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.