by Brian Lumley
Gower nodded. ‘I think so.’
‘Right. Now listen. Thermite bombs in the truck; plastic explosive, too, in haversacks. Dump ‘em in the cellars. Spread ‘em out. Try to take ‘em all down in one go. And no torching while you’re holding the stuff! In fact get out of that kit and take a crossbow like Newton. The stuff’s all set to go off from excessive heat or naked flame. Plant it and get out and then stay out! Three of us in the house itself should be enough. If not the fire will be.’
‘You’re going in there?’ Gower looked at the house, licked his lips.
‘I’m going in, yes,’ Roberts nodded. ‘There’s still Bodescu, his mother and the girl to account for. And don’t worry about me. Worry about yourself. The cellars could be far worse than the house.’ He headed for the open door under the columned portico.
Chapter Fourteen
Inside the house, Layard and Jordan had carefully, systematically searched the ground floor and now approached the main staircase to the upper levels. They’d switched on dim lights as they went, compensating a little for the gloom. At the foot of the stairs they paused.
‘Where the hell is Roberts?’ Layard whispered. ‘We could use some instructions.’
‘Why?’ Jordan glanced at him out of the corner of his eye. ‘We know what we’re up against mainly. And we know what to do.’
‘But there should be four of us in here.’
Jordan gritted his teeth. ‘There was something of a row out front. Trouble, obviously. Anyway, by now someone should be planting charges in the cellars. So let’s not waste time. We can ask questions later.’
On a narrow landing where the stairs turned through a right angle, a large, built-in cupboard faced them squarely, its door a little ajar. Jordan kept his crossbow lined up on the large-panelled door, sidled past and continued up the stairs. He wasn’t passing the buck; it was simply that if there was anything nasty in there, he knew Layard could stop it with a single burst of liquid fire.
Layard checked that the valve on his hose was open, rested his finger on the trigger, toed the door open. In there… darkness.
He waited until his eyes were growing accustomed to the dimness, then spotted a light switch on the wall just inside the door. He reached out his hand, then drew it back. He stepped forward a pace, used the nozzle of his hose to trip the switch. A light came on, throwing the interior of the cupboard into sharp relief. At the back a tall figure! Layard drew breath sharply; his jaw fell partly open and the corners of his mouth drew back in a half-rictus of fear. He was a breath from squeezing the trigger but then his eyes focussed and he saw only an old raincoat, hanging on a peg.
Layard gulped, filled his lungs, quietly closed the door. Jordan was up on the first floor landing. He saw two alcoves, arched over, with closed doors set centrally. There was also a passage, with two more doors that he could see before the corridor turned a corner. The closest door was maybe eight paces away, the furthest twelve. He turned back to the doors in the alcoves, approached the first of them, turned the doorknob and kicked it open: it was a toilet with a high window, letting in grey light.
Jordan turned to the second door, dealt with it as with the first. Inside was an extensive library, the whole room visible at a glance. Then, aware that Layard was coming up the stairs, he started down the corridor and at once paused. His ears pricked up. He heard… water? The hiss and gurgle of a tap?
A shower! The water sounds were coming from the second room — a bathroom? down the corridor. Jordan looked back. Layard was at the top of the stairs. Their eyes met. Jordan pointed to the first door, then at Layard. Layard was to deal with it. Then Jordan thumbed his own chest, pointed along the corridor to the second door.
He went on, but cautiously, crossbow held chest high and pointed dead ahead. The water sounds were louder, and a voice? A girl’s voice singing? Humming, anyway. Some utterly tuneless melody.
In this house at this time, a girl humming to herself in a shower? Or was it a trap? -
Jordan took a tighter grip on his crossbow, turned the knob and kicked in the door. No trap! Not that he could see. In fact the completely natural scene beyond the bathroom door left him at a complete loss. All of the tension went out of him in a moment, and he was left feeling… like some gross intruder!
