Necroscope 4: Deadspeak (55 page)

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.

The two men scuffed among the dust and broken rocks, their excitement dulled to anticlimax after the horror of their too recent experience. They saw a treasure out of time: Thracian gold! Small bowls and lidded cups … gold rhytons spilling rings, necklaces and arm clasps … a bronze helmet stuffed to brimming with earrings, belt clasps and pectorals … even a buckled breastplate of solid gold!

Their find eventually got through to Manolis. “But what do we do with it?”

“We leave it here,” Darcy straightened up. “It belongs to the ghosts. We don’t know what it cost Janos to bring it here and bury it, or where—or how—he got it in the first place. But there’s blood on it, be sure. Eventually someone will come looking for those two, and find this instead. Let the authorities handle it. I don’t even want to touch it.”

“You are right,” said Manolis, and they climbed back up to the castle.

* * *

By 12:30 the two were back down into the village, where Manolis refuelled the boat for the trip to Karpathos. While he worked his fishermen friends came over and asked how were the diggers. “They were blasting,” Manolis answered after a moment, “so we didn’t disturb them. Anyway, the cliffs are very steep and a man could easily fall.”

“Snotty buggers anyway,” one of the fishermen commented. “They don’t bother with us and we don’t bother with them!”

Finished with his fuelling, Manolis bought a litre of ouzo and they all sat around tables in an open taverna and killed the bottle dead. Later, as their boat pulled away from the stone jetty, the Greek said, “I needed that.”

Darcy sighed and agreed, “Me, too. It’s nasty, thirsty work.”

Manolis looked at him and nodded. “And a lot more of it to come before we’re through, my friend. It is perhaps the good job ouzo is cheap, eh? Just think, with all of that gold we left up there, we could have bought the distillery!” Darcy looked back and watched the hump of rock which was Halki slowly sinking on the horizon, and thought:
Yes, and maybe we’ll wish we had …

Halki to Karpathos was a little more than sixty miles by the route Manolis chose; he preferred to stay in sight of land so far as possible, and to cruise rather than race his engine. When the rocks Ktenia and Karavolas were behind them, then he set a course more nearly south-west and left Rhodes behind for Karpathos proper.

That meant the open sea, and now Darcy’s stomach began to play him up a little. It was a purely physical thing and not too bad; after what he’d faced already he wasn’t going to throw up now. At least his talent wasn’t warning against shipwrecks or anything.

To take Darcy’s mind off his misery, Manolis told him a few details about Karpathos:

“Second biggest of the Dodecanese Islands,” he said. “She lies just about half-way between Rhodes and Crete. Where Halki goes east to west, Karpathos she goes north to south. Maybe fifty kilometres long but only seven or eight wide. Just the crest of submarine mountains, that’s all. Not the big place, really, and not many peoples. But she has known the turbulent history!”

“Is that right?” said Darcy, scarcely listening.

“Oh, yes! Just about everyone ruled or owned or was the governor of Karpathos at one time or another. The Arabs, Italian pirates out of Genoa, the Venetians, Crusaders of the Knights of St John, Turks, Russians—even the British! Huh! It took seven centuries for us Greeks to get it back!”

And when there was no answer: “Darcy? Are you all right?”

“Only just. How long before we’re there?”

“We’re almost half-way there already, my friend. Another hour, or not much more, and we’ll be rounding the point just under the landing strip. That’s where we should find the
Lazarus.
We can take a look at her, but that’s all. Maybe we can hail someone—or something—on board, and see what we think of him.”

“Right now I don’t think much of anybody,” said Darcy …

But as it happened Manolis was wrong and the
Lazarus
was not there. They searched the small bays at the southern extremity of the island, but found no sign of the white ship. Manolis’s patience was soon exhausted. In a little while, when it became obvious that their searching was in vain, he headed north for the sandy shallow-water beach at Amoupi and anchored there where they could wade ashore. They ate a Greek salad at the beach taverna, and drank a small bottle of retsina between them. When Darcy fell asleep in his chair under the taverna’s split-bamboo awning, then Manolis sighed, sat back and lit a cigarette. He smoked several, admired the tanned, bouncing breasts of English girls where they played in the sea, drank another bottle of retsina before it was time to wake Darcy up.

