And when Sir John returned home, he found the locality of Lambton under attack from the alien worm. Under the influence of the skull – the fabled Head of Baphomet supposedly worshipped by the Templars, a heathen idol brought back from heathen lands – Sir John fashioned the star-metal weapons and armour to destroy the parasite.
The battle was fierce and went down in legend. Legend also remembered that the worm could regenerate itself. But what it forgot was that when Sir John recovered every part of the unnatural creature’s body and subjected it to the star-metal’s touch, a tiny piece that had been washed away by the Wear was not recovered.
Sir John scoured the countryside thereabouts, searching for the missing piece, but it was never found. And when he died he passed his miraculous suit of armour to his son, and to his descendants, along with the solemn obligation to watch for the worm’s return and, if such a thing came to pass, to seek the monster out and destroy it again.
Little did Sir John know that the treacherous Wear had washed the last remaining piece of the worm’s flesh into caves that lay beneath the grounds of his own ancestral lands. There in the darkness below the earth, the sliver of worm-flesh survived and slowly regenerated until it had grown into a whole new creature, feeding on the slugs and spiders that dwelt in those dark caverns.
And it was there that Sir William Lambton found it, whilst having the grounds of his ancestral home landscaped. The sacred duty that Sir John had placed upon his heirs, only half-remembered now in myth, its importance forgotten, Sir William had found the worm and become host to the first of a new spawning.
IN HER MIND’S eye, Cassandra saw the moment when Sir William had become host to the creature’s young, intoxicated by its musky excretions, and felt sick all over again.
Questions filled Cassandra’s mind as she tried to absorb all that the skull passed on to her. How could she even hear the voice, when before she had not? If the worm was nothing more than a parasite, how had it become the focus for a cult in this age of reason and enlightenment?
And the voice of Baphomet answered her, as if it could somehow hear her unspoken thoughts, as if they were somehow conversing, mind to mind.
THE WORM PRESENTED a dire threat to the future of her world, the voice told Cassandra. For, although it was only a parasite, driven by nothing more sinister than instinct and the need that exists in all living things to perpetuate the species, in taking a host the worm had also absorbed its intelligence.
Whereas on other worlds, it might penetrate colonies of more primitive species and live out its mundane existence causing little harm other than to its host, in a human body it would be subject to all the whims and conflicting emotions of a human being and that was what made it so dangerous.
And then Cassandra understood, at an almost instinctive level, how the voice could communicate with her, how there had been another presence there within her mind all the while it had imparted its vital information. Just as Sir William and the Disciples of Dionin had become bonded to the diabolic parasites, so Cassandra had become bonded with the same living metal entity that had travelled to Earth along with the hunter, all those centuries ago.
The shot that should have killed her had been fired from Sir William’s gun, the gun that had been made from the worm slayer’s sword, the sword that Sir John Lambton had fashioned from the star-metal.
The moment the tiny sphere of star-metal had entered her body, awoken from its dormant state by the heat of the pistol’s discharge, it had liquefied and entered her bloodstream, the tiny component parts of it – like individual workers in an ant colony – set about repairing her wounds and healing her body.
Now she understood why her eyes had been able to register the body heat of the monstrous worm and the highwayman in the utter darkness of the cave. Now she understood how she had been able to extrude lethal silver claws from her fingertips and how that had been enough to put an end to the mother of all worms.
And now she understood the reason for the madness consuming Lambton Hall. What one knew, they all knew; the other worms inhabiting the bodies of the cultists had felt the agonised death-throes of their parent as keenly as they would have felt their own. Quite simply, the pain had driven them mad.
The worms had also drawn upon their hosts’ natural drive to survive; if something had killed the immortal worm god, it could kill them too. They were in danger. They had to get away.
CASSANDRA OPENED HER eyes.
“Are you all right? You’re sweating.”
It was Dick. His hands were clasping her shoulders.
“How long have I been like this?” she asked.
“No time at all. You just starting shaking.”
Cassandra stared into the sparkling pits of the skull’s eye-sockets; the scaled flesh was gone now.
“We have to stop them,” Cassandra said.
“Stop them? Who? These maniacs? I’m getting out of here, and if you’ve any sense left in you you’ll do the same.”
BUT CASSANDRA WASN’T listening to him; she was gazing at the ancient suit of armour, with its curious bladed plates, blades that she now knew had been fashioned from the very essence of the living liquid metal of the otherworldly war-symbiote.
She reached out to touch the suit but stopped, her fingertips barely an inch from the tarnished silver surface. As she watched, the silvery coating on the blades liquefied; what had one minute apparently been solid metal became a gelatinous fluid that ran from the blades onto the suit, in coursing rivulets. These then drew together into one homogenous mass and lifted free of the armour in one long strand, drawn towards her hand like iron fillings to a magnet.
She could feel goose pimples rising all over her body. The liquid metal tendril seemed to hesitate for a second and then crossed the divide, flowing over her hand and coating her fingers.
