Necroscope n-1

by Brian Lumley

  Well, there was a way to find out. Tonight. It would have to be tonight, for tomorrow the English were coming. He made up his mind and went back to the window.

  Use had gone back to feeding her chickens. Hearing his cough, she looked up to see him buttoning his shirt, staring down at her. For a long moment their eyes met; then, stumblingly, he said:

  ‘Use, does it get chilly still? Er, in the night, I mean…’

  She frowned, wondering what he was getting at. ‘Cold? Why, no, it’s summer.’

  ‘Then tonight,’ he blurted, ‘I believe I’ll leave my window — and my curtains — open.’

  Her frown lifted. She tossed her head and laughed. ‘That’s very healthy,’ she answered after a moment. ‘I’m sure you’ll feel better for it.’

  Embarrassed now, Dragosani once more withdrew, closed the window and finished dressing. For a moment or two he regretted what he had done — this rendezvous so simply arranged, which in fact seemed to have been arranged for him — but finally he shrugged the feeling off. It was done now. What would be would be. And anyway, it was time he lost his virginity.

  Lost his virginity, indeed! It made him sound like a young girl! And yet there was a touching naivety about that phrase, unlike the blunt delivery of his undead mentor. How had the old devil in the ground put it that time? ‘A mere pup who never breached a bitch

  Yes, that was it — and he’d been referring to Dragosani’s father. His true father. And so I got into his mind… and I bequeathed the night to them! He got into his mind — to show him how to do it… Dragosani started as a pebble clattered against his window. He had been sitting on his bed, lost in thought. Now he got up, opened the window again. It was Use.

  ‘Breakfast in your room, Herr Dragosani?’ she called up, ‘or will you eat with us?’ The emphasis she put on ‘in your room’ was unmistakable, but Dragosani ignored it.

  No, for first he must speak to the old dragon.

  ‘I’ll come down,’ he answered, and narrowed his eyes thoughtfully at the disappointment which instantly registered in her face. Oh, yes, he would need assistance with this one, this time, this first time. She would know exactly what she was about, and he knew nothing. But… the Wamphyr knew everything. And Dragosani suspected that there were certain secrets which even that devious old one wouldn’t mind divulging. No, not at all…

  Dragosani’s sexual problem — rather, the mental block which had until now checked his psychological development in this area — had been implanted in puberty, at a time when other boys went on to steal their first kisses and explore their first soft bodies with hot, groping, inexperienced fingers. It had happened during his third year in Bucharest while he was boarding at the college there.

  He had been thirteen and looking forward to the summer break. Then his stepfather’s letter had arrived telling him not to come home. There was disease on the farm; the animals were being slaughtered; visitors were forbidden and even Boris would not be allowed on to the estate. The fever was virulent; people could easily spread it about on their feet, their shoes; the entire area for twenty miles around was under quarantine.

  A disaster, apparently — but it need not prove to be one for Boris. He had an ‘aunt’ in Bucharest, his stepfather’s younger sister, and could stay at her house for the break. It was better than nothing; at least he would have somewhere to go and not be stuck in an outbuilding of the old college, cooking his own food on a tiny stove.

  His Aunt Hildegard was a young widow with two daughters only a year or so older than Boris himself, Anna and Katrina, and they lived in a large, rambling wooden house on the Budesti road. Oddly, they had never been much mentioned at home and Boris had only ever met them on their very infrequent visits to the Romanian countryside. He had always found his aunt very affectionate, perhaps too much so — and his cousins a little sickly and giggly in the way of young girls, except that there were also undercurrents of a sly sensuality beyond their years — but hardly darkly suspicious or especially odd. Yet he gained the impression from his stepfather’s attitude towards them that his aunt was something of a black sheep, or at least a lady with a terrible secret.

