On the point of asking Korath to display the Möbius equations, Jake had heard the ch-ching as Castellano armed his stun grenade. Momentarily frozen, paralysed, he saw shadowy figures at the doorway, how they snatched themselves back out of sight … and out of danger!
“Korath!” Jake cried out loud—
—Just a split-second before the grenade went off!
By then the numbers were rolling down the screen of Jake’s mind again, but too late to do anything about it. Indeed, even the thought of doing something caused the equations to disintegrate, flying apart on the rim of Jake’s temporarily blasted mind.
He had heard the clatter as the grenade landed and bounced, and he’d actually managed to dive for cover behind a benchlike device that looked menacingly like a rack. But that was as much as he’d achieved before the blast.
Not designed to kill, the stun grenade hadn’t produced much heat except in the immediate vicinity of the explosion. But of blinding light and deafening sound there’d been plenty—enough to disassociate, disorganize, and deaden the mind of any normal man of flesh and blood. And Jake Cutter was no exception. With fresh blood in his ears and nose, curled in the foetal position, he cradled himself in the smoke-filled chamber, listened to the gonging in his head, tried to stop the starbursts from blooming behind his eyeballs, and simultaneously attempted to make sense of Korath’s hastily reconstituted equations; all to no avail.
And following fast in the wake of the explosion, Castellano and his creatures were into the room, falling on Jake and dragging him to his feet.
Holding a handkerchief to his mouth, Castellano glared redeyed at Jake where he sagged between a pair of vampire thralls, his head lolling stupidly. “So then, Mr. Jake Cutter, we’ve met before, you and I. But this time I know what you are, and there are questions you must answer; not least how you managed to get in here. Garzia, it seems to me this is your area of expertise. You will supply the incentives, and I’ll ask the questions.”
“The lights are shot,” Garzia coughed and waved a cloud of smoke away from his face. “The blast. I’ll light a torch.”
Light flared as he thumbed a cigarette lighter and lifted its steady flame to an oil-drenched torch in its wall bracket. But as the smoke began to clear and the torch came sputtering alive, Garzia gasped and pointed at the thermite charge where Jake had planted it beside the wall. A thin curl of smoke was drifting up from its haversack container.
“What?” Castellano snarled then. “What?”
“Bomb!” Garzia shouted. “That’s its fuse burning!”
“You English bastard!” Castellano brought Jake a stinging, backhand blow to the face, which did nothing to help clear his head. And turning to his lieutenant, “Get rid of it,” the Sicilian said. “It must have a long fuse else this saboteur would have been out of here by now. So into the old well with it. It can’t do much harm down there. The blast will be contained.”
But the ancient well, a walled shaft almost a hundred feet deep, was in another room, and the “bomb” was smoking. Looking at it, Garzia blinked. Then he went for it, reached towards it … and shrank back. He reached for it again, and again shrank back. “Luigi, I … I can’t do this!” he gasped, his eyes bulging and his face twisting in the flaring torchlight. “I can’t … I mean I can’t … I just can’t do it!”
“You fucking idiot!” Castellano howled. “Do you want it to explode!” But of course that’s exactly what Garzia didn’t want it to do, not while he was standing beside it.
“You two,” Castellano yelled at the men holding Jake. “One of you do it. There’s big money in it for the man who does it.” They scarcely moved, except to shuffle their feet and glance at each other. For a moment Castellano looked as if he, too, might panic. But then he took a vicious-looking gun out of his pocket and pointed it at his men saying, “And there’s a bullet for you—for both of you—if you don’t fucking do it!”
At which point Jake moaned aloud, “Two … two minutes.”
“Eh?” said Garzia. “Two minutes? You hear that, Luigi? This thing goes off in just two minutes!” He couldn’t know that Jake was mumbling about the other charges, and that this one still had three, three and a half minutes to go. But in any case:
“Two minutes?” Castellano snarled. “That’s like a lifetime! So fuck all three of you worthless, spineless dogs, and I’ll do it myself! Just look after this one until I’m back.” And snatching up the haversack by its strap, he loped from the room.
