by Brian Lumley
And still looking directly into her eyes, Trask said, “The opposite? Is that what you sensed? Instead of seeking to know, to learn, to understand, what you felt had lost the ability to know. Babies evolve. But what you sensed—”
“Had devolved, yes!” said Liz. “Well, maybe …”
Trask took a deep breath and said, “Let’s finish up here. I want to get back to base, see what Chung’s come up with, if anything. And if nothing, at least we know where to point him now. So let’s go.”
Manolis fished a wad of notes out of his pocket, tossed it on the table. Andreas wrapped skewered meats in paper napkins, and grabbed up a bottle of mineral water.
On the way down from the roof, Manolis told Trask: “Myself and Andreas, we’ll take one car. You and your people return to Skala Astris in thee other.”
“You’re going to take a look at that quarry, right?” said Trask.
“And thee deserted airport,” Manolis nodded. “But please—Ben, my friend—before you do anything back at base, wait for me, yes? I’ll get finished as quickly as possible. I shouldn’t be more than an hour at most. And since Andreas has thee food, we can eat on thee way …”
A little after three-thirty, Trask and his party arrived back at the Christos Studios. They had used secondary roads through the foothills to avoid passing the monastery and Liz’s unknown building on the eastern approach to the village.
Chung and Stavros weren’t back yet, so the four waited for them in The Shipwreck, where Yiannis played some antique music for them. The scratched and battered favourites of forty years ago sounded again in the Greek afternoon.
Perhaps signalling the end of a seemingly interminable summer, a breeze off the sea had cooled the sands; a pair of young German couples had taken the opportunity to come wandering barefoot along the beach, exploring this western extreme; they were just leaving as Trask and his people settled in.
While Yiannis served drinks, Trask spoke to him. “Yiannis, is there some kind of large hotel to the east of here, maybe a mile beyond Skala Astris? It stands on a promontory, I think.”
“Palataki?” Yiannis nodded. “It means ‘the little palace.’ It’s a strange old place, all fallen into ruins. But it isn’t a hotel. You can see it from the beach. Something of it, anyway.”
“Really?” said Trask. “Look, let me get my binoculars, and then perhaps you’d show me.”
There were binoculars in the car; Trask got them and walked down the beach with Yiannis, until small waves called up by the breeze sent ripples up the sand to their feet. The shadows were already beginning to lengthen when Yiannis pointed to the east and said: “There. You can see the twin cupolas, and the roof of the building beneath them behind the tall pines. Not very Greek looking, is it?”
With the glasses to his eyes, Trask replied, “No, it isn’t. I would say it was German.”
“And you’d be right,” said the other. “I can tell you about it, if you’re interested.”
It took him a few minutes to tell Trask the history of the place, and he finished up by saying: “When I was a youth—er, a long time before I met my wife, you understand—I would take my girlfriends walking up there for some privacy in the grounds of the little palace. It was—how do you say it?—ah, yes: ‘a favourite haunt’ of young lovers. More recently, however …”
“Yes?” said Trask.
“Now it’s just a haunt,” said Yiannis. “Strange stories, of a ghost with yellow eyes who stands guard over the old ruin. If I believed in ghosts, I might suspect it was the lady herself.”
“The Lady?” Trask’s flesh prickled at the back of his neck.
“The sainted lady, yes,” said Yiannis, turning and stepping out, back up the beach towards The Shipwreck. “Agia Varvara, the saint whose small shrine stands in the grounds of Palataki.” He said it just as easily, just as casually as that, without ever knowing that Trask had gone cold through and through …
After a moment, Trask started after him. “Did you say, er, Vavara?” He tried to keep his voice even.
“Varvara,” Yiannis called back to him. “The way you say it, it sounds as if you’re missing out the first r. In fact it’s Varvara, which in English translates as Barbara.”
“A Greek saint, you say?” Trask’s mind raced.
“Yes. The shrine has been there as long as I can remember.”
And Trask wondered, Has she seen it? Vavara herself? But of course she has! And would she be able to resist it, the supreme irony of it? Not according to Ladis, she wouldn’t.
