The Last Aerie (77 page)

“But the morning after … never a sign that anything is out of place, and everything back in working order. Except that for the people who saw, felt, dreamed or experienced something,
anything
of it … nothing will ever again be quite the same for them, and they’re all mortally afraid …

“The dreamers are the ones who suffer most.”

“Dreamers?” This was Nathan again.

“Dreamers, yes,” Trask nodded. “It happens at midnight, when most of the city is asleep. But there are dreamers and there are dreamers, Nathan. Sensitive people know when it’s coming, and not just inside the Nightmare Zone. Psychics the world over are wont to nightmare when John Scofield goes on the rampage, tracking down and killing Tod Prentiss—again and again and again.

“A thousand men, women and children have dreamed it: John Scofield after his prey with a razor, an axe, or a blowlamp. Or Tod Prentiss with his face burned off, or with his belly slit open and his entrails uncoiling, or with his eyes dislodged and flopping on his cheeks. John snarling his loathing, while Prentiss screams and runs and tries to protect himself, uselessly. It all takes place in the very heart of the Nightmare Zone, of course, but its psychic echoes are spreading, and its physical manifestations are getting stronger all the time.”

Zek was bewildered. “And no one has wondered about it? I mean, among the ordinary population?”

“Oh, yes,” Trask told her. “Psychiatrists, the governors of mental institutions, the police—who get called out to so many ‘bogus’ sightings—all sorts of people. They all wonder about it, but they’ve no answer to it. For they don’t know the cause. Only we know that, for we’re the people who have to contain it. We’re the ones who have to fight it. Except… we’re losing the fight.”

“How do you fight it?” Nathan was curious. “Where?”

“Where else?” Trask looked at him. “Down there in that old basement behind what used to be a cop shop in Old Finsbury Park—’dead center” of the Nightmare Zone. They died there, those two, and that’s where John Scofield continues to chase his prey back into this world once in a four-month, so that he can kill him all over again.”

“And you want me to help?”

“You’re the only one who can.”

“But so far Keenan Gormley is the only one who will speak to me.”

“So use him, tell him what you’re doing, ask for his help. Keep up the pressure. You know, Nathan, your father used to say that the dead know just about everything there is to know. Make friends with the Great Majority, and you can consider any other problem at least half-way solved.”

“And if John Scofield simply
won’t
talk to me?”

Trask got down from the podium, approached Nathan and put a hand on his shoulder. “Well, if you can’t make him listen to your deadspeak beforehand, then it will just have to be on the night.” (His face was suddenly gaunt and grey.) “The night when you meet John face to face, and put yourself in his way when he goes after Tod Prentiss to re-kill him, and risk your very sanity trying to keep the two of them apart … down there in the Nightmare Zone.”

And Nathan’s voice was unaccustomedly hoarse as he asked: “When will that be?”

But Trask’s was hoarser as he answered, “As of now, we’re not sure. But it’ll be soon, son. Too damn soon by far…”

For the next two days Geoff Smart was Nathan’s constant companion. Trask would have preferred to put aside his administrative work entirely and devote all his time to Nathan; but there were important matters which must be dealt with, arising out of what Nathan had told E-Branch about Turkur Tzonov, and what the Head of Branch had seen with his own eyes in Perchorsk. That was why Smart was temporarily standing in for Trask as Nathan’s mentor: to give his boss time to attend to such items as had come up.

For fifteen years now, Britain, France, Germany, the USA and half a dozen other interested countries had had influential men, call them “advisers”, in the variously titled “United Soviet States”, the “Free Soviet Alignment”, or simply the USSR, as some world authorities still insisted on designating their tired old “enemy”. These men were not engaged in espionage as such but did “keep their eyes” on things. In a country as vast and sprawling and still as volatile as the no longer entirely “united” USS, the West’s vastly superior communication systems, famine relief organizations, nuclear proliferation and pollution control elements, and a witch’s dozen of other aid programs, ensured that the presence of such men was appreciated—certainly by those people “in charge”.

Premier Gustav Turchin was one such authority. Despite the devolution of almost all of the countries and ethnic territories within the old borders, Turchin was a central pivot—even a father figure—whose principal purpose was to keep his many squabbling children in order and so prevent the collapse of his great ungovernable estate into further chaos. And since many of these awkward children were nuclear powers in their own right, his was a very important position.

