Necroscope IV Deadspeak - By Brian Lumley Page 0,28
could reach, triangular eyes floated in the darkness, unblinking, unyielding, unnerving.
Laverne wasn't an especially brave man, but he wasn't a coward either. Whatever the creature was up ahead -fox, wolf or feral dog - it wouldn't much care for fire. He lumbered forward and snatched up the smouldering torch, and waved it overhead to get it going again. A whoosh of flame at once rewarded his efforts and the gathering shadows were driven back. Likewise the creature along the passageway; Laverne caught a glimpse of something grey, slinking, canine, before it was swallowed up in gloom. He also caught a glimpse of something in the trench -
- Something which drove him back against the wall like a blow from a huge fist!
Gasping his shock, his horror - feeling his blood running cold in his veins - Laverne tremblingly held out the torch over the trench. His disbelieving eyes took in the bed of spikes and the figure of his friend, crucified and worse, upon them. George Vulpe squirmed there, impaled through his cheek, neck, shoulders and arms; nailed through his back, buttocks, and thighs; issuing blood from each dark gash and puncture, which coloured the rusty spikes and flowed in thickly converging streams around and between his twitching feet, into the channel and down towards the stone spout.
'Mother of God!' Laverne croaked.
'Ak!... ak!... ak!' said Vulpe, the words bursting in bloody bubbles from his pallid lips.
And along the passageway the great old Grey One growled low in his throat and paced slowly, stiff-legged, into full view.
Vulpe was finished, that much was plain. An army of nurses with a ton of bandages between them couldn't have stopped him bleeding his last, not now. Laverne couldn't save him, neither from the bed of spikes nor from the wolf. On nerveless legs he backed off, shuffling crablike, sideways back along the passage, back towards the shallow steps leading to the false flue. It was all over for George - everything was over for him - and now Laverne must think only of himself. And as Vulpe's blood commenced to gurgle from the carved stone spout into the mouth of the urn, so the overweight American backed away faster yet...
... And paused abruptly, wobbling like a jelly there in the narrow mould of the passageway.
In front, the wolf, its face a snarling mask in the torchlight; between, the dying man on his torture-bed of spikes; and now... now there was something else. Behind!
No longer breathing, Laverne cranked his head round like a nut on a rusty bolt. At first he made little of what he was seeing. All the edges were indistinct, weirdly mobile. The ceiling seemed to have lowered itself, the passage to have narrowed, the floor to have become heaped with... something. Something furry. Something that rustled and flopped!
Laverne's eyes bugged as he thrust out his torch in that direction, bugged more yet as several small parts of that anomalous furriness detached themselves from the moving walls and darted by him in fluttering swoops and dives. Bats! A colony of bats! And more of them clustering to the walls, floor and ceiling even as he grimaced his disgust.
He looked back the other way. The wolf had come to a standstill; its ears were pointed into the trench, its attention centred on the urn. Cold as death, reeling and panting for air, Laverne looked where it looked. He looked, saw, and knew that he was on the verge of fainting. His blood was pooling, his senses whirling - but he also knew that he dared not faint! Not in this nightmare place, and certainly not now.
The urn was belching. Puffs of vapour, like small smoke rings, were issuing from its obscene mouth. Black slime, bubbling up from within, was blistering on the cold rim like congealing tar. As Vulpe's blood was consumed, so something was forming and expanding within the urn. A catalyst, his blood transformed what was within!
Hypnotized by horror, Laverne could only watch. A mottled blue-grey tentacle of slime, crimson-veined, slopped upwards out of the mouth of the urn and into the stone spout. Elongating, it slid like a snake along the trail of blood to where Vulpe lay transfixed. Sentient, it curled round his right leg where it was bent at the knee, surged along the impaled thigh and across his belly, crept over his palpitating chest. He continued to gasp, 'Ak!... ak!... argh!' - but agony had very nearly inured him, numbed him into a mental limbo, and loss