  In the three weeks he lived with her and her precocious daughters, when the college closed down for the summer break, Boris had discovered all he believed he needed to know of her ‘oddness’, of sex and the perverse ways of females, and his experiences had turned him off for all the years in between — until now. For the simple fact of the matter had been that his aunt was a nymphomaniac. Recently set free by the death of her husband, she had allowed her sexual obsession to get out of hand; and her daughters, apparently, were cut of pretty much the same cloth. Even when her ailing husband had been alive she had been notorious for her lovers. Word of her affairs had often got back to her brother in the country, so bringing about his aloofness, his disapproval. He was no prude himself, but he considered her little more than a whore.

  Just how far she had carried her excesses was beyond her brother’s power to know, especially now that he had broken off almost all contact with her. If he had known, then he would have made other arrangements for the youth; but his adopted son was, after all, barely a boy; he would surely stand exempt from the woman’s vices.

  Boris had known none of this but was to find out about it soon enough.

  To begin with, there had been no locks on any of the interior doors in his aunt’s house. Neither the bedrooms nor the bathroom had locks, not even the toilets. Aunt Hildegard had explained that there were no secret places here — nowhere for the performance of secret deeds — and that secret things in general were not tolerated. Which made it hard for Boris to understand the secretive or mischievously furtive looks which often passed between mother and daughters when he was present.

  As for privacy: there was likewise absolutely no need for privacy in a place where nothing was forbidden, nothing frowned upon. Enquiring as to his aunt’s philosophy, Boris had been told that this was ‘a house of Nature’, where the human body and its functions were things of Nature given us to ‘explore, discover, understand and enjoy to their full, without conventional restrictions’. Provided that he respect the house and property of his hostess, there was nothing he could not do here and welcome; but he must similarly respect the ‘natural’ behaviour of the resident females of the house, whose ways he would find entirely open and unrestricted. As for philosophy as such: there was too little love in the world and too much hatred; if the lusts of the body and fires of the spirit could be quenched, sated in the pleasurable violence of embraces instead of war, then surely it would be a better place. Perhaps Boris would not understand immediately, but his aunt was sure that he would in a little while…

  After an early supper on the first evening, Boris had gone up to his room to read. He had brought some of his own books with him from the college, but at the foot of the stairs leading to his bedroom was a tiny room set aside by his aunt as her ‘library’. Looking in, Boris had found the shelves full of erotica and sexual perversions and abnormalities, some of which were so fascinating that he took several of the illustrated volumes upstairs with him. They were unlike anything he had ever seen before, even in the College library which was fairly comprehensive.

  In his bedroom he had become engrossed with one of the books (which purported to be factual but was so ‘Improbable’ to Boris’s mind that he ‘knew’ it must be a spoof, a work of highly imaginative fiction; though how some of the alleged photographs had been produced was quite beyond him) and, like any boy of his age, soon found himself aroused. Masturbation was not unknown to Boris — he relieved himself that way from time to time as most young men do — but here in his aunt’s house he hadn’t felt secure or private enough to do so. To avoid further frustration, he had taken the books back downstairs to the library.

  Earlier, while reading, he had heard a car pull up to the house and the arrival and entry of some visitor or other, someone obviously popular with the household, but had paid no heed. As he deposited the
books back in the library, however, he now heard laughter and the sounds of physical activity and apparent enjoyment from the main living-room — a room he had been shown and in which he’d admired the mirrors set all about and the curiously mirrored ceiling — and was drawn to see what was taking place. The door stood a little ajar, and from within as he approached in silence Boris could hear a guttural male voice, straining in something of exertion, plus the now coarsened and urgent voices of his step-aunt and — cousins. It was then that he had started to suspect that something very much out of the ordinary must be going on in there. Boris paused at the door to stare in through the inches-wide gap and was shocked almost rigid by what he saw. Far from being ‘fantastic’ as he had supposed, the book he had been reading had contained nothing comparable with this! The man — a stranger to Boris, bearded, pockmarked, huge in the belly and hairy — was quite repulsive in his looks and almost malformed in his body. Also, he was naked. What Boris could not know was that he was a satyr, which by this house’s standards more than compensated for his ugliness and malformation.