But “Premier”? Hardly that, not in the sense of Khrushchev, Brezhnev, Andropov, Gorbachev and others before and since them.
They
had been Premiers, and up to Gorbachev’s time at least had been all-powerful from their seats in Moscow’s Kremlin. Turchin wasn’t in the same league; his power was that vested in him by the people of many neighbouring but separate states covering a vast tract of land which was formerly the Soviet Union, and it could be removed from him just as easily.

Turchin was literally the “popular choice”, wherefore he must try to make popular decisions on behalf of all of these frequently opposed states or find himself out of a job. In a way, he might even be seen as the East’s answer to the Secretary General of the United Nations, except the nations Turchin spoke for were weak and mainly divided by poverty, petty jealousies, and old feuds; while the West was stronger than ever before. In short, the Premier could and must advise, if only to avoid chaos and anarchy—but he could never command.

On the other hand he did have power of a sort. For while his people could be rid of him if and whenever they so desired, they still had need of a representative on the world stage, and Gustav Turchin made an imposing figurehead. He had the charisma of a world leader, if not the financial or physical energy. And while his own people might occasionally threaten his so-called “position of power”, no threat of theirs could ever carry the weight of his—to simply quit.

And because he was mainly responsible for his nation’s cohesion and security, he did have a measure of control over certain elements left over from former times. For instance, a much impoverished KGB, and “the Opposition”, of course: Moscow’s own ESP-Agency, the Soviet equivalent of E-Branch. This made him Turkur Tzonov’s direct superior; and who better for the West to talk to about Tzonov’s indiscretions?

The Minister Responsible for E-Branch had been given a full briefing by Trask, and had passed on the salient points of that briefing to a British “representative” in Moscow, an “economic adviser” who had the ear of Premier Gustav Turchin. Thereafter there had been much toing and froing by Trask and the Minister Responsible, between E-Branch HQ and Whitehall, and the Minister’s scrambler telephone had been hot with messages sent down it to Moscow.

The “salient points” had been these:

That Turkur Tzonov had built up a small arsenal of weapons in the subterranean complex known as Perchorsk under the Urals. That we, the West (in particular an intelligence agency of the British Government) had reason to believe that Tzonov might be planning a limited invasion of the parallel world of vampires known to lie beyond the Perchorsk “Gate”. That it was possible he would use the spoils of such an invasion to further his own causes … whatever they might be. That Tzonov had illegal control of a sophisticated machine whose like had been banned for sixty years, since World War II, when the Nazis had been known to be interested in just such a device: a brain-washing machine which could empty its victims of all knowledge and intelligence, and in fact reduce them to vegetables—and then to corpses.

That Tzonov had planned to use this forbidden machine on a man (a human being, not a monster) who had come through the Gate from the other side, in order to obtain advance knowledge of his intended conquests. And that he had only been thwarted by the escape of the alleged “alien”. That this refugee, not only from a cruel world but also from Turkur Tzonov’s cruelties, had flown to the West and provided British E-Branch with much of the above information.

And last but not least, that one Siggi Dam—a telepath in Tzonov’s employ, who
might
have been partly responsible for the escape of the alien from Perchorsk—seemed now to have disappeared off the face of the Earth. It was quite possible that Tzonov had taken his own “punitive measures” against her, and disposed of her in such a way that she could never trouble him again. Not in this world, anyway.

These items in brief—plus a reminder that it was Gustav Turchin himself who had requested the Branch’s assistance at Perchorsk—comprised the contents of the coded, scrambled messages which had gone out to “our man in Moscow”, and from him to the Premier during several private meetings. Since the preparation of these messages (not to mention their painfully neutral, carefully diplomatic wording) had been left to Trask, he’d had more than enough to keep him busy and on his toes …

But in the early afternoon of the third day following Goodly’s NZ warning, as the secure channels to Moscow cooled a little and Trask waited on the results of his reporting, Geoff Smart came knocking on his office door to talk about Nathan.

“How’s it going with him?” Trask wanted to know.

