by Brian Lumley
There was a trapdoor under one of the back rooms which, since George had been down there, Yulian had kept boarded up. That left only the entrance from the side of the house, where Viad kept his vigil as usual. Yuiian took a steak, thick and dripping blood, from the kitchen out to the dog where he guarded the cellars, left him growling and tearing at his food while he descended the narrow steps down one side of the ramp and shoved open the door.
Then, as he stepped into darkness… he had maybe a half-second’s warning of what was waiting for him, but it was enough.
George Lake’s mind was a bubbling pit of crimson hatred. Many emotions were trapped in there, controlled until that last half-second: lust, self-loathing, a hunger beyond human hunger, which was so intense it was in fact an emotion, disgust, jealousy so strong it burned, but mainly hatred. For Yulian. And in the moment before George struck, the bile of his mind touched Yulian’s like acid, so that he cried out as he avoided the blow in the dark.
For darkness had been Yulian’s element long before George discovered it, a fact which the new, half-mad vampire had failed to take into account. Yulian saw him crouching behind the door, saw the arc of the mattock as it swung towards him. He ducked under the rushing, rusty, vicious head of the tool, came up inside the circle of its swing and closed fingers like steel on George’s throat. At the same time, with his free hand, he wrenched the mattock away from him and hurled it aside, and drove his knee again and again up into George’s groin.
For any ordinary man the fight would have been over there and then, but George Lake was no longer ordinary, and no longer merely a man. Forced to his knees as Yulian’s fingers tightened on his throat, he glared back at the youth through eyes like coals under a bellows’ blast. A vampire, his grey undead flesh shrugged off the pain, found strength to fight back. His legs straightened against all Yulian’s weight, and he smashed at Yulian’s forearm to break his grip. Astonished, the youth found himself tossed back, saw the other springing at him to tear his throat out.
And again Yulian knew fear, for he saw, now that his uncle’ was almost as strong as he himself. He feinted before George’s charge, thrust him sprawling, snatched up the mattock from the stone floor. He hefted the tool murderously in his powerful hands, advancing on George where he came surging to his feet. At which moment Anne — Yulian’s dear ‘Auntie’ Anne — came ghosting and gibbering out of the shadows and the darkness to throw herself between Yulian and her undead husband.
‘Oh, Yulian!’ she wailed. ‘Yulian, no. Please don’t kill him. Not… again!’ Naked and grimy she crouched there, her eyes full of animal pleading, her hair wild. Yulian thrust her aside just as George made his second spring.
‘George,’ he grated through clenched teeth, ‘that’s twice you’ve gone for me with this. Now let’s see how you like it!’
Flakes of rust splintered from the sharp point of the mattock as it slammed into George’s forehead and punched a neat hole one and a half inches square just above the triangle formed of eyes and nose. The sheer force of the blow checked George’s forward impetus, snapping him upright like a puppet on a string.
‘Gak!’ he said, as his eyes filled with blood and his nose spurted crimson. His arms rose up at forty-five degrees, his hands fluttering as if he’d been plugged into a live electric socket. ‘Gug-ak-arghh!’ he gurgled. Then his bottom jaw fell open and he toppled backwards like a felled tree, crashing to the floor on his back, mattock still fixed firmly in his head.
Anne came scrambling, threw herself down wailing on top of George’s twitching body. She was in thrall to Yulian but George had been her husband. What he had become was Yulian’s fault, not his own. ‘George, oh George!’ she wailed. ‘Oh, my poor dear George!’
‘Get off him!’ Yulian spat at her. ‘Help me.’
They dragged George by his ankles to the furnace room, the mattock’s handle clattering on the uneven floor. In front of the cold furnace, Yulian put a foot on the vampire’s throat and wrenched the mattock free of his head. Blood and greyish-yellow pulp welled up to fill the crater in his forehead and overflow the rim, but his eyes stayed open, his hands continued to flutter, and one heel thumped the floor in a continuous series of galvanic spasms.
‘Oh, he’ll die, he’ll die!’ Anne wrung her grimy hands, sobbed and cradled George’s shattered head.
