Necroscope: Invaders

CHAPTER NINE Regression

As they seated themselves at a folding table, to a breakfast of black coffee in plastic mugs and bacon and eggs on paper plates, Trask made belated introductions. 'Jake Cutter, mah guid friend here is Grahame McGilchrist, Laird o' Kinlochry…' But then he ahemmed his embarrassment, and went on, 'Who, despite my atrociously false and corny accent, is the genuine article.'

Shaking hands with the big Scotsman across the table, Jake said, 'A Scottish laird, living on the other side of the world? There has to be something of a story in that.'

'No much o' a one,' the other rumbled. 'It's simply a matter o' choice. See, the McGilchrist estate went broke all o' a hundred years ago. Oh, Ah had mah crumblin' old castle, but in truth Ah wiz a figurehead in the local community, and that wiz a'. But Ah still had mah pride. So, when a cousin o' mine pegged it out here in Oz and left me his wee place in Carnarvon, Ah came out and took over. That was some nine years ago.'

'That "wee place" Grahame's talking about,' Trask cut in, 'is two and a half thousand acres of well-watered farmland east of Carnarvon. If he wanted to sell up he could go back home and be a proper laird again.'

'But Ah willnae do it,' McGilchrist said. 'Ah have lads tae tend mah land and animals, while Ah have mah own interests.'

'He has a practice in Carnarvon/ Trask explained. 'His own special slant on psychiatry.'

'Aye, and there ye have the other reason why Ah made mahsel scarce frae they so-called "British" Isles.' McGilchrist cocked his head, frowned at Trask and winked at Jake. 'Tae escape frae these bleddy E-Branch types!'

'He worked for us a while/ Trask said. But Jake had been quick to catch on to something else. 'Psychiatry?' he said, suspiciously. 'And I'm the subject?'

Liz Merrick appeared out of nowhere, looking great in black slacks, cowboy boots and a frilly white blouse. Seating herself beside Jake, she said, 'And a suitable subject at that/'

'Thanks/ Jake told her sourly, while he waited for Trask's or McGilchrist's explanation. And:

'Hypnotic regression/ Trask said without further preamble. 'That's Grahame's speciality. It's not a "talent" as recognized by E-Branch — that is, it isn't some strange parapsychological ability, though the way it works for Grahame it might well be — but it does come in useful in cases like yours/ 'Cases like mine?' Again Jake waited.

'Where the subject has subconsciously deleted some part of his memory/ Trask said. 'Or something else has blocked it—'

'—Or he has simply forgotten it/ McGilchrist finished it for him. 'Ye're no a nutcase, if that's what's bothering ye.' 'You don't know him yet/ said Liz, and Jake scowled. McGilchrist grinned at Liz across the table and said, 'Will one o' ye kind gentleman no introduce me tae this beautiful wee thing? Oh, Ah ken Ah'm a mite late — a mite too old, maybe? — but still Ah'd like tae be in wi' a chance!'

'Too late?' Liz blushed at his words. But McGilchrist simply looked at Jake, smiled, and went on eating…

Jake had been studying the Scotsman, and despite his apprehension he discovered that he liked him. McGilchrist seemed as open as a book. The hypnotist was tall, yes, but with his huge chest

and massive girth looked almost stocky. Jake could well picture him tossing a caber, and for that matter he could probably toss big men around as well. Except, Jake reckoned, that wouldn't be in his nature. He was the salt of Scottish soil, the hard flint of wooded mountains, however far removed; but there was a kindness — an understanding of Nature, human nature especially — in those dark eyes of his, however deeply they might probe.

It was frequently the same with men of rare ability. Even in Jake's few days with E-Branch he had been aware of it in Ben Trask's espers, the ones he'd met, and of course in the Head of E-Branch himself. The big Scotsman might not be as parapsychologically endowed as a true esper, but still there was that special something about him; in those eyes, mainly — those hypnotic eyes — and the way they studied a man…

Jake suddenly realized that they'd been studying him, reading him much as he had been reading the other. Perhaps reading him more, or more cleverly. And breakfast was over now.

'So when's it tae be?' McGilchrist stood up, stretched and yawned. 'God, but ye got me up early, Ben Trask! Ah wiz barely in bed… then up again, when yere chopper landed in mah back yard. Ah wiz expectin' yere man, aye, but no at that hour.'

'I'm sorry about that/ Trask said, 'but we never know how long we'll be in any one place. And in fact we could be moving on at any time. I'm just waiting on some information from London, and then we'll be out of here/

He got to his feet, Jake and Liz, too, and she said, 'Can I come in on this? Jake's my partner, after all/

'He might yet be your partner/ Trask answered immediately. 'We won't know that until we know.'

And Jake, as fidgety as ever, burst out, 'Then for Christ's sake let's get on with it! For whatever it is, it seems my future's hanging on it.'

'Yere future?' said Grahame McGilchrist, as Trask led them towards his tent. 'Ah, no. Ye'd be better off askin' the precog about that. And ye'll find that even he isnae that sure. But as for the past: well, that's different. What's been has been, and it cannae be changed. But even if it's been well and truly buried — buried in or by the mind, that is — we can usually dig it up again, aye. And as for me: Ah'm one hell o' an archaeologist/' He turned his attention to Trask.

'So then, but this is a verra different E-Branch to the one Ah used tae know. They pilots, talkin' over there: Australians, aye? And a couple more fiddlin' wi' those vehicles there? Seems ye're recruitin' far afield these days, Benjamin.'

'No, not really/ Trask answered. 'Not even if it was just our espers you were talking about. See, in E-Branch we've never much cared about colours, creeds or nationalities. In that respect you could even say that we've always recruited far afield. For example: David Chung is of Chinese stock, you are Scottish, and poor Darcy Clarke's forebears were French. As for Zek Foener. Zek…' Trask's voice faltered and his face clouded over.

'Aye, Ah ken, and Ah'm sorry/ McGilchrist took his arm. They had arrived at Trask's tent. Freeing himself from the Scotsman's grip, his well-meant but inopportune commiseration, Trask turned his face away, occupied himself in fastening back the entrance flap to let in the predawn light. And in a while:

'Currently the team consists of a small nucleus of agents, mainly from London HQ/ he went on on. 'But the back-up squads are Australian military, and likewise all their gear. It's not likely that anyone would know that, because the tac signs have been removed from the vehicles and choppers, and of course the men themselves aren't wearing their standard uniforms. But the discipline is the same. And you're quite right, Grahame, there have been several changes in E-Branch. For one, we're no longer the shoestring outfit that we used to be. Financially we're pretty stable now; when you can pay your own way, it gives you that much more clout.

'Five years ago, through our dealings with Gustav Turchin, the Russian Premier, we got ourselves accepted and well-established. We could afford to come out of hiding — emerge, as

it were, from the esoteric closet — but never too far. For let's face it, an organization like E-Branch can't remain secret if everyone knows about it.

'As for these Australians: obviously they're all subject to their own version of the Official Secrets Act, and they've all been hand-picked for their loyalty, their unswerving devotion to duty and their country. Isn't that just exactly how it should be? Who better to do… well, what I'm calling on them to do, than loyal subjects of the country under threat?'

'Under threat?' Suddenly McGilchrist's tone was sharp as he took his seat at Trask's small table.

Trask nodded gravely. 'Perhaps the entire world/ he said. 'Except the world doesn't know it yet, and it mustn't/

'A secret invasion?' McGilchrist looked from face to face, trying to fathom their expressions. 'As bad as a' that, is it? Then ye can only be talkin' about one thing. Oh, Ah dinnae need tae ken it a', but is it… Them?' An ex-member of the Branch, he'd had access to the files on their long-term war against the Wamphyri; indeed those files had long been required reading for all Branch operatives and senior affiliates.

'Grahame, you weren't part of the Sunside/Starside thing/ Trask told him, 'and from past experience I know how dangerous it could be to put you in the picture now. So please let it be. But yes, it is… Them. And now perhaps you'll forgive me for getting you out of bed in the middle of the night? As for Jake Cutter here, he could be very important to us — but very important — in the work we've still to do/

The big Scot had heard enough and was suitably impressed. 'Then we'd best be at it/ he said. 'But tell me, just what am Ah supposed tae be lookin' for? Can ye no offer a wee clue?'

Trask looked torn two ways. He glanced first at Jake, then turned back to McGilchrist. 'I can, but that would mean telling Jake, too/

'What's that? But doesnae he have a right to know?' McGilchrist frowned. And Jake said:

'Huh! My point exactly.'

'But/ Trask countered, 'if he does have such a right, why doesn't he already know? If he's been denied access, it must be for a reason. In which case, what right have I to give him access now?'

McGilchrist shook his head, frowned again. 'Well, doubtless ye ken well enough what ye're on about, but Ah'm as much in the dark as Jake here! Can ye no gi' me a startin' point?'

'Oh, yes,' Trask answered. 'That I can do. Just a week ago Jake was in jail in Italy, Turin, when—' 'Undercover?' the hypnotist cut in.

'Er, no/ said Trask, and the big Scot sat back and scratched at his beard musingly. 'Anyway/ Trask went on, 'Jake escaped from the prison, barely. But it's the way he escaped that interests us. And it's where he escaped to.. p>

'Eh?' said McGilchrist. 'Escaped to…?' 'To Harry's Room, Grahame/ Trask told him. 'You'll remember Harry's Room, at E-Branch HQ?'

'Ah!' The other stopped scratching on the instant, stared hard at Trask, and harder still at Jake. 'He escaped there, ye say?'

'Arrived there/ said Trask. 'But the question is, was he brought there, or did he come of his own volition… or was he sent? And if the latter, by whom was he sent?' And again:

'AW.' said McGilchrist. 'Verra well, then that'll be our startin' point: the prison, the escape/ He unbuttoned a tartan shirt pocket, took out a small vial and uncorked it, gave it to Jake and said, 'Sit down here and swally that/

Jake sat, looked at the colourless liquid in the vial suspiciously. 'Do what?' he said.

'It's only a wee drug/ McGilchrist was completely matter-of-fact about it. 'We've had truth drugs a long time now, stuff ye had tae inject. But we've come a ways since then. This isnae a truth drug, but it does open the mind… it lets ye see more clearly intae yere own past. Aye, and it lets ye talk about it! Oh, and one other thing: it enhances mah power over ye/

'Your power over me?' Jake didn't like the sound of that, especially since he'd already poured the draught down his gullet.

'It simply means that unless there's a verra strong post-hypnotic block on yere mind, yell gi' me all the assistance Ah require. Ye willnae hold anythin' back.'

'And if there is a post-hypnotic block? Will that mean I've been hypnotized before?'

'Well, if no hypnotized, ye'll have been got at, certainly/

'And you'll be able to clear it?'

'Man, Ah cannae make ye that kind o' promise/ McGilchrist was honest about it. 'As Ben here will tell ye, there's hypnotists… and then there's hypnotists. And if what he fears has been here first.. He shrugged.p>

'I understand/ said Jake, though in fact he didn't.

'Now, that's a fast-actin' drug that's in ye/ McGilchrist continued, 'so Ah'd best be tellin' ye one or two things. Ye're tae sit verra still and upright in yere chair; oh, dinnae fret, Ah wouldnae let ye topple over. And ye're tae look at me, at mah eyes. Verra big and black, mah eyes, are they no?'

They were very big and black, and Jake's head was beginning to spin oh so slowly, languidly at first, but gradually getting faster; as if he were drunk, flat on his back on a bed, and the room spinning around him but without the sick feeling.

'And here's me bringin' mah eyes closer, lookin' at ye, and lookin intae ye/ McGilchrist's voice was so very low now, like the growl of a great wolf. So low, so dark, and so close. 'Ah'm lookin' intae ye, and ye're lookin' intae mah eyes, or is it mah eye? For see, there's only one o' they now! The two have merged intae one, like a wee swirly black hole in mah face. Or maybe a big black hole? And it's suckin' at ye, Jake, suckin' at ye.. p>

It was indeed. That blackest of black holes, spinning faster and faster. And Jake felt its lure, its attraction. God, if he could back out of this now he would! But he couldn't. And:

'Dinnae fight it, laddie/ said a voice that burned in his head. Just let it go, and come to me. Open up to Grahame/ And then:

The black hole had him! He was sucked in and whirled like a bug down a plughole. It was as quick as thought; it had happened before he could even cry out, if he had been able to…!

Paolo has slid a length of rubber tubing over the links of the chain to deaden its clanking. Now he looks at me, gives me the nod, and I cup my bands far him.

He steps into my hands, and I can smell his groin… he smells of fear, and I imagine I do, too. Thank Cod there's no moon!

He's up on my shoulders now, swinging the chain. I hear it swish through the dark night air… hear it clatter, too, just the once but enough to make me grit my teeth. And now there's a scraping sound as Paolo hauls on the chain, fattening the roll of barbed wire to the top of the wall. But he's done it! Paolo is on his way up the chain!

I look up; his head and shoulders are silhouetted against the black horizon of the wall. He clings to the chain with his right hand, takes the blanket from around his neck and lobs it up and over. The wire is covered. Damn.' The man's a genius!

Now he's balanced up there with one leg over the wall, and he's reaching down for me. My heart is thudding, hammering away in my chest, but at last I'm on the chain. Up I go, and I reach for Paolo's hand. But what? What? He withdraws it!

I don't believe it! (But I do, I do! I just knew it was too bloody easy!) And I cling to the chain and look up at him, look into his eyes that are looking down into mine. Except now they look beyond me, into the night.

And dangling there, I glance over my shoulder and see them: prison guards, armed and taking aim across the exercise yard. I look up at Paolo, and his sweat falls on me like rain. He gives a shrug, says: 'I sorry, Jake, but they promise me…' And then he jerks and I hear the shot. And now Paolo's blood splashes me as his right eye turns black.

He's falling, taking me with him… we hit the ground like a ton of bricks! Paolo's body is on top of me, which is just as well, because I can feel it jerking, shuddering to the sound of more gunshots. I struggle under his dead weight, somehow manage to throw him off and rise into a crouch. But God, I'm a dead man — I have to be! Fat white sparks light the night like angry fireflies where bullets ricochet off the wall and spit concrete splinters at me. But now—

— Now there's a spark that… that isn't a spark! 1 don't understand it, haven't the time to understand it. But it hovers there like a golden dart, level with my eyes, only twelve inches away, seeming to follow my movements as I dodge bullets. And now it moves, too. And I know that it has to be a bullft after all, because it smacks me right between the eyes!

And I fall face first, but I can't feel it when I hit the ground. Of course I can't feel it, because you don't feel anything when you're dead.

Dead and weightless and rushing somewhere, rushing out of my body, I suppose. Rushing to heaven or hell, if I believed. I wish I had believed now… and I'll bet I'm not the first man who thought that! But Jesus, I'm not going out without a fight… not Jake Cutter! I struggle and twist and tumble. But this can't be right, because I can feel myself. I'm not dead yet!

And now I see a light in the darkness. I rush towards it, fall into it… No, I fall out of the darkness!

My head! God, I'm sick, dizzy, and my head…!

But I'm not dead yet.

I'm not dead yet.

Not dead yet.

Not dead.

Not.

No. i

'It's been an hour/ said McGilchrist's voice. 'Ye ought tae be comin' out o' it now, Jake mah lad.'

Jake remembered where he was and would have jerked erect, but since he was already erect — sitting upright in his chair, just as the 'doctor' had ordered — instead he became aware of incredible cramps in all his limbs, whose pain was physical and of course far worse than the imagined thump on the head that he had 'experienced' for the second time around just a few moments ago.

He opened his eyes, tried to reach up and touch his head, maybe cradle it in his trembling hands, but even the slightest movement caused violent shooting pains in his arms and shoulders, freezing him in position. And:

'35

'G-God Almighty!' he groaned, his throat dry as kindling.

McGilchrist dropped two white pills into a glass of water, swirled them and watched them dissolve. 'These'll do ye a power o' good/ he said.

'And I… I should believe you?' said Jake, blinking rapidly as his eyes grew accustomed to the full dawn light.

'Eh? But they're only wee aspirins, man.'' McGilchrist told him. 'For yere headache, ye ken? Which is a side effect o' that draught o' mine. What, d'ye really think Ah'd poison ye?'

Slowly, Jake allowed himself to slump in his chair. And as his blood began to circulate and pins and needles took over from the true pain, so he took the glass and drank. And then he remembered not only what had gone before, but also something of his regression.

Again he straightened up, but much more carefully now, and said, 'That dart. A golden dart or splinter. I seem to remember it… it entered my head?'

'Just like you told me,' Liz Merrick sighed from where she sat close to him. 'Except you didn't call it a dart.'

Jake carefully turned to squint at her through the tent's luminous air. And Ben Trask said, 'I think that's all we needed to know. It makes any further questions I might have academic, conjectural, meaningless. For the time being, anyway.' He, too, was seated — looked like he needed to be — and his voice was trembling to match Jake's limbs.

'Great,' said Jake, unsteadily. 'Fine. So now that all of your questions are answered, how about mine?'

'Yours?' said Trask, stopped dead in his tracks. And: 'Ah, well! We'll deal with those shortly, yes. And Jake, I'm really, really very sorry about that — I mean, that I had to be so secretive. I'm sure you'll understand when you know it all.'

'But for the next few minutes/ said McGilchrist, with his massive hand on Jake's shoulder, 'ye're tae take it easy, until ye're back on yere feet. And then ye should stop worryin' about what's happened tae ye. Ye're in the verra best o' hands, after a'.'

The stiffness was draining from Jake's limbs and his headache was in recession. 'Did I do okay?' he said, looking at Ben Trask. 'Did you get all you wanted? It was that dart, right? It was that dart that I thought was a bullet. What in hell was the thing?'

But while Jake was beginning to feel okay, Trask was still shaken. 'It's not so much what it was,' he replied, 'as what it is, but definitely. And what that makes you.'

'Makes me?' Sensing something of Trask's quandary, perhaps his reluctance to accept whatever he was having to accept, Jake had stopped feeling okay on the instant. Now, frowning, he said 'How do you mean, what it makes me? What I am is plain: a fugitive from so-called justice, hiding out under the protection of E-Branch. Unless you've changed your mind, that is. Is that it? Did you learn something that makes you want to throw me back to the wolves? Am I in fact the sick, psychotic killer that people have been made to believe I am?'

And perhaps Trask would have started to tell him there and then, but at that moment lan Goodly's piping, excited voice was heard from across the clearing:

'Ben, Ben!' the precog was calling. 'Those serials. I know which ones are missing. And I think we're in a lot of trouble!'

'Think?' Trask called from the open door of his tent.

'I know we are,' Goodly was closer now, and his voice commensurately less strident. 'I've seen it coming, Ben,' he said, heading towards Trask's tent at a fast, agitated lope. 'Trouble with a capital "T", yes. So whatever it is you're doing, put it aside for now. This is just as important — maybe more so — and I think you need to hear me out'

As Trask ducked out under the tent's awning, Liz took hold of Jake's hand and said, 'No one thinks badly of you Jake. What you told us when you were under only serves to corroborate what Ben Trask has been hoping all along. But that's for him to tell you, not me. And as for throwing you to the wolves… au contrain, Jake Cutter: on the contrary. But it could be his intention to throw you at them…'

Ten minutes later, Trask had called his small nucleus of Branch people to him. And at the last moment he'd invited Liz and Jake into the briefing. Everyone was crowded into his tent.

Wasting no time, when all of his people had arrived, Trask said, 'I won't make a meal of this and as soon as we're through here I want you to start packing up. I'd like to be out of here A.S.A.P. Ops truck and vehicles: strip them of everything important to us because we're leaving them behind. Our next target is too far away that we can simply drive to it. It was possible we might have stayed just as we are now, but something has come up. Our Aussie friends will have to follow on behind us, but as the brains behind the brawn, as it were, time is a luxury we've just run out of. So… what's the big hurry, eh?

'Well, you all know about our Mr Miller. But you don't know all about him. To recap: Miller's some kind of nut who believes in friendly aliens, and despite that he's seen the enemy pretty close up he thinks that we are the butchers! He thinks the work we did last night was a totally unjustified pre-emptive strike against a landing party of explorers from outer space, and that they only turned nasty in order to survive. He has even written books on the etiquette of first contact. So obviously, in Miller's warped perceptions, we're sadly lacking in manners.

'It doesn't matter that our "aliens" are stinking, murderous vampires from a parallel world; Miller's mania would never accept that. He doesn't believe a word I've said to him — probably doesn't even believe they're vampires — but he does think he can talk to them…

'Well, that in itself wouldn't be a problem. His own people can look after him, lock him up or do whatever they deem necessary to make him look like an idiot — which he is — if Miller should start babbling his "crazy stories" about our work to the press or other sensationalist outlets. So when I found out that he'd made a run for it, in a way I was pleased. At least he was out of my hair. Yes, but that was before I discovered what he'd taken with him.

'People, last night our locators at London HQ, headed up by David Chung, found us a new target: they detected a hitherto unsuspected patch of mindsmog on the other side of the Australian continent. It was only there for a moment — someone's mental shield slipped, shall we say? — but it was the real thing, the unmistakable signature of a Lord of the Wamphyri. I'm talking about a Lord, yes. And what we have to remember is that the Thing we went up against last night, Bruce Trennier, that was a mere lieutenant — someone in thrall to a Lord — left behind by his maker and master for whatever reason.

'Okay, this mindsmog: it was detected at the same time — I mean precisely the same time — as we were dealing with Trennier. Now, we know that many of the Wamphyri had the power of telepathic contact with their thralls even over great distances, so it's possible, indeed probable, that Trennier's unknown master "felt" his lieutenant's death, and it so surprised or startled him that he let his guard down, if only for a moment. He might even have done it deliberately, tried to establish better contact with Trennier to find out what was happening. As for our people in London, they were lucky; someone happened to be looking in the right place at the right time, and that's when they detected the evil "aura" of a Great Vampire.

'Of course Chung forwarded this information to me, only to have it intercepted by Peter bloody Miller! And now I couldn't give a damn about him speaking to the media or anyone else for that matter. But I do care that he might be on his way to deliver a warning to one of the worst threats our world has ever faced…

'… A warning that we are on our way to destroy it!'

CHAPTER TEN The Vampire File

When everyone with the exception of Jake and Liz was clear of Trask's tent, he opened his briefcase and plumped a thin file down on the tabje.

'Read it/ he told Jake. 'It will give you something to do for a while, for we may be here a little longer than I anticipated. I was forgetting that we'd have to fly Grahame back home again. Even though he's on his way now, it will still be three to three and a half hours before the chopper gets back. But on the other hand, and since I'd like E-Branch to move as a unit, that's probably just as well; it gives us more time to get our act together — our thoughts, too — for which I'm grateful. I hate starting something without being able to think it through first/

He looked pointedly at Jake. 'That file is your chance to think things through, too. You see, I don't want anyone in the Branch who doesn't fit or doesn't want to be here. However, in the event you do decide to move on, you needn't worry about my handing you over to the law. That's not my way. I would simply wash my hands of you. But if you stay, then you're with us all the way. I have no time for quitters, and in that case I would assist the law in any way possible/

'Huh!1 Jake answered. 'And just when I thought you'd begun to appreciate me. Okay, do you want my answer right now?' 'Read the file first/ said Trask curtly, 'then ask Lardis to tell you about Sunside/Starside. After that I'll fill you in on some of our history, bring you up to date on the current situation, and how we got here, and generally try to explain where you fit in the grand scheme of things. Oh, you'll find it lots of fun, Jake, I can guarantee that.' But despite his guarantee, Trask's words were dry as dust; he was deadly serious, his face utterly devoid of humour…

'Oh, good!' said the other, just as drily and seemingly unimpressed. 'I can't wait.'

'God, why him?' Trask asked under his breath, of no one in particular, as he went stamping from the tent. It was a question he would be asking himself for quite some time to come…

'So why arejyow still here?' Jake asked Liz.