The empath shrugged, then said: “Nathan’s a difficult one to read. No, that’s an understatement: at first he was impossible! I got a sort of whirlpool, or maybe a tornado. And yet it wasn’t emotional. In fact it covered his emotions and obscured them, and probably his thoughts, too.”

“The numbers vortex,” Trask nodded. “We know about that. It’s the stuff that’s in him, which we want to draw out. You’re right: it covers his thoughts like a blanket, blocks out telepathic probes. We’re fairly certain it’s something come down to him from his father, and we’ve been looking for ways to improve upon it.”

“Then you’re probably wasting your time,” Smart told him.

“Come again?” Trask couldn’t tell if it was good news or bad.

“Once he got used to me, accepted me, saw that I wasn’t a telepath or voyeur in the common sense of the word, his shield went down. Then … I really did get to him. And I have to tell you, that boy has emotions! Passions, fears, angers, hatreds: the full spectrum—but intense! If he’s typical of his world, it must be one hell of a place.”

“You haven’t read up on Sunside/Starside?” Trask’s voice was sharp-edged. His orders had been very clear.

“I have, yes, but it still reads like fiction. That’s what I’m trying to tell you: that Nathan has brought it all home to me. It’s real now. Only a real place could do that to someone. He’s … a mess!”

“So would you be, if you’d been through all that he’s been through,” Trask answered. “What else? And what makes you think we’re wasting our time?”

“Because you’re looking to enlarge him, give him something, expose something. You’re trying to widen his potential. But his nature, aura, everything about him, is already mature. He’s at his peak. Oh, you can teach him, he can still learn things, but from now on that’s cosmetic. I mean … he’s already equipped. He has everything he needs. That’s the feeling I get: that he’s like a baby who’s about to become a toddler. One day he stands up, takes a first wobbly, tentative step, and walks! And before you know it he’s climbing trees. Nathan’s a newly hatched moorhen at the edge of its nest over the water. The hen only needs to give her chick a push … and he swims! Do you follow me? I mean, I know what I’m talking about because I’m an empath, but I can’t be sure I’m getting through to you.”

“I do know what you mean, yes,” Trask answered. “There was a time when all his father needed was a push, too. What you’re saying is: he’s got the machinery, but he hasn’t plugged it in yet?”

“When I stand beside him,” Smart said, “it’s like standing between a couple of giant electrodes. I mean, it’s frightening. I think: Jesus, thank God the power’s off! Why, he’s like some kind of small Nightmare Zone in his own right!” And Trask saw him give a small, involuntary shiver …

But his words were like an invocation; for a moment later, Ian Goodly and Guy Teale were shoulder to shoulder at the door. Just glancing at their faces, Trask knew what it was. He indicated that they should enter, and said, “Tonight?”

The cadaverous Goodly nodded and said, “Has to be, Ben. We can feel it building even now. John Scofield has refuelled his batteries and is about to give it hell—or give you hell, as it works out. And I hate to say it, but better you than me!”

The sooner they got to it the better. Then, as the thing began to build through the afternoon and evening, they would feel it and know its strength.

Driving out to Old Finsbury Park, Trask suggested to Paul Garvey, their driver: “It mightn’t be a bad idea to stop somewhere and eat.”

“Do you really feel like eating?” Garvey glanced at him in the front passenger seat.

“No, but what with getting our act together and all that, we seem to have missed lunch. A couple more hours, we’ll miss dinner, too. I for one don’t fancy doing this on an empty stomach. By tonight we’ll really be hungry. Now
that
would be the wrong time to eat!”

From the back of the car, perhaps naively, Nathan spoke up. “I’m hungry now,” he said, which settled matters.

They stopped for half an hour at a greasy spoon where their “alien” enjoyed sausage, bacon, eggs, and a mug of tea, just as he’d had for breakfast. Indeed, the standard English breakfast seemed to suit Nathan so well it might have been devised specifically with him in mind. The rest of them had sandwiches and coffee.

As they got back into the car, Nathan told them his immediate intention, and as he settled in a corner of the rear seat and closed his eyes, they kept their conversation to a minimum. He was talking to the ashes of Sir Keenan Gormley in his Garden of Repose a good many miles away, to find out if the Great Majority knew about John Scofield and the Nightmare Zone, and to discover whether Gormley could suggest some possible solution.