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'd 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 com-forted 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 colour 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 exorcised!'
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 breast-feed 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 com-pressing 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.'