Layard checked that the valve on his hose was open, rested his finger on the trigger, toed the door open. In there… darkness.
He waited until his eyes were growing accustomed to the dimness, then spotted a light switch on the wall just inside the door. He reached out his hand, then drew it back. He stepped forward a pace, used the nozzle of his hose to trip the switch. A light came on, throwing the interior of the cupboard into sharp relief. At the back a tall figure! Layard drew breath sharply; his jaw fell partly open and the corners of his mouth drew back in a half-rictus of fear. He was a breath from squeezing the trigger but then his eyes focussed and he saw only an old raincoat, hanging on a peg.
Layard gulped, filled his lungs, quietly closed the door. Jordan was up on the first floor landing. He saw two alcoves, arched over, with closed doors set centrally. There was also a passage, with two more doors that he could see before the corridor turned a corner. The closest door was maybe eight paces away, the furthest twelve. He turned back to the doors in the alcoves, approached the first of them, turned the doorknob and kicked it open: it was a toilet with a high window, letting in grey light.
Jordan turned to the second door, dealt with it as with the first. Inside was an extensive library, the whole room visible at a glance. Then, aware that Layard was coming up the stairs, he started down the corridor and at once paused. His ears pricked up. He heard… water? The hiss and gurgle of a tap?
A shower! The water sounds were coming from the second room — a bathroom? down the corridor. Jordan looked back. Layard was at the top of the stairs. Their eyes met. Jordan pointed to the first door, then at Layard. Layard was to deal with it. Then Jordan thumbed his own chest, pointed along the corridor to the second door.
He went on, but cautiously, crossbow held chest high and pointed dead ahead. The water sounds were louder, and a voice? A girl's voice singing? Humming, anyway. Some utterly tuneless melody.
In this house at this time, a girl humming to herself in a shower? Or was it a trap? -
Jordan took a tighter grip on his crossbow, turned the knob and kicked in the door. No trap! Not that he could see. In fact the completely natural scene beyond the bathroom door left him at a complete loss. All of the tension went out of him in a moment, and he was left feeling… like some gross intruder!
The girl (Helen Lake, surely?) was beautiful, and quite naked. Water streamed down on her, setting her lovely body gleaming. She stood sideways on, picked out in clear definition against blue ceramic tiles, in the shower's shallow well. As the door slammed open she jerked her head round to stare at Jordan, her eyes opening wide in terror. Then she gasped, crumpled back against the shower's wall, looking as if she were about to faint. One hand flew to her breasts and her eyelids fluttered as her knees began to give way.
Jordan half-lowered his crossbow, said to himself: Sweet Jesus! But this is just a frightened girl! He began to reach out his free hand — to steady her — but then other thoughts, her thoughts, abruptly printed themselves on his telepathic mind.
Come on, my sweet! Come help me! Ah, just touch me, hold me! Just a little closer, my sweet… there! And now — Jordan jerked back as she turned more fully towards him. Her eyes were wide, triangular, demonic! Her face had been instantly transformed into that of a beast! And in her right hand, invisible until now, was a carving knife. The knife rose as she reached out and grasped Jordan's jacket. Her grip was iron! She drew him effortlessly towards her — and he fired his bolt into her breast point-blank.
Slammed back against the rear wall of the shower, pinned there by the bolt, she dropped her knife and began to issue peal after ringing peal of soul-searing screams. Blood gushed from where the bolt was bedded in her with little more than its flight protruding. She grasped it, and still screaming jerked her body this way and that. The bolt came loose from the wall in a crunching of tiles and plaster and she staggered to and fro in the shower, yanking on the bolt and screaming endlessly.
‘God, God, oh God!' Jordan cried, riveted to the spot.
Layard shouldered him aside, squeezed the trigger on his flame-thrower, turned the entire shower unit into a blistering, steaming pressure-cooker. After several seconds he stopped hosing, and stared with Jordan at the result. Black smoke and steam cleared and the water continued to hiss, spurting from half-a-dozen places now in the molten plastic tubing of the shower's system. In the shallow well, Helen Lake's body slumped, features bubbling, hair like smouldering stubble, every inch of her skin peeling from her in great raw strips.
‘God help us!' Jordan gasped, turned away to be sick.
‘God?' the thing in the shower croaked, like a voice from the abyss. ‘What god? You bloody black bastards!'
Impossibly she came erect, took a blind, stumbling, groping step forward.
Layard torched her again, but more out of mercy than from fear. He let his flame-thrower roar until fire belched out of the shower and threatened to burn him, too. Then he switched off, backed away down the corridor to where Jordan stood retching over the stair's balustrade.
From below, Roberts's voice reached anxiously up to them: ‘Ken? Trevor? What is it?'
Layard wiped his forehead. ‘We… we got the girl,' he whispered, then shouted, ‘We got the girl!'
‘We got her mother,' Roberts answered, ‘and Bodescu's dog. That leaves Bodescu himself, and his mother.'
‘There's a door up here, locked,' Layard called back. ‘I thought I heard someone in there.'
‘Can't you break it in?'
‘No, it's oak, old and heavy. I could burn it.
‘No time for that. And if there is anyone in there, they're finished anyway. The cellars are mined by now.
You'd better come down — and quickly! We have to get out of here.'
Layard dragged Jordan after him down the stairs, calling ahead, ‘Guy, where the hell have you been?'
‘I'm on my own,' Roberts responded. ‘Trask's out of it for now — but he's OK. Where've I been? I've been checking this place through downstairs.'
‘A waste of time,' Jordan groaned, half to himself.
‘What?' Roberts raised his voice more yet.
‘I said, we'd already done it!' Jordan yelled, but needlessly for they were down the stairs, with Roberts propelling them towards the entrance hall and the open door…
Simon Gower and Harvey Newton had gone down into the cellars via the outbuilding with its narrow steps and central ramp. Loaded down with almost two hundred pounds of explosives between them, they had found the lights out of order, and so been obliged to use pocket torches. The vaults under the house were black and silent as a tomb, seemed extensive as a catacomb. They stuck close together, dumping thermite and plastic explosive packages wherever they found support walls or buttressed archways, and even though they went with something of caution, still they managed rapidly to fairly well saturate the place with their load. Newton carried a small can of petrol with which he left a trail from one dump to the next, until the whole place reeked of highly volatile fuel.
Finally they were satisfied that they'd explored and mined every part — and likewise pleased that they'd come across nothing dangerous — and so turned back and retraced their tracks to the exit. At a place they both agreed to be approximately central under the house, they set down the last of their load. Then Newton splashed what was left of his petrol all the way to the foot of the out building steps, while Gower double-checked the charges they'd planted, making sure they were all amply primed. - At the steps Newton tossed down his empty can, turned
and looked back into the gloom. From a little way back, round a corner, he could hear Gower's hoarse breathing and he knew that the other man worked furiously at his task. Gower's torch made flickering patches of light back there, its beam swinging this way and that as he worked.