Destroy it and I’ll be free, I’m sure! Renewed hope rang in the old man’s mental voice. But . . . how can you destroy it?
Harry knew how: the stake, the sword and the fire. If this creature had a vampire in it, then these things would kill it. So … why not skip the first two steps and go straight to the third?
Outside, ringing faintly, running footsteps sounded. And somewhere an alarm bell had started to gong its raucous warning through the bowels of the subterranean complex.
They know I’m here,’ Harry said. ‘This has to be quick.’
He wheeled Agursky’s shock-box over to the tank. It was an electrical transformer on wheels, with a flexible heavy-duty cable to a wall socket. It had a pair of clamps on coiled extension leads, which Harry quickly made fast to terminals on the side of the tank. Watching him, the creature came to life, changing colour and shape as it began to work through several rapid metamorphoses. It knew what the shock-box was, knew what was coming. Or it thought it did.
Harry didn’t have time to watch its contortions, and in any case he didn’t want to. Feeling slightly sick he turned on the current – and the thing at once went berserk!
Harry wasted no time but turned the current up all the way. The clamps sputtered and issued blue sparks, smoke and a heavy ozone reek. The room’s lights flickered momentarily, then steadied and brightened again. High-voltage current flowed through electrical cables in the glass walls of the tank, and the creature took the full charge. It became a writhing puppet of a man, small, with one tiny arm and hand and one huge one. It balled a massive fist, a fist almost as big as Harry’s head, and slammed it again and again at the glass wall of its prison -the wall of its incinerator.
The thing was melting, mewling and melting. Steam poured off it as its liquids boiled. Its corrugated skin blistered, cracked open, blackened. Gusts of vile vapour escaped in jets from its rupturing pores. It screamed and screamed with old Kazimir’s face, through his mouth, but its voice wasn’t human. Then the glass shattered and its great black steaming fist came through – at which the thing curled up on itself and gave up the ghost.
It collapsed, half-in, half-out of the shattered tank, became still. Then –
The blackened, smoking flesh of its head split open like an overripe pomegranate. A cobra’s head writhed in the mush of boiling, steaming brains .’The vampire! And it too died even as Harry watched.
Free! said Kazimir. Free!!!
Behind Harry the room’s great door sighed open. He conjured a door of his own and stepped through it …
17
Intruder
Khuv, Agursky and the others reeled as they entered the room of the thing. In the swirl and reek of the dead, frying creature in the tank, they failed to see that man-shaped space where the smoke rushed in to fill a sudden gap. Harry had made his exit just in time.
Agursky recovered first, leaped across the room and switched off the power. ‘Who has done this?’ he demanded of no one in particular. ‘Who is responsible?’ He clapped a hand to his brow, staggered toward the sputtering, smoking tank, where even now shards of glass were beginning to melt in the intense heat. Then, as the smoke began to clear, he saw the creature’s blackened remains hanging out through the shattered glass wall; saw, too, something else – something which he didn’t want anyone else to see. He ripped off his smock, quickly threw it over the monstrous remains.
Khuv had meanwhile turned to Leo Grenzel, the locator. ‘You said he was here, an intruder. Well, someone has certainly been here – though I’m damned if I can see how! The door was locked, and there’s a guard outside. Oh, a half-asleep, stupid guard, that’s true, but he’s not a complete idiot! So . . .just getting in here would be hard enough if not impossible – but as for getting out . . .?’ Then Khuv grasped Grenzel by the shoulders, stared hard at him. ‘Leo? Is there something else?’