'Ah, George!' He smiled a sickly smile. 'I was just wondering if perhaps you'd like to see the cellars?' Then he saw George's expression, the mattock in his white-knuckled hands.
'The cellars?' George choked, almost entirely deranged with hatred. 'Yes I fucking would!' He swung his pick-like weapon. Yulian put up an arm to shield his face, turned away. The sharper, rustier blade of the heavy tool took him in the back of his right shoulder, crunched through the lower part of the scapula and buried itself to the haft in his body.
Thrown forward, Yulian went toppling down the central ramp, the mattock still sticking in him. As he fell he said, 'Ah! Ah!' — in no way a scream, more an expression of surprise, shock. George followed, arms reaching, lips drawn back from his teeth. He pursued Yulian, and Vlad pursued him.
Yulian lay face down at the bottom of the steps beside the open door to the vaults. He moaned, moved awkwardly. George slammed a foot down in the middle of his back, levered the mattock out of him. 'Ah! Ah!' again Yulian gave his peculiar, sighing cry. George lifted the mattock — and heard Vlad's rumbling growl close behind.
He turned, swung the mattock in a deadly arc. The dog was stopped in mid-flight as the mattock smacked flatly against the side of its head. It crumpled to the concrete floor, groaned like a man. George panted hoarsely, lifted his weapon again — but there was no sign of consciousness in the animal. Its sides heaved but it lay still, tongue protruding. Out like a light.
And now there was only Yulian.
George turned, saw Yulian staggering into the vault's unknown darkness. Unbelievable! With his injury, still the bastard kept going. George followed, kept Yulian's stumbling figure visible in the gloom. The cellars were extensive, rooms and alcoves and midnight corridors, but George didn't let his quarry out of sight for a single moment. Then — a light!
George peered through an arched entrance into a dimly illumined room. A single dusty bulb, shaded, hung from a vaulted ceiling of stone blocks. George had momentarily lost sight of Yulian in the darkness surrounding the cone of light; but then the youth staggered between him and the light source, and George picked him up again and advanced. Yulian saw him, swung an arm wildly at the light in an attempt to put it out of commission. Injured, he missed his aim, setting the lamp and shade dancing and swinging on their flex.
Then, by that wildly gyrating light, George saw the rest of the room. In intermittent flashes of light and darkness, he picked out the details of the hell he'd walked into.
Light… and in one corner a glimpse of piled wooden racks and cobwebbed shelving. Darkness… and Yulian an even darker shape that crouched uncertainly in the centre of the room. Light — and along one wall Georgina, seated in an old cane chair, her eyes bulging but vacant and her mouth and flaring nostrils wide as yawning caverns. Darkness — and a movement close by, so that George put up the mattock to defend himself. Insane light — and to his right a huge copper vat, six feet across and seated on copper legs; with Helen slumped in a dining chair on one side, her back to the nitre-streaked wall, and Anne, naked, likewise positioned on the other side. Their inner arms dangling inside the rim of the bowl, and something in the bowl itself seeming to move restlessly, throwing up ropes of doughy matter. Flickering darkness — out of which came Yulian's laughter: the clotted, sick laughter of someone warped irreparably. Then light again — which found George's eyes fixed on the great vat, or more properly on the women. And the picture searing itself indelibly into his brain.
Helen's clothing ripped down the front and pulled back, and the girl lolling there like a slut with her legs sprawled open, everything displayed. Anne likewise; but both of them grimacing, their faces working hideously, showing alternating joy and total horror; their arms in the vat, and the nameless slime crawling on their arms to their shoulders, pulsating from its unknown source!
Merciful darkness — and the thought in George's tottering mind: God! It's feeding on them, and it's feeding itself to them! And Yulian so close now that he could hear his rasping breathing. Light again, as the lamp settled to a jerky jitterbug — and the mattock wrenched from George's nerveless fingers and hurled away. And George finally face to visage with the man he'd intended to kill, who now he discovered to be hardly a man at all but something out of his very worst nightmares.
Fingers of rubber with the strength of steel gripped his shoulder and propelled him effortlessly, irresistibly towards the vat. 'George,' the nightmare gurgled almost conversationally, 'I want you to meet something…'
Chapter Six
Alec Kyle's knuckles were white where his hands gripped the rim of his desk. ‘God in heaven, Harry!' he cried, staring aghast at the Keogh apparition where bands of soft light flowed through it from the window's blinds. ‘Are you trying to scare the shit out of me before we even get started?'
I'm telling it as I know it. That's what you asked me to do, isn't it? Keogh was unrepentant. Remember, Alec, you're getting it secondhand. I got it straight from them, from the dead — the horse's mouth, as it were — and believe me I've watered it down for you!
Kyle gulped, shook his head, got a grip of himself. Then something Keogh had said got through to him. ‘You got it from "them"? Suddenly I have this feeling you don't just mean Thibor Ferenczy and George Lake.'
No, i've spoken to the Reverend Pollock, too. From Yulian's christening?
‘Oh, yes.' Kyle wiped his brow. ‘I see that now. Of course.'
Alec! Keogh's soft voice was sharper now. We have to hurry. Harry's beginning to stir.
And not only the real child, three hundred and fifty miles away in Hartlepool, but also its ethereal image where it languidly turned, superimposed over and within Keogh's midriff. It too was stirring, slowly stretching from its foetal position, its baby mouth opening in a yawn. The Keogh manifestation began to waver like smoke, like the heat haze over a summer road.
‘Before you go!' Kyle was desperate. ‘Where do I start?'
He was answered by the faint but very definite wail of a waking infant. Keogh's eyes opened wide. He tried to take a pace forward, towards Kyle. But the blue shimmer was breaking down, like a television image going wrong. In another moment it snapped into a single vertical line, like a tube of electric blue light, shortened to a point of blinding blue fire at eye-level — and blinked out.
But coming to Kyle as from a million miles away: Get in touch with Krakovitch. Tell him what you know. Some of it, anyway. You're going to need his help.
‘The Russians? But Harry —, Goodbye, Alec. I'll get… back… to… you.
And the room was completely still, felt somehow empty. The central heating made a loud click as it switched itself off.
Kyle sat there a long time, sweating a little, breathing deeply. Then he noticed the lights blinking on his desk communications, heard the gentle, almost timid rapping on his office door. ‘Alec?' a voice queried from outside. It was Carl Quint's voice. ‘It…t's gone now. But I suppose you know that. Are you all right in there?'
Kyle took a deep breath, pressed the command button. ‘It's finished for now,' he told the breathless, waiting HQ. ‘You'd all better come in and see me. There's time for an ‘O'-group before we knock it on the head for the day. There'll be things you're wanting to know, and things we have to talk about.' He released the button, said to himself: ‘And I do mean "things".'