29

29

H . P. M UNCK REMOVED his soiled steel-toed boots, leaving them outside the iron door of the room, and tiptoed inside in bare feet. The plush Persian carpet tickled his toes—horned with calluses—in a most luxurious way. Holding up his kerosene lantern, he paused to take in the opulence. It still smelled slightly foul—the recent corpse of that man, Ferenc—but he was not one to find such a natural stench off-putting. Quite the contrary.

He took several more steps into the room. The bed, piled with rich coverings and overtopped with a satin puff, had not been made since he'd removed the corpse, but it nevertheless looked inviting, the clammy air of the room merely adding to the coziness. Taking a small taper from his pocket, he lit it from the lantern, then applied the flame to the many candles that had been placed about the room, filling it with a warm, flickering light.

Ahhhh , thought Munck. This was delightful. He was tired—very tired. Master had kept him especially busy of late, and Munck hadn't had any time to himself in weeks. Until this morning.

The candles having been lit, he approached the bed and crawled in feetfirst, and then drew the covers up to his chin. As he lay, feeling the cold sheets warm up, he thought about how perfect this moment of privacy promised to be. The smells, the knowledge of what had taken place here—all that was missing was… Wait! Just as he was turning his head on the pillows and closing his eyes, he made out a few droplets of dried blood. They must have oozed from Ferenc's ear after his death but still been fresh when his body was laid here: a present for the Pale One.

For a H?mophile such as Munck, this was now truly perfection. As he grew nice and toasty, he reached into his pocket and withdrew a silver flask, raising it to his lips to take a long pull on the contents—raw, unfiltered vodka from his native village of Elkhotovo, rare and expensive, available only in the small Russian ghetto of Hamilton Heights, a mile or so east of the master's mansion.

As the liquid burned its way down his throat, old memories came back—the days of his youth, before Russia's almost total extermination of his native Circassian lands—and the depravity and carnage he'd witnessed. But it was not the violence and bloodshed of Tsarist Russia that he dwelt on, but rather scenes of depravity and carnage he'd committed on his own, hidden for the most part by the greater genocide going on all around him. Another sip of the harsh liquid, and the memories grew still more vivid. Eyes closed, he murmured words in a strange tongue as he nuzzled against the bloody pillow.

Abruptly, his mind snapped back to the present. He'd heard a noise: a distant crump! followed by two more in rapid succession. Crump, crump! With each, a faint shudder had passed through the stone walls.

What was that?

He listened intently, but no more sounds came to his ears. It had been distant—and as the silence stretched on, he decided it was nothing to be concerned about. He once again drew up the covers and closed his eyes, his mind returning to a particularly arousing incident in which he had taken a long—but again, his stream of bloody reveries was interrupted. This time, it had been by a faint breeze stirring his greasy hair.

A breeze, down here? He didn't recollect ever noticing one before. How was that possible?

And then another sound reached him, very different this time: like the whispering of a distant storm, mingled with a strange chorus of squeaking and squealing. It was drawing closer—and growing rapidly in intensity.

Munck sat bolt upright. He recognized the squeaking. It was rats: many, many rats. He had no idea what the whispering was, except it was rising fast—and coming his way.

He got out of bed, went to the half-open iron door of the room, and stuck out his head. The wind in the tunnel was, incredibly, not only strong, but increasing, carrying with it the commotion of the rats. And underneath that horrible chorus of squealing, that other sound was growing louder: not so much a whisper as it was like the continuous reverberation of surf.

He stepped partway outside, holding his lantern up to cast light farther along the tunnel, and saw an astonishing sight: hundreds—thousands—of tiny glowing eyes jittering and bobbing toward him. It was a multitude, an army, of rats—running his way in frenzied panic.

Just as they reached him, he jumped back into the room to avoid being overwhelmed. But none of them had any interest in swarming his chamber. Instead, they just streamed past as he watched, their coarsely bristled tails glistening pink, their bodies mangy, filling the corridor with their squeal and stink.

Munck had a most vivid imagination, but even he could not begin to guess what was happening, or why. He stood, dumbfounded, until the stampede had finally passed, leaving only a few crippled or sick animals in their wake. He'd been so dumbstruck at the sight of the leaping, crawling rodents that at first he didn't notice that the wind had continued to rise and, along with it, that other sound—growing in volume until it was a deafening roar, loud as an approaching train.

Suddenly, Munck understood: water. Not just water: a subterranean flood. He quickly pivoted away from the sound, intending to flee down the corridor in the same direction as the rats, but he was too late. With a roar, a wall of black water came barreling down the tunnel, moving like a living thing, the force of it knocking him back into the room and pushing the iron door shut. Munck scrambled to his feet in a panic: the door, he knew, was designed to lock itself from the outside.

He was trapped.

The door shook from the force of the water, torrents of foul viscous liquid squirting from under the sill and pouring out of a feeding slot in the door, the pressure of its gush quickly covering the floor.

" No! " Munck cried as he tried to slide the feeding slot shut, but the pressure of the water made it impossible. More gushes were surging in from beneath the door.

Water was now filling the room with astonishing rapidity, icy cold and horribly greasy, swirling around his ankles and surging upward, first to his calves, then his thighs. He cried and pounded on the iron door, but he knew no one could hear him—let alone save him. Even if he could open the door himself, he would be drowned in the rush of water beyond. The water swirled about, and as it rose it formed a violent whirlpool that circled the room and began snuffing out the candles. This flood couldn't keep up, the water couldn't keep rising… and yet it did. Munck placed the lantern as high over his head as he could, atop a bureau, then climbed into the bed that smelled of death and pulled the covers up above his head, wrapping himself in a resignation of abject terror. Even though he shut his eyes tightly, he felt the water top the level of the mattress and flood into the sheets, churning around and invading his cocoon; he felt it rise and rise, flooding him until he was choking and spitting. Then it rose above his head and he found himself floating, his mind collapsing in confusion as the clothes and blankets dragged him down from the roiling surface. When his head slipped beneath it and he could no longer take in air, he held his breath until he could hold it no more—then, in an automatic and unstoppable physical reaction, breathed in the frigid black liquid, and that was the end.