Jake’s head was clearing, the gonging oh-so-slowly receding “Korath,” he whispered. “Where are you?”
“Eh?” said Garzia. “Korath?” He grabbed Jake’s hair, yanked his head back, and spat, “What’s that? You have help down here? You fucking—!” He lashed out, rocked Jake’s head back further yet.
Again the Möbius equations disintegrated, collapsing into a whirlpool of jumbled numerals and esoteric algebra, replaced by pain and a million bilious flashes and pinwheels of light. Held up, pinioned between Castellano’s thugs, even if Jake had somehow managed to conjure a door, still he wouldn’t have been able to use it except perhaps to fall through it.
But in the back of his mind: Enough of this! Grusev’s disgusted bark. What? And you dare call yourselves a “Great” Majority? He fights evil—the worst possible evil—and you would let him fight alone? Well, that’s your business, you cowards, but never mine. The Necroscope does this for us—he suffers it for me—and also for you Arguccis, all lying still there. But Jake has the power and can’t use it, because you haven’t told him how to use it. I can feel it in my bones: my dead flesh cries out to me for action, animation, and life in death. And I for one must answer the call of my flesh!
Other voices came up out of nowhere. We Arguccis were never cowards! Nor are we now. All we wanted was peace, and we had it … until this dog Castellano came along, defiling us and using our tomb as a charnel house. As for the Necroscope: we feel bis magnet lure, too, even as we have felt his living warmth in our endless night. Only let him ask for our help, and he shall have it.
Jake heard all of this without understanding its real meaning. But as a drowning man clings to a straw, so he knew he had nothing to lose. And:
“Help me,” he whispered then. “I don’t see how, but if it’s at all possible then please, please help me!”
At which a massed sigh went up throughout all the deadspeak aether …
Luigi Castellano never made it back from the old well. For even before Jake had thought to ask for help from the teeming dead, someone had anticipated his needs, stirred himself up, and was waiting in the shadows. And when Castellano heard the dragging footsteps behind him, and after he had turned in his tracks to see who made them—
—He couldn’t believe what he saw!
Some short distance away, the lights were still burning in the drugs storeroom, and white smoke as dense as a ground mist was only now beginning to roll out ankle-deep through the open door as the first of the thermite charges began to cook. Similarly, the device that Castellano carried was suddenly issuing a lot more smoke and starting to feel hot. But still he hugged it to his chest, gurgling and gagging as he took one stumbling step after another, backwards away from the dead man.
A dead, disfigured man, yes! A man who Castellano couldn’t help but recognize ! Georgi Grusev, lurching from the direction of the Argucci mausoleum! His eyes … but there were no eyes, just black sockets, with blood dried black on his hollow face; the flattened silhouette of his head, where Garzia Nicosia had taken his ears to send to Gustav Turchin; and his arms—which should have been dangling loose from the shoulders because Garzia had broken them there—now reaching with fingerless hands, reaching for Castellano and with vengeful intent!
Grusev came on, and a wave of heat came with him, detracting from the heat that Castellano felt welling from the device against his chest, which he held between himself and the apparition.
But an apparition? Of course! Surely that was all it could be: a nightm
arish hallucination conjured of his own dark imagination. For tortured, butchered, murdered men don’t walk—do they? Yet this one did, and behind the Russian came others who weren’t nearly so complete or functional, clumping and reeling and even crawling through the thickening smoke!
The hip-high wall of the well was behind Castellano where he stumbled backwards to avoid the stumps of Grusev’s terrible fingers. He felt his chest burning and saw that his jacket and waistcoat were smouldering, issuing smoke. The thermite charge was beginning to melt in his agonized hands! He tried to throw the device from him—throw it at Grusev—but it was sticking to his chest, fusing with him.
Finally, as Castellano began to scream, Grusev’s mutilated hands reached him, pushing him backwards to where his backside struck the wall. The Sicilian’s legs stopped, but his top half kept on going. And as he lost his balance, turned upside down, and fell shrieking into the well, Grusev’s blackened, protruding tongue came unglued from the roof of his mouth to issue a gurgled farewell:
“Burn, you filthy, loathsome thing!” he said.
