Defilers

by Brian Lumley

  “Only my promise that when my work is done, then we’ll deal with his problem. Bottom line: revenge. You see, Humph, my case is much the same as yours was before you met up with the Necroscope. I want to rid the world of a cancer that caused me grief and that’s destined to cause more grief if it isn’t rooted out. As for my so-called ‘shadow’: well, it could be argued that his case is far more important than mine—in fact I’m sure it is. But something inside me insists I do my own thing first.”

  These are personal vendettas, then? said Humph.

  “In a way they are,” Jake admitted it. “Mine is, for sure—except I can’t be absolutely sure even of that! But anyway, and as I said, if I don’t correct it, it will cause a lot of others grief, too. My world is full of people, Humph—the children of the Great Majority—and drugs are terrible things. So you tell me: Are the dead really so eager to have their own kith and kin join them, addicted in life, and addicts forever in death, dead before their time, because of this man I’m chasing down? He’s a monster, Humph, and I’ve sworn to put him down with or without the help of the teeming dead.”

  You know, said Humph, the more you talk, the more you sound like Harry Keogh? So tell me more—convince me, Jake. I mean, I really do want to be on your side.

  “There has to be some kind of connection,” Jake said then, “between this place, Harry Keogh, and me. The first time I came here, I was drawn here without knowing where I was going. All I knew was I had to come—as if I was trying to recall something that someone else had forgotten. I just knew to come here, like a different kind of déjà vu, but far more real than that. And I looked up there and ‘saw’ Le Manse Madonie; I expected it to be there, remembered something someone else had seen. Harry Keogh? It seems the only logical explanation to me.”

  To me, too, said Humph.

  “He was doing something here,” said Jake. “Not just for you but for himself, and maybe for the world. But while I know what he actually did—that he took out Le Manse Madonie—I still don’t know why. Because you wanted it done?” He shook his head. “That doesn’t add up; it doesn’t seem a strong enough reason to me. So what was his motive, Humph? You’ve already admitted that he had one.”

  And after a moment Humph said, Maybe you should try asking yourself what it was that always motivated the Necroscope. What it was that he did, and did so very well, so very thoroughly.

  “But that’s easy,” Jake shrugged. “He killed vampires.”

  Humph said nothing, but his silence spoke volumes …

  Jake’s jaw fell open. “He killed vampires!” he said again, almost in a whisper. “So these brothers—what was their name, the Francezcis?—they were vampires?” And when his informant remained silent: “Humph?”

  I’m out of here now, said that one. We’re onto a forbidden subject, Jake.

  “But—”

  But I can’t say any more, Humph backed off. Except to wish you luck, and hope it all works out for you.

  Jake felt him fading away, back into the silence of death, and called out after him, “Just one more thing … Humph?”

  Better make it quick, then. (Like the footfalls of a mouse in Jake’s metaphyical mind.)

  “The Francezci treasure,” Jake said, his thoughts swiftly, chaotically flowing, telling a lot more than he actually said, “the reason the brothers needed a vault: Harry blew it off the mountain along with Le Manse Madonie and it lies buried in the gorge. But how does Castellano—this drug-running bastard I’m trying to bring down—how does he know about it? How does he know it even existed? What’s the fucking connection!?”

  Got to go, Necroscope, said Humph. And his deadspeak voice was so faint now that Jake wasn’t sure he even heard it. But I can tell you something: vampires don’t give in easily. They’re incredibly tenacious things, Jake. The Francezci line, it went back a hell of a long way—back into history, back into time. So who can say? Maybe the same line goes forward, too.

  “Goes forward?”

  Talk to you soon, Jake, said J. Humphrey Jackson Jr. Or at least … I … hope … soooooo. His deadspeak voice dwindled away to nothing.

  And somewhere up in the mountains the owl hooted again …

  Things were starting to come together, but not fast enough for Jake. Driven by those unreasoning, inexplicable urges from deep within—with the pressure constantly building—he could feel his frustration mounting with each passing moment. He knew he’d have to take it out on something, and soon, or else explode!

