Two days later, Tulbeyev let the Amerikans in. Chirkov did not know where the Corporal got the idea; he just got up from the gun emplacement, walked across the foyer, and unbarred the doors. Chirkov did not try to stop him, distracted by efforts to jam the wrong type of belt into the machine gun. When all the bolts were loose, Tulbeyev flung the doors back and stood aside. At the front of the queue, ever since the night they had brought in Valentina’s specimens, was the officer. As he waited, his face had run, flesh slipping from his cheeks to form jowly bags around his jaw. He stepped forwards smartly, entering the foyer. Lyubachevs-ky woke up from his cot behind the desk and wondered aloud what was going on. Tulbeyev took a fistful of medals from the officer, and tossed them to the floor after a shrewd assessment. The officer walked purposefully, with a broken-ankled limp, towards the lifts. Next in was the woman in the pinstripe suit Tulbeyev took her hat and perched it on his head. From the next few, the Corporal harvested a silver chain identity bracelet, a woven leather belt, a pocket calculator, an old brooch. He piled the tokens behind him. Amerikans filled the foyer, wedging through the doorway in a triangle behind the officer.
Chirkov assumed the dead would eat him and wished he had seriously tried to go to bed with Technician Sverdlova. He still had two rounds left in his revolver, which meant he could deal with an Amerikan before ensuring his own everlasting peace. There were so many to choose from and none seemed interested in him. The lift was descending and those who couldn’t get into it discovered the stairs. They were all drawn to the basement, to the Pool. Tulbeyev chortled and gasped at each new treasure, sometimes clapping the dead on the shoulders as they yielded their riches, hugging one or two of the more harmless creatures. Lyubachevsky was appalled, but did nothing. Finally, the administrator got together the gumption to issue an order: he told Chirkov to inform the Director of this development. Chirkov assumed that since Kozintsev was, as ever, working in the Pool, he would very soon be extremely aware of this development, but he snapped to and barged through the crowd anyway, choking back the instinct to apologize. The Amerikans mainly got out of his way, and he pushed to the front of the wave shuffling down the basement steps. He broke out of the pack and clattered into the Pool, yelling that the Amerikans were coming. Researchers looked up – he saw Valentina’s eyes flashing annoyance and wondered if it was not too late to ask her for sex – and the crowd edged behind Chirkov, approaching the lip of the Pool.
He vaulted in and sloshed through the mess towards Ko-zintsev’s cubicle. Many partitions were down already and there was a clear path to the Director’s work-space. Valentina pouted at him, then her eyes widened as she saw the assembled legs surrounding the Pool. The Amerikans began to topple in, crushing furniture and corpses beneath them, many unable to stand once they had fallen. The hardiest of them kept on walking, swarming round and overwhelming the technicians. Cries were strangled and blood ran on the bed of the Pool. Chirkov fired wildly, winging an ear off a bearded dead man in a shabby suit, and pushed on towards Kozintsev. When he reached the centre, his first thought was that the cubicle was empty, then he saw what the Director had managed. Combining himself with his work, V.A. Kozintsev had constructed a wooden half-skeleton which fitted over his shoulders, making his own head the heart of the new body he had fashioned for Grigory Yefimovich Rasputin. The head, built out to giant size with exaggerated clay and rubber muscles, wore its black wig and beard, and even had lips and patches of sprayed-on skin. The upper body was wooden and intricate, the torso of a colossus with arms to match, but sticking out at the bottom were the Director’s stick-insect legs. Chirkov thought the body would not be able to support itself but, as he looked, the assemblage stood. He looked up at the caricature of Rasputin’s face. Blue eyes shone, not glass but living.
Valentina was by his side, gasping. He put an arm round her and vowed to himself that if it were necessary she would have the bullet he had saved for himself. He smelled her perfumed hair. Together, they looked up at the holy maniac who had controlled a woman and, through her, an empire, ultimately destroying both. Rasputin looked down on them, then turned away to look at the Amerikans. They crowded round in an orderly fashion, limping pilgrims approaching a shrine. A terrible smile disfigured the crude face. An arm extended, the paddle-sized hand stretching out fingers constructed from surgical implements. The hand fell onto the forehead of the first of the Amerikans, the officer. It covered the dead face completely, fingers curling round the head. Grigory Yefimovich seemed powerful enough to crush the Amerikan’s skull, but instead he just held firm. His eyes rolled up to the chandelier, and a twanging came from inside the wood-and-clay neck, a vibrating monotone that might have been a hymn. As the noise resounded, the gripped Amerikan shook, slabs of putrid meat falling away like layers of onionskin. At last, Rasputin pushed the creature away. The uniform gone with its flesh, it was like Valentina’s skeleton, but leaner, moister, stronger. It stood up and stretched, its infirmities gone, its ankle whole. It clenched and unclenched teeth in a joke-shop grin and leaped away, eager for meat. The next Amerikan took its place under Rasputin’s hand, and was healed too. And the next.
DAVID CASE WAS BORN in upstate New York and since the early 1960s he has lived in London, as well as spending time in Greece and Spain. His acclaimed collection The Celclass="underline" Three Tales of Horror appeared in 1969, and it was followed by Fengriffen: A Chilling Tale, Wolf Tracks zn& The Third Grave, the latter appearing from Arkham House in 1981. More recently, a new collection entitled Brotherly Love and Other Tales of Faith and Knowledge was published by Pumpkin Books.
A regular contributor to the legendary Pan Book of Horror Stories during the early 1970s, his powerful novella “Pelican Cay” in Dark Terrors 5 was nominated for a World Fantasy Award in 2001.
Outside the horror genre, Case has written more than three hundred books under at least seventeen pseudonyms, ranging from mild porn to Westerns. Two of his short stories, “Fengriffen” and the classic werewolf thriller “The Hunter”, were filmed as And Now the Screaming Starts! (1973) and Scream of the Wolf (1974), respectively.
Ramsey Campbell has suggested that “Case’s problem as a writer was that he was ahead of his time: the gruesome violence of his tale ‘Among the Wolves’ can hold its own against the most extreme of today’s horror fiction, partly because rather than encouraging the reader to gawk at the spectacle, the gruesomeness of Case’s tale seeks to make one feel what the victim feels.”
Last published thirty years ago, I am delighted to present this disturbing novella to a new generation of horror fans . . .
THERE WAS SOMETHING ABOUT the killings which went beyond horror. All murder is horrible enough, of course, but one recognizes contingencies, one comprehends motivations and provocations and circumstances, and can understand, objectively, how a man may be driven or guided to murder. I feel I can glimpse into the dark minds which direct murder for profit, can dismember the warped violence of hatred and revenge, can pity the remorse of a killer swept helplessly along on uncharted currents and even, with a chill of grisly perception, understand the mangled patterns of a madman’s mind reflected in mutilation or the insane fear of punishment which drives a sex maniac to destroy his innocent victim in the wake of satiated lust. These things are horrible, indeed, but they are conceivable – are no more than a distortion of normal human emotion, ambition, passion, greed – a magnification of urges which all men feel and most men keep bound and imprisoned in the deepest dungeons of the subconscious, shackled by the sensibilities. Sometimes – all too often – these shadowed impulses strike off the fetters of restraint and burst ravening from the corporal cell to stalk their prey, to command their former gaolers to violence. And then the crime is done. But somehow these murders were different. They invoked a feeling beyond such motivations as rage and fear, beyond even insanity as we have come to define it. It must have been a madman, there can be little doubt of that. No sane mind could have directed such crimes, no creature of chemical balance could have committed them. And yet – how can one express it? – the specific horror of these murders was that they seemed so utterly natural . . .