by Brian Lumley
Khuv shuddered. The whole thing was like a nightmare, getting worse all the time. Then Luchov's phone rang, causing all three men to start violently. Khuv reached the phone first, snatched it from its cradle. 'Yes?'
'Corporal Grudov, at the entrance, sir,' an excited, tinny voice sounded. 'Agursky, he was here!'
'What?' Khuv crouched over the phone. 'Did you see him? Have you killed him?'
'We shot at him, sir, but kill him? I'm sure we must have hit him, but he seemed to ignore us! So we went after him with a flamethrower.'
'But you didn't get him? Where is he now, outside?' Khuv held his breath. He knew that Agursky mustn't escape.
'No, he ducked back inside. We burned him a little, I think.'
'You think?'
'It all happened so very quickly, sir.'
Khuv thought fast. 'Are the people out yet?'
'Most of them, but they're still coming. I've called up trucks from the barracks, else they'd all freeze out here.'
'Good man!' Khuv sighed his relief. 'Now listen: let everyone out except Agursky. If he shows up again give him all you've got. Kill him, burn him, destroy him utterly! Have you got that?'
'Yes, sir.'
Khuv put the phone down, turned to the others. 'He's still in here. Him and us, and maybe a few stragglers.- Oh, and the soldiers at the core, and whoever else is down there with them.' He turned to Luchov. 'The first button sounds the klaxons, right?'
Luchov nodded. 'You know it does — if they're still working.'
Khuv reached across and pressed button number one. He gave Luchov no time to think or to argue, simply did it. The alarms were still working: their monotonous yet nerve-wrenching howling started up at once. It was like the crying of some vast, wounded prehistoric beast.
'But what are you doing?' Luchov gasped.
'Getting those soldiers out of it,' Khuv nodded at the screens. Down at the core all such niceties as orders went to the wall. Those men down there knew what the klaxons meant. And they'd had enough. Nerves could stand just so much, and then no more. In a matter of moments it was chaos, a panic-flight. The staircase was packed with fleeing men; the Katushev teams were scrambling out of their kit, running for it. A Sergeant-Major fired his pistol into the air once, twice, then holstered it and joined the rush.
Khuv laughed, slapped his thigh, punched Litve's shoulder. 'Agursky can't get out,' he said. 'He's in here, probably wounded, and those men — heavily armed men — are coming up from below. And we're going down from the top!'
'You're right,' Luchov gasped. 'But me, I'm staying right here. If he comes back this way I'll make sure he doesn't get in here; also, I'm not chancing meeting him between here and the exit!'
'Good,' said Khuv. 'But we'll need your flamethrower. Here — ' He brought out his automatic and handed it over. 'It's not much but better than nothing.'
Luchov let them out into the corridor. 'Good luck,' he said, simply.
'You too,' Khuv nodded. Then Luchov quickly closed the door and locked it…
Half-way between Failsafe Control and the magmass levels, they met the soldiers coming up. They came at the stampede, until Khuv called out: 'It's OK, you men. There's no problem. We have a maniac running loose, that's all. The scientist, Vasily Agursky. Has anyone seen him?'
'No, sir,' the Sergeant-Major who had fired his pistol down at the core came to attention, saluted. 'I'm afraid we all panicked, sir, and — '
'Forget it,' Khuv said. 'You were supposed to panic. That way I could be sure you'd get out of there fast, that's all.'
'You see, sir,' the other was at pains to explain, 'the phones have been out for some time, so we guessed there was a problem. Then, when those klaxons started up — '
'I said forget it!' Khuv snapped. 'Now get your men out of here — I mean right out of it. Out of the Projekt.'
Litve grabbed his arm. 'But they could be of assistance,' he protested.
Khuv shook his head. 'With them out of the way, anything else that moves has to be Agursky. And anything that moves dies! Let's go.'
