Lumley, Brian - Vampire World 2 - The Last Aerie

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THE OCCURRENCES OF THAT NIGHT

SIXTEEN YEARS AGO HAD ALL COME

RUSHING BACK IN A FLOOD OF VIVID

MEMORIES, AND THE BEAT OF TRASK'S

HEART HAD PICKED UP

SPEEDTOMATCHTHESUDDENFLOWOF

ADRENALINE.

'David?' he said, making it a question.

Chung answered with a grim nod, simply

that, and whisked him into the elevator. But as

the doors slid shut on them and they were

alone, he uttered those words which Trask

most dreaded to hear: 'He's back.'

Trask didn't want to believe it. 'He?' he

husked, knowing full well who he must be, the

only one he could be. 'Harry?'

Chung nodded, shrugged helplessly, seemed

lost for words. 'Something of him,' he answered

at last, 'who or whatever he is now. But yes,

Ben, I'm talking about Harry. Something of

Harry Keogh has come back to us .. .'

VAMPIRE WORLD II

THE LAST AERIE

Exploring New Realms in Science

Fiction/Fantasy Adventure

Titles already published or in preparation:

Echoes of the Fourth Magic by R. A. Salvatore

When a U.S. submarine set out from Miami and was drawn off-

course by the murderous magic of the Devil's Triangle, Officer Jeff

DelGiudice survived the terrifying plunge through the realms. But his

good fortune had a shocking consequence. He found himself

stranded in a strange world awaiting its redeemer. Here four

survivors ruled the corner of the once-great Earth with the ways of

white magic ... until one of them tasted the ecstasy of evil. Thalasi,

Warlock of Darkness, had amassed an army to let loose death and

chaos, and only the hero promised in the guardians' legends can

defeat such power. Now Jeff must face his destiny -in a dangerous,

wondrous quest to lead humankind's children back to the realms of

Light.

The Earthsea Trilogy by Ursula Le Guin

Wizard of Earthsea • The Tombs of Atuan

The Farthest Shore

As long ago as forever and as far away as Selidor, there lived the

dragonlord and Archmage, Sparrowhawk, the greatest of the great

wizards — he who, when still a youth, met with the evil shadow-

beast; he who later brought back the Ring of Erreth-Akbe from the

Tombs of Atuan; and he who, as an old man, rode the mighty

dragon Kalessin back from the land of the dead. And then, the

legends say, Sparrowhawk entered his boat, Look/or, turned his

back on land, and without wind or sail or oar moved westward over

sea and out of sight.

BRIAN LUMLEY

A ROC BOOK

ROC

Published by the Penguin Group

Penguin Books Ltd, 27 Wrights Lane, London W8 5TZ, England Penguin

Books USA Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, USA

Penguin Books Australia Ltd, Ringwood, Victoria, Australia

Penguin Books Canada Ltd, 10 Alcorn Avenue, Toronto, Ontario, Canada M4V 3B2

Penguin Books (NZ) Ltd, 182-190 Wairau Road, Auckland 10, New Zealand

Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: Harmondsworth, Middlesex, England

First published 1993

13579 10 8642

The moral right of the author has been asserted

Of all the bars at all the conventions

in all the world, you had to walk into mine.

Here's looking at you, kid!

"**- Roc is a trademark of Penguin Books Ltd

Typeset by Datix International Limited, Bungay, Suffolk

Printed in England by Clays Ltd, St Ives pic

Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject

to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent,

re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher's

prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in

which it is published and without a similar condition including this

condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser

PART ONE

E-Branch

Harry's Passing

To the members of E-Branch, bad dreams were an

occupational hazard; it was generally accepted that

nightmares went with the work. Ben Trask, current head

of the Branch, had always had his share of bad dreams.

Indeed, since the Yulian Bodescu affair twelve years ago,

he'd had more than his share. And only half of them when

he was asleep. The sleeping ones were of the harmless

variety: they frightened but couldn't kill you. They were

engendered of the waking sort, which were very different:

sometimes they could kill and worse. Because they were

real.

As for this one, it wasn't so much a bad as a weird

dream. And weirder because Trask was wide awake,

having driven his car through the wee small hours of a

rainy night into the heart of London, and parked it

opposite E-Branch HQ . .. without knowing why. And

Trask was fussy about things like that; he generally liked

to be responsible for his actions.

