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 ‘That's my feeling, too: still here, but no longer active.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 — which 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 proto-flesh 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.
