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  “Anyway, I was here by this time; the rest of this account is first-hand. Oh, and I can show you film of the bat’s emergence, if you like. Not that you’ll learn anything more than I’ve already told you, for it is exactly as I’ve described it. Ah, but the Fifth Encounter … that was something entirely different.”

  At this juncture Jazz had noted how Vyotsky, behind his dark beard, had gone very pale again. He, too, had been present for that Fifth Encounter. “Get it over with,” the big KGB man had stood up, gulped down his drink, started to pace the floor. “Tell him about it, or show him the film, but get done with it.”

  “Karl doesn’t like it,” Khuv’s comment was entirely superfluous, his smile cold and grim. “But then, neither do I. Still, likes and dislikes change nothing. They can’t alter the facts. Come, I’ll show you the film.”

  In a second small room Khuv had something of a study. There were bookshelves, a tiny desk, steel chairs, a modern projector and small screen. Vyotsky made no attempt to join Jazz and his senior officer but poured himself another drink and stayed behind in Khuv’s living-room. Jazz knew, however, that that was the only way out of Khuv’s quarters, and that only a few scant paces and a bit of flimsy door panelling separated him from the huge KGB bully.

  Now, too, he had seen that his coming here had not been a spontaneous occurrence; Khuv had prepared himself in advance; all he had to do was dim the lights and roll the film. And whatever Jazz had expected, it certainly had not been what he saw.

  The film was in colour, had a sound track, was very professional in every way. At one side of the screen a dark, fuzzy, out of focus shadow proved to be the side of a Russian soldier, with a glinting Kalashnikov braced against his thigh. Centre screen was the sphere of white light, or “Gate” as Jazz now thought of it, and imposed on its dazzling surface—the bottom of the “picture” coming just inches higher than the boards of the walkway where it spanned the gap between the Saturn-rings platform and the sphere—was the image … of a man!

  The camera had then zoomed in, turning the entire screen white and therefore that much less dazzling, with the image of the man central. He “strode” straight ahead, looking directly into the camera. His movements were so painfully slow that each pace took long seconds, and Jazz had found himself wondering if he’d ever get here. But then Khuv had warned:

  “See how the picture clears? A sure sign that he’s about to come through. But if I were you I wouldn’t wait for that. Study him now, while you can!” And obligingly, the camera had closed on the man’s face.

  The forehead was sloped, and the skull shaved except for a central lock of hair like a thick black stripe on the pale, almost grey flesh. Swept back like a mane and tied in a knot, the lock bobbed at the back of the man’s neck. His eyes were small and close together, and very startling. They glared out from under thick black eyebrows that met in a tangle across the bridge of a squat or flattened nose. The ears were slightly pointed and had large lobes; they lay flat to the head above hollow, almost gaunt cheeks. The lips were red and fleshy, in a mouth slanted to the left and set with a sort of permanent sneer or snarl. The man’s chin was pointed, made to look even more so by a small black beard waxed to a point. But the face’s main feature was that pair of small, glaring eyes. Jazz had looked at them again: red as blood, they’d gleamed in deep black orbits.

  As if sensing Jazz’s needs, the camera had then drawn back to show the entire man again. He wore a short pelmet of cloth about his loins, sandals on his feet, a large ring of golden metal in his right ear. His right hand was gloved in a gauntlet heavy with spikes, blades and hooks—an incredibly cruel, murderous weapon!

  After that Jazz had only sufficient time to note the man’s leanness, the ripple of his fine-toned muscles, and his wolf’s lope of a walk before he stepped out of the sphere onto the walkway—and then everything had speeded up!

  The British agent came back to the present, gripped the edge of his bed and drew himself into a sitting position. He swung his feet to the floor and put his back to the metal wall. The wall was cool but not cold; through it, Jazz could feel the life of the subterranean complex, the nervous, irregular coursing of its frightened blood. It was like being below decks in a big ship, where the throb of the engines comes right through the floor and walls and bulkheads. And just as he’d be aware of the life in a ship, so he was aware of the terror in this place.

