It should have smashed! There’s a concrete floor down there—so the bottle should have smashed!
An electric light came on, and in the same instant the sledgehammer whirred past Redpath’s head and battered a huge cake of plaster out of the wall at his side. Wilbur Tennent—stripped to his vest and jockey shorts—was standing over him, glaring with his terrible corpse’s eyes, already making another swing with the hammer. Redpath escaped him by leaping the rest of the way down into the cellar, and was committed to the descent, totally unable to turn back, when he saw that most of the walls and floor were covered with a shifting, glistening reddish-brown sludge. The mass, which was like a slurry of clotting blood and fragments of liver, was on the move. It was flowing away from the bottom of the steps, leaving a clear area at the centre of which lay Redpath’s petrol bomb.
Dear God, my first nightmare was right!
I’VE WALKED INTO THE HOUSE’S STOMACH!
His capacity for terror exhausted, his mind saturated with dread, Redpath snatched up the bottle and backed into the corner nearest the bottom of the steps. The obscene tide ceased its retreat and began to flow towards him, reaching out with yearning stalks and tendrils which gorged and fattened on internal fluids before being reabsorbed into the main body.
At the same time Wilbur Tennent slowly came down the rest of the steps with his hammer, followed by Miss Connie and Betty York, who both were carrying their lethal little picks. Betty had pulled off her outer clothing, revealing the angry pinkness of burns on her stomach and thighs, and her hair was shrivelled into cindery lumps on one side of her head. Her eyes were like Tennent’s, blobs of lifeless jelly.
Redpath, moving with the mechanical precision of a robot, thumbed the wheel of his lighter, this time remembering to hold down the gas valve. It produced a spear of blue flame which he touched to the bottle in his other hand, creating a flaming yellow torch which threw out light and heat. The edge of the creeping brown mucus immediately stopped moving. Redpath raised the bottle higher and by the extra illumination it provided saw that, far back in the amorphous mass, there was the suggestion of a central structure, a rounded hummock of protoplasm containing something which might have been a sunken eye. The sight of it began to draw the life from his body, threatening to turn him into an immobile assembly of levers and joints without volition of its own.
It’s taking me again, Leila, and so quickly this time!
I’ve got to throw the bottle before it explodes in my face—but I’ve just realised why it won’t work.
There’s nothing down here to burn!
The petrol alone might injure the Once-born, but it’s too big to be killed this way. I didn’t expect it to be so big. It doesn’t make any difference, anyway, because…because…
Even the capacity for thought deserted Redpath as he saw that Tennent had reached the bottom of the steps and was coming towards him with the hammer poised at his right shoulder. He tried to shift his weight in preparation for evasive action, but a total paralysis had been imposed on his body. It was impossible for him even to open his fingers and drop the petrol bomb. Tennent moved closer, raised the hammer above his head and halted in that attitude, teetering, as the brown-clad figure of Albert materialized directly in front of him.
The appearance was instantaneous, magic, stupefying.
Although Redpath had deduced that the little man had the ability to teleport himself, actually seeing the power in action produced a pang of wonder which affected him significantly even though his perceptions were already overloaded by the imminence of death and the hideous encompassing presence of the alien creature. He stared in something like superstitious awe as Albert spread his arms, turning himself into a protective crucifix which stood between Redpath and the upraised hammer.
“Get out of the way,” Tennent said in an inhuman monotone. “If you don’t get out of the way I’ll have to kill you.”
“That would be a good idea,” Albert replied softly, “but you can’t do it. You see, I’m the only one here that the gaffer still needs. It’s all happening, Wilbur—just the way Prince Reginald told us it were going to happen.”
“He was lying.”
“No! He told us the God’s truth. It’s been going on for ten minutes and more. The gaffer’s been trying to make me take him to the other house. And I’ve been fighting him off, Wilbur. I’ve been resisting, Wilbur. For the first time in twelve years I got up enough spunk to resist the bugger.”
The living brown walls of the cellar heaved once, like a chamber in a beating heart, and Albert staggered as though he had been struck. He turned to face Redpath. His face was pale, streaked by rivulets of sweat, and his eyes were flakes of ice.
“I owe this to you, lad. The gaffer’s scared and he’s getting old, so he can’t keep me down like he’s used to—but you gave him the most trouble. The harder he had to try to keep you down, the easier it was for me to come back up.” Albert paused to swallow painfully. “You’ve got to keep fighting, lad. Don’t pack up now. If you can throw that there bottle you’re holding, that should do the trick. I can get us out of here…end this thing for good an’ all.”
Redpath was aware of the bottle becoming dangerously hot in his hand, threatening to turn him into a human torch, but he was unable to hurl it away from himself. “I…I…Can you get me out, as well?”
Albert gave him a strange, sad smile. “You’re not part of us yet, lad—you’re still clean.”
“Clean?”
“That’s what I said. You see—you never had to help us feed the gaffer.”
“Oh!” Redpath looked into Albert’s eyes and saw something there that went far beyond ordinary pain, something he shrank from knowing.
“Aye, lad, it’s as bad as that.” Albert turned away to face Wilbur and the two women. “Don’t leave it all to me and John! For pity’s sake, give us a hand to get this thing over and done with at last.” His voice was tortured, each word like the shattering of a bone.
Tennent opened his mouth, made a harsh rattling sound far back in his throat and swung the sledge-hammer. It slid from his grasp at the high point of its arc and went tumbling through the air to come down near the central mound of liver-like plasm. It disappeared below the surface in a dark welter of flying jelly.
A silent scream furled through Redpath’s mind, drowning out his senses.
He was only distantly conscious of the loathsome brown tide surging forward, moving with appalling swiftness, reaching out with blind tentacles. It engulfed his own ankles and he felt pain there, but the sensation was numbed by his blurred awareness of what was happening to Tennent, Betty and Miss Connie. Where the slime touched the bare flesh of their legs the skin dissolved on the instant, leaving the musculature exposed and red, glistening with all the awful clarity of an anatomy chart. Miss Connie fell to her hands and knees in the slurry, then struggled up again with hands that seemed to be encased in crimson gloves.
Only Albert was untouched. He stood in a circle of clean concrete, unmoving, his eyes searing into Redpath’s soul.
Redpath, humbled and inspired, made a supreme effort to throw the petrol bomb. His left arm gave a spastic jerk. The bottle slipped from his grasp and landed in the writhing brown ooze near his feet. It did not break, but there was an immediate spillage of burning petrol. The slurry retreated radially, like an iris springing open, and another soundless scream yammered through Redpath’s head.
He clapped both hands to his temples and tried to focus his gaze on Albert. The little man had closed his eyes. His face, in spite of its acromegalic deformities, was that of an ancient high priest. Redpath had a final fragmentary vision of him—uniquely heroic in his scuffed boots and stained brown overalls with the pack of Lucky Strikes projecting from one pocket—then the image was blasted away in the incredible white heat of a furnace.