It was a Sunday in mid-February of 1990, one of those

rare days when Trask could get away from his work and

switch off, or rather switch on, to the normal world which

existed outside the Branch. It should have been one of

those days, anyway. But here he was, at E-Branch HQ in

the middle of the sleeping city; and in the eye of his mind

this weird dream which wouldn't go away, this daydream

repeating over and over, like flick-

ering frames from an old monochrome movie projected

onto a window, so that he could see right through it. A

ghost film; if he blinked his eyes rapidly it would vanish,

however momentarily, and return just as soon as he

relaxed:

A corpse, smouldering, with its fire-bJackened arms

flung wide; steaming head

thrown back as in the

final

agony

of death;

tumbling end over end into a black void

shot through with thin neon bars or ribbons of blue,

green, and red light.

It was a tortured thing, yes, but dead now from all of its

torments and no longer suffering; unknown and

unknowable as the weird waking dream which it was.

And yet there was something morbidly

familiar

about it;

so that watching it, Trask's face was grey and his lips

drawn back in a silent snarl from his strong, slightly

yellow teeth. If only the corpse would stop tumbling for a

moment and come into focus, give him a clearer shot of

the blistered, silently screaming face ...

Trask got out of his car into a sudden squall of leaden

raindrops, as if some Invisible One had dipped his hands

in water and scooped it into Trask's face. And muttering a

curse as he turned up the collar of his overcoat, he

glanced at the building across the street, craning his neck

to peer up at the high windows of E-Branch. Up there he

expected to see a light - just one, burning in a window set

centrally in the length of the entire upper storey which

was the Branch - lighting the room which housed the

Duty Officer through his lonely night vigil. Well, he saw

the Duty Officer's light, right enough, and keeping it

company, three or four more which he hadn't expected.

But he saw more than the lights, for even the rain couldn't

wash away the tortured, monotonously tumbling figure

from the screen of his mind.

Trask knew that if he were someone or thing other than

who and what he was — head of a top-secret, in more

than one way esoteric security organization — that the

experience must surely scare the hell out of him. Except,

well, he'd been scared by experts. Or, he might believe he

was going mad. But there again, E-Branch was ... E-

Branch. This thing he was experiencing, it must be in his

mind, he supposed. It had to be, for there was no physical

mechanism to account for it. Or was there?

Hallucination? Well, possibly. Someone could have

got to him, fed him drugs, brainwashed him ... but to

what end? Why bring him here in the dead of night? And

why bring these other people here? (The extra lights up

there, the shiny black MG Metro pulling into the kerb,

and the bloke across the road - an E-Branch agent,

surely? - even now running through the rain towards the

Branch's back door entrance.) Why were they here?

'Sir?' A girl struggled stiffly, awkwardly out of the

Metro. She was Anna Marie English, a Branch esper.

English by name but never an English rose - nor any sort

of rose by any other name - she was enervated, pallid,

dowdy, a stray cat drowning in the rain. It was her talent,

Trask knew, and he felt sorry for her. She was

'ecologically aware'; or as she herself was wont to put it,

she was 'as one with the Earth'. When water tables

declined and deserts expanded, so her skin dried out,

became desiccated. When acid rains ate into Scandinavian

forests, her dandruff fell like snow. In her dreams she

heard whale species singing sadly of their decline and

inevitable extinction, and she knew from her aching

bones when the Japanese were slaughtering the dolphins.

A human lodestone, she tracked illicit nuclear waste,

monitored pollution, shrank from

yawning holes in the ozone as a coral polyp from a

diver's probing spearpoint. Yes, she was an 'ecopath': she

felt for the Earth and suffered all of its sicknesses, and

unlike the rest of us knew that she, too, was dying from

them.

