Defilers

by Brian Lumley

  You said it best yourself, she told him. Maybe you’re the one he’s chosen to finish something he started.

  “But I’ve spent time with Harry,” Jake answered. “You know I have. So if there really is something he wants me to do, why didn’t he tell me about it when he had the chance?”

  The only reason I can think of, said Zek, is that perhaps he himself doesn’t know what it is.

  Jake’s head spun, and not alone from the constant nagging pain of his wound. “You mean, some part of him remembers something he should have done, but not enough to know what it is? And I’ve got to do it for him?”

  From what you’ve told me, that seems the likely answer.

  “So what did he do during those lost years?”

  Those of the Great Majority who know—and there’s only a small handful—won’t talk about it, Zek answered. They certainly won’t tell me, for they long since made a pact never to speak of it. For Harry’s sake.

  “Even though he’s dead now?”

  We’ve already been into that, she sighed.

  Jake shook his head in frustration. “The dead aren’t talking about it, not even to you, one of their own? Huh! But how about the living? Why hasn’t Trask said something about it?”

  Because he’s like me, said Zek. He doesn’t know.

  “Then for Pete’s sake tell me something you do know!” Jake felt like tearing out his hair. “What the hell was it with the Necroscope that Trask and E-Branch are afraid to talk about!?”

  There was a brief silence, and he could feel how torn Zek was when finally she said, I’m sorry, Jake. Sorry I can’t tell you more. But I will tell you this much: being a Necroscope—being the Necroscope—will be no easy thing. Not for you, and not for the teeming dead. ‘What the hell,’ you asked. And yes, it can get pretty much like that. Pretty much like hell. Talking to the living, or rather to you, is one thing, and if that was all there was to it … but it isn’t. And the dead learned long ago, in Harry’s time, that one thing can lead to another. That’s why they’re so quiet, lying still, keeping their peace. At least for the time being.

  “They don’t care to talk to the living?” Jake was baffled. ‘They really believe in this RIP hokum? They don’t give a damn for their former lives in the world they’ve left behind; don’t want to know how their kids are doing, how the world itself is getting on and everything they created is being used and built upon by their survivors?” He shook his head. “I don’t get it.”

  But they do care! said Zek. More than you can know. And if and when they come round to our way of thinking you’ll see how very much they care. And that’s the answer to both your questions: why for now the Great Majority aren’t communicative, and why E-Branch can’t tell you all about Harry. The world needs a Necroscope, Jake. But it has to be the right one. He has to be brave and careful, and he has to care about what he’s doing. He has to care for the dead, because they may have to pay a very high price for caring for him …

  “I’m wasting my time,” said Jake. “And I’m getting nowhere. But I do trust you, Zek. So if this is how you say it has to be … then I suppose this is how it has to be.”

  One thing more before we part, said Zek. Don’t be too despondent, Jake. However slowly, we are winning the battle; more and more of the Great Majority are coming over onto your side, seeing things your way. However slowly, the tide is turning in your favour. For despite every obstacle in your path—all the difficulties and uncertainties—you haven’t given in. What’s more, your light burns in our darkness more like Harry Keogh’s with every passing hour. And the Thing that you carry with you—which the dead fear more than anything else—hasn’t gained ground but lost it. You’re ahead of the game, Jake, and all we have to do now is make sure you stay there.

  “But I have sent a few less than worthy people your way,” said Jake, remembering the outlines he’d seen through the wet patio windows of Le Manse Madonie. “Knowing how much the dead respect life, that can’t have improved my image too much …”

  Actually, said Zek, you also cleared an awful lot of debts along the way. For you’re right: not a one of them was worthy. They were murderers all, and they’re all excluded. They aren’t to be counted among the Great Majority.

  ‘They’re excommunicated?”

  Always, said Zek. Committed to the darkness where they’ll do no more harm. And now I have to go.

