Brian Lumley - Necroscope - Invaders

The warning was timely. Even with his eyes tightly closed, and sheltered by the column, still Trask saw the blinding white light blossoming through the membrane of his eyelids… and at the same time he heard and indeed felt the terrific report that shook the floor and shattered glass fixtures into flying shards. Then there was a stunned silence and cordite stench, and at the last a mewling whimper rising to a scream.

A tattered male figure came staggering, wreathed in smoke, himself smoking. His eyes were feral in the gloom. And the Major, Trask, and Goodly didn't wait to see what he would do or if he was capable of doing anything, but cut him down in a withering crossfire.

'We got him! We got Malinari!' The Major stood up, started forward up the marble steps. But as the precog and Trask joined him, the latter was already shaking his head.

'That isn't Malinari,' Trask coughed a denial into the now smoky atmosphere. 'And this isn't over yet. The elevator's gone and we're trapped. Trapped by the very creature we're trying to destroy…'

His words were portentous of the sudden thunder, the gouting fire and blazing light that at once rocked the night beyond the shattered windows. The three men looked at each other, then hurriedly crossed the floor to look out and down on a scene out of Dante's Inferno. On the far perimeter of Xanadu, disintegrating chalets erupted in red and yellow ruin, and fireballs lifted dieir mushroom heads to the night sky. But Trask was right: it wasn't over yet.

For as the three stood there watching, impotent to act, so midway between the burning perimeter and the casino a second series of terrific explosions, then a third, ripped through the shattered resort. Concentric rings of destruction were closing in on the Pleasure Dome, hurling flaming debris aloft and turning night to day.

'Now he springs the trap,' Trask husked. 'Xanadu is no use to him now and he'll destroy it, and us with it. So this is it. We're next!'

'The place is wired, mined!' The Major's face was ashen. 'I should have know it from the very first explosion, the one that took one of my men.'

'Don't blame yourself/ said Trask. 'We've all been equally stupid. And that bastard is sitting somewhere watching us, knowing that by now \ve know. I don't suppose there's any point asking you to call the chopper down?'

'Wouldn't if I could,' the other shook his head. 'No way — not into this lot. But in any case my radio's been out since we got into the lift. Some kind of electrical interference.'

As he finished speaking, so lan Goodly reeled and caught at the Major's arm to steady himself. And, Jake!' the precog gasped. 'My God, Ben — it's Jake!'

'Jake?' Trask repeated him. 'What about him?'

'He… he's on his way here,' Goodly answered. 'But so is the elevator!'

'Jake's in the elevator?' Trask failed to understand. But:

'No,' Goodly shook his head. 'Jake is in the Mobius Continuum. The bomb is in the elevator! When I staggered just now, it was because I'd seen it going off— but seen it at close range, even this close — and it's due to happen any time now!'

The Major might have asked what they were raving about but didn't have time. In a sudden stirring of smoky air, Jake stepped out of the Mobius Continuum with Liz clinging to him like a leech — and at the same time the elevator pinged and its doors hissed open.

Jake and Liz were staggering, disoriented; the Major didn't know what was going on; and the precog, knowing he was about to die, couldn't take his eyes off the elevator. Ben Trask was the only one who saw the 'truth' of it and knew what to do.

'To me!' he shouted. 'To me!' And without waiting he swept them into his arms, bundled all four of them close to himself.

'What?' Jake said, completely out of the picture.

'Make a door!' Trask shouted at him. 'For God's sake, make a goddamned door! Make a big one, and I mean right now!'

And Jake, and Korath, they made a door.

The blast took them right through it, all five of them (or six, with Korath), through the door into the Mobius Continuum. And in the hot blast and the fire that followed them, Jake knew only one safe place to take them. He remembered those suntanned, near-naked bodies sprawling indolently, and the shadow of the helicopter dark on the sparkling water. And he knew the coordinates.

Down they went in one of Xanadu's pools, and coughing and spluttering they surfaced…

… In time to see Chopper One at an altitude of one hundred and fifty feet, wheeling to face the backdrop of cliffs, steadying up and sitting like a hawk on the air, and opening up with its nose cannons on no clearly discernible target.

In his once-secret hiding place, Malinari saw it, too, and didn't believe it. But as cannon-fire ripped the chimney's facade to shreds he had to believe it. And while he still had time he tripped the rest of his switches. Then, with his thin clothing tearing under the pressure of madly metamorphosing flesh — and his bolthole hideaway collapsing around him — Malinari made a headlong dive through his window of observation, out into the night.

For a moment the pilot of Chopper One saw him: the jetcopter's thermal-imaging highlighted a shifting, flattening, morphing blob of a figure that at first plummeted, quickly adopted a manta-like shape, and finally glided from view. The pilot might even have taken a shot at the thing, but powerful updraughts from the blazing hell that was Xanadu were rocking his machine, forcing him to take action and climb out of danger.

And as Jake and the others left the pool, so Nephran Malinari shot like an arrow overhead. He might easily have been some primal pterodactyl out of Earth's prehistory, but was in fact a predatory creature from an alien, parallel world. Trask saw him — his crimson eyes, the dark blur of his passing — and a moment later heard his taunting laughter echoing from on high.

Hearing that laughter, and remembering Zek — unable to forget her, ever — all Trask wanted was to stand there and let his hate out, and will this monster to a terrible death. He knew he couldn't, but he had never wanted anything so much in his life.

In close proximity like this — so intent upon each other — Malinari had 'heard' Trask and sent back:

Hatred such as that is catching, Mr Trask. It breeds hatred! As for willing me to death: we must see whose will is the strongest, ehP Not here and now, no, but in another place, another time. This was nothing hut a skirmish, to get your measure. But if you would live tojight another day, first you must survive the night. Alas, I don't think so. If you survive, however, do not despair. For I shall he waiting, Mr Trask, I shall he waiting…

All of them with Trask heard it — that dark voice in their heads and its taunting message — but especially Liz. She heard it, and saw beyond it. Malinari's plan: flight, to a safe haven in another place, another country.

She might even have discovered which one, but Nephran Malinari recognized her presence and withdrew snarling into mental obscurity. Where his evil telepathic voice had been, only mindsmog remained, spiralling after him into a mental void.

And Malinari was gone…

But to Trask and the others it seemed the danger was still present. Xanadu was burning end to end; a series of devastating

explosions continued to rock the place; Malinari's bubble aerie on top of the Pleasure Dome was no more, and showers of plastic and glass were still raining to earth. Scraps of blazing debris drifted across the night sky, and clods of earth and grass were fountaining in the garden where Chopper One had made its initial landing. A lucky mistake on Malinari's part, that last. One of his few errors.

But the Pleasure Dome itself, the casino, was still standing, and now the precog lan Goodly cried, 'The big one is still to come. It's the casino. A set piece of delayed action — like the pause before the last big firework at the end of the show!'