Now, for Trask, the mass of evidence seemed overwhelmingly conclusive; but as yet his overall knowledge, his tactical intelligence, was insufficient to set a covert war in motion. This evening, however, working as a team with their esoteric skills, and sure now of their targets, he and his espers should at last be able to probe deep into the dark heart of vampire territory. And once they knew the total of the forces facing them—and as soon as their own forces were strong enough—then no amount of mental camouflage or alien evil would keep Trask and his people from their goal: the total destruction of Vavara and Malinari, and of everything they stood for.
And walking up the beach in Yiannis’s footsteps, Trask was glad now that he wasn’t himself a telepath. For if he had been … then he couldn’t for a moment doubt but that he would turn to the east, shake his fists at Palataki’s cupolas, and beyond them the towers of a once-monastery, and hurl his threats, his curses, his vengeful rage and determination, at both.
“Look out, you lousy bastard Things!” (He would shout with his enhanced mind.) “You, Vavara, you fucking bag—and especially you, Malinari! Your very presence here defiles earth, air, and sea—the entire world! But I’ve found you, and I’m going to make you wish you’d stayed in Starside. I’m coming for you, you grotesque bastard monsters. Make no mistake, Ben Trask and E-Branch, we’re coming for you!”
But since he wasn’t a telepath, he was unable to offer any such threat, any such challenge. And that was just as well …
David Chung and Stavros, and Manolis and Andreas, arrived back at the Christos Studios almost in tandem, with only a minute or so separating them. Liz met them, took them straight to Trask’s accommodation.
Trask hadn’t been wasting his time. Despite the continuing—indeed worsening—sunspot activity, which had effectively destroyed ninety-five percent of all electrical communications worldwide, he’d managed to get through to the HQ in London, warning them to be wary of nuns. Weird as it must have sounded, that in essence had been his message: the D.O. was to get onto the major airports and tell them to check all incoming flights from Greece for nuns. If any such were discovered, ways should be found to detain them just long enough for Special Branch to put tails on them. And then they should be “kept the hell away from E-Branch,” but at the same time the Branch would take over covert surveillance from the police. All of this to be arranged through the Minister Responsible. “Give the bugger something to do …”
Mercifully the D.O. was John Grieve, whose tele-telepaphic talents weren’t in the least affected by the weather; his less than cryptic reply had been: “A new guise on an old geist, eh? It’s amazing the kind of people who pick up bad habits, right?”
“Or who get infected with them,” Trask had told him, before asking after Millie.
“She’s gone home to get her stuff together; says that since she’s to be locked up here for the duration, there are bits and pieces she needs,” Grieve had told him. “She takes over from me at eight o’clock tonight my time.”
Trask had been alarmed. “She’s out on her own?” But:
“No,” Grieve had reassured him. “I arranged a plainclothes police escort for her. When she’s got her stuff together, then she can call for another detective to bring her back.”
And Trask’s final question, before the incredibly bad line broke up completely: “Any news on that Lefranc freak?”
“We have … locator … Special Branch … we … gadgets … nothing … useless
…” And then nothing more, except the hiss and sputter of static.
Trask had a portable fax machine that hadn’t worked since leaving England. But he had tried it anyway, to no avail. When he’d fed his message into the slot—PUT HALF A DOZEN PEOPLE ON STANDBY FOR THE MED. WE MAY NEED HELP.—and after requesting a printout confirmation copy, all he’d got was an A4 sheet of something that looked like a Japanese cryptogram, which endlessly repeated itself down the page. And he’d believed he knew what Grieve had meant by “gadgets … nothing … useless.”
The Head of E-Branch, while he wasn’t a prude, wasn’t much known for cursing either, but: “Hell and damnation! Fuck every-fucking-thing!” he’d complained, slamming the machine back into a bulky briefcase. “And especially Elfucking-Niño!”
Which had taken place just a moment before Liz knocked on the door and brought the others in with her. They sat on beds, chairs, a small table, whatever was available.
And Trask said: “David, you first. Shoot.”
