vampire had held it down, bitten through its neck and siphoned off its living blood. And it had formed a pair of fleshy, needle-tipped tubes to do so, actual siphons which it had slid into the rat's severed vessels.
The 'meal' had taken only a minute or two to complete, and Agursky had never seen the creature so avid for its food. After that… occasionally the thing would take on certain rodent characteristics, which its keeper assumed it had 'learned' from the creature it devoured. Nor was 'devoured' too strong a word for it; for after leeching the rat's blood, then the creature had consumed skin, bones, tail and all!
From this and subsequent meals of living food, Agursky had drawn several conclusions, however unproven. Encounter One had been a vampire; or if not vampiric, certainly it had been a carnivore. It had been seen to devour men whole before it fled the complex. Encounter Two, the wolf, was also a predator, a flesh-eater. Four was a bat — but specifically a vampire bat. And five… he had declared himself to be Wamphyri. Was there anything at all in that world beyond the Gate which was not vampiric or savagely carnivorous? Agursky's conclusion: that world was not one he would care to visit to find out at first hand.
Another speculation or line of thought which might lead to a number of unthinkable conclusions was this: that three of the five encounters — the five incursions from beyond — had been shape-changers, creatures which were not bound to one form. The thing in the tank, having examined and eaten a rat, could now assume an imperfect rodent identity. Would it also be able to emulate a man? Which in turn begged the question, was the Wamphyri warrior a man with the ability to change his shape, or had he been something else which now merely imitated a man?
Morbid thoughts and questions such as these had driven Agursky to drink, and thinking them again now made him wish he had a bottle with him right here, right now. But he didn't. The sooner he could get done with this, the sooner he'd be able to get back to his quarters and drink himself to sleep.
Just inside the door stood a trolley with the creature's food in a lidded container. The container was hooked up to an electric pump. Agursky wheeled the trolley closer to the tank and plugged in to the power supply. He coupled up the container's outlet to a feeder tube in the end wall of the tank, turned the valves on the container and tank to the open position and started the motor. The electric motor was quietly efficient; with a cough and a gurgle, glutinous liquids commenced to flow.
As he worked, Agursky had been aware that the thing was watching him. Strangely, it had not turned toward the food supply but remained in the position in which he'd left it. Only its eyes had swivelled to follow his movements. Agursky was puzzled. Dark red lumps of minced meat in a stream of semi-clotted beast-blood were jetting in sporadic spurts into the tank, forming a foul heap of guts on the sand at that end of the thing's 'lair'. And still it hadn't moved.
Agursky frowned. The creature could consume half its own weight at a time, and it hadn't been fed for four days. Could it be sick? Was its air supply OK? And now what the hell was it doing?
He went back to his chair and seated himself as before, with his arms folded on the backrest and his chin resting on the back of his left hand. The creature stared back at him through eyes which now seemed very nearly human. Its face, too, had lost much of its rodent identity and had taken on more nearly human outlines. The leech- like body sac was elongating, losing its dark colour and corrugations. Legs were developing, and arms — and breasts?
'What?' Agursky hissed the single word from between clenched teeth. 'What…?'
The spurious pebble-examining member shrank, was withdrawn into the main mass of the body. That body was now very nearly human, in shape if nothing else. It was like a girl, even had a girl's flowing hair. But on the creature's head that mass of hair was coarse and lacklustre, like the false hair of a poorly made doll. The breasts were lumpy and without nipples, like pallid blobs of flesh stuck on a flat male chest. The size, too, was wrong, for the thing only had the mass of a large dog, which even remodelled made for a very small woman.
With every passing second the expression on Agursky's face grew that much more disgusted. The creature was attempting to resemble a woman, but it was making a nightmarishly horrific job of it. Its 'hands' had now shaped themselves into appendages very like human hands, but the nails on the too-slender fingers were bright scarlet and far too long. Worse, its 'feet' were also hands: the creature couldn't discriminate. Then… the thing's simpering, idiot face smiled at Agursky, and suddenly he knew where he'd seen that smile before.