  There were men down there in that unnatural cavern in the heart of the mountain, men with guns. Some of them had seen for themselves, and others had been shown on films like the one Jazz had seen, what could come through the Gate they guarded. Little wonder the Perchorsk Projekt was afraid.

  He gave a small shiver, then a grim chuckle. He’d caught the Projekt’s fever: its symptom was this shivering, even when it was warm. He’d seen them all doing it, and now he did it, too.

  Jazz deliberately gave himself a mental shake, forced himself to return to the film Khuv had shown him …

  Chapter Five

  Wamphyri!

  THE MAN CAME RIGHT OUT THROUGH THE SPHERE ONTO THE walkway—and then everything speeded up!

  He shuttered his red eyes against the sudden light, shouted an astonished denial in a language Jazz half-way understood or felt he should understand, and fell into a defensive crouch. Then the film had suddenly come alive. Before, the sounds had seemed muted: the occasional low cough, nervous conversation, feet shuffling in the background, and now and then the springs of weapons being eased or tested and the unmistakable metallic clatter of magazines slapped into housings. But all of it seeming dull and a little out of tune, like the first few minutes of a film in a cinema, where your ears are still tuned to the street and haven’t yet grown accustomed to the new medium of wall to wall sound.

  Now, however, the sound was very much tied to the film. Khuv’s voice, shouting: “Take him alive! Don’t shoot him! I’ll court martial the first man who pulls a trigger! He’s only a man, can’t you see? Go in and capture him!”

  Figures in combat uniforms ran past the camera, caused the cameramen and therefore the film to jiggle a little, burst into view on the screen and almost blotted out the picture. Having been ordered not to shoot, they carried their weapons awkwardly, seemed not to know what to do with them. Jazz could understand that: they’d been told that hideous death lurked in the sphere, but this seemed to be just a man. How many of them would it take to cow just one man? With an assortment of weapons at their fingertips, they must feel like men swatting midges with mallets! But on the other hand, some damned weird things had come out of that sphere, and they knew that, too.

  The man from the sphere saw them coming, straightened up. His red eyes were now at least partly accustomed to the light. He stood waiting for the soldiers, and Jazz had thought: this lad has to be six and a half feet if he’s an inch! Yes, and I’d bet he can look after himself, too.

  And certainly he would have won his bet!

  The walkway was maybe ten feet wide. The first two soldiers approached the near-naked man from the sphere on both sides, and that was a mistake. Shouting at him to put his hands up in the air and come forward, the fastest of the two reached him, made to prod him with the snout of his Kalashnikov rifle. With astonishing speed the intruder came to life: he batted the barrel of the gun aside with his left hand, swung the weapon he wore on his right hand shatteringly against the soldier’s head.

  The left side of the soldier’s head caved in and the hooks of the gauntlet caught in the broken bones of his skull. The intruder held him upright for a moment, flopping uselessly like a speared fish. But it was all nervous reaction, for the blow must have killed him instantly. Then the man from the Gate snarled and jerked his hand back, freeing it, and at the same time shouldered his victim from the walkway. The soldier’s body toppled out of sight.

  The second soldier paused and looked back, his face bloodless where the camera caught his indecision. His comrades were hot on his heels, outraged, eager to bring this unknown warrior down.
Made brave by their numbers, he faced the intruder again and swung his rifle butt-first toward his face. The man grinned like a wolf and ducked easily under the blow, at the same time swinging his gauntlet in a deadly arc. It tore out the soldier’s throat in a scarlet welter and knocked him sideways. He went sprawling, got to his knees—and the intruder brought his weapon down on top of his head, caving in his fur hat, skull and all!

  Then the rest of the combat-suited figures were surging all around the warrior, clubbing with their rifles and kicking at him with booted feet. He slipped and went down under their massed weight, howling his hatred and fury. The yelling of the soldiers was an uproar, over which Jazz had recognized Khuv’s voice shouting: “Hold him down but don’t kill him! We want him alive—alive, do you hear?”

