Defilers

by Brian Lumley

  He spoke quickly, authoritatively to his men, detectives from his own division in Athens. And without a word they stood up and left the room.

  “There, is better.” Papastamos invited his visitors to sit, poured ouzo, then prowled the room while he talked. And without further ado he told them what had happened, all of it up to the point where his car had been pushed over the cliff.

  “And you survived that?” Chung shook his head; he couldn’t conceal his astonishment and wasn’t thinking straight. But then he checked himself and said, “Yes, of course you did! But how?”

  “My seat belt,” said Manolis. “She wasn’t fastened—thank God! I remember we hit somethings going down; once, twice … I don’t know, can’t say. But thee car, she spinning. Then my door is torn off and I falling through thee air. I thinking: Manolis, you are dead! Then … nothing else. Some men in a fishing boat near thee cliffs see thee car go down. They saving me from thee sea. But Eleni—she was gone. Thee water was very deep in that part …”

  “And afterwards?” said Trask.

  “Afterwards, I wake up in Krassos town in thee hospital. I am shook up: my ribs, collarbone, jaw, and all thee bruises. I go a little crazy, you know? Because I remember but I can’t say anything. Not about that, what I suspecting! They move me here, this ward for thee men with thee shell shock. And that is good, because I want be off that Krassos! Then, when I start thinking straight again, I call you.”

  Trask nodded and said, “You’d guessed what you were dealing with, and you knew who to call first.”

  “Not first,” Manolis shook his head. “First I calling thee office in Athens, to get these men down here pretty damn fast!”

  “You thought they—wherever they are—might try coming after you,” said Chung.

  “Right. And that kind of thing … I didn’t want it coming after me!” Manolis shuddered. “Not when I was weak, unprotected. But this place, this hospital,” he nodded his head in approval, “she is secure, I think. And my men are good.”

  Which prompted Trask to ask: “How much do your men know of all this?” It was a very important question.

  “Only that I have thee accident, and that I need help. But how to tell them? I mean, hey—if they knew what I thinking—how do I do thee explaining?”

  “You don’t,” Trask shook his head. “No way! I’m sure these men of yours are very good men, but even if they believed you—especially if they believed you, believed in what you suspected—it could jeopardize the whole thing. And E-Branch has been on this case for a long time.”

  Then, as briefly and as quickly as possible, he gave Manolis a sketchy outline of what had been happening and E-Branch’s role in things.

  “So, this is all on you,” said the other.

  “We were hoping to put some of it on you, too,” said David Chung. “But not like this.”

  “Hey, I am alive!” said Manolis. “Thee reason I put it out that I bad hurt is for throwing these things off my trail. Waiting for you here, I am near thee scene. So you want to put some of this on me? Yes! Good! Do it! I expecting it! We are working together before, so now we doing it again. You thinking I wants these damn things in Greece? In thee Greek islands? What? These vrykoulakas dog bastards!?” His English was deteriorating commensurate with his mounting anger.

  “Calm down, Manolis,” said Trask, “and think. While you’re certainly alive, still you’re not in the best possible shape. I mean, just look at you … You’re pretty much banged about. And I’m sure you haven’t forgotten how it was on Halki, Rhodes, and Kárpathos that time? With Janos Ferenczy and his creatures? You wouldn’t want to slow us down, now would you?”

  “I want do whatever I can!” the other declared. And:

  “Very well,” said Trask, and went on to tell him about the transfers of large sums of money from Jethro Manchester’s Swiss accounts to a bank “somewhere” in Greece. He finished by saying, “Find that out for us, and you’ll be doing us a big favour.”

  “And myself,” Manolis nodded. “And Greece, and thee world! But I can do that from here, I think. So, will you wait?”

  Trask shook his head. “No, we’re moving on. But we’ll have your number and we’ll stay in touch, let you know where we are. That way you can always call us if you get anything.”

  “And when I feeling a little better? When I getting rid of these bandages, then maybe I—?”

  “They know what you look like,” Trask cut him short. “The creatures who did this to you.” It was only an excuse, for they knew what Trask looked like, too (one of them did, anyway) but the Head of E-Branch didn’t want Manolis to get hurt any worse than he was right now.

