'Mother of God!' Laverne croaked.
'Ak!… ak!… ak!' said Vulpe, the words bursting in bloody bubbles from his pallid lips.
And along the passageway the great old Grey One growled low in his throat and paced slowly, stiff-legged, into full view.
Vulpe was finished, that much was plain. An army of nurses with a ton of bandages between them couldn't have stopped him bleeding his last, not now. Laverne couldn't save him, neither from the bed of spikes nor from the wolf. On nerveless legs he backed off, shuffling crablike, sideways back along the passage, back towards the shallow steps leading to the false flue. It was all over for George — everything was over for him — and now Laverne must think only of himself. And as Vulpe's blood commenced to gurgle from the carved stone spout into the mouth of the urn, so the overweight American backed away faster yet…
… And paused abruptly, wobbling like a jelly there in the narrow mould of the passageway.
In front, the wolf, its face a snarling mask in the torchlight; between, the dying man on his torture-bed of spikes; and now… now there was something else. Behind!
No longer breathing, Laverne cranked his head round like a nut on a rusty bolt. At first he made little of what he was seeing. All the edges were indistinct, weirdly mobile. The ceiling seemed to have lowered itself, the passage to have narrowed, the floor to have become heaped with… something. Something furry. Something that rustled and flopped!
Laverne's eyes bugged as he thrust out his torch in that direction, bugged more yet as several small parts of that anomalous furriness detached themselves from the moving walls and darted by him in fluttering swoops and dives. Bats! A colony of bats! And more of them clustering to the walls, floor and ceiling even as he grimaced his disgust.
He looked back the other way. The wolf had come to a standstill; its ears were pointed into the trench, its attention centred on the urn. Cold as death, reeling and panting for air, Laverne looked where it looked. He looked, saw, and knew that he was on the verge of fainting. His blood was pooling, his senses whirling — but he also knew that he dared not faint! Not in this nightmare place, and certainly not now.
The urn was belching. Puffs of vapour, like small smoke rings, were issuing from its obscene mouth. Black slime, bubbling up from within, was blistering on the cold rim like congealing tar. As Vulpe's blood was consumed, so something was forming and expanding within the urn. A catalyst, his blood transformed what was within!
Hypnotized by horror, Laverne could only watch. A mottled blue-grey tentacle of slime, crimson-veined, slopped upwards out of the mouth of the urn and into the stone spout. Elongating, it slid like a snake along the trail of blood to where Vulpe lay transfixed. Sentient, it curled round his right leg where it was bent at the knee, surged along the impaled thigh and across his belly, crept over his palpitating chest. He continued to gasp, 'Ak!… ak!… argh!' — but agony had very nearly inured him, numbed him into a mental limbo, and loss of his life's blood was quickly finishing the job.
Somehow, summoning up his last ounce of strength from the very roots of his will, Vulpe managed to lift his face up off the spike which pierced his right cheek and lower jaw; and conscious to the last, he saw what reared on his chest and even now formed a flat, swaying, blind cobra head!
His bloody jaws flew open — perhaps in a scream, though none came — and the leech-thing at once drove itself into his yawning mouth and down his straining gullet! He convulsed on the spikes; his lips split at their corners as his jaws were forced apart and the now corrugated, pulsating bulk of the thing thrust into him.
The urn was empty now, steaming and slimed where the 'tail' of the leech-creature had snaked free. But still Vulpe gagged and frothed and bled from his nostrils as the horror filled him. His neck was fat from its passage into him; his eyes stood out as if to burst from their sockets; his three-fingered hands tore free of the spikes and grasped at the monster raping his throat, trying to tear it out of him. To no avail.
In another moment the entire creature had entered him — and still he tossed on the spikes, flopped his head this way and that, slopped blood and mucus all around.
'Oh, Jesus! Oh, great God in heaven!' Laverne wailed. 'Die, for Christ's sake!' he instructed Vulpe. 'Let it go! Be still!' And it was as if George Vulpe heard him. He did let it go, he was… suddenly… still.
The entire scene stood frozen, timeless. The great wolf, a statue blocking the way forward; the bats, almost completely choking Laverne's single route of exit; the drained and hideously refilled body of his friend, motionless on its bed of spikes. Only the flickering torch in Laverne's hand had any life of its own, and that too was dying.
In one badly shaking hand the firebrand, and in the other his pocket-torch; Randy Laverne could never have said how he'd hung on to either one of them. But now, snarling his outrage and terror, he turned to the wall of bats and thrust at it with his smoking, guttering torch. They didn't retreat but clustered to the firebrand, smothered it with their scorching, crackling bodies, put it out! A dozen dead or dying bats fell to the floor of the passage, were ploughed under by the creeping furry tide of their cousins where they wriggled and flopped forward.
Laverne went a little mad then. He screamed hoarsely, brokenly; he panted, gasped and screamed again; he lashed out with his arms in the near-darkness and aimed the ailing beam of his electric torch this way and that all around, never giving himself a moment's time to see anything.
He did not see George Vulpe wrench himself upright, free of the spikes in the trench, or the way his gashes had stopped bleeding and were mending themselves even now. Nor did he see him climb up from the trench, fondling the old wolf's ears and smiling. Especially, he did not see that smile. No, his act of dropping the electric torch and sliding semiconscious down the wall to crumple on the floor of the passage was occasioned by none of these things but by Vulpe's sudden appearance, his rising up there, directly before him. By that and by his redly glaring eyes, and his entirely alien, phlegm-clotted voice, saying:
'My friend, you came to this place of your own free will. And I believe you are… bleeding?' Vulpe's nostrils opened wide, sniffed, and his eyes became fiery slits in that preternaturally pale face. 'Indeed, I'm sure you are. Now really, someone should see to that wound — before something gets into it.'
Emil Gogosu woke up to find someone kneeling close by. It was young Gheorghe, one hand shaking the hunter awake, the other holding a warning finger to his lips. 'Shhhr he hushed.
'Eh? What is it?' Gogosu whispered, at once wide awake and peering about in the night. The fire was burning low, its heart redly reflecting from Vulpe's eyes. 'Dawn already? I don't believe it!'
'Not dawn,' the other replied, also in a whisper, however hoarse and urgent. 'Something else.' He stood up. 'Come, bring your gun.'
Gogosu unrolled himself from his blanket, reached for his rifle and came lithely to his feet. He prided himself that his bones didn't ache.
'Come,' Vulpe said again, stepping carefully so as not to wake Armstrong.