what his new job was. Since when Clarke had been driving, and cursing.
He had joined the M1 at Leicester, then picked up the A19 at Thirsk. He was now something less than an hour from his destination, and the time was (he glanced at his watch)—4.50P.M.
Clarke stopped cursing. God! What would it be like right now, down there?
‘Where the hell did this mist spring from?' Trevor Jordan shivered, turning up the collar of his coat. ‘Hell, it was a nice day, from the weather point of view, anyway.' For all his vehemence, Jordan had spoken in a whisper.
All of the INTESP agents, at their various stations around Harkley House, had been speaking in whispers for the last twenty minutes. At 4.30, working to Roberts's instructions, they'd formed pairs — which was as well, for the mist had thickened up and started to threaten their individual security. It felt nice to have someone really close to you.
Jordan's ‘buddy' in the system was Ken Layard the locator. He was shivering, too, despite the fact that he carried seventy-eight pounds of Brissom Mark III flame-thrower on his back. ‘I'm not sure,' he finally answered Jordan's question, ‘but I think it's from him.' He nodded towards the house where it stood swathed in mist.
They were just inside the north wall, at a place where they'd found a gap in the stonework. Just a minute ago, at 4.50, they'd checked their watches and squeezed through, and Jordan had helped Layard into his asbestos leggings and jacket. Then they'd strapped the tank on his back and he'd checked the valve on the hose and trigger mechanism. With the valve open, all he had to do was squeeze the trigger and he could conjure up an inferno. And he fully intended to.
‘Him?' Jordan frowned. He looked around at the mist. It crept everywhere. From here the rear wall up the hillside was invisible; likewise the wall fronting onto the road. Harvey Newton and Simon Gower would be making their way down from the hill, Ben Trask and Guy Roberts coming up the drive from the gate. They would all converge on the house together, at 5.00 P.M. sharp. ‘Who do you mean, 'him'? Bodescu?' Jordan led the way through shrubbery towards the dimly looming mass of the house.
'Bodescu, yes,' Layard answered. ‘I'm a locator, remember? It's my thing.'
What's that got to do with the mist?' Jordan's nerves were starting to jump. He was a telepath of uncertain kill, but Roberts had warned him not to try it on Bodescu and certainly not at this crucial stage of play.
'When I try to find him in my mind's eye,' Layard attempted to explain, ‘inside the house there, I can't zero in on him. It's as if he were part of the mist. That's why I think he's somehow behind it. I sense him as a huge amorphous cloud of fog!'
‘Jesus!' Jordan whispered, shivering again. In utter, eerie silence they moved towards the small outbuilding, whose open door led down to the cellars.
Simon Gower and Harvey Newton approached the house from the gently sloping field of shrubs at its rear. There wasn't too much cover so the mist was a boon to them. So they thought. Newton was a telepath, called down from London along with Ben Trask as reinforcements. Newton and Trask weren't quite as au fait with the situation as the rest, which was why they'd been split up.
‘What a team we make, eh?' said Newton nervously as the ground levelled out and the mist billowed up more yet. ‘You with that bloody great torch on your back and me with a crossbow? You know, if this stake-out is a dud, we're going to look awfully —'
‘God!' Gower cut him short, dropped to one knee and worked furiously at the valve on his hose.
‘What?' Newton gave a massive start, glared all about, held his loaded crossbow out in front of him like a shield. ‘What?' He couldn't see anything, but he knew Gower's talent lay in reading the future — especially the immediate future!
‘It's coming!' Gower no longer whispered. In fact, he was shouting. ‘It's coming — NOW!'
At the front of the house, where Guy Roberts and Ben Trask pulled up in Roberts's truck, Gower's shouting wasn't heard over the throbbing of the vehicle's engine.
But on the north-facing side of the house it was. Trevor Jordan instinctively crouched down, then began to run at an angle towards the rear of the building. Ken Layard, hampered by his flame-thrower load, was slower off the mark.
Layard, stumbling through damp shrubbery, saw Jordan's figure swallowed into a rolling bank of mist where he ran past the open door in the small outbuilding
— then saw something erupt from that door in a snarling, slavering frenzy! Bodescu's great dog! Without pause the flame-eyed brute hurled itself into the mist after Jordan.