They proceeded to the magmass levels, checking rooms and laboratories as they went. And all the while the klaxons sounding, sounding, sounding, and their flesh crawling on them like they were covered in cockroaches…
Up in Failsafe Control, Viktor Luchov heard the pounding of booted feet as the core's military units vacated the Projekt. Well, at least they were out of it now. That left Khuv and Litve, and whatever else was down there waiting for them. Luchov glanced again at the silent, now motionless screens — especially the centre screen, which showed the core and the Gate — then returned to his private thoughts. Thoughts about Khuv. He had never much cared for the man; the KGB were a brutal lot. And yet now…
Luchov's thoughts froze right there. Gooseflesh crept on his neck. Something he had seen? He looked at the centre screen again. He strained his eyes, rubbed at them… but no, there was nothing wrong with his eyes.
On the centre screen a pale, gelatinous mass was visible on the curve of the sphere's dome, a slow-motion picture of something within. It hadn't been there ten or fifteen minutes ago — or maybe it had, and with so much going on he simply hadn't noticed it. Crazy! It was exactly what he was here to notice!
He stared harder, and yes — in a minute the thing had grown larger, starting to bloat up huge on the great curved screen which was the Gate. It was like… like Encounter One. But bigger. Much bigger! And it was moving faster than anything had ever moved in there before. If it was the same sort of creature as Encounter One, and if it should break loose from the Gate -
'God/' Luchov gritted his teeth, slammed a balled fist into his palm. At a time like this!
Khuv and Litve were still down there somewhere. They had thought to trap Agursky between themselves and the soldiers. And now who was trapped? At least Luchov could try to warn them. Khuv's own novel method should suffice.
He reached out a trembling hand and pressed button number two…
Down on the fringe of the eerie magmass levels, Khuv and Litve stayed close together, moving very slowly. There was darkness here, where even the well-illuminated areas were dark with implication. Even above the blaring, maddening klaxons, whose row was fading a little behind them, the heart of the Perchorsk beast could be heard thudding more loudly, seemed that much closer.
They moved cautiously down the wide timber stairway, Khuv's eyes raking the magmass on the right, and Litve's on the left. The pilot-lights of their flamethrowers threw weird, blue-flickering shadows, making faces and threatening figures of the disturbing magmass fusions.
Khuv adjusted the strap of his flamethrower across his right shoulder, and metal parts chinked together. The sound was amplified by the magmass, and despite the incessant klaxons came echoing back seemingly from all directions. Another sound, having its origin elsewhere and rising to drown it out, came back with it: stuttering, almost chattering laughter!
'Behind us?' Khuv whirled to look back, eyes wide so as to miss nothing.
'No,' Litve's voice was a whisper where he crouched, 'in front of us — I think.'
'It's hard to tell,' said Khuv, beginning to breathe a little faster. 'He could be anywhere.'
'But he's just one,' Litve was starting to shake, his voice, too, 'and there are two of us. For God's sake don't get separated from me, Major!'
They turned right and followed the wooden path — an artificial and entirely familiar road through this alien landscape — into the heart of a magmass cavern, where the echoes of their footsteps resounded louder yet… and that was when the pitch and frequency of the alarms increased from a repetitive, mindless blaring to a definite cry of warning!
'What the hell — ?' Litve gasped.
That was Luchov,' said Khuv, 'telling us that something isn't right. Shit — we know that already!'
The laughter came again, and this time there was no mistaking its source: behind them. Also, Khuv recognized the voice as Agursky's beyond any shadow of doubt. So did Litve, appar
ently. 'He's tracking us,' he whispered.
'Let's find a vantage point,' Khuv moved faster, heading for the stairwell through to the core. That was the only way to go now, down to the core itself. But with still thirty or so paces to go to the final descent, Litve grabbed Khuv's elbow. '
'Look!' he croaked.
Khuv looked back. From behind a leaning magmass nodule, a shadow had fallen on the walkway. One that moved. Closer still, there was more movement: Khuv's and Litve's startled eyes went together to a heavy-duty cable where it snaked along the mad flow of the magmass wall. The cable jerked; its loops between staples contracted as something hauled on it. Almost before the meaning of this could dawn, there came a cry of combined pain and frustration from behind the same magmass nodule. The shadow on the walkway was highlighted, emboldened by flaring blue illumination and a shower of sputtering sparks. And it was a monstrous shadow!