  Viewing the interior of the room through a mirror which stood just inside the door, therefore not directly, Boris could not see the entire performance, but what he could see was more than enough. The three females were taking turns with their playmate, urging him to greater efforts, working on him with their hands and mouths and bodies in a frenzy of sexual excess.

  He lay on his back upon a divan, while the younger of the sisters, Anna, kneeled astride him and literally bounced herself up and down on him. With each upward bound of her body she revealed most of the great length and thickness of him, shiny with the liquids of their throbbing bodies. With each brief appearance of that slippery pole of flesh, Boris could see Katrina’s tiny and almost fragile hand locked tightly around its girth between the two where they continued to collide, working at it no less than her sister’s jolting body. As for the mother of the girls, ‘Aunt’ Hildegard, a woman of perhaps thirty-four: she kneeled at the head of the couch and flopped her great loose breasts upon his feverish face, so that her nipples dangled alternately into his gaping, gasping mouth. Occasionally, apparently lost in her ecstasy, she would stretch up, thrusting her pubic region against his quivering lips and tongue.

  The women were not naked but all the more lewd for their garments, loose, baggy white things which were open and allowed their breasts and buttocks to be fondled, and all parts of them to be touched at will. What transfixed Boris most, riveting him to the spot, was not so much that this was sex — of which he knew very little in any case — but that all four participants seemed so utterly involved and engrossed, each enjoying not only the rewards of his/her own facet of the performance, whatever the part being played, but also the cavorting of the others!

  But as they changed places and positions before his eyes, and almost without pause commenced a new series of intricate exertions (this time with the man mounted atop his aunt like some awful dog, while the girls played lesser roles), so Boris had begun to understand. No one was neglected here; each became the aggressor in turn, so that all received maximum satisfaction. Or, in Boris’s fevered eyes, so that all seemed equally disgusting.

  In any event, while he believed that he now understood something of what he was seeing, still he did not quite believe that he was actually seeing it. It was the central character — the man, the awful spurting machine — which he couldn’t fathom.

  Boris knew how exhausted he always felt after masturbating, so how must this hairy animal in the room of mirrors feel? He seemed to be hosing out semen almost continually, and groaning with the intensity of the pleasure given him by each fresh burst; except that it hardly seemed to weary him at all but only served to drive him to greater excess. Surely he must collapse at any moment now!

  And as Boris had finally got his legs going and backed away from the door — and as if his aunt had been thinking almost precisely the same thing as Boris himself — he heard her gaspingly say: ‘Now, now, you two! Let’s not weary Dmitri so quickly. Why don’t you go and play with Boris, eh? But not too fiercely or else you might frighten him. Poor lamb, he looks the sort who’d frighten very easily. About as lusty as a lettuce!’

  That had been enough to send Boris scrambling frantically upstairs to his room, out of his clothes in a flash and into bed. There he lay and cringed — knowing his door was unlocked, that it couldn’t be locked — waiting for… something he daren’t even essay a guess at. If he had been alone with one cousin, one normal girl, then perhaps things might have been different. Perhaps then there might have been a shy, gradual, fumbling introduction to sex — to normal sex — with Boris himself taking the stumbling initiative.

  For until now Boris’s dreams and fancies in this respect had been fairly ordinary. He had even entertained fantasies of being alone with his aunt — of smothering himself in her soft breasts, her white body — and had not found them especially abhorrent or shameful. Not before.

  But now he had seen! Any innocence his fantasies might have contained was gone now, wrenched out of him. What could there possibly be of normal, healthy sex now? Was there any such thing? He had seen, yes.

  Downstairs in this very house he had seen three women (he could no longer think of his cousins as girls) coupling with a seemingly inexhaustible beast. He had seen the beast’s great pole of lusting flesh. And should he compare himself with that? Did he as a male even exist after that? A twig against a branch? And must he be a party to orgies, such as that — like one small hare amongst a pack of hounds? The mere thought of contact with the beast was sickening!

