The Second Hammer Horror Film Omnibus
Page 34
He made a dive for the knife. The young man came after him in a fury, and together they crashed into the door. It swung shut. Sir James got his shoulders against it, kicked out savagely, and got to his feet with the knife in his hand before another attack could be launched.
The young man cursed and came on again. Sir James pushed all his weight away from the door and struck out with the dagger.
His aim was true. The blade drove into the man’s neck, and blood spurted up over the hilt. Sir James held on for a moment, then let go. The young man gurgled, stared at him with glazing eyes, and then rolled backwards. He went down with a crash and rolled towards the fire.
Sir James grabbed the Gladstone bag and went to the door.
It would not open. It had locked itself. And there was no handle on the inside.
He swung towards the secret panel. But it had slid back into place. Somewhere there must be a catch; but he could not find it. He prodded the woodwork and tested each protuberance with his fingertips. He explored under the nearer shelves. Still nothing.
A wisp of smoke curled round him from behind. There was a smell of burning. He turned.
The dead man had fallen more closely to the fire than he had realized. One foot must have flailed out and dislodged some of the burning coals. The carpet was smouldering, and a tongue of flame was beginning to devour one corner. Sir James stamped on it. A dozen other small flames began to lick up along the fringe.
There were heavy, dusty curtains over the windows. He tugged at one until it tore free from its runners. It came down in a cloud of choking dust, and he threw it over the carpet and tried to beat out the fire. Instead, the curtains began to blaze at once, so that he had to spring back. A mass of flame belched up into the room.
Sir James looked desperately round. The panel would not yield up its secrets; the door was too heavy to be broken down.
A bellpull hung near the fireplace. He edged round the blaze and took hold of it, then hesitated. But whatever the consequence of pulling it might be, the consequence of not pulling it was all too plain: he would be burnt alive.
He pulled.
A few seconds later he pulled again. The room was suffocating. If nobody came, he could not hope to survive more than another ten or fifteen minutes at most. Perhaps it would be quicker than that. He didn’t want to dodge from one last vantage point to another, choking and dying by inches. Let it be quick.
The door opened. A colored servant with two white ritual gashes down his cheeks appeared in the opening. He stepped forward incredulously, then turned to hurry away.
Sir James launched himself. He caught the man’s arms and twisted them behind his back. There was no time to waste.
“Hamilton—where is he? Take me to him.”
The man struggled like a tiger.
“Take me to him. Do you want to burn to death in this house?”
The man shook his head and writhed to and fro.
“I’ll throw you in there,” Sir James threatened. “Tell me where Hamilton is, or else . . .”
“He’s . . . down there.”
“Down where?”
The man was nodding at the floor.
“Take me to him!” bellowed Sir James.
“There’s no way. Not through here. Only the master knows how to open the panel from this side. The only way is through the mine.”
“The mine?”
“I swear it.”
Sir James hustled the man ahead of him, out into the hall. When he looked back into the room he saw that the flames were at their fiercest over the carpet. The young man’s body was beginning to char. A ring of fire licked more gently round the desk, gathering strength. Smoke wreathed over the Gladstone bag into which he had packed the effigies.
He needed them as evidence. Needed them for exorcism. But the heat was unbearable. And he thought of what might be going on at this very minute—the rituals Hamilton must be conducting, and their possible consequences. Time was running out. Already he might be too late.
Sir James turned and dashed out of the house.
12
The altar in the rock face was waiting. Tonight fresh blood would run over it and add to its sacrificial stains.
Hamilton strode along the narrow tunnel towards it. His white cloak swung from his shoulders, and on either side his creatures hunched themselves against the walls as he passed. When he had gone they resumed work—hacking out tin ore with picks and loading the wooden trolleys which ran on rails towards the mineshaft. Over them stood Denver’s friends with whips and riding crops, lashing them on if they flagged.
Their faces were blank. Their wasted bodies were clad in the remains of filthy shrouds. It did not matter: nobody noticed, least of all themselves. Closer to the altar area was a zombie in less tattered cloth—Martinus, who had so newly joined them.
Denver ought to be here, accompanying the master. Hamilton waited, then scowled. He carried the effigy which he had brought from his study and raised it now above his head.
Several of the zombies formed a ring behind him. The native drummers settled over the taut skins of their drums and began to beat.
Hamilton began the invocation. “Kada nostra . . . kada estra . . .”
In a house in the village a mile away a young woman sewing beside a lamp stopped and shivered. A damp film of perspiration formed across her forehead. To herself she murmured, in a trance:
“Kada nostra . . . kada estra . . .”
Peter Tompson looked up from the book he had been reading.
“What was that?”
“Nothing,” said Sylvia. “Nothing.”
Then the room began to spin round her. She saw Peter get up, alarmed. And while she wanted to cry out to him, she was at the same time laughing at him. The fool—that worried face of his, the silliness of all of them, their ignorance in the face of great power . . . ! Great power. It drew her, sucked her up, possessed her. Even as she fell to the floor in a fit, her lips beginning to foam, she was somehow standing apart from herself and watching everything that happened.
Peter bent over her and moved her gently away from the nearby chair legs. He settled her on the rug so that she was unlikely to harm herself, and then hurried out of the room to find a medicine or a palliative.
As soon as he had gone, Sylvia got calmly to her feet. She needed no potions—only what the Master would give her.
The Master. He was waiting. He had summoned her and she would go. She would learn all the things that these smaller creatures could only grope for. She would enter that other world, leaving all the others behind. The Master’s face was clearly before her as she went smiling out of the house into the night.