Incapable as yet of movement, the two watched. The shadow — a single shadow — began to split in two. There came a rending sound, like sailcloth tearing, as the two halves of the shadow struggled to break apart — struggled and succeeded. Two of them now: one of which seemed human, and the other the size and roughly the shape of a dog, except it was not a dog. Then both of them moving back a little, merging with the shadow of the nodule, and a further moment of struggling with the power cable. There was more electrical sputtering and a second shower of sparks…
And the lights went out!
The two men backed toward the shaft going down to the core. Their legs were jelly but they forced movement out of them. A faint wash of light came from behind them, over their shoulders: residual light from the sphere-gate, shining up through the shaft. But along the walkway where they'd been, all was now night.
'If he — it — they are going to come,' Litve stuttered, 'then it has to be along this walkway.'
Khuv's throat was too dry and tight to answer, but he thought: that's right. They were both wrong. The thing from the tank, or rather metamorphic vampire material from the core of the thing in the tank — not dead but subsumed into Agursky, and now released to even up the score, two against two — didn't have to come that way at all. It came under the walkway!
Almost at the mouth of the shaft, where the walkway turned sharply to the left and once more descended as stairs, the thing struck. Something coiled up over the handrail, wrapped itself clingingly around Litve's waist, dragged him screaming through the shattering rail. He was there, beside Khuv, and he was gone. His flamethrower put forth a single blast of flame, and looking down Khuv saw what had him. The thing from the tank, yes: a great flat tentacled leech now, which smothered Litve's face and the upper half of his body like a mass of leprous dough, while its many-jointed 'limbs' wrapped him and crushed his body like so many pythons! And eyes in the surging filth of the thing, staring up unblinking at Khuv where he choked and gurgled on the walkway.
Litve's flamethrower went clattering; Khuv knew that was the end of him; he aimed his own weapon and sent searing flame blasting into the heaving obscenity where it threshed on the magmass floor. Screaming his rage and terror, he burned it — burned it — burned it. Until the white heart of his torch turned yellow, hissed, crackled into silence, until the pilot-light itself went out. Then came Agursky's chuckle again, and through the reek and the smoke Khuv saw him coming. He saw him closing with him, his hands elongating, reaching…
He dropped his empty weapon, ran, stumbled, went flailing down the stairwell into the heart of the place; and down the stairs from the landing onto the boards of the Saturn's-rings perimeter. Agursky came close behind, chuckling, flowing, inexorably pursuing. Khuv looked back and saw him: the impossible gape of his jaws, the nightmare of his bone dagger teeth meshing like a mincer in the cavern of his mouth. He screamed and raced for the nearest Katushev cannon.
'Shit, shit!' he screamed, and: 'Oh, God! Oh mother of — ' He leaped up onto the Katushev's platform, slid into the gunner's chair, traversed the assembly to face Agursky where he loped after him. But… he had no idea how to fire the thing!
Before Agursky could reach him, he leaped out of his seat, fled across the rings and onto the gantry bridging the gap to the sphere. The power was off and the gate in the electrical fence open; Khuv ran through it, reached the spot where the boards were scorched and blackened. The Gate was the only route open to him now, but better that than -
He skidded to a halt, threw up his hands before him to ward off… something he couldn't believe, something from the mind of a raving lunatic! He stared at the sphere and his eyes bulged, popped in his white mask of a face. Agursky had seen it, too, and he was likewise brought up short. And a third pair of eyes had seen it, had indeed been watching it for some time.
Up in Failsafe Control, Viktor Luchov waited no longer but threw the failsafe switch. He opened the floodgates to hell — because he had to, and for Khuv. For Khuv, yes, who even now turned his face to the closed circuit TV monitor and pleaded with him, begged him to do it. 'Do it!' the Major's face screamed silently at Luchov from the centre screen. 'For God's sake, Viktor, if you know the meaning of mercy — do it!"
Volatile liquids rushed and sprinklers commenced spraying all through the Projekt; plastic pipes began to blister as the liquid flowed faster; thousands of litres of the stuff flowed into the heart of Perchorsk, becoming vapour where it was exposed to air. Forced by the weight of fuel in the huge tanker, dragged downwards by gravity, it quickly saturated the complex, began to gush from an outlet into the core itself.