'Because I'm good company,' she answered testily. 'Or maybe I'm maintaining some kind of balance: my good and pleasant aura versus your miserable, messed-up, self-pitying—'

'—I don't pity myself/ Jake cut in, scowling.

'Then have pity on me and leave it out!' she told him. And abruptly, angrily starting to her feet: 'Very well, do it your way. Who needs you, anyway!?'

'Wait/ Jake said. 'Sit down. I may need you — to help me with this.' He waved a dismissive hand at Trask's file.

Liz took a very deep breath, but despite her annoyance she sat down, folded her arms, said nothing.

And after a while Jake said, 'You know why I'm pissy, even with you?'

That 'even' told Liz something, at least… mainly that she was special, different in his perception. But she remained cool towards him and simply said, 'Go on?'

'Ben Trask, Goodly, Lardis/ he said, 'especially Lardis! — he can give you bad dreams, that one — it's as if they were all waiting for something to happen/ And he thumbed himself in the chest. 'To happen to me!'

'Or waiting for you to do something/ she said.

'Exactly/ Jake narrowed his eyes at her. 'And you, too?'

'Well, and weren't we justified in that?' she countered. 'I mean, we've seen one of the things you can do. The way you move… without moving.'

'But I thought that was agreed/ his frustration was mounting. 'I've already told you that's not me!'

'Maybe it's trying to be you,' she said — and at once bit her KP— Jake nodded, and his voice was harder when he accused: 'So you are in on it.'

'Jake/ Liz told him, 'if you were to learn everything all in one go, it might be too much for you. I can understand that even if you can't. Ben Trask and the other espers, they've recognized a germ in you. But maybe it's more than a germ. Especially after last night, and again this morning with McGilchrist. Anyway, they would like it to grow; they don't want to kill it off with the shock of sudden awareness. That's why they'll let you in on it slowly, gradually. That way, when it all becomes clear to you, you'll be ready for it.'

Jake looked at her and saw only truth in her eyes. Then he looked at the file again. 'So reading this stuff is like Trask said: just another step in my gradual education, right?'

'I think so, yes/ she answered.

'Huh!'And muttering darkly to himself, Jake picked up the file. It had a yellow plastic jacket with a red diagonal stripe stamped with the word COSMIC. A once-white, well-thumbed label gummed in the top righthand corner bore a scrawled legend in Indian ink: 'VAMPIRES AND THE WAMPHYRI — basic/

But as Jake Cutter was about to discover, there was little or nothing basic about them…

Jake had of course been briefed prior to last night's foray; a very sparse — even a brief— briefing before being 'thrown in at the deep end/ as he had had it. He'd seen a jerky old black and white film from a place called Perchorsk in the Ural Mountains, which at first he'd thought was a clip from some old horror movie that a sensitive

20th Century film censor had refused to pass for general viewing. It was just too graphic, too real, too horrific. And its special effects had been… well, something else.

But the rest of the footage (of the underground Perchorsk Complex, which was obviously real, and of an incredible, nightmarish flying creature that two USAF fighters had sent to hell over the Hudson Bay all of thirty years ago, coupled with Ben Trask's matter-of-fact, voice-over commentary) had finally served to convince Jake of its authenticity… well, almost. But still not quite with it, and at that time not really wanting to be, he had allowed himself to arrive at his own incorrect conclusion:

That all those years ago Soviet scientists had been breeding something — probably biologically engineered soldiers — in subterranean laboratories in the Urals, and that an unspecified number of genetically mutated monsters, not to mention several 'altered' human beings had somehow escaped… which even now seemed a far more acceptable explanation than the fantastic story he was beginning to piece together from the notes in Trask's file.

'WAMPHYRI/ (Jake read the heading again): 'The Mowing notes result from Harry and Nathan Keogh debriefs. The Keoghs, father and son(s), were mainly responsible for the destruction of the Wamphyri. This file should be read in conjunction with 278, "HARRY KEOGH," 279, "NECROSCOPE," and 311, "NATHAN/"

And then he started again on the text:

'The Wamphyri are the original vampires of "myth" and legend. For the last two thousand years vampires have been periodically "banished" from their own world into ours. Prior to that time it seems possible that several of them found their own way to Earth via a "wormhole" situated in Starside, having its exit in a subterranean cave under the foothills of the Carpatii Meridional! the Transylvanian Alps. This is obviously the reason why, even to this day, that region is associated with vampires and vampirism. It is the source of the so-called "myth."

'But the Wamphyri are not a myth. They are the inhabitants of an Earth-type world lying parallel to Earth in a "universe" on "the other side" of our familiar space-time continuum; and but for the fact that the wormhole enters our world deep underground on a watercourse subject to flash flooding, it is quite feasible that by now the human race would have been conquered, converted and enslaved by vampires.

'However, and whatever might have been Mankind's fate, one thing is certain: there will be no more vampires in this world. The only means of entry have been closed. In 2007, the Russian Premier, Gustav Turchin, diverted hydroelectric dam waters from the Urals Pass into the subterranean complex at Perchorsk, thus drowning the singularity or "Gate" in the heart of the complex. This action served to preserve the integrity of both worlds and guaranteed the future safety of at least one of them, ours. For further reading see 262, PERCHORSK, and 297, THE REFUGE. 'STAGES OF VAMPIRISM — the Vampire Life-Cycle — in large part speculative:

'In the east and west of Sunside/Starside lie swamps which are always gloomy under rolling banks of fog. In a time immemorial to Sunside's Szgany (nomadic humans), the first vampires came out of these swamps.

'The morphology or evolution of the Wamphyri would make for a fascinating study in its own right. (But we must consider any clinical, laboratory, or experimental study of ANY PHASE of vampires and vampirism far too dangerous!) Cyclical, it frequently involves forms other than human. Vampire DNA is unique in being mutative within a single life-cycle without the benefit of generation. Like any disease, but almost sentiently aggressive, it invades non-vampire tissues to infect them. But instead of destroying the contaminated body it passes on its mutant DNA, causing the host to adapt — and indeed to mutate — within its own span. Since longevity is invariably a result of vampirism, barring accidental death or fatal diseases the lifespan of the victim, then a vampire in his own right, might easily extend to many hundreds and perhaps even thousands of years.

'In the vampire swamps of Sunside/Starside, the first (or final) phase of the cycle may be found. It is a black mushroom that ripens to give off red spores. SPECULATIVE: The spores are the genesis of vampiric life and carry the as yet "blank" form of vampire DNA. Breathed in, the spores attach to animal lungs and commence leaking their "poison" into the bloodstream along with oxygen. Then the mutation quickens, the victim falls ill, and following a period of some three days emerges as a vampire in his own right. In Transylvania, the illness would occasionally appear fatal and the victim dead. Hence the legend of the vampire rising from his grave after three days in the earth.

'The spores do not discriminate; they infect who or whatever breathes them in. An infected fox or dog would have vampire instincts. But the true vampire has instincts of its own.

'SECOND PHASE. (In part, speculative):

'Within an infected host, certain special strands join up to take on a separate, parasitic identity. This may take a few years, decades, or even centuries; the reason for these variations are as yet undetermined. But the symbiotic creature that results is the true vampire: a semi-protoplasmic leech clinging to the spine of the host and extending its own nervous and sensory systems into his brain, literally possessing his mind. It is him, and he is it. And the parasite or symbiont's appetite is for blood. It feeds on the source of life itself: the blood of its host's future victims. Indeed, "the blood is the life."

'The symbiont is not necessarily "faithful" to an original host; in Sunside, should a dog or fox host come in contact with a human being, a wholesale transfer of leech from the animal to the human is possible, especially if the animal is stricken and dying. In other words the leech will seek a continued existence — or even better, a higher life-form — in its new host. Among the Szgany of Sunside, the tenacity of the leech is a legend in its own right.

'THIRD PHASE: Wamphyri.

'Not only has the symbiont become an integral part of its host's body, but the host's being — even his thought processes, his personality, and of course his DNA — have been altered forever. Just as strands of that DNA have mutated into the leech, so the host's flesh has become in itself imitative. His flesh is now metamorphic: he can within certain limits bring about physical alterations in his shape and form. He is Wamphyri.'

'FOURTH PHASE: Back to the Origin. Speculative: 'In the event of death the symbiont leech (and even the host's "dead" flesh) may attempt a secondary existence by way of reconstitution. Essential fats and amino acids — the building blocks of life — may seek to escape into the earth, there to develop into mushroom spawn that lies dormant until a time of maximum opportunity. How the "vampire essence" or mushroom germs recognize this one opportune moment remains unknown. In Transylvanian legends, as in those of Sunside, certain vampire Lords store native soil and sleep upon it — clear evidence of the instinct for survival. And once again, immemorial Sunside myths have it that the Drakuls — an especially infamous line of Lords — kept loam from Starside's swamps for the same purpose, against just such an eventuality.

'FINAL PHASE: The True Death.

'Decapitated, a vampire dies. (There is no brain for the leech to control to its own ends — but the symbiont itself may still attempt to escape its host's termination). However, the bulk of a symbiont is located mainly on the left or heart side of its host's spine, and a stake driven through the heart will usually suffice to pin the creature there, for a time at least. A stake soaked in garlic will certainly do the job, for garlic, like silver, is a quick-acting poison to vampire flesh. But the only sure way to kill a vampire is to burn it to ashes. Wherefore Sunside's Szgany stake, decapitate, and burn all vampire manifestations wherever possible. Only then can they be certain that the vampire has died the "True Death." 'There exists one other phase in the vampire life-cycle. (See "Egg-son" or "-daughter" in the next section following). VAMPIRISM: Infection, Deliberate and Accidental. 'By a bite. The virulence of a vampire's bite, which is usually delivered in the act of feeding, would seem to differ from vampire to vampire. But the bite of a Lord of the Wamphyri is especially infectious. It can cause delirium and death, though not necessarily the True Death. When a Lord (or Lady) seeks to "recruit" a vampire thrall or servitor, the bite isn't usually deep and little blood is taken. In this case the bite has been used to transmit vampire DNA, but only in an amount sufficient to bring about the first phase of the change. It may then take years for a leech to develop and the servitor — or, later, the "lieutenant" — to "ascend" and become Wamphyri.

'But when a Lord or Lady's bite is excessive and too much plasma is taken — and a commensurate amount of vampire essence transfused — then the result may be "death" of a sort, lasting the specified three days. Then, too, when the victim ascends it will be with the germ of a leech established and growing within him.

' "Accidental" infection may occur when an infected animal (such as a dog, fox, or wolf), fighting to avoid entrapment or/ and execution, bites a human being. In such a case it is possible for a person bitten in this manner to develop the characteristics of the original host beast. This is the proven source of the werewolf legend; it seems feasible that in Earth's past there were even "genuine" vampire bats other than Desmodus and Diphylla.

'Accidental infection may also occur when vampire blood is spilled, such as in Sunside executions of suspect vampires by the Szgany. In common with AIDS and similar contagious diseases, open wounds and mucous membranes are especially susceptible. Even healthy, whole skin splashed with a vampire's blood or urine should be treated immediately. (Oil of garlic applied with a silver scraper is the best remedy, though no guarantees may be given).

'The most definite, and definitely the most effective form of vampiric infection is obtained when a Lord or Lady wishes to create an "egg-son" or "daughter." Apart from one rare exception (see "Mother," below) a symbiont leech is capable of producing only one cryptogenetic "egg" during its lifespan. In this the parasite relies on the judgement of its usually human host to provide a superior vessel for habitation. The egg — a flexible ciliolate spheroid half an inch in diameter — is "willed" into being by the vampire host and passed on mouth to mouth, or by sexual intercourse, or by simple spillage when it must find its own way. 'A spilled egg, being protoplasmic, will seep through the skin of a designated host or other acceptable vessel, interacting with him to cause speedy infection and transformation. Any such changeling is considered to have ascended and is Wamphyri.

'Not all exchanges of bodily fluids between vampires (the Wamphyri) and human beings are necessarily infectious. The vampire has a degree of control over his parasite, and also over his blood and other plasma fluids. A Lady of the Wamphyri may consort with a human lover without converting him. She simply avoids taking his blood, and following intercourse "wills" her vampire essence to destroy his sperm. Likewise a Lord may will his sperm free of vampiric influence to keep a concubine pristine.

'This cannot in any way be taken as indicative of love or even affection; it is simply that the Wamphyri do not casually "create" other Wamphyri! Egg-and bloodsons and daughters are chosen with infinite care, and among the reasons are these:

'A powerful egg-son may one day usurp the father; knowing and even accepting this, the nature of the man, the prospective host, must first be explored to the full. And egg-daughters — as all Wamphyri Ladies — are treated with great care not only by their sires but also other Lords, because while the occurrence is rare, nevertheless the occasional Lady will prove to be a "Mother" or breeder of vampires. The exception that disproves the general rule, a Mother's parasite has the ability to spawn a great many more than the usual single egg…

'THE NATURE OF VAMPIRES: A Possible Explanation of the Wamphyri Lifestyle.

'The Wamphyri are aggressive, tenacious, territorial, egotistical, ruthless, and unrepentantly evil, and proceed in each mode or mood with passions exaggerated to a degree quite beyond human understanding. By our standards they are deranged.

'It appears that the symbiont leeches are directly responsible for their hosts' invariably antagonistic natures: unless the host is made strong, the parasite cannot be certain of its own longevity. Lacking aggression the host would be seen to be weak, easy prey to his contemporaries. And without tenacity or the will to survive, he must fail. If territory exists for the taking, a vampire will take it; extending his boundaries makes a Lord safer within his own sphere of jurisdiction. And as for ruthlessness: since the driving instinct of the leech is survival, the question of law and order

— and especially justice — never arises. Might is the only right. The "evil" of the Great Vampire springs naturally from all of his other vices. An intelligent being may not be aggressive, ruthless and territorial — and of course a merciless killer — without being unrepentantly evil.

'As for the vampire's ego: that becomes glaringly evident in the pride he takes in his evil. According to Szgany legends, the first of the Wamphyri was Shaitan — in our world, Satan. And pride (or ego, as we understand it) was his downfall, too.

'It will have been noticed that the above vices are identical with Man's, forming in the main our definition of evil. In that respect it should also be pointed out that the vampire has no recognition of evil. "Regret", "shame" or "guilt" are in all probability words that he does not accept, or emotions which — if experienced at all

— are held in abeyance by his parasite.

'As for any comparison with Man's evil: the scale of difference

— the enormity of the gap between ours and the vampire's capacity for evil — simply does not allow for comparison. Vampires are in themselves the Ultimate Evil.

'DISEASES and VULNERABILITIES:

'The Wamphyri shrug off most diseases common to man; their leeches produce antibodies to order. There is one ailment, however, whose morbid encroachment may only be delayed by the symbiont's healing powers and the host's protoplasmic DNA. Leprosy, "the bane of vampires," disfigures and kills them no less than it kills wholly human beings, but the disease's progression is usually far slower in the Wamphyri. The symbiont is itself susceptible to the disease, and once the infection breaks through a vampire's resistance to infect the leech the process becomes irreversible and the True Death results.

'Silver is a poison to the Wamphyri. The mythical "silver cross" may well turn aside or stay a vampire's hand, but not by virtue of any mysterious religious power in the cross. The silver itself is the deterrent and may not be considered a "supernatural" element in this regard but simply a poison to the Wamphyri, much as mercury, lead, and plutonium are poisons to Man. But it does more nearly compare with plutonium in this respect, as it is quite deadly when used correctly. (NOTE: In E-Branch, while the supernatural is never scorned, neither is it accepted until scientific explanations have been ruled out.)

'Silver will sear the vampire's flesh. Wounded with a silver knife, the wound will take longer to heal and leave a permanent scar. Injected internally, as by a shotgun using silver shot, or a gun firing silver bullets, it will cripple and even kill. Vampire flesh damaged by silver in this way must be shed and new flesh manufactured by a protoplasmic process.

'Garlic is also a poison. And once again, no supernatural reason is attached; garlic is simply poisonous to the vampire, even as various fungi, poisoned ivy, and many fruits and vegetables are poisonous to Man. The smell of garlic, offensive to many humans, is emetic to the vampire; its oil will sting him, causing his flesh to slough; taken internally, if it does not kill him it will certainly damage organs and make it difficult for the symbiont to effect repairs. The Szgany of Sunside make extensive use of garlic, not only in their cooking but also as a poison with which to daub their crossbow bolts.

'Nevertheless — and despite the fact that silver is by no means rare and garlic is plentiful on Sunside — still the Wamphyri have been a scourge among the Szgany from time immemorial to the most recent of times…

'THE SZGANY: How They Relate to the Vampire.

'The Szgany (Travellers, Romers, or Romany) are so called because they are kept on the move by Wamphyri raiders who come nightly into Sunside to hunt. The Szgany are their prey, their livelihood, their sole means of survival and continuity. Without the Szgany there would be no Wamphyri, for the leech would never have had access to humanity and the means to rise above the intelligence level of, say, a dog or a wolf.

'The Szgany provide sport, and women for the Lords of the Wamphyri and men for their Ladies. Szgany blood is the staple diet of Starside's vampires; their flesh feeds vampire beasts; even their skins, bones, and hair are fashioned into furniture or decorations for the manses of their persecutors. The Szgany are to the Wamphyri of Starside as the coconut to the 20th Century South Sea Islanders: useful in every part, with little or nothing going to waste.

'But when the Szgany are no longer of use as lieutenants, concubines or thralls, then they are drained of their blood and butchered, and all unappetizing parts ground down for "the provisioning," as meal for the flying creatures and warrior beasts of their masters…

'WAMPHYRI ESP, AND OTHER "SUPERNATURAL" SKILLS:

'Most Lords and Ladies of the Wamphyri are to some extent telepathic. In addition to being physically stronger than entirely human beings (in an approximate ratio of four or more to one), their sensory skills have also been enhanced — including several "sixth" or higher senses as defined by E-Branch. It is therefore fortunate that their intelligence has not been enhanced; their symbionts can only make use of what native intelligence was there to begin with, and ruthlessness and deviousness must compensate for the simplicity of the peasant mind, a lack of learning which, ironically, has come about as a direct result of centuries of Wamphyri predation!

'On the other hand and in response to Wamphyri ESP — and apparently as a process of natural selection — the Szgany are adept at disguising their thoughts; mentally they are equipped to "hide" from the telepathic probes of their hunters. But the "supernatural" abilities of the Wamphyri almost always tip the balance their way, and our science is hard-pressed to find an answer to certain of the Great Vampire's skills. 'METAMORPHOSIS:

'The entire life-cycle of the Wamphyri could be said to be a series of metamorphoses; a constant ongoing mutation is apparent even in the individual specimen. But in certain circumstances the vampire's spontaneous metamorphosis is theoretically improbable, scientifically baffling, and physically awesome. It is, too, a reality. In battle, the "normal" or "usual" morphology of a Lord of the Wamphyri (the basic structure of his anthropoid form) becomes something else entirely when whatever aspect he has assumed is put aside in favour of his parasite's best protective armour and weaponry.

'His flesh stretches, tears, and refashions itself; hands become talons, while jaws elongate fantastically to accommodate teeth or tusks worthy of a sabretooth or wild boar. His usually pale aspect turns grey to leaden as his skin thickens to hide; the wild, feral yellow of his eyes turns from flame to red (as in infrared, perhaps?), especially at night, possibly enhancing his already incredible night-sightedness. And in the fullness of his change, the very sight of him is as a weapon in itself. The closest approximation in Man would be the rage of the berserker — without the berserker's disregard for his own safety. For over and above all else, survival is uppermost in the vampire's symbiont-controlled mind.

'Survival: the basic instinct that quite literally lends a vampire wings. For in certain extremes many of the Wamphyri can so change their shape as to flatten their bodies, lengthen their arms, sprout webbing like the membranes of a bat or flying squirrel, and form aerofoils to support their weight or at least allow for gliding. And the most adept of all are capable of controlled flight and aerial manoeuvres. In this respect it seems reasonable to suspect that there is something of the bat about them. There are giant bats

in Starside — they are often the watchdogs of the Wamphyri — and if an infected bat with a spore grown to a leech were to bite and pass on its characteristics to a man…?

'This theory might well account for the sensitive, convolute snout to be found in a great many Lords and Ladies of the Wamphyri; also their night vision and of course their tendency to flight. But what theory or accident of evolution could possibly account for their mist-making? Or is this "simply" another facet of the vampire's powers of metamorphosis?

'For when the Great Vampire is in danger — or conversely, when he sets out to creep up on prey or a foe — he can "create" or "call up" a mist to cover his movements. And vampire mist is not the often humid and softly lapping vapour we know but slimy and cold as a cold sweat. And the vampire Lord's enhanced senses — the normal five along with his telepathic probes — are carried in his mist like electricity in a wire but faster than the speed of light, at the speed of thought.

'As for the mist itself:

'It issues from the vampire's pores, as sweat issues from ours. But the process is brought about through his will. There is a theory, however fanciful, concerning the way in which the earth itself is caused to release its moisture.

'This theory holds that the vampire mist is some kind of catalyst, as when dry ice is released over a cloud to excite precipitation. But this scarcely explains the volume of such mists as are generated by the Wamphyri…

'For "HYPNOSIS, ONEIROMANCY, AND OTHER POWERS OF THE WAMPHYRI,' see also the Appended Notes to 176, E-BRANCH AND OTHER TALENTS…'

This brought Jake to the end of a paragraph a third of the way down a page that was two-thirds blank. Turning the page, he read:

'A more comprehensive file is in preparation.'

Then nothing more, except perhaps the feeling that he was floating at the centre of a weird sphere of inexplicable understanding…

CHAPTER ELEVEN The Lidesci's Story

Silently closing the file, Jake started as Liz's voice reached him through the vacuum of concentration — a zone exclusive to his mind and the words that the file had left mirrored upon it — which had somehow settled about him. 'Well?' she said.

And surprising himself, frowning he answered, 'Where have I read this before? I mean, do I know these things?' Too late, for the vacuum was dissolving, the familiarity fading. 'No, of course I don't.' And shaking his head, perhaps to clear it, he looked at her.

'No questions?' she said, staring hard at him.

'Should there be?'

Liz shrugged, but not casually. 'You tell me, Jake. All I can tell you is that for the last half hour you've been sitting there like a man in a dream, totally engrossed.'

Learning? ht wondered. Or remembering? But aloud he only said, 'Well, a couple of questions, maybe.'

'Like what?'

'Oh, one or two ambiguities. Anyway, I think I've already worked out some of the answers.'

'Go on/

'Well/ he said, 'this file cover, for one thing. It has a few dents in it… it's obviously not new. In fact, it's got to be years old. As for this label on the cover, it's been thumbed to death! But these

pages, I mean the paper itself, is new, and the text has at least one glaring ambiguity/

'Oh?'

He nodded. 'It talks about an underground exit in the Carpathian foothills — one underground exit, that is. But it also mentions Gustav Turchin, and how he flooded a Gate in Perchorsk in the Urals/ He frowned again and continued, Tunny, but when I was reading this stuff it seemed to make sense. I don't know, I seemed to understand. But now I only remember the text/

'Like… Eureka!' Liz said. 'That word on the tip of your tongue. That abrupt but transient flash of insight. It's there, and it's gone. Right?'

Jake knew she was fishing — albeit for something he wasn't able to give her, not yet — and said, 'Weren't we talking about Gates?'

'There are two/ she answered. 'The one under the Carpatii Meridionali is the original; it occurred naturally and has been there for — well, no one knows how long. It's like a black hole, or perhaps a grey hole, and its other end comes out in Starside in a vampire world. A long time ago, warrior Lords would throw their conquered enemies into it. It's how vampires got here in the first place/

Jake accepted that; it felt real, he knew it was so. 'And the other?'

'Is man-made/ Liz told him. And settling back, she said, 'This is how the story goes:

'Thirty years ago the Americans put one over on the Soviets. A \>ig one, that is. And good for them — for us, the whole world — too, because since World War Two the Russians had been bluffing the West right out of its pants. Kennedy was the first US President to call that bluff, over Cuba. Later, Ronald Reagan and Maggie Thatcher would have their say. They just said no. Thatcher was good at that/

'Said no to what?' Jake was no historian.

