Necroscope: Avengers

The packed cruise ship is a terrific nesting ground for a Lord and Lady of the Wamphyri on the run from E-Branch and the new Necroscope, Jake Cutter. By the time the ship is reported missing, the few beings still living on board will no longer be human . . . and the Wamphyri will be long fled to their next conquest. Korath, the vampire who lurks in Jake Cutter's mind, is determined to gain control of Jake's life, and Jake is equally determined not to let him have it. But to win this struggle Jake must confide in Ben Trask-and Trask, the head of E-Branch, is likely to want Jake dead the minute he learns of Jake's intrusive passenger! The spore garden planted under London by the third Wamphyri, Lord Swartz, is bearing bitter fruit indeed as a mysterious sleeping sickness-with a vampiric taint-slowly spreads among the population of Great Britain.E-Branch action teams have more on their plates than they can handle. They must locate terrorists who threaten the world with nuclear homicide; permanently close the Gate between the Wamphyri world and Earth; analyze the spore plague; and locate and destroy the three Wamphyri.Even the powers of Harry Keogh, the original Necroscope, summoned from the Great Beyond via the combined powers of E-Branch's strongest agents, may not be enough to defeat the monsters who have brought Earth to the brink of total destruction.

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What Has Gone Before: Invaders and DefilersTHREE YEARS AGO, THREE GREAT VAMPIRES--two Lords and a "Lady" of the Wamphyri, the alien originators of the alleged vampire "myths" or "legends" of Earth--entered our world via a transdimensional Gate under the Carpathian Mountains. Having split up following their covert "invasion," the trio went their own ways. Lord Nephran Malinari ("Malinari the Mind") enthralled an Australian billionaire to set himself up in a casino aerie in the exclusive resort of Xanadu in the Macpherson Range. Lord Szwart, a metamorphic "fly-the-light" in the truest sense of the term, headed for London, settling in a forgotten Roman "temple" in the deepest, most inaccessible bowels of the city. And Vavara--"beautiful" mistress of mass hypnotism--defiled an order of nuns by infiltrating their fortresslike monastery on the Greek island of Krassos.Their plan to overthrow the planet, reducing it to a vampire paradise, was in essence a simple one: to plant gardens of deadspawn fungi and bring them to deadly maturity. Nurtured on the life fluids (the mutated DNA) of sacrificed vampire thralls or lieutenants, these toadstools when they ripened and spawned would release a myriad of spores into the Earth's atmosphere, to be breathed by an unwitting human race! Then, as men became blood-lusting monsters who hid from the sun during daylight hours and hunted by night, and nation fought nation as the world sank into chaos, and no one--least of all the mazed, blood-addicted victims--was able to understand or even consider fighting the incurable "disease" that was converting them...then the Great Vampires, the Wamphyri, would emerge from the shadows and come into their own.As in the earliest days of their predawn Vampire World of Sunside/Starside, their thralls and lieutenants would go abroad in the world, carrying their monstrous plague with them as they consolidated their masters' (and mistress's) territories, where the laws of the Wamphyri would be the only laws. Malinari would take Australia, expanding into all the islands around and eventually Asia, and Vavara would take the Mediterranean and Africa, spreading east to form a border with Malinari. As for the metamorphic horror that was Lord Szwart: while it would seem he had been disadvantaged, with only the British Isles, France, Spain, and the northern and westernmost regions of Europe coming under his control, as he deployed his forces west across the Atlantic, he would quickly seed the Americas with his deadspawn, and when the time was ripe he would move his power base to New York. The metropolis's sprawling underground network would provide access to all parts of the city whether in daylight or darkness, while its greatest building would be Szwart's aerie, its every window lacquered black and draped against the sun.These had been the ambitions of the Wamphyri, and they had seemed infallible; their dreams, and an unwitting mankind's as yet unrealized nightmares. But despite their legendary cunning and leechlike tenacity, the three Great Vampires had not reckoned with E-Branch.E-Branch (E for ESP): a top-secret arm of the British intelligence services, many of whose psychically talented agents had dealt with vampires before, and not only in this world but also in Sunside/Starside. Ben Trask, the members of his London-based organization, and a small handful of people in the Corridors of Power were the only human beings who knew of the alien invasion. And because of the planetwide panic any disclosure would cause, they didn't dare speak of it to anyone outside their circle.But having traced Malinari to Australia (and with the ever-grudging assistance of their Minister Responsible in Whitehall: his help in covertly informing an Australian counterpart of the problem and enlisting military aid), Trask and an E-Branch task force had ventured down under to confront Malinari in his aerie. There in Xanadu they had destroyed his fungi garden (though not without the timely assistance of Jake Cutter, a young man whose extraordinary powers were not yet fully developed or even understood) but The Mind himself had escaped.As for Jake Cutter (though more especially from Ben Trask's necessarily cautious point of view):Jake seems an entirely wrongheaded man with something of a chequered background. Having fallen foul of a gang of international drug-runners and suffering at their hands, he was bent on settling old scores when strange circumstances brought him into contact with E-Branch. (He was in fact pursuing a vendetta with this criminal organization's powerful leader and several of his close colleagues--people who had raped and murdered a girl of Jake's acquaintance, with whom he had had a brief but passionate affair--and had been responsible for a