  Then Khuv himself had come into view, advancing onto the walkway and waving his arms frantically over his head. “Pin him down,” he yelled, “but don’t beat him to a pulp! We want him … in one piece?” The final three words were an expression of Khuv’s astonishment, his disbelief. And watching the film Jazz had been able to see why, had understood the change in Khuv’s voice, had almost been able to sympathize with him.

  For the strange warrior had quite genuinely slipped when he went down—possibly in blood—and that was the only reason he’d gone down. The five or six soldiers where they crowded him, hampered by their weapons and desperate not to come in range of that terrible mincing-machine he wore on his right hand, weren’t even a match for him! One by one they’d rear up and back, clutching at torn throats or mangled faces; two of them went flying over the rim of the walkway, plunging sixty-odd feet to the basin-like magmass floor; another, hamstrung as he turned away, was kicked almost contemptuously into empty air by the warrior—who finally stood gory and unfettered, and alone, on the red-slimed boards of the walkway. And then he had seen Khuv, and nothing between them but four or five swift paces across the planking.

  “Flame-thrower squad!” Khuv’s voice was hoarse, almost a whisper in the sudden, awed silence of the place. “To me—quickly!” He hadn’t looked back, dared not for a moment take his eyes off the menacing man from the sphere.

  But the warrior had heard him speak. He cocked his head on one side, narrowed his red eyes at Khuv. Perhaps he took the KGB Major’s words for a challenge. He answered: a short, harshly barked sentence—probably a question—in a language which once again Jazz had felt he should understand, a question which ended in the word “Wamphyri?” He took two paces forward, repeated the enigmatic, vaguely familiar words of the sentence. And this time the last word, “Wamphyri?”, was spoken with more emphasis, threateningly and with something of fierce pride.

  Khuv went down on one knee and cocked an ugly, long-barrelled automatic pistol. He pointed it waveringly at the warrior, used his free hand to beckon men urgently forward from behind him. “Flame-thrower squad!” he croaked. There had been no spittle in his throat, nor in Jazz’s throat, by the time the film had reached this point.

  And then the warrior had loped forward again, only this time he hadn’t looked like stopping; and the look on his face and the way he held his deadly gauntlet at the ready spoke volumes for his intentions. The clatter of booted feet sounded and figures darkened the sides of the screen where men hurried forward, but Khuv wasn’t waiting. His own orders about the use of weapons were forgotten now, so much hot air. He held his automatic in both trembling hands, fired point-blank, twice, at the menacing human death-machine from the other side.

  His first shot took the warrior in the right shoulder, under the clavicle. A dark blotch blossomed there like an ugly flower in the moment that he was thrown backwards, sent sprawling on the boards. The second shot had apparently missed him entirely. He sat up, touched the hole in his slumped shoulder, stared in open astonishment at the blood on his hand. But pain didn’t seem to have registered at all—not yet. When it did, a second later—

  The warrior’s howl wasn’t a human sound at all. It was something far more primal than that. It came from night-dark caverns in an alien world beyond strange boundaries of space and time. And it was shocking and frightening enough to match the man himself.

  He would have hurled himself at Khuv, indeed he crouched down and made ready to do so, but the three-man flame-thrower squad was in the way. The machine they handled wasn’t the small man-pack variety that can be carried on one man’s back; it was a weighty thing consisting of a fuel tank on a motorized trolley which one man controlled while another walked alongside with the flame-projector. The third member of the squad held a large flexible asbestos shield, fragile protection against blow-back.

  The man from the sphere, wounded though he was, smashed his gauntlet weapon through the asbestos shield and almost succeeded in knocking it from the keeper’s hands. Before he could withdraw the gauntlet, which seemed to be stuck, Khuv shouted: “Show him your fire! But only show it to him—don’t burn him!”

  Perhaps they were a little too eager: a jet of flame lashed out, lapped at the warrior’s side where he screamed his rage and terror and turned away. And when the fire was snuffed out at its source, still chemical flames leaped up the man’s body from his side, burning away his beard, eyebrows, and setting fire to the single lock of black hair on his head.

