'That was why they were using their pagers, every last one of them; also why the duty room's switchboard was lit up like a Christmas tree, and why Zek had been woken up and called in for her opinion.
'But she didn't get to voice that opinion, for as she entered the duty room and saw the switchboard, two things happened simultaneously. One: she reached out with her mind — to one of the kids, a case she'd been working with and knew intimately — and two, the old-fashioned landline telephone jangled and went on jangling. Of course it was Trennier, but a damned insistent Trennier.
'First the kid, a Romanian orphan of maybe eighteen years. Zek broke into his mind…
'… And someone was there! Not just the kid, but someone, something, else. Something incredibly intelligent, that crawled and observed and was thirsty for knowledge, something that felt like cold slime, and left a cold, cold void behind it! And when Zek's talent touched it, she "felt" a recoil, and then a question — "Who?" — as whatever it was tried to fasten on her, too.
'Then she was out of there, snatching her thoughts back as if they'd contacted a live wire, closing them down and erecting her mental barriers as things began to make sense.
'By which time one of the duty nurses was answering Trennier's call. This was a male nurse, one who Zek knew to be solid as a rock; but as he listened to Trennier's hysterical
babbling over that tinny old telephone wire, so his eyes widened and his mouth fell open.
'Zek took the phone from him, told him to go and see what was wrong with the kids. The other nurse had already left, and now she was on her own — well, except for the terrified voice of Bruce Trennier, reaching up to her from the sump.
'He told her about the body in the monitor pipe, said that it had been shoved, or crushed, all the way in, almost its full length. But despite the awesome force that must have been exerted to cram it in there head first — because the pipe was only eighteen inches in diameter, and the male figure was… Ug — there was still some kind of horrible life in it; the feet kept twitching! And that wasn't the worst of it. Whoever or whatever had done this awful thing was still down there. Trennier had heard something, and he'd seen movement in the inky darkness between him and the open duct!
'And now Zek knew beyond a doubt what was happening here. She didn't want to believe it, but she knew anyway. In the eye of her mind, suddenly she could see the whole story: something had happened to stop the water flowing from Perchorsk, and the Starside Gate was open again. It was the only possible explanation. The children were feeling the influence of whatever Trennier was experiencing, and the "darkness" between him and his only escape route had to be, could only be—
'—Wamphyri! How didn't matter, but they were back. Back in our world this time, and Bruce Trennier was down there with them. And the kids… their vulnerable minds had been discovered and explored by more powerful minds, or one more powerful mind at least. Sensing it as mice sense a cat, the orphans had reacted — not without justification. Knowing the Wamphyri, Zek knew that their thoughts were terrible things — knew also that the cat was already bunching its muscles, preparing to spring.
'Her mind must have flown every which way. Her responsibilities to the Refuge, the children, E-Branch… even to me, God damn it! The fact that out of the Refuge's double handful of staff she was the only one who knew anything about the Wamphyri.
And the sure knowledge that if they broke into the Refuge, into Romania, the world, then the nightmare would be on us all over again. All of these things galvanizing Zek into activity. But the right or wrong activity — who could say? She only knew she must do something.
'And how to tell Trennier, still hysterical on the phone, that he was already as good as dead or changed forever, so perhaps he'd care to volunteer his own life for the sake of everyone else's? For Zek knew something about the Refuge that no one else, not even the New Zealander, the engineer, knew: that some years ago E-Branch had installed the last of several fail-safes, and down there in the sump there was a way to close this end of the loop for good.
'Powerful explosive charges in the ceiling of the cavern: a blast sufficient to bring down the roof of the place and seal it permanently. And we would have done it long since, but the Gates were closed and the Wamphyri gone and we needed the turbine to power the Refuge.
'There were two switches that had to be thrown, one inside the sump to arm the charges, and the other outside the reinforced concrete barrier that sealed the resurgence and channelled its waters: the exterior switch triggered the thing, obviously. But also, as a sensible safety precaution, there was a fifteen-minute delay after both switches had been thrown. And last but not least by way of safety, both hatches had to be locked from the outside — in fact, they could only be locked from the outside — before the electrical circuit could complete itself.
'Zek calmed Trennier down as best she could, gave him directions to the switchbox, told him to throw the switch and get out of there (if he was able) — but she kept that last reservation to herself. For there was no time, no way she could begin to explain her fears about the Wamphyri. Not that the New Zealander would have understood; he was in too much of a funk. And who wouldn't be, trapped in the dark with the Utterly Unknown? At least Zek had given him something to go on, instructions of a sort.
'Then she hit the alarms, woke the staff, told them to take the kids and move out — all of this taking very little time and none of it making too much sense to anyone except Zek, who just didn't have time to explain.
'And in that chaos of blaring alarms and puzzled, sleepy staff colliding with each other, and scared kids awake and crying in their rooms, the rest of it was up to Zek. Now she must make her way to the basement, set the trigger, and wait at the open hatch for the engineer to come through — and hope that it was only the engineer who came through — before she closed the hatch and locked it, completing the connection that would blow the sump and whatever else it contained to hell.
'But if it wasn't the New Zealander who came through, what then? My God! What a nightmare!
'And now maybe you'll forgive me that I've tried to forget all this, all the panic and sweaty horror of it as Zek, my Zek, rushed to the basement levels, climbed down into the now-silent engine room, and made her way down a spiralling steel staircase into the belly of the Refuge, to the reinforced concrete floor whose underside was the man-made ceiling in the natural cavern of the resurgence. In normal circumstances that floor would have been trembling to the throb of pressured water, but the water was a trickle now and the place no longer vibrated.
'There, in that cellar-like room which now seemed vaguely threatening, a pair of cylindrical turrets stood up knee-high from the floor. The carbon-steel hatch of one of them had been laid back on massive hinges, revealing a dark throat that was more threatening yet. But looking around and seeing a niche in the wall, and a shelf bearing an extension telephone handset, Zek believed she knew how to approach this thing.
'First and foremost there was the hatch: it must be closed, and immediately. If Trennier was on his way out… he would go through hell when he found the hatch locked. But there was nothing else for it, and it was only a temporary measure. And trying not to think of the New Zealander's terrible situation, Zek wasted no time but closed the hatch, locked its wheel, then ran to the open end of the cavern, where concrete steps took her down to the ancient bed of the resurgence.
'From there she climbed rusting iron rungs to a place high in the wall of the cavern, where a deep crevice housed the trigger's waterproof switch. It was stiff— probably a little rusty — but she managed to throw it anyway, then rapidly retraced her route back to the empty, echoing basement.