‘Trevor, behind you!' Layard yelled at the top of his voice. He yanked open the valve on his hose, jerked the trigger, prayed: God, please don't let me burn Trevor!
A roaring, gouting stream of yellow fire tore open the curtain of mist like a blowtorch through cobwebs. Jordan was already round the corner of the house, but Vlad was still in view, bounding purposefully after him. The expanding, blistering ‘V' of heat reached after the dog, touched him, enveloped him but briefly. Then he, too, was round the corner. -
By now, at the front of the house, Guy Roberts and Ben Trask were down from the truck. Roberts heard shouting, the roar of a flame-thrower. It was still a minute or two to five but the attack had started which probably meant that the other side had started it. Roberts put a police whistle to his lips, gave one short blast. Now, whatever else was happening, all six INTESP agents would move on the house together.
Roberts had the third flame-thrower; he headed straight for the main door of the house where it stood ajar in the shadow of a columned portico. Trask followed. He was a human lie-detector; his talent had no application here, but he was also young, quick-thinking and he knew how to look after himself. As he made to follow Roberts something caught his attention: a furtive movement glimpsed in the very corner of his eye.
‘Twenty-five yards away between billowing banks of mist, a flowing figure had passed swiftly, silently inside the shell of the old barn. Who or whatever had gone in there, there would be nothing to stop it from clearing off out of the grounds once Roberts and Trask were inside the house. ‘Oh no you don't!' Trask grunted. And raising his voice: ‘Guy, in the barn there.'
Roberts, at the door of the house, turned to see Trask running at a crouch towards the barn. Cursing under his breath, he strode after him.
At the back of Harkley House, Vlad came coughing and mewling out of the mist and attempted to spring at the three men he found there. The dog was a blackened silhouette sheathed in smoke and flame, burning even as he launched himself lopsidedly at Jordan's back.
As Jordan had come running round the corner of the building, Gower had very nearly triggered his flame- thrower; he'd recognised Jordan only at the last possible moment. Harvey Newton, on the other hand, had actually — drawn a bead on the misted figure and was in the act of firing his bolt when Gower cried a warning and shouldered him aside. The bolt flashed harmlessly off at a tangent and disappeared in mist and distance. Fortunately Jordan had seen the two men saw them apparently aiming at him and thrown himself flat. He hadn't seen what pursued him, however, which even now overshot his sprawled body and arced overhead in a cloud of sparks and smoulder. Vlad landed awkwardly, gathered himself to spring at Newton and Gower, and discovered himself forging head-on into a withering jet of flame from Gower's torch. The dog crumpled to earth, a blazing, crackling, screaming ball of fire that tried to run in all directions at once and ran nowhere.
Jordan got to his feet and the three men stood panting, watching Vlad burn. Newton had fumblingly reloaded his crossbow; he thought he saw something move in the mist and turned in that direction. What was that? A loping shape? Or… just his imagination? The others didn't seem to have noticed; they were watching Vlad.
‘Oh my God!' Jordan gasped. Newton saw the look on Jordan's face, forgot the thing he thought he had seen, turned to watch the death agonies of the incandescent dog.
Vlad's blackened body throbbed and vibrated, burst open, put up a nest of tentacles that twined like alien fingers four or five feet into the air. Mouthing obscenities, eyes bulging, Gower hosed the thing down with fire. The tentacles steamed, blistered and collapsed but the dog's body continued to pulsate.
‘Jesus Christ!' Jordan moaned his horror. ‘He changed the dog, too!' He unhooked a cleaver from his belt, moved forward, shielded his eyes against the blaze and severed Vlad's head from his body with one single clean stroke. Jordan backed off, shouted at Gower: ‘You finish it make sure you finish it! I heard Roberts's whistle just now. Harvey and me will go on in.'
As Gower continued to burn the remains of the dog-thing, Jordan and Newton went stumbling through smoke and reek to the rear wall of the house, where they found an open window. They looked at each other, then licked