The girl (Helen Lake, surely?) was beautiful, and quite naked. Water streamed down on her, setting her lovely body gleaming. She stood sideways on, picked out in clear definition against blue ceramic tiles, in the shower’s shallow well. As the door slammed open she jerked her head round to stare at Jordan, her eyes opening wide in terror. Then she gasped, crumpled back against the shower’s wall, looking as if she were about to faint. One hand flew to her breasts and her eyelids fluttered as her knees began to give way.
Jordan half-lowered his crossbow, said to himself: Sweet Jesus! But this is just a frightened girl! He began to reach out his free hand — to steady her — but then other thoughts, her thoughts, abruptly printed themselves on his telepathic mind.
Come on, my sweet! Come help me! Ah, just touch me, hold me! Just a little closer, my sweet… there! And now — Jordan jerked back as she turned more fully towards him. Her eyes were wide, triangular, demonic! Her face had been instantly transformed into that of a beast! And in her right hand, invisible until now, was a carving knife. The knife rose as she reached out and grasped Jordan’s jacket. Her grip was iron! She drew him effortlessly towards her — and he fired his bolt into her breast point-blank.
Slammed back against the rear wall of the shower, pinned there by the bolt, she dropped her knife and began to issue peal after ringing peal of soul-searing screams. Blood gushed from where the bolt was bedded in her with little more than its flight protruding. She grasped it, and still screaming jerked her body this way and that. The bolt came loose from the wall in a crunching of tiles and plaster and she staggered to and fro in the shower, yanking on the bolt and screaming endlessly.
‘God, God, oh God!’ Jordan cried, riveted to the spot.
Layard shouldered him aside, squeezed the trigger on his flame-thrower, turned the entire shower unit into a blistering, steaming pressure-cooker. After several seconds he stopped hosing, and stared with Jordan at the result. Black smoke and steam cleared and the water continued to hiss, spurting from half-a-dozen places now in the molten plastic tubing of the shower’s system. In the shallow well, Helen Lake’s body slumped, features bubbling, hair like smouldering stubble, every inch of her skin peeling from her in great raw strips.
‘God help us!’ Jordan gasped, turned away to be sick.
‘God?’ the thing in the shower croaked, like a voice from the abyss. ‘What god? You bloody black bastards!’
Impossibly she came erect, took a blind, stumbling, groping step forward.
Layard torched her again, but more out of mercy than from fear. He let his flame-thrower roar until fire belched out of the shower and threatened to burn him, too. Then he switched off, backed away down the corridor to where Jordan stood retching over the stair’s balustrade.
From below, Roberts’s voice reached anxiously up to them: ‘Ken? Trevor? What is it?’
Layard wiped his forehead. ‘We… we got the girl,’ he whispered, then shouted, ‘We got the girl!’
‘We got her mother,’ Roberts answered, ‘and Bodescu’s dog. That leaves Bodescu himself, and his mother.’
‘There’s a door up here, locked,’ Layard called back. ‘I thought I heard someone in there.’
‘Can’t you break it in?’
‘No, it’s oak, old and heavy. I could burn it.
‘No time for that. And if there is anyone in there, they’re finished anyway. The cellars are mined by now.
You’d better come down — and quickly! We have to get out of here.’
Layard dragged Jordan after him down the stairs, calling ahead, ‘Guy, where the hell have you been?’
‘I’m on my own,’ Roberts responded. ‘Trask’s out of it for now — but he’s OK. Where’ve I bee
n? I’ve been checking this place through downstairs.’
‘A waste of time,’ Jordan groaned, half to himself.
‘What?’ Roberts raised his voice more yet.
‘I said, we’d already done it!’ Jordan yelled, but needlessly for they were down the stairs, with Roberts propelling them towards the entrance hall and the open door…
Simon Gower and Harvey Newton had gone down into the cellars via the outbuilding with its narrow steps and central ramp. Loaded down with almost two hundred pounds of explosives between them, they had found the lights out of order, and so been obliged to use pocket torches. The vaults under the house were black and silent as a tomb, seemed extensive as a catacomb. They stuck close together, dumping thermite and plastic explosive packages wherever they found support walls or buttressed archways, and even though they went with something of caution, still they managed rapidly to fairly well saturate the place with their load. Newton carried a small can of petrol with which he left a trail from one dump to the next, until the whole place reeked of highly volatile fuel.