  And explode was the executive word.

  Sensing Jake’s mood, Korath kept the peace and did what was required of him without question.

  In Paris, Jake fully equipped himself before going back to the gorge. Back on the road—standing in the open, silhouetted against the night sky where he would be seen—he fired three rapid shots into the air to attract the attention of the night-watchmen. As they came at the run, he watched them through his nite-lites. As far as he could tell they were ordinary working men, and he had nothing against them. But all of the machinery down in the quarry, that belonged to Castellano. Anything that happened here—to this machinery and this close to home—was certain to enrage and unnerve the bastard.

  Well fuck him!

  As the night-watchmen drew closer, scrambling up towards his position, Jake moved into the shadows, took the Möbius route to their brazier’s glow, and from there into the cab of the digger where he’d seen them smoking. A few seconds to plant his charge and he moved on to the next vehicle.

  He planted five charges in all, all with twenty-five-second delay fuses, then returned to the shadows under the wall of the gorge. Using the Möbius Continuum, it had been as simple and as quick as that.

  The night-watchmen were less than fifty feet away from him; they peered this way and that into the night and saw absolutely nothing, not for the next few seconds. After that … but they just wouldn’t believe what they would see after that.

  Jake glanced at his luminous watch and counted it down: “Five, four, three, two, one—hang!”

  Five bangs in fact, coming just a few seconds apart.

  The big digger was first, of course. The explosion drove it down on its huge shocks—which at once tossed it back into the air in two main parts and lots of lesser, blazing debris. For a big, heavy vehicle it rose up quite a way—until its ruptured fuel tanks tore it asunder in midair. By which time a massive, eight-wheeled dumper truck was teetering about on its nose, and three of its great wheels were leaping this way and that across the floor of the quarry, blazing as they went.

  On the road, the night-watchmen cowered down; Jake, too, as the fireworks show continued. A second digger, but smaller than the first, was performing aerial cartwheels, its severed caterpillar tracks lashing the air like a pair of gigantic, crippled snakes. As for the site shack—a not inconsiderable structure that used to stand on the far side of the quarry—that was in the process of dispersing itself far and wide, reduced to fifty thousand fragments of splintered timber, buckled aluminum cladding, shards of glass and plastic, and nuts and bolts that flew everywhere, spanging like bullets.

  Last to go was a conveyor belt and sieve equipment, used to filter coins, precious metals, and other items out of the rubble. In a spectacular explosion, the various components of the setup disintegrated, and for several long seconds the sky rained fire and scraps of unidentifiable junk.

  Then the roaring of the flames, black smoke roiling for the sky, drifting sparks and smaller, secondary explosions as drums of fuel oil got hot and blew themselves to hell, and the quarry seeming to slump into itself, almost as if the rubble and everything else was melting down into one big lake of fire.

  Jake had moved back behind a jut of rock when the first of the fires lit the night. Now, using what little Italian he knew to the best of his ability, he called out from that position to the night-watchmen where they stood gawping down into the ruins of what had been a work-site:

  “You men, do you know why you’re alive? You’re a
live so you can tell your boss, Castellano, just exactly what happened here. Be sure to tell him who did it—me, Jake Cutter—and that I won’t rest until I’ve destroyed all that he owns, everything he ever touched. And you can also tell him that when I’ve finished with all that, then that I’ll be coming for him.”

  They looked—saw only the fires reflected off the face of the cliff—and shrank back. They were out in the open, on the road, sitting ducks, and Jake was nowhere to be seen. They both had weapons, sawn-off shotguns by their looks, which now, amazingly, they threw down.

  Then, as they backed off and turned to head down the road toward the distant coast, one of them called back: “We won’t be around from now on. So tell him your f-f-fucking self!”

  Jake knew what he meant. After what had happened here, any attempt to explain things to Luigi Castellano would be more than their lives were worth …

  Do you feel better now? Korath asked him as they sped along the Möbius route to Paris.