‘No he won’t.’ Yulian worked to get the furnace going. ‘That’s just it, you stupid creature. He can’t die — not like that, anyway. What’s in him will heal him. It’s working on his crushed brain even now. He could be good as new, maybe even better — except that’s something I can’t allow.’
The fire was set. Yulian struck a match, held it to paper, opened the iron draught grid squealingly so that the flames would draw, and closed the furnace door. As he turned from the furnace, he heard Anne gasp:
‘George?’
The hammering of George’s spastic heel on the stone floor had been absent for some little time.
Yulian spun on his heel — and the Thing he had made crashed into him and forced him back against the furnace door! As of yet there was no heat, but the wind was driven from Yulian’s lungs in a huge gasp. He drew air painfully, held the other at bay. George’s feral eyes glared through blood and mucus from the hole in his head; his teeth, like small daggers, chomped in his twisted face; his hands flopped against Yulian like blind things. His ruptured brain was functioning, barely, but already the vampire in him was mending his wound. And his hatred was as strong as ever.
Yulian gathered his strength, hurled George from him. Unable to control the impaired functions of his limbs, he crashed down on to the pile of coke. Before he could rise again Yulian glared all about in the gloom, moved to take up the mattock.
‘Yulian! Yulian!’ Anne went to intercede.
‘Get out of my way!’ He thrust her aside.
Ignoring George where he crawled after him, hooked hands reaching, he loped to the arched entrance where the stone walls were massively thick. And there without pause he swung the shaft of the mattock against the stonework. The hardwood shaft broke, splintering diagonally across its grain, and the rusty head went clattering into darkness. Yulian’s hands were left numb where they clutched a near-perfect stake: eighteen inches of hardwood, narrowing down to an uneven but deadly sharp point.
Well, and it had been his intention to discover the full range of a vampire’s vitality, hadn’t it?
George had somehow managed to lurch to his feet. Eyes sulphurous in the near-darkness, he came after Yulian like some demoniac robot.
Yulian glanced at the floor. Here there were thick stone paving slabs, pushed up a little in places by some force from below. The Other, of course, in its mindless burrowing. George was closer, stumbling spastically, mouthing thick, phlegmy noises unrecognisable as words. Yulian waited until the crippled vampire took another lurching pace towards him, then stepped forward and slammed the stake into George’s chest slightly left of centre.
The hardwood point ripped through George’s linen burial shift and grated between his ribs, shedding splinters as it went. It skewered his heart and almost severed it. George gasped like a speared fish, fumbled at the stake with useless hands. There was no way he was going to pull it out. Yulian watched him staggering there — watched in disbelief, astonishment, almost in admiration — and wondered: would it be this hard for someone to kill me? He supposed it would. After all, George had tried hard enough.
Then he kicked George’s jelly legs out from under him and went in search of the broken mattock head. A moment later and he returned, and still George squirmed and gagged and wrestled with the stake in his chest. Yulian grabbed one of his twitching legs, dragged him to a spot where black soil showed between the broken jointing of displaced flags. He got down on his knees beside him, used the mattock head as a hammer to drive the stake right through him and into the floor. Finally, jammed between two of the flags, the stake would go no further. George was pinned like some exotic beetle on a board. Only two o
r three inches of the stake stood up from his chest, but there was little blood to be seen. His eyes were still open, wide as doors, and there was white froth on his lips, but no more movement in him.
Yulian stood up, wiped his hands down his trousers, went in search of Anne. He found her crouching in a dark corner, whimpering and shivering, looking for all the world like a discarded doll. He dragged her to the furnace room and pointed to a shovel. ‘Stoke that fire,’ he ordered. ‘I want it hotter than hell, and if you don’t know now how hot hell is, I’m the one to show you! I want that flue glowing red. And whatever else you do, don’t go near George. Leave him completely alone. Do you understand?’
She nodded, whimpered, shrank back away from him. ‘I’ll be back,’ he told her, leaving her there by the furnace, which was now just beginning to roar.
On his way out, Yulian spoke to VIad. ‘Stay, watch.’ Then he went back into the house. Upstairs, passing his mother’s room, he heard her moving. He looked in. Georgina was pacing the floor wringing her hands and sobbing. She saw him.