Finally they were satisfied that they’d explored and mined every part — and likewise pleased that they’d come across nothing dangerous — and so turned back and retraced their tracks to the exit. At a place they both agreed to be approximately central under the house, they set down the last of their load. Then Newton splashed what was left of his petrol all the way to the foot of the out building steps, while Gower double-checked the charges they’d planted, making sure they were all amply primed. - At the steps Newton tossed down his empty can, turned
and looked back into the gloom. From a little way back, round a corner, he could hear Gower’s hoarse breathing and he knew that the other man worked furiously at his task. Gower’s torch made flickering patches of light back there, its beam swinging this way and that as he worked.
Roberts appeared at the top of the steps, called down, ‘Newton, Gower? You can come up out of there as quick as you like. We’re all set if you are. The others are spread out round the house, just waiting. The mist has cleared. So if anything tries to break loose, we’ll —‘
‘Harvey?’ Gower’s tremulous voice came out of the darkness, several notes higher up the scale than it should be. ‘Harvey, was that you just then?’
Newton called back, ‘No, it’s Roberts. Hurry up, will you?’
‘No, not Roberts,’ Gower was breathless, almost whispering. ‘Something else.
Roberts and Newton looked at each other round-eyed. The ground gave itself a shake, a very definite tremor. From inside the cellars, Gower screamed.
Roberts came halfway down the steps, stumbling and yelling: ‘Simon, get out of there! Hurry, man!’
Gower screamed again, the cry of a trapped animal. ‘It’s here, Guy! Oh, God — it’s here! Under the ground!’
Newton made to go in after him but Roberts reached down and grabbed his collar. The ground was shaking now, dust billowing out of the yawning mouth of the old cellars. There were rending sounds, and other noises which might or might not be Gower choking his life out. Bricks started to slide loose from rotten mortar in the retaining walls, spilling down the sides of the ramp.
Newton started to back up the trembling steps, with Roberts dragging him from above. When they were almost at the top, they saw a cloud of dust and debris suddenly expelled forcefully from the entrance to the cellar — and then the door itself was lifted off its rusty hinges and hurled down at the foot of the ramp, a mass of splintered boards.
Something was framed in the dusty gap of the entrance. It was Gower, and it was more than Gower. He hung for a moment suspended in the otherwise empty doorway, swaying left and right. Then he emerged more fully and the watchers saw the huge, leprous trunk which propelled him. The thing — indeed ‘the Other’ — had entered his back in a solid shaft of matter, but inside Gower its massive pseudopod of vampire flesh had branched, following his pipes and conduits to several exits. Tentacles writhed from his gaping mouth and nostrils, the sockets of his dislocated eyes, his ruptured ears. And even as Roberts and Newton clambered in a frenzy of terror up the last few steps from the ramp, so Gower’s entire front burst open, revealing a lashing nest of crimson, groping worms!
‘Jesus!’ Guy Roberts shouted then, his voice a sandpapered howl of horror and hatred. ‘Sweet J-e-s-u-s!’
He aimed his hose down the ramp. ‘Goodbye, Simon. God grant you peace!’
Liquid fire roared its rage, ran like a flood down the ramp, hurled itself in a fireball at the suspended man and the beast-thing holding him upright. The great pseudopod was instantly retracted — Gower with it, snatched back like a rag doll — and Roberts aimed his hose directly at the doorway at the foot of the steps. He turned the valve up full, and a shimmering jet of heat blasted its way into the cellar, fanning out inside the labyrinth of vaults into every niche and corner. For a count of five Roberts held it. Then came the first explosion.
Down went the entrance in a massive shuddering of earth. A shockwave of lashing heat hurled dirt and pebbles up the ramp, knocking Roberts and Newton off their feet. Roberts’s finger automatically came off the trigger. His weapon smoked hot but silent in his hands. And crump! crump! crump! came evenly spaced, muffled concussions from deep in the earth, each one shaking the ground with pile-driver power.