Her hand felt suddenly numb. Cassandra held it up, marvelling at the mirrored sheen of the substance now clinging to her flesh, seeing her own wondering expression reflected there. The liquid metal was quickly absorbed through the pin-hole wounds in the tips of her fingers.
And then she was looking at naked flesh again, the liquid metal running like silvery blood through her veins.
“In the Devil’s name, what the hell was that?” the highwayman gasped, backing away in horror.
“Dick, it’s all right,” Cassandra said as calmly as she could manage. And she did feel calm, calmer than she had ever felt since embarking on her mission. “I understand what has to be done. I understand everything now.
“Well I’m glad you do, because I sure as hell don’t! I’ve seen enough! I’m getting out of here!”
“Stay with me, Dick. Help me. I can’t do this alone. They have to be stopped, you do understand that, don’t you? I saved your life. You are in my debt.”
“No! God’s bones, no! I’ve seen enough madness this night to last me a lifetime. No.” He backed away from her towards the open doors of the house. “I’ll play no part in your crazed quest for revenge. I’m only interested in doing what I’ve always done – and that’s to look after number one! Milady, it is time we went our separate ways. I bid you farewell. Adieu!”
Turning on his heels, he sprinted along the corridor, after the fleeing cultists and their panicking lackeys, and disappeared through the open doors.
So be it, Cassandra thought bitterly as she watched him depart.
With barely a moment’s hesitation she too set off after the cultists, but with a wholly different purpose in mind.
Stumbling out of the house into the cold November morning she came upon a scene of utter chaos and confusion.
Coaches clattered from the stabling yard and through the main gate of Lambton Hall – horses whipped into a frenzy by desperate drivers – carrying away the worm-infested hosts as night itself took flight before the coming dawn.
She was too late; her quarry was getting away. She would have to act quickly.
From her vantage point at the top of the steps, she scanned the
courtyard, searching for a suitable steed. Instead her eyes fell upon Captain Drysdale, Galloping Dick’s former captor, and his troop of redcoats. The soldiers were milling around a black lacquered carriage bearing the crest of the Lambton family.
Long fingers twitched the corner of the black velvet curtain pulled across the window and Cassandra saw the Dragoon captain converse briefly with whoever was inside.
Cold dread suddenly knotted her stomach and, in that instant, Drysdale turned. His expression darkened as he pointed in her direction with his unsheathed rapier.
“Seize her!”
VIII
The Changeling
BEFORE SHE COULD put up any kind of resistance, Cassandra was quickly and efficiently surrounded by the Dragoons. She twisted and kicked as two hefty soldiers seized her, but it was futile. In another minute someone had brought a length of hemp rope and bound her arms to her side, looping the rope tightly several times around her waist.
As the rest of Sir William Lambton’s guests fled from the house, the door of the crested carriage was thrown open and Cassandra was bundled inside.
She half-fell onto the cracked leather seat, struggling to sit up, fully aware of the fact that there was already at least one other person already in there with her.
The door slammed shut again and, at a single command from Captain Drysdale, the carriage jolted off over the cobbles.
“What did you do?” a voice hissed from the other side of the carriage.
Cassandra peered into the gloom, the black velvet preventing most light from entering the carriage. A strange musky scent filled the air, a smell curiously familiar to her now.
“I said, what did you do?”
Cassandra blinked, and then suddenly she could see; a corpulent figure picked out in patches of heat and cold, the carriage seat creaking under his enormous weight. He was holding one hand to his head, the other clutching the goitre at his throat.
“I... I...”
“I know you’re a spy, sent here to find out all you can about my Disciples of Dionin,” Sir William Lambton snarled. “I know that our position here has been compromised. But what I don’t understand is how you could survive both being shot and the fall? And how did you kill the Divinity?
“Oh yes, I know that you have committed deicide, that you have slain our Lord and Master. We were all forced to experience the agonies of our Lord’s death, but I still don’t understand how you did it! How could you slay the Godhead when my misguided ancestor could not? Tell me!”
Cassandra took a breath to speak.
“Oh, never mind!” Sir William said. “I see that I am just going to have to take you apart to find out for myself. And, I have to say, I shall take great pleasure in doing so.”
The jolting carriage throwing its passengers from side to side, the bloated peer lunged at Cassandra, fingers knotted into claws, determined, it seemed, to take her apart with his bare hands.
He was still wearing his robe from the ceremony and this fell open now, exposing his rippling nakedness. Cassandra could feel his distended stomach rippling as he pressed his massive, trembling bulk against her, as something slithered and writhed beneath the pallid, blue-veined flesh.
Screaming and kicking at the wobbling mass of the Lord of Lambton, magus of the Disciples of Dionin, she knew that if she didn’t somehow free herself, then Sir William would be able to keep his macabre promise. But the rope that pinned her arms to her side had been wrapped tight around her body. Even as she rubbed her wrists raw, she knew that she wasn’t going to be able to free herself in time.
“Stop struggling!” the peer puffed as he pinned her beneath his obesity. “There’s someone I want you to meet.”
