‘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 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 between his ribs, shedding splinters as it went. It skewered his heart and almost severed it. George gasped like a speared fish, fumbled at the stake with useless hands. There was no way he was going to pull it out. Yulian watched him staggering there — watched in disbelief, astonishment, almost in admiration — and wondered: would it be this hard for someone to kill me? He supposed it would. After all, George had tried hard enough.