'To the Russian military build-up/ she answered. 'To trying to keep up with all of that expenditure on ships, aircraft, bombs, the space race. And so President Reagan or his advisors invented SDI, the Space Defense Initiative.'

'"Star Wars?'" He remembered that much, at least.

'Right,' Liz said. 'A fantasy scenario if ever there was one. And the Soviets fell for it. Now the boot was on the other foot and eventually their expenditure went over the top. It was probably the beginning of the end for Russian Communism. But in the early '80s, while they were still financially stable, their top boffins and physicists were tasked to dream up an answer to the USA's SDI — a programme that didn't exist except on paper, and very thin paper at that.

'Well, that's what Perchorsk was all about. They built a dam across a powerful watercourse in a ravine to give them the hydroelectric power they needed, also to give them some camouflage against the West's spy satellites — which was something else that didn't work — and carved out a subterranean complex from the bedrock. They put in an atomic pile to boost the project's energy requirements, and bingo, they were in business. But they very quickly went out of business.

'The idea was… I don't know, some kind of radar? A fan of energy raking the sky, covering all the north-western territories of the then Soviet Union. It was an experiment, but if it had worked they'd have built more complexes just like it as "defensive" measures against incoming missiles or bombers. Hitting that fan would be like running into a brick wall; nothing was going to be able to get through. In effect, a force-screen. Huh! Talk about an "Iron Curtain?" And what price SDI then, eh? Except of course, there was no SDI…

'… And no force-screen, either. During the first test it backfired, the pile imploded and a new kind of energy — or perhaps a different and extremely primal kind of energy, a different kind of heat — was discovered. And where the pile had been, right at the core of the Perchorsk Complex, there was this… well, this hole. This hole that went right through the wall of our universe.

In Starside the new singularity appeared in close proximity to the original, the "natural" one. So—'

'—So,' Jake took it up, 'when Turchin flooded the Perchorsk complex he drowned both Gates on Starside, making any sort of travel through them impossible.'

She smiled at him. 'For someone who hasn't read the files, you figured that out pretty quickly!' Which gave him pause, because he'd been thinking much the same thing; and again he knew that what she'd told him was so.

But Liz was already going on; 'Well, there you have it, the answer to at least one of your ambiguities. Now, what about the others?'

'Just one other/ Jake told her, 'but a difficult one. In a way it makes no sense, while in another — in the light of our involvement — it makes too much sense. The file talks about how the Gates were closed, "drowned" by Gustav Turchin, which "guaranteed" Earth's safety. Similarly, it talks about Harry and Nathan Keogh, father and son, men whom it credits with "destroying" the Wamphyri. But if the world is safe and the danger past, why is all of this information laid out in the present tense? Also, how can it possibly fit with what we saw and did last night?'

Liz nodded. 'This is the bit you already have the answers for, right? It's self-explanatory. Well, you're correct. Those inserts in the file are brand new, hastily prepared, and incomplete. Makeshift replacements for the old text that used to be in the past tense, which is now present tense because—'

'Because that's the nature of the problem,' Jake finished it for her. 'As we saw last night, it's here and now. Not left for dead in another world's past, but alive and well and horribly real in our world's present. Fine, or not so fine, whichever — but it still doesn't answer my questions, doesn't tell me where I fit in.'

Liz tossed her head. 'I, I, bloody I!' she said. 'Is that all you exist for, Jake? You?' But he could get just as irritated, and:

'No,' he rasped. 'I exist for something else. Something I haven't finished, that I still have to do and that all of this is pushing to one side.''

'Jake?' came a gruff query from out in the morning. 'Jake Cutter? Is that you in there, huffing and puffing again?' Lardis Lidesci, his shadow falling across the tent's doorway.

'Right on cue,' Liz snapped. 'And very welcome. If anyone can answer your questions, Lardis can. He'll certainly be able to add to your knowledge, anyway. And if nothing else comes of it at least I'll get a break from your moaning, and find something better to do with all of the valuable time I'm currently wasting on you.''

E-Branch staff and espers were busy all around the camp, stripping personal and Branch kit and equipment from the vehicles. A lot of the 'gadgetry' — the hardware in the Ops vehicle — was in reality common-or-garden stuff, computers and communications equipment on loan from the Australian Army along with the truck itself. Mobility would be the key word in any future war — the mobility of Ops Centres, that is, and war meaning any 'conventional' war between nations, not species — and all of the WACs, the Western Alliance Countries, used compatible equipment. But the software and such belonged to E-Branch. And just as Trask's people had been thorough in cleaning up last night's mess, now they were being thorough in removing every last trace of their work and presence here. For, as Trask had pointed out, covert organizations such as E-Branch couldn't remain secret if too many people knew about them. And in the sort of war that he envisaged, the Branch's secrecy would be of the utmost importance, indeed Cosmic.

'On Sunside,' Lardis said, 'oh, not all that long ago, the Szgany fought the Wamphyri with whatever weapons were to hand. Here your weapons are far super— er, superior! And not only your guns, grenades, and flamethrowers. No, for it seems to me that you're using trreir own tactics against them, too.' 'Eh?' Jake queried, walking beside him. 'Disguises, smokescreens, visual lies — like that vehicle there.

Beer? No such thing. A deadly weapons system! Or if not a weapon itself, a system capable of directing and controlling weapons. Ben has told me that in Earth's past the vampires had a saying, that: "Longevity is synon— er, synonymous, yes? — with anon— er, anonym— er…"'

'Anonymity/ said Jake, and knew it for a certainty, without knowing how he knew.

'Yes!' Lardis nodded his grizzled, bandaged head. 'And in E-Branch they have another saying: that secrecy is synonymous — hah! — with survival. Pretty much the same, wouldn't you say?'

'Pretty much,' said Jake. 'But vampires are one thing and I'm another. And frankly, I've had it with all the secrecy. If I'm so important to the Branch, why can't I be told about it?'

'At first it was because you might be less — or other — than you seemed,' Lardis told him. 'Now it's because you might be more. And also because you mightn't like what you are — if you are. Confusing? Well, not only for you, believe me! Anyway, regardless of what Liz says, it's not my job to tell you about you but about me and mine and the way things were, and the way they could be again by now, on Sunside/Starside.'

Around the camp, goodbyes were being said, hands shaken, the Australian contingent making ready to move out. Soon there would be just the Ops truck, with its array of worldwide communications devices, one jetcopter, and another on its way back from Carnarvon. The two choppers were transport for Branch personnel and SAS commanders; the Ops truck would stay until they were airborne, when it too would move out. In their next location, Trask's team of espers and support staff would be on their own until their Aussie back-up teams caught up with them. Thus these farewells were temporary; the same parties would soon be meeting up again, next time on the far side of the continent.

This was something that puzzled Jake. 'How come we don't move as a complete unit? Trask has all the contacts; why can't he order up one of those big military transport choppers? Better still, why doesn't he just call on ahead and arrange for a new righting force to be waiting for us?'

'He could probably do any or all of those things/ Lardis answered, 'but how would it look if we all arrived together at our next camp? Wouldn't you consider that indis — er, indisc — er, indiscreet, Jake? Remember, it's no easy thing for a man or men to hide their intentions from the Wamphyri. Any event unusual enough to arouse the interest of ordinary citizens is bound to arouse theirs, too.'

'Like a sudden influx of specialist troops?' said Jake. 'Indeed,' said Lardis, with a nod. 'And as for starting out fresh with a brand new platoon of soldiers… but doesn't that go against the very first rule? The fewer people who know about us—' 'The longer we survive/ said Jake.

'Hah!'said Lardis. 'Finally we make progress. And the problem with Mrs Miller becomes that much clearer, too.'

The first vehicles were pulling out now, and the Old Lidesci grunted his approval. 'This I like/ he said. 'It's what the Traveller is all about: constant movement between one place and the next. On Sunside, we Szgany became Travellers to stay ahead of the Wamphyri; we rarely stood still for very long in any one place. But here? Here we are the hunters. We move to track them down, and then we kill the bastards! Oh, yes, I like it a lot.'' He smacked his lips.

The pair had arrived at the place of last night's campfire. The back-burner, stoves and oven were gone, but a steaming pot of coffee and a few paper cups had been left beside the trench. And as these very different men from entirely different worlds sat down on the last of the folding chairs, Jake said, 'Lardis, why don't you tell me about Sunside/Starside? I mean, all about Sunside/Starside, or as much as I can take in. For since that's where all this seems to have started, maybe it's my best starting place, too/

And Lardis said, 'As you will. But I may as well tell you now, it still won't answer your one big question/

'I had a feeling it wouldn't/ Jake grunted. 'But tell me anyway/

And in a low growly voice, in words that strove valiantly to accommodate Jake's language — and when they failed reverted to Lardis's native Szgany, which the listener took in as best he could — the Old Lidesci complied…

'As its name suggests, though in more senses than one, Sunside/ Starside is a divided world. On Sunside, a slow and benevolent sun spins out days to more than four times the length of Earth days. But it sits low in the sky and casts long shadows — the shadows of the barrier mountains — on Starside. And the gloom and the long nights of Starside must have been the greatest of aids in the evol — er, the evolution, yes, of the Wamphyri.

'We don't know how it started; it happened in a time lost to memory except in myths and legends, campfire stories carried down — and altered, of course — by word of mouth. But before the Wamphyri there was something of a young civilization, in a world much like this world, with oceans and mountains, islands and continents, and even seasons. And its peoples were setting out to explore it, just as your first sailors explored yours.

'Then, an accident. Not of Man but of Nature. A white sun fell from the sky. Ben Trask will tell you it was some kind of "singularity"… but that is science, of which I know very little. Anyway, it bounced over the world like a flat stone skipping on water. In one place where it bounced, the impact caused its outer shell to break in pieces which fell to earth in such numbers they couldn't be counted. According to Nathan Keogh — called Kiklu upon a time — the land there became hot; chemicals in the soil gathered into pools; acids ate the white sun's metal skin into rust. Thus a "Great Red Waste" came into being, which today lies east of the barrier mountains.

'But the core of the white sun made a final leap. Shrinking, it sped west and slightly north; and such was its lure or fascination — its incredible "gravity?" — that even as it fell to earth it drew up from the earth those mountains that formed the barrier range.

'I've probably made light of this; it should be said that the entire planet was in shock, convulsion. Lightnings crashed, the earth shook and broke open, and oceans stood on end, hurling themselves upon the land. From a benign world, the planet was changed to a nightmare. Entire races were wiped out, vanishing forever in the tumult of earth and fire, wind and water. It can't be known for a fact, but Trask's science has created a model for such a disaster which calculates that ninety-five out of every hundred human beings on my homeworld were killed in that historic upheaval! The seasons were no more; even our world's orbit around its sun was changed, again by the "gravity" of the white sun, which had not destroyed itself but come to rest in a crater on Starside. The barrier mountains reared where none had reared before, and north of the mountains grim and pitiless lands of ice shone dark blue under writhing auroras. It was as if a hell had descended from the sky, and the Szgany — those of my race who remained — were its denizens.

'But they weren't its only denizens… 'At first, there were no Wamphyri. But there were always other peoples. The Szgany had avoided other races; they deemed them strange and called them un-men. Among these others, survivors of a northern clan of troglodytes now settled in caverns in the lee of Starside. Un-men from warmer southern climes, secretive desert folk known as the Thyre, became inhabitants of the burning regions south of Sunside's fertile green belt. It is even said that a race of cannibals — necromancers who tortured and ate the dead — existed and perhaps still exist in a remote far eastern country beyond the Great Red Waste, the mountains, and all other places known to the Szgany. Of these latter: I have never seen one, and do not wish to.

'But all of this resettling, and all of the planet's gradual recovery, took years and centuries and even millennia. Trask has said that it must have seemed like "an endless nuclear winter."

Well, to the people of the time, I suppose it was. But it did end eventually. And then there were no seasons, or only the very smallest climatic changes; and the green belt close to the barrier mountains was the only land in all of Sunside that could support the Szgany tribes, who slowly but surely began to multiply and forage in the forests.

'On Starside, where a great pass splits the mountainous divide, there in its crater resting-place at the fringe of the barren boulder plains the white sun sat like a blind eye deep in its socket, shining its white light up into the night like a beacon, or perhaps a warning? It was like… like a door, or a gateway to the unknown! For if a man should climb down to touch that blinding light… ah, be sure he would not come up again! And because it had brought hell to the Szgany, it became known as the Hell-Lands Gate, aye.

'From then on, hunters and wanderers in the heights of the barrier mountains would look down on Starside and see the light of the Hell-Lands Gate, and they would curse it by their stars, and turn their faces away. And the faces of all the Szgany were turned away from Starside and its Gate.

'But then, who would be interested in exploring Starside? What was Starside but barren and endless boulder plains reaching north, and towering stone pinnacles — stacks, or "buttes," as Trask calls them — reaching thousands of feet into the sky, and to the north the frozen oceans, and beyond the oceans the Icelands with their eerie auroras? No fit habitation for men, my friend, where the sun shone only on the topmost spires, and the cold was a knife in your bones. I have been to the foot of one of those great fangs… that far but no further. And now, thanks to Harry and his sons, there are no aeries as such…

'But it appears I've gone ahead of myself. Best if I slow down. I was speaking of the past, and this is how it was:

'Came the vampires. Ask me how, I can only shake my head. Today, no man knows. None living, anyway. We know their spores were born in the swamps west of the farthest reach of the barrier mountains, and Nathan Keogh has spoken of similar swamps in the east. Very well then, that's where they came from, but how did they get there? Ben Trask has a theory — his people, these E-Branch people, have theories for most things — which has it that they were released into my world's skies out of the debris of the white sun: an alien life form from the stars. Perhaps it is so, but I am not a scientist.

'Anyway, and however it was, they came. Legend has it that Shaitan was the first. Because he couldn't bear the sun, he co-habited with trogs in the gloom of Starside caverns. But he was more like unto a man, and he wondered about the Szgany, of whom the trogs had told him. Finally, when he grew weary of the company and the blood of trogs, he came in the night into Sunside. And the curse of the vampire — Shaitan's mark, his vices — was left on all the tribes of the Szgany for all time to come.

'There's that of Shaitan in all of us, and I think in all of your people, too, especially the espers — but mercifully it amounts to very little. Watered down by time and blood, we see it only in these rare talents that Ben Trask collects and uses against the forces of evil. In him it's his ability to see the truth and therefore to recognize falseness; in Goodly it's his visions of the future, and in me it's my seer's blood, warning me of dangers whose scent is blown on the air, felt in. running waters, and glimpsed in the leaping flame of fires or patterns in the dust. When all is not well, I feel it. And in you—

'In you it is something else… 'But once again I've strayed.

'In Sunside Shaitan recruited thralls. But the sun was too strong for him and his; they retreated into Starside. And there he built the first aerie of the Wamphyri, in those great stacks out on the boulder plains.

'And the Great Vampire begat other vampires out of Sunside women and even out of trogs, and he raided on Sunside for blood and plunder. And while the Wamphyri prospered, the Szgany suffered every conceivable torment.

'Fortunately the Szgany had been nomadic, Travelling folk for long and long before the advent of the Wamphyri. Since land was their only possession, they had to beat the bounds to protect it and lay claim to ownership. And so they were rarely at rest. Just as well, for their mobility was their survival. They could run and they could breed and they could hide, but that was all. And at night the vampire would ride his flyers out of Starside to hunt and to "play" in Sunside's darkened forests. And everything that the Szgany are today is built out of the incredible, the despicable depredations of the Wamphyri.

'The Szgany learned to hide, not only their trembling bodies but their very thoughts. Why, eventually they even learned how to fight back! But that was a long time in the coming. And as evolution taught the Szgany its lessons of survival, so the vampire — by nature lazy — found it increasingly difficult to take his prey. And then, from time to time, vampire would turn upon vampire, and all Starside become a battle zone.

'The wars of the WTamphyri, their bloodwars, were endless, and except when truces were called they were times of rejoicing for the Szgany clans. But gutted aeries would always need replenishing, and depleted larders filling, and fallen flyers and broken warrior creatures refashioning in their morbid masters' vats of metamorphosis. And however long it took, the Wamphyri would return to Sunside, its pleasures and plunders.

'The Szgany Lidesci were the fiercest fighters of all. I make no boast, though naturally I'm proud, but merely state a fact when I say that my fathers' fathers — the forefathers of the Szgany Lidesci — were the first of the Travellers to lay traps for the Wamphyri, their lieutenants, thralls and creatures. We were staking, beheading, and burning those bastards a hundred years ago! Aye, even before The Dweller and Harry Hell-Lander took up our fight and showed those monsters what a real war looked like, the Lidescis had the respect of the Wamphyri… along with their hatred, of course.

'I was Chief of the Szgany Lidesci when The Dweller came, and later Zekintha, and later still Jazz Simmons. And finally Harry Hell-Lander, called Dwellersire. But Harry and his sons, The Dweller and Nathan Keogh, they all moved as you move, Jake… between the spaces used by common men, along a route invisible. Nathan Keogh still does, but in Sunside, in my world, on the far side of space-time; or one of its far sides, at least. Which is Ben Trask speaking, you understand. Me? Hah! I don't even know where space-time is!

'Anyway, I was Chief when Harry and his boy fought their battle in The Dweller's garden — their grand battle with the Wamphyri — and won! I couldn't be there with them, more's the pity, couldn't stand alongside Zek, and Jazz Simmons, and the Lady Karen, too; no, for I had problems of my own and arrived too late. But with these very eyes I saw what they had done: how they'd used the science of another world, the Hell-Lands, and weird talents from… well, from beyond any lands of the living, to defeat the forces of Lord Shaithis of the Wamphyri and kick his backside into the Icelands.

'We thought that was the end of it. All of the aeries bar one, Karen's, had been burned out, toppled, and brought crashing down onto the boulder plains. Why, the thunder of it — the shaking of the earth — had been felt in Sunside itself! Well, perhaps not as far away as that, but you get the idea. It had been awesome. And as I have said, we thought that was the end of it, that finally the Wamphyri were no more.

'Most of my people thought so, anyway…

'But I have a seer's blood in me — perhaps even vampire blood… oh, it's possible! — and I didn't believe that the Wamphyri were no more. It simply didn't smell right, it didn't feel right, and for a time equal to four of your Earth years I couldn't settle but watched and waited and held my breath. And from time to time I would climb up into the barrier mountains, through the high crags and passes, and down into The Dweller's garden, all fallen into ruin, where I would sit alone to think it over… and to worry.

'And not without good reason. One time when I went there, Harry came back. But he was changed. No, don't ask my meaning;

he simply wasn't the man I'd known. But I believe he was soil my friend. And the Necroscope had chosen a most opportune time to return to my world, for my seer's blood had told me no lie: the Wamphyri were back in Sunside/Starside! Not only the last of them, but also the first.

'Shaitan the Unborn himself, aye, come back like a plague that can never die…'

CHAPTER TWELVE The Rest Of Lardis's Story

'Shaitan the Fallen — Shaitan the Unborn, Shaitan himself— and his banished descendant, Lord Shaithis: the two of them back in Starside after four years of peace and quiet and nights without nightmares, back from the Icelands. They had flyers and warrior beasts, the makings of a small but deadly army. And Harry Hell-Lander… no longer himself. And his son The Dweller much less than himself, for he was a changeling creature. As for the Lady Karen: who could say what Karen would do or where her loyalties now lay, who for four long years had been alone and brooding in Karenstack, the last great aerie of the Wamphyri?

'Well, the rest of it is strange and frightening. I know, I know: all of it is strange and frightening! But to me far worse, for it came of Earth's science, of which I knew nothing at that time. And when I saw it I knew we had named the Hell-Lands Gate aright, for most certainly this was made in hell. What? It was the very breath of hell.' This is how it was:

'Shaitan, Shaithis and their forces, they had made camp at the Starside Gate. The Necroscope had been taken prisoner, the Lady Karen, too, for in fact she'd sided with Harry. Which was only natural, I suppose. After all, Karen had always been Shaithis's most deadly enemy. As for the details: I can't be definite about any of this, because my observation point was so far away, high in the mountains. I assume they were suffering torture. Certainly bonfires were blazing down there among the many clumps of boulders surrounding the Gate.

'Then, I felt something happening. And I sensed it was of the Necroscope's doing. My seer's blood warned me not to look, and I warned the others there with me. Mostly, they heeded my cry of warning. But one of them, Peder Szekarly, was young and sometimes stupid — brave but stupid. He continued to look, and was witness to it. He saw it… then saw no more, ever again. The light was such that it burned him, burned his eyes out and blinded him. Nor did he live for very long.

'But that lightll swear it shone through the very boulders where we crouched! For comparison, the Gate's glare was but a candle. And the light was merely the beginning, for then came the crack! Rut that doesn't convey it, for it was a sound like the earth splitting! And finally the blast.

'Well, I've seen what a grenade can do, but this…

'Not even a million grenades — and all of them detonating at the same time — could equal it. But before that:

'I had looked up from behind the rocks where I crouched. I didn't know that Peder had failed to heed my warning. There he stood exposed, looking down on Starside. But then, in the smallest fraction of a second, that awful light jumped from Starside into the mountains and shone on Peder. Smoke leaped from him as from a leaf fallen in the fire. He screamed his agony, clutched at his face, tottered back away from the gap in the rocks. But even as he stumbled it was as if a giant's hand slapped at him, hurled him down. And I remember thinking:

'"Perhaps this was how it was when the white sun fell!"

'Hot grit stinging, and stones spattering; the earth trembling, and lightning lashing the sky. And myself— aye, and the rest of my men with me — gasping in our terror of the unknown, while Peder moaned and sobbed where he had fallen.

'Then, in a while — as the frenzy of the winds gradually lessened, and the pebbles stopped falling, and the ground stopped shaking — that rumble of sound, that hissing of warm rain, that darkness closing in as the stars were shut out. And, when I dared look, that mushroom cloud going up and up, towering as high and higher than the mountains themselves. And the electrical storm in its dome, and the fires that billowed all up and down its pulsing stem…

'Ben has told me what it was: a "tactical weapon," he says — which I'm told means a small one of its kind — had been fired through the Gate from the underground complex at Perchorsk. And would you believe it, he pretends not to understand why I still think of your world as the Hell-Lands!?

'So, we didn't know it was a weapon, and since its deadly cloud swept north we didn't suffer its effects on Sunside. But when it was all over and done the Gate shone as bright as ever, and Starside looked no different, except now beyond the Gate a softly glowing plume lay fallen on the earth, forever pointing in the direction of the Icelands. And no matter the rainstorms or howling winds, the plume was always there.

'Then for a while we blessed the Gate, because it had issued that awful breath of hell that destroyed the first and last of the Wamphyri. So we thought for long and long. And this time I admit that I believed it, too. For with ah1 we had learned of the tenacity of the vampire, we had not yet learned the lessons of history…

'Let me go back a little way. At an earlier time, following the battle in The Dweller's garden, Harry Keogh, called Hell-Lander, had fallen sick. At the time we'd thought it must be similar to the sickness that was in his son, The Dweller, for both men had used the power of the sun itself as a weapon against the Wamphyri, wherefore both might have suffered similar scorchings. The Dweller — who had seemed the most badly burned — was soon well on his way to recovery; so we thought. Yet his father, far less badly affected, if at all… he had fallen ill.

'Er, but all of this is incidental to my story, you understand.

'Anyway, the Necroscope had a Szgany woman, Nana Kiklu,

to tend him where he lay tossing in his fever upon a bed in one of the garden's houses… The Dweller had built small stone homes for his trog servitors, and Harry lay ill in one of these. Now, Nana's man, Hzak, had died in the fight for the garden, and she was without child. And here was Harry Keogh, also called Dwellersire, a handsome man of rare skills and soaring intelligence, mumbling in his fever dreams of olden loves and lusts.

