‘Twenty-five yards away between billowing banks of mist, a flowing figure had passed swiftly, silently inside the shell of the old barn. Who or whatever had gone in there, there would be nothing to stop it from clearing off out of the grounds once Roberts and Trask were inside the house. ‘Oh no you don't!' Trask grunted. And raising his voice: ‘Guy, in the barn there.'
Roberts, at the door of the house, turned to see Trask running at a crouch towards the barn. Cursing under his breath, he strode after him.
At the back of Harkley House, Vlad came coughing and mewling out of the mist and attempted to spring at the three men he found there. The dog was a blackened silhouette sheathed in smoke and flame, burning even as he launched himself lopsidedly at Jordan's back.
As Jordan had come running round the corner of the building, Gower had very nearly triggered his flame-thrower; he'd recognised Jordan only at the last possible moment. Harvey Newton, on the other hand, had actually -drawn a bead on the misted figure and was in the act of firing his bolt when Gower cried a warning and shouldered him aside. The bolt flashed harmlessly off at a tangent and disappeared in mist and distance. Fortunately Jordan had seen the two men saw them apparently aiming at him and thrown himself flat. He hadn't seen what pursued him, however, which even now overshot his sprawled body and arced overhead in a cloud of sparks and smoulder. Vlad landed awkwardly, gathered himself to spring at Newton and Gower, and discovered himself forging head-on into a withering jet of flame from Gower's torch. The dog crumpled to earth, a blazing, crackling, screaming ball of fire that tried to run in all directions at once and ran nowhere.
Jordan got to his feet and the three men stood panting, watching Vlad burn. Newton had fumblingly reloaded his crossbow; he thought he saw something move in the mist and turned in that direction. What was that? A loping shape? Or... just his imagination? The others didn't seem to have noticed; they were watching Vlad.
‘Oh my God!' Jordan gasped. Newton saw the look on Jordan's face, forgot the thing he thought he had seen, turned to watch the death agonies of the incandescent dog.
Vlad's blackened body throbbed and vibrated, burst open, put up a nest of tentacles that twined like alien fingers four or five feet into the air. Mouthing obscenities, eyes bulging, Gower hosed the thing down with fire. The tentacles steamed, blistered and collapsed but the dog's body continued to pulsate.
‘Jesus Christ!' Jordan moaned his horror. ‘He changed the dog, too!' He unhooked a cleaver from his belt, moved forward, shielded his eyes against the blaze and severed Vlad's head from his body with one single clean stroke. Jordan backed off, shouted at Gower: ‘You finish it make sure you finish it! I heard Roberts's whistle just now. Harvey and me will go on in.'
As Gower continued to burn the remains of the dog-thing, Jordan and Newton went stumbling through smoke and reek to the rear wall of the house, where they found an open window. They looked at each other, then licked their lips nervously in unison. Both of them were breathing raggedly of the sodden, stinking air.
‘Come on,' said Jordan. ‘Cover me.' He aimed his crossbow in front of him, swung his leg across the window sill . .
In the barn Ben Trask pulled up short, his square face alert, ears attentive to the silence. The silence said there w as no one here, but it was lying. Trask knew it as surely is if he sat behind a one-way window and listened in on an important interrogation by police of big-time criminals. The picture here was false, a lie.
Old farm implements were strewn everywhere. The mist, billowing in through the open ends of the building, had turned old steel slick with a sort of metallic sweat; chains and worn tyres hung from hooks in the walls; a stack of tongue-and-groove boards teetered uncertainly, as if recently disturbed. Then Trask saw the wooden steps ascending into gloom, and at the same time a single stem of straw where it came drifting down.
He drew air in a sharp gasp, turned his face and crossbow up towards the badly gapped boarding overhead — and was just in time to see a woman's insanely working face framed there, and hear her hiss of triumph as she launched a pitchfork at him! Trask had no time to aim but simply pulled the trigger.
The pitchfork's sharp offside tine missed him but its twin scraped under his collar bone and passed through his right shoulder, driving him down and backwards. At the same time there came a mad, babbling shriek to end all shrieks, and Anne Lake crashed through rotten boards in a cloud of dust and powdery straw. She landed square on her back, with Trask's bolt sticking out of her chest dead centre. The bolt alone should have done for her, and the fall certainly, but she was no longer entirely human.
Trask lay against the side wall and tried to pull the pitchfork out of his shoulder. There was no strength in him; he couldn't do it; pain and shock had left him weak as a kitten. He could only watch and try to keep from blacking out as Yulian Bodescu's ‘auntie' crept towards him on all fours, grabbed the pitchfork and yanked it viciously free. And then Trask did black out.
Anne Lake drew back the pitchfork, growling like a big cat as she aimed it at Trask's heart. Behind her, Guy Roberts grabbed the fork's wooden handle, hauled on it and threw her off balance. She howled her frustration, fell on her back again, grasped the bolt in her chest with both hands and tried to draw it out. Roberts, impeded by the apparatus on his back, lumbered by her, took hold of Trask by the front of his jacket and somehow managed to drag him clear of the barn. Then he turned back, aimed his hose, and applied a firm and steady pressure to the trigger.
The barn was at once transformed into a gigantic oven; heat and fire and smoke filled it floor to tiled roof, spilling out of its open ends. And in the middle of it all something screamed and screamed, a wildly hissing, rising scream that finally shut itself off as the upper floor collapsed and tipped blazing hay down into the roaring inferno. And still Roberts kept his finger on the trigger, until he knew that nothing — nothing — could have survived in there .
At the back of -the house Ken Layard found Gower burning Vlad. Jordan had just stepped in through the open window and Newton was about to follow him. ‘Hold it!' Layard shouted. ‘You can't work two crossbows together!' He came forward. ‘I'll go in this way,' he told Newton, ‘with Jordan. You stick with Gower and go round the front. Go now!'
As Layard clambered awkwardly in through the window, Newton dragged Gower away from the cindered, smoking thing that had been Vlad and jerked his thumb towards the far corner of the house. ‘That thing's finished,' he shouted, ‘so now get a grip of yourself! Come on the others will be inside by now.'
They quickly made their way through the mist-wreathed gardens on the south side of the house, and saw Roberts turn away from the blazing barn and drag Trask out of the danger area. Roberts saw them, yelled: ‘What the hell's going on?'
‘Gower burned the dog,' Newton yelled back. ‘Except it wasn't... wasn't a dog not any more!'
Roberts's lips drew back from his teeth in a half-snarl, half-grimace. ‘We got Anne Lake,' he said, as Newton and Gower came closer. ‘And, of course, she wasn't all woman! Where're Layard and Jordan?'
‘Inside,' said Gower. He was shaking, rivered in sweat. ‘And it's not finished yet, Guy. Not yet. There's more to come!'
‘I've tried scanning the house,' Roberts said. ‘Nothing! Just a fog in there. A mental fucking fog! Pointless trying, anyway. Too damned much going on!' He grabbed Gower. ‘You OK?'
Gower nodded. ‘I think so.'
‘Right. Now listen. Thermite bombs in the truck; plastic explosive, too, in haversacks. Dump ‘em in the cellars. Spread ‘em out. Try to take ‘em all down in one go. And no torching while you're holding the stuff! In fact get out of that kit and take a crossbow like Newton. The stuff's all set to go off from excessive heat or naked flame. Plant it and get out and then stay out! Three of us in the house itself should be enough. If not the fire will be.'