The Source by Brian Lumley Page A

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pale, almost grey flesh. Swept back like a mane and tied in a knot, the lock bobbed at the back of the man’s neck. His eyes were small and close together, and very startling. They glared out from under thick black eyebrows that met in a tangle across the bridge of a squat or flattened nose. The ears were slightly pointed and had large lobes; they lay flat to the head above hollow, almost gaunt cheeks. The lips were red and fleshy, in a mouth slanted to the left and set with a sort of permanent sneer or snarl. The man’s chin was pointed, made to look even more so by a small black beard waxed to a point. But the face’s main feature was that pair of small, glaring eyes. Jazz had looked at them again: red as blood, they’d gleamed in deep black orbits.
    As if sensing Jazz’s needs, the camera had then drawn back to show the entire man again. He wore a short pelmet of cloth about his loins, sandals on his feet, a large ring of golden metal in his right ear. His right hand was gloved in a gauntlet heavy with spikes, blades and hooks—an incredibly cruel, murderous weapon!
    After that Jazz had only sufficient time to note the man’s leanness, the ripple of his fine-toned muscles, and his wolf’s lope of a walk before he stepped out of the sphere onto the walkway—and then everything had speeded up!
    The British agent came back to the present, gripped the edge of his bed and drew himself into a sitting position. He swung his feet to the floor and put his back to the metal wall. The wall was cool but not cold; through it, Jazz could feel the life of the subterranean complex, the nervous, irregular coursing of its frightened blood. It was like being below decks in a big ship, where the throb of the engines comes right through the floor and walls and bulkheads. And just as he’d be aware of the life in a ship, so he was aware of the terror in this place.
    There were men down there in that unnatural cavern
in the heart of the mountain, men with guns. Some of them had seen for themselves, and others had been shown on films like the one Jazz had seen, what could come through the Gate they guarded. Little wonder the Perchorsk Projekt was afraid.
    He gave a small shiver, then a grim chuckle. He’d caught the Projekt’s fever: its symptom was this shivering, even when it was warm. He’d seen them all doing it, and now he did it, too.
    Jazz deliberately gave himself a mental shake, forced himself to return to the film Khuv had shown him …

Chapter Five
    Wamphyri!
    THE MAN CAME RIGHT OUT THROUGH THE SPHERE ONTO THE walkway—and then everything speeded up!
    He shuttered his red eyes against the sudden light, shouted an astonished denial in a language Jazz half-way understood or felt he should understand, and fell into a defensive crouch. Then the film had suddenly come alive. Before, the sounds had seemed muted: the occasional low cough, nervous conversation, feet shuffling in the background, and now and then the springs of weapons being eased or tested and the unmistakable metallic clatter of magazines slapped into housings. But all of it seeming dull and a little out of tune, like the first few minutes of a film in a cinema, where your ears are still tuned to the street and haven’t yet grown accustomed to the new medium of wall to wall sound.
    Now, however, the sound was very much tied to the film. Khuv’s voice, shouting: “Take him alive! Don’t shoot him! I’ll court martial the first man who pulls a trigger! He’s only a man, can’t you see? Go in and capture him! ”
    Figures in combat uniforms ran past the camera, caused the cameramen and therefore the film to jiggle a little, burst into view on the screen and almost blotted out the picture. Having been ordered not to shoot, they
carried their weapons awkwardly, seemed not to know what to do with them. Jazz could understand that: they’d been told that hideous death lurked in the