'I need say no more — indeed, I know no more — except that nine months later Nana gave birth to twin boys, one of whom was Nathan. Which explains why we oft-times refer to "Harry and his sons". As to the other son, Nestor… but he grew up wild, and doesn't concern us here.

'Many years passed and Nathan grew into a youth. But while he possessed the germ of his alien father's skills, no one knew of it because we believed he was Hzak Kiklu's son, conceived at the time of the battle in The Dweller's garden. Well, perhaps I had guessed otherwise. But Nana was a good, hard-working woman, and I was fond of her boys, both of them at that time. And anyway, the Szgany Lidesci had always had more than its fair share of gossipy, chattering hags. It wasn't for me to offer them yet another tidbit to cackle over. And remember, even I didn't know that he was, or would soon become, more like his father.

'So then, and now you know something of Nathan. But a deal more to come later…

'I have mentioned my annual trek into Starside, when — as if to reassure myself that the vampires were no more, and their aeries toppled, all save one — I would venture to the foot of lone Karenstack and gaze up at that great grim relic of ancient horror, and shout into its nether caverns until the echoes sounded to bring down the dust. Came a time, when I was returning home from just such a journey, I felt that I was witness to… something. But I couldn't be sure.

'It had become my habit to pause in the mouth of the pass at a certain hour, the hour of sun-up, climb to a higher elevation and gaze back on the emptiness of Starside and the boulder plains. On Sunside it would be morning now; but here, Starside of the pass, the barrier mountains cast their shadows for many an uncounted mile out across the barren waste. And here it was that a certain sight had never failed to gladden me: the first rays of the morning sun lighting on the topmost spires of the last great aerie of the Wamphyri.

'How it buoyed me up to see that purifying light burning there, to watch a golden stain spreading over the highest ramparts of that vast tower of evil, and to know that nothing was hiding within, behind bone balconies and black-draped windows. Yes, it made these pointless-seeming trips of mine worthwhile; it satisfied my seer's blood, which even now, all these years later, was wont to bring me awake, clammy and troubled in the dead of night.

'But this time, even after I had climbed back down to the pass, something seemed burned on the surface of my eye… and in my mind. "But of course" — I told myself— "the sun, even reflected from the uppermost fangs of an aerie, is a brilliant, dazzling thing that can blur your vision and cast false images, if only momentarily." Ah, but on this occasion that moment went on and on, and I could not forget it.

'Karenstack: in my mind's eye it continued to burn. Karenstack, and something else I had thought to see. And every time I closed my eyes the picture came up clearer: the aerie's crest aglow with its false halo of fire. But below the area of reflected light, where the golden rays could never reach:

'Black motes swirling, jetting, settling towards the yawning gape of a vast landing bay. They appeared as midges at that distance, but what would they be up close?

'It was my imagination, of course. What, close on a thousand sun-ups come and gone since the Gate spat hell at the last of the Wamphyri, and still I didn't accept it but kept on conjuring nightmares out of thin air, sunlight, and swirls of dust? HahlThey would say I was mad!

'And after that, the way I set off for home — almost at a run — I'm sure my companions did think I was mad. But even if I

was, my seer's blood was not. And the attack on Sunside, and on Settlement, the town we had built at the edge of the forest under the mountains, came at the next sundown.

'The Wamphyri were back, this time from the east, a place beyond the Great Red Waste. They were led by a Lady, Wratha the Risen, and though Wratha's band was small its members were evil and ruthless as any gone before. Canker Canison was a dog-Lord; I hesitate even to hazard a guess at his lineage! And Gorvi the Guile, who was so devious as to be legendary even among his own kind. And Vasagi the Suck, whose face was like that of a stinging insect. Aye, and blood-crazed twins named Wran and Spiro — also called the Killglance brothers — whose very cognomen says it all. But they were only the harbingers of a worse, a greater force still to come.

'It was the Lord Vormulac Unsleep, who pursued Wratha from the east to punish her for fleeing his jurisdiction. And Vormulac's army was a horde!

'But let me cut a long story short. This was the time when Nathan came into his own, though not without great trials. When he was taken by the Wamphyri and thrown into the Starside Gate, who could imagine he would be back? Here in your world, in Perchorsk, he was captured by evil men, escaped, fled to Ben Trask and E-Branch, who helped develop his powers… even as they'll try to develop yours, Jake.

'Finally Nathan returned to Sunside, with Zek — sweet Zekintha, ah! — and Trask, lan Goodly, David Chung, and other good men, and marvellous weapons from the Hell-Lands — or "Earth," as I must learn to think of this place. And at last we could carry their bloodwar back to the Wamphyri on Starside!

'And we did. But Nathan: it seems he had his father's powers and then some. Or perhaps it was the talents of all of that brave band, for certainly they were all in on it at the end. It was five years ago, Jake, but I remember it like yesterday. Who could forget such a thing?

'Nathan and the others had walked into a trap at the Starside Gate. He'd been trying to send his companions safely home again, back through the Gate to Perchorsk and out of the thick of the fighting. But vampire lieutenants stood in the way, and no room for manoeuvring. Nathan and his colleagues must stand and fight. They had Earth weapons, aye, but were low on ammunition; eventually they must be taken. And if Nathan were taken, what then of Sunside? But here I'm being selfish and perhaps I should ask: what then for Earth? For the Wamphyri — now under the leadership of Devetaki Skullguise, a mentalist Lady of awesome skill and enormous greed — had learned the Gate's secret. They knew that beyond it lay an entire world ripe for the taking.

'Now, don't ask me how it was done, for I'm a simple man. But Nathan and the others, linking hands, they pitted themselves against the Starside Gate itself. The Gate is immovable — even that incredible "tactical weapon" that destroyed Shaithis and Shaitan had not moved it nor even marred its surface — and sitting there on the boulder plains it seemed anchored in position, perhaps by its own enormous gravity? Wherefore, in order to move the Gate, a man or men must move the world.'

'And they did. With all their weird talents together, acting in unison they willed the Gate to move south. South towards the rising sun, which had never once shone on Starside since an age long forgotten. And the Gate — and the world — moved! The world turned, all Sunside/Starside, turning like a great wheel, and the sun rising ever faster over the barrier mountains. And the Wamphyri, their lieutenants, creatures and all were seared in a moment…

'And now, surely it must be over? Why, with the turning of the world even the last aerie had fallen like a felled giant, toppling onto the boulder plains! All that remained of that great and monstrous tower was its stump, like a flat-topped mound — or perhaps one of Ben Trask's "buttes?" — glooming on the horizon, while its vile body sprawled like a corpse, crumbling in the new-found light of Starside.

'In the far east and west, as far as men were yet to journey, the vampire swamps were drying out, cracking open in their beds, cleansed by the sun. And in all the length and breadth of Sunside/Starside, no vampires existed — at least as far as men knew. But that didn't mean that men wouldn't keep watching, not while I lived, anyway!

'Nor was the transformation confined to the swamps. Water, presumably released from the Icelands, had brought great rains to the scrubland savannas, and showers even to the furnace deserts south of Sunside's fertile belt, until the land was green as far as the closest Thyre colonies. All of which processes of an altered Nature, and others, would continue a while yet—

'—But not for long enough.

'As for the Starside Gate: that was scarcely the ominous place it had been. For now it was the centre of a lake, a constantly moving body of water diverted from its source in your world, in this world, Jake, and driven by its own weight into Starside. And the wormholes around the Gate — or "energy channels," as Ben Trask calls them, which wound through solid rock to the first or "primal" Gate, the white sun deep in the belly of the crater — they had become whirlpool sinkholes, diverting the waters of the lake a second time and returning them to the Refuge at Radujevac in this world, Earth, and on into the Danube. Thus nothing was lost, and nothing gained.

'But what a wonder! That fountain of light, reaching up a hundred feet into the Starside night, lit up by the Gate glowing in its core, and raining its soft white waters on the land and into the lake! Moreover, it had closed off both routes out of and into Sunside/Starside, which preserved the integrity of both worlds…

'And so things stood, for one and a half of your years — Earth years, that is — and seventy of my days, for the sun rose much higher now and the days were longer yet. Well, at least in the new beginning. But it wasn't destined to stay that way.

'Man can't master Nature, Jake. Or if he does his reign is short. What Nathan and the men of E-Branch had done was against Nature… what? To move a world? And slow but sure the lure of the white sun, its strange gravity, began to turn us northwards again. The days grew shorter, the sun sank ever lower, and Starside's shadows lengthened as before. The rains retreated, seasons we had known but briefly merged into one, the savannas wilted away to their usual russets and yellows. Nightly the rim of the barrier mountains showed more stars, flowing back into position from the north, and once again the grim Northstar, which had always shone on Karenstack, rode high in the Starside sky.

'But were the Szgany dismayed? Or the trogs in their caverns, or the desert-dwelling Thyre? Not a bit of it! The trogs had detested the surplus of light; it destroyed their mushroom farms and irritated their skins and moon-white eyes. The Thyre in their subterranean colonies had been hard put to build barriers against unseasonal flood waters that coursed along their river routes. And the Szgany? We had enjoyed our permanence of climate; what need had we of seasons, when the trees were ever in fruit? But with the world turned… even the foliage — the flora? — had suffered. Too much sun in the one season, a surfeit of rain in the next, and colder air in the third.

'And now back to normal, except there was no more scourge, no more vampires, no more Wamphyri.' They'd been erased forever out of our world and the Szgany could sleep easy in their beds and not fear for their lives and the blood of their loved ones. Why, we might even begin to explore those lands and territories previously forbidden to us — Starside itself, perhaps! And the great lakes or oceans that lay north of the boulder plains. And those unknown lands to east and west of the no-longer "barrier" mountains, beyond the dried-out swamps and the Great Red Waste; for it would take time for the swamps to revert. And the Thyre were no longer un-men but neighbours — we valued their friendship and had determined to share with them all the "technology" that Nathan had brought us from the Hell-Lands. Ah, how perfect it all seemed!

'Grand schemes and grander dreams, aye. 'Ah, Jake, but my seer's blood told me it wouldn't be so. And I fretted while I waited…

'There are myths and there are legends. A myth is a story come down the ages, so changed by its re-telling over and over that that we may no longer say if it is true or simply a story. One such myth was Shaitan the Unborn — until he became reality. A legend, on the other hand, is something much closer in time. A legend is not so old that it has lost its authenticity.

'Here in your world, Jake, you have a saying: "he's a living legend." Do you see what I mean? A thing — usually a man or woman — that attains legendary status even in its, his or her own lifetime. But legends are generally older than that, if not as old as myths. In Sunside, our days being so long, the Szgany use them as a measure much as you use years. And we have a legend that dates back twenty-five thousand sun-ups. Not as long as your history, no, but still five hundred years. Oh, yes, I have learned your numbering system. I pride myself that I've learned many things, even though I've no use for them on Sunside.

'But five hundred years ago in my world, there were three Great Vampires unlike any others before or since. And they were legends. Two of them were Lords (for now, the time being, let's say that they were Lords, past tense) and the other a so-called "Lady". But Vavara, believing her name potent enough in its own right, a warning enough in itself, scorned all titles and cognomens. The name itself would suffice, and she was simply Vavara. And perhaps she was right. For see, even as I speak that name — " Vavaaara" — so I shudder. Ugh!

'Not that she was ugly. On the contrary, she was incredibly beautiful — irresistibly so. And that was Vavara's menace: she was a beguiler, a spellbinder. It was a kind of hypnotism, Jake, but by no means the same as Grahame McGilchrist's. Grahame uses a drug to enhance the authority of his eyes and voice; his is a skill as opposed to a true Power. There again, who can say? Perhaps Vavara's hypnotism was just such a skill, but one enhanced out of all proportion by her vampire leech, as all human senses are enhanced by vampirism.

'Trask's science has it that not only humans but all creatures possess lures other than the purely physical attractions efface and form. But in humans the voice and the eyes are especially important in defining a person's — what, charisma? Hah! But that is also a Szgany word, for personality. Ben talks about pheromones, and chemistry and such. But all I know of chemistry is how to mix a decent gunpowder. And it's a damn hard thing to beguile a rocket, or silver shot from double barrels!

'Anyway, and whatever this attraction is, Vavara had it. And again, perhaps Ben's right. For the spell she cast over men was stronger than her power over women, and usually fatal. Any man who took her fancy — whether a simple Sunsider or even, on occasion, a Lord of the Wamphyri — he was a goner. To resist Vavara was a wasted effort.

'So much for the witch. Now for the wizards: 'The other two were Lords, as I have said. Lord Szwart was one, for he had taken his Szgany name, by which the Szgany knew him: Szwart, pronounced like the German "schwartz," which means black. And black he was, blacker than night, black as the black heart of the leech that empowered him… but with what strange powers? I've said he was blacker than night: a totally inadequate description. Lord Szwart was the night!

'Now, all of the Wamphyri are children of the night. Certainly they are, for they cannot bear the sunlight. And because night is their element — because they are awake at night, and see and revel and hunt at night — it is like a cloak they wear, disguising them even from the most keen-sighted of men. On Sunside when vampires were abroad in the forest, the Szgany would lie still in their hiding places and watch them pass. And sometimes when they passed a clinging mist would spring out of the earth, by which you would know they were there; or perhaps the stars would blink as a shape flowed across them, but you would not see whose shape it was, just a darkness in the lesser dark. And sometimes — oh, sometimes — the mist and the shape would come close, closer, and sniff… and laugh!

'But you must excuse me, Jake, the things of which I speak are not pleasant things. I may not speak of them without remembering…

'Anyway, Lord Szwart's command over the night was so much greater than any other's that when the sun was down he was simply invisible. He made no mists, blotted no stars, and cast no shadows. Yet he was seen, but only once, by a man of the Szgany — seen in a storm, in a flash of lightning — and then no more. But the man who saw him was a madman until his dying day, which wasn't long in coming. For he went into the woods to dig a hole to hide in, but never stopped digging! And when finally the pit fell in on him, he didn't cry out in his horror at being buried alive but only his lunatic joy… for at last he was safe, and Lord Szwart could never get him now.

'I do not know what Lord Szwart was. Only that he was Wamphyri.

'Which leaves one other, and perhaps the most dangerous of all. Lord Nephran Malinari — called Malinari the Mind, or simply The Mind — was a mentalist, a thought-thief, a mind-reader without peer. None of the stripling telepaths in Ben Trask's E-Branch today would have stood a chance against Lord Malinari in any battle of minds, nor all of them together. Let me tell you how it was with him:

'Among the Szgany, even more so than in your people, there were weird talents. My own sixth sense — my seer's blood — is but one example. But we had mentalists, too, and oneiromancers, and even men like lan Goodly, aye, despite that their precognition was a dubious art at best. For it's as I've said, there's a trace of the Wamphyri in all men of Sunside; their taint lingers on, and I fancy it has carried over even into this world. But Malinari… was special. His evil was special! Why, among the Wamphyri themselves, Lord Nephran Malinari had no friends. But don't let me mislead you, Jake: it's not that the Wamphyri were given to forming lasting relationships. They weren't, but some of them did form alliances; well, occasionally. But never with Malinari the Mind. How may a man trust, or remain on good terms, with a creature who knows his every thought, who is one step ahead of his every move? The Wamphyri are devious, secretive… but how to keep secrets from such as Malinari?

'Let him but touch a man, a mere touch of the fingertips, and it was as though the other's thoughts flowed like water — or like blood? — out of their owner and into the mind of Malinari. Ah, a vampire with a difference: he slaked two kinds of thirst, the one for blood and the other for knowledge! No idle curiosity, Jake, but the lust for knowledge itself. And once a thing was learned, Nephran Malinari never forgot it.

'But of course in Sunside/Starside, just as in this world, there were those who could not be read. Be it strength of will, or simply their nature, there was a wall in their minds no ordinary mentalist could ever breach. Ah, but Lord Malinari was no ordinary mentalist. I have said his touch opened the way. So it did, like opening a dam in a pent river. But if the soft brush of fingertips would not suffice… there was another way.

'Fingertips… and the incredible strength of the Wamphyri… Trask says it's their metamorphism that allows them to punch stiffened fingers into a man's chest to nip his heart. I think so, too, for it certainly wasn't brute force with Malinari. His fingers were fluid, like liquid, allowing the exploration of a man's inner ear, or the sockets behind his eyes, or the brain itself. And whenever The Mind stole a man's thoughts out of his very brain… then he left nothing behind. No, not even the will to live…

'We're almost done. What remains is not for me to tell but for Ben Trask — in his own time, that is.

'Just one more thing. I spoke of Vavara, Lord Szwart, and

Malinari the Mind in the past tense. For that's how I heard of them, around camp fires when I was a boy, as part of Sunside's legends. The final part of the legend had it that four hundred years ago the rest of Starside's Lords and Ladies got together to be rid of them, and it took all of their strength and their fighting forces together to do it, to banish them into the Icelands.

'But five years ago — when Nathan and Trask's espers turned Sunside/Starside towards the sun — it appears that some of the ice melted. And if Vavara, Szwart, and Nephran Malinari were locked in the ice, waiting out the long cold years…?

'That's Trask's explanation, anyway.

'And now we're done, for that's all I know of it, or all I'm willing to say for now… except for one final thing that I'm sure you've worked out for yourself: the fact that they're back, Jake. All three of those monsters, they're back.

'And that's the nature of Trask's mission. It's what he and his espers are pledged to do. For once again there are vampires on the loose—

'—And no longer confined to Sunside/Starside!'

CHAPTER THIRTEEN Trask's Story

When Jake looked up he was alone. Perhaps he'd been asleep by the end of Lardis's story, but he didn't think so. It had gone in, all of it, and perhaps a lot more than Lardis had actually said. Weird, but that's how it had felt during the telling: as if Jake had been there on Sunside/Starside; as if he had known all or most of these things — the sights and sounds and smells of Lardis's world — and had only needed the old gypsy's corroboration.

But that was during the telling, and now it was all receding; the scenes that Lardis had painted so inadequately, which Jake's own mind had coloured, and into which he'd inserted the finishing touches, were just words instead of feelings, sensations… emotions? And all that was left was a legend in its own right. Half of a legend, anyway.

'You didn't tell me everything…' Jake accused, before he fully realized that he was alone. Then, looking all around and feeling foolish, he stood up, tossed aside the dregs of coffee gone cold in his cup, stretched the stiffness out of his limbs. It would be good to get some real sleep sometime.

Suddenly the silence, the emptiness, the loneliness of the place had become oppressive, weighing on him… until he spied movement in the clump of pale, stumpy trees between himself and the big Ops truck. It was Ben Trask, dappled grey and green and gold in the partial shade of the trees, heading his way.

'Jake?' Trask called ahead. He wasn't shouting, but in the clear morning air — the silence of the near-deserted campsite — sound carried a long way. And drawing closer, Trask asked, 'Did I hear you talking to someone?'

'Talking to myself,' Jake answered, rubbing at the stubble on his chin. 'Or maybe to one of your ghosts — Lardis? That old man has this strange effect on me. He doesn't just tell a story but takes me with him! Says his piece and leaves me there, then vanishes.'

'Sunside/Starside?'

Jake nodded. 'But he left a lot out.'

'He was told to,' Trask said. 'But that's okay… you can have the rest of it from me. Most of it, anyway. And if there's stuff I leave out, you'll just have to believe me that there's a good reason. Let's go to the Ops truck. It's going to get hot out here in the next hour or so, by which time the chopper will be back and we can get on our way. Meanwhile, the Ops truck has air-conditioning.'

As they walked back towards the articulated vehicle, Jake said, 'The stuff Lardis left out, I mean apart from the technical stuff, or "science," as he calls it, was mainly to do with people. Harry Keogh, of course, the mysterious Necroscope? But also his sons: The Dweller, Nestor, and Nathan. Huh! I learned more about Vavara, Malinari, and Szwart than about these human figures.'

Trask looked at him but said nothing, and so Jake went on: 'That term, Necroscope. It comes up time and time again. Now I know what a telescope is. "Tele" is from the Greek, right? Far, as in far away? Likewise "micro" in microscope, which obviously means very small. But Necroscope? An instrument for seeing corpses?'

'Something like that,' Trask told him.

'And that makes sense to you?'

'And to you, eventually,' Trask answered. 'I hope.'

Jake shook his head. 'So it's your belief that this Harry Keogh, this Necroscope who sees dead folks, is in my head? Now, I know I've tried asking this before, but what the hell is this guy? Some kind of telepath?'

Trask nodded. 'He was that, too, towards the end.'

'Was?' Jake frowned. 'Towards the end?' Then he snapped his fingers. 'Oh, yes, and that's the other thing. Lardis mentioned a bomb — a nuke? — that came through the Gate into Starside. And I somehow got the impression that Harry and this, er — this "changeling" son of his, The Dweller? — that they were there at the time.'

They were approaching the steps at the rear of the big Ops vehicle. Trask paused in his striding to take Jake's arm. 'They were there/ he said, his voice hoarse now. 'And before you ask me: no, Harry didn't escape.'

'What?' Jake said.

Trask climbed the steps and made to enter, then turned and looked back. 'Harry Keogh, Necroscope — the original Necroscope — is dead and gone, Jake,' he said. 'In one way an incredible waste, and in another a merciful release, and probably a blessing, too.'

'Dead?' Jake said, and was suddenly cold fn the full glare of the sun. 'Then how can—?'

'—Harry's gone/ Trask cut him short. 'He's just another one of E-Branch's ghosts. But dead and gone or alive and living in you, he has never been more important to us than he is right now.. p>

Inside the vehicle's Ops section, the Duty Officer and the pre-cog lan Goodly were seated within the central control area. Liz was standing outside the desk, her elbows on its no-longer-cluttered surface, her chin cupped in her hands. Apart from minimum services — the permanent telephone array, one small radio crackling with static, and a dimly-luminescent wall screen — Ops had been more or less unplugged and decommissioned, however temporarily.

The muted conversation tailed off awkwardly as Trask and Jake entered, but the Head of E-Branch held up a hand and said, 'It's okay, I want all of you to stay. I have to speak to Jake, and I can't see any reason to leave anyone out. lan, if I slip up and forget some important detail, you'll be here to correct me. And

Liz, there may be the odd tidbit of information that's new to

you, too.'

He hitched himself up onto the desk, and Jake let down one of the wall seats and sat opposite. Then, without further pause, Trask told his part of the story.

'Jake, Lardis Lidesci has told you something about his world, a parallel world called Sunside/Starside by its inhabitants. He's told you about Vavara, Szwart — and Malinari, too. So by now you know that these aren't just legendary or mythical figures but a very real threat to everyone in our world. They're here, biding their time, hiding out somewhere on Earth. Now, please take that for granted and believe that it's so, for last night was a mere lesson — a primer, a single leaf— out of the Great Textbook of the enormous threat posed by the Wamphyri.

'So let's deal with it step by step. How they got here has to be the first question, that's obvious.

'Five years ago the Gate in Perchorsk was closed. That was in large part Gustav Turchin's doing, for which our thanks. But Turchin is only one man, and Russia is a big place; the expansionist element hasn't gone away; there are still plenty of powerful people in the former USSR who hanker after the "good old days", when their satellite subordinates paid tribute to Mother Russia. So while Communism may have been wounded, its scars are quickly healing and the scene is set for a resurgence. The Russians are rather well known for their capacity for the odd revolution now and then, and their armed forces are now political factors in their own right. Well, the fact is they always have been, but never more so than now.

'In E-Branch we all remember how Turkur Tzonov, then head of the Opposition — our term for the USSR's answer to E-Branch — planned to take his partly nationalistic but mainly egomaniac schemes, along with a dedicated crack military unit, into Sunside/Starside to conquer it for Russia. But Turchin had his own ideas about Tzonov's real motives, and so did we.

