by Brian Lumley
—Something which drove him back against the wall like a blow from a huge fist!
Gasping his shock, his horror—feeling his blood running cold in his veins—Laverne tremblingly held out the torch over the trench. His disbelieving eyes took in the bed of spikes and the figure of his friend, crucified and worse, upon them. George Vulpe squirmed there, impaled through his cheek, neck, shoulders and arms; nailed through his back, buttocks, and thighs; issuing blood from each dark gash and puncture, which coloured the rusty spikes and flowed in thickly converging streams around and between his twitching feet, into the channel and down towards the stone spout.
“Mother of God!” Laverne croaked.
“Ak! … ak! … ak!” said Vulpe, the words bursting in bloody bubbles from his pallid lips.
And along the passageway the great old Grey One growled low in his throat and paced slowly, stiff-legged, into full view.
Vulpe was finished, that much was plain. An army of nurses with a ton of bandages between them couldn’t have stopped him bleeding his last, not now. Laverne couldn’t save him, neither from the bed of spikes nor from the wolf. On nerveless legs he backed off, shuffling crablike, sideways back along the passage, back towards the shallow steps leading to the false flue. It was all over for George—everything was over for him—and now Laverne must think only of himself. And as Vulpe’s blood commenced to gurgle from the carved stone spout into the mouth of the urn, so the overweight American backed away faster yet …
… And paused abruptly, wobbling like a jelly there in the narrow mould of the passageway.
In front, the wolf, its face a snarling mask in the torchlight; between, the dying man on his torture-bed of spikes; and now … now there was something else. Behind!
No longer breathing, Laverne cranked his head round like a nut on a rusty bolt. At first he made little of what he was seeing. All the edges were indistinct, weirdly mobile. The ceiling seemed to have lowered itself, the passage to have narrowed, the floor to have become heaped with … something. Something furry. Something that rustled and flopped!
Laverne’s eyes bugged as he thrust out his torch in that direction, bugged more yet as several small parts of that anomalous furriness detached themselves from the moving walls and darted by him in fluttering swoops and dives. Bats! A colony of bats! And more of them clustering to the walls, floor and ceiling even as he grimaced his disgust.
He looked back the other way. The wolf had come to a standstill; its ears were pointed into the trench, its attention centred on the urn. Cold as death, reeling and panting for air, Laverne looked where it looked. He looked, saw, and knew that he was on the verge of fainting. His blood was pooling, his senses whirling—but he also knew that he dared not faint! Not in this nightmare place, and certainly not now.
The urn was belching. Puffs of vapour, like small smoke rings, were issuing from its obscene mouth. Black slime, bubbling up from within, was blistering on the cold rim like congealing tar. As Vulpe’s blood was consumed, so something was forming and expanding within the urn. A catalyst, his blood transformed what was within!
Hypnotized by horror, Laverne could only watch. A mottled blue-grey tentacle of slime, crimson-veined, slopped upwards out of the mouth of the urn and into the stone spout. Elongating, it slid like a snake along the trail of blood to where Vulpe lay transfixed. Sentient, it curled round his right leg where it was bent at the knee, surged along the impaled thigh and across his belly, crept over his palpitating chest. He continued to gasp, “Ak! … ak! … argh!”—but agony had very nearly inured him, numbed him into a mental limbo, and loss of his life’s blood was quickly finishing the job.
Somehow, summoning up his last ounce of strength from the very roots of his will, Vulpe managed to lift his face up off the spike which pierced his right cheek and lower jaw; and conscious to the last, he saw what reared on his chest and even now formed a flat, swaying, blind cobra head!
His bloody jaws flew open—perhaps in a scream, though none came—and the leech-thing at once drove itself into his yawning mouth and down his straining gullet! He convulsed on the spikes; his lips split at their corners as his jaws were forced apart and the now corrugated, pulsating bulk of the thing thrust into him.
The urn was empty now, steaming and slimed where the “tail” of the leech-creature had snaked free. But still Vulpe gagged and frothed and bled from his nostrils as the horror filled him. His neck was fat from its passage into him; his eyes stood out as if to burst from their sockets; his three-fingered hands tore free of the spikes and grasped at the monster raping his throat, trying to tear it out of him. To no avail.