‘Yulian?’ Her voice was a tremor. ‘Oh, Yulian, what’s to become of you? And what’s to become of me?’
‘What was to become has become,’ he answered coldly, unemotionally. ‘Can I still trust you, Georgina?’
‘I… I don’t know if I trust myself,’ she eventually answered.
‘Mother,’ — he used the term without thinking — ‘do you want to be like George?’
‘Oh, God! Yulian, please don’t say.
‘Because if you do,’ he stopped her, ‘it can be arranged. Just remember that.’
He left her and went to his own room. Helen heard him coming. She gasped at the sound of his quiet, even footfalls and threw herself on his bed. As he came in through the door she lifted her dress up to display the lower half of her body. She was naked under the dress. He saw her, the way her face worked: trying to smile through a mask of white terror. It was as if someone had thrown powdered chalk on the face of a clown.
‘Cover yourself, slut!’ he said.
‘I thought you liked me like this!’ she cried. ‘Oh, Yulian, don’t punish me. Please don’t hurt me!’ She watched him stride to a chest of drawers, take out a key and unlock the top drawer. When he turned towards her he was grinning his sick grin, and in his hands he weighed a shining new cleaver. The thing had a seven inch blade and was heavy as a small axe.
‘Yulian!’ Helen gasped, her mouth dry as sawdust. She slid off the bed and shrank away from him. ‘Yulian, I —’
He shook his head, laughing a weird, bubbling laugh. Then his face turned blank again. ‘No,’ he told her, ‘it’s not for you. You’re safe as long as you’re… useful to me. And you are useful. I’d have to pay a lot to find one as sweet and fresh as you. And even then — like all women
— she wouldn’t be worth it.’ He walked out and closed the door noiselessly behind him.
Downstairs, as he left the house again, Yulian noticed the column of blue smoke rising from the chimney stack at the back. He smiled to himself and nodded. Anne was working hard down there. But even as he studied the smoke, the fluffy September clouds parted a little and the sun struck through. Struck bright, hot, searing!
The smile twisted on Yulian’s face, became a snarl. He had left his hat indoors. Even so, the sun shouldn’t burn like this. His flesh almost felt scalded! And yet, looking at his naked forearms, he could see no blisters, no burns.
He guessed what it must mean: the change had speeded up in him and his final metamorphosis was beginning. Then, shrinking from the sun, gritting his teeth to keep from crying out as the pain increased, he hurried back to the cellars.
Down below Anne worked at the furnace. Her breasts and buttocks were shiny with sweat and streaked with grime. Yulian looked at her and marvelled that this had been ‘a lady’. As he approached she dropped the shovel, backing away from him. He carefully put down his cleaver, so as not to dull its edge in any way, and advanced on her. The sight of her like this — wild and naked, hot and perspiring and full of fear — had triggered his lust.
He took her on the heaped coke, filled her with himself, with the vampire thing in him, until she cried out her immeasurable horror — her unthinkable pleasure? — as his alien protoflesh surged within her.
Finished at last, he left her sprawling exhausted and battered on the coke and went to inspect George.
He found the Other inspecting him, too. Up from the gaps between strained flags, protoplasmic flesh had crept in doughy flaps and tendrils, binding George Lake to the floor as the Other examined him. There was no real curiosity in the thing, no hatred, no fear (except maybe an instinctive fear of even the slightest degree of light) but there was hunger. Even the amoeba, which ‘knows’ very little, knows enough to eat. And if Yulian had not returned when he did, certainly the Other would have devoured George, absorbed him. For there was little denying that he was food.
Yulian scowled at the Other’s flaccid, groping pseudopods, its quivering mouths and vacuous eyes. No! He sent out the sharp thought, like a drill on the creature’s nerve-. endings. Leave him! Begone! And whatever else it failed to understand, definitely the Other understood Yulian.
As if seared by a blowtorch, the pseudopods and other anomalies lashed, retracted, disappeared with squelching sounds below. It took only a second or two; but this had been only part of the Other. Yulian wondered how big it had grown now, just how much of it filled the compacted earth under the house.