Just after 5:05 they set out to return to Rhodes …

* * *

That evening, coming in stiff, weary, and tanned by sun and sea-spray, Darcy and Manolis found four people waiting for them in the lounge of their hotel. There were several moments of confusion. Darcy knew two of the arrivals well enough, for Ben Trask and David Chung were his own men; but Zekintha Foener (now Simmons), and her husband Michael or “Jazz”, were strangers to him except by hearsay. Darcy had anticipated four and had booked accommodation accordingly, but of this specific group he had only expected two. On Harry Keogh’s advice he had tried to get a message to Zek and Jazz that they should stay out of it, but either it hadn’t reached them or they had chosen to ignore it. He would find out later. The two missing men were E-Branch operatives finalizing a job in England, who would fly out here ASAP on completion of that task.

The four newcomers, having already dropped off their luggage in their rooms and introduced each other, were more or less ready to talk business. Darcy need only introduce Manolis and make known the Greek policeman’s role in things, then replay the action so far, and all systems would be go. Before that, however …

… Darcy and Manolis excused themselves and took invigorating showers before rejoining the E-Branch people where they waited for them. Then Manolis took them all to a rather expensive taverna on the other side of town which wasn’t likely to be swamped with tourists, and there arranged seating around a large secluded corner table with a view on the night ocean. Here Darcy quickly restated the introductions, this time detailing the various talents of his group.

There was the married couple Zek and Jazz Simmons, who had been on Starside together with Harry Keogh. Zek was a telepath of outstanding ability and an authority on vampires. She was experienced as few before her, in that she had met up with the minds of the Real Thing, the Wamphyri themselves, in an entirely alien world. She was very good-looking, about five-nine in height, slim, blonde and blue-eyed. Her Greek mother had named her after Zante (or Zakinthos), the island where she was born. Her father had been East German, a parapsychologist. Zek would be in her mid-thirties, maybe eighteen months to two years older than her husband.

Jazz Simmons had no extraordinary talents other than those with which an entirely mundane Mother Nature had endowed him, plus those in which British Intelligence had expertly instructed him. After Starside, he had opted out of intelligence work to be with Zek in Greece and the Greek islands. Just a fraction under six feet tall, Jazz had unruly red hair, a square jaw under slightly hollow cheeks, grey eyes, good strong teeth, hands that were hard for all that they were artistically tapered, and long arms that gave him something of a gangling, loose-limbed appearance. Lean, tanned and athletic, he looked deceptively easy-going …
was
easy-going in normal circumstances and when there was little or no pressure. But he was not to be underestimated. He’d been trained to a cutting edge in surveillance, close protection, escape and evasion, winter warfare, survival, weapons handling (to marksman grade), demolition and unarmed combat. The only thing Jazz had lacked had been experience, and he’d got that in the best—or worst—of all possible places, on Starside.

Then there were the two men from E-Branch: David Chung, a locator and scryer, and Ben Trask, a human lie-detector. Chung was twenty-six, a Chinese “Cockney” tried and true. Born within the sound of Bow bells, he had been with the Branch for nearly six years and during that time had trained himself to a high degree in the extrasensory location of illegal drugs, especially cocaine. If not for the fact that he’d been working on a long-term case in London, then he and not Ken Layard might well have been out here in the first place.

Ben Trask was a blocky five feet ten, mousey-haired and green-eyed, overweight and slope-shouldered, and usually wore what could only be described as a lugubrious expression. His speciality was Truth: presented with a lie or deliberately falsified concept, Trask would spot it immediately. E-Branch loaned him out to the police authorities on priority jobs, and he was in great demand by Foreign Affairs to see through the political posturing of certain less than honest members of the international community. Ben Trask knew the ins and outs of London’s foreign embassies better than most people know the backs of their hands. Also, he’d played a part in the Yulian Bodescu affair and wasn’t likely to take anything too lightly.