Sunside/ Starside is rich in gold, far richer than the Yukon's Klondike in its heyday. And it's not some kind of localized motherlode: gold is common in the vampire world, it can be found literally anywhere. Working with Turchin, we tried to keep that a secret, too, for obvious reasons. Or maybe they're not so obvious, so I'd better clarify:

'Russia is broke. Her army, navy, and air force are destitute, or so close it makes no difference. They can't even afford to decommission their clapped-out nuclear submarines and leaking missiles but have to dump them in someone else's backyard! But Russia's generals, her admirals and air marshals are still very powerful. When that lunatic Turkur Tzonov went into Starside to get himself killed, he left many of his men behind, trapped in Perchorsk by Gustav Turchin's security forces. Tzonov had promised his men gold, and we all know what gold does to men.

Gold is power, power corrupts, and ultimate power…?

'So then, Sunside/Starside was literally one big goldmine, and the only sure access was through Perchorsk in Russia's Ural Mountains. Oh, it was blocked, flooded, that's true. But if you can turn a tap on, you can also turn it off.

'Okay, the rest of this can't be guaranteed as pure fact, but we're E-Branch and we do what we do, and we're not usually very far wrong. We keep our eyes and our ears — oh, and a lot of other equipment — open, and try to keep up to date. And we also have what Nathan Keogh told us. So it's a patchwork quilt of sorts, but pretty accurate, we think…

'Where was I? Oh, yes: the Perchorsk Gate was closed, but somebody wanted it open. Enter Russian Internal Security, a militarized, updated KGB lookalike headed by General Mikhail Suvorov. They stepped in and did just that: diverted the Perchorsk dam waters back into the ravine and let the Gate drain the complex dry. Then they had to decide who was going to explore Sunside/Starside, though "exploit" might be a better word for it. But in any case, it didn't quite come to that.

'More than eighteen months had passed since Turchin closed the Gate, since when he'd had a hard time fighting off Suvorov, who of course wanted it opened up because he had heard rumours about the gold. And Suvorov eventually won the fight, because Turchin was over a barrel. Russia was in the red and Suvorov — who was very Red — had the answer: a huge goldmine in a primitive world at the other end of an interdimensional tunnel whose only accessible entrance lay deep in the earth and deeper still inside Mother Russia!

'Thus Turchin had very little choice: he could step aside and let Suvorov get on with what he'd promised would be a "limited" exploration, or Suvorov would tell all the hungry Russian people about the unlimited wealth that their Premier was striving to deny them! Well, we all know what that would have meant… only think back on the Klondike and you'll see what I mean. Everyone would want a piece of the action. And remember, Gustav Turchin knew something about the horrors of the vampire world — knew as much if not more than we do about what happened at Perchorsk in its early days. Certainly he realized that the fewer people who entered the Gate, the smaller the odds they'd bring something back with them out of Starside. Something other than gold, that is…

'And in all that time — some eighteen months — we'd had no word from Nathan Keogh, who of course had made his home in Sunside. But how could we have heard from him, since the Gates had been closed? Ah, but Nathan had his own route to Earth, through the Mobius Continuum! That's the place where you go, Jake — er, between going places? — it's the darkness between leaving one place and arriving at the next.

'Okay, I know that's not good enough, but more later…

'Anyway, Nathan probably had his own reasons for breaking contact with us, but it wasn't as if we felt let down; indeed, without him we'd have been in a hell of a mess, "we" being our entire world. It's bad enough that we have three of these monsters here, but without Nathan we'd have had an army. Come to think of it, lan and I wouldn't even be here right now to talk about these things, and none of you would be here to hear what I'm saying.

Oh, you would probably still be here — somewhere in the world — but not the way you are now. And damn few other people, not as you know them.

'Very well, Nathan's reasons for breaking contact: 'In turning his world and working out a means of preserving its integrity — for it had been Nathan's idea to flood Perchorsk, not the Russian Premier's; Turchin was acting mainly on Nathan's suggestion — he'd also secured a measure of isolation for Sunside/Starside. Maybe he thought that if he left us alone we would leave him and his alone. He knew how far ahead we were technologically speaking… I don't know, perhaps he preferred to keep his people out of the rat-race? Also, he wouldn't have forgotten that there were some people who would continue to see his world as a threat despite all precautions, and he knew they had the means to destroy it. And finally… there was all that gold, useless to the Travellers except as a malleable metal, but valuable beyond measure on Earth. An irresistible lure for the Hell-landers? — meaning you, me, us — probably.

'Well, enough of that… he simply didn't contact us for whatever reasons. And during that same period of time Nathan's world was swinging back again, the shadows lengthening on Starside, and the sun settling back into its old, accustomed orbit. And far beyond the boulder plains, under the flutter and weave of strange auroras, a lot of the northern ice had melted.

'Enter Szwart, Vavara, and Nephran Malinari. The only possible explanation is that they had been locked in the ice — or they had locked themselves in the ice, preserving themselves in suspended animation — when they'd been thrown out of Starside. Wamphyri, they could do it; they must have done it, deep-frozen themselves, a handful of thralls, and however many flying creatures they'd required to bear them into the Icelands when they were banished from the aeries of the Wamphyri. The natural, or unnatural, tenacity of the vampire.

'And meanwhile, here on this world, our world, we weren't even aware that Mikhail Suvorov and a party of scientists,

geologists, and prospectors — not to mention a platoon of heavily armed Russian soldiers — had entered Starside through the Gate in Perchorsk. Perhaps Turchin had been warned not to inform us; I like to think so. Or maybe he didn't want to, for that would have been to admit his own impotence in the matter. And he must have been just as ignorant as we were of the return of the Wamphyri. No way he could have known they were back in Starside.

'Nathan knew, though, and so did Lardis Lidesci. They knew because of the new spate of raids on Sunside. Ah, but this time the Wamphyri didn't have it all their own way, not by any means. Nathan had equipped his people with some devastating Earth-type weaponry, and because of his knowledge of our technology, Traveller "science" was likewise leaping ahead. So that as quickly as Vavara and Lords Szwart and Malinari were recruiting, building up their vampire forces in the hollow stumps of the fallen aeries of the Wamphyri, Nathan and his Traveller fighting men were cutting them down to size again. But while this resulted in some kind of stalemate, still Szgany lives were being lost, especially in the farthest corners of Sunside, in tribal territories that lay far beyond the Lidesci sphere of influence.

'Despite Nathan's ESP, those amazing powers that he'd inherited from his father, he couldn't possibly be everywhere at once. And even in Sunside/Starside, charity begins at home. Of course his main concern was for the Szgany Lidesci, and he had his work cut out protecting them. Part of that work, which was of the utmost importance to Nathan, was to get the Old Lidesci and his wife, Lissa, safely out of there. For it's a fact that Lardis is an old man now — older than his years — as a direct result of living most of his life in the shadow of the Wamphyri. In his youth, life on Sunside was no bowl of cherries. Now Nathan would take over from him… just as soon as he'd taken him out of harm's way.

'So let Lardis complain all he wanted — and I'm told he complained quite a bit — Nathan gave him no choice but simply brought him and his wife to the supposed safety of our world. That's how he got here, and why Lissa is in the care of our people in London. Nathan would have protected his own wife, Misha, in the same way, but Misha wasn't having it. She'd lost him twice before; if Nathan was going to be fighting the Wamphyri yet again, she was going to be at his side. It's the same story for our own Anna-Marie English: Anna had married a Traveller called Andrei Romani, and made a life for herself caring for orphans of the bloodwars. She wasn't going to leave Andrei or the children behind without one hell of a fight. And so she stayed.

'Very well, but just weeks before Nathan, er, transported Lardis and Lissa to Earth, there was a curious lull in vampire attacks on Sunside. When they started up again, the three principal survivors of four or five hundred years of frozen banishment were no longer in command of their lieutenants, thralls, and warrior creatures — or rather, they no longer accompanied them in their raids on Sunside. In order to find out what was happening, Nathan and his Szgany fighting men trapped a lieutenant, bound him to a cross with silver wire, and offered him the usual choice: he could talk and die a clean death with a crossbow bolt in his heart, or he could say nothing and be lowered face down, undead and kicking, into a fire pit. He talked, died quickly, and then burned. There is no other way for a vampire.

'As for what he said:

'Vavara and the others had intercepted strangers entering Starside from the Gate on the boulder plains. There was a short, unequal battle — very short, for Suvorov's troops weren't prepared for this; but then, who would have been? — and Lord Malinari was now "questioning" the handful of survivors before they were sent to the provisioning… that is, before they were used and drained by lieutenants and thralls, and their corpses turned to fodder for the beasts. For of course, following Malinari's kind of interrogation, they wouldn't be very much good for anything else…'

Apparently stalled by something in his story, Trask had paused. His face was drawn and grey now, his eyes sunken; he looked

far 'older than his years,' much as he'd described the Old Lidesci.

The precog lan Goodly knew what was wrong, and said, 'Ben, I'll take it from here if you like.'

'No,' Trask husked. 'When Jake was under pressure, he told his own story. So it's only right I tell mine. Hell, I've lived with it for almost three years now…' But still he took a few seconds to straighten out his thoughts. Then:

'Call it coincidence,' he continued, 'or maybe synchronicity, but Nathan arrived at E-Branch, in Harry's room, yes, just a little too late. He had Lardis and Lissa with him, and a list of stuff he wanted to take back with him. But it was the middle of the night and there was only a skeleton staff; and I… was already on my way in, driving like hell through the empty, cold night streets. God only knows how many red lights I'd crashed.

'Why was I in such a hurry? Because of a dream — a bloody nightmare — a feeling that something was wrong. No, it was much more than just a feeling: the sure knowledge that something was definitely wrong. My espers: how often had I heard it from them that their talents were a curse? Mine, too, I supposed, when I had to sit and listen to rapists, paedophiles and murderers trying to talk their way out of jail, sit there reading their lies and knowing that in fact they were cold-blooded killers, molesters and defilers. But not once, until that night, had I really considered my talent a curse. And I can well understand how you felt, lan, seeing the future in a dream, but not knowing it was more than a dream!

'For that's how it had been with me: just a dream, but oh-so-much more than a dream. And I… it had been "a hard day at the office"… I'd just lain there, tossing and turning, reading the truth of the damned thing but unable to wake up, until she told me to. God…!' And again he paused.

But this time, before Goodly could speak up again: 'It was Zek, my wife!' Trask blurted it out. 'She was at the Refuge in Romania, where for a fortnight the outflow from the underground river had been almost at a standstill. The regular crew at Radujevac couldn't understand it, but since it coincided with low winter rainfall patterns right across Europe, that's what they put it down to.

'Anyway, that's not why she was there. Zek is — she was — a telepath of the highest order. But she was more than that. No one who ever met her could fail to be impressed by my beautiful Zek. Harry Keogh himself, Jazz Simmons, Lardis Lidesci… even the Lady Karen, they'd all been won over by Zek. And those poor Romanian kids at the Refuge, some grown into men now, but still suffering from deep psychological traumas dating back to Ceau§escu's time; of course she must try to help them. She could get inside their minds, track down their problems, even try to cancel them out. Sometimes it worked, other times she cried.

'And she was crying in my dream, crying out to me, to her husband, who knew he was only nightmaring yet at the same time knew he wasn't, but in any case couldn't do a damn' thing about it. And despite what was happening to her, or about to happen, Zek was getting through to me in the only way left to her.

'It wasn't the first time. Once before she'd contacted me telepathically. That was in May 2006, when she was with Nathan in the Mediterranean, more specifically the Ionian. They'd gone to Zante — or Zakynthos, the island of Zek's birth, from which she'd taken her name — so that she could, well, pay her respects to Jazz Simmons who was buried there. Jazz had been Zek's first husband… he was dead of natural causes. But Turkur Tzonov's people were tracking Nathan to kill him. And since Zek was with him they'd kill her, too. It was while they were trying to kill her that she'd contacted me, and for a moment I had experienced all that she was feeling. I had known what it was like to die. But she hadn't died, because that's when Nathan discovered the Mobius Continuum and used it to bring her back to E-Branch.

'In my nightmare, it was the same again, Zek in her — God, her extreme of terror! — knowing it was over, yet trying to get through to me, to let me know what was happening. In one way it was a cry for help, which she must have known I couldn't possibly answer, and in another it was this

incredibly brave woman, passing on everything she knew about, about…

'It came thick and fast; telepathy is like that, conveying a lot more than mere words. What's that old saw about a picture being worth a thousand words? Well, it's true enough; I saw half of it in pictures and half in thoughts, mind to mind. All of it while I tossed and turned and — damn my dreams forever — while I slept on!

'One of the Refuge's maintenance men, a New Zealander called Bruce Trennier, was down in the sump — the subterranean river's exit or resurgence — examining the system of hydroelectric barriers and the turbine that powered the Refuge during the Romanian rainy season. His being down there was partly in connection with the fall-off in the outflow, and partly because his instrumentation indicated that something wasn't right down there. The system hadn't been entirely reliable since the time when CMI–Combined Military Intelligence, disbanded now, thank goodness — made their biggest-ever mistake and blew it up!

'Anyway, Trennier was in contact by landline with the Refuge's night staff, and he'd told them he was opening a dry inspection duct to go into the actual cave of the resurgence. He'd thought that perhaps something was clogging the works in there. And something was — a dead vampire lieutenant, his body rammed into the pipe that monitored the flow!

'Obviously Vavara, Szwart and Malinari had been trying to get someone's attention, and they'd succeeded. And Trennier had provided them with a way out.

'Well, the rest is sheer conjecture. I'm trying to remember all of this from a dream, after all, and it's a dream I've tried so hard to forget! And even at the time it was fragmentary, as dreams usually are; and Zek, my Zek… she wasn't at her best. But who would be in her… in her situation?'

Once again Trask fell silent, choking on his own emotions. In a little while, when Liz quietly inquired if she should make coffee, he simply nodded. Then for a time no one said anything, not even Jake…

CHAPTER FOURTEEN Zek's Passing

It was several minutes before Trask could continue, but eventually: 'Let me try to tell it the way I saw or received it/ he said. 'It was night at the Refuge, two hours ahead of our time in London. Zek had been awakened by her pager, a call from one of the two-man night-nursing staff. Bruce Trennier was already down in the sump; whatever the trouble was, he'd said it couldn't wait. The forecast said heavy rain, and the resurgence was prone to flash-flooding. If there was a blockage, the pressure could create all kinds of fresh problems down there.

'Which was why he had gone down at night, with a tool box, a powerful torch, and an ancient, battery-powered landline telephone that was probably on the blink, because contact was weak and intermittent. But even before Zek got to the duty room, she sensed that something was wrong. Not with Trennier, you understand — for she didn't even know about him — but just generally wrong. Zek was a very strong telepath, as I've said, and there was… what? A presence? A probing in the psychic aether? Some kind of interference? Whatever, something wasn't right with the "static" — the term used by telepaths to define the background hiss and babble of thoughts emitted by the people around them — and it was something she'd never experienced before.

'Now, in E-Branch we have rules: we don't use our talents on each other, never. Myself, I have an excuse: my thing's automatic,

as was Darcy Clarke's before me. Darcy wasn't in charge of what he did — in fact, he didn't do anything — his thing simply took care of him. He was a deflector, the opposite of accident-prone, as if some kind of guardian angel was constantly on duty looking after him. Darcy could have crossed a minefield in snowshoes without getting hurt, except his talent wouldn't have let him. But don't think it made him careless. On the contrary, he used to switch off the power before he'd even change a light bulb! Or maybe that was just another form of his talent in action.

'My thing is the same: if someone lies to me I can't help but know it. It's not that I want to, not every time, it's just something that happens. But a telepath has a choice: to tune in on the thoughts of others or simply to ignore them. And most telepaths can turn the static down or even switch it off. Which is just as well, or they'd never get any sleep.

'So in E-Branch we don't mess with each other. Let's face it, it has to be the easiest way to lose friends. If your partner is in a bad mood, you really don't want to know that you're pissing him off just by being in the same room!

'But Zek… she was the same with everyone. At work — in the foreign embassies, or working criminal cases — she was the best. Outside of work, she switched off; she wasn't interested in the many perverse little thoughts that are flying around out there. And it was the same at the Refuge. She had enough on her plate just working with those poor sick kids, let alone probing the minds of her colleagues. And incidentally, she was the only esper out there. It's quite some time since E-Branch maintained any real presence in Radujevac.

'I mention these things so you'll see why she didn't immediately switch on to the truth of what was going on. Zek didn't use her talent as a matter of course, only where it was needed. And as for Trennier being down in the sump: she didn't find out about that until she'd reached the duty room. And even then she wasn't much bothered. Not at first.

'For that wasn't the reason she'd been woken up; no, that was because, being E-Branch, she was the Senior Officer in situ at that time. And any problem with the kids, the Senior Officer had to be informed. That's what it was, the kids. And as far as Zek was concerned — half-awake and all — that's all it was. But they were really going to town. Or rather, they weren't. That's what was wrong with the static: not that its flow had been interrupted, but that it just wasn't there. It was as if… as if the kids had all come awake at the same time and were listening to something. But listening intently, to the exclusion of everything else. And whatever it was they could hear… they didn't much like it.

'That was why they were using their pagers, every last one of them; also why the duty room's switchboard was lit up like a Christmas tree, and why Zek had been woken up and called in for her opinion.

'But she didn't get to voice that opinion, for as she entered the duty room and saw the switchboard, two things happened simultaneously. One: she reached out with her mind — to one of the kids, a case she'd been working with and knew intimately — and two, the old-fashioned landline telephone jangled and went on jangling. Of course it was Trennier, but a damned insistent Trennier.

'First the kid, a Romanian orphan of maybe eighteen years. Zek broke into his mind…

'… And someone was there! Not just the kid, but someone, something, else. Something incredibly intelligent, that crawled and observed and was thirsty for knowledge, something that felt like cold slime, and left a cold, cold void behind it! And when Zek's talent touched it, she "felt" a recoil, and then a question — "Who?" — as whatever it was tried to fasten on her, too.

'Then she was out of there, snatching her thoughts back as if they'd contacted a live wire, closing them down and erecting her mental barriers as things began to make sense.

'By which time one of the duty nurses was answering Trennier's call. This was a male nurse, one who Zek knew to be solid as a rock; but as he listened to Trennier's hysterical

babbling over that tinny old telephone wire, so his eyes widened and his mouth fell open.

'Zek took the phone from him, told him to go and see what was wrong with the kids. The other nurse had already left, and now she was on her own — well, except for the terrified voice of Bruce Trennier, reaching up to her from the sump.

'He told her about the body in the monitor pipe, said that it had been shoved, or crushed, all the way in, almost its full length. But despite the awesome force that must have been exerted to cram it in there head first — because the pipe was only eighteen inches in diameter, and the male figure was… Ug — there was still some kind of horrible life in it; the feet kept twitching! And that wasn't the worst of it. Whoever or whatever had done this awful thing was still down there. Trennier had heard something, and he'd seen movement in the inky darkness between him and the open duct!

'And now Zek knew beyond a doubt what was happening here. She didn't want to believe it, but she knew anyway. In the eye of her mind, suddenly she could see the whole story: something had happened to stop the water flowing from Perchorsk, and the Starside Gate was open again. It was the only possible explanation. The children were feeling the influence of whatever Trennier was experiencing, and the "darkness" between him and his only escape route had to be, could only be—

'—Wamphyri! How didn't matter, but they were back. Back in our world this time, and Bruce Trennier was down there with them. And the kids… their vulnerable minds had been discovered and explored by more powerful minds, or one more powerful mind at least. Sensing it as mice sense a cat, the orphans had reacted — not without justification. Knowing the Wamphyri, Zek knew that their thoughts were terrible things — knew also that the cat was already bunching its muscles, preparing to spring.

'Her mind must have flown every which way. Her responsibilities to the Refuge, the children, E-Branch… even to me, God damn it! The fact that out of the Refuge's double handful of staff she was the only one who knew anything about the Wamphyri.

And the sure knowledge that if they broke into the Refuge, into Romania, the world, then the nightmare would be on us all over again. All of these things galvanizing Zek into activity. But the right or wrong activity — who could say? She only knew she must do something.

'And how to tell Trennier, still hysterical on the phone, that he was already as good as dead or changed forever, so perhaps he'd care to volunteer his own life for the sake of everyone else's? For Zek knew something about the Refuge that no one else, not even the New Zealander, the engineer, knew: that some years ago E-Branch had installed the last of several fail-safes, and down there in the sump there was a way to close this end of the loop for good.

'Powerful explosive charges in the ceiling of the cavern: a blast sufficient to bring down the roof of the place and seal it permanently. And we would have done it long since, but the Gates were closed and the Wamphyri gone and we needed the turbine to power the Refuge.

'There were two switches that had to be thrown, one inside the sump to arm the charges, and the other outside the reinforced concrete barrier that sealed the resurgence and channelled its waters: the exterior switch triggered the thing, obviously. But also, as a sensible safety precaution, there was a fifteen-minute delay after both switches had been thrown. And last but not least by way of safety, both hatches had to be locked from the outside — in fact, they could only be locked from the outside — before the electrical circuit could complete itself.

'Zek calmed Trennier down as best she could, gave him directions to the switchbox, told him to throw the switch and get out of there (if he was able) — but she kept that last reservation to herself. For there was no time, no way she could begin to explain her fears about the Wamphyri. Not that the New Zealander would have understood; he was in too much of a funk. And who wouldn't be, trapped in the dark with the Utterly Unknown? At least Zek had given him something to go on, instructions of a sort.

'Then she hit the alarms, woke the staff, told them to take the kids and move out — all of this taking very little time and none of it making too much sense to anyone except Zek, who just didn't have time to explain.

'And in that chaos of blaring alarms and puzzled, sleepy staff colliding with each other, and scared kids awake and crying in their rooms, the rest of it was up to Zek. Now she must make her way to the basement, set the trigger, and wait at the open hatch for the engineer to come through — and hope that it was only the engineer who came through — before she closed the hatch and locked it, completing the connection that would blow the sump and whatever else it contained to hell.

'But if it wasn't the New Zealander who came through, what then? My God! What a nightmare!

'And now maybe you'll forgive me that I've tried to forget all this, all the panic and sweaty horror of it as Zek, my Zek, rushed to the basement levels, climbed down into the now-silent engine room, and made her way down a spiralling steel staircase into the belly of the Refuge, to the reinforced concrete floor whose underside was the man-made ceiling in the natural cavern of the resurgence. In normal circumstances that floor would have been trembling to the throb of pressured water, but the water was a trickle now and the place no longer vibrated.

'There, in that cellar-like room which now seemed vaguely threatening, a pair of cylindrical turrets stood up knee-high from the floor. The carbon-steel hatch of one of them had been laid back on massive hinges, revealing a dark throat that was more threatening yet. But looking around and seeing a niche in the wall, and a shelf bearing an extension telephone handset, Zek believed she knew how to approach this thing.

'First and foremost there was the hatch: it must be closed, and immediately. If Trennier was on his way out… he would go through hell when he found the hatch locked. But there was nothing else for it, and it was only a temporary measure. And trying not to think of the New Zealander's terrible situation, Zek wasted no time but closed the hatch, locked its wheel, then ran to the open end of the cavern, where concrete steps took her down to the ancient bed of the resurgence.

'From there she climbed rusting iron rungs to a place high in the wall of the cavern, where a deep crevice housed the trigger's waterproof switch. It was stiff— probably a little rusty — but she managed to throw it anyway, then rapidly retraced her route back to the empty, echoing basement.

'By now Zek was feeling shaky: the combination of fear and frantic physical activity had almost exhausted her, but at last the stage was set. By now, too, Trennier should be battering on the closed hatch… but wasn't. And if by now he'd thrown that switch, he only had eight to ten minutes to get out of there.

'Zek had an automatic pistol. Ever since being attacked on Zante, she'd been in the habit of carrying a gun; I don't think I need mention what kind of ammunition she used. Now, preparing her weapon, she stuck it in her waistband and took up the dusty telephone from its shelf in the wall niche. Neglected, its battery was dead, but its generator handle twirled readily enough. In a moment she had Trennier on the other end of the line.