And then, slowly and deliberately—as Castellano’s screams rose to the pitch of a whistling steam kettle, and quickly died away—the dead man turned and went stumbling back towards the mausoleum. And behind him the obscene mouth of the well belched smoke and heat, and the rancid steam of a boiling vampire …
Back in the torture chamber, Garzia and the two vampire thralls had heard Castellano’s scream. Jake heard it, too, where he was fighting desperately hard to pull himself together, in the sure knowledge that at any time now the temperature would suddenly rise by a hundred, a thousand, and then ten thousand degrees.
“That sounded like Luigi!” said Garzia, his face a pallid skull-mask where he held Jake’s head up by his braid, sniffing at him like a rabid dog. “Your friends got Luigi!” Taking out a knife, he showed it to Jake. “If Luigi’s gone, then I’m the new boss, the next in line. But unlike him, I won’t be wasting time fooling about with you.”
“Garzia,” said one of the thralls, “if you’re the boss it’s time we were out of here. This place is getting hot, filling up with smoke. We’ll be lucky to find our way out … that’s if we don’t get blown apart trying!”
“You’re right,” said Garzia. “We daren’t wait any longer.” And to Jake: “What kind of bomb was it anyway?”
“Thermite,” said Jake, able to see and hear at last. “They were incendiary bombs—all three of them. And I think you’ve left it too late!”
“Too late for you, for sure,” said Garzia, making ready to draw his knife across Jake’s throat.
But: “Garzia!” The thralls shrank back, let go of Jake, and one of them pointed a trembling hand at the smoke-wreathed doorway.
Garzia looked and saw something—saw a stream of rotting, crumbling somethings—that came walking, crawling, and flopping through the smoke that was now spilling into the chamber. Their cerecloth garb was falling from them in wormy shreds and tatters, and pieces of them were falling, too, crumbling apart under the stress and strain of unaccustomed movement. But like the mummified figures that shed them, even these fretted limbs didn’t lie still but kept right on coming!
“Agh!—aghh:—aghhhh!” said Garzia, the knife falling from his numb fingers, as the long-dead Arguccis closed on him and his vampire thralls.
And Jake, as he backed away, couldn’t believe what he was seeing—or what he was hearing—as the dead men told him: Go now, Necroscope. There’s no more work for you here. Your vendetta, and ours, is over. But remember this night, and never let it be said that the Arguccis were cowards.
Jake’s flesh crept on his arms and back; his hair stood up as if electrified; his jaw fell open and his eyes bugged. This impossible thing that was happening here … he was its author! He knew now what a Necroscope was—knew what it was that Trask and E-Branch hadn’t been able to tell him—knew precisely what those esoteric skills were that they had been hinting at.
Necroscope: not just a man with the power to look into the minds of the dead and talk to them, but one who can raise them up from their very graves. And he was it, and he had done it!
A wall of heat came blasting in through the doorway. Those Arguccis closest to the door burst into flames, and still Jake stood there, backed up against the far wall as if pinned there, stunned by the knowledge of what he was and what he had done.
He saw the leading Arguccis converge on Garzia and his men—saw the shrieking three dragged under and buried in ancient, desiccated flesh and nitreclad bones—and despite the heat he felt his own blood freezing in his veins.
Until suddenly: Jake! Korath was shouting in his metaphysical mind. Get out of there! Here are the numbers, the Möbius equations. Can’t you bear me? Can’t you see the numbers? Use them, Jake, and make a door! Your time is up!
And as a mass of liquid stone and jumbled bones came seething through the doorway like so much lava—which it was, of a sort—Jake accepted the equations and conjured a Möbius door. And not a moment too soon. For even as he half-staggered, half-fell through it, so the temperature throughout the cellars shot up as if someone had opened a different door entirely, a portal to hell!
Then he was out of there, and through the Möbius Continuum, and back to his vantage point on the rising ground south of the doomed house … where he emerged in the cool of the night, and promptly sat down with a thump.
