‘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.
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.