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'Ah, George!' He smiled a sickly smile. 'I was just wondering if perhaps you'd
like to see the cellars?' Then he saw George's expression, the mattock in his
white-knuckled hands.
'The cellars?' George choked, almost entirely deranged with hatred. 'Yes I
fucking would!' He swung his pick-like weapon. Yulian put up an arm to shield
his face, turned away. The sharper, rustier blade of the heavy tool took him
in the back of his right shoulder, crunched through the lower part of the
scapula and buried itself to the haft in his body.
Thrown forward, Yulian went toppling down the central ramp, the mattock still
sticking in him.
As he fell he said, 'Ah! Ah!' - in no way a scream, more an expression of
surprise, shock. George followed, arms reaching, lips drawn back from his
teeth. He pursued Yulian, and Vlad pursued him.
Yulian lay face down at the bottom of the steps beside the open door to the
vaults. He moaned, moved awkwardly. George slammed a foot down in the middle
of his back, levered the mattock out of him. 'Ah! Ah!' again Yulian gave his
peculiar, sighing cry. George lifted the mattock -
and heard Vlad's rumbling growl close behind.
He turned, swung the mattock in a deadly arc. The dog was stopped in
mid-flight as the mattock smacked flatly against the side of its head. It
crumpled to the concrete floor, groaned like a man. George panted hoarsely,
lifted his weapon again - but there was no sign of consciousness in the
animal. Its sides heaved but it lay still, tongue protruding. Out like a
light.
And now there was only Yulian.
George turned, saw Yulian staggering into the vault's unknown darkness.
Unbelievable! With his injury, still the bastard kept going. George followed,
kept Yulian's stumbling figure visible in the gloom. The cellars were
extensive, rooms and alcoves and midnight corridors, but George didn't let his
quarry out of sight for a single moment. Then - a light!
George peered through an arched entrance into a dimly illumined room. A single
dusty bulb, shaded, hung from a vaulted ceiling of stone blocks. George had
momentarily lost sight of Yulian in the darkness surrounding the cone of
light; but then the youth staggered between him and the light source, and
George picked him up again and advanced. Yulian saw him, swung an arm wildly
at the light in an attempt to put it out of commission. Injured, he missed his
aim, setting the lamp and shade dancing and swinging on their flex.
Then, by that wildly gyrating light, George saw the rest of the room. In
intermittent flashes of light and darkness, he picked out the details of the
hell he'd walked into.
Light... and in one corner a glimpse of piled wooden racks and cobwebbed
shelving.
Darkness... and Yulian an even darker shape that crouched uncertainly in the
centre of the room.
Light - and along one wall Georgina, seated in an old cane chair, her eyes
bulging but vacant and her mouth and flaring nostrils wide as yawning caverns.
Darkness - and a movement close by, so that George put up the mattock to
defend himself. Insane light - and to his right a huge copper vat, six feet
across and seated on copper legs; with Helen slumped in a dining chair on one
side, her back to the nitre-streaked wall, and Anne, naked, likewise
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positioned on the other side. Their inner arms dangling inside the rim of the
bowl, and something in the bowl itself seeming to move restlessly, throwing up
ropes of doughy matter. Flickering darkness - out of which came Yulian's
laughter: the clotted, sick laughter of someone warped irreparably. Then light
again - which found George's eyes fixed on the great vat, or more properly on
the women. And the picture searing itself indelibly into his brain.
Helen's clothing ripped down the front and pulled back, and the girl lolling
there like a slut with her legs sprawled open, everything displayed. Anne
likewise; but both of them grimacing, their faces working hideously, showing
alternating joy and total horror; their arms in the vat, and the nameless
slime crawling on their arms to their shoulders, pulsating from its unknown
source!
Merciful darkness - and the thought in George's tottering mind:
'God! It's feeding on them, and it's feeding itself to them!'
And Yulian so close now that he could hear his rasping breathing.
Light again, as the lamp settled to a jerky jitterbug - and the mattock
wrenched from George's nerveless fingers and hurled away. And George finally
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