by Brian Lumley
While Theo Dolgikh was thinking back on the day’s events, Carl Quint’s mind was similarly engaged; and now that the broken fangs of Faethor Ferenczy’s castle once more appeared through the dark, motionless pines, so his memory instinctively homed in on what he and Felix Krakovitch had found there during their first visit this morning. All four of them had been present, but only he and Krakovitch had known where to look.
The place had been almost magnetic in their psychically enhanced minds: the exact spot had drawn them like iron filings to a magnet. Except they were not filings, and it was not their intention to get stuck here. Quint remembered now how it had been.
‘Faethor’s castle,’ he’d breathed, as they came to a halt at the very rim of the ruins. ‘The mountain fastness of a vampire!’ And in the eye of his mind he’d seen it again as it must have been a thousand years ago.
Volkonsky would have gone clambering into and amongst the crumbling stone blocks, but Krakovitch had stopped him. The ganger knew nothing at all of what was buried here, and Krakovitch didn’t intend to tell him. Volkonsky was down to earth as any man could be. At the moment he was committed to assist them, but that might change if they tried to tell him what they were doing here. And so Krakovitch had simply warned, ‘Be careful! Try not to disturb anything…‘ And the big Russian had shrugged and climbed down again from the tumbled mass of the decaying old pile.
Then Quint and Krakovitch together had simply stared at the place and touched its stones, and let the aura of its antiquity and its immemorial evil wash over them. They’d breathed its essence, tasted of its mystery and let their talents lead them to its innermost secret. As they had picked their way carefully, almost timidly through the fallen rubble of ancient masonry, suddenly Quint had come to an abrupt halt and said huskily, ‘Oh, yes, it was here all right. It still is here! This is the place.’
And Krakovitch had agreed: ‘Yes, I sense it too. But I only sense it — I don’t fear it. There’s no warning to bar me from this place. I’m sure that there was a great evil here, but it’s gone now, extinct, utterly lifeless.’
Quint had nodded, sighed his relief. ‘That’s my feeling, too: still here, but no longer active. It’s been too long. There was nothing to sustain it.’
Then they had stared at each other, both of them thinking the identical thought. Finally Krakovitch had given it voice. ‘Dare we try to find it, perhaps disturb it?’
For a moment Quint had known fear, but then he’d answered, ‘If I don’t at least discover what it was like — at the end, I mean — then I’ll wonder about it for the rest of my life. And since we’re both agreed that it’s harmless now..
And so they had called up Gulharov and Volkonsky to the place where they stood, and all four of them had set to work. At first the going was easy and they used makeshift implements and their bare hands to clear away masses of loose dirt and rubble. Soon they’d revealed the inner core of an ancient stone staircase, with the steps winding on the outside. The stone had been scorched black with fire and was scarred by jagged cracks as from great heat. Apparently Thibor’s plan had worked: the spiral stairwell leading downstairs had been blocked by blazing debris, burying the vampire women and the unfortunate Ehrig alive. Yes, and the burrowing proto-thing too. All of them, buried alive — or undead. But a thousand years is a long time, in which even the undead might truly die.
Then Volkonsky had got his massive arms around a great block of fractured rock and eased it upwards from the rubble which seemed to completely choke the stairwell. Suddenly it had come loose, at which Gulharov had added his own not inconsiderable muscle to the task. Together they’d heaved the block up and over the rim of the excavation — at which the debris at their feet had sighed and settled down a little, and a blast of foul air had rushed up into their faces!
They’d jumped back, startled, but still there had been no threat in it, no sense of impending danger. After a moment, taking Gulharov’s arm to steady himself, the big Russian foreman had stepped down from the already uncovered stone steps onto the now dubious surface of the material blocking the descent. Still clinging to Gulharov he’d stamped first one foot, then the other — and at once gone down with a cry of alarm up to his waist in the stuff as it suddenly shifted and gave way under him!
Then the earth had seemed to rumble and shudder a little; Volkonsky had clung to Gulharov for dear life; Quint and Krakovitch had thrown themselves flat and reached down from above to grab hold of the ganger under his armpits. But he’d been quite safe, for already his feet had found purchase on unseen steps below.
