by Brian Lumley
“Er, can we get on?” George had apparently had enough of interruptions.
“Of course, of course,” the old man peered again at his book, skipped several more lines. “Er … promise that you are his sureties, that he will renounce the devil and all his works, and constantly believe …”
Yulian had also had enough. He began to kick, gathered air for the howling session. His face puffed up and started to turn a little blue, which would normally mean that frustration and anger were coming to the boil just beneath the surface. Georgina couldn’t keep back a great sigh of relief at that. What was Yulian but a helpless baby after all?
“ … the carnal desires of the flesh … was crucified, dead, and buried; that he went down into hell, and also did rise again the third day; that he …”
Just a baby, thought Georgina, with Ilya’s blood, and mine, and … and?
“ … the quick and the dead?”
The church was thunder dark, the storm almost directly overhead.
“ … resurrection of the flesh; and everlasting life after death?”
Georgina gave a start as Anne and George answered in unison: “All this we steadfastly believe.”
“Wilt he then be baptized in this faith?”
George and Anne again: “That is his desire.”
. But Yulian denied it! He gave a howl to raise the rafters, jerked and kicked with an astonishing strength where his mother cradled him. The old clergyman sensed trouble brewing—not the real trouble but trouble anyway—and decided not to prolong things. He took the baby from Georgina’s arms. Yulian’s white christening-gown was a haze of almost neon light, himself a pink pulsation in its folds.
Above the baby’s howling, the old vicar said to George and Anne: “Name this child.”
“Yulian,” they answered simply.
“Yulian,” he nodded, “I baptize thee in the name of—” He paused, stared at the baby. His right hand—practised, accustomed, of its own accord—had dipped into the font, lifted water, poised dripping.
Yulian continued to howl. Anne and George and Georgina heard his crying, only that. No longer touching her child, Georgina felt suddenly free, unburdened, separate from what was coming. It was not her doing; she was merely an observer; this priest must bear the brunt of his own ritual. She, too, heard only Yulian’s crying—but she felt the approach of something enormous.
To the vicar the infant’s howling had taken on a new note. It was no longer the cry of a child but a beast. His jaw dropped and he looked up, blinking rapidly as he peered from face to face: George and Anne smiling, if a little uncomfortably, and Georgina, looking small and wan. And then he looked again at Yulian. The baby was issuing grunts, animal grunts of rage! Its crying was only a cover, like perfume masking the stink of ordure. Underneath was the bass croaking of utter Horror!
Automatically, his hand trembling like a leaf in a gale, the old man splashed a little water on the infant’s fevered brow, traced a cross there with his finger. The water might well have been acid!
NO! the thunderous croaking formed a denial. PUT NO CROSS ON ME, YOU TREACHEROUS CHRISTIAN DOG!
“What—!” the vicar suspected he’d gone insane. His eyes bulged behind the thick lenses of his spectacles.
The others heard nothing except the baby’s crying—which now ceased on the instant. Old man and infant stared at each other in a deafening silence. “What?” the vicar asked again, his voice a whisper.
Before his eyes the skin of the baby’s brow puffed up in twin mounds, like huge boils accelerated to instantaneous eruption. The fine skin split and blunt goat horns came through, curving as they emerged. Yulian’s jaws elongated into a dog’s muzzle, which cracked open to reveal a red cave of white knives and a viper’s flickering tongue. The breath of the thing was a stench, an open tomb; its eyes, pits of sulphur, burned on the vicar’s face like fire.
“Jesus!” said the old man. “Oh, my God—what are you?” And he dropped the child. Or would have—but George had seen the glazing of his eyes, the slackening of his body, the blood’s rapid draining from his face. As the old man crumpled, George stepped forward, took Yulian from him.
Anne, also quick off the mark, had caught the old man and managed to lower him a little less than gently to the floor. But Georgina was also reeling. Like the other two, she had seen, smelled, heard nothing—but she was Yulian’s mother. She had felt something coming, and she knew that it had been here. As she, too, fainted, so there came a thunderbolt that struck the steeple, and a cannonade of thunder that rolled on and on.
