had had his office, which Dragosani had turned into his control room on the night of the 
horror.
  The stairwell was scarred and blackened, with tiny fragments of shrapnel, flattened 
lead bullets and copper cases lying everywhere. The stink of cordite was still heavy in 
the air. That would be from blast grenades, tossed down here from above when the tower 
came under attack. But none of this had stopped Harry Keogh and his Tartars. On the 
second floor landing the door to a tiny anteroom stood open. The room had served as an 
office for Borowitz's secretary, Yul Galenski. Krakovitch had known him personally: a 
generally timid man, a clerk with no extrasensory talent. Just staff.
  Between the open door and the stairwell's safety rail, face down on the landing, lay a 
corpse in the Chateau's duty uniform: grey coveralls with a single diagonal yellow stripe 
across the heart. Not Galenski (he had been a "civvies only" man) but the Duty Officer. 
The corpse's face lay quite flat on the floor in a pool of blood. Flatter than it should. 
That was because there was very little of actual face left, just a raw flat mess.
  Krakovitch and Gulharov stepped carefully over the body, entered the little office. 
Behind a desk, crumpled in one corner, Galenski sat clutching a rusty curved sword where 
it stuck out of his chest. It had been driven home with such force that he was pinned to 
the wall. His eyes were still open, but no longer terrified. From some people, death 
steals all emotion.
  "Mother in heaven!" Gulharov whispered. He'd never seen anything like this. He wasn't 
even a combat soldier, not yet.
  They went through a second door into what had been Borowitz's office. It was spacious, 
with great bullet-proof bay windows looking out and down from the tower's curving stone 
wall toward distant woodland. The carpet was burned and stained here and there. A massive 
block of a desk in solid oak stood in one corner, receiving light from the windows and 
protection from the stone wall at its back. As for the rest of the room: it was a 
shambles-and a nightmare!
  A shattered radio spilled its guts onto the floor; walls were pockmarked and the door 
splintered from the impact of sprayed bullets; the body of a young man in Western styled 
clothes lay where it had fallen, ripped by machine gun fire, almost in two pieces behind 
the door. It was glued to the floor with its own blood. This was Harry Keogh's body: 
nothing much to look at, but there was no fear or pain on his white, unmarked face.
  As for the nightmare: that lay propped against the wall on the other side of the room.
  "Boris Dragosani," said Krakovitch, pointing. "The thing pinned to his chest is what 
controlled him, I think." He stepped carefully across the room to stand gazing down on 
what was left of Dragosani and his parasite creature; Gulharov was right behind him, not 
wanting to get too close.
  Both of Dragosani's legs were broken and lay at weird angles. His arms hung slack down 
the wall to the skirting, elbows just off the floor, forearms at ninety degrees and hands 
projecting well beyond the cuffs of his jacket. They were hands like claws, big, powerful 
and grasping, frozen in Dragosani's final spasm. His face was a rictus of agony, made 
worse by the fact that it was hardly a human face at all, and worse still by the gash 
that split his skull ear to ear.
  But his face!
  Dragosani's jaws were long as some great hound's, gaping open to display curving needle 
teeth. His skull was misshapen, and his ears were pointed where they curved forward and 
lay flat against his temples. His eyes were ruptured red pits above a nose long and 
wrinkled and flattened to show gaping nostrils, like the convoluted snout of some great 
bat. That was how he looked: part man, part wolf, part bat. And the thing pinned to his 
chest was worse.
  "What . . , what is that?" Gulharov gasped out the question.
  "God help me, Krakovitch shook his head, "I don't know! But it lived in him. I mean, 
inside him. It only came out at the end."
  The trunk of the thing had the form of a great leech some eighteen inches long, but 
tapering to a tail. There were no limbs; it seemed to cling to Dragosani's chest by 
suction, and was held there by a sharp stake formed of the splintered hardwood stock of a 
heavy-duty machine gun; its skin was grey-green, corrugated. Gulharov saw that its head, 
flat and cobra-like-but eyeless, blind-lay on the carpet a little apart.
  Like... like some gigantic tapeworm?" Gulharov's horror was plain on his face.
  "Something like that," Krakovitch nodded grimly. "But intelligent, evil, and deadly."
  "Why have we come up here?" Gulharov's Adam's apple bobbed. "There are fifty million 
better places to be."
  Krakovitch's face was white, pinched. He could fully appreciate Gulharov's feelings. 
"We've come up here because we have to burn this, that's why." His talent again, warning 
him that both Dragosani and his symbiont must be destroyed, utterly. He looked around, 
saw a tall steel filing cabinet standing against the wall to one side of the door. He and 
Gulharov tore out the shelving, turning the cabinet into a metal coffin. They lowered it 
onto its back and dragged it across the floor to Dragosani.
  "You take his shoulders, I'll take his thighs," said Krakovitch. "Once we've got him in 
here we can close the door and slide the cabinet down the steps. Frankly, I don't fancy 
touching him. I'll touch him as little as possible. This way has to be best."
  They gingerly lifted the corpse, strained to get it over the rim of the cabinet, 
lowered it inside. Gulharov went to close the door and the projecting stake got in the 
way. He grasped the splintered stock in both hands-and the mental warning hit Krakovitch 
like a fist in his heart!
  "Don't touch that!" he yelled, but too late.
  As Gulharov wrenched the stake free, so the leech-thing-headless as it was-came alive. 
Its hideous slug-like body began to lash in a frenzy, so that it almost ejected itself 
from the cabinet. At the same time its leathery skin broke open in a dozen places, 
putting out protoplasmic tentacles that writhed and vibrated in a sort of mindless agony. 
These pseudopods whipped out, struck the sides of the cabinet and recoiled, settled on 
Dragosani's body. They passed through clothing and dead flesh and burrowed into him. More 
of them sprouted from the main body; they formed barbs, hooked themselves into 
Dragosani's flesh. One of the tentacles found his chest cavity; it thickened rapidly to 
the diameter of a man's wrist; the rest dissolved their barbs, released their holds, 
withdrew and followed the main branch into him. With a final sucking plop the entire 
organism drew itself down into Dragosani's body. His trunk began to heave and throb where 
it lay in the cabinet.
  While all of this occurred, so Gulharov had danced away and clambered up onto the desk. 
He was mouthing half-inarticulate obscenities, shrieking like a woman. And he was 
pointing at something. Krakovitch, almost numb with shock and horror, saw the 
leech-creature's flat cobra head vibrating on the floor, flipping and flopping like a 
stranded flatfish. He gave a cry of loathing, began to panic, then gripped himself tight 
and drove the panic out. Finally he slammed the cabinet door shut and shot the bolt.
  He grabbed a metal drawer from the cabinet's scattered guts, yelled: "Well, help me!"
  Gulharov got down off the desk. He still had the stake, was hanging on to it like grim 
death. Prodding the flopping head, and cursing all the time under his breath, finally he 
juggled the thing into Krakovitch's drawer. Krakovitch slammed a section of shelving down 
on top of it, and Gulharov brought a pair of heavy ledgers to put on top of that. Both 
cabinet and drawer shuddered and shook for a few seconds more, then were still.