'The New Zealander was still in a state — even worse than before — and he hadn't done what Zek required of him. Oh, he'd found the switch in its secret place, but he hadn't thrown it. Trennier wasn't a stupid man. An engineer, he'd taken one look at that switch and known that the sump was rigged for destruction. Knowing Zek, however, he was pretty sure that wasn't going to happen while he was in there, but still he wasn't taking any chances. And in a panting whisper, he demanded to know what was going on, what it was all about, and what it was that was keeping him silent but observant company down there? Something was watching him, he felt sure.

'She couldn't tell him, could only tell him once again to throw the switch and get back to one of the ducts — either one, it made no difference — and climb out of there. As long as they stayed in

contact, she would know it was him and no other; she wouldn't shoot him as he emerged.

'But telling him that was a mistake. No other? What other or others was Zek going on about? What did she know that Trennier didn't? Others that needed shooting? Others that were capable of stuffing a big man into an eighteen-inch pipe? What in hell were the murdering things down there in the dark with him, in the sump? But no, she needn't bother to tell him. And fuck the switch! He'd be going back to the duct right now — and up through the hatch

— and God help anyone or anything that got in his way!

'Zek yelled into the phone then, screamed into it to get his attention, and finally she got it; but she knew she had to be hard on him. It was the only way. And so she told him about the hatches, how they were closed and she wasn't going to open one until she was sure he had thrown that switch! Oh, Zek knew she would let him out anyway, however it went, but she daren't let him see that.

'And so he did it, threw the switch; and Zek knew he had, because she'd reached out to him with her telepathy and "seen" him do it! And now there were just fifteen minutes to go…

'But in reaching out to Trennier, she had opened her mind

— and it wasn't only his thoughts that came through the breach. Then, however briefly, she found herself listening to something else, the Thing that had terrified the children. It was a fleeting experience, momentary, but all the same it chilled her mind like a blast out of some frozen hell:

'"Ahhh, see! Now he makes a move. Now he flees this place, and in so doing shows us the way out.. "That much and no more, before Zek closed her mind again. But more than enough, surely? Panicked, Bruce Trennier was on his way… and how many of the Wamphyri were following on behind him?

'But it also showed a degree of uncertainty on their part — showed that they weren't entirely sure of what they were up against in this world — for they hadn't simply taken Trennier and made him show them the way out. What would that cold Thing have learned, for example, from the damaged minds of the Refuge's children? Nothing, except perhaps something of the caring warmth and attention of the Refuge's staff. But that in itself might have been seen as a weakness, for on Starside such children wouldn't have been spared. Mentally — and frequently physically — unfit, their only use would be as fodder for the beasts. Even on Sunside the Szgany would have thought twice before accepting such burdens, especially under threat from the Wamphyri. What could such children be, except an enormous hindrance? Yet here they were cared for? It spoke volumes for the inhabitants of Earth, but mainly that they were soft, riddled with unnecessary guilt, self-doubt, and pity for their society's underdogs. But in Starside underdogs were eaten.

'What Zek didn't know, of course, was that Vavara and the others — had already seen something of Earth's awesome firepower. At the Starside Gate, they'd clashed with General Mikhail Suvorov's men: an unequal battle, yes, but at the time they'd been an army. Now there were just the three of them, plus a handful of lieutenants. Not only that, but Malinari also knew that at least one of this world's inhabitants was a powerful telepath. While she wasn't of his order (but then again, who was?) still she was proof that the Hell-Lands weren't entirely defenceless.

'The minutes ticked by, and Zek was on tenterhooks. Five minutes, six, seven. Even if she returned to the dry bed of the resurgence and climbed up to the crevice with the switch, still she wouldn't be able to reverse the process now. The clock was ticking and nothing could stop it, and the only way to delay it would be to open one of the hatches, a temporary measure and definitely the most dangerous of all.

'The basement was lit by half a dozen naked light bulbs in the ceiling. Since these were powered by a small emergency generator, their light was less than reliable. Through all of what she had been doing, Zek had worked in the flicker of these weak light sources, all the while conscious of the Refuge's foghorn alarms, their muted blare carrying down to her through concrete floors

and steel stairwells. Yet in a way the sound had comforted her, and even the flickering lights had reminded her of the world above, its relative sanity.

'Now it seemed someone was intent on denying her even these small comforts. For suddenly the alarms ceased, and at the same time the lights burned low, held for a moment, and went out. It could only be that up there in the chaos of the Refuge, someone had turned the alarms off. Whoever it was, he had inadvertently hit the basement light switch, too.

'And now there were only a few minutes left before the sump erupted in death and destruction. Zek couldn't even be sure she herself was safe there in the basement, let alone Bruce Trennier in the sump. And she was tempted to reach out to him yet again and see what progress he'd made. She would have done so — but that was when the telephone jangled.

'Mercifully she'd thought to take a small torch down there with her. Three paces took her to the niche with the telephone, and in another moment she was asking: "Bruce… are you alright? Where on earth are you?"

' "At the foot of the duct," he answered, and his voice was one long shudder. "I've been dodging… God, Things!! catch them in my torch beam, and they just sort of melt aside! But I can feel them there in the darkness. One of them… it doesn't seem to have a shape! It collapses in my torch beam, flows, reforms. And Zek — God, Zek — they make my flesh creep!"

' "Bruce, come up," she told him. "But as quick as you can, and I'll let you out."

'And then another slow minute until she heard him banging on the hatch that she'd closed. A moment to spin the wheel, her heart hammering and breath coming in panting gasps; the silence absolute, the darkness, too, except where her torch beam sliced into it. She hauled on the hatch, and he pushed from below, and in that last moment she thought to reach out to him, touch him with her mind. And she did—

'—But his mind was a blinding white agony, and his single thought was a scream that shrank even as it pierced her, gradually disappearing into the distance of mental oblivion! And as it ran and ran, with nowhere to hide, still it echoed her name: "Zek! — Ah} Zek! — Zekkk! — Zekkkk! — Ah, Zek-k-k-k-kf Until it was gone. Then: 'Zek's strength was as furious as her fear as she tried to slam the heavy lid on Trennier. For in fact it was the New Zealander — his head and shoulders — emerging from the hatch. But it wasn't his mind that drove him; it wasn't his muscles propelling him up out of the darkness, for pain had robbed him of consciousness and all its attendant skills. Try to picture it. His body rising up, loose arms flopping up over the rim, blind eyes staring, back ramrod straight. The engineer was like some grotesque puppet… he was a grotesque puppet.'

'For someone had an arm up inside him, at full stretch, and that someone's hand was gripping his spine from inside, holding him upright! A glove-puppet, yes, as he folded in the middle to topple out of the turret, and another's head and shoulders came into view. But such an Other!

'Zek's legs were rubber, her hand, too, where she forced it to reach for the gun in her waistband. She was stumbling backwards, away from this scene of uttermost horror, yet every move she made was in some kind of dreadful slow-motion. And the figure in the hatch wrenching its crimson arm from Trennier's body… blood flying, splashing Zek's face in a red slap… yellow eyes burning on her, seeming to burn into her, their cores blazing scarlet in a moment. They were like the holes in a Hallowe'en mask, those eyes, but they were alive!

'He — it — came out of the hatch in one flowing movement, while another figure rose up behind him; all of this happening in a surreal slow-motion that was simply a trick of Zek's mind. For in fact it was very fast, and in her extreme of numb, gnawing terror, almost too fast to follow.

'She snapped out of it, put her hands together, aimed with the torch and the gun both. But even as she pulled the trigger, that bloodied arm swept the gun aside, sent it flying, and the torch,

too. And a cold wet hand caught at her wrists, trapping both of them in its icy grip…'

Trask had paused. His eyes were staring, unblinking. Gaunt and grey, he seemed to have collapsed down into himself a little.

When a crackle of static sounded from the radio, the Duty Officer gave a start. But then a tinny voice was heard, reporting the jetcopter's progress. 'Bird One to base… ETA twenty to twenty-five minutes, over.'

'Roger, out,' said the D.O. into his handset. That served to bring Trask out of it, and:

'I suppose I'd better finish it,' he said. And in a little while, lacklustre and robotic, but inured now, he carried on.

'Understand, this wasn't my dream — not all of it — though I'm sure that parts of it were. What I've told you so far is my… my reconstruction of the so-called "Radujevac incident," as I've pictured it time and time over in my mind's eye, and in my current nightmares. It's built out of details that Nathan Keogh gave us, out of… God, evidence… that we found at the Refuge, and lastly out of Zek's telepathic contact with me, while I lay tossing and turning during her final moments.

'Her final moments, yes…

'For that was when she knew it was over, when that bastard thing Malinari trapped her wrists, gripped them in his freezing cold hand, and smiled his dreadful smile at her. Smiled at Zek, inclined his head, and began reading her like a book. But every page as he absorbed it was torn out, discarded, went fluttering into oblivion. And knowing it was over, that was when she contacted me. Once before she'd done it, when she'd thought she was dying. But this time she was dying.

'In my nightmare I saw his face. Handsome, yes, but a vacant sort of beauty, superficial, cosmetic. Lord Malinari looked as he willed himself to look, young but not too young, dark but not too dark, thirsty and… and no way to hide it. Greedy for knowledge, and the power it would bring. Zek's knowledge, which she wasn't going to give him without a fight.

'At first she didn't look at him, could only stare at poor Trennier, sprawled on the floor in his own blood, his face alternating between glaring white and shadow, white and shadow, as her torch rocked to a standstill close by. At his bulging eyes, his gaping mouth. Poor Trennier, raped and dead. But—

'"Ah, no," said Malinari the Mind, in a voice like bubbles bursting on a pool of oil. "Not dead but undead, or soon to be. He knows things — of metals, machines and engines — and I would know them, too. But you… the things thatjyow know are of far greater interest. Moreover, I see that I am not the first of my kind that you have known."

'Zek could feel her knowledge slipping from her — slithering out of her and into him, like a greasy rope in a tug-o'-war — and she fed her thoughts to me that much faster. But Malinari would not be denied; he read her telepathic messages, too, interpreting them as best he might. As for her knowledge:

'It was as if Zek's past, her memories, her understanding of the world… as if it were all iron filings, and Malinari's mind a vast magnet drawing them out of her. But she fought — oh, how she fought — so that what came to me was of the moment, not of the past, as she allowed me to see how it was, and explained in a kaleidoscope of telepathic scenes how it had been for her, and how if would be for the world if I didn't receive her warning.

'But she knew that it couldn't go on — couldn't be allowed to go on — for he was taking too much, and if she let him he'd get it all. About me, E-Branch, our espers, their talents Malinari would get it all, if she let him.

'By now the others were up out of the sump: Vavara, incredibly beautiful in Zek's mind, lit by her own radiance, alluring so as to further weaken Zek by her presence. And I saw her, but I'll spare you any description because I know that any description would be false. For the beauty of a vampire Lady is literally skin deep. Let me just say this: most women — young women, especially those of great beauty — would hate her; they would be irresistibly attracted to her, but they'd hate her. And even the most blase man, a man drained by his excesses, sated to his full measure, would lust after Vavara.

'And finally Lord Szwart. A darkness… a flowing, oozing something… a shape without a shape… the ultimate in metamorphism… scorning any fixed form for the constant, ongoing, unceasing mutation of protoplasm which was his existence. A fly-the-light, but more so than any other Great Vampire: the closest comparison we could make would be Nathan Keogh's description of Eygor Killglance of Madmanse in Turgosheim, in a vampire world. But where Eygor was made of flesh and bone

— albeit the flesh and bones of others — Szwart was of a far more elemental material. And most of it was darkness.

'Vavara, seeing Zek drawn up against Nephran Malinari, and jealous of any naturally attractive woman, said, "Take what you will and finish it." Her voice was beautiful as her lying form, as ugly as her words. And Szwart's was a hiss of air driven out through temporary lungs specifically created, as on the spur of the moment, to enable speech:

'"Aye, get done with it. There are young ones up above…. sweet meat for the taaaking… and a world entire to conquer." But:

' "No, ah no," said Malinari, and moved his slender hand to lift Zek's chin. "She fights me with a will of iron, and I desire what's in there." And to Zek — and through her to me — "Do you know, the eyes are the windows of the soul? It's true, Zekintha. But to these fingers of mine, they are also the doorways to the mind. And I weary of this and would have it quickly." He held up two fingers before her, aiming them at her, only inches from her eyes.

'Zek knew what he would do; but seeing his fingers vibrating, pulsing with purple veins, elongating and reaching towards her, she also knew what she must do. She volunteered a picture, thrust it at him, showed him the doom she'd planned for him and the others and seared it into his probing mind. Oh, she lied — described a devastation far greater than the truth, that would come ripping through the floor in rivers of fire and tortured concrete, threatening him even here — and perhaps Lord Malinari suspected it was a lie. But the way Zek's eyes were locked on that open hatch, out of which the last of three lieutenants was even now appearing, he couldn't take the chance.

' "What?" he said, furious where he drew back a pace. "And was this for me, for us?" Then he gathered her up, carried her to the hatch, and without pause… without pause…

'Head first she fell, down and down, and as Nephran Malinari slammed and locked the hatch, the time was up.

'That was when I woke up, drenched and shivering, hot yet cold, with Zek's last words still ringing in my mind. '"Goodbye, Ben," she said. "I love you…" 'And then a blinding white light, which I prayed was only the dazzle of my bedside lamp as my trembling fingers switched it on. That's what I prayed it was— '—But it wasn't.'

CHAPTER FIFTEEN Charnel House

It was plain that Trask couldn't go on, so while he sat there shaking his head in a kind of numb disbelief, still seeking a reason for, or perhaps a solution to, his irreparable trauma, the precog lan Goodly took over. In contrast to Trask's harsh, grating rasp, his voice was almost melodious:

'It was a period of unrest among the old USSR's satellite countries,' he began, 'one of many since the death of European Communism. The former Yugoslavia, Bulgaria, Romania, they were all in a state of political turmoil, and Radujevac stood at the crossroads, as it were, of all three nations. The Refuge was a kind of Sovereign Base Area — a British enclave, if you like — on foreign soil. But despite that, and as a result of its work, it was greatly respected and had achieved an almost diplomatic status. Of course, the British government had safe houses, embassies and the like, in all the former satellites. But because of the unrest access was always difficult, even to the Refuge.

'Well, Nathan Keogh arrived at our London HQ that night, and he was in the process of explaining what was happening in Sunside/Starside when Ben got there. At first Ben was overjoyed, even relieved to see him. Maybe this was what had sparked his dream; perhaps in some way he had anticipated this renewed contact with a friend from the once-hostile environment of the vampire world. But as Nathan's story unfolded, Ben's awareness — his sense of dread, of foreboding — returned in short order. It was one of those times that come to all esp-endowed persons, when out of the blue they're made aware of the other side, the downside of their talents. And now more than ever Ben's talent was telling him that Zek's telepathic message had been no mere nightmare…'

As the precog paused, Trask levered himself off the desk, stood up straight and closed his eyes. He breathed in until his lungs couldn't take any more, then made for the door. And no one said anything until he had made an unsteady exit.

Covering for his superior — though in fact Trask needed no such excuse — Goodly said, 'Did you hear the chopper?' (No one had.) 'Ben will want to see it safely down, and maybe… maybe talk to the pilot?' He offered a shrug which was followed by an awkward silence, until Jake said:

'lan?' It was the first time he'd used Goodly's first name. 'Will you finish it?'

Goodly looked mildly surprised as he answered, 'Of course. All of this is for you, after all. But in any case there's not much more to tell.' And in a little while:

'We had radio and telephone links to the Refuge,' the precog went on. 'Well, we should have had, but not that night. We tried but couldn't get through. And because of what Nathan had told us, we feared the worst. But Ben — denying, or even defying his own talent — he had to know for sure, of course. Several means were to hand.

'We called in our espers, everyone who was available, and put them to work. But long before the first of them arrived at the HQ, Nathan was volunteering his services. He'd been to the Refuge before and its coordinates were locked in his mind. But if Ben was right and the Wamphyri had come through the subterranean Gate — and if they were still there — what then?

'For Ben, the next hour was an endless anxiety attack; he sweated and agonized over danger-fraught decisions and equally

painful but inescapable truths. Having faith in his talent, he knew it was already too late — but it was Zek who was there at the Refuge! And Nathan: he would have gone at the snap of Ben's fingers — indeed, he was the only one who could go, along that special route of his. And in fact we had to restrain him, order him not to. And Ben weighing all of this in his tormented mind, all the time knowing in his heart that it was too late, that it had been too late from the moment he'd started awake in a cold sweat at his home in Kensington.

'Then Millicent Cleary arrived; Milly is — now she is — the very best of our telepaths. And right on her heels our locator of long standing, David Chung. I'll never forget the scene in the Ops Room that night: Chung standing before the illuminated wall map with the tip of his index finger touching the location of Radujevac, and his left hand holding Milly's. We frequently work in tandem that way. And after only a second or so, their reactions:

'How David snatched himself back, away from the wall. And how Milly snatched back her hand from his! For the locator had sensed something — something at Radujevac, at the Refuge — and she had picked it right out of his mind: the clammy feel of it, its evil taint. Mindsmog!

'Milly had hoped to contact Zek; firm friends and colleagues, they knew each other's minds. But now, there was simply no trace of Zek's telepathic aura, no indication of life. Hers was a "flatline" on the monitor of telepathic awareness. And as for the overwhelming presence of mindsmog: it couldn't be denied or mistaken, and Ben's worst fears were corroborated.

'Of course, the Necroscope had his own way of looking into matters of that sort, but… no need to go into that here.

'Well, just like last night I blamed myself. Why hadn't I seen it coming? What good is a talent that only reveals itself when it wants to? Why is the future so bloody devious? I blamed myself that I hadn't foreseen it, while Ben was in hell for having seen it! And the rest of the team, they were depressed that they'd had to confirm it. While at the Refuge, the mindsmog was rapidly dispersing…

'After that, there was no holding Nathan. His father, Harry Keogh, had owed Zek favours. And Nathan himself was in her debt… not only was she a friend, one who had fought alongside him in Starside, but she'd even been involved with his discovery of the Mobius Continuum. No less than Ben, Nathan knew he wouldn't rest until he — until they — were sure. Not sure that Zek was dead, for all of us knew that by then, but sure that she would never be wndead.

'And so we armed ourselves, and Nathan took us to the Refuge. But a refuge no longer, for now it was a charnel house…

'Ben, myself, Chung, and Lardis — huh! Try keeping the Old Lidesci out of it; he'd loved Zek dearly — Nathan took us along the Mobius route to Radujevac. It was some two hours, maybe two and a half, since Ben had come awake from his nightmare. More than enough time for the… the slaughter of the staff and children. From what we saw, twenty minutes had been enough!

'Those poor kids, and the people who had looked after them; their torn, sometimes shrivelled bodies were already cold. They had been dead before Ben had driven his car even halfway in to the HQ. And I believe that seeing that for himself— that knowing there was nothing he could have done — was the only thing that kept him sane.

'There were no survivors. Thirty-six kids and eight staff, dead or… or disappeared. Gone from us, anyway. For you see, we knew only too well that the ones who weren't there… that they weren't survivors, either. And certainly they'd have been better off dead. For they were now undead, or if not now, then soon. There was no other explanation for their absence; unless they had simply been taken as food, for later. But if that was the case, why only adults, when the children had been murdered out of hand and left behind? Anyway:

'The missing staff, three of them — or rather two of them, since last night — were Denise Karalambos, a paediatrician from Athens, Andre Corner, a psychiatric specialist from London, and

… and someone who isn't any longer a problem: Bruce Trennier, the engineer. As for why they were singled out, there are theories but we can't be sure. Trennier, as we've seen, found favour as a lieutenant. Perhaps the others are similarly situated. But anyone who feels sorry for them can forget it. They'd be better off dead — they're going to be better off dead. At least, that has to be our point of view. Not to mention our intention.

'But about Zek — and excuse me if I seem offhand; it's simply that I find it best to be cold about certain things, for I'm sure my emotions would be just as fragile as anyone else's if I were to forget myself and let them hold sway — Zek hadn't suffered. When that blast hit the sump, she hadn't felt a thing. Down in the basement, everything was askew. The reinforced concrete floor had buckled upwards; the turrets had been blown off their bases like popping a pair of corks; the cave of the resurgence… simply wasn't there any more! The walls and roof were completely caved in, and it's a wonder that the rear end of the Refuge hadn't followed suit.

'The Wamphyri and their lieutenants must have felt it, too: that awesome blast. Indeed, any creature in that basement — any creature of normal flesh and blood — would have been stunned by the concussion or even killed by the shock of it. But then, the Wamphyri aren't human, and in all probability it only served to enrage them further. Certainly they raged through the Refuge.

'The only good thing to come of it all, as far as I could tell, was that one of those bloody awful Gates was now well and truly closed. Oh, the Gate itself was still there, miles up the underground river, under the Carpathian foothills, but its single exit was finally blocked by two thousand tons of fractured concrete slabs and God only knows how much solid rock.

'So much for that, but what about the three creatures who had come through and were already in our world? What about them and their lieutenants, and now a trio of new thralls to aid and advise them in their Earthly ventures? And three very intelligent thralls, at that, who knew the ways of Earth?

'That, we believe, is the main reason why those three were spared… or cursed, depending on how you see it: because they could add to Malinari's intelligence of this new and potentially dangerous world. And we also see something of his cunning — and of his ruthlessness, too — in the murder of the innocents. It was simply a matter of leaving no one behind to speak about what they had witnessed.

'For you see, only six of the victims appeared to have… to have been used. And where they had been fairly well drained, the rest of them were just dead. But horribly dead. For most of them it had been instantaneous: stiffened fingers with nails as hard and as sharp as chisels had chopped through their backs or into their chests, to break their spines or crush their hearts. The terrible strength of the Wamphyri! But others… we don't think some of the others had it so, well, so "easy".

'I said that certain corpses were shrivelled. But "shrivelled" doesn't say it all by any means. Lardis, when he saw those bodies, said it was Szwart's work. It wasn't simply a reduction of bodily fluids but of… I don't know, of the substance, the essence — the soul? — of the victims. The destruction of whatever it is that makes a person human, giving him shape, character, humanity, for Christ's sake.' These pitiful things, they no longer had any of that. Picture the last apple on the tree, all wrinkled and dried out by the sun, all fallen in, with the last of its juices fermented and sick inside it. When it falls or if you touch it, its skin splits, and deep in its core the pulp is rotten and black. That's what they were like… 'And there were others whose eyes were open, staring, quite empty, and for all that they were dead I couldn't help but feel that they hadn't known very much about it. Their bodies weren't shrivelled like those of Szwart's victims, no, but it seemed to me that their minds had been. And Lardis told us Malinari would have been responsible for that.

'As for the female victims: their pale dead faces were full of awe, amazement… rapture? Some kind of exquisite, delicious agony? It's true that I don't have the words for it, but I might have a name: Vavara….'

Well, enough. There are no words that can say how we felt. Appalled doesn't nearly cover it. And nothing we could do about it, not then, not immediately. What, we should alert the authorities, shout it to the world, initiate total panic and put the fear of God and all the devils of hell into every mortal human being on the entire planet… if we were believed? We couldn't do any of those things, and for obvious reasons. Can't you just picture the witchhunts? God, but we'd be back in the Dark Ages! Witch-pricking and human bonfires, and licences to torture and kill handed out willy-nilly, free to anyone with a grudge.

'Medical research would stop, stop dead — or undead! The laboratories would search for cures, of course they would, and spread the thing faster than a plague. Blood donors? You think we're short of blood now? But blood would become the most precious of commodities, and keeping it the first priority. People locked in their homes, making them impregnable fortresses, defending them with guns, silver, stakes, crossbows and whatever. And the filthy rich with their private armies, making the odd, eccentric hermit of, say, Howard Hughes's meager stature seem like a high-profile socialite by comparison.

