The core: where now Agursky knew he was finished and closed with Khuv, reaching for him. But the Major was no longer concerned with Agursky, only with the thing that was breaking through the screen of the sphere, only with the heaving, pulsating monstrosity of hooks and teeth and claws which wore the vast, bloated, nightmare distortion of… of Karl Vyotsky's face!
But this was not, could not be, the Vyotsky who had gone into that other world; it was so radically different that its passage through the gate in the reverse direction had not been forbidden. It half-emerged, saw and fell upon the figures on the gantry and devoured them, and in the next moment was itself devoured. Somewhere, the deadly vapours had reached a naked flame. Incendiary fires raced through the Projekt in an unstoppable chain- reaction. The entire place detonated — exploded — like a vast bomb!
Viktor Luchov, gasping and almost fainting from his exertions, was hauled through the wicket-gate onto the marshalling area in the ravine under the cold night stars. They hurried him away from the giant doors, which in a little while were blown off their rollers like so much scrap metal. A shaft of fire roared out, bending like a waterfall to strike the dammed waters, sending clouds of steam boiling upwards.
Perchorsk was no more…
From the time of his early childhood, when he was maybe eight or nine years old, Harry Keogh remembered one especially bad dream. It had been repetitive, bothering him through many long nights, and even now — especially now — was not forgotten.
Where the idea had originated, he couldn't say. It might have come from some ancient medical book, or from the mind of one of his long-dead friends, may even have stemmed from a flash of precognition. But he could still remember it in detail. The long hall, brick walls, and the heavy wooden tables set end to end; the starving man stretched out on his back, lashed to the end table; his head firmly fixed between blocks of wood, a leather strap across his forehead to keep it tilted back, and his jaws propped wide open.
He lay there, conscious, skeletal, chest heaving and arms and legs straining where they, too, were lashed, and men in long white coats and a woman with a long-bladed hatchet watching him and nodding among themselves, tight-lipped. Then the men (doctors, maybe?) standing well back, and the woman with the hatchet laying her weapon down on the table farthest from the wretched man. Her departure through an arched doorway, and her return with a large plate of rancid fish.
The pictures were very vivid: the way she carefully took a piece of putrid fish and smeared it from directly in front of the man's face, all the way along the centre of the joined-up tables to the last one, before dropping it on the plate with the other stinking remnants. There was a screen at that end, where now she took her position, seated there with her cleaver in her hand, patience itself as she looked through a peephole in the screen and waited for it to happen. The way her eyes fixed upon the gaping mouth of the racked man.
Then the worst part of the dream, when the cestode came out of him, its segmented, ribbonlike body inching laboriously from his convulsing throat, writhing where it followed the fish-stink in its search for food. Blind, the tapeworm, but not without senses of its own, and not without hunger; its head flat on the table but swaying this way and that, creeping forward, and the hooked segments coming into view from the man's choking throat, one by one, releasing their hooks within him and venturing forth into daylight. For while the man was starving because of his worm, it was starving because of the doctors who hadn't fed him for five or six days!
Harry remembered it so well, that dream:
The length of the thing, covering first one six-foot table, then two, three, until it had been feared that six tables would not be enough. Twenty-five feet of it when at last the forked, scorpion tail appeared, trailing mucus and blood behind it. And at that one of the doctors had tensed, started to inch silently forward.
And the man on the table gurgling and gagging; the cestode worm creeping warily forward, but more avidly as the fish-stink thickened; the woman with her cleaver poised, waiting, her teeth drawn back from her lips in almost savage anticipation…
The parasite reaching the plate and its leech-head gorging… the cleaver flashing silver in those practiced female hands, shearing through the soft chitin and primitive guts of the thing… the doctor slapping his hand over the man's mouth, as the frantically writhing rear sections of the worm tried to wriggle back into him.
Which was always the point where Harry used to come yelping awake.
He came awake now, to the Lady Karen's voice asking some questions of him where they sat facing each other across her table; and he hoped he'd been able to keep the canvas of his mind shielded from her, so that she had not read the vivid thoughts painted there. 'I'm sorry? My mind was wandering.'
'I said,' she repeated herself, smiling, 'that you've been my guest through three sundowns, with another on its way soon, and still you haven't told me why you came — came willingly, of your own volition, into my aerie.'
For my son. 'Because you were a friend to The Dweller in a time of need,' he lied, keeping his mind-voice to himself, 'and because I'm curious and desired to see your aerie.' Also, because if I can find a cure for you I might be able to cure him.
She shrugged. 'But you've seen my aerie, Harry. Almost all of it. There are some things I have not shown you because you would find them… unpleasant. But you have seen the rest of it. So what keeps you here? You won't eat my food or even drink my water; there's really nothing here for you — except maybe danger.'
'Your vampire?' he raised an eyebrow. Your cestode, with its hooks in your heart and your guts and your brain?
'Of course — except I no longer think of it as 'my vampire'. We are one.' She laughed, but not gaily — and a snake's tongue flickered behind her gleaming teeth. And her eyes were of a uniform, very deep scarlet. 'Oh, I fought it for a long time, but uselessly in the end. The battle in The Dweller's garden was the turning point, when I knew it was over and accepted that I am what I am. It was the battle and the power and the blood. Waiting, watchful, quiescent until then, that's what woke it up and brought it to ascendancy. But I mustn't think of it that way, for now we're the same creature. And I am Wamphyri!'
'You are warning me?' he said.
She looked away, gave an impatient toss of her head, looked back. 'I am telling you it were better if you went. The Dweller's father you may be, but you are innocent, Harry Keogh. And this is no place for innocence.'
Me, innocent? 'When I fell asleep in my room,' he said, ' — when I sat by my window and watched the gold fading on the distant peaks, before the last sundown — and woke up with a start, I dreamed you were standing over me.'
'I was, or had been,' she sighed. 'Harry, I have lusted after you.'
After me? Or after my blood? 'How?' 'In every way. My host is a woman, with a woman's needs. But I am Wamphyri, with the needs of a vampire.' 'You don't have to draw blood.' 'Wrong. The blood is the life.'
'Then by now you must be starved of life, for you haven't eaten. Not while I have been here.' He had taken his meals in the garden, travelling to and fro via the Mobius Continuum. But they'd been more snacks than meals proper, for he had not wanted to leave her alone too long, had not wanted to miss… anything.
When she spoke again her voice was cold. 'Harry, if you insist on staying… I cannot be held responsible.' Before he could answer she stood up, swept out of the great hall, disappeared from view in that regal way of hers. Harry had not followed her before, had not spied on her in any depth. But the time had come and he knew it.
'Where is she going?' he asked the long-dead cartilage creatures where their corpses fashioned the stack's decor. A carved bone handrail following stairs between the upper levels answered him:
She descends, Harry, to her larder. Her hand falls on me even now.
'Her larder?'
Where like Drama! Doombody before her, she keeps a number of trogs in store, hibernating.
'She told me she had set her trogs free, sent them home.'
But not these, the handrail, once a trog itself, answered. These are for fashioning, and in times of siege for eating!
Harry went there, two levels down, saw Karen flow in through a dark niche doorway and followed her. A trog had been activated, brought out of its cocoon. Harry stayed in the shadows, guarded his thoughts. He watched Karen lead the trog to the table. The creature, shambling, only half-awake, enthralled, lay down, bent back its ugly prehistoric head for her.
Her mouth opened, opened — gaped! Blood dripped from her gums where scythe-teeth sprouted to poise over the creature's sluggishly pulsing jugular. Her nose wrinkled, flattened back on itself, and her eyes were crimson jewels in the twilight room.
