by Brian Lumley
Using what cover he could find, the vampire risked his neck making excursions outside the house. He used a rear ground floor window where it was shrouded by shrubbery, also the cellar exit through the outbuilding. Twice, if he’d been fully prepared, he might have made a break for it, when the watchers to the rear and at one side of the house went down to the road for their supplies; on both occasions they returned while he was still calculating the odds. Yulian grew still more nervous, his thinking becoming very erratic.
Back in the house, whenever he crossed tracks with one of the women, he would lash out, shout, curse. His nervousness transferred itself to Vlad and the great dog prowled the empty cellars to and fro, to and fro.
Then, about 4.00 P.M., suddenly Yulian was aware of a weird psychic stillness, the mental lull before the storm. He strained his vampire senses to-their fullest extent and could detect… nothing! The watchers had screened their minds, so that not even a trace of their thoughts their intentions could escape. In so doing they gave away their final secret, they told Yulian the time they had planned for his death.
It was to be now, within the hour, and the light only just beginning to fade as the sun lowered itself towards the horizon.
Yulian put fear aside. He was Wamphyri! These men had powers, yes, and they were strong. But he had powers too. And he might yet prove to be stronger.
He went down into the cellars and spoke to Vlad:
You’ve been faithful to me as only a dog can be, he said, facing the great beast, their yellow eyes locked, but you are more than a dog. Those men out there might suspect that, and they might not. Whichever, when they come, you go out first to meet them. Give no quarter. if you survive, seek me out.
And then he ‘spoke’ to the Other, that loathsome extrusion of himself. It was the implanting of suggestions in a blank space, the imprinting of an idea upon a void, the burning of a brand into a beast’s hide. Floor flags buckled in one dark corner, the ground underfoot shifted and dust fell in rills from the low vaulting. That was all. Perhaps it had understood, and perhaps not.
Finally Yulian returned to his room. He changed his clothes, put on a neutral grey track-suit and shoved his wide-brimmed hat into the waistband. He neatly folded a suit of clothes into a small travelling case, along with a wallet containing a good deal of money in large notes. That was that; he needed nothing more.
Then, as the minutes ticked by, he sat down, closed his eyes and pitted his own dark nature against the great Mother Nature herself in one final test of his now mature vampire powers. He willed a mist, called up a wreathing white screen from the earth and the streams and the woods, a clinging fog down from the hillsides.
The watchers, tense now and taut as the strings of their crossbows, scarcely noticed the sun slipping behind the clouds and the ground mist creeping at their ankles; as a man, their attention was riveted on the house.
And time moved inexorably towards the appointed hour.
I Darcy Clarke drove furiously north. He had cursed aloud until his throat was raw, and then silently until his cursing had come down to one four-letter word repeated over and ver again in his fuming mind. What his fury amounted to was this: he wouldn’t be in on the kill. He was out of the attack on Harkley. Now, instead, he was to be minder in-chief to a… a tiny infant!
Clarke was well aware of the importance of his new task and understood the purpose of it: with his talent it is unlikely that any harm would come to him. And so, if he was shielding the young Harry Keogh, the baby should likewise be safe. But to Darcy’s way of thinking, prevention was better than cure. Stop Bodescu dead at Harkley House, and you wouldn’t have to worry about the baby at all. And if he, Darcy Clarke, was at Harkley — if only he was there then guarantee Bodescu would be stopped!
But he wasn’t there, he was here, driving north for that godforsaken hole Hartlepool.
On the other hand, he knew that every single man of them back there was equally dedicated to Bodescu’s destruction. Which helped a little.
Clarke had got back to Paignton before 6.00 A.M. and Roberts had ordered him straight into bed. Later, he said, he would have a big job for him and wanted him to get at least six hours’ sleep. Finally Clarke had dozed off, and though he’d feared the very worst dreams none had come. At noon Roberts had shaken him awake, told him what his new job was. Since when Clarke had been driving, and cursing.
He had joined the M1 at Leicester, then picked up the A19 at Thirsk. He was now something less than an hour from his destination, and the time was (he glanced at his watch)—4.50P.M.
Clarke stopped cursing. God! What would it be like right now, down there?
‘Where the hell did this mist spring from?’ Trevor Jordan shivered, turning up the collar of his coat. ‘Hell, it was a nice day, from the weather point of view, anyway.’ For all his vehemence, Jordan had spoken in a whisper.
All of the INTESP agents, at their various stations around Harkley House, had been speaking in whispers for the last twenty minutes. At 4.30, working to Roberts’s instructions, they’d formed pairs — which was as well, for the mist had thickened up and started to threaten their individual security. It felt nice to have someone really close to you.