Faster came the underground explosions, occurring in sporadic bursts, occasionally twinned, as the planted charges reacted to the heat and added to the unseen inferno. Newton got up and helped Roberts to his feet. They stumbled clear of the house, took up positions with Layard and Jordan, a man to each of the four corners but standing well back. The old barn, still blazing, began to vibrate as if itself alive and suffering its death agonies. Finally it shook itself to pieces and slid down into the suddenly seething earth. For a moment a lashing tentacle reached up from the shuddering foundations to a height of some twenty feet, then collapsed and was sucked back down into the quaking, liquefying quag of earth and fire.
Ken Layard was closest to that area. He ran raggedly away from the house, put distance between himself and the barn, too, before stumbling to a halt and staring with wide eyes and gaping mouth at the upstairs windows of the main building. Then he beckoned to Roberts to come and join him.
‘Look!’ Layard yelled, over the sound of subterranean thunder and the hiss and crackle of fire. They both stared at the house. Framed in a second-floor window, the figure of a mature woman stood with her arms held high, almost in an attitude of supplication. ‘Bodescu’s mother,’ Roberts said. ‘It can only be her: Georgina Bodescu — God help her!’
A corner of the house collapsed, sank into the earth in ruins. Where it went down, a geyser of fire spouted high as the roof, hurling broken bricks and mortar with it.
There were more explosions and the entire house shuddered. It was visibly settling on its foundations, cracks spreading across its walls, chimneys tottering. The four watchers backed off further yet, Layard dragging Ben Trask with him. Then Layard noticed the truck where it stood on the drive, jolting about on its own suspension.
He went to get it, but Guy Roberts stayed where he was, stood over Trask and continued to watch the figure of the woman at the window.
She hadn’t changed her position. She stumbled a little now and then as the house settled, but always regained her pose, arms raised on high and head thrown back, so that it seemed to Roberts that indeed she talked to God. Telling Him what? Asking for what? Forgiveness for her son? A merciful release for herself?
Newton and Jordan left their positions at the rear of the house and came round to the front. It was clear that nothing was going to escape from that inferno now. They helped Layard get Trask into the truck; and while they busied themselves with preparations for their leaving, still Roberts watched the house burn, and so was witness to the end of it.
The thermite had done its job and the earth itself was on fire. The house no longer had foundations on which to stand. It slumped down, leaned first one way and then the other
. Old brickwork groaned as timbers sheared, chimney stacks toppled and windows shivered into fragments in their twisting frames. And as the house sank in leaping flames and molten earth, so its substance became fuel for the fire.
Fire raced up walls inside and out; great red and yellow gouts of flame spurted from broken windows, bursting upward through a rent and sagging roof. For a single instant longer Georgina Bodescu was silhouetted against a background of crimson, searing heat, and then Harkley House gave up the ghost. It went down groaning into a scar of bubbling earth that resembled nothing so much as the mouth of a small volcano. For a little while longer the peaked gable ends and parts of the roof were visible, and then they too were consumed in vengeful fire and smoke.
Through all of this the reek had been terrible. Judging by the stench, it might well have been that fifty men had died and been burned in that house; but as Roberts climbed up into the passenger seat of the truck and Layard headed the vehicle down the drive towards the gates, all five survivors, including Trask who was now mainly conscious, knew that the stench came from nothing human. It was partly thermite, partly earth and timber and old brick, but mainly it was the death smell of that rendered down, gigantic monstrosity under the cellars, that ‘Other’ which had taken poor Gower.
The mist had almost completely cleared now, and cars were beginning to pull up along the verges of the road, their drivers attracted by the flames and smoke rising high into the air where Harkley House had stood. As the truck rolled out of the gates onto the road, a red-faced driver leaned out of his car’s window, yelled, ‘What is it? That’s Harkley House, isn’t it?’
‘It was,’ Roberts yelled back, offering what he hoped looked like a helpless shrug. ‘Gone, I’m afraid. Burned down.’
‘Good Lord!’ The red-faced man was aghast. ‘Has the fire service been informed?’
‘We’re off to do that now,’ Roberts answered. ‘Little good that’ll do, though. We’ve been in to have a look, but there’s nothing left to see, I’m afraid.’ They drove on.