Brian Lumley - Necroscope - Invaders

'To more than one,' Liz corrected him. And now that she'd got started, she quickly went on, 'But you know how dreams are supposed to happen in the last few minutes before you wake up? Well, not this one. It started the moment he fell asleep, went on until he woke up. And it was more than just a dream, Ben.'

The other's face was grey now, gaunt with the sudden, sure knowledge of what Liz was about to tell him. He knew, but asked her anyway. 'Who was Jake talking to?'

'To Harry Keogh,' she answered, 'and to someone else who I didn't know and don't want to know, ever. I couldn't read him — he was a complete blank — but I could sense his presence like a sick taste in my throat. And just the opposite to him, a little

earlier there'd been a third presence like… like a breath of fresh air. She was someone I'd never known, who I wish I had.'

'It was Zek!' Trask groaned. 'He was talking to Zek. Jake was talking to Zek, through Harry.' And clasping Liz's hands in his: 'Liz, what was she saying? What did Zek say?'

'I don't know,' she shook her head, wanted to put her arms round him but couldn't for fear it would crack him up. And anyway, they wouldn't be Zek's arms. 'I got something of what Jake was saying — though very little, because he didn't say much — but nothing of what the others actually said. That was a void.'

lan Goodly said, 'Of course it was. You heard Jake because he's alive. That was your telepathy working, Liz. But Harry and the others… they're a different category, and they were in a different mode.'

'Deadspeak, yes,' Trask murmured, gaunt and visibly shaken where he let his head flop back against the seat's headrest and closed his eyes. 'And whether I like it or not, it looks like I now have to accept it. Jake is our new Necroscope, and Harry is introducing him to… to people who'll be able to help him. As for this numbers thing that Jake was talking about when he woke up — the difficulty he seemed to be having — I think that can mean only one thing.'

Trask looked at the precog and Goodly nodded his confirmation. 'Despite that Jake's future is beyond me, uncertain now,' he said, 'still I can only go along with you. It was the Necroscope's sidereal maths, his numbers, that gave him the edge. And now it looks like the old master is trying to teach his apprentice the tricks of the trade…'

The safe house set aside for E-Branch use was in the New Marchant Park district, north of the city. An ugly two-storey affair, it had aluminium cladding designed and painted in a rather poor imitation of timber; Brisbane no longer favoured wooden structures of any kind.

The house was set back from the road up a short palm-lined drive; its gate was remote-controlled from inside the lead limo and opened into a featureless garden. Two medium-sized, innocuous-looking saloon cars stood on a gravel drive in front of the house. In fact they were fitted with bullet-proof windows, heavily-plated bodywork, hidden roll-bars and other anti-crash/anti-terforist devices. Short of a bomb-blast or a head-on collision at speed, no one was going to come to harm driving one of these vehicles. They were for the use of Trask and his people.

Laid to lawn and enclosed within high stone walls, the garden was on a level and surrounded the house on all sides; every inch of grass (or straw as it was now) was clearly visible from the windows of both storeys. Of the house itself: it had bullet-proof, heavily curtained windows, and a security/intruder warning system second to none. In plan, the ground floor consisted of four long rooms, one on each side, each furnished and decorated in a slightly out-of-date style, with little or nothing to show that the place was anything other than a fairly expensive private dwelling house. The central room, however, which wasn't visible from the gardens, was an operational and communications nerve centre of screens and computerized equipment.

The sleeping quarters (in fact a pair of cramped dormitories with beds for up to fourteen people, or maybe eighteen at a push, and a handful of curtained-off, cell-like units for VIPs) were upstairs. And overhead on the roof, a bank of 'solar-heating panels' (tinted windows) concealed an array of hi-tech communications aerials and dishes.

The agent-chauffeurs showed Trask and his crew of six over the house, asked how they could help them settle in or if there was anything else they needed. Trask checked with Jimmy Harvey and Paul Arenson — in their element as they switched on and got acquainted with the gadgets in the ops room — and Arenson told him:

'We're fully compatible throughout. Give us ten minutes to hook our stuff up to this lot, and we'll have the HQDuty Officer up there on that big screen so clear you'll think you're in London.'

'Scrambled?' Trask wasn't that easily satisfied.

'As per SOPs, yes,' said the other.

At which Trask thanked the ASI men (Australian Special Intelligence), who headed back to the airstrip to connect with incoming Chopper Two's military commanders and three more members of Branch ground staff. Once they were in, and until the slower back-up squads of Australian SAS types had arrived and taken up their tactical locations, the advance party was on its own…

In fact, it took the technicians half an hour to complete their hook-up. Meanwhile an uncharacteristically subdued Liz had brewed a pot of Earl Grey for Trask and herself, coffee for Jake and the others. Goodly had taken his coffee through into ops. Trask was enjoying his tea in one of the living rooms while poring over a small-scale map of the Queensland/New South Wales border areas. It was somewhere there, in the vicinity of the border, that the locator Chung had detected mindsmog, probably due to the mental activity of a master vampire, Wamphyri! Probably, but not definitely, not with one hundred per cent certainty; the Branch had long since discovered psychic 'hotspots' where a proliferation of lesser, human ESP talents could produce the same result. It had been David Chung's 'hunch', however, that this time it was the real thing, which the synchronous 'coincidence' of vampire lieutenant Bruce Trennier's death had seemed to confirm.

Jake took his coffee over to where Trask worked, watched him use a red highlighter to plot a dotted line along the border from Stanthorpe to Coolangatta, then circle the whole area in a ring of pale red ink. As Trask looked up from what he was doing, Jake lifted an enquiring eyebrow.

'If our target is here/ Trask explained, 'and if he has established himself, then he's somewhere inside this ring. Personally, I fancy he is. I've known David Chung for a long time and he doesn't make too many mistakes. It was Chung who discovered Trennier. Once we had an approximate location, we checked with the local police and picked up on a handful of disappearances — Trennier's recruits, those creatures we killed at the Old Mine gas station. That one was fairly easy; in a region as thinly populated as the Gibson Desert, people are wont to take notice when their kith and kin cease to exist! But here in the east, on the coastal strip…' He paused, glanced again at the map, shook his head.

'Densely populated,' Jake nodded. 'And that circle you've drawn covers, what — maybe five, six thousand square miles?'

'Closer to eight,' Trask corrected him glumly. 'And folks disappear around here every other half-hour, about the same as they do in similar areas of population all over the world.'

Lardis Lidesci had been talking to Liz. Now he came over, put a gnarled finger on the map and growled, 'These?' 'Mountains,' Trask answered.

'Huh!' Lardis grunted. 'Thought so. And the border follows the mountains, right?'

'In part,' Trask nodded. 'A natural boundary, yes.'

'An wnnatural boundary, in Sunside/Starsidef Lardis said. 'But there again, the Barrier Mountains are different entirely, and they never knew sunlight such as these mountains have seen. But beggars, and even the Wamphyri, can't be choosers. Not in a world like this. So there you are. And now maybe you can narrow it down.'