Brian Lumley - Necroscope - Invaders

Liz glanced at her watch. 'Five minutes/ she said. And as at a signal the intercom began buzzing.

The pilot was on the earphones saying: 'Message from Callsign One. The mindsmog has been "awake" but more or less static for some time. Now it's on the move, but only locally. Callsign One is also mobile. His ETA the target area is five minutes.'

Trask answered, 'Tell him roger that. We'll see him there, and not to forget his nose-plugs.' Then, turning to the bulk of the helicopter party, 'And you mustn't forget yours.'

They hadn't forgotten. Aerosol sprays were hissing; a fine garlic mist filled the air, settling on everyone's clothing; it was almost a pleasure to insert filter plugs like fat cigarette tips deep into their nostrils…

In Xanadu, from a position some two hundred feet up the almost sheer rock wall of the mountainside, Lord Malinari of the Wamphyri looked down on the sprawling dark cobweb of the deserted resort, and at the single road that wound its serpentine route up the steep mountain contours to Xanadu's gates.

Malinari's vantage point was a roughly-hewn 'room' carved from the solid rock at the head of a natural chimney. When Xanadu was being built, it had been Jethro Manchester's intention to create a special entertainment here. There was to have been a ski-lift or cable-car from the gardens up to this point, and a series of aquachutes back down to the pools. The chimney had been fitted with a spiralling service-and/or emergency-staircase behind a facade constructed to match the flanking cliffs, so disguising the chimney's vertical fault, and work had commenced on this room or landing stage. At which point technical difficulties had caused the project to be abandoned.

Now the chimney was Lord Malinari's bolthole from Xanadu. From this window he would fly out on the night

wind, and glide down to a place in which he had long since secreted a cache of clothing, money and other necessaries to speed him on his way to his next venture. But not before he ensured that the chase ended here, and that this E-Branch had suffered such losses as to finish it forever, or at least slow it down until his, Vavara's, and Szwart's greater scheme was brought into play…

Malinari looked down on Xanadu and smiled a hideous smile. If only he could be down there to see the mayhem. But that way he might find himself caught up in all of the destruction, and that was out of the question. As for Xanadu itself:

Oh, he might bemoan a very little the waste of this place… but not for very long. For the world was a wider place far, and his plans of conquest of far greater scope.

A shame that his 'garden' with its special 'crop' must be discovered — especially now that it had been nourished so recently. Or then again, perhaps it would not be found; for it was after all hidden away, in the subterranean darkness that suited it so very well. In which case it would lie there, all unattended and dormant for now, only to flourish later in its own good time. For what Malinari had seeded would not die unless it were put down, deliberately and utterly destroyed. Ah, the tenacity of the Great Vampire, and of his works!

As for the last of Malinari's human watchdogs: the spiderlike, gangling Garth Santeson was by now no more. He had served his purpose the moment he warned of E-Branch's arrival here, an intrusion that Malinari had been expecting ever since his lieutenant Bruce Trennier died the true death some few days ago far in the western desert, and of which he'd had warning apart from and since Trennier's demise, not alone from Garth Santeson.

A warning, aye, and delivered by a seeming idiot! But even an idiot may have his uses. Malinari had certainly found a good use for that one…

But poor Trennier, the manner of his passing. Malinari remembered it well, those last few moments of the man's miserable life: the faithful servant crying his agonies, and Malinari the Mind, the master, feeling something of those agonies even here, in Xanadu:

The/ire! That awesome, all-consuming, withering fire that melted even metamorphic flesh, exploded bone, liquefied sinew, and reduced all to ashes! It had lasted a while — the pain, too, Trennier's pain — until Malinari had been obliged to shut it out of his mind. But through the jet of blistering heat that stripped Trennier's flesh from his body and finally blinded and destroyed him, Malinari had recognized some of the faces of his lieutenant's tormentors. The face of Ben Trask, remembered from the mind ofZek Foener, and that of lan Goodly, yet another man of weird talents…

But if only Malinari had had longer with the Foener woman. There had been so much more that he might have learned (such as the nature of their skills, these men of esoteric talents), and so very much more that he would have enjoyed… of that beautiful woman herself, perhaps, and not only her mind.

Well, too late for that now — too late from the moment he hurled her down that shaft into oblivion — but at least he had fathomed something of the dangers of this world. Especially the greatest danger of all, which was E-Branch.

And now they had found him… as he had known they would, against which inevitability he'd long since taken ingenious and even marvellous precautions.

On a board bolted to the wall close to Malinari's 'window' (which was simply a large hole in the moulded concrete facade), a master switch stood in the 'off position beside a series of smaller electrical switches set in a roughly oblong array. The array was a precise match for Xanadu itself, its concentric pattern of switches duplicating the cobweb design of the resort in the gloom of the mountain saddle.

Now, waiting there in his secret bolthole, Malinari threw the master switch. There was a low, answering hum of power, but nothing more. And his slender fingers were impatient where they fluttered over the smaller switches — those electrical messengers of instantaneous death — as he gloatingly rehearsed a certain sequence:

'First the outer chalets, to close them in. Then the inner structures, to catch them where they run. And when finally they think they have me "trapped" in my night-dark dome…' His hand trembled with pent anticipation over the central switch.

'A pleasure dome, aye. But for my pleasure, not theirs!'

He laughed a coughing laugh, long and low… then paused abruptly. Down there, coming into view along the approach road toward Xanadu's gates: a vehicle. The night was dark now — but night and darkness were Malinari's greatest allies — and that vehicle with its lowered, carefully probing lights; the coiled-spring tension in its vengeful passengers!

Malinari sensed it, their human bloodlust — or what passed for bloodlust in men — and laughed again. Bloodlust? Why, Nephran Malinari had pissed thicker blood than coursed through the veins of whelps such as these!

And with his telepathic probes concentrating on the vehicle, he felt what its occupants felt:

Fear, of the Great Unknown that was Malinari. Oh, he recognized and relished it! Primal fear of the night and what the night might bring, its roots burrowing like worms in every human fibre, revenant of cavern-dwelling ancestors. Fear in the face of an alien threat, the menace of the blood-beast!

But tempering the fear, holding it at bay, there was also a wall of grim determination. And bolstering that blind determination, the sure knowledge of vastly superiorfirepower.

Oh, really…?

And again Malinari laughed, but a second later hissed and grimaced, and clasped his handsomely alien head in wildly trembling hands. It was the pain — those lightning-flashes of terrible pain which ever accompanied any excessive use of his mentalism — the pain that came from searching out or listening to the thoughts of so many others, and of suffering the tumult of their massed emotions, their thronging dreams and fancies. For weirdly mutated minds were gathering here now, and the greater their talents the more piercing the pain in his head.