And as they’d all four watched in astonishment, so the choking debris around Volkonsky’s thighs had settled down, collapsing in upon itself, sinking like quicksand into the hollow depths of the stairwell. Hollow, yes! The stairs had not been completely choked but merely plugged, and now the plug had been removed.
‘Now it’s our turn,’ Quint had said when the dust had settled and they could breathe freely. ‘You and me, Felix. We can’t let Mikhail go down there ahead of us, for he has no idea what he’s up against. If there is still an element of danger attached to it, we should be the first ones down there.’
They’d climbed down beside Volkonsky, paused and looked at each other. ‘We’re unarmed,’ Krakovitch had pointed out.
Up above, Sergei Gulharov had produced an automatic pistol, passed it down to them. Volkonsky saw it, laughed. He spoke to Krakovitch who smiled.
Quint asked, ‘What did he say?’
‘He said, why do we need a gun if we’re seeking treasure?’ Krakovitch answered.
‘Tell him we’re scared of spiders!’ said Quint; and taking the gun, he had started down the littered steps. What good bullets would be if the vampires were still extant he couldn’t have said, but at least the feel of the weapon in his hand was a comfort.
Blackened chunks of rock, large and small, cluttered the stairs so badly that Quint was often obliged to climb over them; but after turning through another full spiral, at last the steps were clear of all but small pieces of rubble, pebbles and sand sifted down from above. And at last he had been at the bottom, with Krakovitch and the others close on his heels. Light filtered down from above, but not much.
‘It’s no good,’ Quint had complained, shaking his head. ‘We can’t go in there, not without proper light.’ His voice had echoed as in a tomb, which was what the place was. The place he spoke of was a room, a dungeon — the dungeon, for it could be no other place than Thibor’s prison — beyond a low, arched stone doorway. Maybe Quint’s reluctance had been his final attempt to back away from this thing, maybe not; whichever, the resourceful Gulharov had the answer. He’d produced a small, flat pocket torch, passed it to Quint who shone its beam ahead of him. There under the arch of the doorway, fossilised timber — age-blackened fragments of oak — lying in a pile, with red splashes of rust marking the passing of defunct nails and bands of iron: all that remained of a once stout door. And beyond that, only darkness.
Then, stooping a little to avoid a keystone which had settled somewhat through the centuries, Quint had stepped warily under the archway, pausing just inside the dungeon. And there he’d aimed his torch in a slow circle to illumine each wall and corner of the place. The cell was quite large, larger than he’d expected; it had corners, niches, ledges and recesses where the beam of light couldn’t follow, and it seemed cut from living rock.
Quint aimed the beam at the floor. Dust, the filtered dust of ages, lay uniformly thick everywhere. No footprint disturbed it. In roughly the centre of the floor, a humped formation of stone, possibly bedrock, strained grotesquely upwards. It seemed there was nothing here, and yet ‘Quint’s psychic intuition told him otherwise. His, and Krakovitch’s too.
‘We were right,’ Krakovitch’s voice had echoed dolefully. He’d moved to come up alongside Quint. ‘They are finished. They were here and we sense them even now, but time has put paid to them.’ He’d moved forward, leaned his weight on the anomalous hump of rock — whi
ch at once crumbled under his hand!
In the next moment he’d jumped back with a cry of sheer horror, colliding with Quint, grabbing him and hugging him close. ‘Oh God! Carl — Carl! It’s not… not stone!’
Gulharov and Volkonsky, both of them suddenly electrified, had steadied Krakovitch while Quint shone his torch directly at the humped mass. Then, mouth gaping and heart fluttering, the Englishman had breathed, ‘Did you sense… anything?’
The other shook his head, took a deep breath. ‘No, no. My reaction, that was simply shock — not a warning. Thank God for that at least! My talent is working — believe me it is working — but it reveals nothing. I was shocked, just shocked.
‘But just look at this… this thing!’ Quint had been awed. He’d moved forward, carefully blown dust from the surface of the mass and used a handkerchief to dust it down. Parts of it, anyway. For even a perfunctory dusting had revealed — total horror!