The locator stood in the middle of the chalet’s tiny floor space and said, “I got something, and I got nothing.” He tossed a plastic bag onto his bed beside Manolis. The sleeve end of an ugly, armoured, insectlike piece of metallic machinery—like some kind of hollow tool—projected from the bag where it lay. Manolis took it out, frowned suspiciously, went to put his hand into what was obviously some kind of gauntlet. But:
“Don’t,” said Trask. “It’s nasty enough as it is. Just flex your hand inside that thing … you could do someone, including yourself, an injury. It’s what’s known in the trade as a Wamphyri battle gauntlet.” Then he turned to Chung again. “Nothing?”
“Right, and yet wrong,” said the locator, looking harassed. “I can’t pinpoint it because we’re in the middle of it.”
“Go on,” said Trask.
“Nothing more to say,” Chung shrugged. “If I look forward, backward, left, right, up, and down, I get nothing. But if I go outside the area and look inwards—this entire place seethes! I don’t mean this place, but this area. It’s contaminated. If I had been using my talent from the first moment we got here, I’d have known right away. But as you’re aware, and as you ordered, I was keeping it on a tight leash.”
“So, then,” said Trask. “The whole place ‘seethes,’ but you can’t be more specific. So tell me, where does it seethe most?”
Chung thought about it for a few moments, then said, “Along the coast road between here and Limari. But that’s only a guess. I mean, it came and went. I seemed to sense something there … and then I didn’t.”
“Are you sure we can’t narrow it down?” said Trask. “Should I give you a clue? How about a mile east of here, for example?”
Chung stared at him and narrowed his slanted eyes a little. “Funny you should say that,” he answered. “But since I couldn’t say for sure … I just wasn’t about to send you off on a wild-goose chase.”
Liz nodded understandingly and said, “It left you in doubt of your own talent—the same as it did to me.”
“It?” said the locator, looking from face to face.
“Something that Vavara does,” said Trask, and quickly went on: “How about the monastery? Did you get that far?”
Now Chung’s jaw fell open. “How did you know—?”
“Okay,” said Trask, cutting him off. “Here’s what we’re going to do. Another hour and it’ll be cooler and darker. The sun will still be visible in the west, and it will still be shining on the places where these bastards sleep easiest in their beds: the high places in their aeries, that is. Well, we’ve found two places that just could be their aerie or aeries. And now I want to know what’s in them.” He opened a map and stabbed at it with his forefinger. “Earlier today Liz found us this knoll—it got in the way when she was looking through a telescope. It happens to be the highest place in this vicinity, and if I haven’t forgotten my map-reading skills these contours allow for an almost clear line of sight on both locations. That’s where we’re going next.”
He stood up, said: “Boys—and girl—you have fifteen minutes to get tidied up, changed, and to do what you’ve got to do. Then we’re on our way. We’ve got to get this next phase over and done with before sundown, for obvious reasons. So let’s go.”
And fifteen minutes later, they went …
Using two of the four-wheel-drive vehicles, they drove along a farm track skirting an olive grove, then about a mile inland to the foot of the knoll. The knoll’s base was formed of a scree skirt that extended all the way round what was in fact a marble outcrop. On the south-facing skirt, the slope was about one-in-three and it was marked with crisscrossing goat tracks through hardy herbage to the foot of the outcrop. The vehicles made the climb without too much difficulty, but from there on the eight had to go on foot.
Trask was concerned for Lardis and said it might be better if he took it easy and waited there, but the Old Lidesci insisted that this was his kind of climbing. “What is it but a small hill?” he said. “In my time I climbed the Barrier Mountains!”
“This isn’t your time,” said Trask, making hard work of it up the boulderstudded slope.
But climbing past him, Lardis answered, “Nor yours, by the look of it!”
With one hundred feet to go they climbed into sunlight that came streaming from the west, and as the high dome of the knoll levelled out so the going became that much easier. From the top the view was all Trask could have wished for: almost due south, the cupolas of Palataki reflected the sunlight where they stood up from the grimly gothic building below, and to the southeast the monastery’s towers were lit with gold where the cliffs fell sheer to the sea. In that same direction, the Aegean itself was already shaded, its deep blue surface flecked with small white wave crests.