Then there was only silence. And light gradually returning, and dust shaken down in rivulets from rafters high overhead.
And George and Anne, white as ghosts, gaping at each other in the church’s lightening gloom.
And Yulian, angelic in his godfather’s arms …
Georgina was a year making her recovery. Yulian spent the time with his godparents, at the end of which they had their own child to fuss over and care for. His mother spent it in a somewhat select sanatorium. No one was much surprised; her breakdown, so long delayed, had finally arrived with a vengeance. George and Anne, and others of Georgina’s friends, visited her regularly, but no one mentioned the abortive christening or the death of the vicar.
That had been a stroke or some such. The old man’s health had been waning. He’s lasted only a few hours after his collapse in the church. George had gone with him in an ambulance to the hospital, had been with him when he died. The old man had come to in the final moments before he passed forever from this world.
His eyes had focussed on George’s face, widened, filled with memory, disbelief. “It’s all right,” George had comforted him, patting the hand which grasped his forearm with a feverish strength. “Take it easy. You’re in good hands.”
“Good hands? Good hands! My God!” The old man had been quite lucid. “I dreamed … I dreamed … there was a christening. You were there.” It was almost an accusation.
George smiled. “There was supposed to be a christening,” he’d answered. “But don’t worry, you can finish it when you’re up and about again.”
“It was real?” the old man tried to sit up. “It was real!”
George and a nurse supported him in his bed, lowered him as he collapsed again on to his pillows. Then he caved in. His face contorted and he seemed to crumple into himself. The nurse rushed from the room shouting for a doctor. Still convulsing, the vicar beckoned George closer with a twitching finger. His face was fluttering, had turned the color of lead.
George put his ear to the old man’s whispering lips, heard: “Christen it? No, no—you mustn’t! First—first have it exorcized!”
And those were the last words he ever spoke. George mentioned it to no one. Obviously the old boy’s mind had been going, too.
A week after the christening Yulian developed a rash of tiny white blisters on his forehead. They eventually dried up and flaked away, leaving barely visible marks exactly like freckles …
Chapter Five
“HE WAS A FUNNY LITTLE THING!” ANNE LAKE LAUGHED, shook her head and set her blonde hair flying in the breeze from the car’s half-open window. “Do you remember when we had him that year?”
It was late in the summer of ’77 and they were driving down to stay with Georgina and Yulian for a week. The last time they’d seen them was two years ago. George had thought the boy was strange then, and he’d said so on several occasions—not to Georgina and certainly not to Yulian himself, of course not, but to Anne, in private. Now he said so again:
“Funny little thing?” He cocked an eyebrow. “That’s one way of putting it, I suppose. Weird would be a better way! And from what I remember of him last time we came down he hasn’t changed—what was a weird baby is now a weird young man!”
“Oh, George, that’s ridiculous. All babies are different from each other. Yulian was, well, more different, that’s all.”
“Listen,” said George. “That child wasn’t two months old
when he came to us—and he had teeth! Teeth like little needles—sharp as hell! And I remember Georgina saying he was born with them. That’s why she couldn’t breastfeed him.”
“George,” said Anne warningly, a little sharply, reminding him that Helen sat in the back of the car. She was their daughter: a beautiful, occasionally precocious girl of sixteen.
Helen sighed, very deliberately and audibly, and said, “Oh, mother! I know what breasts are for—apart from being natural attractions for the opposite sex, that is. Why must you put them on your taboo list?”
“Ta-boob list!” George grinned.
“George!” said Anne again, more forcefully.
“Nineteen seventy-seven,” Helen scoffed, “but you’d never know it. Not in this family. I mean, feeding your baby’s natural, isn’t it? More natural than letting your breasts be groped in the back row of some grubby flea-pit cinema!”
“Helen!” Anne half-turned in her seat, her lips compressing to a thin line.
“It’s been a long time,” George glanced at his wife, semi-ruefully.
“What has?” she snapped.
“Since I was groped in a flea-pit cinema,” he said.