The curtain flapped open as the carriage jolted downhill and, as the first piercing rays of a new day broke over the wooded horizon to the east, Cassandra was granted a clear view of what was happening before her.
Sir William was making horrible gargling retching noises, as his head bobbed backwards and forwards, saliva drooling from his open mouth. His eyes rolled up into his head as he attempted to regurgitate his parasite.
An acrid smell of bile rose from the man’s infested innards, mixed with the musky pheromone-scent exuded by the cult’s worm god, and Cassandra could not help but stare into the dark pit of the peer’s gaping gullet.
Then she saw it: a bulbous white head, slick with mucus, squeezing its way past the man’s tonsils, and then, with one last great gagging convulsion, the parasite pushed clear of the man’s mouth. She saw the elastic jowls suddenly stretched taut as a drum-skin and heard the pop of the man’s jaw dislocating, as the worm strained to reach for her, its leech-like mouthparts chomping hungrily.
It was getting hard to breathe now, and Cassandra’s struggling was becoming more feeble by the second. Her vision began to grey at the edges and she knew that it would only be a matter of moments before she blacked out.
It suddenly felt like it would be the easiest thing in the world to give up so that the pain might go away, so that she might rest. And at that moment, something spoke to her through the still small voice of her subconscious, telling her that the only way out of this was to stop thinking like a normal human being, for she could consider herself a normal human being no longer. She must learn to embrace her new abilities, working in consort with the symbiotic entity that now lived again within her.
As the darkness threatened to overwhelm her, clarity of purpose returned and she focused on the liquid metal now coursing through her veins. In her mind’s eye she saw the tiny component parts, like a swarm of ants racing through her body to where it was needed to defend the nest, and saw again the offensive armour of Sir John Lambton Knight of Rhodes, saw the light glinting off its razor-sharp blades.
There was a slick cutting sound and, in an instant, myriad blades burst from Cassandra’s arms, slicing through the bonds that bound her, the hemp sizzling in places as if the blades were red hot.
With a high-pitched shriek, the pus-white parasite recoiled and the corpulent peer stumbled from her to collapse on the seat opposite, gurgling horribly, unable to articulate his own thoughts as the worm’s body was still blocking his throat.
The severed ropes fell from Cassandra and she rose unsteadily, still reeling from the pain the emerging blades had inflicted, the metal withdrawing into her flesh, leaving a myriad puncture marks, and the shredded sleeves of her shirt spotted crimson with her own blood.
Forcing the pain to the back of her mind, she knew that she had to press home her advantage. Focusing her thoughts once more, she remembered the moment, not so long ago, down in the dark beneath the hill, when the parent organism had sought to make a meal of her and how, unconsciously, she had discovered the means to kill it.
Long metal claws, like white-hot skewers, burst from her fingertips and she slashed clumsily at the recoiling worm.
The worm shrieked as Sir William gurgled, expressing his own discomfort as the worm’s experiences were relayed to its host’s mind.
What one knew, all knew, the voice of Baphomet had told her. The worm knew the metal could harm it, kill it even. Trapped in the confines of the carriage, tied to its overweight human host, the instinct for survival overrode all others and the worm saw that there was only one way out.
With a horrible sucking noise, eight feet of segmented worm shot from the man’s mouth. Sir William’s body collapsed in on itself as the parasite pulled free.
With another peristaltic spasm the worm launched itself through the curtained window of the carriage, leaving the Lord of Lambton to tumble onto the floor between the seats, nothing more than an empty sack of sagging skin and clattering bones.
Barely giving Sir William a second look, Cassandra flung open the door. Marshalling her strength, giving the stony surface of the road hurtling by beneath her only a cursory glance, trusting to blind luck rather more than judgement, she threw herself out of the speeding coach, after the escaping worm.
CAPTAIN DRYSDALE WATCHED incredu
lously as something like a snake – and yet, at the same time, looking like a pallid leech – escaped from the carriage and slithered away towards the river, quickly followed by the woman, whom only minutes before had been chucked into the back of the carriage, bound securely.
Urging his steed forward he drew parallel with the coach and peered in through the open, swinging door.
He had expected to see Sir William Lambton there, but the gaunt man lying in a gasping heap between the seats, his red robe speckled with what looked like blood or bile, looked practically nothing like him.
“Sir William?”
“Drysdale!” the cadaverous bag of bones wheezed, as he tried to push his dislocated jaw back into place. “Stop her.”
IX
The Dandy Highwayman
THE RIVER WEAR tumbled over water-smoothed boulders as it broiled downstream, the broken water of the rapids glittering like quicksilver in the first golden light of dawn.
The worm slipped through the long grass of the riverbank.
The morning was clear but cold, and Cassandra’s breath steamed in the air before her as she bounded after the parasite, almost losing her footing more than once on the uneven terrain.
For something which had no real limbs to speak of, the thing was moving incredibly fast. But she was closing on it nonetheless. The only thing she wasn’t certain of was whether she would to catch up with it before it made it to the river.
Despite being focused on the worm, over the sound of her own laboured breathing, she could hear the pounding of hooves on the turf behind her.
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