The Hammer Horror Omnibus (6 page)

A dark girl with high cheekbones and deep eyes lost in shadow stood by the table.

She said: “Forgive me for intruding. The door was open—I couldn’t make anyone hear . . .”

“Who are you?”

“I’m Carla Hoffmann.” She came towards the door, and as she moved she gave off a faint musky scent which went well with her graceful, almost animal walk. Yet seen at close quarters she was a trim, modern young woman with an urban self-assurance. “Dr. Namaroff’s assistant at the Institution,” she added.

“Can I help you?” said Paul with no great enthusiasm. Her attractiveness was undeniable, but if she was Namaroff’s assistant he was in no mood to be attracted.

“I’d like to help
you
if I can,” she said.

“Does Namaroff know you’re here?”

“He’d be very angry if he did.” When Paul waited noncommittally, she burst out: “Please believe me, I only came here to see if there was anything I could do.”

“Nobody in Vandorf seems very anxious to do anything for me,” said Paul dourly.

Carla looked past him, down the steps, and out into the forest. She said: “Did Dr. Namaroff say anything to you about the local superstitions? About the thing that roams the woods?”

“He didn’t want to talk about anything of the kind. He doesn’t believe in any of it.”

“Doesn’t he?” said Carla softly. “Perhaps he believes more than he will admit. Your father tried to discuss the fear with him—and although he made a show of brushing it all aside, I know he is beginning to worry about . . . about . . .”

“Yes?”

“The creature.”

“Have you seen her?” Paul demanded. Madness, yes; but they were all afflicted by it, and he had a wild moment of debating whether or not this might be the dark curse of the place—an obsessive, contagious madness, a mass hysteria which one puff of sanity might, under the right conditions, dispel.

“Nobody,” said Carla, “has seen her and lived.”

“Do you really think that Namaroff believes in her?”

“He believes in something that he won’t dare to admit, even to himself. But
you
. . . Mr. Heitz,
you
must believe in her.”

Paul was taken aback. “Why?”

“If you don’t, you’ll see no reason to leave here at once. And if you stay, you’ll be found like the others. Here, you’re too great a threat. You won’t be allowed to survive.”

A short time ago Paul had been sanely and sensibly planning to leave because there was nothing to be accomplished here. Now it suddenly became imperative that he should stay. In the span of a few weeks he had lost first his brother and then his father. He could not desert them now. Vandorf had defeated them, but there was still another member of the family to carry on the battle.

He said: “I’m grateful to you, but I can’t leave.”

“Please . . .”

Her concern was so genuine that he felt an impulse to put his arm round her and reassure her. Indeed, he was startled by the force of his own longing to hold her. If things had been different—if he had come to this idyllic setting and met this beautiful girl without any background of menace and hostility—they could have meant something to each other. It was as swift and sure as that.

Bitterly he thought of Bruno, who had loved and died here.

Carla said: “I must go. I’m on duty in half an hour. But please do as I say. Please, for your own sake, leave Vandorf.”

When she had gone he was drawn back despite himself to that perplexing, insane letter. He picked it up and, denying that it could mean any part of what it said, read it yet again.

7

A
t night the bustle of the Institution slackened to the tempo of sleep—a steady, rhythmic breathing in a twilight of shaded lamps. The petulant chatter of the larger wards was hushed. In a private room a sleepless patient tried to read herself into drowsiness. In Namaroff’s office, Carla recited from memory:

“ ‘If someone in Vandorf is possessed or subject to periodic fits of possession, that person must be found. In my view it will prove to be a woman. Symbolically and metaphysically this is inevitable. A woman who has become only the slave of this ancient evil, enabling it to satisfy its greed for slaughter. I am trying to find rational terms for a phenomenon which is in fact one of pure terror. Perhaps the old, original terms must stand. The Gorgons—heads crowned with living snakes—anyone who looked on them was petrified. Hence the word “Gorgonized”—literally meaning turned to stone. Incredible. But our whole history is incredible, filled with monsters and fear.’ ” Carla stopped. “I’m sorry. He came back into the house just then. That’s all I had time to memorize.”