  He began to blister, screamed in agony and beat at the flames with his left hand. Then he snatched the asbestos shield from the soldier who held it and hurled it at the squad. Before they could recover from this, he turned and staggered, still smoking, back toward the shiny white sphere.

  “Stop him!” Khuv shouted. “Shoot him—but in the legs! Don’t let him go back!” He began firing, and the man jerked and staggered as bullets smashed into the back of his naked thighs and lower legs. He had almost reached his objective when a lucky shot hit him behind the right knee and knocked him down. But he was close enough to the sphere to try hurling himself into it. Except—

  —It threw him back! It was as if he’d tried to dive through a brick wall.

  And at that moment, watching the film, Jazz had known—as those who had been present had known, and everyone who’d seen the film since—that the Gate was a mantrap. Like the pitcher plant, it allowed its victims access, then denied them egress. Once through the Gate, the creatures from the other side were stuck here. And Jazz had wondered: would it be the same for someone going through from this side? Except of course there was no way anyone was ever going to find out—was there?

  “Now he has to come quietly!” Khuv was jubilant. As the firing ceased he ran down the walkway toward the flame-thrower squad, stood behind them watching the pitiful antics of the man from the Gate. At that moment Jazz had found himself feeling sorry for the weird visitor, but the moment had not lasted long.

  The man sat up, shook himself dazedly, reached out a hand toward the shining sphere. His hand met resistance, could not proceed. He got to his knees, turned to face his tormentors. His scarlet eyes opened wide and glared his hatred at them; he hissed at them, spat his contempt onto the walkway. Even with great yellow blisters bursting and seeping their fluid all down his right side, crippled and—helpless?—still he defied them.

  Khuv stepped to the fore, pointed at the gauntlet on the warrior’s right hand. “Take it off!” he made unmistakable gestures. “Get rid of it—now!”

  The man looked at his gauntlet and, incredibly, struggled to his feet. Khuv backed away, aimed his gun. “Take that bloody thing off your hand!” he demanded.

  But the man from the sphere only smiled. He looked at Khuv’s gun, at the flame-projector whose nozzle pointed directly at him, and smiled a twisted smile. It was a strange expression, combining triumph, unbearable irony, even sardonic sadness or melancholy. But never a sign of fear. “Wamphyri,” the man thumbed his chest, lifting his head in pride. Then … he laid back his head and literally howled the word: “Wamphyri!”

  As the echoes of that cry died away, he thrust his face forward and glared once more at the men on the walkway, and there was that in his look
which said: “Do your worst. You are nothing. You know nothing!”

  “The gauntlet!” Khuv cried again, pointing. He fired a shot in the air for emphasis, aimed his gun at the warrior’s heart. But in the next moment he inhaled sharply, audibly, and let his air out in a gasp.

  Standing there on the walkway, swaying a little from side to side, the man from the sphere had opened his jaws, opened them impossibly wide. A forked tongue, scarlet, lashed in the cavern of his mouth. The gape of his jaws expanded more yet; they visibly elongated, making a sound like tearing sailcloth. And because all else was total silence and the rest of the tableau was frozen, the sight and sounds of his metamorphosis were that much more vivid.

  Jazz had held his breath as he watched; and now, in his cell, he held it again at the very memory of what he’d seen:

  The warrior’s fleshy lips had rolled back, stretching until they split, spurting blood and revealing crimson gums and jagged, dripping teeth. The entire mouth had resembled nothing so much as the yawning muzzle of a rabid wolf—but the rest of the face had been as bad if not worse! The squat, flattened nose had grown broader, developed convoluted ridges like the snout of a bat, whose oval nostrils were shiny-black flaring pits in dark, wrinkled leather. The ears, previously flat to the head, had sprouted patches of coarse hair, growing upward and outward to form scarlet-veined and nervously mobile shapes like fleshy conchs; and in this respect, too, the effect was batlike. Or perhaps demoniac.