  Jake felt her drift away, but it was only after she’d gone that he realized Zek hadn’t answered the one question that she could have answered, to which he was sure she knew the answer:

  Why had Harry Keogh, the original Necroscope, deserted our world for Sunside/Starside … ?

  A car honked as it went by, and Jake suddenly realized that he was on the road to Argasi, walking in the brilliant Ionian sunlight. He had walked as he talked, as if to a corporeal person. Once you were used to it, that was what deadspeak was like. But now he was alone again, walking nowhere and to no purpose.

  Korath came as soon as Jake called out for him. “Where were you?” said Jake.

  Where else? said the other gloomily.

  “Sleeping?”

  Sleeping, resting, being alone. You’re not the only one who can suffer from exhaustion, you know. That business in the Möbius Continuum was … it was fatiguing, to say the least.

  “Sleep and weep,” said Jake. “Are you telling me you missed yet another opportunity to get inside my head?”

  I missed nothing! Korath snorted. Nor have I forgotten that we have a deal. What he didn’t say was that with Jake’s mind in shock, or at best in something of a turmoil, he had felt better off out of there. Anyway, why did you call me? What’s next? Now that you’ve become aware of the attendant dangers, is it at all possible that you’ve finally given up on your vendetta? But no, I can see that was too much to hope for. And he fell silent.

  “All done?” said Jake. “Well good! Thanks for asking after my health. I’m fine, thank you. I nearly got my head blown off, but I’ll live. Now I need to get back to Paris, clean up, eat a decent meal, and get some healing sleep. Because tonight—”

  —We’ll be busy again. Korath groaned.

  “That’s right,” said Jake.

  And do you trust yourself to use the Möbius Continuum? Are you sure that what happened won’t happen again?

  “The coordinates are all back in place,” said Jake. “Better than before. And there are a couple of new ones, too. But don’t worry, I won’t be checking them out. Not yet a while, anyway.”

  Huh! Korath grunted, as he set the Möbius equations rolling down the screen of Jake’s mind. This time the esoteric math was more familiar; Jake could even see patterns emerging; the weird symbols and numbers no longer had power to awe him. They were a key, that was all, to the metaphysical Möbius Continuum, and he felt he would soon be able to grasp that key for himself.

  Until then—but only until then—Korath would remain the gatekeeper. These were secret thoughts, which Jake kept guarded in those innermost vaults of mind to which as yet Korath wasn’t privy. Thus both men—or one man and a creature—had secrets known only to themselves. And Zek had been quite right: as yet, Korath hadn’t taken the upper hand.

  Not as yet …

  It was 12:40 P.M. in Paris by the time Jake had cleaned himself up, taken some aspirins, put a plaster on his head, and his head gently on the pillows.

  Feeling ill and fearing a relapse, he had no sooner arrived in his room than he’d banished Korath back to the ruined Romanian Refuge. Then his nausea had returned with a vengeance. He’d felt too sick to eat; the pain of his wound was sending regular stabs of lightning deep into his brain; it was as well that his plans for the night ahead were vague, since he might now have to abandon them entirely. But that as a last resort.

  For still he hoped his condition would improve with healing sleep. And who could say? Maybe his plans would work themselves out, too.

  Then a strange thing, as if “things” in Jake’s life weren’t strange e
nough already. But as he closed his eyes to sleep, Liz was on his mind again—

  —And in the next moment she was really on his mind!

  He came bolt upright in his bed, his attitude one of intent listening. It came from far away—some kind of contact, brief, filtered by distance, the merest telepathic touch—as if for a moment Liz’s scent was in his nostrils, her sweet breath on his face. No more than that, but it was more than enough. Jake felt a chill in his soul; it made the short hairs at the back of his neck prickle and stand up straight.

  Now what the bell was that? But it was gone before he could question or examine it, or lock on to its location. And after a while he lay back down again, but wonderingly.

  She’d felt … disturbed? Not fearful but deeply disturbed. She’d been searching for something telepathically. Not for Jake but for someone—or something or things—other. But as always Jake had been on her mind, and the effort that Liz had put into whatever it was she was doing had been such that her probe had reached out to touch upon his thoughts, too.

