'I do not believe.'
He had been heard.
'There's somebody up here,' Gideon called. The man approached the door, and beat on it. 'Open up!'
Baliard heard him quite clearly, but didn't reply. His throat was burning, and the roar of rotors was growing louder again. He put his back to the door and despaired.
Suckling was up the stairs and at the door in seconds. 'Who's in there?' he demanded to know. 'Answer me! Who's in there?' Getting no response, he ordered that Cripps be brought upstairs. There was more commotion as the order was obeyed.
'For the last time -' Suckling said.
The pressure was building in Ballard's skull. This time it seemed the din had lethal intentions; his eyes ached, as if about to be blown from their sockets. He caught sight of something in the mirror above the sink; something with gleaming eyes, and again, the words came - 'I do not believe' - but this time his throat, hot with other business, could barely pronounce them.
'Ballard,' said Suckling. There was triumph in the word. 'My God, we've got Ballard as well. This is our lucky day.'
No, thought the man in the mirror. There was nobody of that name here. Nobody of any name at all, in fact, for weren't names the first act of faith, the first board in the box you buried freedom in? The thing he was becoming would not be named; nor boxed; nor buried. Never again.
For a moment he lost sight of the bathroom, and found himself hovering above the grave they had made him dig, and in the depths the box danced as its contents fought its premature burial. He could hear the wood splintering - or was it the sound of the door being broken down?
The box-lid flew off. A rain of nails fell on the heads of the burial party. The noise in his head, as if knowing that its torments had proved fruitless, suddenly fled, and with it the delusion. He was back in the bathroom, facing the open door. The men who stared through at him had the faces of fools. Slack, and stupefied with shock - seeing the way he was wrought. Seeing the snout of him, the hair of him, the golden eye and the yellow tooth of him. Their horror elated him.
'Kill it!' said Suckling, and pushed Gideon into the breach. The man already had his gun from his pocket and was levelling it, but his trigger-finger was too slow. The beast snatched his hand and pulped the flesh around the steel. Gideon screamed, and stumbled away down the stairs, ignoring Suckling's shouts.
As the beast raised his hand to sniff the blood on his palm there was a flash of fire, and he felt the blow to his shoulder. Sheppard had no chance to fire a second shot however before his prey was through the door and upon him. Forsaking his gun, he made a futile bid for the stairs, but the beast's hand unsealed the back of his head in one easy stroke. The gunman toppled forward, the narrow landing filling with the smell of him. Forgetting his other enemies, the beast fell upon the offal and ate.
Somebody said: 'Ballard.'
The beast swallowed down the dead man's eyes in one gulp, like prime oysters.
Again, those syllables. ''Ballard.' He would have gone on with his meal, but that the sound of weeping pricked his ears. Dead to himself he was, but not to grief. He dropped the meat from his fingers and looked back along the landing.
The man who was crying only wept from one eye; the other gazed on, oddly untouched. But the pain in the living eye was profound indeed. It was despair, the beast knew; such suffering was too close to him for the sweetness of transformation to have erased it entirely. The weeping man was locked in the arms of another man, who had his gun placed against the side of his prisoner's head.
'If you make another move,' the captor said, Til blow his head off. Do you understand me?'
The beast wiped his mouth.
'Tell him, Cripps! He's your baby. Make him understand.'
The one-eyed man tried to speak, but words defeated him. Blood from the wound in his abdomen seeped between his fingers.
'Neither of you need die,' the captor said. The beast didn't like the music of his voice; it was shrill and deceitful. 'London would much prefer to have you alive. So why don't you tell him, Cripps? Tell him I mean him no harm.'
The weeping man nodded.
'Ballard ...'he murmured. His voice was softer than the other. The beast listened.
'Tell me, Ballard -' he said,'- how does it feel?'
The beast couldn't quite make sense of the question.
'Please tell me. For curiosity's sake -'
'Damn you -' said Suckling, pressing the gun into Cripps' flesh. 'This isn't a debating society.'
'Is it good?' Cripps asked, ignoring both man and gun.
'Shut up!'
'Answer me, Ballard. How does it feel?
As he stared into Cripps' despairing eyes the meaning of the sounds he'd uttered came clear, the words falling into place like the pieces of a mosaic. 'Is it good?' the man was asking.
Ballard heard laughter in his throat, and found the syllables there to reply.
'Yes,' he told the weeping man. 'Yes. It's good.'
He had not finished his reply before Cripps' hand sped to snatch at Suckling's. Whether he intended suicide or escape nobody would ever know. The trigger-finger twitched, and a bullet flew up through Cripps' head and spread his despair across the ceiling. Suckling threw the body off, and went to level the gun, but the beast was already upon him.
Had he been more of a man, Ballard might have thought to make Suckling suffer, but he had no such perverse ambition. His only thought was to render the enemy extinct as efficiently as possible. Two sharp and lethal blows did it. Once the man was dispatched, Ballard crossed over to where Cripps was lying. His glass eye had escaped destruction. It gazed on fixedly, untouched by the holocaust all around them. Unseating it from the maimed head, Ballard put in his pocket; then he went out into the rain.
It was dusk. He did not know which district of Berlin he'd been brought to, but his impulses, freed of reason, led him via the back streets and shadows to a wasteland on the outskirts of the city, in the middle of which stood a solitary ruin. It was anybody's guess as to what the building might once have been (an abbatoir? an opera-house?) but by some freak of fate it had escaped demolition, though every other building had been levelled for several hundred yards in each direction. As he made his way across the weed-clogged rubble the wind changed direction by a few degrees and carried the scent of his tribe to him. There were many there, together in the shelter of the ruin. Some leaned their backs against the wall and shared a cigarette; some were perfect wolves, and haunted the darkness like ghosts with golden eyes; yet others might have passed for human entirely, but for their trails.
Though he feared that names would be forbidden amongst this clan, he asked two lovers who were rutting in the shelter of the wall if they knew of a man called Mironenko. The bitch had a smooth and hairless back, and a dozen full teats hanging from her belly.
'Listen,' she said.
Ballard listened, and heard somebody talking in a corner of the ruin. The voice ebbed and flowed. He followed the sound across the roofless interior to where a wolf was standing, surrounded by an attentive audience, an open book in its front paws. At Ballard's approach one or two of the audience turned their luminous eyes up to him. The reader halted.
'Ssh!' said one, 'the Comrade is reading to us.'
It was Mironenko who spoke. Ballard slipped into the ring of listeners beside him, as the reader took up the story afresh.
'And God blessed them, and God said unto them, Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth ...'
Ballard had heard the words before, but tonight they were new.
'... and subdue it: and have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air ...'