Anne snorted her exasperation. “She gets it from you!” she accused. “You’ve always treated her like an adult.”
“Because she is an adult, very nearly,” he answered. “You can only guide them so far, Anne my love, and after that they’re on their own. Helen’s healthy, intelligent, happy, good-looking, and she doesn’t smoke pot. She’s worn a bra for nearly four years, and every month she—”
“George!”
“Taboo!” said Helen, giggling.
“Anyway,” George’s irritation was showing now, “we weren’t talking about Helen but Yulian. Helen, I submit, is normal. Her cousin—or cousin once removed, or whatever—is not.”
“Give me a for-instance,” Anne argued. “An example. Not normal, you say. Well then, is he abnormal? Subnormal? Where’s his defect?”
“Whenever Yulian crops up,” Helen joined in from the back, “you two always end up arguing. Is he really worth it?”
“Your mother’s a very loyal person,” George told her over one shoulder. “Georgina is her cousin and Yulian is Georgina’s son. Which means they’re untouchable. Your mother won’t face simple facts, that’s all. She’s the same with all her friends: she won’t hear a word against them. Very laudable. But I call a spade a spade. I find—and have always found—Yulian a bit much. As I said before, weird.”
“You mean,” Helen pressed, “a bit nine-bob notish?”
“Helen!” her mother protested yet again.
“I get that one from you!” Helen stopped her dead in her tracks. “You always talk about gays as nine-bobbers.”
“I never talk about … about homosexuals!” Anne was furious. “And certainly not to you about them!”
“I’ve heard Daddy—in conversation with you, about one or two of his man-friends—say that so-and-so is gay as a defrocked vicar,” said Helen matter-of-factly. “And you’ve replied:”What, so-and-so, nine-bobbish? Really?’”
Anne rounded on her and might well have lashed out physically if she could have reached her. Red-faced, she cried, “Then in the future we’ll have to lock you in your bloody room before we dare have an adult conversation! You horrid girl!”
“Perhaps you better had.” Helen was equally quick to rise. “Before I also start to swear!”
“All right, all right!” George quietened them. “Points taken all round. But we’re on holiday, remember? I mean, it’s probably my fault, but Yulian’s a sore point with me, that’s all. And I can’t explain why. But he usually keeps out of the way most of the time we’re there, and I can’t help it but hope it’s the same this time. For my peace of mind, anyway. He’s simply not my type of lad. As for him being how’s-your-father—” (Helen somehow contrived not to snigger) “—I can’t say. But he did get kicked out of that boarding school, and—”
“He did not!” Anne had to have her say. “Kicked out, indeed! He got his qualifications a year early, left a year before the rest. I mean to say, do qualifications—does being intelligent above the average—certify someone as a raving … homosexual? Heaven forbid! Clever Miss Know-it-all here has a couple of second class ‘A’ Levels, which apparently make her near-omniscient; in which case Yulian has to be close to godlike! George, what qualifications do you have?”
“I fail to see what that has to do with it,” he answered. “The way I hear it, more gays come out of the universities than ever came out of all the secondary moderns put together. And—”
“George?”
“I was an apprentice,” he sighed, “as you well know. Trade qualifications, I’ve got them all. And then I was a journeyman—an architect earning money for my boss, until I got into business for myself. And anyway—”
“What academic qualifications?” she was determined.
George drove the car, said nothing, wound down his window a little and breathed warm air. After a while: “The same as you, darling.”
“None whatsoever!” Anne was triumphant. “Why, Yulian’s cleverer than all of us put together. On paper, anyway. I say give him time and he’ll show us all a thing or two. Oh, I admit he’s quiet, comes and goes like a ghost, seems less active and enthusiastic about life than a boy his age should be. But give him a break, for God’s sake! Look at his disadvantages. He never knew his father; was brought up by Georgina entirely on her own, and she’s never been altogether with it since Ilya died, has lived in that gloomy old mansion of a place for twelve years of his young life. Little wonder he’s a bit, well, reticent.”
