In the near distance, softened by night and the fast-falling snow, the Chateau blazed with light, its searchlight beams cutting to and fro as they searched for targets. Most of Harry’s army – what remained of it – was already at the walls of the Chateau itself, however, from which the staccato yammering of machine-guns now sounded unceasingly. The remaining defenders were trying to kill dead men, and they were finding it hard.
Harry looked about, saw a group of latecomers leaning into the snow as they plodded towards the beleaguered building. Eerie figures they were, gaunt scarecrow men, creaking past him in monstrous animation. But death held no fears for Harry Keogh. He stopped two of them, a pair of mummied cadavers a little less ravaged than the
rest, and offered one the hardwood stake. ‘For Dragosani,’ he said.
The other Tartar carried a great curving sword all scabbed with rust; Harry reckoned he’d used it in his day to devastating effect. Well, and now – with any justice -he’d use it again. He pointed to the sword, nodded, said: ‘That, too, is for Dragosani – for the vampire in him.’
Then he opened a Mobius door, and guiding his two sere companions stepped through it.
Inside the Chateau Bronnitsy it had been all hell let loose almost from the beginning. The place had been built two hundred and thirty years ago on an ancient battlefield; the building itself was a mausoleum for a dozen of the fiercest of all the Tartar warriors. And its protection had kept the peaty ground pliant, so that the bodies which had lain there were more truly mummies than fleshless corpses.
Also, Dragosani had ordered the great stone flags in the cellars lifted and floorboards ripped out in his search for signs of sabotage; and so, at Harry Keogh’s first call, there had been little to deter these re-animated Tartars as they’d struggled up from their centuried graves to answer his command and prowl the Chateau’s corridors, laboratories and conservatories. And wherever they found ESPers or defenders, they had simply put them down out of hand.
Now all that remained were the fortified machine-gun positions in the Chateau’s own walls, which allowed the men within them no egress, no means of escape. The machine-gun posts could only be entered from within the Chateau; there were no exterior doors, no way out. The voice of one such call-sign trapped in his fortified position told Dragosani the entire story in every gory detail where he raged and frothed in his tower control room:
‘Comrade, this is madness, madness!’ the voice moaned over Dragosani’s control radio, blocking all other traffic -if any remained to be blocked! ‘They are . . . zombies, dead men! And how may we kill dead men? They come -and my gunner cuts them down and shoots them to pieces – and then the pieces come! Outside, a pile of pieces wriggles and kicks and builds itself into a wall against the wall of the Chateau. Trunks, legs, arms, hands – even the smaller pieces and the naked bones themselves! Soon they will pour in through the gun slits, and what then?’
Dragosani snarled, more animal now than ever, and shook his fists at the night and the drifting snow beyond the tower’s windows. ‘Keogh!’ he raged. ‘I know you’re there, Keogh. So come if you’re coming and let’s be done with it.’
‘They’re inside the Chateau, too!’ the voice on the radio sobbed. ‘We’re trapped in here. My gunner is a madman now. He raves even as he works his gun. I’ve jammed the steel door shut but something continues to batter at it, trying to get in. I know what it is, for I saw it; it stuck a leathery claw inside before I could slam the door on its wrist; now the hand – oh God, the hand! -claws at my legs and tries to climb. I kick it away but it always returns. See, see? Again! Again!’ And his voice tapered off into static and a crackling peal of laughter.
Simultaneous with the idiot sounds from the radio, suddenly Yul Galenski cried out in terror from his anteroom office. ‘The stairs! They’re coming up the stairs!’ His voice was shrill as a girl’s; he had no experience of fighting; he was a clerk, a secretary. And in any case, who had experience of such as this?