It had the breasts of women, and a half-formed male head, and many pseudohands. Eyes, bulging behind their closed lids, were everywhere. And mouths, some human and others inhuman. Yes, and there were other features much worse than these.
Emboldened, Gulharov and Volkonsky had come forward; the latter, before he could be cautioned, had reached out a hand and laid it upon a cold, shrivelled breast where it protruded alongside a flabby-lipped mouth. All was the colour of leather and looked solid enough, but no sooner had the big ganger touched the teat than it crumbled into dust. Volkonsky snatched back his hand with an oath, stepped back a pace. But Sergei Gulharov was much less timid. He knew something of these horrors, and the very thought of them infuriated him.
Cursing, he lashed out with his foot at the base of the thing where it sprouted from the floor, lashed out again and again. The others had made no attempt to stop him; it was his way of working it out of his system. He waded into the crumbling monstrosity, fists and feet pounding at
it. And in a very little while nothing remained but billowing dust and a few fretted bones.
‘Out!’ Krakovitch had choked. ‘Let’s get out of here before we suffocate. Carl.’ He’d clutched the other’s arm, ‘thank God it was dead!’ And with their hands to their mouths, finally they’d climbed back up the stairwell into clean, healthy daylight.
‘That. . . whatever it was, should be buried,’ Volkonsky had growled to Gulharov as they moved away from the ruins.
‘Exactly!’ Krakovitch had taken the opportunity to agree with him. ‘So as to be absolutely certain, it has to be buried. And that’s where you come in. .
The four had been back to the ruins a second time since then, when Volkonsky had drilled holes, laid charges, unrolled a hundred yards of detonating cable and made electrical connections. And now they’d returned for the third and last time. And as before, Theo Dolgikh had followed them, which was why this would be the last time.
Now, from the cover of bushes back along the overgrown track near the cliff and its precarious ledge, the KGB man watched Volkonsky put down his firing box at the end of the prepared cable, watched as the party moved on towards the ruins, presumably for one last look.
This was Dolgikh’s best chance, the moment the Russian agent had been waiting for. He checked his gun again, took off the safety and reholstered it, then quickly scrambled up the scree slope on his left and into a straggling stand of pines where the trees marched at the foot of the gaunt cliffs. If he used his cover to its best advantage, he could stay out of sight until the last minute.
And so, moving with some agility beneath the trees, he quickly closed the distance between him and his intended victims as they approached the gutted ruins.
In order to maintain his cover in this way, Dolgikh occasionally had to lose sight of his quarry, but finally he reached the furthest extent of the cliff-hugging trees and was forced back down into the lesser undergrowth of the old track. From here the group of men at the ancient castle’s walls were plainly visible, and if they should happen to look in Dolgikh’s direction, they might also see him. But no, they stood silent one hundred yards away, lost in their own thoughts as they gazed upon that which they intended to destroy. All three of them were deep in thought.
Three? Dolgikh squinted, frowned, glanced quickly all about. He saw nothing out of the ordinary. Presumably the fourth man — that young fool, that traitor Gulharov —had entered through the broken exterior wall of the ruins and so passed out of sight. Whichever, Dolgikh knew that he now had all four men trapped. There was no way out at their end of the defile, and in any case they had to come back here to detonate the charges. Dolgikh’s leering expression changed, turned into a grim smile. An especially sadistic thought had just occurred to him.
His original plan had been simple: surprise them, tell them he was investigating them for the KGB, have them tie each other up — finally hurl them one at a time from the castle’s broken rim. It was a hell of a long way down. He’d make sure that part of the rotten wall went with them, to make it more convincing. Then, at a safe place, he’d climb down, make his way back to them and carefully remove their bindings. An ‘accident’, as simple as that. There’d be no escape for them: the nylon cord in Dolgikh’s pocket had a 2001b breaking strain! They probably wouldn’t even be found for weeks, months, maybe never.