Brian Lumley - Necroscope - Invaders

Trask paused for breath, and Lardis Lidesci said, '—Then he'll send me to stop you flapping them — perhaps permanently!' The Old Lidesci stood in the narrow doorway, holding his machete to his chest, thumbing its blade and turning it in his hand to make it reflect the Ops Room's lights into the fat man's eyes. 'Twenty-seven notches, remember, Miller? But in your case, I'd just love to make it twenty-eight.'

Miller flinched a little but his expression didn't change. And again he blurted, 'You… you… you!'

'Obviously I haven't made myself clear,' Trask sighed. And to Jake: 'See if there's a spare bunk room back there, will you? And lock this fuckhead safely inside it!'

And that was that, for the moment.

Finally, they could all get some sleep. To some, a jplessing…

But Jake Cutter didn't much care for sleep. For some time now, in fact since his weird escape almost a week ago, sleeping had been a problem. Oh, he could do it, and he could do with it — indeed, his eyes felt heavy from the lack of it — but he didn't want to do it. Because when he went to sleep, that was when the Other woke up. That bloody Other, that one who was there in the back of his mind. And when Jake slept… why, then he couldn't be sure that his dreams were his at all.

He hadn't told Ben Trask about it, mainly because he suspected that Trask would be interested. It was the relationship that was developing between them: just as the Head of E-Branch continued to hold things back, so did Jake Cutter. In his book trust was something that could only work if it was mutual.

And so he was left to face it on his own, and sleep was a necessity he avoided as best he could while yet recognizing, of course, that it was a necessity. It wouldn't be so bad — or so he told himself— if only he could remember what these troubled dreams of his were about afterwards, when he was awake; or, then again, maybe it would. And maybe that was why he couldn't remember them: because he didn't want to…

Lardis Lidesci sat with Jake a while, heaped a little wood on the dying fire, opened a can of sausages and beans in tomato sauce and ate them cold. The Old Lidesci smacked his lips appreciatively. 'Some of the things in this world…' he said, then started again, '—hell no, most of 'em.' — I could do without. But a can-opener and a can of beans…' he grinned, smacked his lips again, and shook his head. 'Well, these beans and the meat in these sausage things, they're a sight easier on these gnarly old tusks of mine than roasted shad, I can tell you!' 'Shad's a fish,' Jake said, tiredly.

'In this world, sure,' Lardis nodded. 'But the first time I see a fish pull a caravan… I'll quit drinking plum brandy, and that's a vow/' He held the empty can in one hand, the can-opener in the other, looked at each in turn admiringly, burped and uttered a sigh. 'But since my people don't have cans, what good's a can-opener?' 'You and Trask could drive a man mad,' Jake told him without looking up. 'You come up with this weird stuff right out of the blue, as if I'm supposed to know what the hell you're talking about! I mean, I've seen enough now to know this isn't some gigantic leg-pull, so what the hell is it?'

'Hell's just about right,' Lardis grunted, creaking to his feet. He laid a hand on Jake's shoulder. 'But, son, take my word for it: Ben's not trying to drive you mad, and neither am I. It could be we say these things hoping you'll recognize something, hoping you'll perhaps remember.'

There was something in Lardis's gruff old voice that caused Jake finally to look at him. 'But remember what?' he said.

And it was as if they stared deep into each other's souls. So that for a moment — just for a moment — it seemed that they had known each other, oh, for quite some time. Then Lardis nodded, and as though he had read Jake's mind said:

'Other times, maybe? Other places?'

'Times and places?' Though Jake tried hard to understand, still it was beyond him. 'Make sense, can't you?' There was no anger now, just a need to know.

'A time on Starside, perhaps,' Lardis said, still staring hard at Jake, 'when a man and his changeling son laid waste to the aeries of the Wamphyri? Or a time when the same man lay in the arms of a wonderful woman, whose name was Nana Kiklu. Or a time when we met — met for the last time, that man and I — in the ruins of The Dweller's garden, when it was already far too late for him…'

Lardis's words conjured pictures that came and went. They meant something — Jake knew that much at least — but they were monochrome things; they flickered like the frames of some ancient silent movie… jerky scenes and twitching puppet figures. And despite that Jake thought he recognized some of them, still it was as if he saw them through someone else's eyes:

He looked down on a plain of boulders, lit silver-grey beneath a tumbling moon, where distant spires climbed to a sky of ice-chip stars. And that alien sky was alive with flying beasts whose weird shapes…! God, those shapes! Designs not of Nature but of Nightmare!

As quickly as it had come the scene was gone, disappeared, and another took its place.

A garden — The garden? — where a younger Lardis stood by a wall and gazed upon a scene of desolation. A windmill's crumpled vanes slumped all lopsided atop a skeletal, tottering timber tower; some of the roofs of low stone dwellings hadfalien in; the trout pools were green with algae., and the greenhouses were tangles of shattered frames, leaning or fallen flat, with clumps of bolted vegetation sprouting through their torn plastic sheeting.

The pictures continued to flicker and blur, and the oddly young Lardis turned jerkily to stare at Jake… or at the one gazing back at him through Jake's eyes. But in this not-so-Old Lidesci's eyes there was fear, and in his hands a shotgun that came swinging,frame byjlickeringframe — click, clickety-click — in Jake's direction. And the look in Lardis's eyes was no longer fear, or not entirely, but fear combined with deadly intent! Abruptly, the scene changed:

To the straining face of a handsome woman. Handsome, yes, but by no means beautiful — yet beautiful, too, in her way. Her body was beautiful, certainly. And hands (Jake's handsP) on her breasts where they lolled in his face. And her breath.like Jire in his (or some other's?) flared, nostrils, and. the sweat of her passion as slippery and hot on his hands as the wet core of her womanhood where it sheathed his jerking flesh. Nana?

'Nana!' Jake exclaimed, as the scene slipped from memory — but his memory? — and he found himself seated by the campfire, his hands before his face, perhaps to fondle (whose? What was her name?) the handsome woman's breasts, anyway, or perhaps to ward off Lardis Lidesci's shotgun. Well, there was the old man, sure enough, but now more surely the 'Old' Lidesci as Jake knew him; and he had no shotgun but a strange satisfied look on his face.

'And it's Nana, is it?' Lardis said, with a knowing nod, as Jake's mind swam back into focus and he slowly lowered his trembling hands. 'Took you back a ways, didn't I, my young friend?'

'What… what did you do to me?' Jake whispered, the words sighing out of him.

'I have an ancestor's seer's blood in me,' Lardis answered. 'It smells things out. And I think that it has smelled you out, too, Jake Cutter. For just as this art of my forebears has been passed down to me, so something has been passed to you. It's in you, man.'

Not in your blood, as it was in Nestor's and Nathan's blood, but buried in your mind and your soul for sure!' And now the look on the Gypsy's face was one of awe as much as anything else.

'It's in me, yes,' Jake agreed, knowing it was so. And then, coming very close to desperation, 'But what is it, Lardis? What is it?'

The other shook his head. 'No, no. Ben wouldn't want me to say any more. Indeed, he'd nag that I've already said too much! It will have to take its own good time, that's all. But what's in will out, of that you can be sure. And now, goodnight to you, Jake Cutter.' With which he backed off, and like the wild thing he was faded into the night…