That’s part of it, yes, but mainly I want. . . to be still!
Harry frowned. Often the dead were more vague than the living. ‘Maybe I’d better come and see you. I mean, this is sort of impersonal. Is it safe where you are?’
It’s never safe here, Harry, Kazimir told him. And where I am it’s always horrible. I can tell you this much: I’m in a room at the Perchorsk Projekt, and at the moment I’m alone. At least there are no people with me. But . . . do you have a strong stomach, Harry? How are your nerves?
Harry smiled briefly. ‘Oh, my stomach’s strong enough, Kazimir. And I think my nerves will hold up.’ Then the smile slipped from his face. What was the other’s situation, he wondered?
Then come, by all means, said the old man. Only don’t say I didn’t warn you!
Harry grew cautious. It had been his intention to visit Perchorsk anyway. That was why he had come to see his mother; so that with the aid of her friends she could guide him there. But now . . . ‘Just tell me this,’ he said. ‘If I come, right now, will my life be endangered?’
No, nothing like that. I’ve been told you can come and go as you wish, and in any case we’re not likely to be disturbed – though there is always that possibility. But. . . I’m with something that isn’t pleasant. The old man’s mental voice was full of shudders.
‘I’ll come,’ said Harry. ‘Just keep talking to me and I’ll home in on you.’ He conjured a Mobius door and followed Kazimir’s thoughts to their source . . .
At Perchorsk it was an hour after midnight. The room of the thing was in darkness, where only the red ceiling lights gave any illumination. Harry emerged from the Mobius Continuum there, stared all about in the red-tinged gloom and felt the sinister heart of the place throbbing through the floor under his feet. Then he saw the tank, and the shape inside it, but for the moment he couldn’t quite see what that shape was.
Me! said Kazimir Kirescu. My resting place. Except it doesn’t rest.
‘Doesn’t rest?’ Harry repeated him, but softly. There were dimmer switches on the wall, a nest of them. Harry reached for them, went to turn up the lights. They came up slowly. ‘Oh, my God!’ said Harry in a shaky whisper. ‘Kazimir?’
That’s what ate me! the other answered, in a voice horrified as Harry’s own. That’s where I am. I don’t mind being dead so much, Harry, but I would like to lie still.
Harry moved uncertainly across the room toward the creature in the tank. It seemed slug- or snail-like; its corrugated ‘foot’ or lower body pulsated where it adhered to the glass wall; atop its lolling neck sat an almost human head with the face of an old man. Flaccid ‘arms’ hung down bonelessly from rubbery ‘shoulders’, and several rudimentary eyes gazed wetly, vacantly from where they opened like suckers in the thing’s dark skin. Its normal eyes – those in the old man’s face – moved to compensate for the languid lolling of the head, remained firmly fixed upon Harry. But they were only normal in that they occupied a face. Other than that, they were uniformly scarlet.
My face, said Kazimir with a sob. But not my eyes, Harry. And dead or alive, no man should be part of this thing.
And then, while Harry continued to stare at the monstrosity, Kazimir told him all he knew about the Perchorsk Projekt, and of the events leading to his current predicament . . .
Fifteen minutes later and a mere fifty yards away:
Major Chingiz Khuv, KGB, came awake, sat up jerkily in his bed. He was hot, feverish. He’d been dreaming, nightmaring, but the dreams were quickly receding in the face of reality. Reality, as Khuv was well aware, was often far more nightmarish than any dream. Especially here in Perchorsk. But it was as if the unremembered dreams were premonitory; Khuv’s nerves were already jangling to the buzzing of his doorbell. He got up, threw on a dressing-gown and went to the door.