Her feet remembered the way. She looked neither left nor right as she went through the village and up the path towards the moor. As she approached the minehead she slowed. Beyond her, for the last few yards, the route was strange.
But her escort was waiting. Martinus stood with his arms outstretched, his head turning gently from side to side as though tasting the air. His shroud billowed out. Sylvia quickened her pace again, almost running to greet him. He swept her up in his arms and carried her towards the mineshaft.
They were descending. A darkness heavier than that of the night sky closed in around her. The zombie that had once been Martinus held her impassively, cold and unbreathing.
There was the creak and squeal of the lift as it dropped into the bowels of the earth. Then a faint glow came up the shaft, accompanied by a low, rhythmic moaning.
The lift jolted to a stop. The zombie stepped out with Sylvia in its arms.
She turned her head gratefully. She had come to the trysting place, and all was now to be fulfilled. The Master was here. She looked into his eyes.
And suddenly the spell was broken. For a moment there was a grinning, fearsome mask; and then it was lifted, and she stared into the face of Clive Hamilton.
Sylvia screamed.
Hamilton laughed and dragged her from the zombie’s embrace. Sh
e stumbled on the uneven rocky floor, and then he was hurrying her towards an altar which seemed to sway in the flickering torchlight, expanding and contracting like a foully beating heart.
Zombies in their torn shrouds came forward like automatons and held her down on the altar. Hamilton bound her hands with a silken cord and then waved his creatures away.
A faster drumming started. It spoke with a wild glee of imminent slaughter.
The exaltation which had raced through Sylvia’s veins was utterly gone. Sick with fear, she looked round at the hideous shadows and the tall white-clad figure of Clive Hamilton—and she knew that this was the ultimate insanity and that she could hope for no release, no escape to the sweetness of life and the sane world again.
Hamilton washed his hands with leisurely thoroughness in a golden bowl. Then he picked up a bejewelled knife. He stepped towards the altar.
“No!”
The yell rang out through the drumming. Hamilton spun round. Sylvia twisted herself to one side so that she could look down from the altar along the tunnel.
Peter was racing towards her from the mineshaft. But he would not reach her. Some of the young bloods turned away from the zombies in their charge and grabbed him as he came level. Peter fought madly, but there were too many of them.
Hamilton stared at him for a long moment as though deciding what use might later be made of him. Then he turned back with relish to Sylvia.
Light blazed up suddenly.
It was not part of the ritual. That was very clear: Hamilton faltered, and cursed. And beyond him, Sylvia saw great gouts of flame spewing up towards the low ceiling of the cavern. Grey shapes were transformed into torches—torches which ran and clawed and twisted in a fiery danse macabre. The zombies were ablaze. Smoke obscured their heads, their clothes began to smoulder, flame engulfed them. They became the leaping, agonized spirits of hell itself.
Two of the creatures, trailing smoke and sparks, hurled themselves despairingly at their overseers—two of the young bloods who were holding Peter. The group fell back against the wall, and then Peter was free. He came weaving through the inferno of the undead, and sprang up to the altar. Hamilton, dazed and lost in the middle of his crumbling world, tottered back into the gloom.
Peter carried Sylvia from the altar and began to walk resolutely back towards the lift shaft. The terrible dance of flaming corpses grew madder and madder.
Then Hamilton let out a shriek that was like the tearing apart of a mind. Galvanized into activity by the snapping of his reason, he came racing through the smoke in pursuit. He snatched up a timber which was beginning to burn red at one end, and advanced with maniacal fury on Peter.
Sylvia tried to ease herself from Peter’s arms so that he could defend himself; but he swung her against the wall, shielding her with his body against the scorching wood that Hamilton was jabbing towards them.
There was the screech and rattle of the lift. Sir James appeared like an avenging angel. He stopped for an instant, shaken by the nightmare vision he saw in the blazing cavern. Then he pulled the two of them into the lift just as Hamilton sprang.
Their last sight of this hell under the earth was of Hamilton lurching against the wall and then turning to find himself enclosed in an arc of zombies, blazing and smouldering as they edged forward to engulf him in their own consuming flames.
The sounds of bedlam fell away below. The cool night air was on their faces. Sir James and Peter helped Sylvia out of the lift and down the slope. They stumbled away without looking back until they had gone down into the hollow and up the other side. Then, aching with the intensity of their own fear, they stopped and turned.
A red glow was seeping up the shaft under the winding wheel. It brightened as they watched. There was a gush of sparks, and all at once the wheel and the side of the winding shed caught alight.
Peter caught Sir James’s arm and pointed beyond the woods. In the direction of the manor house an echoing glow throbbed in the sky.
Sir James nodded as though this explained something satisfactorily to him.
Sylvia found her voice. “Those . . . those creatures. What made them burst into flames like that? It seemed to come from inside them . . .”
The memory of it sickened her. Peter put a steadying arm round her shoulders.
“The bag,” said Sir James. “That was it. The Gladstone bag in which I had collected all the effigies. When the fire reached them and began to destroy them, its effects were inevitably duplicated in the husks of the undead.”
As they watched, the night sky was swept by a cleansing blaze. It had all the magnificence of a rich, splendid sunset.
“The undead,” said Sir James, “are dead at last. The wretched wanderers can rest now.”
Table of Contents
Back Cover
Hammer Films
Titlepage
Copyright
The Reptile
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
Dracula–Prince of Darkness
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
Rasputin–The Mad Monk
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
The Plague of the Zombies
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12