'Borders. In the last fifteen to twenty years we've seen them open up. Britain has been cagey about controls, passports and such, thank God — but Europe? Can't you just imagine the panic, see the chaos as all the old rules and statutes were reinstated, the checkpoints rushed back into being, with armed guards at ports and airports, and not forgetting the reservoirs, farms, fisheries, and… and anywhere where food is processed? And how long before countries started blaming each other?

'When the shit — excuse me, the accusations — started flying, Russia and Romania would probably take the brunt of it, if only because the Gates are on their territory. But what about the UK, Great Britain? We've known about the Gates for thirty-odd years! Or am I just talking about "we," the team, the organization — E-Branch itself, for God's sake — and our involvement? As for our Minister Responsible, the "Invisible Man" at the top: hull But haven't we all heard about this — er, how does it go? — this "culpable deniability," or some such gobbledygook? "Damage limitation," and the like? Does anyone care to guess what those things really mean? They're just ways of carrying on lying to cover up unpalatable truths that weren't told the first time around, that's all. And folks, what that boils down to is we would get crucified! The end of E-Branch… and who would look after the shop then?

'And that's not the end of it. Hell, I've barely started! Sooner or later the world would find out that the Russians had actually made the Gate at Perchorsk, an experiment that didn't work out. And the same world would demand that they destroy it. Too damned late, of course, but destroy it anyway. Oh, really? What, with Mikhail Suvorov's henchmen in Moscow still waiting for it to pay off) They should shut down a potential goldmine just because the gold-greedy West couldn't stand the competition? And can't you just see the old Iron Curtain slamming shut again, and that old red flag flying as before?

'Oh, they might get the message eventually — when nights turned to nightmares — and then they'd destroy it quick enough. But how? As they were ready to do it the last time around, with nukes? For just like the rest of us the Soviets have made "progress" in the last quarter-century, and I really don't care to speculate about what they might do now… but I will, if only to make the point and get this over and done with:

'Nuclear, biological, and chemical weapons; missiles with multiple warheads, launched through the Gate at Perchorsk. The total devastation of a world — Nathan's world — and Nathan and all his people, all the Szgany, with it. Neutron bombs, yes, so that all life would die but the gold would still be there, with no one and nothing to deny its plundering, its massive, planetwide tomWooting! Which is fine, or not, except we don't even know if neutron radiation will kill the Wamphyri. Only that it will kill everything else.

'And meanwhile the vampires would be raging on this world.

Because if we killed a couple of thralls, the Lords would make more. Survival, people: the damned survival of the damned! And how long before total embargoes — in effect, sieges — were laid on entire islands, nations, continents, as the terror overtook them one by one? And how long then before the missiles and the neutron bombs were flying again, this time on our world? We've had "final solutions" before, but there are holocausts and holocausts.

'I mentioned the Dark Ages, but I think we could probably go back, oh, a couple of centuries earlier than that…

'… So, you see, we couldn't tell anyone. It was our baby, and we'd just have to handle it ourselves. BUT… if we handled it our way — E-Branch's way, the right way — then we might have a chance. And in fact there were several clues that indeed we had a chance. 'It was a question of thinking it all through, then using our combined talents to check on our conclusions. Very well, so why had Vavara, Szwart, and Malinari left Starside to come venturing in our world? Where were the benefits for them? What was wrong with Sunside that they'd left it to their lieutenants and burgeoning vampire army in favour of Earth?

'But they were known on Sunside, indeed they were figures from legend there, and the Szgany knew how to fight them; fight them with alien weapons and the incredible skills of the Necroscope, Nathan Keogh. Also, these vampires were ambitious beyond the bloodiest dreams of almost any other Lords or Ladies of the Wamphyri before them. Perhaps the world of Sunside/Starside was too limiting in its scope. But Earth…

'They'd learned of Earth from Mikhail Suvorov and his ill-fated team of explorer-prospectors. They knew us: that without our weapons we were softer far than the Szgany of Sunside. And there were millions, indeed billions of us, spread out in many different nations across a world that was as wide as its horizons. Not merely a single strip of habitable woodlands between barrier mountains and burning deserts, but a huge and thriving termite's nest of sprawling humanity! A land of milk and honey — and blood, of course — stretching out forever.

'Better far, we didn't believe in vampires! In our world a vampire was a fiction, a creature in a book, a myth out of our superstitious past. Even in Romania, Hungary, or the Greek Islands, you'd have trouble finding more than a handful who truly believe in vampires today. In E-Branch, however, we have known for a long time that they never were a myth, that indeed there were vampires in our world once before, and maybe more than once.

'And Zek, she knew it, too, and knew it better than most. She had actually lived in the Lady Karen's aerie, on Starside.' So perhaps the mentalist Lord Malinari took something from her after all, the fact that earlier invaders had learned an important lesson: in this world longevity is synonymous with anonymity. But having faced — or having sent their thralls to face — Mikhail Suvorov's firepower on Starside, maybe they'd known that before they set out.

'There's evidence of that last, too. Suvorov's party went through from Perchorsk, emerging into Starside through the surface Gate. But the Wamphyri chose the other route, the original or natural Gate into our world, probably because they knew that Perchorsk was once again a semi-military base and defended, and all of its weapons concentrated in one spot, the Perchorsk Gate itself. Hardly a good place to commence a covert infiltration.'

'But the best evidence that Malinari and the others intended to keep their presence secret, at least for the time being, lay with those poor dead kids and murdered staff. For they had not been vampirized! No vampire essence — nothing of that sort — had been allowed to get into them. So plainly it wasn't the intention of the Wamphyri to start a plague. Not yet, anyway.

'But people had been killed, murdered by vampires, and the Old Lidesci wouldn't be satisfied until the bodies were burned. While he had found no trace of infection in them — not even in the six who'd been used, drained — still he was insistent. And since no one in this world has Lardis's experience in such matters, the experience of so many years, no one argued the point.

'What was more, the… the cremation that Lardis insisted

upon fitted perfectly with a plan we were shaping, however gradually. For not only were we unable to bring the presence of the Wamphyri into the open, but we must actually disguise it, cover it up, assist them in their efforts to remain secret! Secret to the world in general, at least, but not to us, not to E-Branch. No, for we knew our enemy of old.

'There was fuel oil, plenty of it, at the Refuge. Ben saw to it that the entire contents of a fifty-gallon drum went down the wrecked inspection ducts, then we punctured the rest of the drums and let the fuel leak through all the ground floor rooms. And finally we stood off while Nathan struck a match. That one match was all it took.

'It could only be the act of a maniac or group of maniacs, some kind of crazed sect. Or perhaps sabotage, the work of some anti-British terrorist organization? Or maybe a band of utterly ruthless criminals, determined to cover up their crime. At any rate, that was how it would look…

'Well, Romanian rescue services are notoriously slow, and where the Refuge stood across the Danube from Radujevac… it wasn't the most populated or accessible region. The Danube itself was the most frequented route through the countryside. Fortunately for us there were no landing stages, wharves or docks on the Romanian side, and the nearest fire engine was all of a hundred miles away!

'So we watched the Refuge burn, and eventually Nathan took us home again. But back in London we took our time before calling the authorities in Belgrade, Sofia, Bucharest, to tell them we'd had an SOS, a Mayday, from the Refuge, that a gang of raiders was sacking the place. It took them a couple of days to get back to us with their condolences; their security forces would do all they could to bring the unknown marauders to justice, of course, but since the Refuge had been gutted there was precious little to go on…

'And meanwhile, we were busy. was busy, bending all my efforts to scan the future as never before. But… the simple factp> is I can't force what I do, can't control it. I see what I see when I see it, and that's it. And our locators were busy, none more so than David Chung. But where to look? There was no more mindsmog, and there were no borders in continental Europe. The three invaders, their lieutenants out of Starside and their "raw" recruits, they could be anywhere. They could have crossed the river west into Yugoslavia, gone east into Bulgaria, headed north into the Carpathians, or caught a boat up-river for Hungary. In daylight hours they'd go to earth, or to any dark, safe place. But at night… no one travels as fast as the Wamphyri.

'Nathan suggested returning to Sunside for Anna-Marie English, but to what purpose? The invaders were leaving no "blight" behind them. As yet, they weren't vampirizing anyone. Murders? But there are always murders, and there are always missing persons. No, we couldn't hope to track them that way. In any case, Anna-Marie wouldn't have come back; she has dedicated her life to the orphans of the bloodwars, and to her man in Sunside.

'The mindsmog thing puzzled us a while: the lack of it. For where there are vampires, and especially Lords of the Wamphyri, there is usually mindsmog: a tainted, impenetrable cloud on the psychic aether… unless that was something else that Malinari had stolen from Zek's mind? But of course it was! He had also been about to learn something of E-Branch from her — until she had deliberately shortened his interrogation by showing him his intended doom, which had precipitated and mercifully shortened her own.

'But just how much did he know? How much had he sapped from Zek's mind, her memory, her knowledge in general and especially of the Branch? We had no way of knowing. But it must have been sufficient that he and the others felt the need to lie low and control their alien mental emissions. Or perhaps we were wrong and they were simply being cautious, biding their time.

'Nathan stayed with us for five days, just long enough to look up a few old… well, acquaintances? But he was needed in Sunside

and dared not delay any longer. And remember, his problem was as great if not greater than ours: a small army of aspiring Lords lieutenants, thralls, and warrior creatures, left behind by our trio of Wamphyri invaders; an army which now inhabited the toppled ruins of Starside's ancient aeries, from which they raided on the Szgany as before. No, we had no claim on Nathan; indeed, our long-term debt to him could never be repaid. And so we had to let him go, with our best wishes — and as many weapons as he could take with him — back along the Mobius route to rejoin the battle for his vampire world.

'And through all of that time, that terrible, frantic week, the only one of us who wasn't busy was Ben Trask. He had simply withdrawn from a world that would never be the same again, and I admit that I thought E-Branch had seen the last of him. Fortunately I was wrong, and when he returned he was stronger than ever — well, in some ways — but in his resolve, for sure.

'And now I'll tell you something that even he doesn't know. I was Duty Officer that night at E-Branch HQ — that night when Nathan brought Lardis through from Sunside, and Ben nightmared about Zek — and the moment that Ben came in and I saw the state he was in, I… I knew about Zek. I mean, I knew!

'Oh, I couldn't tell him, but where he was uncertain and daren't allow himself to be sure, I knew and hated myself for knowing. Just seeing him like that, Ben's future was immediately apparent to me. In one way it was the clearest picture of anyone's future that I'd even seen, yet in another it was the vaguest — which was how I knew.

'For all I saw was how cold and lonely that future would be…'

Goodly's delivery, the way he had told the story of the events of that night at E-Branch HQ from his own personal viewpoint — the obvious passion and compassion in this apparently reserved, indeed phlegmatic man — had brought him into far greater definition in Jake's perception; or rather, it had brought him into focus as a three-dimensional character in his own right. Previously a shadow or a soft-voiced cipher, he had somehow filled out. And Jake understood now that the precog had been a major part of this scene for a very long time.

Now, too, and also for the first time, Goodly's physical person had impressed itself upon the Branch's most recent however hesitant recruit. lan Goodly: all of six feet four inches tall, skeletally thin and gangly, grey-haired and mainly gaunt-featured. His expression was usually grave; he rarely smiled; only his eyes

— warm, brown, and totally disarming — belied what invariably constituted an unfortunate first-impression appearance, that of a cadaverous mortician. Except, and as Jake was suddenly aware, you can't always tell a book from its cover. He would have done better to take more notice of Goodly's eyes than his outline.

Outside the Ops truck, he cornered the precog and drew him away from the others into the shade of a tree.

'What is it?' Goodly asked, though he believed he already knew well enough. For just like Trask and Lardis Lidesci before him, he'd left several blank pages in his telling of the story. Jake was still fishing for the bits that would bring the whole thing into focus.

'Just you and me/ Jake answered. 'Just the two of us, and no one else to confuse the issue. Would you mind if I ask you a few questions? I mean, right from square one I've had this feeling that you're on my side, that you think I should be told the whole thing. The others are holding stuff back, but you're reluctant to do so. Am I right?'

Goodly smiled a wry smile, sighed and said, Til tell you what I can. But even though you're right about my being on your side

— or rather, about my talent being on your side — still I won't be able to answer all of your questions. The Branch comes first, and Ben Trask is the Branch. What Ben says goes.'

'Some of my questions, then,' Jake pressed. And he quickly went on: 'So you're a precog, right? And this talent of yours, this precognition, it lets you see into the future?'

'That's the general idea,' Goodly sighed again. 'But only a very rough idea, for it's not nearly as simple as that. Haven't I made that plain?' And now he was frowning.

'Okay, fine,' Jake placated him. 'But you did tell me you'd seen some of my future, right? You did say that I'd be with you, with E-Branch, for quite some time to come.'

'That's true, yes,' Goodly answered.

'In what capacity?'

'I don't know.'

'Okay, then is it going to be that way simply because Trask won't let me go off and do my own thing, or…?'

'Possibly because he won't let you go,' the precog answered. 'He has to see how you work out, which could take a while. That could be — it obviously is — part of the reason why I've foreseen your continuing presence, yes. But what is this, Jake? Are you still uncertain? I thought you'd decided to stay?'

'… Or, is it mainly because he thinks I'm going to be useful to you?' Jake ignored Goodly's last.

'Well, that too, we hope. But Jake, you're talking in circles. And I don't see—'

'—I'm getting to it!' Jake growled, his attitude intense now. And after a moment's thought: 'So tell me, is it me, Jake Cutter, who'll be useful to you, or is it this Harry?'

'Er, that was my meaning, yes,' said the precog, 'that the Necroscope would definitely be useful to us. But if you want me to pick and choose, I can't do it. I would have to answer, both of you — you'll both be extremely useful to us. I thought that had been made plain, too.'

'He's… what, contacting me, this Harry? Getting into my head to guide me, is that it?' Jake was pushing it now. 'Or is he simply using me?'

'Using you? Personally, I would say he's keeping you safe. Wouldn't you?'

'But in my head, like telepathy? A kind of telepathic control?' Jake scowled.

'Telepathy?' Goodly seemed uncertain. 'Something like telepathy, yes. But Harry had a different name for it.'

'"Had"? Why is it that when we talk about this Harry everything has to be past tense?' Then Jake gave a snort. 'Huh! Dumb question — because he's dead, of course! — which I can't see at all. For if he's dead, how can he do whatever it is he's doing to me? See, I don't believe in ghosts. They're a concept I just can't seem to wrap my head around. And as for Harry Keogh: he's something I don't want to wrap my head around, even though it's apparent he's already seen to that! But, since he's obviously a disembodied voice out of the past, then it must be equally obvious that his talent was similar to yours. I mean, Harry didn't so much read the future as reach into it… is how it seems to me? But okay, fine, let's keep it going: so if what he's doing to me isn't telepathy, then what did he call it?'

'It wouldn't help you to know, not at this stage.' Goodly shook his head. 'In fact it could easily become an obstruction, a deterrent to your acceptance of… of everything.'

Jake's frustration was mounting again. 'A deterrent to my acceptance?' he snapped. 'Don't you think there are enough deterrents already? It's nuts, all of it! I mean, what am I, some kind of psychic medium? If there was a reason, just one logical reason, why I should suddenly become this dead bloke's target, his focus, his genius loci, then I might be willing to believe at least some of this… this whatever. See, I know that what I've actually seen and experienced so far is real, but I don't know that a lot of what I've been told is real. I trust my own five senses, or used to, but I don't understand how or why I'm involved. I'd even like to believe what I've heard, if only as an alternative to considering myself some kind of psycho, some kind of schizoid nutcase. But… but… but Harry is fucking dead!'

'Well, in a way he's dead,' said the precog, just as serious as ever, as if their conversation was utterly mundane. 'But you see, Harry didn't view existence, life and death, as we do. There was a time when he really was two people. It was after he suffered

… well, an accident, that his mind temporarily manifested itself in the identity of his own infant son. And later, he underwent another singular change. Best to think of it as a kind of metempsychosis, or—'

'Metempsychosis?' Jake cut him short. For despite that he was sure he'd never heard the word before, still he understood it; likewise another word that meant much the same thing. 'You mean transmigration? Of souls? Like he was… what, some kind of body-snatcher?' And now suspicion was written plain on the younger man's face.

'It wasn't like that at all!' the precog protested.

'What?' Jake's voice was brittle now, cracking like glass splintering under the heel of a boot. 'I don't give a twopenny toss what it was like! Shit, look at it from my point of view! This bloke's dead but he's trying to control my mind? And then what, my body? And if he ever got it, do you really think he'd want to give it back? And what about me, Mr lan bloody Goodly, precog? What the fuck about me? Is that why you can't tell me my future? Because the real me doesn't have one!?'

'Calm down, for goodness sake!' Goodly looked alarmed. 'My word, but you've a very short memory, Jake Cutter!'

'Eh?' That had served to slow Jake down a little. 'A short memory? How so?'

'But didn't Harry get you out of jail? Hasn't he saved your life twice already, and Liz's, too?'

Jake considered it, relaxed a very little, said: 'But what does he hope to do with me, this… this ghost?'

'Well, perhaps that's one I can answer,' Goodly told him. 'You see, the Necroscope's principal tenet was that whatever a man does in life he will continue to do after death. He proved it, too: used it to discover the Mobius Continuum. You'll just have to take my word for that, for the time being, anyway. But Harry's greatest claim to fame, or one of them, lay in finding and destroying vampires. Oh yes, the Earth was infested before this latest invasion. And believe me, Jake, without the Necroscope on our side, our world would have become an unimaginable hell-hole of a place a long time ago. So…'

'… So, you think he intends to keep on doing what he did before/ Jake nodded his understanding, all the while fighting hard to suppress his disbelief. 'This Harry… he's trying to come back because he somehow knows they have come back, and he wants to go on killing vampires. He's the avenging ghost and I… I'm his gadget?'

The precog shrugged and answered, 'And there you have it.'

Jake shook his head, looked bewildered, said: 'Come again? Didn't you get something backwards just then? Surely you meant there it has me!'

But Goodly was weary of this now. 'As you will,' he answered. And, pursing his thin lips, he turned away.

Jake saw his mistake, didn't want to alienate someone who obviously gave a damn, and quickly said, 'Listen, I appreciate everything you've told me. I'm not trying to mess you about — none of you — but looking for a little firm ground, somewhere I can safely plant my feet. The way I'm feeling, every step is like quicksand. And what you just said doesn't help any. What, I'm supposed to be happy with the notion of this Harry working his will through me, if not actually on me? Well, that's probably fine by you E-Branch people, all nice and safe in your own talented little skulls, but—'

'But… there's no safe place in E-Branch, Jake,' the precog cut him short, glancing back over his shoulder. 'However, I did say you would be around for quite some time. Which with the Necroscope — or something of him — on your side, seems a very fair forecast to me.'

'But a ghost?'

'There are ghosts and ghosts/ the other answered, walking away.

'But he's dead, for Christ's sake!' Made meaningless now, through repetition, still Jake's exclamation exploded from his dry lips. 'And not just a ghost — not just any old spook — but one who has access to my mind!'

'In E-Branch/ Goodly told him, without looking back, we do believe in ghosts, especially in the ghost of Harry Keogh. We have every good reason to. But that's something you don't have to take my word for, Jake. You see, I'm sure that before very long you 11 believe in them, too. I, Mr lan bloody Goodly, precog, am very sure of it, yes.. p>

CHAPTER SIXTEEN A Meeting Of Minds

Jake was in Chopper one with Trask, Liz, Goodly, Lardis, and a pair of technicians, Jimmy Harvey and Paul Arenson. Their next stop was Alice Springs (a 'mere' eight hundred miles east) for refuelling. Chopper two needed an hour's maintenance and would follow on behind. As for the vehicular contingent:

'They're heading south for Kalgoorlie,' Paul Arenson, a gangling, blue-eyed blond of maybe thirty-three years was telling his younger colleague. 'From there they'll go piggyback on a freight train to Broken Hill, then back on the road again to Brisbane. All except the big artic. It has to be the Great Aussie Bight coast road for the big feller. I calculate something like two thousand three hundred miles all told. We'll be home and dry in less than five hours; that's taking it easy, including a stop to stretch our legs at Alice. But as for the lads in the big truck… just be glad you're not one of them. Five hours for us, and three or four days for them!'

The conversation buzzed in Jake's head, singing with the vibration of the jetcopter. The airplane was safe and stable, but with its paramilitary design it hadn't been built for comfort. Jake sat on the floor in the narrow stowage area towards the tail, where there were no seats. Half-reclining, his large, angular frame was cushioned by holdalls, sausage-bags, and various packs of personal belongings, some hard and some soft; it wasn't his idea of luxury. But tired, and even hoping to get a little sleep, he repositioned himself as best he could and let the aircraft's singing soak into him.

The 'tune' was much too regular for a lullaby, and snatches of muted conversation kept drifting back to him, monotone lyrics that didn't fit the music but clung like cobwebs to his thoroughly weary mind. Cocooned in this odd mix of white noise and blurred babble, gradually Jake felt himself nodding off.

Liz Merrick was loosely belted into the rearmost of the seats, a gunner's swivelling bucket-seat between wide sliding doors on both sides. Her long legs were up, flopping over the gunner's arm rests; the gun itself slumped nose-down, strapped in position. Glinting a dull blue-grey, and despite its proximity to Liz's lovely body, the weapon looked sullenly impotent. But the picture Jake kept in his mind as he drifted into sleep was that of a naked Liz with the gun between her legs…

… But then he was asleep, and he was the gun between her legs! And — damn it to hell! — he wasn't fucking Liz but was facing xwsy from her out of the door. And she wasn't trying to ride him but was firing him… her arms round his waist, with one hand massaging his balls while the other, working his rampant dick, shot burst after burst of silvery, smoking semen at nightmarish vampire shapes that flapped in the chopper's slipstream, snarling their bloodlust as they fought to get inside the plane, to get at Liz, Trask, Goodly and the others!

Barely asleep, Jake jerked awake. Liz was staring at him, her cheeks flaming, mouth half-open, eyes wide. And Jake didn't need a degree in psychiatry — or in parapsychology — to understand what had happened here. Whether as a deliberate voyeur or an innocent observer, Liz had been in his mind. She'd seen that last scene. And as for what it meant: that was his fear surfacing, his ongoing suspicion that Ben Trask was simply using him, now complicated by the notion that Trask was also using her as some kind of bait — like a carrot for a donkey? — to keep him happy as he plodded on. He could be right at that, or he could be wrong. But if Liz were the carrot, then what did Trask have in mind for the stick? Everything remained to be seen.

'I… I…' Liz mouthed words at him — mouthed them, but nothing came out — as she quickly, selfconsciously, ashamedly slid her jean-clad legs from the gunner's arm rests and sat up straighter in the bucket-seat. And:

Serves you fucking right! Jake snapped back, but silently, in his head. And he knew he'd reached her from the way her head jerked. And now keep the fuck out!

Following which, as his anger cooled, it took some time to get back to sleep…

Snatches of conversation drifting back to him. But in his ears or in his had? Perhaps he was still on Liz's mind, and unsuspected even by the girl herself where she sat in her bucket-seat midway between Jake in stowage and the others in their seats up front, she had become some kind of mental relay station. For in the few days she had known him Liz had established something of a rapport with Jake; it was possible that the sending technique she had used to taunt Bruce Trennier had 'fixed' itself and was now developing more rapidly in her special mind. Maybe this was simply her way of making amends: by letting Jake in on the conversation. The conversation about him. Or was it something, or some one, else entirely?

Trask's hushed voice, asking: 'But why him?' Lardis Lidesci: 'Does the why of it really matter? If Jake has been chosen, he's been chosen.'

And lan Goodly: 'There are certain similarities. Maybe we shouldn't overlook them. I'm sure mental characteristics — how Jake thinks — are more important than the purely physical way he looks. When we look at him we don't see Harry, that's true, but the Necroscope was a hard act to follow. Perhaps we should give more thought as to how Harry sees him. And there are similarities.' Trask: 'Go on.'