  No, Jake answered in like mode. But I will when the rest of tonight’s work is done.

  Marseilles? Korath queried.

  Haven’t I warned you about that? said Jake. Haven’t I told you not to try to get to know me too well?

  But it was in your mind clear as crystal, said Korath, and your thoughts are deadspeak. You no longer shield them from me like you used to, and I had even begun to hope that perhaps we—how shall I say it? That perhaps you and I—that maybe we were drawing closer together?

  “Think again,” said Jake. “I must be getting careless, that’s all.”

  Before Korath could utter his usual “disgusted” snort, they were back in the Paris hotel room, where Jake quickly re-equipped himself …

  On the hillside overlooking Castellano’s Marseilles villa, Jake used his nite-lites to scan the place. His binoculars’ thermal-imaging system showed that there was no heating in the house—but then, who would be using central heating in weather such as this?—except a small white patch in a lesser building to one side, probably the boiler room. The nite-lites couldn’t pick up concealed human movements, however, not unless there was a lot of heat attendant.

  Still empty? said Korath.

  “Probably,” Jake answered. “But in any case we’ll keep our eyes open.” It was becoming easy now to forget that Korath was incorporeal.

  Or you will, the other remind him, while what I see will always be secondhand—pictures relayed by your thoughts, and likewise clouded by them—and not by direct vision. Just one more example of how much easier it would be if we were one. No requirement for these night-seeing devices then; we would know at a glance if the house was occupied, and if it was we’d soon sniff out the occupant.

  “It sounds irresistible,” said Jake drily. “Thanks, but no thanks.” And having turned down Korath’s “offer” yet again, he fell silent and studied the villa.

  What is it? said Korath after a while. Why aren’t you moving? What gives you pause? Are you afraid?

  “I was afraid,” said Jake. “I’ve only been in that bloody awful place twice, and both times I was afraid. Afraid of what they were doing to Natasha—and of what they might do to me. And they did it both times. The first time, one of them raped her, and then kicked several shades of shit out of me. And the next time … they all raped Natasha, killed her, and tried to kill me. And Luigi Castellano sitting in the shadows watching, enjoying, directing everything.”

  Which is why we’re here, said Korath. Tonight you get your own back, against the house at least.

  “Both times,” Jake went on as if Korath hadn’t spoken, “it happened in a bedroom. For a long time now I’ve shut that room out of my mind, the room where I was forced to watch what they did. It’s at the back of the villa, I think, but on the ground floor like the study. I shut it out because I couldn’t bear to remember. But now, in the dark of night … I can feel it down there. I can almost taste that fucking room … and I know its coordinates.”

  And that’s where you’ll plant your bomb.

  “Exactly,” said Jake, as Korath conjured the Möbius equations. “If that’s my ground zero, maybe I’ll be able to forget it. Some of it, anyway. But that’s only the villa. The rest of it will stay right with me until I catch up with Castellano.”

  The bedroom was as Jake remembered it. He swept it once with a tiny torch, planted his bomb on the floor in the centre of the room where he’d been bound to a chair, and prepared to leave.

  But then, as he shaped the constantly mutating Möbius equations into a door:

  “Uh? What? Is someone there?” A voice—old, sleepy, speaking French—coming from somewhere else in the house, probably the study at the front. What, the old caretaker?

  Jesus! thought Jake, as he stepped into the Continnum, and out again into the study. The bomb had only a ten-second fuse, and time was ticking away.

  The old man had thrown a blanket onto the floor as he rose from the couch where he’d been sleeping. As Jake rushed toward him, he almost tripped on the blanket, felt it wrap around his feet. But stumbling forward he managed to gather the caretaker up, and swept him through another hastily conjured door—

  —And out again on the hillside.

  “Eh? W-what?” the caretaker gasped, losing his balance and sitting down heavily in the stubble. Which was all he had time to say or do before Castellano’s villa went up in a thunderous uproar of light and sound and fire that set the hills echoing and dogs barking all the way into Marseilles. The distance between the villa and Jake’s hillside vantage point was maybe five hundred feet, but that wasn’t going to be distant enough.