The thing was slumped where in uncounted years past it had groped one last time upwards from the packed earth of the floor. It was one mass now — the mummied remains of one creature — but clearly it was composed of more than one person. Hunger and possibly madness had forced the issue: the hunger of the protoflesh in the earth, the madness of Ehrig and the women. There had been no way out and, weak with hunger, the vampires had been unable to resist the advances of the mindless, subterranean ‘creeper’. It had probably taken them one by one, adding them to its bulk. And now that bulk lay here, fallen where it had finally, mercifully ‘died’. In the end, governed only by weak impulse and indeterminate instinct, perhaps it had attempted to reconstitute the others. Certainly there was evidence to that effect.
It had the breasts of women, and a half-formed male head, and many pseudohands. Eyes, bulging behind their closed lids, were everywhere. And mouths, some human and others inhuman. Yes, and there were other features much worse than these.
Emboldened, Gulharov and Volkonsky had come forward; the latter, before he could be cautioned, had reached out a hand and laid it upon a cold, shrivelled breast where it protruded alongside a flabby-lipped mouth. All was the colour of leather and looked solid enough, but no sooner had the big ganger touched the teat than it crumbled into dust. Volkonsky snatched back his hand with an oath, stepped back a pace. But Sergei Gulharov was much less timid. He knew something of these horrors, and the very thought of them infuriated him.
Cursing, he lashed out with his foot at the base of the thing where it sprouted from the floor, lashed out again and again. The others had made no attempt to stop him; it was his way of working it out of his system. He waded into the crumbling monstrosity, fists and feet pounding at
it. And in a very little while nothing remained but billowing dust and a few fretted bones.
‘Out!’ Krakovitch had choked. ‘Let’s get out of here before we suffocate. Carl.’ He’d clutched the other’s arm, ‘thank God it was dead!’ And with their hands to their mouths, finally they’d climbed back up the stairwell into clean, healthy daylight.
‘That… whatever it was, should be buried,’ Volkonsky had growled to Gulharov as they moved away from the ruins.
‘Exactly!’ Krakovitch had taken the opportunity to agree with him. ‘So as to be absolutely certain, it has to be buried. And that’s where you come in.
The four had been back to the ruins a second time since then, when Volkonsky had drilled holes, laid charges, unrolled a hundred yards of detonating cable and made electrical connections. And now they’d returned for the third and last time. And as before, Theo Dolgikh had followed them, which was why this would be the last time.
Now, from the cover of bushes back along the overgrown track near the cliff and its precarious ledge, the KGB man watched Volkonsky put down his firing box at the end of the prepared cable, watched as the party moved on towards the ruins, presumably for one last look.
This was Dolgikh’s best chance, the moment the Russian agent had been waiting for. He checked his gun again, took off the safety and reholstered it, then quickly scrambled up the scree slope on his left and into a straggling stand of pines where the trees marched at the foot of the gaunt cliffs. If he used his cover to its best advantage, he could stay out of sight until the last minute.
And so, moving with some agility beneath the trees, he quickly closed the distance between him and his intended victims as they approached the gutted ruins.
In order to maintain his cover in this way, Dolgikh occasionally had to lose sight of his quarry, but finally he reached the furthest extent of the cliff-hugging trees and was forced back down into the lesser undergrowth of the old track. From here the group of men at the ancient castle’s walls were plainly visible, and if they should happen to look in Dolgikh’s direction, they might also see him. But no, they stood silent one hundred yards away, lost in their own thoughts as they gazed upon that which they intended to destroy. All three of them were deep in thought.
Three? Dolgikh squinted, frowned, glanced quickly all about. He saw nothing out of the ordinary. Presumably the fourth man — that young fool, that traitor Gulharov — had entered through the broken exterior wall of the ruins and so passed out of sight. Whichever, Dolgikh knew that he now had all four men trapped. There was no way out at their end of the defile, and in any case they had to come back here to detonate the charges. Dolgikh’s leering expression changed, turned into a grim smile. An especially sadistic thought had just occurred to him.