  It was the rapport they had between them. Despite that Jake might be considered undeserving of Liz’s affection—and regardless of the distance between—the connection was still there.

  It, the connection, was or had been there … but where was Liz? He reached out for her—sought a direction, a coordinate—and found nothing. The moment had passed.

  And Jake had no way of knowing that on Krassos, in a place in the mountains called The Aerie, Liz had been looking through a telescope, searching for Vavara and Malinari; no way of knowing that shortly she’d be on her way with Trask and the others back to Skala Astris.

  No way of knowing—not yet—that E-Branch was hot on the trail of mankind’s greatest enemies, and that much like himself, Liz was only a few short hours away from unthinkable horror.

  Which was as well. For if he had known, then he never would have slept …

  It was dark when Jake woke up, and he was hungry. But the pain in his head had reduced to a dull throbbing with no more lightning flashes, and he found he could think quite clearly.

  He dressed, called for sandwiches in his room, then called for Korath. And Korath came:

  “Like a genie in a bottle,” said Jake. His words were deadspeak, of course, and conveyed his meaning.

  A bottle, or a lamp, said Korath, with a mental shrug. What odds? Either one would make a pleasurable grave … compared to a cramped metal pipe in a drowned, subterranean sump! And then, changing the subject, I see that you’re feeling better.

  “Not as good as new,” said Jake, “but a little better, yes. And that’s good, because we have things to do. First some bombs, big ones, that I have to put together—”

  Bombs that blast, said Korath.

  “—And then there’s something I’m to collect from the other side of the world.”

  And bombs that burn.

  “Precisely.” Jake nodded.

  Explosions, and chemical fires, said Korath.

  “That’s right.”

  You realize, of course, that this time Castellano will most certainly be waiting for you?

  “That seems likely,” said Jake, as he finished eating. “But I still hope to surprise him. The Möbius Continuum gives me all the edge I need.”

  But it wasn’t enough of an edge at Le Manse Madonie, Korath reminded him.

  Jake sighed and said, “I see you’re your cheerful self, as usual. Anyway, what happened was my mistake and I won’t let it happen again. But talking about Le Manse Madonie, it’s time we took a look at that place to see what damage I did.”

  Jake took nothing with him but his 9 mm Browning automatic and a spare clip, and he and Korath went to Italy, to the coordinates of the slip-road where it left the highway and climbed to Le Manse Madonie—or what was left of it.

  The sky was clear and the place bright in starlight. Where Le Manse Madonie had looked out over the Ligurian Sea, a vivid white scar showed in the face of the cliff, like the new flesh under a scab that has been torn away. There was simply nothing there; the slip-road ended at a sheer drop down to the highway, where the entire cliff face had been blasted loose. And it had taken Le Manse Madonie with it. Down below, bulldozers were at work clearing the last of the rubble from the road to Imperia.

  You can be sure that no one lived through that! Korath was obviously awed. Whoever it was who shot at you, he is no more.

  “Actually,” said Jake, “I had hoped that someone had lived through it. That way he might have reported my death, too.”

  But he sensed the “shake” of Korath’s head. No, Castellano must know by now that you aren’t the one to die so easily. And I’m sure he will be expecting you.

  “You’re probably right,” said Jake. But he wasn’t about to let that stop him. Or rather something—the force that drove him on—wasn’t about to let it stop him. No, for the original Necroscope, Harry Keogh, had gone up against far worse dangers than these—

  —Hadn’t he?

  In the sprawling Gibson Desert of western Australia, somewhere on the three-hundred-mile trail between Wiluna and Lake Disappointment, Jake exited from the Möbius Continuum at coordinates remembered from his brief time with E-Branch and the grim work they had done there.

