But his face!
Dragosani’s jaws were long as some great hound’s, gaping open to display curving needle teeth. His skull was misshapen, and his ears were pointed where they curved forward and lay flat against his temples. His eyes were ruptured red pits above a nose long and wrinkled and flattened to show gaping nostrils, like the convoluted snout of some great bat. That was how he looked: part man, part wolf, part bat. And the thing pinned to his chest was worse.
‘What . . , what is that?’ Gulharov gasped out the question.
‘God help me, Krakovitch shook his head, ‘I don’t know! But it lived in him. I mean, inside him. It only came out at the end.’
The trunk of the thing had the form of a great leech some eighteen inches long, but tapering to a tail. There were no limbs; it seemed to cling to Dragosani’s chest by suction, and was held there by a sharp stake formed of the splintered hardwood stock of a heavy-duty machine gun; its skin was grey-green, corrugated. Gulharov saw that its head, flat and cobra-like – but eyeless, blind – lay on the carpet a little apart.
Like . . . like some gigantic tapeworm?’ Gulharov’s horror was plain on his face.
‘Something like that,’ Krakovitch nodded grimly. ‘But intelligent, evil, and deadly.’
‘Why have we come up here?’ Gulharov’s Adam’s apple bobbed. ‘There are fifty million better places to be.’
Krakovitch’s face was white, pinched. He could fully appreciate Gulharov’s feelings. ‘We’ve come up here because we have to burn this, that’s why.’ His talent again, warning him that both Dragosani and his symbiont must be destroyed, utterly. He looked around, saw a tall steel filing cabinet standing against the wall to one side of the door. He and Gulharov tore out the shelving, turning the cabinet into a metal coffin. They lowered it onto its back and dragged it across the floor to Dragosani.
‘You take his shoulders, I’ll take his thighs,’ said Krakovitch. ‘Once we’ve got him in here we can close the door and slide the cabinet down the steps. Frankly, I don’t fancy touching him. I’ll touch him as little as possible. This way has to be best.’
They gingerly lifted the corpse, strained to get it over the rim of the cabinet, lowered it inside. Gulharov went to close the door and the projecting stake got in the way. He grasped the splintered stock in both hands – and the mental warning hit Krakovitch like a fist in his heart!
‘Don’t touch that!’ he yelled, but too late.
As Gulharov wrenched the stake free, so the leech-thing – headless as it was – came alive. Its hideous slug-like body began to lash in a frenzy, so that it almost ejected itself from the cabinet. At the same time its leathery skin broke open in a dozen places, putting out protoplasmic tentacles that writhed and vibrated in a sort of mindless agony. These pseudopods whipped out, struck the sides of the cabinet and recoiled, settled on Dragosani’s body. They passed through clothing and dead flesh and burrowed into him. More of them sprouted from the main body; they formed barbs, hooked themselves into Dragosani’s flesh. One of the tentacles found his chest cavity; it thickened rapidly to the diameter of a man’s wrist; the rest dissolved their barbs, released their holds, withdrew and followed the main branch into him. With a final sucking plop the entire organism drew itself down into Dragosani’s body. His trunk began to heave and throb where it lay in the cabinet.
While all of this occurred, so Gulharov had danced away and clambered up onto the desk. He was mouthing half-inarticulate obscenities, shrieking like a woman. And he was pointing at something. Krakovitch, almost numb with shock and horror, saw the leech-creature’s flat cobra head vibrating on the floor, flipping and flopping like a stranded flatfish. He gave a cry of loathing, began to panic, then gripped himself tight and drove the panic out. Finally he slammed the cabinet door shut and shot the bolt.
He grabbed a metal drawer from the cabinet’s scattered guts, yelled: ‘Well, help me!’