Trask looked at her: she was twenty-four and looked

fifty. Despite his pity, perhaps paradoxically, he thought

of her in harsh, disassociated, almost disapproving terms

- thick-lensed spectacles, liver spots, hearing aid,

straggly-haired, crumpled blouse, splay-legged - and

knew he disliked her because she mirrored the decline of

the world. And that was his talent at work. Ben Trask was

a human lie-detector: he recognized a lie when he saw,

felt, heard, or otherwise perceived one as other men

recognize a slap in the face; so that conversely, in the

absence of falsehood he must acknowledge truth. Except

Anna Marie English's truth was unbearable. If

Greenpeace had her and could make the world believe in

her, they would win their case in one ... though of course

it would be lost at one and the same time. For they'd

suspect that they were too late. But Trask also knew that

it wasn't quite like that. The world was a huge creature

and had been sorely wounded, and Anna Marie English

was just too small to sustain so much damage. But while

she was suffering almost beyond endurance, the Earth

could go on taking it for a long time yet. This was Trask's

view of it, anyway. He supposed it made him an optimist,

which was something of a paradox in itself.

'Can you see it?' he said. 'Do you have any idea what

it's all about?'

She looked at him and saw a mousey-haired, green-

eyed man in his late thirties. Trask was about five feet

ten, a little overweight and slope-shouldered, and wore

what could only be described as a lugubrious expres-

sion. Perhaps it had to do with his talent: in a world

where the plain truth was increasingly hard to find, it

was no easy thing being a lie-detector. White lies, half-

truths, and downright fables came at Trask from all

directions, until sometimes he felt he didn't want to look

any more.

But Anna Marie English had her own problems.

Finally she nodded her bedraggled mop of a head. 'I see

it, yes, but don't ask me what it's all about. I woke up,

saw it, and knew I had to come here. That's all. But I've a

hunch the world's a loser yet again.' Her voice was a

coughing rasp.

'A hunch?'

This thing isn't specific to me,' she frowned. This time

I'm just ... an onlooker? It isn't hurting me. I feel for

him, yes, but his fate doesn't seem to have made much

impression on the world in general. Yet at the same

time, somehow I think it makes the world less.'

'Do you know him?'

'I feel that I should know him, certainly,' she

answered, simultaneously shaking her head. And

ruefully, 'I know that I was watching him when I should

have been watching the road. I went through two red

lights at least!'

Trask nodded, took her by the elbow and guided her

across the street. 'Let's join them and see if anyone else

has

clue.' In fact he already had more than a clue but

was unwilling to give it voice. If he was right, then just

like the ecopath he could scarcely view this

phenomenon as Earth-damaging. In fact it might even

be a relief.

With Whitehall no more than a ten minute walk away,

the torn front page from a discarded Pravda seemed

strangely out of place where it spun slowly in the

current of the flooded gutter, inching soggily and

perhaps prophetically towards the iron-barred throat of a

gurgling sump. But as if in defiance of the stinging rain,

the night, and all other distractions, the phantom

hologram continued to display itself wherever the glances

of Trask and Anna Marie English happened to fall. It was

there in the tiny unmanned foyer, playing on the neutral

grey doors of the elevator as if projected there from their

eyeballs; and when the doors hissed open to admit them,

they took it with them into the cage to be carried up to the

top floor offices of E-Branch HQ.

The rest of the building was a well-known hotel; bright

lights at the front, and a uniformed doorman from the

Corps of Commissionaires sheltering from the rain under

his striped plastic canopy, or more likely inside taking a

coffee with the night clerk now that all the guests were

abed. But up here on the top floor . . .

This was a different world. And a weird one.

E-Branch: Ben Trask felt much the same about it now

as he had fourteen years ago when he was first recruited,

and as every Branch esper before and since. Alec Kyle,

an old friend and ex-Head of Branch was dead and gone

now, (was he? And his body, too? Was that what this was

all

about?) but he had come closest to it when he'd used

to say, 'E-Branch? A bloody funny outfit, Ben! Science

and sorcery — telemetry and telepathy - computerized

probability patterns and precogni-tion - gadgets and

ghosts. We have access to all of these things .. . now.'

That 'now' had qualified it. For at the time, Kyle had

been talking about Harry Keogh. And later he had

become Harry Keogh; Keogh's mind in Kyle's body,

anyway ...

The cage jerked to a halt; its doors hissed open; Trask

and the unnaturally aged 'girl', and the hologram, got out.

Hologram or phantom? Trask wondered. Gadget ...

or ghost? When he was a kid he'd believed in ghosts.

