Necroscope-Defilers

1 IMAGES OF THE PAST Ben Trask and his people were home again, but there was little enough time for rest and recuperation. The world might well be described as a small planet, but it was still a big place; its evils were many, and England had always had its fair share. Compared with what Trask and his principal espersDavid Chung the locator, and lan Goodly the precoghad encountered in Australia, the routine of E-Branch HQ seemed drab and almost boring. Almost. But here in the heart of London, in Trask's own even smaller world of gadgets and ghosts, he knew that he could never really get bored. For even when the ghosts were quiet, the gadgets would keep right on going, and vice versa, though often as not they were active at the same time. Right now the gadgetsin the shape of the HQ's telephones, its ground-based and satellite communication systems, its computers, TVs, and video screenswere in ascendance, catching up on time lost when Trask, a handful of his espers and technicians, plus a couple of new people, had been out of touch by virtue of their work on the other side of the world. But the Head of E-Branch knew that the ghosts would come into their own soon enough. He knew it because he commanded them. Ghosts of a sort, anyway. And for eight days now he had been steadily working his way through all the paperwork, sorting the priority jobs, detailing his workforce to whichever tasks best suited their various talents, and generally breaking up the logjam. It had to be done, because Trask knew that sooner or later he'd be on his way once againthat he, personally, would be on his way, for this was a personal thing nowout into a world threatened by the greatest of all possible evils. An evil born in another world, with a name that was similarly alien and undisguisably evil...Wamphyri! Despite that there was other work to be done, this was the name, and the thought, that was uppermost in Trask's mind where he sat at his desk, in his office at the end of the main corridor in E-Branch HQ, pen in hand but stilled for the moment, not scratching away at one or another of a hundred different documents and forms. Stilled, brought to an abrupt halt by this sudden thoughtor perhaps not so sudden, because for some three years now it had never been far from his mindthat in a world where Zek was no more, in this monstrously, unbelievably depleted world, the Wamphyri were.Theywere here, and because of them, she was not. And he was surprised to hear the rumble in his throat that was a growl trying to escape, surprised to see his hand turning white where it now gripped the pen like a dagger. The Wamphyri: Malinari, and Szwart, and Vavara, alive or undead in his world, the world where they had murdered Zek! And still her last wordsher last thoughts, which she had sent winging to himsighing in his memory, from which he could never hope to erase them and would never want to, but guessed he'd be the better man for it if he could: Goodbye, Ben. I love you... Then the blinding flash of white light that had woken him up that time three years agowhich he had hoped was only the glare of his bedside lamp, perhaps blinking into life where his arm had hit the cord as he threshed in his nightmare. Trask had hoped so, yes, but deep inside he'd known it wasn't so. For the truth and Ben Trask were soul mates. The truth was his talent, and sometimes his curse. Times such asthat time. That blinding flash of white light... ...Which wasn't white at all but green, and which wasn't blinding but merely blinking. One of the tiny lights on Trask's desk console, drawing him back to Earth, to the present, to the nowLumley, Brian is the author of 'Necroscope-Defilers' with ISBN 9780812566734 and ISBN 0812566734.