The smile twisted on Yulian’s face, became a snarl. He had left his hat indoors. Even so, the sun shouldn’t burn like this. His flesh almost felt scalded! And yet, looking at his naked forearms, he could see no blisters, no burns.
He guessed what it must mean: the change had speeded up in him and his final metamorphosis was beginning. Then, shrinking from the sun, gritting his teeth to keep from crying out as the pain increased, he hurried back to the cellars.
Down below Anne worked at the furnace. Her breasts and buttocks were shiny with sweat and streaked with grime. Yulian looked at her and marvelled that this had been ‘a lady’. As he approached she dropped the shovel, backing away from him. He carefully put down his cleaver, so as not to dull its edge in any way, and advanced on her. The sight of her like this — wild and naked, hot and perspiring and full of fear — had triggered his lust.
He took her on the heaped coke, filled her with himself, with the vampire thing in him, until she cried out her immeasurable horror — her unthinkable pleasure? — as his alien protoflesh surged within her .
Finished at last, he left her sprawling exhausted and battered on the coke and went to inspect George.
He found the Other inspecting him, too. Up from the gaps between strained flags, protoplasmic flesh had crept in doughy flaps and tendrils, binding George Lake to the floor as the Other examined him. There was no real curiosity in the thing, no hatred, no fear (except maybe an instinctive fear of even the slightest degree of light) but there was hunger. Even the amoeba, which ‘knows’ very little, knows enough to eat. And if Yulian had not returned when he did, certainly the Other would have devoured George, absorbed him. For there was little denying that he was food.
Yulian scowled at the Other’s flaccid, groping pseudopods, its quivering mouths and vacuous eyes. No! He sent out the sharp thought, like a drill on the creature’s nerve-. endings. Leave him! Begone! And whatever else it failed to understand, definitely the Other understood Yulian.
As if seared by a blowtorch, the pseudopods and other anomalies lashed, retracted, disappeared with squelching sounds below. It took only a second or two; but this had been only part of the Other. Yulian wondered how big it had grown now, just how much of it filled the compacted earth under the house .
Yulian took his cleaver and got down beside George. He placed his hand on his midriff just under the stump of stake. Something at once moved convulsively in him. Yulian sensed it coiling itself like a prodded caterpillar. George might look dead, should be dead, but he wasn’t. He was undead. The thing that lived in him — that which had been Yulian’s, but grown now and controller of George’s mind and body — merely waited. The stake alone had not been enough. But that came as no real surprise, Yulian had not been especially sure that it would be.
He took up his cleaver and wiped the shining blade on his rolled shirt sleeve. And the yellow eyes in George’s grey, mutilated face moved in their blood-rimmed orbits to follow his movements. Not only was the vampire’s body in George’s body, but its mind was in his mind, grafted to it like a feasting leech. Good!
Yulian struck. He struck rapidly, three times: hard, chopping blows that bit into George’s neck and cut through flesh and bone with perfect ease. In another moment his head rolled free.
Yulian gripped the severed head by its hair and stared into the core of the neck stump. Something green- and grey-mottled drew itself out of sight into fibrous mucus. Nothing Yulian could see looked like it should. The manpart of this thing was a mere -envelope of flesh, a shell or disguise to protect the creature within. Likewise the body:
when Yulian propped up the headless trunk with his knee, a sinuous something slipped quickly down into the bloody pipe of George’s yawning gullet.
Perhaps in two parts the vampire would eventually die, but it was not dead yet. Which left only one sure way, one tried and true means of disposal. Fire.