  These had been his thoughts as his cousins came looking for him where he lay wrapped in sheets and blankets, absolutely still and breathless in his bed. He had heard them enter, had tried not to twitch when Anna had giggled throatily and asked: ‘ Boris, are you awake?’

  ‘Is he? Is he?’ Katrina had eagerly wanted to know.

  ‘No, I don’t think so.’ (Disappointed.)

  ‘But… his light is on!’

  ‘Boris?’ (Anna’s weight pressing down on his bed beside him.)‘Are you sure you’re asleep?’

  Feigning sleep, his heart hammering, Boris had turned a little where he lay, grumbled, said: ‘Wha-? What? Go away. I’m tired.’

  It was a mistake. Both of them giggled now, their voices still coarse and full of lust. ‘Boris, won’t you play a game with us?’ said Katrina. ‘Stick your head out, at least. We’ve something…’ (more giggles) ‘… something to show you!’

  He couldn’t breathe. He’d tugged his bedclothes so close and tight that he’d shut out the air. He would have to come out in a moment, whether he wanted to or not. ‘Please go away and let me sleep.’

  ‘Boris’ (Anna again, and a vision of her with her dainty hands on the beast’s belly, jolting up and down on that pink pole) ‘if we put the lights out will you come out?’

  For a moment — the merest moment — a gulp of air — just long enough to fill his lungs! ‘Yes,’ he had gasped.

  Then he’d heard the click of the light switch and felt Anna stand up, lifting her weight from his bed. ‘There, it’s out!’

  It was out, as Boris discovered a moment later when, having struggled to free his head, he thrust it into darkness and breathed air deeply into his starved lungs — and almost gagged!

  And at once, with more giggles from across the room, the light came on again.

  Which of the girls it was, he couldn’t tell, but one of them had been standing beside his bed with her loose cassock thing over his head like a tent. The musty smell of her body had been beating into his face, and he had seen the dark V of her pubic patch dewed with a string of milky semen pearls. The light through her garment wasn’t good, but it was good enough for Boris to see, when she deliberately bowed her legs outward a little, what looked to him like the parting of that patch into a greedy vertical grin!

  ‘There!’ Boris had dimly remembered a husky voice saying, through a rising gale of coarse laughter. ‘A
nd didn’t we tell you we had something to show you?’

  But that was all that was said, for suddenly beside himself in a panic of loathing, that was when Boris had lashed out. Later he remembered little of it — only the giggles turning to screams, and the dull pain in his fists and skinned knuckles — but he did remember how, the next day, his tormentors had kept well away from him; and how both of them had sported blue bruises, while Anna had a split lip and Katrina a great black eye! Perhaps his aunt had been correct to liken him to a lettuce — in one direction. But as for tenacity and ferocity — Boris had lacked neither one.

  That next day had been nightmarish. Exhausted after a night of wakefulness, barricaded in his room against all entreaty to come out, Boris had had to suffer his aunt’s wrath and (from a safe distance) the accusations of her oversexed daughters. Aunt Hildegard would not feed him, starving him for punishment, and she swore that she would complain to his father if he didn’t come to his senses at once. By that she meant that he should come out of his room and talk to her, apologise to the girls, and generally pretend that nothing had happened. He would have none of it, remaining in his room except for short and hurried excursions to the toilet and bathroom, determined that before nightfall he would flee the house and make his way back to Bucharest.

  The only trouble with that scheme was that his father was bound to find out and would want to know why, and Boris would simply not be able to tell him. He’d never

  been an easy man to talk to, and this — this had been simply unbelievable. And even then, assuming his stepfather did believe and accepted all that had happened, mightn’t there still be doubts about Boris’s own — participation? His active, perhaps his willing participation…

  There were other difficulties, too. Boris had no money and no arrangements had been made for him at the college. Which was why, when evening came around again and when his aunt’s threats turned to pleading, he had dragged his bed and dresser away from the door and allowed her to take him downstairs.