Brian Lumley - Necroscope IV - Deadspeak

It was the middle of May 1989, the tourist season only just beginning and already threatening to be a blockbuster, and the sun was a ball of fire one-third of the way up the incredibly blue dome of the sky. A 'dome' because you couldn't take it in in its entirety but must close your eyes to a squint, thus rounding off the corners and turning your periphery of vision to a shadowy curve. That was how Trevor Jordan felt about it, anyway, having thrown back maybe one or two Metaxas too many the night before. But it was early yet, just after 8:00 a.m., and he guessed he'd recover in a little while; though by the same token he knew the town would get a lot noisier, too.

Jordan had breakfasted on a boiled egg and single piece of toast and was now into his third cup of coffee — the British 'instant' variety, not the dark-brown sludge which the Greeks drank from thimble-sized cups — which he calculated was gradually diluting whatever brandy remained in his system. The trouble with Metaxa, as he'd discovered, was that it was extremely cheap and very, very drinkable. Especially while watching the nonstop belly-dancing floor-show in a place called The Blue Lagoon on Trianta Bay.

He groaned and gently fingered his forehead for the fifth or sixth time in a half-hour. 'Sunglasses,' he said to the man who sat with him, similarly attired in dressing-gown and flip-flops. 'I have to buy a pair. Christ, this glare could take your eyes out!'

'Have mine,' Ken Layard told him, grinning as he passed a pair of cheap, plastic-framed shades across their tiny breakfast table. 'And later you can buy me new ones.'

'Will you order more coffee?' Jordan groaned. 'Say, a bucketful?'

'I thought you were knocking it back a bit last night,' the other answered. 'Why didn't you tell me you'd never been to the Greek islands before?' He leaned over the balcony rail, called down and attracted the attention of a waiter serving breakfast to other early-risers on a terraced lower level, then lifted the empty coffee pot and jiggled it suggestively.

'How do you know that?' said Jordan.

'What, that this is new to you? No one who's been here before drinks Metaxa like that — or ouzo for that matter.'

'Ah!' Jordan remembered. 'We started off on ouzo!'

'You started off on ouzo,' Layard reminded him. 'I was getting atmosphere, local colour. You were getting drunk.'

'Yes, but did I enjoy myself?'

Layard grinned again, shrugged and said, 'Well… you didn't get us thrown out of anywhere.' He studied the other in his self-inflicted discomfort.

An experienced but variable telepath, Jordan could be forceful when he needed to be; usually, though, he was easy-going, transparent, an open book. It was as if he personally would like to be as readable as other people's minds were to him, as if he were trying to make some sort of physical compensation for his metaphysical talent. His face reflected this attitude: it was fresh, oval, open, almost boyish. With thinning fair hair falling forward above grey eyes, and a crooked mouth which straightened out and tightened whenever he was worried or annoyed, everyone who knew Trevor Jordan liked him. Having the advantage of knowing about it when people didn't like him, he simply avoided them. But rangy-limbed and athletic despite his forty-four years, it was a mistake to misread his sensitivity; there was plenty of determination in him, too.

They were old friends, these two, who went back a long way. They could clown with each other now because of their past, in which there'd been times when there was little or no room for clowning; times and events, in fact, so outré even in their weird world that they'd receded now to mere phantoms of mind and memory. Like bad dreams or tragedies (or even drunken nights), best forgotten.

There was nothing so deadly strange in their current mission — though certainly it was serious enough — but still Jordan realized he'd been in error the previous night. He put on the sunglasses, frowned and sat up straighter in his cane chair. 'I didn't draw attention to us or anything stupid like that?'

'Lord, no,' said the other. 'And anyway I wouldn't have let you. You were just a tourist having himself a good time, that's all. Too much sun during the day, and too much booze through the night. And what the hell, there were plenty of other Brits around who made you look positively sober!'

'And Manolis Papastamos?' Jordan was rueful now. 'He must have thought me an idiot!'

Papastamos was their local liaison man, second in command of the Athens narcotics squad, who had come across to Rhodes by hydrofoil to get to know the pair personally and see if there was anything he could do to simplify their task. But he'd also proved to be something of a hellraiser, even a liability.

'No,' Layard shook his head. 'In fact he was more under the influence than you were! He said he'd join us on the harbour wall at 10:30 to see the Samothraki dock — but I doubt it. When we dropped him off at his hotel he looked like hell. On the other hand… they do have remarkable constitutions, these Greeks. But in any case we'll be better off without him. He knows who we are but not what we are. As far as he's concerned we're part of Customs and Excise, or maybe New Scotland Yard. It would be hard to concentrate with Manolis around making conversation and creating a mental racket. I hope to God he stays in bed!'

Jordan was looking and feeling a little healthier; the sunglasses had helped somewhat; fresh coffee arrived and Layard poured. Jordan watched his easy movements and thought: Just like a big brother. He looks after me like I was a snot-nosed kid. He always has, thank God!

Layard was a locator, a scryer without a crystal ball. He didn't need one; a map would do just as well, or an inkling of his quarry's location. A year older than Jordan, he stood a blocky seventy inches tall, with a square face, dark hair and complexion, expressive, active eyebrows and mouth. Under a forehead lined from accumulated years of concentration, his eyes were very keen and (of course) far-seeing, and so darkly brown as to border on black.

Looking at Layard through and in the privacy of dark lenses, Jordan's thoughts went back twelve years to Harkley House in Devon, England, where he and the locator had formed their first real partnership and worked as a team for the very first time. Then as now they'd been members of E-Branch, that most secret of all the Secret Services, whose work was known only to a handful of 'top people'. Unlike now, however, their work on that occasion had been far less mundane. Indeed, there had been nothing at all mundane about the Yulian Bodescu affair.

Memories, deliberately suppressed for more than a decade, sprang once more into being, full-fleshed and fantastic in Jordan's ESP-endowed mind. Once more he held the crossbow in his hand, chest-high and aimed dead ahead, as he listened to the hiss of jetting water and the girl's voice humming that tuneless melody from beyond the closed door, and wondered if this were a trap. Then -

He kicked open the door to the shower cubicle — and stood riveted to the spot! Helen Lake, Yulian Bodescu's cousin, was utterly beautiful and quite naked. Standing sideways on, her body gleamed in the streaming water. She jerked her head round to stare at Jordan, her eyes wide in terror where she fell back against the shower's wall. Her knees began to buckle and her eyelids fluttered.

'But this is just a frightened girl!' he told himself-in the moment before her thoughts branded themselves on his telepathic mind:

Come on, my sweet! she thought. Ah, just touch me, hold me! Just a little closer, my sweet…

Then, jerking back away from her, he saw the carving knife in her hand and the insane glare in her demonic eyes. As she drew him effortlessly towards her and lifted her knife in a gleaming arc, so he pulled the crossbow's trigger. It was an automatic thing, his life or hers.