She would have liked to add that she had found even this much of the task unpalatable. She had not enjoyed spying on that young man, whose presence in Vandorf was like an affirmation from another world—a saner, cleaner outside world.

“Hm.” Namaroff had been seated at his bureau. Now he got up and paced slowly across the room. “The Professor was an expert on the literary aspects of such myths. I am beginning to feel that he was closer to the reality than I allowed myself to believe at the time.”

Carla was chilled by this admission. Namaroff had never been one to reveal doubts and hesitations easily.

He turned at the end of a stride and caught her expression. Before she realized what was happening he had put his hands on her shoulders and tried to draw her close to him.

“Carla . . . you’ve got to trust me. I want you to stay with me—stay where I know you’re safe.”

He tried to kiss her. She twisted aside and freed herself from his grasp. His eyes gleamed with desire, and at last she summoned up the courage to say what had been in her mind for so long. “I want to leave Vandorf,” she said.

“Leave? You can’t. After all I’ve done for you . . .”

“I’m grateful to you,” she said in as level a tone as possible, “but I think I’ve been here too long. I’m not working as well as I should—”

“I’ve never made any complaints,” he said quickly. “After your illness you were afraid of being sent away. I kept you on, looked after you, gave you time to recover your self-confidence, and I thought . . . I thought . . .”

It was rare to see him at such a loss. Carla said: “I know. And it’s because of what you’ve been thinking that I know I must leave. I owe you a lot, Dr. Namaroff, and I respect you and your work. But I can’t stay in Vandorf any longer, let alone here with you.”

She had tried to make it sound regretful but firm. His face worked. When his answer came it was as savage as a blow across the face.

“You can’t leave,” he said. “That’s the truth of it. I won’t let you leave. You are not to go out of this building without letting me know.”

“Not . . . but that’s ridiculous.”

“You are in grave danger,” said Namaroff.

“Danger?”

“One thing I can tell you . . .”

Abruptly the door was flung open and Ratoff stood there, his hair unkempt and a bruise beginning to swell below his left eye.

He panted: “That devil! She’s out.”

“Martha?” gasped Carla.

“Look for her,” snapped Namaroff. “Don’t waste any time. Take who you need. And don’t come back here till you’ve found her.”

“If I do find her,” said Ratoff, “I’ll kill her.”

“You’ll bring her back alive.”

Ratoff scowled, but turned away. Namaroff slumped against the edge of his bureau. Tiredness dragged the lines of his face down.

Carla said quietly: “Perhaps we’d better talk again . . . settle things . . . tomorrow.”

Namaroff nodded. Then he seemed to bring her back into focus. He reached out again and seized her arm.

“I was about to tell you that I’m forced to agree with one of Professor Heitz’s suppositions. We must assume that the Gorgon has taken on human form.”

“Human?”

Carla glanced instinctively at the window. The curtains were drawn, but she could visualize, beyond the garden and under the black canopy of the trees, poor demented Martha ranging the forest . . . in search of what?

8

T
he wind had begun to rise in the middle of the evening. A few flecks of rain spattered against the windows of the old millhouse and struck a reverberating note from the section of window that had been boarded up after the assault on Professor Heitz. In the distance thunder muttered over the hills.

Paul Heitz had drunk half a bottle of wine and was staring into the wood fire that crackled fitfully in the iron basket of the grate. The weather was still mild but he found the flames cheering, and Hans had been glad to build the fire for him. It was something useful and normal.

Not that it was proving of much use to Paul. He sought inspiration and found none. The licking flames were soothing, not stimulating.

He had no idea where to begin.

Unless, of course, he explored Castle Borski. He had not dared to approach the villagers too frankly after all that he had heard of their previous behavior, but even in passing them he could not have failed to notice how they kept their eyes averted from the castle, how the houses themselves were built in such a way that their windows did not face towards the commanding turrets. He had not collated the references to Castle Borski in the various books which his father had left, but its appearance in several scribbled notes left no doubt that in the Professor’s mind it had played an important part in recent events.

