Chapter Seven

11.00 P.M., the first Friday in September, 1977: in Genoa Alec Kyle and Carl Quint were hurrying through rain- slick cobbled alleys toward their rendezvous with Felix Krakovitch at a dive called Frankie's Franchise.

But seven hundred miles away in Devon, England, the time was 10.00 P.M. on a sultry Indian summer evening. At Harkley House, Yulian Bodescu lay naked on his back on the bed in his spacious garret room and considered the events of the last few days. In many ways they had been very satisfactory days, but they had been fraught with danger, too. He had not known the extent of his influence before, for the people at school and later Georgina had all been weak and hardly provided suitable yardsticks. The Lakes had been the true test, and Yulian had sailed through that with very little difficulty.

George Lake had been the only real obstacle, but even that had been an accidental encounter, when Yulian wasn't quite ready for him. The youth smiled a slow smile and gently touched his shoulder. There was a dull ache there now, but that was all. And where was ‘Uncle George' now? He was down in the vaults with his wife, Anne, that's where. Down where he belonged, with Viad standing guard on the door. Not that Yulian believed that to be absolutely necessary: it was a precaution, that's all. As for the Other: that had left its vat, gone into hiding in the earth where the cellars were darkest.

Then there was Yulian's ‘mother', Georgina. She was in her room, lost in self-pity, in her permanent state of terror. As she had been for the last year, since the time he did it to her. If she hadn't cut her hand that time it might never have happened. But she had, and then shown him the blood. Something had happened to him then —the same thing that happened every time he saw blood —but on this occasion it had been different. He had been unable to control it. When he had bandaged her hand, he'd deliberately let something... something of himself, get into the wound. Georgina hadn't seen it, but Yuiian had. He had made it.

She had been ill for a long time, and when she recovered... well, she had never really recovered. Not fully. And Yulian had known that it had grown in her, and that he was its master. She had known it too, which was what terrified her.

His ‘mother', yes. Actually, Yulian had never considered her his mother at all. He had come out of her, he knew that, but he'd always felt that he was more the son of a father — but not a father in the ordinary sense of the word. The son of... of something else. Which was why this evening he had asked her (as he'd asked her a hundred times before) about Ilya Bodescu, and about the way he died, and where he died. And to make sure he got the entire story in every last detail, this time he'd hypnotised her into the deepest possible trance.

And as Georgina had told him how it had been, so his mind had been lured east, across oceans and mountains and plains, over fields and cities and rivers, to a place which had always existed in the innermost eye of his mind; a place of hills and woods and... and yes, that was it! A place of low wooded hills in the shape of a cross. The cruciform hills. A place he would have to visit. Very soon. .

He would have to, for that's where the answer lay. He was in thrall to that place as much as the rest of them in the house were in thrall to him, which was to say totally.

And the strength of its seduction was just as great. It was a strength he had not realised until George had come back. Back from his grave in Blagdon cemetery, back from the dead. At first that had been a shock — then an all-consuming curiosity — finally a revelation! For it had told Yulian what he was. Not who he was but what. And certainly he was more than merely the son of Ilya and Georgina Bodescu.

Yulian knew that he was not entirely human, that a large part of him was utterly inhuman, and the knowledge thrilled him. He could hypnotise people to do his will, whatever he desired. He could produce new life, of a sort, out of himself. He could change living beings, people, into creatures like himself. Oh, they did not have his strength, his weird talents, but that was all to the good. The change made them his slaves, made him their absolute master.

More, he was a necromancer: he could open up dead bodies and learn the secrets of their lives. He knew how to prowl like a cat, swim like a fish, savage like a dog. The thought had occurred to him that given wings he might even fly — like a bat. Like a vampire bat!

Beside him on a bedside table lay a hardback book titled The Vampire in Fact and Fiction. Now he reached out a slender hand to touch its cover, trace the figure of a bat in flight impressed into the black binding cloth. Absorbing, certainly — but the title was a lie, as were the contents. Much of the alleged fiction was fact (Yulian was the living proof), and some of the supposed fact was fiction.

Sunlight, for instance. It didn't kill. It might, if he should ever be foolish enough to stretch himself out in a sheltered cove in midsummer for more than a minute or two. It must be some sort of chemical reaction, he thought. Photophobia was common enough even among ordinary men. Mushrooms grow best-under a covering of straw through foggy, late September nights. And he'd read somewhere that in Cyprus one can find the selfsame edible species, except they never break the surface. They push up the parched earth until cracks appear, which tell the locals where to find them. They didn't much care for sunlight, mushrooms, but it wouldn't kill them. No, Yulian was wary of the sun but not afraid of it. It was a question of being careful, that's all.

As for sleeping through the day in a coffin full of native soil: sheer fallacy. He did occasionally sleep during the day, but that was because he often spent much of the night deep in thought, or prowling the estate. He preferred night, true, because then, in the darkness or in the moonlight, he felt closer to his source, closer to understanding the true nature of his being.

Then there was the vampire's lust for blood: false, at least in Yulian's case. Oh, the sight of blood aroused him, did things to him internally, worked him into a passion; but drinking it from a victim's veins was hardly the delight described in the various fictions. He did like rare meat, however, and plenty of it, and had never been much of a one for greens. On the other hand, the thing Yulian had grown in the vat in the cellar, that had thrived on blood! On blood, flesh, anything animate or ex-animate. On flesh or the red juice of flesh, alive or dead! It didn't need to eat, Yulian knew, but it would if it could. It would have absorbed George, too, if he hadn't been there to stop it.

The Other... Yulian shuddered deliciously. It knew him for its master, but that was its sum total of knowledge. He had grown it from himself, and remembered how that had come about:

Just after he'd been expelled from school, the first of what he had always supposed to be his adult teeth had come loose. It was a back tooth and painful. But he wouldn't see a dentist. Working and worrying at it, one -night he'd broken the thread. And he'd examined the tooth closely, finding it curious that this was part of himself which had been shed. White bone and a thread of gristle, the red root. He'd put it in a saucer on the window ledge of his bedroom. But in the morning he heard it clatter to the floor. The core had put out tiny white rootlets, and the tooth was dragging itself like a hermit crab out of the morning light.

Yulian's teeth, except the back ones, had always been sharp as knives and chisel-tipped, but human teeth for all that. Certainly not animal teeth. The one which had pushed out the lost one was anything but human. It was a fang. Since then most of his teeth had been replaced, and the new ones were all fangs. Especially the eye-teeth. His jaws had changed too, to accommodate them.