  Manolis chewed his lip, then breathed deeply, and finally grunted his disappointment. “I … I feeling useless!” And in a typically Greek display of frustration, he threw up his hands.

  “On the contrary,” Trask told him. “With what you’ve told us, you’ve corroborated everything we suspected.”

  “Huh!” said Manolis. “Right.” But he seemed doubtful.

  “Is there anything else you want to tell us before we go?” Trask asked him.

  “Tell you, no—show you, sure.” And Manolis scattered the playing cards from the tabletop, unfolding a map of Krassos in their place. The map was one of those cheap and cheerful, none-too-accurate, homegrown efforts that display sites of historic and archaeological interest, as well as local hotels, tavernas, and allegedly golden sand beaches; in short, a guide to all the island’s tourist traps.

  “Would you believe,” said Chung, “that Krassos is where we were supposed to be going?”

  “Thee island?” Manolis stared at him, remembered his weird talent. “Are you, er, locating something? On Krassos?”

  “Not yet,” Chung answered ruefully. “Later, maybe.”

  “We’re tourists,” Trask explained.

  “Ah! Your cover. But Krassos? You knew to go there?”

  “A coincidence,” Trask answered. “And anyway, by now we’ve missed the ferry.”

  “There will be another ferry in a few hours,” Manolis told him, “before thee night. But Ben, this island—this Krassos—she is thee very dangerous place for men like you. For any men! You have thee backup?”

  “Shortly,” said Trask.

  And Manolis nodded. “Very shortly, I hoping! But not thee Necroscope, eh? Not thee Harry Keogh. Ah, he was thee one! That man … we are thinking we are thee bravos, yes?” He stuck out his chest, then winced and relaxed his posture. “But thee Harry … next to that one we are all thee big cowards.”

  “He was much too brave for his own good,” said Trask, “and in the end came too close. Without him we wouldn’t have stood a chance, wouldn’t have understood even the basic hows or whys of such things. We still owe him for that, and now we’re using the knowledge he left us all over again.”

  “That time, we all came too close,” said Manolis, unashamedly shivering. “But we were thee lucky ones.” He nodded again, checked his pocket telephone, and scrawled the number on the map. And stabbing at the chart with his pen, he explained the layout of the island and its various features.

  “Thee map, she is showing it all,” he said. “But anyway, I giving you thee running commentary:

  “Thee island, she is like thee apple with some bites taken out. Ninety, or maybe one hundred kilometres right round. Coast roads mainly, except where thee mountains come down to thee sea. Krassos is thee green island; thee forests are up in thee hills and mountains. In thee north, five or six skalas; I explaining thee term skala. Many of thee villages are twinned. By thee sea, thee village gets thee name Skala—Skala this, Skala that. But thee twin in thee mountain is thee main town. In thee old times thee fishermen live by thee sea, of course—hey, they live off thee sea! Invaders come, they move into thee heights. Then came thee olives and thee farming; now thee peoples live in all thee villages. So, Astris in mountains, Skala Astris on thee coast.

  “In a deep bay in east of Krassos, here is Limari, a ‘bi
g’ town of more than fifteen hundred peoples; big by island standards, you understand. That mutilated body—thee one with thee leech—was found in thee sea a few miles south of Limari. Here is thee monastery, between Limari and thee place where I forced off thee road. Thee big limo was waiting for me there. I didn’t get thee number.” He gave an apologetic shrug. “But hey—I was busy! And on this southern point, here is Skala Astris.

  “Now we are on thee south coast heading west. Here is thee village Portos, and thee skalas Peskari and Sotira. And here—after thee bend in thee coast—is thee big town, Krassos town, thee capital. Then, heading north, more villages and skalas all along thee west coast.

  “Most of thee coast roads are very good. But inland, up in thee mountains, not so good.” Manolis shook a cautionary finger. “Four-wheel-drive vehicle, my friends, if you going up into thee mountains.