In another moment the entire creature had entered him—and still he tossed on the spikes, flopped his head this way and that, slopped blood and mucus all around.
“Oh, Jesus! Oh, great God in heaven!” Laverne wailed. “Die, for Christ’s sake!” he instructed Vulpe. “Let it go! Be still!” And it was as if George Vulpe heard him. He did let it go, he was … suddenly … still.
The entire scene stood frozen, timeless. The great wolf, a statue blocking the way forward; the bats, almost completely choking Laverne’s single route of exit; the drained and hideously refilled body of his friend, motionless on its bed of spikes. Only the flickering torch in Laverne’s hand had any life of its own, and that too was dying.
In one badly shaking hand the firebrand, and in the other his pocket-torch; Randy Laverne could never have said how he’d hung on to either one of them. But now, snarling his outrage and terror, he turned to the wall of bats and thrust at it with his smoking, guttering torch. They didn’t retreat but clustered to the firebrand, smothered it with their scorching, crackling bodies, put it out! A dozen dead or dying bats fell to the floor of the passage, were ploughed under by the creeping furry tide of their cousins where they wriggled and flopped forward.
Laverne went a little mad then. He screamed hoarsely, brokenly; he panted, gasped and screamed again; he lashed out with his arms in the near-darkness and aimed the ailing beam of his electric torch this way and that all around, never giving himself a moment’s time to see anything.
He did not see George Vulpe wrench himself upright, free of the spikes in the trench, or the way his gashes had stopped bleeding and were mending themselves even now. Nor did he see him climb up from the trench, fondling the old wolf’s ears and smiling. Especially, he did not see that smile. No, his act of dropping the electric torch and sliding semiconscious down the wall to crumple on the floor of the passage was occasioned by none of these things but by Vulpe’s sudden appearance, his rising up there, directly before him. By that and by his redly glaring eyes, and his entirely alien, phlegm-clotted voice, saying:
“My friend, you came to this place of your own free will. And I believe you are … bleeding?” Vulpe’s nostrils opened wide, sniffed, and his eyes became fiery slits in that preternaturally pale face. “Indeed, I’m sure you are. Now really, someone should see to that wound—before something gets into it.”
Emil Gogosu woke up to find someone kneeling close by. It was young Gheorghe, one hand shaking the hunter awake, the other holding a warning finger to his lips. “Shhhr he hushed.
“Eh? What is it?” Gogosu whispered, at once wide awake and peering about in the night. The fire was burning low, its heart redly reflecting from Vulpe’s eyes. “Dawn already? I don’t believe it!”
“Not dawn,” the other replied, also in a whisper, however hoarse and urgent. “Something else.” He stood up. “Come, bring your gun.”
Gogosu unrolled himself from his blanket, reached for his rifle and came lithely to his feet. He prided himself that his bones didn’t ache.
“Come,” Vulpe said again, stepping carefully so as not to wake Armstrong.
As they left the campfire and the ruins behind and the darkness began to close in, the hunter caught at Vulpe’s arm. “Your face,” he said. “Is that blood? What’s been going on, Gheorghe? I didn’t hear anything.”
“Blood, yes,” the othe
r answered. “I was keeping watch. I heard something out here, in the trees there, and went to see. It might have been a dog or fox—even a wolf—but it attacked me. I fought it off. I think it may have bitten my face. And it’s still out here. It was following me as I came back for you.”
“Still out here?” Gogosu turned his head this way and that. The moon was down a little, its grey light coming through hazy clouds. The hunter saw nothing, but still the young American led the way.
“I thought maybe you could shoot it,” said Vulpe. “You said you’d tried to shoot a wolf up here before.”
“I have, that’s right,” Gogosu answered, hurrying to keep up. “I hit him, too, for I heard him yelp and saw the trail of blood!”
“Well,” said the other, “and now another chance.”
“Eh?” the hunter was puzzled. Something wasn’t quite right here. He tried to get a good look at his companion in the pale moonlight. “What’s wrong with your voice, Gheorghe? Frog in your throat? Still shaken up, are you?”
“That’s right,” said Vulpe, his voice deeper yet. “It was something of a shock …”
Gogosu came to a halt. Something was definitely wrong. “I see no wolf!” he said, the tone of his voice an accusation in itself. “Neither wolf nor fox nor … anything!”
