They were just inside the north wall, at a place where they’d found a gap in the stonework. Just a minute ago, at 4.50, they’d checked their watches and squeezed through, and Jordan had helped Layard into his asbestos leggings and jacket. Then they’d strapped the tank on his back and he’d checked the valve on the hose and trigger mechanism. With the valve open, all he had to do was squeeze the trigger and he could conjure up an inferno. And he fully intended to.
‘Him?’ Jordan frowned. He looked around at the mist. It crept everywhere. From here the rear wall up the hillside was invisible; likewise the wall fronting onto the road. Harvey Newton and Simon Gower would be making their way down from the hill, Ben Trask and Guy Roberts coming up the drive from the gate. They would all converge on the house together, at 5.00 P.M. sharp. ‘Who do you mean, “him”? Bodescu?’ Jordan led the way through shrubbery towards the dimly looming mass of the house. .
‘Bodescu, yes,’ Layard answered. ‘I’m a locator, remember? It’s my thing.’
What’s that got to do with the mist?’ Jordan’s nerves were starting to jump. He was a telepath of uncertain kill, but Roberts had warned him not to try it on Bodescu and certainly not at this crucial stage of play.
‘When I try to find him in my mind’s eye,’ Layard attempted to explain, ‘inside the house there, I can’t zero in on him. It’s as if he were part of the mist. That’s why I think he’s somehow behind it. I sense him as a huge amorphous cloud of fog!’
‘Jesus!’ Jordan whispered, shivering again. In utter, eerie silence they moved towards the small outbuilding, whose open door led down to the cellars.
Simon Gower and Harvey Newton approached the house from the gently sloping field of shrubs at its rear. There wasn’t too much cover so the mist was a boon to them. So they thought. Newton was a telepath, called down from London along with Ben Trask as reinforcements. Newton and Trask weren’t quite as au fait with the situation as the rest, which was why they’d been split up.
‘What a team we make, eh?’ said Newton nervously as the ground levelled out and the mist billowed up more yet. ‘You with that bloody great torch on your back and me with a crossbow? You know, if this stake-out is a dud, we’re going to look awfully —’
‘God!’ Gower cut him short, dropped to one knee and worked furiously at the valve on his hose.
‘What?’ Newton gave a massive start, glared all about, held his loaded crossbow out in front of him like a shield. ‘What?’ He couldn’t see anything, but he knew Gower’s talent lay in reading the future — especially the immediate future!
‘It’s coming!’ Gower no longer whispered. In fact, he was shouting. ‘It’s coming — NOW!’
At the front of the house, where Guy Roberts and Ben Trask pulled up in Roberts’s truck, Gower’s shouting wasn’t heard over the throbbing of the vehicle’s engine.
But on the north-facing side of the house it was. Trevor Jordan instinctively crouched down, then began to run at an angle towards the rear of the building. Ken Layard, hampered by his flame-thrower load, was slower off the mark.
Layard, stumbling through damp shrubbery, saw Jordan’s figure swallowed into a rolling bank of mist where he ran past the open door in the small outbuilding
— then saw something erupt from that door in a snarling, slavering frenzy! Bodescu’s great dog! Without pause the flame-eyed brute hurled itself into the mist after Jordan.
‘Trevor, behind you!’ Layard yelled at the top of his voice. He yanked open the valve on his hose, jerked the trigger, prayed: God, please don’t let me burn Trevor!
A roaring, gouting stream of yellow fire tore open the curtain of mist like a blowtorch through cobwebs. Jordan was already round the corner of the house, but Vlad was still in view, bounding purposefully after him. The expanding, blistering ‘V’ of heat reached after the dog, touched him, enveloped him but briefly. Then he, too, was round the corner. –