  “As for what you looking for,” he shrugged again, “I don’t know. This vrykoulakas woman’s place … there are a great many high places on Krassos. But thee island peoples will know everythings about thee foreign peoples who are owning properties. In thee tavernas, you can talk, ask questions, but carefully. Hey, who I speaking to, eh? Of course you ask carefully!” He laughed and slapped Trask on the shoulder …

  And then it was time to go.

  Chung folded Manolis’s map and pocketed it. Then, tossing back the last dregs of ouzo in his glass, he held it out empty in front of him. Trask likewise finished off his drink, and all three men clinked glasses. “Here’s to success,” said Trask, and Chung echoed his toast.

  “Me, too,” said Manolis. “Er, I meaning success—yes!”

  In the taxi, on the way to Keramoti, Chung said, “Well, what do you think?”

  “About the task?” Trask dabbed sweat from his brow. “When the rest of the team join up with us, time enough then to think about it. Half a dozen heads—the kind of minds and technology that we command—will give us a much clearer picture than just yours and mine alone. We’re here to do a preliminary survey and organize a base of operations, that’s all.”

  “So that’s the job,” said Chung. “But what about Manolis?”

  “Ah!” said Trask. “You’re obviously thinking he let us off the hook too easily.”

  “You told him he couldn’t come with us … and he accepted it just like that?” Chung shook his head. “He didn’t even argue the point but sat still and simply let us walk out on him? Does that ring true to you? Well not to me! It isn’t the man we know. So, what are the odds we’ll be seeing him again—and I do mean very shortly?”

  “I’m not taking bets,” said Trask. “Put it this way: let’s say I wasn’t convinced by his acceptance. And in fact he didn’t accept it, didn’t agree one way or the other that he would stay out of it. He didn’t say anything much but just played at being frustrated. That was an act … I know because I got an instant reaction from my talent. He was hiding something: his desire to come with us, probably. And the hell of it is we could use him, if only he wasn’t so banged about.”

  “Talking about talents,” said Chung, “actually, I’m beginning to feel pretty lonely. Just you and me, and what’s waiting for us out there.”

  “Waiting for us?” said Trask. “I hope not!”

  “You know what I mean,” said the locator. “The future, and whatever it has in store for us. The as yet unfurled, immutable and oh-so-devious future. At least, that’s how Ian Goodly might describe it.”

  “Devious, yes,” Trask mused, nodding. “And immutable. What will be has been, eh?”

  “We must hope,” said Chung, “that it continues to be as it has been, that we’ll win this one just like we won the others.”

  “Amen to that,” Trask agreed wholeheartedly. “But tell me: what’s all this got to do with feeling lonely?”

  “I’m switched off,” the locator reminded him. “My talent, I mean. This close—or as close as we think we are—I daren’t use it. For in Malinari’s case, what I can find might as easily find me! So I’ll just hang on to what I’ve got until it’s really needed. Which also means I’m no longer in contact with the rest of our people. Not like a telepath, no, but just being able to reach out and sense them there. It’s something I’ve had for—well, it feels like forever—a sense of security, of being in good company, and I hadn’t realized how much I’d miss it. But I do. Hence the loneliness.”

  “Then I suppose in that respect I’m lucky,” said Trask. “I can’t switch mine on and off; it’s simply there. But it doesn’t reach out and can’t be detected. Not that I’m aware of, anyway. It doesn’t connect me to anyone, unless he starts lying to me—doesn’t ‘disturb the psychic aether,’ so to speak—so it isn’t something that Malinari can latch on to.”

  “Exactly,” said the other quietly. “But that only makes me feel that much more lonely. For the time being there’s just the two of us, and I’m the one who might forget himself, start glowing in the dark. Why, for all we know I could be doing it right now: like a myriad mental pheromones radiating away from me, my own personal version of mindsmog! So I’ll be very glad when the other members of the team show up.”

  Then they were into and passing through the port of Keramoti: spears of dazzling yellow light, and dark-shadow smudges, where they sped through narrow streets between dusty buildings. But suddenly the air wafting in through the taxi’s open windows tasted salty, and as the vehicle emerged into full daylight and halted in a sun-bleached parking lot close to the deep-water harbour, the Aegean was there: a horizontal bar of scintillant, blinding blue, slashed through by the lolling masts of boats at their moorings, and draped with their sullen pennants.