“Oh?” said the other, also pausing. “Then what’s that?” He pointed and something moved silently, low to the ground, grey-dappled where moonlight formed pools under the trees. It was there, then gone. But the hunter had seen it. As if in confirmation, a low growl came back to them out of the night.
“Damn me!” Gogosu breathed. “A Grey One!” He brushed past Vulpe, crouched low, ran forward under the trees.
Vulpe came after, caught up with him, pointed off at a tangent. “There he goes!” he rasped.
“Where? Where? God, you’ve the eyes of a wolf yourself!”
“This way,” said Vulpe. “Come on!”
They came out of the trees, reached the piled scree at the foot of rearing crags. The younger figure breathed easy, but Gogosu was already panting for air. “Lord,” he gulped, and finally admitted it: “but my legs aren’t as young as yours.”
“What?” said Vulpe, half-turning towards him. “Oh, but I assure you they are, Emil Gogosu. Centuries younger, in fact.”
“Eh? What?”
“There? said the other, pointing yet again. “Under that tree there!”
The hunter looked—brought his rifle up to his shoulder—saw nothing. “Under the tree?” he said. “But there’s nothing there. I —”
“Give me that,” said Vulpe. And before the other could argue, he’d taken the gun. Aiming at nothing in particular, he said: “Emil, are you sure you shot a wolf up here that time?”
“What?” the old hunter was outraged. “How many times do you need telling? Aye, and I damn near got him, too! You can wager he bears the scar to prove it.”
“Calm down, calm down,” said the other, his voice dark as the night now. “No need for wagering, Emil, for I’ve seen that gouge in his flank, where your bullet burned his hide! Oh, yes, and just as you remember him, so he remembers you!”
And as suddenly as that the hunter knew that this wasn’t Gheorghe Vulpe. He looked deep into his shadowed face, hissed his terror and shrank down—and saw the Grey One crouched to spring, silhouetted on top of a mound of sliding scree. It snarled, sprang … Gogosu snatched at his rifle where the other seemed to hold it oh so lightly … try snatching an iron bar from the window of a cell.
The wolf struck and knocked him down, away from this awful stranger he’d thought a friend. Its fangs were at his throat, slavering there. He went to cry out, but already those terrible teeth had met through his windpipe, turning his scream to a scarlet froth that flew like a brand across a wrinkled grey brow over vengeful yellow eyes …
“You let me sleep late!” was Seth Armstrong’s first reaction when he found himself prodded awake. The moon was down, the ground mist gone, the fire almost dead.
“Are you complaining?” said the man seated close by, who at first glance was George Vulpe.
“No,” Armstrong shook his head, as much to free it from sleep as in answer, “I guess I was tuckered. Must be the altitude.”
“Good,” said the other. “I’m glad you enjoyed your sleep. Sleep is a necessity, however wasteful. Why should we sleep when there’s a life to be lived, eh? I shall not sleep again in … oh, a long time.”
Armstrong was almost awake now. “What?” he said, and sat up. He might have jumped up, but the barrel of Gogosu’s rifle was prodding him in the chest. And a lean grey wolf, lying prone on its belly like a dog, with paws stretched forward towards him, was gazing directly into his eyes! One of its ears stood stiffly erect; the other, twitching, lay close to its elongated skull. The wolf might be half-grinning, or half-snarling; whichever, its quivering muzzle was splashed with scarlet.
“Jesus H. Christ!” Armstrong snatched back his feet, which got tangled in the lower half of his sleeping-bag.
“Be still,” commanded the one he still believed was Vulpe. “Do as you’re told and he won’t attack you, and I won’t squeeze this trigger.”
“Geor—Geor—George!” Armstrong finally found his voice. “That’s a bloody wolf, there!”
“Bloody, yes,” said the other.
“So sh—sh—shoot the bastard!” Armstrong’s face was deathly white in pale blue starshine.
“Eh?” said the seated man, cocking his head curiously on one side, for all the world as if he hadn’t heard right. “I should shoot him? I should reward an old and trusted friend by shooting him? No, I think not.” He picked up a dry branch and tossed it onto the bed of hot ashes, where small flames lingered still. Sparks showered up and the flames leaped higher, and Armstrong saw the bloodied holes in the other’s clothing, his torn, rapidly mending face, the pits of hell which were his eyes.
