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"Well?" said Romana.
Bernice dropped down and pressed her ear to the floor. "Come and listen!"
Romana sighed and lay down beside her. She put her ear to the flagstone and heard a faint steady hum of
power. There was something else behind the hum, a steady pulsing sound. Romana found it strangely
familiar.
They both got up.
"He said there was a generator," said Romana.
"That's no steam generator, it's something much more hi-tech. The thing is, how do we get to it? I'm pretty
sure there's an entrance in here."
Bernice roamed around the museum until she found herself standing before the portrait of the Great Vampire.
She drew back the curtain and rubbed her finger across the bottom of the painting. It came away smudged
with paint. "Ancient artist," she muttered. "It's so new the paint's still wet. So why bother, unless. . ." She
gripped the edge of the painting and pulled. It swung open like a door, revealing a real door behind it: a
perfectly ordinary door, made of shining steel. She opened it and revealed a metal staircase leading
downwards. She looked at Romana and started to descend the steps. Romana followed.
The metal steps led them down into an enormous, brightly lit underground chamber. Romana and Bernice
stopped at the bottom of the steps and stood looking around them.
The centre of the chamber was occupied by a colossal glass tank. The tank was filled with a dark swirling
fluid, at the heart of which floated a huge, dimly seen form. A low steady pulsing sound came from the tank,
like the beat of a great heart. One end of the room was filled with a complex-looking bank of instrument
consoles, humming with power.
Around the other three sides of the chamber were upright glass coffins. The coffins were occupied by
vampires, white-faced and bloody-fanged, eyes closed and hands folded on their breasts.
They heard the slam of the door and turned to see Lord Sargon looking down at them, no longer old and
white-haired but young and handsome. He smiled, stroking his chin with his long white hand. "You were right,
after all," he said. "Instant vampire - just add fresh blood and stir."
He seemed to float down the steps toward them, and Bernice instinctively snatched the blaster from her
pocket.
"Keep back!"
Sargon smiled and kept coming. Thumbing the blaster to the "kill" setting, Bernice fired.
Sargon's body absorbed the energy bolt with no apparent effect. He reached out and plucked the useless
blaster from Bernice's fingers, tossing it aside.
Faced with a smiling and apparently invulnerable enemy, Bernice reached into her other pocket, found the
Doctor's signalling device and did the only thing possible.
She pressed the panic button.
24 THE QUARRY
It was closing time at Doc's place, and the last customer had just left. Ace was bathed, dressed, fed and her
old stroppy self again. She'd had a couple of celebratory drinks with Dekker and sent him home, and she was
ready to confront the Doctor.
He was sitting in his usual alcove, immaculate in his white dinner-jacket, whisky glass by his side, cigarette
burning in the ashtray. Ace sat beside him in a new black evening gown, the black velvet bag with the
Browning automatic inside close at hand.
They were tourist attractions by now, the mysterious Doc and his Lady in Black. Rumours about the events
at Schofield's flower shop and the Palace Hotel were already circulating, and that night Doc's place had been
busier than ever. Ace was beginning to worry that their images were taking over.
"All right Doctor, I've been drugged, kidnapped, shot at, beaten up and almost ravished, and that's just this
afternoon. Don't you think it's time you told me what this is all about?"
"Yes," said the Doctor. "I suppose it is." He took a small crystal sphere from his pocket and handed it to
Ace.
She took it cautiously. "What is it?"
"It has several uses. For you it's a kind of snapshot album."
Ace stared into the sphere which was full of swirling mists, and suddenly she was somewhere else. Several
somewhere elses in fact, in rapid succession.
She was on a balcony overlooking a bakingly hot city square scattered with blazing bonfires. Eager crowds
watched human figures writhing in the heart of the flames. Beside her on the balcony stood an elegant figure
in a black robe and hood, a tall man with a long thin face and long white hands. He was savouring the smoke
and the screams like perfume, and he was smiling.
She was on another balcony overlooking another square in another place and another time. Wooden carts
rumbled along the street beneath, filled with white-faced men and women in tattered finery. At the centre of
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