Paul, determined to shake off his languor of frustration, got up and went out on to the garden steps.

The rain had coaxed a fresh, pungent smell from the grasses and the trees. It was still not heavy, and when Paul strolled down towards the fishpond he lifted his face into the cooling shower.

Thunder throbbed again, and the moon edged a turbulent mass of clouds with silver. Somewhere far away, lightning flickered.

Paul looked down into the fishpond. The rain mottled the surface only faintly, not hard enough to distort the reflection of the wall, the edge of the millhouse, and his face.

And that other face . . .

At first he saw it as curling strands of weed below the surface of the pond. Then, as the moonlight brightened, he knew that it was a reflection of something behind him, looking down from a height—from one of the lower steps.

He almost turned. But when the features swayed gently into their hideous clarity, he was transfixed. There in the water was the face that no painter, no sculptor, no creative madman could ever have conceived. It was a warped, dead thing, drowned in the pond; and yet it was alive. Its lips drew back and those drifting tendrils became serpents. The eyes held Paul’s: he tried to look away, but if he looked away he would behold the reality of which this was only the palest reflection.

The snakes appeared to twist upwards in an effort to break the surface like slimy creatures of the pond. Paul could bear it no longer. He put his arm across his eyes and turned to run. But even as he began to lurch towards the house he knew that it . . .
she . .
. was waiting for him.

He tottered to one side. There must be a way round this side of the building to the front. He tried to shout for help, to arouse Hans, but then stifled the sound. If Hans were to come out now he might be face to face with the creature without warning.

Paul dared to lower his arm and search for the way alongside the millhouse. It came to an end in a jagged wall. He couldn’t get over. He pushed himself away from it, and his feet caught in a tangle of tall weeds. The world was going round. A clap of thunder was like some devilish jubilation. Paul felt himself reeling sideways, keeping his balance as he went but waiting to fall, until at last he struck the wall of the fishpond and sagged over it. His head smacked into the staring reflection of abomination and broke it into a swirl of ripples . . .

Somewhere there was an uncontrollable screaming. He drowned in a nest of weed and serpents, and all the time he was fighting to claw his way back to the surface that screaming went on.

His eyes, strangely, were tightly shut. He tried to open them. The serpents relaxed their grip, but the water still obscured his vision. Then a face began to form in it. Paul recognized the screaming voice as his own, and screamed louder as the face took on substance. If this time he was to see the Gorgon full face, he must die; and he didn’t want to die.

Then the fear drained away and he felt the cool sheet over him, the pillow under his head. Carla Hoffmann looked down at him.

“It’s all right,” she said gently.

“She was behind me,” he babbled, “waiting for me to turn. The heads of the snakes were plunging . . .”

“It was a dream,” she said. “Only a dream.”

“No.”

A door opened. Dr. Namaroff came into the neat, aseptic little room. He stood beside Carla and stared at Paul—not, thought Paul through the blur of returning consciousness, like a doctor concerned about his patient but like a man on the defensive, daring him to speak of what he had seen.

Paul said: “What happened to me?”

“Miss Hoffmann had some sort of presentiment that something was going to happen to you. We found you lying over the wall of the pool in your garden.”

The memory of a blasphemous monster stirred below the surface, swaying as the surface swayed—and then Paul fought it back into the depths where it belonged.

“How long have I been here?” he managed to ask.

“Five days.”

Paul, incredulous, tried to sit up. Carla put a restraining hand on his shoulder.

“Lie still,” said Namaroff. Then he went on, challenging yet reluctant: “Can you remember what happened before you fell?”

“I . . . I remember seeing . . . in the pool . . .”

“What? What did you see?”

Carla’s hand moved down to Paul’s and closed on it comfortingly. He said: “A face. The most horrible thing I’ve ever seen.”

“In the pool?”

“It must have been there behind me. But all I saw was . . . No!” It was fearful to think of, impossible to speak of. Paul turned over, burying his face in the pillow.

“You must rest,” said Namaroff in a more conventional, professional tone. “I’ll talk to you again in a day or two.”