But we’re not finished yet, Korath told him, almost as much in awe and horror of Jake as Jake was of himself. There’s still the plastique, the house itself. And:
Don’t leave the job half finished, Jake, said Georgi Grusev. Don’t we deserve a proper grave, the Arguccis and I?
Jake looked through his nite-lites. A half-dozen grey-blob figures were fleeing from the house, which itself had become a shimmering grey mass in the crosshairs of the thermal-imaging lenses. Castellano’s vampire thugs were getting away, escaping into the cover of the densely grown olives. And Jake knew that Korath and Grusev were right, he had to finish the job. But:
“I … I can’t see how I can deal with the ones who’ve got out of there,” he said. “But as for the house, that has to go, yes.”
Jake’s plastique bombs were already rigged with detonators. Setting two minutes on each device, he activated the timers and took the Möbius route back down to the house.
Streamers of white smoke were belching from the open doors and geysering from the chimneys now, and the windows all splintering from the pressured heat within. In very short order Jake planted his bombs at the bases of the front and back walls, and at one major end wall. The remaining end wall was of recent and far weaker construction, part of a modern extension that probably housed the boiler room and generator. Jake was sure that it would be destroyed along with the more fortresslike building.
All done he stood off, and saw that he needn’t have worried about the escapees. For Castellano’s remaining vampire soldiers hadn’t gone any further than the ancient olive groves … where for more than fifty years their master had been burying many of his victims under the grotesquely twisted roots and branches of those hideously nurtured trees!
All blackened leather and gleaming white bone, these nightmarish, lurching, long-dead cadavers, too, had answered Jake’s call, levering themselves up from their shallow graves to herd the terrified vampire mobsters back toward the burning house.
And their timing was perfect, for the two minutes were up.
Jake was near the gates, sheltering in the lee of the high stone wall, when the house went up or inwards. But even before that final, colossal, triple ex- or implosion, the place had been ablaze and beginning to slump down into itself, its buckling walls slowly settling into the cauldron of the cellars.
Caught within a few yards of the simultaneous detonations, the last members of Castellano’s vampire mob were ripped apart, literally disintegrating in a blast that threw the material of the house inwards and upwards, creating a mighty mushroom stem that rose into the sky, and a furiou
s wind that rushed outward to flatten the closest of the olives. The ground shuddered and the flash of light was blinding, the explosion senses-shattering, as the house ceased to exist. And when the echoes stopped coming back from the hills, then Jake looked again.
Not that there was much to see: just a vast flattened area where the place had been, and tons of hot dirt and rubble spattering down out of the sky, and geysers of steaming, lavalike stuff spouting up volcanically from the surface of the quaking slag …
“Done,” said Jake then. “But how well done? Did anyone get away into those olive trees?”
There’s a way to find out, Korath answered “breathlessly” in Jake’s mind.
In the Continuum they looked forward through a future-time door at Jake’s blue life-thread winding its way into a life as yet unlived. But in the immediate future there were no scarlet threads.
It seems we got them all, said Korath with a grateful deadspeak sigh. In all that blue, I can’t see a trace of red.
“Not in this location, anyway,” said Jake. “It appears the Arguccis were correct: my vendetta is over now. But as for your problem—and E-Branch’s, and the world’s at large—well, that remains to be dealt with.”
His comment might well have been an invocation. For as Jake emerged from the Continuum back at his vantage point to collect his sausage bag:
Jake! Liz Merrick’s telepathic cry of terror—a whisper in the psychic aether—coming to him from six hundred miles away.
“Liz!” He gasped out loud, starting and glancing all about, straining his eyes in the darkness to see where she was, before realizing that she wasn’t. “Liz?”
Jake! it came again, but much clearer, louder now, as Liz’s probe fastened on his. And with it came pictures—as vivid as the reality from which they were plucked—on the screen of his mind; such a whirling kaleidoscope of surreal scenes and sensations that Jake could scarcely accommodate them. And all of this from Liz, a good “receiver” but an alleged amateur when it came to “sending,” except that with Jake she had this rapport. Thank God, he thought, for this rapport!