Now, knowing where to aim, he redirected his thoughts
— and met the mind of the stranger! But only for a moment, the merest instant of time. Then mental shutters came down like the jaws of a steel trap. The glint of spectacles or binoculars disappeared, the cigarette's glow was extinguished, and the man himself, the merest shadow, was gone.
Vlad! Yulian commanded instinctively. Go, find him. Whoever he is, bring him to me!
And down in the brambles and undergrowth near the door to the vaults, where he lay half asleep, VIad at once came alert, turned his sensitive ears towards the drive and the gate, sprang up and set off at a loping run. Deep in his throat, a growl not quite a dog's growl rumbled like dull thunder.
Darcy Clarke was doing late shift on the Harkley place. He was a psychic sensitive with a high degree of telepathic potential. Also, he was big on self-preservation. A freakish automatic talent, over which he had no conscious control, was always on guard to keep him ‘safe'; he was the opposite of accident prone and led a ‘charmed' life. Which on this occasion was just as well.
Clarke was young, only twenty-five, but what he lacked in years he more than made up for in zeal. He would have made a perfect soldier, for his duty was his all. It was that duty which had kept him here in the vicinity of Harkley House from 5.00 till 11.00 P.M. And it was exactly on the dot of 11.00 P.M. that he saw the crack of the curtains widen a little in one of Harkley's dormer windows.
That in itself was nothing. There were five people in that house and God-knows-what else, and no reason at all why it shouldn't show signs of life. With a grimace, Clarke quickly corrected himself: signs of undeath? Fully briefed, he knew that Harkley's inhabitants were something other than they seemed. But as he adjusted his nite-lite binoculars on the window, suddenly there was something else, a realisation that struck at Clarke like a bolt of lightning.
He had known, of course, that someone in there, probably the youth, was psychically endowed. That had been obvious for the last four days, ever since Clarke and the others first clapped eyes on the place. To any half-talented sensitive the old house would reek of strangeness. And not just strangeness, evil! Tonight, as darkness fell, Clarke had sensed it growing stronger, the wash of dark emanations flowing from the house like mental sewage. Until now he'd simply let it flow right past him, without touching, but as that dark figure had come into view behind the crack in the curtains, and as he'd focussed his binoculars upon it —
— Something had been there in his head, touching on his mind. A talent at least as strong as his own, probing his thoughts! But it wasn't the talent that surprised him — that was a game he'd played before with his colleagues at INTESP, where they practised constantly to break in on each other's thoughts — it was the sheer unbridled animal animosity that caused him to gasp, draw back a little, slam shut the doors on his ESP-endowed consciousness. The gurgling black whirlpool bog of the invading mind.
And because he had set up defences, so he failed to detect any hint of the physical threat, the orders Yulian had issued to his black Alsatian. He had failed, but his primary talent — the one no one as yet understood — was not failing him. It was 11.00 P.M. and his instructions were quite clear: he'd go back now to his temporary surveillance HO at a hotel in Paignton and make his report. The watch on the house would begin again at 6.00 A.M. tomorrow, when a colleague of Clarke's would take it up. He tossed his cigarette down, ground it out under his heel, pocketed his nite-lites.
Clarke's car was parked in a layby where the hedge and fence were cut back twenty-five yards down the road. He was on the field side of the hedge. He put his hand on the top bar preparatory to climbing over to the road, then thought better of it. Though he didn't know it, that was his hidden talent coming into play. Instead of climbing the fence, he hurried through the long grass at the edge of the field towards his car. The grass was wet where it whipped his trousers, but he ignored it. It saved time this way and he was in a hurry now, eager to be away from the place. Only natural, he supposed, considering what he'd just learned. And he hardly gave it a thought that by the time he got to his car he was almost running.
But it was then, as he fumbled the key into the lock and turned it, that he heard something else running: the faint scuff of padded feet slapping the road, the scrabble of claws as something heavy jumped the fence back there where he'd been standing. Then he was into the car, slamming the door behind him, eyes wide and heart thumping as he gazed back into the night.
And two seconds later Viad hit the car!
He hit so hard, with forepaws, shoulder and head, that the glass of the window in Clarke's door was starred into a cobweb pattern. The impact had sounded like a hammer blow, and Clarke knew that one more charge like that would shatter the glass to fragments and leave him totally unprotected. But he'd seen who, or what, his assailant was, and he had no intention of sitting here immobile and just waiting for it to happen.
Clarke turned the key in the ignition, revved, reversed a skidding three feet to bring the bonnet free of overhanging branches. Vlad's second spring, aimed again at Clarke's window, sent the dog sprawling on the bonnet directly in front of the windscreen. And now the young esper saw just how fortunate his escape had been. Out in the open — there was little he could have done against that!
Viad's face was a savage black mask of hatred, a contorted, snarling, saliva-flecked visage of madness! Yellow eyes spotted with crimson pupils glared through the glass at Clarke with such a burning intensity that he almost fancied he could feel their heat. Then he was into first gear and skidding out on to the road.
As the car jerked and slewed forward, so the dog's feet were jolted from under him. He crashed over on to his side on the bonnet and was sent sprawling into the darkness of the hedgerow as Clarke straightened the car up and sent it careening along the road. In his rearview mirror, he saw the dog emerge from the hedge and shake itself, glaring after the speeding car. Then Clarke was round a bend and Vlad lost to sight.
That wasn't something he felt sorry about. Indeed, he was still shaking when he switched off the car's engine in the hotel car park in Paignton. Following which… he flopped back in his seat and wearily lit a cigarette, which he smoked right down to the cork tip before securing the car and going in to make his report Frankie's Franchise was wall to wall sleazy. It was a place for habitual wharf-rats, prostitutes and their pimps, pushers and Genoese low-life in general. And it was noisy. An old American juke-box, back in fashion, was blasting Little Richard's raw ‘Tutti Frutti' across the main room like a gale force wind. There was no smallest corner of the place that escaped the music's blast, but in any one of the half-dozen arched alcoves you could at least hear yourself think. That was why Frankie's was so ideally suitable: you couldn't concentrate enough to hear anyone else think.
Alec Kyle and Carl Quint, Felix Krakovitch and Sergei Gulharov, sat at a small square table with their backs to the protective alcove walls. East and West faced each other across their drinks. Curiously, on the one side Kyle and Quint drank vodka, and on the other Krakovitch and Gulharov sipped American beers.
Identifying each other had been the easiest thing in the world: in Frankie's Franchise, no one else fitted the prescribed picture at all. But personal appearance wasn't the only yardstick; for of course, even in the hubbub, the three sensitives were able to detect each other's psychic auras. They had made their acknowledgement with nods of their heads, picked their way with their drinks from the bar to an empty alcove. Certain of the club's regulars had given them curious glances: the hard men a little wary, narrow-eyed, the prostitutes speculative. They had not returned them.