Goodly: 'For one thing, they both lost loved ones. Both of them drowned, murdered, too.'

Trask: 'Granted, but that's where it ends. And as for losing a loved one, murdered, you could say the same about me. But where is Harry's humility? Where's his compassion, his warmth? This Jake… he's abrasive, a roughneck, spoiled and wild.'

Goodly: 'A roughneck? But in the right circumstances that would be — and it already has been — a positive bonus. A rough diamond, maybe. Surely the Necroscope would know better than to choose a weakling for a job like this?'

Trask: 'But a hard man? A killer, even if he does have his reasons?'

Lardis: 'Me, I say they were good reasons. I like him! And I say it again, if he's Harry Hell-Lander's choice, that's good enough for me.'

Trask: 'And me… well, within limits. So don't misunderstand me — I'm not arguing the Necroscope's choice — it's just that I don't understand it. I have this feeling that Jake's not only fighting us but fighting Harry, too.'

Goodly: 'Oh, he is, be sure of it! But aside from his manners and tendency to aggression, there are similarities.'

Trask, dubiously: 'More similarities?'

Goodly: 'Indeed. For Harry believed in revenge, too. Don't you remember? An eye for an eye? He was just a boy when he went after Boris Dragosani. If like attracts like — mentally speaking, that is — then I can well see how Harry would be drawn to this one. And that's something else you might give some thought to: if you want Jake firmly on the team, and his mind exclusively on the job in hand, you could do a lot worse than find this man, this Luigi Castellano.'

Trask 'And then what? Let Jake go after him?'

Goodly: 'This Castellano is rubbish and should be disposed of — we're all agreed on that. I think Jake will chase him down no matter what, which makes Castellano a distraction. But if he were to be taken out…. no more distraction. And we would have Jake's gratitude.'

Trash, mildly surprised: 'Well now! And just listen to the cold-blooded one! But you're right, and we're checking into it. Interpol and other friends abroad. If we could just bring Castellano to justice, that might suffice.'

Goodly: 'No, it wouldn't.' (A sensed shake of the precog's head). 'When he is dead, that will suffice. You know as well as I do how Jake dealt with the other members of that gang. Do you really think he'll be satisfied to see their boss nice and comfortable, all warm and well fed behind bars?'

Lardis: 'Anyway, in case I haven't already said it loud or often enough, I like Jake Cutter. And so does Liz.'

Liz, heatedly: 'I do not! Well, not especially.'

Lardis, chuckling throatily: 'See?'

Then silence for a while, the darkness deepening, and Jake finally adrift in dreams. And a strange cold current taking him in tow, steering him to an unknown yet oddly familiar destination…

A river bank, and below its grassy, root-tangled rim, the water swirling in the eddies of a small bight. A boy, sitting on the edge and leaning forward at what seemed an unsafe angle, dangling his feet close to the slowly swirling surface. His elbows were on his knees, his hands propping his chin, and he appeared to be talking to someone. Perhaps to himself.

Jake's shadow fell on him, and the boy turned his head to look up at him. He didn't seem at all surprised by Jake's presence (but then, neither did Jake). On the contrary, he smiled a pale, painful, yet appreciative greeting. 'Hello, there! So you came. Why don't you sit down a while and talk to me?'

'I, er, didn't like to cut in on you!' Jake answered, not knowing what else to say. And then, because he wasn't sure what else to do, either — and wondering if he knew the other — he finally followed his suggestion, sat down, and asked him: 'Er, do you think it's possible we've met somewhere before?'

Beginning to feel the strangeness of it all, he looked the boy over more closely, perhaps even warily.

Apart from the obvious fact that the other had recently been fighting, there didn't seem to be anything especially odd about him. He could be any scruffy boy, though for some reason Jake found himself doubting that. Maybe eleven or twelve years old, sandy-haired, freckled; he wasn't skinny yet barely filled out his ill-fitting, threadbare, second-hand school jacket. The top button was absent from a once-white shirt that hung halfway out of his grey flannel trousers, and a frayed, tightly knotted tie with a faded school motto hung askew from his crumpled collar. His lumpish nose supported plain prescription spectacles, small, circular windows through which dreaming blue eyes gazed out in a strange mixture of wonder and weird expectation.

Then, suddenly aware of Jake's inspection, the boy looked down at himself, wrinkled his nose in disgust, said: 'This will be the school bully, big Stanley Green's work. He's got it coming, has our Stanley. In about a year from now, or maybe two.' And his lips were thinner, tighter, more determined.

There was dried blood on those lips, a gash in the corner of his mouth, but little or nothing of fear in his dreamy eyes, which were now other than dreamy and contained a certain glint. Indeed, they looked older than the rest of him, those eyes, and Jake thought there was probably a pretty mature mind in there, somewhere behind that half-haunted face. But he could never in a million years have guessed how mature — or how wise in otherworldly ways.

And because the boy hadn't as yet answered his first question (as to whether or not they knew each other), Jake now felt the urge to remind and prompt him. 'Er, son?'

But he needn't have concerned himself. Obviously the other had considered Jake's earlier question, and now took his prompt into account, too.

'Son?' he finally repeated Jake, and cocked his young-old head on one side. 'And you're wondering if we know each other? Well, I've got to answer no to both questions. Uh-uh, Jake. You and I don't know each other, not yet. And I'm not too comfortable with you calling me "son". It's a case of — I don't know — what came first, the chicken or the egg?' There was no animosity in his reply.

'Eh?' Jake frowned. 'Someone else just bursting with riddles? I don't need that right now.'

'But it's a hell of an adventure,' said the boy, sounding not at all like a child, despite his child's voice. 'Er, working them out, that is. I've done my share of that, Jake.' Then, sitting back and gazing directly into Jake's eyes, studying his face and perhaps more than his face: 'So you're him. And you've been having a hard time of it, right?'

'Well, since you seem to understand what's going on here,' Jake answered, perhaps peevishly, 'why don't you tell me?' His dream might be working something out for him, resolving a problem.

And the other nodded. 'Very well, I'm telling you: you're having a hard time of it. But that's just as much your fault as mine; you have a very defensive mind. And me, I don't have much of a mind at all! Or I do, but not all in one place, not all at one time. Oh, I know — I mean, I've known — a lot of things. But what I remember and what I've forgotten are completely random. Like a kind of amnesia or a bad case of absent-mindedness. Except it's not. For you see, I'm really not all here. Or putting it more sympathetically, all of me isn't here. Which means that while I won't get things one hundred per cent wrong, I may not get them entirely right either. That's why I need a focus. But now, since you seem determined to reject me, it looks like it may be hard for us to get along, and harder still for me to get it together. So, how long do you plan to keep slamming the door in my face, Jake?'

'Who are you?' Jake asked him then, feeling a weird tingle in his scalp, an unheard-of sensation of negative deja vu: that it wasn't him but the boy who had been here —

or somewhere — before. And Jake felt he knew where he'd been.

But the other frowned and now seemed as uncertain as Jake. 'I… I'm all sorts of people and things,' he said. 'I'm Alec, Nestor, Nathan, take your pick. There's something of Faethor in me, or has been, or will be. And something of me in a whole lot of people. It all depends on the time, the date, the place. And time is relative: what will be has been, ask any precog. That's why we have to be sure it works out right, don't you see?'

'You… you're Harry Keogh!' said Jake, shivering without knowing why — until he remembered what Harry Keogh was. 'You're the ghost they've been telling me about!'

'And you're the gadget,' said Harry.

'But I don't want to be!' Jake felt himself riveted to the river bank; he wanted to leap away but couldn't move. It was the dream, the nightmare — one of those nightmares — where, try as you might, you can't escape from the thing that's chasing you.

I'm not chasing you,' the young Harry protested. 'You are chasing me. Chasing me away!' And in fact he was wavering, physically (or metaphysically) wavering, his figure a mere outline, his face and form thinning towards transparency.

'But you're after my mind, my body!' Jake cried.

The boy, the dream-Harry, the ghost (who by now was beginning to look ghostly, insubstantial as smoke) gave a desperate shake of his almost immaterial head. 'That's not me, Jake. It's the Wamphyri who want your mind, body and soul. I am the one — or rather we are the ones, and maybe the only ones — who might be able to stop them. So don't send me away, Jake. Don't fight me off!'

And suddenly Jake realized that he could, that he was actually doing it: fighting the other off, sending him away. And:

'I… I can, can't I?' he said, his fear retreating.

'You very nearly did!' said Harry, sighing as he firmed up again. 'Okay, so perhaps this is too strange for you, the wrong time and place, the wrong me. I didn't think you'd see any harm in a small boy, that's all.'

'What, in a child who talks like a man?' Jake felt himself shivering again, but less violently. 'A boy whose eyes are innocent as a baby's yet old as the ages? A boy capable of metempsychosis — who's in my mind right now — while I'm the helpless intended vessel?'

'You're by no means as helpless as you think,' said Harry, perhaps admiringly. 'That mind of yours: stubborn as hell, with good shields you've never had reason to use, nor even suspected you had them! Anyway, mind transference isn't something that I… that I have in mind? I've had my time, Jake, my lives — and I'm still having them — but I do get your point. So, very well, let's try something else…'

A moment ago it had been warm in evening sunlight that came in flickering beams, fanning through the trees on the far bank and setting the water sparkling out towards the middle of the river where the current ran fastest. Now, in a single instant, it was cold and dark; frost lay thick on the ground, and the river was a ribbon of ice, frozen and motionless. A full moon hung low in a windswept sky, and a trio of gardens fronted rich houses that reared to the right of Jake and the boy where they walked along the river path. Except Jake's companion was no longer a boy but a youth.

Jake started away from the stranger — stumbled, might have fallen into frosted brambles on the overgrown river bank — but Harry was quick to take his arm, hold him steady. 'It's okay,' he said, to still Jake's cry of alarm. 'It's a different time, that's all, an older me. But the same place, more or less. The same river. We were back there,' he thumbed the air, indicated the path behind them, 'a few hundred yards downriver, sitting on the bank. It was summer and I was talking to my mother when you came by. Now it's… oh, quite a few winters later. I'm a little closer to your own age now, so perhaps we'll be able to get along that much better.'

Closer to my own age? Jake thought. But you're a good deal firmer, too. That's a Ml of a strong grip you have on my arm, and how much stronger on my mind?

But Harry the youth only shook his head in disappointment. 'Hiding your thoughts won't help. I'm in here, remember? Well, at present I am, anyway, while you accept me.'

'Jesus!' Jake gasped. 'It's like something out of A Christmas Carol! When I wake up, I won't believe it.'

'That's what I'm afraid of,' said Harry. 'Worse still, you may not even remember it. That's why we have to get things done while we can, and hope they get fixed in your mind.'

'Things?'

'Until you trust me,' the other answered, 'until you allow me a little permanency, we'll have to move in stops and starts. We'll get nowhere until I know the whole story, and I won't be able to help you until you believe.'

'Believe in a ghost?'

'But I'm not, not really. And Jake, you wouldn't — I mean you really wouldn't — believe how often I've been through this before! Oh, I've had trouble convincing others before you.'

While Harry talked, Jake looked him over. It was the same 'boy' for sure, but he'd be nineteen or maybe twenty years old now. Wiry, he would weigh some nine and a half stone and stand seventy inches tall. His hair was an untidy sandy mop that reminded Jake of Glint Eastwood's in those old western movies of more than thirty years ago. But his face wasn't nearly so hard and his freckles were still there, lending him a naive and definitely misleading boyish innocence.

More than any other feature, Harry Keogh's eyes were especially interesting. Looking at Jake, they seemed to see right through him (the sure sign of an esper, as Jake was now aware), as if he were the revenant, and not the reverse. But they were oh so blue, those eyes, that startling, colourless blue which always looks so unnatural, so that one thinks the owner has to be wearing lenses. More than that, there was something in them which said they'd seen a lot more than any twenty-year-old has any right seeing.

But still Jake felt a little easier with all of this now. After all, it was only a dream. And since this ghost, or whatever it was, was conversational, why not talk to it? Or humour it, as the case might be.

'So, if convincing people is as hard as you make out, why do you put yourself to the trouble?' he asked his strange companion.

They had come to a halt before the gate in the garden wall of the central house. Lights in the downstairs room adjacent to the garden sent angular black shadows marching over the brittle shrubbery arid garden path… the shadows of men, glimpsed only briefly before the patio doors were slammed and curtains jerked hurriedly across the wide windows.

For a long moment Harry made no answer to Jake's question; he stood as if transfixed, looking in through the gate's horizontal bars. But the house was mainly dark, where mere chinks of light escaped at odd angles from the corners and joins of poorly-fitted curtains.

Then the youth started, blinked his eyes in the pale moonlight, and breathlessly answered, 'Why do I keep putting myself out? That's easy, Jake. It's because I was the beginning, and I have to be the end…' Then he gave another start, and said:

'We can't stay here. That house there is where I was born. My stepfather has visitors — Boris Dragosani and Max Batu — and later, I'll be visiting him, too. Tonight is the night I killed him. But there are things you mustn't see, not yet.'

'You… you killed him?' And now the cold that Jake felt wasn't entirely physical, if it ever had been.

'I will,' said the other. 'But I don't want to see it, and I

don't want you to see it. So now we have to go. Another place and time. Are you up to it?' 'Do I have a choice?'

'You can always wake up, but I wouldn't advise it! It was hard enough getting into you this time. And if you're as badly frightened as—'

'Frightened?' Jake cut him off, his pride surfacing. 'Maybe I am, but I'm also interested — very. I want to know where this is going, want to find out what it's all about. And since they won't tell me—'

'They?' (Harry's turn to cut in).

'Ben Trask and his people,' Jake answered.

'Ah!' said Harry, nodding his head and smiling knowingly. 'I might have guessed. In fact, I suppose I knew. You mentioned "them" before, and obviously E-Branch HQ was where I aimed you that first time, when I first became aware of you. But that was then and this is now, and we have to move on. Since this was my home for so many years, we'll probably be back. But… my timing was years off, and I can't think why. It must be my memory, which is incomplete. You see, I'm incomplete! I'm not entirely here. Actually, I'm not entirely anywhere! It seems to be only the strongest of times and places to which I'm drawn.'

'Maybe it's a variation on the old theme,' said Jake. 'The killer returning to the scene — and time — of the crime!'

'Very clever,' said Harry. 'And you could even be right — in a way. The lure of powerful times and places. Yes, I can see that. But a killer?' He shrugged. 1 can't deny it, and I won't try to explain it, not now. It's like I said: this isn't a good time for me. So I'll ask you once again—'

And: 'Yes,' Jake nodded. Tm up to it. I think.'

'Very well,' the other nodded. 'But this time I'll try for a place of innocence.'

'Er, before we go,' Jake quickly put in, 'can you answer a question or two? I mean, while I'm still steady on my feet?'

'I'm surprised you haven't asked them sooner,' Harry answered, his eyes still anxious where they peered through the bars of the gate at the house.

'Why me?' Jake said. 'Why not one of these people you seem to know so well, the E-Branch crowd? Surely they would have accepted you that much more readily. From some of the things I've heard them say about you, they hold you in some kind of awe.'

'But you're young,' said the other. 'You're strong enough to face whatever it is that's coming. Ben Trask and the others, they're old now. And they don't need—'

'Yes?'

'—Redemption? No, that's not it. Let's just say they're not troubled. They're straight in what they have to do. But you are troubled. There's a lot of anger in you, Jake, an explosive strength. And that's what is needed. It's what we have to find a use for, but the right use.'

'So I was chosen out of nothing?' Jake frowned. 'Because I need saving? What if I don't want saving? You see, I still have a job to do, and one way or the other I'll do it. What I'm saying is you're taking a chance with me. I might not work out the way you want me to/

'There was a certain element of chance in it, yes/ Harry answered. 'But there were also things I couldn't ignore. In the Mobius Continuum, down future time-streams, I've seen your blue life-thread crossed with the red of vampires where you're going to meet up with them. But where some of them blink out, expire, your blue thread goes on. Deja vu, Jake! I just couldn't ignore it. I want to make sure that blue thread goes on and on, that's all'

Bewildered, Jake shook his head. 'None of which makes any sense at all to me/

'But it will, when you understand the Continuum. When you command it. And when you're able to do… other things/

'Command it? This… this going-places thing? You're saying there's some kind of order to it? I can control it?

And as for doing other things: frankly, that worries me. You're beginning to sound a lot like these E-Branch people/

'How's your math?' The other turned his back on the house, looked out over the star-shot river of ice.

'My math?' Jake's bewilderment grew apace.

'Your numbers, your reckoning/

'I don't get short-changed, if that's what you mean/

'We should talk to Mobius/ said Harry. 'Except we can't, for he's long gone. That's a problem. So I suppose you'll have to learn it parrot-fashion. From me. And that could be a problem in its own right, because what I do now is pretty much instinctive, intuitive/

'And not very accurate/ said Jake. 'And probably dangerous, too. What good's all this jumping about if it doesn't get you where you want to go?'

'But it does/

'But not this time!' Jake waved a hand at the house. 'You said so yourself/

'Uh-uh/ Harry shook his head. 'You're all confused. You keep forgetting that this is only a dream — and your dream at that! I can guide these subconscious thoughts of yours, I can aim them, but I'm not flying you. I'm just the co-pilot. Deep inside you want to know about me, my times, places, and history. That's what's driving all of this, your need to know. So give me a little help to move on, won't you? I can't concentrate to best effect in this location. I'm not at all comfortable here/

'You didn't need help the first time/ Jake reminded him, 'when you moved us from daylight to night, from the river bank to this place, and—'

'—And when you didn't expect it/ the other pointed out. 'But it's this mind of yours. It resists me — resists psychic or metaphysical interference — and its resistance grows stronger all the time. Maybe that's another reason why I was drawn to you: because you were a rare one with a talent of your own, if not all your own, just waiting to be developed. In fact a great many people have one sort of ESP-ability or another; in most of them it's usually stillborn, incapable of further development. But I suspect that as esper begets esper the powers of the mind will come more and more into their own. Evolution, Jake: that was how it happened to me, and also how it happened in Sunside. Szgany shields are powerful, too. They have to be, or the Szgany would be extinct. In you it was dormant, waiting for an opportunity to break out. But now that it has been awakened — perhaps by contact with me, my dart — or then again by E-Branch…'

'Your dart? That really was you, then?' Jake was managing to absorb some of this, at least.

'Part of me, something of me. Awareness, Jake, awareness! Do you know the easiest way to magnetize a piece of iron? You throw it in with a lot of big magnets, that's how. And as for you—'

'I was thrown in at the deep end,' said Jake.

The other nodded. 'Apparently. So now if you'll only relax a little, we'll move on.'

And Jake relaxed…

To anyone else these time and location shifts might be unnerving: from a summer day on the river, to a moonlit winter night, to a nightlight in a tiny garret room. Unnerving even if they worked as intended, but this time it seemed something had gone wrong. For in the little room where the dreamer now found himself he was on his own and there was no sign of his host. (His ghost?) But Jake — one of those rare types who can often distinguish between dreams and reality — wasn't too concerned. If anything he was pleased. Or rather he was glad on the one hand (for the dream had been getting out of hand) and a little disappointed on the other. Just when he'd thought he was getting somewhere, learning something…

But you still are, said Harry.

Startled, Jake looked all about. But he looked too quickly

and saw nothing. And at the same time it dawned on him that he hadn't so much heard Harry's voice as felt it. 'Telepathy?' he said. 'Does that mean you didn't make it? In which case, where the hell are you?'

I'm over here, said Harry. Sucked into the most innocent of places. Innocent for the time being, anyway.

The 'over here' was a direction-finder as clear as and clearer than any voice. And now that Jake looked again he saw what he'd missed the first time: a cot, standing on rockers in the corner of the small room, where the eaves came down low. And lowering his head a little, he stepped towards it.

Within the cot, an infant; the baby had kicked himself free of a soft woollen blanket, lay naked and chubby, exposed except for diapers. His face was angelic, and his eyes—

'You!' said Jake.

Different times, different Harry Keoghs, said the other.

'But a baby, you?'

Well, I was, once upon a time! But what you're looking at… no, it isn't me. On the other hand, I am in here. For this is a time when I was incorporeal, Jake, and my son's mind was like a black hole. It sucked me in, saved me until I could become someone else.

'He… he has your eyes,' said Jake, because there was no other way to answer what he'd just heard. And yet it did ring a bell, for lan Goodly had tried to tell him something similar.

He has my mind, too! Harry told him, gurgling happily — or unhappily? — in his cot. His and mine both. And unless I'm mistaken we've arrived at a very bad time.

'What, again?'

I was looking for innocence and found it. But if I'm right, that's just about to end. You see, this is the time, almost to the moment, when Harry Jr moves on, becomes The Dweller. Which in turn means—

A woman's voice cried out from an adjacent room in the garret flat. A cry of uttermost terror! But:

Don't panic, said Harry, despite that his own mental voice was filled with urgency now. That's his mother, but things are well under control. And we're almost out of here. Before that, though… Jake, I need the names of these invaders, the creatures I've seen crossing your life-thread in Mobius time. If you know who they are, I can probably trace their histories to discover their weaknesses, maybe work out some way for you to deal with them.

(Sounds of crashing furniture came from the other room, and a single shrill cry: No!' Followed by a dull thud, a low moan, and silence… for a moment. Then a padding, and a hoarse, low panting. Sounds such as an animal might make. A large animal.)

Their names! cried Harry in Jake's mind.

'Names?' Jake answered, his eyes on the door where it stood slightly ajar. 'Lords Malinari and Szwart, and the Lady Vavara: Wamphyri out of Starside.' He might just as easily have uttered an invocation.

Almost wrenched from its hinges, the door crashed inwards, and in a moment Jake's dream became a shrieking, hellish nightmare! 'What…?.'' he gasped. And:

Yulian Bodescu! the Necroscope's revenant sighed in Jake's mind.

The thing framed in the doorway was or had been a man; it wore a man's clothing and stood upright, however forward-leaning. Its arms were… long! And the hands at the ends of those arms were huge and clawlike, with projecting nails. The thing's face was something unbelievable. It could have been the face of a wolf, but it was almost hairless and there were certain anomalies that suggested a bat-like origin. The monster's ears grew flat to the sides of its misshapen head; they too were bat-like and projected higher than the rearward-sloping, elongated skull. Its nose — or rather its snout — was mobile, wrinkled, convoluted, with black and gaping nostrils. The thing's skin was ridged, looked scaly; its yellow, crimson-pupilled eyes were deep-sunken in black sockets. And as for its jaws, its teeth!

The creature — Yulian Bodescu? — ignored Jake, loped to the cot, and crouched over it. And the light in his or its eyes had the glow of molten sulphur, the fires of hell fuelled by eager anticipation! Taloned hands were already reaching for the helpless infant as Jake tried to snatch at a gun that was no longer there. Uttering a strangled curse, he leaped to the attack… or would have, except his limbs seemed locked in place.

A nice gesture, but useless, Harry told him. And anyway, in the waking world it would only serve to get you killed! This is a scene from my past, Jake. Obviously we survived it, myself and my son both, but I fancy your dream won't. So one last word before we part: next time, try to be easier to reach…

The scene warped, began to melt away even as Jake strove to move his body — a single muscle, a fingertip — and failed miserably. He stood poised, inert, desperate to go to the infant's aid despite what the Necroscope had told him. He tried to shout a warning, managed a hoarse croak, a clotted gurgle, and all in vain. For everything was dissolving away. Terror, utter horror, can bring a man awake even when he knows he's only dreaming.

The last thing Jake saw before he surfaced was the beast: on its knees beside the cot, mad with frustrated rage, tearing the bedclothes to shreds. But of the baby Harry himself, nothing at all…

And Jake gave a small glad cry and woke up. For somehow in the moment before waking he knew — he'd been given to know — where the infant had gone.

Along the Mobius route to E-Branch, of course.

Where else?