It was the face and smile, even the hair, of that sex-starved hag Klara Orlova, a spindly theoretical physicist who was fascinated by the creature and occasionally came in here to admire it! It had seen her face, her hands with their brightly painted nails, the upper roundness of her bosom where she wore that gown of hers unbuttoned to titillate the common soldiers — but it didn't know she had nipples, and it hadn't seen her feet at all. It had simply assumed that her feet were like her hands!
Agursky checked himself: no, for that would be to grant the thing too high a level of intelligence, and he had already satisfied himself that it was not especially bright. This mimicking was like the mindless, human-seeming cry of a parrot, or the ape wearing spectacles to 'read' a book. Indeed it was less than the latter, for it was purely instinctive. Like the colour change of a chameleon, or better still the chameleon's colour control plus the elasticity of the octopus.
Even while he was thinking these thoughts the thing had been ironing out certain imperfections. The skin tone was more nearly correct, as was the painted Cupid's bow of the mouth. The vampire's nose and dark nostrils, however, were still ugly and alien, ridged, convoluted and quivering. In its natural environment (wherever the hell that was) its sense of smell might well be its most important tool for survival; to change that organ's shape would be to drastically degrade its function. In any event, the final image which the thing presented — for all that it was still wrong, still grotesque — was at least something of… an attempt?
But an attempt at what?
Suddenly, unreasonably, Agursky felt fury surging in him. Was this… this damned, flesh-eating slime actually trying to seduce him?
'Damn you — you thing! — that's it, isn't it?' he cried, jumping to his feet. 'You know the difference between us — or at least you sense it. And you'd like to use it! You think I'll be a little nicer to my plastic, blood-guzzling, alien little whore if 1 think I can maybe make love to it, eh? By God! — have you got the wrong man!'
Like a playful cat the thing stretched, rolled on its back, thrust its pale, useless breasts at him. There was no navel in its belly, but a little below where a navel should be was a protuberant, pulsing tube of flesh that could only be the thing's conception of a human vulva. The sexual implications turned Agursky white with rage in a moment. The thing was trying to seduce him! He yanked a black card from the pocket of his smock, showed it to the half- smiling, half-grimacing thing.
'You see this, you motherless monstrosity? How'd you like to dance for uncle, eh? You don't like that, do you?' But it was a bluff and the creature knew it. Its limpid eyes looked through the glass, this way and that all around the room, but Agursky hadn't brought the shock-box with him. He was impotent to carry out his threat.
The gurgling, crimson mess from the feeder tube continued to pump into the tank. The container was almost empty, and still the thing hadn't been tempted to start feeding. But now, as Agursky tremblingly took his seat again, a stream of scarlet seepage from the pile of offal found a zigzag route to the creature and touched its side. The metamorphosis which took place in it then was rapid indeed.
Its neck twisted round at an impossible angle to allow its quasi-human face to peer at the blood spreading round its flank. Then the face turned back and Agursky saw that the thing's eyes had taken on the hue of the blood it had observed. Hell glared out of those eyes at him. The grotesque, imitation face began to melt into another shape, another form. The mouth widened until it spanned almost the entire face, opened to display a cavernous gape where crooked, needle-sharp teeth lined a scarlet throat as far back as Agursky cared to look. And a forked snake's tongue vibrated in there, the tips of the fork flickering this way and that between the slime-dripping lips of the thing.
'That's more like it!' Agursky cried, feeling that he'd achieved something of a victory. 'Your little plan didn't work, so now let's see you as you really are.'
Contact with the raw red pulp had triggered the thing's hunger, ripped away its mask. In the face of instinctive urges it was incapable of keeping up the deception. Except… for all the time he'd spent with the creature, Agursky had never seen anything quite like this before. Its food was there and the thing from beyond the Gate knew it, but more than just hunger and blood-lust had been triggered. And again the scientist wondered: is it ill? Is it suffering? And if so, from what?
For as if the vibration of the tongue had been only the start of it, the catalyst, now the thing's entire body was beginning to tremble. The human paleness of its protoplasm (Agursky could scarcely bring himself to think of it