The core: where now Agursky knew he was finished and closed with Khuv, reaching for him. But the Major was no longer concerned with Agursky, only with the thing that was breaking through the screen of the sphere, only with the heaving, pulsating monstrosity of hooks and teeth and claws which wore the vast, bloated, nightmare distortion of… of Karl Vyotsky's face!
But this was not, could not be, the Vyotsky who had gone into that other world; it was so radically different that its passage through the gate in the reverse direction had not been forbidden. It half-emerged, saw and fell upon the figures on the gantry and devoured them, and in the next moment was itself devoured. Somewhere, the deadly vapours had reached a naked flame. Incendiary fires raced through the Projekt in an unstoppable chain-reaction. The entire place detonated — exploded — like a vast bomb!
Viktor Luchov, gasping and almost fainting from his exertions, was hauled through the wicket-gate onto the marshalling area in the ravine under the cold night stars. They hurried him away from the giant doors, which in a little while were blown off their rollers like so much scrap metal. A shaft of fire roared out, bending like a waterfall to strike the dammed waters, sending clouds of steam boiling upwards.
Perchorsk was no more…
From the time of his early childhood, when he was maybe eight or nine years old, Harry Keogh remembered one especially bad dream. It had been repetitive, bothering him through many long nights, and even now — especially now — was not forgotten.
Where the idea had originated, he couldn't say. It might have come from some ancient medical book, or from the mind of one of his long-dead friends, may even have stemmed from a flash of precognition. But he could still remember it in detail. The long hall, brick walls, and the heavy wooden tables set end to end; the starving man stretched out on his back, lashed to the end table; his head firmly fixed between blocks of wood, a leather strap across his forehead to keep it tilted back, and his jaws propped wide open.
He lay there, conscious, skeletal, chest heaving and arms and legs straining where they, too, were lashed, and men in long white coats and a woman with a long-bladed hatchet watching him and nodding among themselves, tight-lipped. Then the men (doctors, maybe?) standing well back, and the woman with the hatchet laying her weapon down on the table farthest from the wretched man. Her departure through an arched doorway, and her return with a large plate of rancid fish.
The pictures were very vivid: the way she carefully took a piece of putrid fish and s
meared it from directly in front of the man's face, all the way along the centre of the joined-up tables to the last one, before dropping it on the plate with the other stinking remnants. There was a screen at that end, where now she took her position, seated there with her cleaver in her hand, patience itself as she looked through a peephole in the screen and waited for it to happen. The way her eyes fixed upon the gaping mouth of the racked man.
Then the worst part of the dream, when the cestode came out of him, its segmented, ribbonlike body inching laboriously from his convulsing throat, writhing where it followed the fish-stink in its search for food. Blind, the tapeworm, but not without senses of its own, and not without hunger; its head flat on the table but swaying this way and that, creeping forward, and the hooked segments coming into view from the man's choking throat, one by one, releasing their hooks within him and venturing forth into daylight. For while the man was starving because of his worm, it was starving because of the doctors who hadn't fed him for five or six days!
Harry remembered it so well, that dream:
The length of the thing, covering first one six-foot table, then two, three, until it had been feared that six tables would not be enough. Twenty-five feet of it when at last the forked, scorpion tail appeared, trailing mucus and blood behind it. And at that one of the doctors had tensed, started to inch silently forward.
And the man on the table gurgling and gagging; the cestode worm creeping warily forward, but more avidly as the fish-stink thickened; the woman with her cleaver poised, waiting, her teeth drawn back from her lips in almost savage anticipation…
The parasite reaching the plate and its leech-head gorging… the cleaver flashing silver in those practiced female hands, shearing through the soft chitin and primitive guts of the thing… the doctor slapping his hand over the man's mouth, as the frantically writhing rear sections of the worm tried to wriggle back into him.
Which was always the point where Harry used to come yelping awake.
He came awake now, to the Lady Karen's voice asking some questions of him where they sat facing each other across her table; and he hoped he'd been able to keep the canvas of his mind shielded from her, so that she had not read the vivid thoughts painted there. 'I'm sorry? My mind was wandering.'
