don’t die in peculiar circumstances in Athens?”

  “This one’s been in the water,” Manolis said, and wrinkled his nose. “Gasses? I can do without gasses.”

  Eleni was about his age, but time and the work hadn’t been kind to her. Her hair was greying and she seemed to have shrivelled down into herself. She was a small, pale woman, but still very capable, Manolis was sure. Moreover, he suspected that she wasn’t nearly as cold or callous as she liked to pretend.

  “I have gauze masks,” she said. “Soaked in eau de cologne, or maybe ouzo, they’ll dilute the smell. But they won’t keep it out. Not entirely.” Turning her head on one side, she looked at him quizzically. “On the other hand, you don’t have to watch at all if you don’t want to. A queasy stomach, perhaps?” There was no hint of humour in her voice; no sympathy, either.

  So maybe it wasn’t pretence and Eleni Barbouris really was cold and callous! “I’ll stay,” he told her, nodding. “But first let’s invite the local boys to help us get her out of there …”

  After the village policemen had left—and they wasted very little time in leaving—Eleni got down to it. First an external examination of the body. There was nothing to be done about the corpse’s head, but if the damage to the ears and lower face was the work of a propeller, there was scant sign of any abrasions to the rest of the body. The neck was scarred on the left, where something had gouged a groove half an inch wide and quarter of an inch deep in the puffy flesh between the missing ear and the collarbone; this might have been caused by the blade of a propeller, but Eleni seemed dubious. The throat, however, was choked behind the missing mandible, probably with weed, and the pathologist started there, cutting the windpipe to lay it open in twin flaps above the clavicle.