Brian Lumley - Necroscope IV - Deadspeak

Manolis spat out a stream of gabbled Greek curses, snatched his Beretta from its shoulder holster and transferred the speargun to his left hand. The man, thing, vampire was still coming at them out of the dark, but they saw him more clearly now. He was tall, slim, strangely ragged-looking in silhouette. He wore a wide-brimmed hat, baggy trousers, a shirt whose unbuttoned sleeves flapped loosely at the wrists. He looked for all the world like a scarecrow let down off his pole. But it wasn't crows he was scaring.

'Only… one of them?' Darcy gasped — and felt his hair stand on end as he heard pebbles sliding and clattering on the ledge behind them!

The man in the cave lunged forward; Manolis's gun flashed blindingly, deafeningly; Darcy looked back and saw a second — creature? — bearing down on them. But this one was much closer. Like his colleague in the cave he wore a floppy hat, and in its shade his eyes were yellow, viciously feral. Worse, he held a pickaxe slantingly overhead, and his face was twisted in a snarl where he aimed it at Darcy's back!

Darcy — or perhaps his talent — turned himself to meet the attack, aimed point-blank, squeezed the trigger of his speargun. The harpoon flew straight to its target in the vampire's chest. The impact brought him to a halt; he dropped his pickaxe, clutched at the spear where it transfixed him, staggered back against the wall of the cliff. Darcy, frozen for a moment, could only watch him lurching and mewling there, coughing up blood.

In the cave, Manolis cursed and fired his gun again — and yet again — as he followed his target deeper into the darkness. Then… Darcy heard an inhuman shriek followed by the slither of silver on steel, and finally the meaty thwack of Manolis's harpoon entering flesh. The sounds brought him out of his shock as he realized that both his and Manolis's weapons were now empty. He leaned to grab a harpoon from the open basket, and the man on the ledge staggered forward and kicked the whole thing, basket and contents, right off the rim!

'Jesus!' Darcy yelled, his throat hoarse and dry as sandpaper as again the flame-eyed thing turned towards him. Then the vampire paused, looked about and saw its pickaxe where it lay close to the rising cliff. It moved to pick it up, and Darcy moved too. His talent told him to run, run, run! But he yelled 'Fuck you!' and flew like a madman at the stooping vampire. He bowled the thing over, and himself snatched up the pick. The tool was heavy but such was Darcy's terror that it felt like a toy in his hands.

Manolis came unsteadily out of the cave in time to see Darcy swing his weapon in a deadly arc and punch the wider point of its dual-purpose head into his undead opponent's forehead. The creature made gurgling, gagging sounds and sank to its knees, then slumped against the cliff face.

'Petrol,' Manolis gasped.

'Over the edge,' Darcy told him, his voice a croak.

Manolis looked over the rim. Further down the mountain, maybe fifty feet lower, the wicker basket was jammed in the base of a rocky outcrop, where debris from the diggings had piled up to form a scree slide. The lid was open and several items lay scattered about. 'You stay, keep watch, and I'll get it,' Manolis said.

He gave Darcy his gun and started to clamber down. Darcy kept one eye on the vampire with the pickaxe in his head, and the other on the leering mouth of the cave. The creature he had dealt with — a man, yes, but a creature, too — was not 'dead'. It should be, but of course it was undead. The small percentage of its system which was vampire protoplasm was working in it even now, desperately healing its wounds. Even as Darcy watched it shuddered and its yellow eyes opened, and its hand crept shakily towards the harpoon in its chest.

Gritting his teeth, Darcy stepped closer to it. His guardian angel howled at him, poured adrenalin into his veins and yelled run, run! But he shut out all warnings and grasped the end of the spear, and yanked it this way and that in the vampire's flesh, until the thing gnashed its teeth and coughed up blood, then flopped back and lay still again.

Darcy stepped back from it on legs that trembled like jelly — and gave a mighty, heart-stopping start as something grasped his ankle!

He glanced back and down, and saw the one from the cave where he'd come crawling, his iron hand clasping Darcy's foot. There was a spear through his throat just under the Adam's apple, and the right side of the thing's face had been shot half away, but still he was mobile and one mad eye continued to glare from a black orbit set in a mess of red flesh. Darcy might easily have fainted then; instead he fell backwards away from the undead thing, and sat down with a bump on the ledge. And aiming directly between his feet, he emptied Manolis's gun right into the grimacing half-face.

At that point Manolis returned. He hauled the basket up behind him, ripped open its lid and yanked out Harry Keogh's crossbow. A moment later he was loading up, and just in time… for the one on the ledge had torn the pickaxe from its head and was now working to pull out the harpoon from its chest!

'Jesus! Oh, Jesus!' Manolis croaked. He stepped close to the blood-frothing horror, aimed his weapon from less than three feet away, and fired the wooden bolt straight into its heart.

Darcy had meanwhile scrambled backwards away from the other creature. Manolis caught hold of him and hauled him to his feet, said: 'Let's finish it, while we still can.'

They dragged the vampires back inside the cave, as far back as they dared, then hurried back out into sunlight. But Darcy was finished; he could do no more; his talent was freezing hiiri right out of it. 'Is OK,' Manolis understood. 'I can do it.'

Darcy crawled away along the ledge and sat there shivering, while Manolis took up the petrol and again entered the cave. A moment later and he reappeared, leaving a thin trail of petrol behind him. He'd liberally doused everything in the cave and the container was almost empty. He backed away towards Darcy, sprinkling the last few drops, then tossed the container far out into empty air and took out a cigarette lighter. Striking the flint, he held the naked flame to the trail of petrol.

Blue fire so faint as to be almost invisible raced back along the ledge and into the mouth of the cave. There came a whoosh and a tongue of fire like some giant's blowtorch — followed in the next moment by a terrific explosion that blew out the mouth of the cave in chunks of shattered rock and brought loose scree and pebbles avalanching down from above. The shock of it was sufficient to cause Manolis to stumble, and sit down beside Darcy.

They looked at each other and Darcy said: 'What the — ?'

Manolis's jaw hung loosely open. Then he licked dry lips and said: "Their explosives. They must have kept their explosive charges in there.'

They got up and went shakily back to the blocked mouth of the cave. Down below, boulders were still bounding down the mountain's steep contours to the sea. Hundreds of tons of rock had come crushingly down, sealing the diggings off. And it was plain that nothing alive — but nothing — was ever going to come out of there.

'It's done,' said Manolis, and Darcy found strength to nod his agreement.

As they turned away, Darcy saw something gleaming yellow in the rubble. Next door to the collapsed cave another, smaller opening was still issuing puffs of dust and a little smoke. The stone wall between the two excavations had been shattered, spilling fractured rock onto the ledge. But among the debris lay a lot more than just rocks.

Darcy and Manolis stepped among the rubble and looked more closely at what had been unearthed. There in that broken wall, carefully packed in and sealed behind cleverly shaped blocks of stone, had lain the treasure for which Jianni Lazarides — alias Janos Ferenczy — had searched. That same treasure he himself had lain down all those centuries ago. Only the changing contours of the mountain, carved and fretted by nature in storms and earthquakes, had confused and foiled him. The old Crusader castle had been his landmark, but even that massive silhouette had crumbled and changed through the long years. Still, he'd missed his mark by no more than two or three feet.