  Even here on the coast the heat was appalling. But beyond the parking lot on the landward side of the street, the canvas awnings and motionless umbrellas of a long string of shops and tavernas offered jet-black blotches of shade and the irresistible promise of cold drinks.

  Leaving the taxi, Trask and Chung shrugged themselves out of their damp jackets and folded them over their arms. Lugging a single suitcase each—in addition to which Trask carried a fat briefcase containing several “gadgets,” one of which was a world-ranging telephone and scrambler device—they made their way toward the street’s hot tarmac, and beyond it to the shade and liquid refreshments of the tavernas …

  Meanwhile in Szeged in Hungary, at the local police HQ:

  In a grubby, unwelcoming, second-storey room with barred windows, a solid oak table and a handful of wooden chairs, Liz Merrick, Ian Goodly, and Lardis Lidesci “interviewed” old Vladi Ferengi—and Vladi in his turn viewed them with such contempt that it bordered on loathing. Hunched in his chair like a wrinkled old spider, grinding his jaws on several gold teeth and a very few ivory fangs, and endlessly knotting and unknotting his purple-veined, rheumatic fists, he glared his fury at the three across the heavy table. But mainly at the Old Lidesci.

  “You,” he grunted at Lardis. “You came to me in the woods at Eleshnitsa, came ‘in friendship,’ hah!—‘in search of your roots’—but you were only spying on me and mine. I should have let my men bloody you up a little and tumble you in the thorns, should never have allowed a stranger in my caravan in the first place. Ah, but with your use of the old tongue, you made a fool of me. Szgany, you? Never! And if you ever were, then no longer. You are a traitor to your own kind, Lardis of the Lidescis, and that’s all you are. I have travelled through and lived in these parts for all my years, and never any trouble, yet now you have brought the police down on me. I am taken from my people like a common criminal, and for what? A handful of old wives’ tales and fairy stories, malicious lies and rumours. And you expect me to talk to you? I have no respect for you, and I have nothing more to say to you …” He turned his face away.

  Lardis nodded and answered, “Old king—I respect that you are the king of your people, but no more than that. As to why I offer you even this much respect: it’s because I’m a king in my own right. Except I prefer to be known as a leader, but one who never
led his people into slavery, which is what your ancestors did. And I agree: I should not have approached you in your camp—not without first ensuring that I’d covered my back, also my front, and my two sides, and my top and my bottom—because to do so in the old times, the time of your father’s fathers, in a world you’ve long forgotten, would be to place myself in direst jeopardy. And you call me a traitor? Why, the very names Ferenc, Ferenczy, and Ferengi are still curse words among all true sons of the Szgany! You probably don’t know it, old man, but you are sprung from a long line of supplicant dogs who called a monster master, and tried to assuage his lusts with the blood of anyone unlucky enough to stray into their territory. Worse still, they even sacrificed the innocent flesh of their own children!”

  Lardis had taken his time, considered his words, and delivered them in an emotionless monotone, in the guttural Szgany of old Sunside, an all but forgotten form in this world. But Vladi had understood enough that it caused him to sit up and listen.

  “Eh? What?” His face creased into a thousand wrinkles, and his rheumy eyes came glittering alive. “Lies and insults? From such as you? Ferenc? Aye, I know the name, from stories that my grandfather told me where we sat by the campfire, as his grandfather told them to him. The Ferenc was glorious! A magnificent Boyar of olden times, who led my forebears into this world from out of one of the strange places. Why, we even took his name—the Szgany Ferengi—and I have made it the work of a lifetime to wander far throughout this world in search of his messenger, or even his kin. For our legends have it that one day, one such will come among us. And so I’ve searched and waited for him, or a Lord just like him, destined to return to us from the strange places and raise us to our former glory. Such has been my sole … my sole pursuit for years without … years without—”

  But here, licking his lips and shrinking back, as if fearing that he had said too much, Vladi came to a faltering halt.