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.
Sometimes he thought: perhaps I’m the cause of this change in myself. Maybe I’m making it happen. Willing it. Mind over matter. Because I’m evil.
Georgina had used to say that to him sometimes, tell him he was evil. That was when he was small and she still had a measure of control over him, when he’d done things she didn’t like. When he’d first started to experiment with his necromancy. Ah, but there’d been many things she hadn’t liked since then!
Georgina — ‘mother’ — terror stricken chicken penned with a fox cub, watching him grow sleek and strong. For as Yulian had grown older, so the element of control had changed, passed into his hands. It was his eyes; he only had to look at her with those eyes of his and . . . and she was powerless. The teachers and pupils at his school, too. And with use, so he’d become expert in hypnotism. Practice makes perfect. To that extent, at least, the book was correct: the vampire is quite capable of mesmerising its prey.
But what about mortality — or immortality, undeath? That was still a puzzle, a mystery — but it was one he’d soon resolve. Now that he had George there was very little he couldn’t resolve. For George was still in large part a man. Returned from the grave, undead, yes, but his flesh was still a man’s flesh. And that which was within him couldn’t have grown very large in so short a time. Unlike the Other, which had had plenty of time.
Yulian had, of course, experimented with the Other. His experiments had told him very little, but it was better than nothing. According to the fiction, vampires were supposed to succumb to the sharpened stake. The Other ignored the stake, seemed impervious to it. Trying to stake it was like trying to leave an imprint on water. The Other could be solid enough at times: it could form teeth, rudimentary hands, even eyes. But in the main its tissues were protoplasmic, gelatinous. And as for putting a stake through its ‘heart’ or cutting off its ‘head’ .
And yet it wasn’t indestructible, it wasn’t immortal. It could die, could be killed. Yulian had burned part of it in an incinerator down there in the cellars. And by God — if there was a God, which Yulian doubted — it hadn’t liked that! He was perfectly sure that he wouldn’t have liked it either. And that was a thought which occasionally worried him: if ever he were discovered, if men found out what
he was, would they try to burn him? He supposed they -would. But who could possibly find him out? And if
someone did, who would believe it? The police weren’t much likely to listen to a story about vampires, now were they? On the other hand, what with the local ‘satanic cult’, maybe they were!