She seemed to have won the day. They said nothing to dispute her logic, had apparently lost all interest in the argument. Anne searched her mind for a new topic, found nothing, relaxed in her seat.
Reticent. Helen turned her own thoughts over in her head. Yulian, reticent? Did her mother mean backward? Of course not, her argument had been all against that. Shy? Retiring? Yes, that’s what she must have meant. Well, and he must seem shy—if one didn’t know better. Helen knew better, from that time two years ago. And as for queer—hardly. She would greatly doubt it, anyway. She smiled secretly. Better to let them go on thinking it, though. At least while they thought he was a woofter they wouldn’t worry about her being in his company. But no, Yulian wasn’t entirely gay. AC, DC, maybe.
Two years ago, yes …
It had taken Helen ages to get him to talk to her. She remembered the circumstances clearly.
It had been a beautiful Saturday, their second day of a ten-day spell; her parents and Aunt Georgina gone off to Salcombe for a day’s sea- and sun-bathing; Yulian and Helen were left in charge of the house, he with his Alsatian pup to play with and she to explore the gardens, the great barn, the crumbling old stables and the dark, dense copse. Yulian wasn’t into bathing, indeed he hated the sun and sea, and Helen would have preferred anything rather than spend time with her parents.
“Walk with me?” she’d pressed Yulian, finding him alone with the gangling pup in the dim, cool library. He had shook his head.
Pale in the shade of this one room which the sun never seemed to reach, he’d lounged awkwardly on a settee, fondling the pup’s floppy ears with one hand and holding a book in the other.
“Why not? You could show me the grounds.”
He had glanced at the pup. “He gets tired if he walks too far. He’s not quite steady on his legs. And I burn easily in the sun. I really don’t much care for the sun. And anyway, I’m reading.”
“You’re not much fun to be with,” she had told him, deliberately pouting. And she’d asked, “Is there still straw in the hayloft over the barn?”
“Hayloft?” Yulian had looked surprised. His long, not unhandsome face had formed a soft oval against the dark velvet of the back of the settee. “I haven’t been up there in years.”
“What are you reading, anyway?” She sat down beside him, reached for the book held loos
ely in his long-fingered, soft-looking hand. He drew back, kept the book from her.
“Not for little girls,” he said, his expression unchanging.
Frustrated, she tossed her hair, glanced all about the large room. And it was large, that room; partitioned in the middle, just like a public library, with floor to ceiling shelves and book-lined alcoves all round the walls. It smelled of old books, dusty and musty. No, it reeked of them, so that you almost feared to breathe in case your lungs got filled with words and inks and desiccated glue and paper fibres.
There was a shallow cupboard in one corner of the room and its door stood open. Tracks in the threadbare carpet showed where Yulian had dragged a stepladder to a certain section of the shelving. The books on the top shelf were almost hidden in gloom, where old cobwebs were gathering dust. But unlike the neat rows of books in the lower shelves, they were piled haphazardly, lying in a jumble as if recently disturbed.
“Oh?” she stood up. “I’m a little girl, am I? And what does that make you? We’re only a year apart, you know …” She went to the stepladder, started to climb.
Yulian’s Adam’s apple bobbed. He tossed his book aside, came easily to his feet. “You leave that top shelf alone,” he said unemotionally, coming to the foot of the ladder.
She ignored him, looked at the titles, read out loud: “Coates, Human Magnetism, or How to Hypnotize. Huh! Mumbo-jumbo! Lycan … er, Lycanthropy. Eh? And … The Erotic Beardsley!” She clapped her hands delightedly. “What, dirty pictures, Yulian?” She took the book from the shelf, opened it. “Oh!” she said, rather more quietly. The black and white drawing on the page where the book had opened was rather more bestial than erotic.
“Put it down!” Yulian hissed from below.
Helen put down the Beardsley, read off more titles. “Vampirism—ugh! Sexual Powers of Satyrs and Nymphomaniacs. Sadism and Sexual Aberration. And … Parasitic Creatures? How diverse! And not dusty at all, these old books. Do you read them a lot, Yulian?”