With very little time to spare, David Chung and Liz chose a flat-topped boulder to use as a table, and set themselves up to gaze through their glasses first on Palataki’s gilded cupolas.
“Now remember,” Trask reminded them, as they settled to the task, “this place stands on top of a mine. We may not find what we’re looking for in those cupolas or even in the main building. According to what Yiannis says, the promontory was mined extensively—almost hollowed out—during a prewar German mining operation. So for all we know Vavara might have quite literally gone to ground. On the other hand, we suspect she’s in the monastery, in which case there must be something else in Palataki. Malinari? We don’t know … but we do want to know.”
“We’ll go in hand-in-hand,” said Liz quietly, “riding each other’s probes.”
“But carefully,” Trask told her. “Oh so very carefully. And be ready to get out if anything—if anything—”
“If anything probes back,” the precog, Ian Goodly, finished it for him.
The locator had Malinari’s gauntlet close to hand, its dull metal casing softly agleam in the gradually fading sunlight. In the west, the sun’s lower rim had already touched the blue-grey crest of a distant range of hills.
The two espers stood shoulder to shoulder with their elbows resting on the boulder, their heads hunched forward, the binoculars to their eyes …
After a minute or so of almost complete silence, disturbed only by the shuffle of nervous feet on chalky ground, suddenly Liz said, “Seething, yes—that’s the way I would describe it, too, David—but what’s it seething with?”
“It isn’t Malinari.” The other offered a negative twitch of his head and placed his trembling right hand on the gauntlet’s scaled surface. “This weapon of his is stone cold dead. If Malinari were there, I’m certain I’d have some kind of reaction by now. But something’s there, for sure.”
“Go down,” said Liz. “Cut through the trees to the building itself, the lower floors, the cellars, and even—”
“Stop!” said the locator, his voice cracking like a whip.
“What is it?” Trask said hoarsely.
“Mindsmog!” Chung whispered now. “There’s someone—there’s something—there.”
“I’ve got him!” Liz answered with a whisper of her own.
“Vampire!” Chung breathed.
“How many?” Trask snapped. “I want numbers.”
And after a moment: “Just the one,” said Liz. “A caretaker, I think.”
“Caretaker?” Trask very carefully put his hand on her shoulder. But:
“Ah!” Liz gasped in that same moment, withdrawing her probe and snatching the binoculars away from her eyes so quickly that they almost slipped from her grip. “I think he must have sensed me. I felt him stiffen.”
“Leave it be!” said Trask at once. “Don’t go back in there. You’ve done enough. David?” Now he touched Chung.
“It’s okay,” the locator told him. “I’ve moved on past him. He might have picked up on Liz, but not me. He definitely isn’t Malinari. I’m going down—down into the mine, now—into the earth. For it’s the earth that’s doing the seething. It’s … I don’t know … but it’s poisoned, down there.”
“What is it?” said Trask. “What have you found?”
But once again the locator could only reply with a negative twitch of his head.
“Let me read his mind,” said Liz. “David’s mind. That way I won’t be in direct contact, and whatever it is won’t sense me.”
“Do it,” said Trask.
And in a moment, “This is it,” Liz said. “An imbecile mind, or minds. The devolved thing that I sensed from the roof of The Aerie. That is what’s doing the seething. It’s … it’s growing down there!”
And finally—recognizing it for what it really was—she shuddered herself into Trask’s arms and said, “I think it must be the same as that awful garden under the Pleasure Dome, where Peter Miller had rotted down into that hideous—”
“Deadspawn!” said Trask. “Or un-deadspawn, if you like.”
The locator was finished for the moment. “I can get nothing else,” he said, glad to be out of it and resting his metaphysical mind and his eyes both.
“You’ve done fine,” said Trask, “both of you. But we’re not finished yet. Now, while there’s still time, I want you to look at the monastery …”
