The Source

The creature was hungry, and Agursky - unable to sleep despite the half-bottle of vodka he'd consumed -had decided to come down here and feed it. The queer thing (one of many queer things) was this: that lately he'd noticed how its moods seemed to affect him. When it was restless, so was he. Likewise when it was hungry. Tonight, despite the fact that he'd eaten fairly well during the day, he had felt hungry. And so he'd known that it must be hungry, too. It didn't really need to eat, not that he'd been able to discover, but it did like to. Offal from the cookhouse, blood of slaughtered beasts, the matted hides and hooves, eyes and brains and guts which men scorned - all of these things were grist for its mill. Ground up, they'd all go in through its feeder tube, and the thing in the tank would devour the lot.

'What the hell are you?' Agursky asked the creature for what must have been the thousandth time since it came into his care. Frustrating to say the least, for if anyone should have known the answer to his question it was Agursky himself. Zoology and psychology were his 'A' subjects; he'd been brought in specifically to study the thing and find out what made it tick, but all he'd discovered so far was that it ticked. After he'd worked with it for only a month or so other scientists, supposedly better qualified, had come to see it. Agursky had been slacking, apparently. But they'd looked at it, studied his notes, shaken their heads and gone away baffled. And he'd been left to get on with it. But get on with what? He knew the creature as intimately as any man could possibly wish to know it, and still he didn't know it.

Its blood was similar to the blood of all Earth's myriad animals, but sufficiently dissimilar to any of them as to make it alien. On the scales of intelligence it was not a higher species - not in comparison with Man, the dolphins, canines, apes - and yet it did have a certain sly intelligence. Its eyes, for example, were near-hypnotic. Every now and then Agursky had to stop staring it down and look away, or he was liable to go to sleep. The thing had put him to sleep on several occasions. And nightmares had invariably brought him gibbering awake.

It could be taught but resisted learning: it knew, for instance, that when its keeper showed it a white card food was coming. Also that a black card meant it was in danger of receiving an electrical shock. It had learned, painfully, that white and black cards together meant: 'Don't touch the food until the black card is taken away'. But to show it those cards together would produce a great fury in it. When food was available it did not like being denied it, or threatened through it. These were a few of the things Agursky had learned about the creature, but he would get the uncomfortable feeling just looking at it that it had learned far more about him. Another thing he knew about it was this: that it had a capacity for hate. And he knew who it hated.

'Feeding time,' he told it. 'I'm going to pump some vile, rancid, gone-off shit in there with you. And you're going to slurp it up like mother's milk and honey sweet from the comb - you bloody thing.' Doubtless it would prefer a live white rat or two, but the sight (even the thought) of that had already given Agursky too many bad dreams. For that was something else he'd learned about the thing in the tank: that while it would take dead, clotted blood readily enough, it in fact preferred it straight from a perforated, pulsing artery. Namely, that it was a vampire.

As Agursky stood up and began to prepare the feeding apparatus, he remembered the first time he'd tried the thing with a live rat. That had meant first drugging the creature in the tank and putting it well and truly to sleep. A small amount of blood containing a massive dose of tranquillizing agent had seen to that; after the thing had groggily retreated beneath the sand of its tank to sleep, then the heavy lid had been undamped and lifted, and the wriggling rat inserted. Three hours later (a remarkably short spell for the drug dosage) the thing had regained its senses and surfaced to see what was going on.

The rat hadn't stood a chance. Oh, it had fought as only a cornered rat can fight, but to no avail. The vampire had held it down, bitten through its neck and siphoned off its living blood. And it had formed a pair of fleshy, needle-tipped tubes to do so, actual siphons which it had slid into the rat's severed vessels.

The 'meal' had taken only a minute or two to complete, and Agursky had never seen the creature so avid for its food. After that... occasionally the thing would take on certain rodent characteristics, which its keeper assumed it had 'learned' from the creature it devoured. Nor was 'devoured' too strong a word for it; for after leeching the rat's blood, then the creature had consumed skin, bones, tail and all!

From this and subsequent meals of living food, Agursky had drawn several conclusions, however unproven. Encounter One had been a vampire; or if not vampiric, certainly it had been a carnivore. It had been seen to devour men whole before it fled the complex. Encounter Two, the wolf, was also a predator, a flesh-eater. Four was a bat - but specifically a vampire bat. And five... he had declared himself to be Wamphyri. Was there anything at all in that world beyond the Gate which was not vampiric or savagely carnivorous? Agursky's conclusion: that world was not one he would care to visit to find out at first hand.

Another speculation or line of thought which might lead to a number of unthinkable conclusions was this: that three of the five encounters - the five incursions from beyond - had been shape-changers, creatures which were not bound to one form. The thing in the tank, having examined and eaten a rat, could now assume an imperfect rodent identity. Would it also be able to emulate a man? Which in turn begged the question, was the Wamphyri warrior a man with the ability to change his shape, or had he been something else which now merely imitated a man?

Morbid thoughts and questions such as these had driven Agursky to drink, and thinking them again now made him wish he had a bottle with him right here, right now. But he didn't. The sooner he could get done with this, the sooner he'd be able to get back to his quarters and drink himself to sleep.

Just inside the door stood a trolley with the creature's food in a lidded container. The container was hooked up to an electric pump. Agursky wheeled the trolley closer to the tank and plugged in to the power supply. He coupled up the container's outlet to a feeder tube in the end wall of the tank, turned the valves on the container and tank to the open position and started the motor. The electric motor was quietly efficient; with a cough and a gurgle, glutinous liquids commenced to flow.

As he worked, Agursky had been aware that the thing was watching him. Strangely, it had not turned toward the food supply but remained in the position in which he'd left it. Only its eyes had swivelled to follow his movements. Agursky was puzzled. Dark red lumps of minced meat in a stream of semi-clotted beast-blood were jetting in sporadic spurts into the tank, forming a foul heap of guts on the sand at that end of the thing's 'lair'. And still it hadn't moved.

Agursky frowned. The creature could consume half its own weight at a time, and it hadn't been fed for four days. Could it be sick? Was its air supply OK? And now what the hell was it doing?

He went back to his chair and seated himself as before, with his arms folded on the backrest and his chin resting on the back of his left hand. The creature stared back at him through eyes which now seemed very nearly human. Its face, too, had lost much of its rodent identity and had taken on more nearly human outlines. The leech-like body sac was elongating, losing its dark colour and corrugations. Legs were developing, and arms - and breasts?