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.