Yulian took his cleaver and got down beside George. He placed his hand on his midriff just under the stump of stake. Something at once moved convulsively in him. Yulian sensed it coiling itself like a prodded caterpillar. George might look dead, should be dead, but he wasn’t. He was undead. The thing that lived in him — that which had been Yulian’s, but grown now and controller of George’s mind and body — merely waited. The stake alone had not been enough. But that came as no real surprise, Yulian had not been especially sure that it would be.
He took up his cleaver and wiped the shining blade on his rolled shirt sleeve. And the yellow eyes in George’s grey, mutilated face moved in their blood-rimmed orbits to follow his movements. Not only was the vampire’s body in George’s body, but its mind was in his mind, grafted to it like a feasting leech. Good!
Yulian struck. He struck rapidly, three times: hard, chopping blows that bit into George’s neck and cut through flesh and bone with perfect ease. In another moment his head rolled free.
Yulian gripped the severed head by its hair and stared into the core of the neck stump. Something green-and grey-mottled drew itself out of sight into fibrous mucus. Nothing Yulian could see looked like it should. The manpart of this thing was a mere — envelope of flesh, a shell or disguise to protect the creature within. Likewise the body:
when Yulian propped up the headless trunk with his knee, a sinuous something slipped quickly down into the bloody pipe of George’s yawning gullet.
Perhaps in two parts the vampire would eventually die, but it was not dead yet. Which left only one sure way, one tried and true means of disposal. Fire.
Yulian kicked the head in the direction of the furnace. It rolled past Anne where she lay exhausted, barely conscious in her extremity of terror. She had seen all that Yulian had done. The head came up against the foot of the furnace, rebounded a little way and stopped. Yulian dragged the body to the furnace and threw open the door. Inside, all was an orange and yellow shimmer. Heat blasted out; a shaft of heat roared up into the flue.
Without pause Yulian picked up the head and threw it into the furnace, as far to the back as he could get it. Then he propped up George’s body against the open door, and levered him shoulders first into the inferno. Last to go in were the legs and feet, which already were starting to kick. Yulian needed all his strength to control the thrashing limbs until he at last got them up over the rim of the door and slammed it shut. The door at once banged open, impelled by a raw, steaming foot. Again Yulian thrust the member inside
and slammed the door, and this time he shot the bolt. For long seconds, in addition to the roaring of the fire, there came thumping vibrations from within.
In a little while, however, the noises subsided. Then there was only a long, sustained hissing. Finally only the fire’s roar could be heard. Yulian stood there for long moments with his own private thoughts, before finally turning away…
By 11.00 P.M. that same Saturday, Alec Kyle and Carl Quint, Felix Krakovitch and Sergei Gulharov were on a scheduled Al Italia night flight for Bucharest, which would arrive just after midnight.
Of the four, Krakovitch had spent the busiest day, arranging all the paraphernalia of entry into a Soviet satellite for the two Englishmen. He had done this the easy way: by phoning his Second in Command at the Château Bronnitsy — one Ivan Gerenko, a rarely talented ‘deflector’ — and getting him to pass the details on to his high-powered go-between on Brezhnev’s staff. He had also asked that it be arranged for him to have maximum assistance, if he should require it, from the USSR’s ‘comrades’ in puppet Romania. They were still an insular lot, the Romanians, and one could never be absolutely sure of their co-operation — …hus Krakovitch’s afternoon was taken up in making and answering calls between Genoa and Moscow, until all arrangements were in hand.
Not once through all of this did he mention the name of Theo Dolgikh. Ordinarily he would have taken his complaint to the very top — to Brezhnev himself, as the Party Leader had ordered — but not in the present circumstances. Krakovitch had only Kyle’s word that Dolgikh was temporarily and not permanently detained. As long as he remained ostensibly in ignorance of the KGB agent and his affairs, then all would be well. And if indeed Dolgikh were safe and merely, for the moment. ‘secure’ — …ime enough later to bring charges of interference against Yuri Andropov. Krakovitch did marvel, though, that the KGB had got on to his supposedly secret mission to Italy so quickly. It made one wonder: were EBranch officials under KGB surveillance all of the time?
