‘God, God, oh God!' Jordan cried, riveted to the spot.

Layard shouldered him aside, squeezed the trigger on his flame-thrower, turned the entire shower unit into a blistering, steaming pressure-cooker. After several seconds he stopped hosing, and stared with Jordan at the result. Black smoke and steam cleared and the water continued to hiss, spurting from half-a-dozen places now in the molten plastic tubing of the shower's system. In the shallow well, Helen Lake's body slumped, features bubbling, hair like smouldering stubble, every inch of her skin peeling from her in great raw strips.

‘God help us!' Jordan gasped, turned away to be sick.

‘God?' the thing in the shower croaked, like a voice from the abyss. ‘What god? You bloody black bastards!'

Impossibly she came erect, took a blind, stumbling, groping step forward.

Layard torched her again, but more out of mercy than from fear. He let his flame-thrower roar until fire belched out of the shower and threatened to burn him, too. Then he switched off, backed away down the corridor to where Jordan stood retching over the stair's balustrade.

From below, Roberts's voice reached anxiously up to them: ‘Ken? Trevor? What is it?'

Layard wiped his forehead. ‘We... we got the girl,' he whispered, then shouted, ‘We got the girl!'

‘We got her mother,' Roberts answered, ‘and Bodescu's dog. That leaves Bodescu himself, and his mother.'

‘There's a door up here, locked,' Layard called back. ‘I thought I heard someone in there.'

‘Can't you break it in?'

‘No, it's oak, old and heavy. I could burn it. .

‘No time for that. And if there is anyone in there, they're finished anyway. The cellars are mined by now.

You'd better come down — and quickly! We have to get out of here.'

Layard dragged Jordan after him down the stairs, calling ahead, ‘Guy, where the hell have you been?'

‘I'm on my own,' Roberts responded. ‘Trask's out of it for now — but he's OK. Where've I been? I've been checking this place through downstairs.'

‘A waste of time,' Jordan groaned, half to himself.

‘What?' Roberts raised his voice more yet.

‘I said, we'd already done it!' Jordan yelled, but needlessly for they were down the stairs, with Roberts propelling them towards the entrance hall and the open door...

Simon Gower and Harvey Newton had gone down into the cellars via the outbuilding with its narrow steps and central ramp. Loaded down with almost two hundred pounds of explosives between them, they had found the lights out of order, and so been obliged to use pocket torches. The vaults under the house were black and silent as a tomb, seemed extensive as a catacomb. They stuck close together, dumping thermite and plastic explosive packages wherever they found support walls or buttressed archways, and even though they went with something of caution, still they managed rapidly to fairly well saturate the place with their load. Newton carried a small can of petrol with which he left a trail from one dump to the next, until the whole place reeked of highly volatile fuel.

Finally they were satisfied that they'd explored and mined every part — and likewise pleased that they'd come across nothing dangerous — and so turned back and retraced their tracks to the exit. At a place they both agreed to be approximately central under the house, they set down the last of their load. Then Newton splashed what was left of his petrol all the way to the foot of the out building steps, while Gower double-checked the charges they'd planted, making sure they were all amply primed. - At the steps Newton tossed down his empty can, turned

and looked back into the gloom. From a little way back, round a corner, he could hear Gower's hoarse breathing and he knew that the other man worked furiously at his task. Gower's torch made flickering patches of light back there, its beam swinging this way and that as he worked.

Roberts appeared at the top of the steps, called down, ‘Newton, Gower? You can come up out of there as quick as you like. We're all set if you are. The others are spread out round the house, just waiting. The mist has cleared. So if anything tries to break loose, we'll —‘

‘Harvey?' Gower's tremulous voice came out of the darkness, several notes higher up the scale than it should be. ‘Harvey, was that you just then?'

Newton called back, ‘No, it's Roberts. Hurry up, will you?'

‘No, not Roberts,' Gower was breathless, almost whispering. ‘Something else . .

Roberts and Newton looked at each other round-eyed. The ground gave itself a shake, a very definite tremor. From inside the cellars, Gower screamed.

Roberts came half-way down the steps, stumbling and yelling: ‘Simon, get out of there! Hurry, man!'

Gower screamed again, the cry of a trapped animal. ‘It's here, Guy! Oh, God — it's here! Under the ground!'

Newton made to go in after him but Roberts reached down and grabbed his collar. The ground was shaking now, dust billowing out of the yawning mouth of the old cellars. There were rending sounds, and other noises which might or might not be Gower choking his life out. Bricks started to slide loose from rotten mortar in the retaining walls, spilling down the sides of the ramp.

Newton started to back up the trembling steps, with Roberts dragging him from above. When they were almost at the top, they saw a cloud of dust and debris suddenly expelled forcefully from the entrance to the cellar — and then the door itself was lifted off its rusty hinges and hurled down at the foot of the ramp, a mass of splintered boards.

Something was framed in the dusty gap of the entrance. It was Gower, and it was more than Gower. He hung for a moment suspended in the otherwise empty doorway, swaying left and right. Then he emerged more fully and the watchers saw the huge, leprous trunk which propelled him. The thing — indeed ‘the Other' — had entered his back in a solid shaft of matter, but inside Gower its massive pseudopod of vampire flesh had branched, following his pipes and conduits to several exits. Tentacles writhed from his gaping mouth and nostrils, the sockets of his dislocated eyes, his ruptured ears. And even as Roberts and Newton clambered in a frenzy of terror up the last few steps from the ramp, so Gower's entire front burst open, revealing a lashing nest of crimson, groping worms!

‘Jesus!' Guy Roberts shouted then, his voice a sand-papered howl of horror and hatred. ‘Sweet J-e-s-u-s!'

He aimed his hose down the ramp. ‘Goodbye, Simon. God grant you peace!'

Liquid fire roared its rage, ran like a flood down the ramp, hurled itself in a fireball at the suspended man and the beast-thing holding him upright. The great pseudopod was instantly retracted — Gower with it, snatched back like a rag doll — and Roberts aimed his hose directly at the doorway at the foot of the steps. He turned the valve up full, and a shimmering jet of heat blasted its way into the cellar, fanning out inside the labyrinth of vaults into every niche and corner. For a count of five Roberts held it. Then came the first explosion.

Down went the entrance in a massive shuddering of earth. A shockwave of lashing heat hurled dirt and pebbles up the ramp, knocking Roberts and Newton off their feet. Roberts's finger automatically came off the trigger. His weapon smoked hot but silent in his hands. And crump! crump! crump! came evenly spaced, muffled concussions from deep in the earth, each one shaking the ground with pile-driver power.

Faster came the underground explosions, occurring in sporadic bursts, occasionally twinned, as the planted charges reacted to the heat and added to the unseen inferno. Newton got up and helped Roberts to his feet. They stumbled clear of the house, took up positions with Layard and Jordan, a man to each of the four corners but standing well back. The old barn, still blazing, began to vibrate as if itself alive and suffering its death agonies. Finally it shook itself to pieces and slid down into the suddenly seething earth. For a moment a lashing tentacle reached up from the shuddering foundations to a height of some twenty feet, then collapsed and was sucked back down into the quaking, liquefying quag of earth and fire.