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 or 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.