series of violent, extremely ugly deaths in their higher echelon.)But the leader of the gang--a Sicilian vampire named Luigi Castellano--had laid a trap for Jake, causing him to fall into the hands of the Italian police. Incarcerated in a Turin prison, Jake had soon discovered that Castellano was not without influence there, and that Jake's demise had been scheduled for the very near future.Then, during a jailbreak (also arranged by Castellano), when it seemed certain that Jake must die under fire from the guards...a weird reprieve, a miraculous escape: Jake's first taste of things to come, and the beginning of his transition.Something he took to be a ricochetting bullet--a flash of golden fire--struck him in the forehead. But instead of falling dead he fell into something else entirely and was conveyed through the Möbius Continuum (a means of metaphysical teleportation) to Harry's Room at E-Branch HQ in London.Harry's Room:The long-dead (?) Necroscope Harry Keogh was once the most important member of E-Branch. On those occasions when he stayed at the London HQ, he had a room of his own, as did many espers. Harry's Room, however, has always been (and still is) different from other rooms. Perhaps to signal their regard for their much loved, highly respected ex-member--or perhaps because the room continues to retain something of the Necroscope's personality--it has been left untouched and unoccupied, exactly as it was in the time of Harry's residence.And so it was a singular event for Ben Trask and his espers to discover a bewildered stranger inside the locked room of the Necroscope, in the heart of security-conscious E-Branch HQ! And it had to be more than a mere coincidence...Jake's advent had come at a propitious moment (or at least, everyone except Trask thought so), for it was only a short time later that Nephran Malinari was discovered in Xanadu, his playboy retreat and aerie in the mountains of the Macpherson Range. And teaming Jake up with Liz Merrick, a young, attractive, budding telepathic receiver whose powers, like Jake's, were still developing, Trask took them to Australia as part of his task force.It was during the course of this largely successful operation that Jake discovered the truth of what Trask and his people had suspected all along: that indeed he had inherited something of Harry's powers. For when the original Necroscope had died on Starside, his metaphysical personality--the sidereal intelligence that was Harry--had fragmented into many golden splinters or darts, one of which had entered into Jake! Now in his dreams Jake could converse with the "dead" Necroscope through the medium of deadspeak. Then, too (not yet aware that his dreams were of crucial importance, that they had real meaning in the waking world and were much more than disturbing symptoms of paramnesia and a crumbling mentality), Jake had felt obliged to ask Trask just what, exactly, a Necroscope was.But while Trask had been willing to explain something of a Necroscope's powers to Jake--his ability to teleport, and the unearthly "gift" which enabled him to converse with the dead--there were certain other things that he dared not speak of. For as the director of E-Branch for many years, Trask had developed an enquiring and skeptical mind; he knew how very deceiving outward appearances can be, and how even the most innocent seeming of men (especially the innocent ones: for example, the original Necroscope) may be susceptible to the greatest evils. Moreover, Trask had never had much faith in coincidence or synchronicity. He believed that things usually had good reasons for happening, and that when they happened might be equally relevant...Jake had come on the scene at a propitious time, certainly--but for whom? And wasn't it simply too much of a coincidence that at the advent of a trio of Great Vampires out of Starside, a new Necroscope should also put in an appearance? So, had Jake arrived of his own (or Harry Keogh's) accord, by "coincidence," or had he in fact been sent to infiltrate E-Branch? What was it of the original Necroscope--how much of Harry, what element--had entered Jake? Something of his light side, from his earlier life, or something of his far more dangerous side from a later, darker period?For one of the several things that Jake didn't yet know was that at the end of the Necroscope's time on Earth he had been a vampire in his own right--Wamphyri! And probably the greatest of them all! And not only Harry but two of his sons: they, too, had been vampires, changeling creatures, on Starside in a weird parallel world...Thus Trask's doubts--or more properly his natural caution, coupled with his inability to read the young Necroscope despite that his own weird talent made him a human lie detector--held him back from bringing Jake more fully into his confidence. For if Jake was not the real thing, if he had not inherited Harry's mantle to become the fantastic weapon against the Wamphyri that most of Trask's agents believed him to be, but rather possessed the potential to become the exact opposite...then Trask might yet have to kill him!Hence his great quandary, for if on the other hand Jake was the real thing, and if he was made privy to everything, then he might easily shy from the knowledge--the full knowledge--...

About the Author

Brian Lumley is the author of the bestselling Necroscope series of vampire novels. The first Necroscope, Harry Keogh, also appears in a collection of Lumley's short fiction, Harry Keogh and Other Weird Heroes, along Titus Crow and Henri Laurent de Marigny, from Titus Crow, Volumes One, Two, and Three, and David Hero and Eldin the Wanderer, from the Dreamlands series. An acknowledged master of Lovecraft-style horror, Brian Lumley has won the British Fantasy Award and been named a Grand Master of Horror. His works have been published in more than a dozen countries and have inspired comic books, role-playing games, and sculpture, and been adapted for television.When not writing, Lumley can often be found spear-fishing in the Greek islands, gambling in Las Vegas, or attending a convention somewhere in the US. Lumley and his wife live in England.

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