Jordan’s ‘buddy’ in the system was Ken Layard the locator. He was shivering, too, despite the fact that he carried seventy-eight pounds of Brissom Mark III flame-thrower on his back. ‘I’m not sure,’ he finally answered Jordan’s question, ‘but I think it’s from him.’ He nodded towards the house where it stood swathed in mist.
They were just inside the north wall, at a place where they’d found a gap in the stonework. Just a minute ago, at 4.50, they’d checked their watches and squeezed through, and Jordan had helped Layard into his asbestos leggings and jacket. Then they’d strapped the tank on his back and he’d checked the valve on the hose and trigger mechanism. With the valve open, all he had to do was squeeze the trigger and he could conjure up an inferno. And he fully intended to.
‘Him?’ Jordan frowned. He looked around at the mist. It crept everywhere. From here the rear wall up the hillside was invisible; likewise the wall fronting onto the road. Harvey Newton and Simon Gower would be making their way down from the hill, Ben Trask and Guy Roberts coming up the drive from the gate. They would all converge on the house together, at 5.00 P.M. sharp. ‘Who do you mean, “him”? Bodescu?’ Jordan led the way through shrubbery towards the dimly looming mass of the house.
‘Bodescu, yes,’ Layard answered. ‘I’m a locator, remember? It’s my thing.’
What’s that got to do with the mist?’ Jordan’s nerves were starting to jump. He was a telepath of uncertain kill, but Roberts had warned him not to try it on Bodescu and certainly not at this crucial stage of play.
‘When I try to find him in my mind’s eye,’ Layard attempted to explain, ‘inside the house there, I can’t zero in on him. It’s as if he were part of the mist. That’s why I think he’s somehow behind it. I sense him as a huge amorphous cloud of fog!’
‘Jesus!’ Jordan whispered, shivering again. In utter, eerie silence they moved towards the small outbuilding, whose open door led down to the cellars.
Simon Gower and Harvey Newton approached the house from the gently sloping field of shrubs at its rear. There wasn’t too much cover so the mist was a boon to them. So they thought. Newton was a telepath, called down from London along with Ben Trask as reinforcements. Newton and Trask weren’t quite as au fait with the situation as the rest, which was why they’d been split up.
‘What a team we make, eh?’ said Newton nervously as the ground levelled out and the mist billowed up more yet. ‘You with that bloody great torch on your back and me with a crossbow? You know, if this stake-out is a dud, we’re going to look awfully —’
‘God!’ Gower cut him short, dropped to one knee and worked furiously at the valve on his hose.
‘What?’ Newton gave a massive start, glared all about, held his loaded crossbow out in front of him like a shield. ‘What?’ He couldn’
t see anything, but he knew Gower’s talent lay in reading the future — especially the immediate future!
‘It’s coming!’ Gower no longer whispered. In fact, he was shouting. ‘It’s coming — NOW!’
At the front of the house, where Guy Roberts and Ben Trask pulled up in Roberts’s truck, Gower’s shouting wasn’t heard over the throbbing of the vehicle’s engine.
But on the north-facing side of the house it was. Trevor Jordan instinctively crouched down, then began to run at an angle towards the rear of the building. Ken Layard, hampered by his flame-thrower load, was slower off the mark.
Layard, stumbling through damp shrubbery, saw Jordan’s figure swallowed into a rolling bank of mist where he ran past the open door in the small outbuilding
— then saw something erupt from that door in a snarling, slavering frenzy! Bodescu’s great dog! Without pause the flame-eyed brute hurled itself into the mist after Jordan.
‘Trevor, behind you!’ Layard yelled at the top of his voice. He yanked open the valve on his hose, jerked the trigger, prayed: God, please don’t let me burn Trevor!
A roaring, gouting stream of yellow fire tore open the curtain of mist like a blowtorch through cobwebs. Jordan was already round the corner of the house, but Vlad was still in view, bounding purposefully after him. The expanding, blistering ‘V’ of heat reached after the dog, touched him, enveloped him but briefly. Then he, too, was round the corner. -
By now, at the front of the house, Guy Roberts and Ben Trask were down from the truck. Roberts heard shouting, the roar of a flame-thrower. It was still a minute or two to five but the attack had started which probably meant that the other side had started it. Roberts put a police whistle to his lips, gave one short blast. Now, whatever else was happening, all six INTESP agents would move on the house together.
Roberts had the third flame-thrower; he headed straight for the main door of the house where it stood ajar in the shadow of a columned portico. Trask followed. He was a human lie-detector; his talent had no application here, but he was also young, quick-thinking and he knew how to look after himself. As he made to follow Roberts something caught his attention: a furtive movement glimpsed in the very corner of his eye.
‘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 collap
sed 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?’