Then for a time he hadn't. Now he worked for E-Branch

and ... sometimes he wished he were a kid again. For

then it was all in the imagination.

lan Goodly, the Night Duty Officer, was waiting for

them in the corridor. Very tall, skeletally thin and

gangly, he was a prognosticator or 'hunchman'. Grey

and mainly gaunt-featured, Goodly's expression was

usually grave; he rarely smiled; only his eyes - large,

brown, warm and totally disarming - belied what must

otherwise constitute a rather unfortunate first

impression, that of a cadaverous mortician. 'Anna,' he

offered the girl a polite nod. 'Ben?'

Trask returned the unspecified query. 'Do you see it,

too?'

'We all do,' Goodly answered, his voice high-pitched

and a little shrill, but not unusually so. And before

Trask could say anything else: T guessed you'd be in.

I've told them to wait for you in the Ops room.'

'How many of them?'

Goodly shrugged. 'Everyone within a thirty mile radius.'

Trask nodded. Thanks, lan. I'll go and speak to them.

And you'd better go back to keeping watch.'

Again Goodly's shrug. 'Very well, but apart from this

it's going to be a quiet night. This thing is happening,

and soon it will be finished. And then we'll see what

we'll see.' He began to turn away.

Trask caught his arm and stopped him. 'Any ideas?'

Goodly sighed. 'I could give you . . . an "educated

guess". But I suspect you'd prefer to let it play itself

out, right?' Like all hunchmen, he was cautious about

being too specific. The future didn't like being pinned

down.

Someone had called the elevator; its doors closed and

the indicator signalled its descent. As Goodly made to

return to his watch, Trask uttered a belated, 'Right,' then

turned left along the corridor and headed for the Ops

room. And Anna Marie English limped along behind him.

In the Ops room they found their colleagues waiting

for them. In front of the briefing podium an area had

been cleared of chairs where eleven espers formed an

inward-facing circle. Trask and the girl made thirteen. A

witch's dozen, he thought, wryly. We complete the coven.

As the circle opened up and its members adjusted their

positions the better to accommodate the latecomers, so

Trask saw the point of the formation. The combined

awareness of the espers added to the hologram's

authentication: to experience the thing as a group was to

focus it, lend it definition. And the hitherto nebulous

mental projection expanded in a moment from a 3-D

picture in Trask's mind's eye to a seemingly physical,

apparently solid figure right there in front of him! But

only apparently solid, for obviously it wasn't real.

The ring formed by the espers was maybe fifteen to

eighteen feet in diameter; the location of the smouldering

corpse where it tumbled backwards, head over heels, free

of the floor, as on some invisible spit, was no more than

ten feet away from any individual viewer. If it were solid

- if it were 'here' at all - then the figure would have to be

that of a child or a dwarf. But its proportions were those

of a normal, adult human being. And so the apparition

was some kind of hologram, viewed as from a

considerably greater distance than was apparent. It was

like a scene in a crystal ball: they were seeing something

which had happened, or which

was even now in enactment, somewhere else. And more

than ever Trask believed he knew this ... victim? And

more than ever he suspected that this was a scene from

another world, even another universe.

On entering the room, the Head of Branch had noted

the identities of the eleven. There was Millicent Cleary, a

pretty little telepath whose talent was still developing.

There seemed little doubt but that one day she would be a

power in her own right, but right now she was vulnerable

- telepathy could do that to a person - and Trask thought

of her as the kid sister he'd never had. Then there was

David Chung, a hugely talented locator and server. He

was slight, wiry, slant-eyed and yellow as they come. But

he was British from birth, a Londoner, and fiercely loyal to

the Branch. All of them were loyal, or else the Branch

would fail. Chung tracked Soviet stealth subs, IRA units

in the field, drug-runners -especially the latter. Addiction

had killed his parents, which was where his talent had its

genesis. And it was still growing.