“Christ—Christ—Christ!” the big, gangling man gasped. “George, what the hell’s happening here?”
“Be still,” the other said again, his head still tilted at an angle. For long moments he stared into Armstrong’s terrified face, studying it, perhaps thinking something over. And eventually: “You’re a big man and strong, and I cannot be alone in the world. Not now, and not for some time. I have things to learn, places to go, things to do. I will need instruction. I must be taught before I may … teach? I got something from Gheorghe’s mind, you see, before he honoured the covenant. But not enough. Perhaps I was too eager. It is understandable.”
“George,” Armstrong licked his lips, which were parched. “George, listen.” He reached out a trembling hand to the other—but the old wolf’s muzzle at once cracked open to display jaws like a bone vice. He lifted his belly off the earth, crept closer.
“I said be still!” said the one with the rifle, lifting it until its foresight pressed against Armstrong’s bobbing Adam’s apple. “If the Grey One understands my wishes, why can’t you? Or perhaps you’re a fool, in which case I’m wasting my time. Is that it? Am I wasting my time? Should I be done with it, simply squeeze this trigger and make a fresh start?”
“I’ll … I’ll be still!” Armstrong gasped, his voice a hoarse whisper, cold sweat starting out on his brow. “I’ll be still! And … and don’t worry, George. I’ll help you. God, yes, whatever bug you’ve picked up, I’ll help you!”
“Oh, I know you will,” said this—this stranger?—still staring from his crimson eyes.
“I’ll do anything you say,” said Armstrong. “Anything at all.”
“Yes, that too,” said the other, nodding. And having made up his mind: “Very well, and shall we start with something simple? Look into my eyes, Seth Armstrong.” He moved the barrel of the rifle aside to lean closer, until his terrible mesmeric face was only a foot away. “Look deep, Seth. Look under the skin of my eyes, into the blood and the brains and the very landscape of my mind. The eyes are the windows of the soul, my friend, did you know that? Portals on one’s drea
ms and passions and aspirations. Which is why my eyes are red. Aye, for the soul behind them has been torn asunder arid eaten by a scarlet leech!”
His words conjured seething horror, but more than that they inspired awe, a creeping paralysis, a lassitude of terror. Armstrong knew what it was: hypnotism! He could feel his mind going under. But Vulpe—or whoever this was in Vulpe’s body—had been right: Seth Armstrong was strong. And before his will could be subverted utterly—
—He batted the rifle aside, so that it was directed at the wolf, and reached for the throat of his tormentor. Tm going to have me … a piece of … you, George!” he panted.
As the Texan’s fingers closed on Vulpe’s windpipe, so that facsimile gave a grunting cry and clawed at his face. The three fingers of his left hand hooked in the corner of Armstrong’s lower lip, tearing it. Armstrong howled his pain, bit down hard on the smallest of Vulpe’s fingers, severed it at the central knuckle in the moment before the other dragged his hand free.
The rifle went off, its flash startling and the crack of its discharge reverberating from the peaks. The great wolf knew something about guns; unharmed, fur bristling, still he whined and backed away.
Gurgling and clutching at his damaged hand, Vulpe had reared to his feet. Armstrong spat out Vulpe’s little finger, which hung from his mouth on a thread of blood and gristle. The Texan now had possession of the rifle and knew how to use it. But even as he tried to turn the weapon on the madman, so Vulpe recovered and kicked it from his hands.
Somehow Armstrong burst free of his sleeping-bag, but as he lurched to his feet he felt something clinging to his face and moving there. And shaking with laughter, the mad thing which had been George Vulpe pointed at Armstrong—at his face. He pointed with his freakish left hand, where all that remained of the third finger was now a bloody stump.
The Texan put up a hand and slapped at the finger on his cheek, clawed at it. It climbed higher, with a life of its own, and gouged at the corner of his right eye. Armstrong howled as it dug in, dislodged the eyeball and entered the socket. With his eye hanging on his cheek, he danced and screamed and clutched at his face; but he couldn’t dislodge the thing, which burrowed like an alien worm into his head.
