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.
A mile towards Paignton, a clattering fire engine came tearing from the other direction. Layard drew dutifully in towards the side of the road to give the fire engine room. He grinned tiredly, without humour. ‘Too late, my lads,' he commented under his breath. ‘Much too late — thank all that's merciful.'
They dropped Trask off at the hospital in Torquay (with a story about an accident he'd suffered in a friends garden) and after seeing him comfortable went back to the hotel HQ in Paignton to debrief.
Roberts enumerated their successes. ‘We got all three women, anyway. But as for Bodescu himself, I have my doubts about him. Serious doubts, and when we're finished here I'll pass them on to London, also to Darcy Clarke and our people up in Hartlepool. These will be simply precautionary measures, of course, for even if we did miss Bodescu we've no way of knowing what he'll do next or where he'll go. Anyway, Alec Kyle will be back in control shortly. In fact it's queer he hasn't shown up yet. Actually, I'm not looking forward to seeing him: he's going to be furious when he learns that Bodescu probably got out of that lot.'
‘Bodescu and that other dog,' Harvey Newton put in, almost as an afterthought. He shrugged. ‘Still, I reckon it was just a stray that got into… the grounds. somehow?' He stopped, looked from face to face. All were staring back at him in astonishment, almost disbelief. It was the first they'd heard of it.
Roberts couldn't restrain himself from grabbing Newton's jacket front. ‘Tell it now!' he grated through clenched teeth. ‘Exactly as it happened, Harvey.' Newton, dazed, told it, concluding:
‘So while Gower was burning that… that bloody thing which wasn't a dog not all of it, anyway — this other dog went by in the mist. But I can't even swear that I saw it at all! I mean, there was so much going on. It could have been just the mist, or my imagination, or… anything! I thought it loped, but sort of upright in an impossible forward crouch. And its head wasn't just the right shape. It had to be my imagination, a curl of mist, something like that. Imagination, yes — especially with Gower standing there burning that godawful dog! Christ, I'll dream of dogs like that for the rest of my life!'
Roberts released him violently, almost tossed him across the room. The fat man wasn't just fat; he was
heavy, too, and very strong. He looked at Newton in disgust. ‘Idiot!' he rumbled. He lit a cigarette, despite the fact that he already had one going.
‘I couldn't have done anything anyway!' Newton protested. ‘I'd shot my bolt, hadn't reloaded yet.
‘Shot your bloody bolt?' Roberts glared. Then he calmed himself. ‘I'd like to say it's not your fault,' he told Newton then. ‘And maybe it isn't your fault. Maybe he was just too damned clever for us.'
‘What now?' said Layard. He felt a little sorry for Newton, tried to take attention away from him.
Roberts looked at Layard. ‘Now? Well, when I've calmed down a little you and me will have to try and find the bastard, that's what now!'
‘Find him?' Newton licked dry lips. How?' He was confused, wasn't thinking clearly.
Roberts at once tapped the side of his head with huge white knuckles. ‘With this!' he shouted. ‘It's what I do. I'm a 'scryer', remember?' He glared again at Newton. ‘So what's your fucking talent? Other than screwing things up, I mean.
Newton found a chair and fell into it. ‘I… I saw him, and yet convinced myself that I hadn't seen him. What the hell's wrong with me? We went there to trap him — to trap anything coming out of that house — so why didn't I
