glaring, brilliant, blinding. Overbalanced as gravity returned (by the sudden, unaccustomed weight of the flamethrower), tripping and flying headlong into a wall, and rebounding, Jake landed on something soft and squirmy…
… Something that cried its terror, and two seconds later wrapped its arms around him.
'Jake, oh Jake!' Liz gasped, holding tightly to him on the one hand, but wriggling and kicking desperately away from something on the other. Her Baby Browning was clenched in her fist, and she kept aiming it and pulling the trigger — click! click! click! — as the firing pin fell on blank space. A pair of empty clips lay on the sandy floor where she'd discharged and discarded them.
It was the strip lighting that had blinded Jake, that and his dizzying, head-over-heels emergence from the Mobius Continuum. Now, as his head stopped spinning, he saw what had turned this determined, self-possessed, assertive woman into a frightened little girl again: weird, morbid motion.
The floor of the place was alive… or undead!
Jake could scarcely take it in — scarcely believe what he was seeing — but he had to, and quickly.
The cavern was the size of a large room. A planked walkway crossed the centre of the floor and disappeared into tunnels at both ends. On the other side of the walkway, maybe fifteen feet away, the floor was… different. It was humped, veined, corrugated… and mobile. And it wasn't the floor!
Something tossed and turned — or churned — there. Something throbbed and gulped and gasped. It was a fleshy, flopping octopus of a thing; an immense doughy pancake of metamorphic flesh, throwing up purple-veined extrusions that groped blindly in the air before collapsing back down into the bulk of… of It! The colour of dead flesh in its main mass, it squelched, fumed, and stank like gas bubbles bursting in a swamp. And mindlessly, aimlessly, it worked at fashioning its ropy extensions.
Or perhaps not mindlessly. For as Jake sat there cradling Liz, so the thing extruded a tentacle that came whipping across the walkway to rear before them in a questioning, semi-sentient fashion. It pulsed, vibrated, and an eye formed in its tip! The eye was a uniform red, lidless, apparently vacant — yet it must be seeing or sensing something. For as Liz shrilled and started pulling the trigger again — click! click! click! — so a second tentacle emerged and lengthened in their direction.
As it came, a row of greedy, suctorial mouths rippled into metamorphic being along its length. They slobbered and grimaced, those mouths — and they had human teeth! But far worse, some of them were reforming, shaping themselves into tumescent, purple-veined penises!
Jake felt rooted to the spot, for the moment paralysed. It seemed to him that the whole mass of the thing beyond the
walkway was now on the move, edging towards him — and certainly towards Liz! And that was enough.
He unfroze, fought Liz off, brought up the flamethrower's nozzle and squeezed the trigger to get its pilot light going — then cursed vividly as nothing happened, and squeezed it again, and again, and yet again, before it lit — then gripped the firing lever and applied a steady, deadly pressure.
First Jake aimed down between his spread legs, aimed at the rearing pseudopods, to drive them back, and his relief was immense as he watched them burst into flames and shrivel in the incandescent, pressured heat of his lance. Then he scrambled to his feet, and with Liz dancing close behind, clutching his combat jacket and urging him on, so he advanced towards the walkway and the bulk of the thing that hissed and steamed and shuddered its agony there.
And as the tentacles writhed, dripped their fluids, blackened and shrank — and as the main body withdrew into itself— there, sprouting in the floor where its bulk had protected them, clusters of small black mushrooms, dozens of them, were melting in the chemical fire. Their smell was nauseating, but Jake kept on firing; kept cursing, too, as Malinari's 'garden' burned.
But this was vampire stuff, tenacious and defiant.
The shrinking body of the mass burst open, and a steaming head — a human, or almost-human head, and shoulders — grew out of it. Again Jake felt himself gripped by a paralysis of disbelief. Yet the nightmare was here and undeniably real.
But so was Korath here, and so was he real. And in Jake's mind as the livid vampire head took shape: It is him! Korath's deadspeak voice hissed. Demetrakis Mindsthrall, who was Malinari's lieutenant, second only to myself! Because he had been a vampire for long and long, Malinari used him to make this garden. It must be so, for only the most contaminated flesh could ever have produced a crop such as this! Ah, but just think. If there had been no Demetrakis, then this would be me! And so it seems I got the better of the bargain after all…
'Whoever it was, it's time he died,' said Jake. And:
Aye, Korath agreed. The true death. I know he would thank you for it. And Jake hosed fire on the terrible thing where it mewled and melted, until his torch began to sputter.
Then he eased back on the flamer's lever, to see what damage he'd done, and if he had done enough. The cave steamed and smoked but was mainly still — except in one badly-lit corner. There was some slight movement there, and Jake advanced across the smoking floor, making sure as he went that he stepped only where there was no sign of contamination.
But as he approached the corner: 'H-help me!' the faintest of whispers reached out to him. 'H-h-help me, pleeeease!'
A single short burst of fire from the flamethrower chased back the shadows, then a longer burst, to allow for confirmation of what Jake had seen. And, indeed, he needed such confirmation.
From the heck up the thing in the corner was a man… and from there on down it had been a man. But now the eyes in that purple, once-arrogant, once-querulous face were bulging, staring, terrified — and they were filled with such agony as Jake could only imagine.
As for the 'body' of this thing: that was a slumped, naked heap of limbless, alien flesh similar to the composition of the monstrous guardian of Malinari's garden. And Jake couldn't stop his gorge rising — felt sick to his stomach — as it dawned on him in a sudden burst of loathing that this mutated abnormality had once been a man, and that it or he had been converted into live nourishment for the garden and its guardian!
Finger-thick, pulsing, translucent arteries — like fleshy worms — even now connected the two forms, and towards the centre of the cave where Jake's fire had seared and split the guardian open, spurts of yellow and crimson plasma went to waste, fountaining uselessly in the smoky air.
All of which was bad enough, but worse by far was the fact that Jake knew who this travesty of a human being had been.
That Peter Miller 'lived' in his condition — if this could be called life — and that he was capable of realizing his fate and
asking for help, was a miracle in itself. But it was also a curse that Jake would wish on no man, not even on his worst enemy.
For this was worse than any death, compared to which death would be a blessing. And when Miller found strength to ask once more, 'Please… please help me!' then Jake was happy to grant his request. It didn't take long, but it used up the last dregs of the flamer's fuel.
When it was over, Jake steadied himself and turned to Liz. But still his face was ashen as he asked, 'Where now?'
'You can actually do it?' Almost back in possession of herself, still Liz clutched his jacket. 'The Mobius Continuum?'
'Yes,' he told her. 'We… I mean I, can do it.'
'The bubble dome,' she told him. 'Ben is up there. There's something I have to tell him. We walked right into a trap, Jake, all of us, and I think that we're still in danger. Malinari was in my mind, imitating Ben! But at the end — just before he left me in this place — then for a moment I was in his mind! Telepathy is a two-way thing, but my forte is as a receiver. And Malinari… he was oh-so-sure of himself! I think that maybe he's sabotaged this place! I sensed it there, in his mind.'
'When you called out to me,' Jake answered, 'I heard something of what he said to you. You're right: he seemed very sure of himself. Perhaps too sure.'
And Liz nodded and repeated, 'The dome, on top of the casino. Take us there.'
'Hold on to me,' Jake told her, for he had flown over Xanadu and knew the coordinates. And Korath knew the numbers…