  It was early morning and relatively cool. Jake stood at the edge of the road—more nearly a track—and looked north and a little east at the rugged country ahead. The last time he was here it had been with Liz, and he’d been looking through binoculars. There was no requirement for those now; he knew the way well enough, and perhaps even too well.

  His vantage point was the crest of a rise in the road where it began to dip down into a riverbed that had dried up in prehistoric times, and he gazed at the base of a knoll that bulged at the foot of a massive outcrop or butte. The road (or ancient riverbed) wound around the ridgy, shelving base of the outcrop and disappeared north.

  On the shelf above the road, at the base of the knoll, that was where the Old Mine petrol station—a front for Nephran Malinari’s vampiric activities—had been situated not so long ago. Then E-Branch had discovered it, and now …

  … Now the face of the knoll was fire-blackened, the ground around had been scorched clean of vegetation, and the entrances to the old mine’s workings had been blocked by hundreds of tons of rock blasted from above. They’d made a good job of it, even as good as Jake had made of Le Manse Madonie.

  Jake knew that if he moved closer to the actual site of the petrol station he’d find evidence of recent activity; as recent as last night, when E-Branch and Major Tom’s men had been checking the place over, opening it up, searching it minutely, and closing it down again, this time sealing it for good. But he didn’t need to go that close.

  Where a ramp of hard-packed earth rose from the road to the elevated shelf in front of the knoll, he found what he was looking for, a hardwood stake with a warning sign that read:

  HEALTH HAZARD!

  TOXIC WASTE! KEEP OUT!

  Just twelve inches away from the foot of the signpost, the ground had recently been turned. Jake glanced at the sign again and thought: Health hazard? Well, what’s buried here is definitely going to become a health hazard for someone!

  He didn’t have a spade but the ground was still very loose. Down on his knees, scooping up earth and pebbles with his bare hands, he soon dug down to the canvas shoulder-straps of three thermite charges in their haversack containers. After that the rest was easy; he simply hauled on the straps, gradually dragging the haversacks up out of the loose soil.

  And now you’re all set, said Korath.

  “Right,” said Jake. “But we’ve time to go before it’s one o’clock in the morning in Bagheria, Sicily. And that’s when I intend to hit him: in the wee small hours of the morning, when all good men and true should rightfully be in their beds.”

  Good men and true, maybe, said Korath. But what about monsters? From what you’ve said of him, this Castellano is one of the worst. Well, for an entirely human being, that is. />
  Jake could only agree. For neither he nor his dead vampire companion had any way of knowing just how close the latter had come to revealing the truth of it.

  Which was how things stood when they took the Möbius route back to Jake’s hotel in Paris …

  Some hours earlier, on the island of Krassos, events had moved on apace.

  With the sun down and the dusky Greek twilight settling in, Trask and his people had left the knoll where Liz and Chung had made their observations on Palataki and the monastery, returned to the Christos Studios, and commenced contingency planning for the night ahead.

  “We now know more or less what we’re up against,” Trask told the others where they gathered in his and Chung’s accommodation. “The monastery is Vavara’s and so are its nun occupants. And you can feel sorry for them all you like, but it won’t help them. That’s the way things are, and there’s no hope for any of them. Ian will confirm that he’s already seen them burning—or rather, that he’s already foreseen them burning. But that could well be a symbolic thing, as some of his forecasts have been in the past, because God knows we don’t have anything to burn them with! However brutal it might sound, I only wish we had!”

  “Er, excuse me,” Manolis quickly cut in. “But it’s possible there are other options on that front which might still be open to us. But please go on. I can explain when you’re finished.”

  Trask nodded and continued. “So, then: the monastery has to go, and especially since Vavara has a houseguest, Lord Nephran Malinari. Now, that’s a fact: we know that both Vavara and Malinari are in residence, and that the monastery must have become some kind of hell for its rightful dwellers … they’re already burning, if you see what I mean. Perhaps that’s what our precog has seen.” He paused to glance at Goodly. But Goodly’s face was gaunt, even paler than usual, and devoid of any message.