His original plan had been simple: surprise them, tell them he was investigating them for the KGB, have them tie each other up — finally hurl them one at a time from the castle’s broken rim. It was a hell of a long way down. He’d make sure that part of the rotten wall went with them, to make it more convincing. Then, at a safe place, he’d climb down, make his way back to them and carefully remove their bindings. An ‘accident’, as simple as that. There’d be no escape for them: the nylon cord in Dolgikh’s pocket had a 2001b breaking strain! They probably wouldn’t even be found for weeks, months, maybe never.
But Dolgikh was something of a vampire in his own right, except he fed on fear. Yes, and now he saw the opportunity to give his plan an elaborate twist. A little extra something for his own amusement.
He quickly kneeled, used his strong square teeth to strip the cable down to its copper cores, and connected up the firing box. Then, still on one knee, he called out loudly up the trail: ‘Gentlemen!’
The three turned, saw him. Quint and Krakovitch recognised him at once, looked stunned.
‘Now what are we having here?’ he laughed, holding up the box for them to see. ‘See? Someone is forgetting to make the connections — but I have done it for him!’ He put down the box and drew up the plunger.
‘For God’s sake, be careful with that!’ Carl Quint threw up his arms in warning, stumbled out of the ruins.
‘Stay right where you are, Mr Quint,’ Dolgikh shouted. And in Russian: ‘Krakovitch, you and that stupid ox of a foreman come to me. And no tricks, or I blow your English friend and Gulharov to bits!’ He gave the T-shaped handle two savage right-hand twists. The box was now armed; only depress the plunger, and —‘Dolgikh, are you mad?’ Krakovitch called back. ‘I’m here on official business. The Party Leader himself—’
‘— Is a mumbling old fool!’ Dolgikh finished for him. ‘As are you. And you’ll be a dead fool if you don’t do exactly as I say. Do it now, and bring that lumbering engineer with you. Quint, Mr English mind-spy, you stay right there.’ He stood up, took out his gun and the nylon cord. Krakovitch and Volkonsky had put up their hands in the air, were slowly leaving the area of the ruins.
In the next split second Dolgikh sensed that something was wrong. He felt the tug of hot metal at his sleeve before he heard the crack of Sergei Gulharov’s automatic. For when the others had gone forward to the ruins, Gulharov had stepped into a clump of bushes to answer a call of nature. He had seen and heard everything.
‘Put up your gun!’ he now yelled, coming at Dolgikh at a run. �
�The next shot goes in your belly!’
Gulharov had been trained, but not nearly as thoroughly as Theo Dolgikh, and he lacked the agent’s killer instinct. Dolgikh fell to his knees again, straightened his gun arm toward Gulharov, aimed and squeezed the trigger of his weapon. Gulharov was nearly on him. He, too, had fired again. His shot went inches wide, but Dolgikh’s was right on target. His snub-nosed bullet blew away half of Gulharov’s head. Gulharov, dead on the instant, jerked to a halt, then took another stumbling step forward and crashed over like a felled tree — directly on to the firing box and its extended plunger!
Dolgikh hurled himself flat, felt a hot wind blow on him as hell opened up just one hundred yards away. Deafening sound blasted his ears, left them ringing with wild peals. He didn’t see the actual explosion, or simultaneous series of explosions, but as the spray of soil and pebbles subsided and the earth stopped shaking he looked up — and then he did see the result. On the far side of the gorge the ruins of Faethor’s castle stood much as before, but on this side they had been reduced to so much rubble.
Craters smoked where the castle’s roots were bedded in the mountain. A landslide of shale and fractured rock was still tumbling from the cliff onto the wide, pitted ledge, burying deep the last traces of whatever secrets had been there. And of Krakovitch, Quint and Volkonsky — Nothing whatsoever. Flesh isn’t nearly as strong as rock.
Dolgikh stood up, brushed himself down, heaved Gulharov’s corpse off the detonating box. He grabbed Gulharov’s legs and dragged his body to the smouldering ruins, then toppled him from the cliff. An ‘accident’, a genuine accident.
On his way back down the track, the KGB man rolled up what was left of the cable; he also collected Gulharov’s gun and the box. Halfway down the ledge where it hugged the cliff he threw all of these things into the dark gurgling ravine. It was finished now, all of it. Before he got back to Moscow he would have thought up an excuse, a reason why Gerenko’s supposed ‘weapon’, whatever it had been, no longer existed. That was a pity.