The precog Guy Teale stood to the left of Trask. Like

lan Goodly, he was 'gifted' in reading the future, a suspect

talent at best. The future didn't like being read and had

kicked back more than once. Teale was small, thin,

jumpy. Easily startled, he lived on his nerves. His

sometime partner Frank Robinson, a spotter who infallibly

recognized other espers, stood next to him. Robinson was

as blond as Teale was dark; boyish and freckled, he

looked only nineteen or thereabouts, which was seven

years short of the mark. The pair had worked with Trask

on the Keogh job some six or seven months ago; they'd

helped him corner the Necroscope in his house near

Edinburgh, and burn the place to the ground. That had

caused Harry to escape right out of this world to a place

on the other side of the Perchorsk

1110

Gate. Since then, everyone who knew the score had

prayed that he wouldn't be back. And he hadn't been ...

... Until now? Trask wondered. Is this - image - is it

Harry? And he suspected that they were all wondering

the same thing. And just like him, they'd all be glad that

it was only an image.

Paul Garvey, a full-blown telepath, stood directly

opposite Trask on the other side of the circle. He caught

Trask's eye through the rotation of the projection and

nodded almost imperceptibly. It was his

acknowledgement of Trask's thought, which Garvey had

'heard'. Yes, they were all thinking pretty much the same

thing.

Garvey was tall, well-built, and had been a good-

looking thirty-five year old. But then, that time six

months ago, he'd tackled a murderous swine called

Johnny Found and lost most of the left side of his face.

Since then some of the best plastic surgeons in England

had worked on Garvey till he looked pretty good, but a

real face is made of more than flesh. Garvey's was

mostly tissue now, and the nerves didn't connect up too

well. He could smile with the right side but not the left,

and so avoided the travesty by not smiling at all.

It had happened when they were tracking Harry

Keogh, who in turn had been tracking Found, a

necromancer whose speciality was to molest women

before and

after

they were dead. Garvey had made the

mistake of finding Harry's quarry first, that was all. But

the Necroscope had squared it; later, in a graveyard, the

police had discovered Pound's body so badly chewed up

that he was barely recognizable. And despite everything

else that was happening at the time - the fact that Harry

had been a prime target - Garvey still reckoned he owed

him for that.

As for Ben Trask, he reckoned they all owed Harry

Keogh something, the whole world. It would have been

so easy for the Necroscope to release the plague of

vampirism which he carried within himself upon all

humanity and be emperor here, with an entire planet for

his empire. But instead he'd let them hound him into exile

in an alien world of vampires, where he would be just

one more monster. Harry had let it happen, yes, before the

Thing inside him could take full control.

But whenever Trask thought back on that, on the alien

passions which had governed Harry - how he'd looked

the last time Trask saw him, in the garden of his burning

house not far from Edinburgh - then his own mixed

emotions would sort themselves out in short order, and he

would know it was for the best:

The lower half of Harry's figure had been mist-shro-

:ded, visible only as a vague outline in the opaque, milky

swirl of his vampire mist ... but the rest of him had been

all too visible. He'd worn an entirely ordinary suit of

dark, ill-fitting clothes which seemed two sizes too small

for him, so that his upper torso sprouted from the trousers

to form a blunt wedge. Framed by a jacket held together

by one straining button, the bulk of Harry's rib-cage had

been massively muscular.

His white, open-necked shirt had burst open down the

front, revealing the ripple of his muscle-sheathed ribs and

the deep, powerful throb of his chest; the shirt's collar had

looked like a crumpled frill, insubstantial around the

corded bulk of his leaden neck. His flesh was a sullen

grey, dappled lurid orange and sick yellow by leaping fire

and gleaming moonlight. And he towered all of a foot

taller than Trask, quite literally dwarfing him. But his face

—

- That had been the absolute embodiment of a waking

nightmare.' His halogen Hallowe'en eyes which had

12 13

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THEOCCURRENCESOFTHATNIGHTSIXTEENYEARSAGOHADALLCOMERUSHINGBACKINAFLOODOFVIVIDMEMORIES,ANDTHEBEATOFTRASK'SHEARTHADPICKEDUPSPEEDTOMATCHTHESUDDENFLOWOFADRENALINE.'David?'hesaid,makingitaquestion.Chungansweredwithagrimnod,simplythat,andwhiskedhimintotheelevator.Butasthedoorsslidshutonthemandtheywerealone...

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Lumley, Brian - Vampire World 2 - The Last Aerie

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