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'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
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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
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