By now, at the front of the house, Guy Roberts and Ben Trask were down from the truck. Roberts heard shouting, the roar of a flame-thrower. It was still a minute or two to five but the attack had started which probably meant that the other side had started it. Roberts put a police whistle to his lips, gave one short blast. Now, whatever else was happening, all six INTESP agents would move on the house together.
Roberts had the third flame-thrower; he headed straight for the main door of the house where it stood ajar in the shadow of a columned portico. Trask followed. He was a human lie-detector; his talent had no application here, but he was also young, quick-thinking and he knew how to look after himself. As he made to follow Roberts something caught his attention: a furtive movement glimpsed in the very corner of his eye.
‘Twenty-five yards away between billowing banks of mist, a flowing figure had passed swiftly, silently inside the shell of the old barn. Who or whatever had gone in there, there would be nothing to stop it from clearing off out of the grounds once Roberts and Trask were inside the house. ‘Oh no you don’t!’ Trask grunted. And raising his voice: ‘Guy, in the barn there.’
Roberts, at the door of the house, turned to see Trask running at a crouch towards the barn. Cursing under his breath, he strode after him.
At the back of Harkley House, Vlad came coughing and mewling out of the mist and attempted to spring at the three men he found there. The dog was a blackened silhouette sheathed in smoke and flame, burning even as he launched himself lopsidedly at Jordan’s back.
As Jordan had come running round the corner of the building, Gower had very nearly triggered his flame-thrower; he’d recognised Jordan only at the last possible moment. Harvey Newton, on the other hand, had actually -drawn a bead on the misted figure and was in the act of firing his bolt when Gower cried a warning and shouldered him aside. The bolt flashed harmlessly off at a tangent and disappeared in mist and distance. Fortunately Jordan had seen the two men saw them apparently aiming at him and thrown himself flat. He hadn’t seen what pursued him, however, which even now overshot his sprawled body and arced overhead in a cloud of sparks and smoulder. Vlad landed awkwardly, gathered himself to spring at Newton and Gower, and discovered himself forging head-on into a withering jet of flame from Gower’s torch. The dog crumpled to earth, a blazing, crackling, screaming ball of fire that tried to run in all directions at once and ran nowhere.
Jordan got to his feet and the three men stood panting, watching Vlad burn. Newton had fumblingly reloaded his crossbow; he thought he saw something move in the mist and turned in that direction. What was that? A loping shape? Or . . . just his imagination? The others didn’t seem to have noticed; they were watching Vlad.
‘Oh my God!’ Jordan gasped. Newton saw the look on Jordan’s face, forgot the thing he thought he had seen, turned to watch the death agonies of the incandescent dog.
Vlad’s blackened body throbbed and vibrated, burst open, put up a nest of tentacles that twined like alien fingers four or five feet into the air. Mouthing obscenities, eyes bulging, Gower hosed the thing down with fire. The tentacles steamed, blistered and collapsed but the dog’s body continued to pulsate.
‘Jesus Christ!’ Jordan moaned his horror. ‘He changed the dog, too!’ He unhooked a cleaver from his belt, moved forward, shielded his eyes against the blaze and severed Vlad’s head from his body with one single clean stroke. Jordan backed off, shouted at Gower: ‘You finish it make sure you finish it! I heard Roberts’s whistle just now. Harvey and me will go on in.’
As Gower continued to burn the remains of the dog-thing, Jordan and Newton went stumbling through smoke and reek to the rear wall of the house, where they found an open window. They looked at each other, then licked their lips nervously in unison. Both of them were breathing raggedly of the sodden, stinking air.