'After this,' said Anne, 'you should spend what's left of the weekend in bed!'
'I believe I will, my dear.' Fumblingly, the vicar went back to his text.
Georgina said nothing. She felt the strangeness. Something was unreal, out of focus. Did churches frown? This one was frowning. It had been hostile from the moment they'd arrived. That's what was wrong with the vicar: he could feel it too, but he didn't know what it was.
But how do I know what it is? Georgina wondered. Have I felt it before?
'… They brought young children to Christ, that he should touch them; and his disciples rebuked those that brought them…'
Georgina felt the church groaning around her, trying to expel her. No, trying to expel… Yulian? She looked at the baby and he looked back: his face broke into that unsmile which small babies smile. But his eyes were fixed, steady, unblinking. Even as she stared at him, she saw those darling eyes swivel in their sockets to gaze full upon the old vicar. Nothing wrong with that — it was just that it had looked so deliberate.
Yulian is ordinary! Georgina denied what she was thinking. She'd had this feeling before and denied it, and now she must do it again. He is ordinary! It was her, not the baby. She was blaming him for Ilya. It was the only explanation.
She glanced at George and Anne, and they smiled back reassuringly. Didn't they feel the cold, the strangeness? They obviously thought she was concerned about the vicar, the service. Other than that, they felt nothing. Oh, maybe they felt how draughty the place was, but that was all.
Georgina felt more than the cold. And so did the vicar. He was skipping lines now, hurrying through the service almost mechanically, about as human as some gaunt robot penguin. He avoided looking at them, especially Yulian. Maybe he could feel the infant's eyes on him, unwaveringly.
'Dearly beloved,' the old man was chanting at Anne and George now, the godparents, 'ye have brought this child here to be baptised…'
have to stop it. Georgina's thoughts were growing wilder. She started to panic. Have to, before it — but before what? — happens!p>
'…to release him of his sins, to sanctify him with…
Outside, much closer now, thunder rumbled, accompanied by lightning that lit up the west-facing windows and sent kaleidoscopic beams of bright colours lancing through the interior. The group about the font was first gold, then green, finally crimson. Yulian was blood in Georgina's arms; his eyes were blood where they stared at the vicar.
At the back of the church, under the pulpit, almost unnoticed all of this time, a funereal man had been sweeping up, his broom scraping on the stone flags. Now, for no apparent reason, he threw the broom down, tore off his apron and rolled it up, almost ran from the church. He could be heard grumbling to himself, angry about something. Another flash of lightning turned him blue, green, finally white as an undeveloped photograph as he reached the door and plunged out of sight.
'Eccentric!' The vicar, seeming a little more in control of himself, frowned after him, blinked at his abrupt disappearance. 'He cleans the church because he has a "feel" for it! So he tells me.'
'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 a 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 baptised 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 baptise 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.