  The blanket from the study was still wrapped around Jake’s feet; he kicked free, threw himself down alongside the old man and yanked on the blanket to cover them both. Chunks of debris struck against the blanket, bounced off and fell to the ground. There was a pattering of lesser fragments, and then a smell of burning. The blanket was smouldering.

  Jake threw it aside, stood up, and drew the old man to his feet. Patches of stubble were burning, and in the sky, fluttering like fiery kites, scraps of curtains, bedclothes, and other soft materials were drifting on thermals from the blazing ruins of the villa. Around a small central crater, lesser fires were springing into being as burning floorboards, rafters, and fragments of shattered furnishings continued to fall. The place had been totally gutted, and it was perhaps a good thing that Luigi Castellano had enjoyed his privacy; there were no other private homes or buildings within a quarter mile.

  You spared no effort with that one! said Korath quietly, in awe of Jake’s perceptions of the destruction.

  But Jake wasn’t listening. “Are you all right?” he held the old man up with one hand and unobtrusively frisked him with the other.

  The caretaker looked at him and asked, “What happened?” And looking down at his stockinged feet: “My shoes! I left them … in there?” And his eyes were huge where they gazed on the ruins of the villa.

  Apart from his feet, he was fully clad in a shirt, trousers, and a crumpled lightweight jacket. He’d obviously been taking a nap. Cool and still in the darkness of the house, keeping a low profile, he hadn’t showed up in Jake’s nite-lites.

  “I saw you running from the house,” Jake lied. “It was burning. I helped you to get up here. Maybe you got hit on the head or something?”

  The old man felt his head, said, “I … I don’t know. I had a nightmare, I think. Something ran at me, and then I was here. But I shouldn’t have been sleeping in the first place! And I’ll lose my job! They’ll sack me!”

  “They?”

  “The agency.” The caretaker flapped his hands. He had been in shock but was coming out of it.

  “What agency?” Jake asked him.

  “The agency that employs me,” said the other. “I look after rich houses when the owners aren’t there.”

  “But what about Mr. Castellano?” Jake’s voice had hardened “Isn’t he your employer?”

  “Eh?” said the other. “Mr. Castell
ano? I don’t know him. I only have his card, in case something happens. And now … now something has happened! Mon dieu!”

  “Show me his card,” said Jake. And the old man, still very uncertain of what had happened, rummaged in his jacket pockets until he found Castellano’s card.

  Jake glanced at it, said.

  Remember this. The numbers and the addresses both.

  Done, said Korath in a moment.

  Odd, said Jake, that for a creature whose world had little use for written words and numbers, you happen to be so good at remembering them.

  The words and numbers, Korath replied, mean nothing to me. I remember their patterns, that’s all. My legacy from Malinari the Mind, remember?

  Sirens were sounding in the distance; a convoy of vehicles came speeding from Marseilles, their lights and coloured, revolving strobes strung out along a winding road.

  Jake spoke again to the old man: “Here’s your card back. But do me a favour. When you speak to the police, don’t mention me.”

  “But you saved my life!” the other protested.

  “Do I have your word?”

  “Of course, if you insist. It’s the least that I—”

  “But when you call Castellano,” Jake cut in, “by all means tell him about me.”

  “I don’t even know who you are,” said the old man.

  “Just tell him an Englishman was here, okay?”

  The old man looked mystified, shrugged, and finally nodded his acquiescence.

  “So until the fire engines and police get here, you may as well stay where you are and watch the show,” said Jake. “As for me, I have to be going.”

  The old caretaker was indeed watching the show—the fires dying out, others starting up, and what was left of the villa’s walls crumbling in the furnace heat under a gradually drifting, mushroom-shaped pall of black smoke—but as what Jake had said connected, he turned to him, or to where he had been, and said, “Going?”

  Better, perhaps, if he had used the past tense, since Jake was no longer there …