Blackened chunks of rock, large and small, cluttered the stairs so badly that Quint was often obliged to climb over them; but after turning through another full spiral, at last the steps were clear of all but small pieces of rubble, pebbles and sand sifted down from above. And at last he had been at the bottom, with Krakovitch and the others close on his heels. Light filtered down from above, but not much.
‘It’s no good,’ Quint had complained, shaking his head. ‘We can’t go in there, not without proper light.’ His voice had echoed as in a tomb, which was what the place was. The place he spoke of was a room, a dungeon — the dungeon, for it could be no other place than Thibor’s prison — beyond a low, arched stone doorway. Maybe Quint’s reluctance had been his final attempt to back away from this thing, maybe not; whichever, the resourceful Gulharov had the answer. He’d produced a small, flat pocket torch, passed it to Quint who shone its beam ahead of him. There under the arch of the doorway, fossilised timber — age-blackened fragments of oak — lying in a pile, with red splashes of rust marking the passing of defunct nails and bands of iron: all that remained of a once stout door. And beyond that, only darkness.
Then, stooping a little to avoid a keystone which had settled somewhat through the centuries, Quint had stepped warily under the archway, pausing just inside the dungeon. And there he’d aimed his torch in a slow circle to illumine each wall and corner of the place. The cell was quite large, larger than he’d expected; it had corners, niches, ledges and recesses where the beam of light couldn’t follow, and it seemed cut from living rock.
Quint aimed the beam at the floor. Dust, the filtered dust of ages, lay uniformly thick everywhere. No footprint disturbed it. In roughly the centre of the floor, a humped formation of stone, possibly bedrock, strained grotesquely upwards. It seemed there was nothing here, and yet ‘Quint’s psychic intuition told him otherwise. His, and Krakovitch’s too.
‘We were right,’ Krakovitch’s voice had echoed dolefully. He’d moved to come up alongside Quint. ‘They are finished. They were here and we sense them even now, but time has put paid to them.’ He’d moved forward, leaned his weight on the anomalous hump of rock — which at once crumbled under his hand!
In the next moment he’d jumped back with a cry of sheer horror, colliding with Quint, grabbing him and hugging him close. ‘Oh God! Carl — Carl! It’s not. . . not stone!’
Gulharov and Volkonsky, both of them suddenly electrified, had steadied Krakovitch while Quint shone his torch directly at the humped mass. Then, mouth gaping and heart fluttering, the Englishman had breathed, ‘Did you sense. . . anything?’
The other shook his head, took a deep breath. ‘No, no. My reaction, that was simply shock — not a warning. Thank God for that at least! My talent is working — believe me it is working — but it reveals nothing. I was shocked, just shocked. .
‘But just look at this . . . this thing!’ Quint had been awed. He’d moved forward, carefully blown dust from the surface of the mass and used a handkerchief to dust it down. Parts of it, anyway. For even a perfunctory dusting had revealed — total horror!
The thing was slumped where in uncounted years past it had groped one last time upwards from the packed earth of the floor. It was one mass now — the mummied remains of one creature — but clearly it was composed of more than one person. Hunger and possibly madness had forced the issue: the hunger of the proto-flesh in the earth, the madness of Ehrig and the women. There had been no way out and, weak with hunger, the vampires had been unable to resist the advances of the mindless, subterranean ‘creeper’. It had probably taken them one by one, adding them to its bulk. And now that bulk lay here, fallen where it had finally, mercifully ‘died’. In the end, governed only by weak impulse and indeterminate instinct, perhaps it had attempted to reconstitute the others. Certainly there was evidence to that effect.