Brian Lumley - Necroscope

No, he had not asked the thing in the ground that question — not in a place such as this, during the hours of darkness. For who could gauge what the reaction might or might not be? It could be a very dangerous question indeed. And anyway, Dragosani believed he already knew the answer.

The next day was Thursday. Dragosani had spent a poor night with very little sleep, and he was up early. Looking out of his window, he saw Use Kinkovsi feeding chickens where they had wandered out of the farmyard and on to the grass verge of the country road. Out of the corner of her eye she saw his movement at the window and turned her face up to him.

Dragosani had thrown the windows wide, was breathing the morning air deeply into his lungs. Leaning on the sill, leaning out into the light, his flesh was pale as snow. Use looked at his naked chest. When he breathed in deeply like that, the muscles under his arms where they fed down into his back seemed to swell out like air sacs. He was deceptive, this one. She suspected he would be very powerful. 'Good morning!' she called up.

For an answer he nodded, and staring at her knew now why he'd slept so badly. She was the reason…

'Is that good?' she asked, her teeth white where she deliberately licked them.

'What?' he went on the defensive again — and at once silently cursed himself for an immature child. Yes, him Dragosani!

'The air on your skin like that. Does it feel good? But look at you, so pale! You could use some sunlight, too, Herr Dragosani.'

'Yes, you could… could be right,' he stuttered, and withdrew from the window to get dressed. Angrily tugging his clothes on, he thought: women, females, sex! So… ugly? Is it? So unnatural! And so… necessary? Is this what I lack?

Well, there was a way to find out. Tonight. It would have to be tonight, for tomorrow the English were coming. He made up his mind and went back to the window.

Use had gone back to feeding her chickens. Hearing his cough, she looked up to see him buttoning his shirt, staring down at her. For a long moment their eyes met; then, stumblingly, he said:

'Use, does it get chilly still? Er, in the night, I mean…'

She frowned, wondering what he was getting at. 'Cold? Why, no, it's summer.'

'Then tonight,' he blurted, 'I believe I'll leave my window — and my curtains — open.'

Her frown lifted. She tossed her head and laughed. 'That's very healthy,' she answered after a moment. 'I'm sure you'll feel better for it.'

Embarrassed now, Dragosani once more withdrew, closed the window and finished dressing. For a moment or two he regretted what he had done — this rendezvous so simply arranged, which in fact seemed to have been arranged for him — but finally he shrugged the feeling off. It was done now. What would be would be. And anyway, it was time he lost his virginity.

Lost his virginity, indeed! It made him sound like a young girl! And yet there was a touching naivety about that phrase, unlike the blunt delivery of his undead mentor. How had the old devil in the ground put it that time? 'A mere pup who never breached a bitch

Yes, that was it — and he'd been referring to Dragosani's father. His true father. And so I got into his mind… and I bequeathed the night to them! He got into his mind — to show him how to do it… Dragosani started as a pebble clattered against his window. He had been sitting on his bed, lost in thought. Now he got up, opened the window again. It was Use.

'Breakfast in your room, Herr Dragosani?' she called up, 'or will you eat with us?' The emphasis she put on 'in your room' was unmistakable, but Dragosani ignored it.

No, for first he must speak to the old dragon.

‘I'll come down,' he answered, and narrowed his eyes thoughtfully at the disappointment which instantly registered in her face. Oh, yes, he would need assistance with this one, this time, this first time. She would know exactly what she was about, and he knew nothing. But… the Wamphyr knew everything. And Dragosani suspected that there were certain secrets which even that devious old one wouldn't mind divulging. No, not at all…

Dragosani's sexual problem — rather, the mental block which had until now checked his psychological development in this area — had been implanted in puberty, at a time when other boys went on to steal their first kisses and explore their first soft bodies with hot, groping, inexperienced fingers. It had happened during his third year in Bucharest while he was boarding at the college there.

He had been thirteen and looking forward to the summer break. Then his stepfather's letter had arrived telling him not to come home. There was disease on the farm; the animals were being slaughtered; visitors were forbidden and even Boris would not be allowed on to the estate. The fever was virulent; people could easily spread it about on their feet, their shoes; the entire area for twenty miles around was under quarantine.

A disaster, apparently — but it need not prove to be one for Boris. He had an 'aunt' in Bucharest, his stepfather's younger sister, and could stay at her house for the break. It was better than nothing; at least he would have somewhere to go and not be stuck in an outbuilding of the old college, cooking his own food on a tiny stove.

His Aunt Hildegard was a young widow with two daughters only a year or so older than Boris himself, Anna and Katrina, and they lived in a large, rambling wooden house on the Budesti road. Oddly, they had never been much mentioned at home and Boris had only ever met them on their very infrequent visits to the Romanian countryside. He had always found his aunt very affectionate, perhaps too much so — and his cousins a little sickly and giggly in the way of young girls, except that there were also undercurrents of a sly sensuality beyond their years — but hardly darkly suspicious or especially odd. Yet he gained the impression from his stepfather's attitude towards them that his aunt was something of a black sheep, or at least a lady with a terrible secret.

In the three weeks he lived with her and her precocious daughters, when the college closed down for the summer break, Boris had discovered all he believed he needed to know of her 'oddness', of sex and the perverse ways of females, and his experiences had turned him off for all the years in between — until now. For the simple fact of the matter had been that his aunt was a nymphomaniac. Recently set free by the death of her husband, she had allowed her sexual obsession to get out of hand; and her daughters, apparently, were cut of pretty much the same cloth. Even when her ailing husband had been alive she had been notorious for her lovers. Word of her affairs had often got back to her brother in the country, so bringing about his aloofness, his disapproval. He was no prude himself, but he considered her little more than a whore.

Just how far she had carried her excesses was beyond her brother's power to know, especially now that he had broken off almost all contact with her. If he had known, then he would have made other arrangements for the youth; but his adopted son was, after all, barely a boy; he would surely stand exempt from the woman's vices.

Boris had known none of this but was to find out about it soon enough.

To begin with, there had been no locks on any of the interior doors in his aunt's house. Neither the bedrooms nor the bathroom had locks, not even the toilets. Aunt Hildegard had explained that there were no secret places here — nowhere for the performance of secret deeds — and that secret things in general were not tolerated. Which made it hard for Boris to understand the secretive or mischievously furtive looks which often passed between mother and daughters when he was present.

As for privacy: there was likewise absolutely no need for privacy in a place where nothing was forbidden, nothing frowned upon. Enquiring as to his aunt's philosophy, Boris had been told that this was 'a house of Nature', where the human body and its functions were things of Nature given us to 'explore, discover, understand and enjoy to their full, without conventional restrictions'. Provided that he respect the house and property of his hostess, there was nothing he could not do here and welcome; but he must similarly respect the 'natural' behaviour of the resident females of the house, whose ways he would find entirely open and unrestricted. As for philosophy as such: there was too little love in the world and too much hatred; if the lusts of the body and fires of the spirit could be quenched, sated in the pleasurable violence of embraces instead of war, then surely it would be a better place. Perhaps Boris would not understand immediately, but his aunt was sure that he would in a little while…