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Roy Glashan's Library
Non sibi sed omnibus
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Terror Tales, February 1935, with "Thirst of the Ancients"
A strange girl it was whom John Carson married—one moment pure and wholesome, the next a demon of greedy passion. Yet not till he had followed her to the home of her ancestors, till he had seen the withered, horrible ancient making ready for his feast, did John Carson guess the fearful truth...
IT was almost three months since I had married Elise Delsart. Over and over again, I told myself that I was very happy—though when I was with her I needed no such assurances. Her strange, haunting presence enmeshed me in a fiery web that hazed my senses and beclouded my mind. I knew then only that I loved her, loved her with a strange dual love which was, I realized later, but a counterpart of the dual nature of her own being.
There were times when she was everything that a lovely, normal young bride should be. Her caresses were pure and wholesome, her face alight with tenderness. The haunting dread that seemed so often to shadow her eyes would vanish like smoke.
But there were other times—and they followed like snapping, snarling wolves on the very heels of sweet normality—when a stealthy shiver would tremble over her body from crown to toe, and that strange, greedy look I had come to know only too well would creep into her eyes.
Then, like a will-less automaton, like a man in a dream, I would sink into those warm-tinted, rounded arms that tightened fiercely about me, stare into the fathomless depths of those jet-black eyes, see the dark wine of her slightly parted lips, behind which gleamed whitely the even, sharp teeth—too sharp, almost.
In such moments there was always the queer prickling sensation that perhaps this time was the last. Horrible similes made lightning tracks through my brain. I thought of the strange nuptial flight of the queen bee and her mate; I thought of the praying mantis. In such moments it seemed to me that my very soul was being sucked out of my body, that one more instant of madness and the slender strands that still held its whispering tenuity would part irrevocably.
Yet I could do naught else. For it was always Elise, my wife, who would finally release her strangling embrace, and, with panting breath and swift horror in her eyes, push me from her as if—as if—God help me for the thoughts that crept unbidden into my mind—she had recoiled from the very edge of some dark and dreadful deed too hellish for human comprehension.
Once, in the hothouse passion of such a transformation, Elise had bitten me with those sharp little teeth of hers. It was just a mere bruising of the skin, the tiniest of lacerations; but a small globule of blood had welled forth. It had been salt on her full carmine lips. A convulsive shiver permeated her being. Her arms were whipping snakes about my form, her passion-flower mouth nuzzled against the unprotected line of my throat. I felt her teeth edging, edging... oh God, I could not move nor breathe!
Then she pushed me away violently, so violently that I all but lost my balance.
"John, darling!" There was shrinking dread, desperate fear in her voice, not justified by the trifling hurt. "You are bleeding! I have hurt you!"
She hurried away, came back a moment later. The iodine applicator in her hand trembling like a leaf in a shrieking hurricane. Her face, pale now as new snow, was stiffly averted.
What, after all, did I know of Elise? Nothing! I had met here at a Bohemian affair, where one's only passport was the ability to hold one's liquor. She qualified. So did I. No one knew her, but all eyes followed her pantherish grace, the Mona-Lisa mystery of her smile. She was lushly exotic; she was ageless, she was woman incarnate!
From that moment the spell was on me. I courted her with whirling ardor. She seemed to return my love, and yet, strangely, she seemed at the same time to flee my advances. That haunted look which later was to be a perpetual part of her, crept into her eyes the first time she refused me. I persisted, such being my madness; at last I won and married her. I had not known her antecedents; I still did not know them. She evaded my fumbling questions, and I felt a strange, unaccountable reluctance to press the point.
There was no question, however, about the fact that my friends no longer visited me, no matter how urgent the invitation, no matter how sweetly Elise insisted when we chanced casually to meet in the street. They would mutter hasty, indistinguishable excuses, look queerly at me, then in slanting sidewise fashion at the exotic loveliness on my arm, and would quicken their pace almost to a run as they left us.
It was also true that something had happened to me. I was no longer the sane, eminently practical lawyer I had always been. I seemed to walk in a perpetual haze. My mind, once keen and alert, fumbled and groped in a dark world peopled with hideous shapes and sounds. My clients gradually fell away from me; my office became an empty desolation.
In a vague fashion I connected my malaise with Elise. I sat alone, head in hand, for hours, trying to analyze the situation. It was no use. My thoughts would not function. I knew afterwards that subconsciously I was afraid—afraid of the woman I had married, of what she was, of what she might have been.
THEN, I noted after weeks had passed, with a great wave of thankfulness a gradual change in Elise. The dark cloud that overlaid her with brooding strangeness was gradually disappearing. Her spells of shudder—some passion grew more and more infrequent, and she even sometimes laughed—wholeheartedly, girlishly. She had never laughed before. A black shroud seemed lifted from both of us.
It was not quite three months since our wedding now. I came home that night cheerfully from the office. Whatever it was that had threatened our existence was gone. I was sure of that.
Elise met me at the door. Her manner was distraught. Her midnight hair made a disordered cloud and there was a frantic glitter in her deep-shaded eyes.
"John!" she cried huskily. "I just received a telegram. My—my uncle is dying!"
I kissed her and released myself gently. I stared at her a bit puzzled. Why such abandoned sorrow over an uncle? Then it struck me. It was the first time my wife had said anything about a family.
"That's too bad, honey," I murmured sympathetically. "But don't take on so. After all, uncles do die."
She clenched her hands convulsively. The knuckles were drained white. Something showed in her eyes, something more than sorrow, something more than dread, than terror even. It was frantic, supreme determination. I fell away a bit, afraid.
Elise must have seen that. She veiled her eyes. "You don't understand," she said very low. "My uncle is all I have—besides you. He brought me up from earliest childhood. My father died before I was born; my mother six months after. I must see him before it is too late."
I patted her shoulder, ashamed of certain dark, unbidden suspicions. She loved her uncle who had been father and mother to her. That was natural. It made her human; it—I started, shuddered. That very phrase flitting through my mind showed the frightful abyss, the vile foulness of my thoughts.
Aloud I said: "Of course, honey, we must go. We'll leave at once."
She shrank back from me as if she had been stung by a poisonous snake.
"No, no!" she panted. "You must not! Never! I must go alone!"
All my old suspicions flared again. What was she hiding from me? What was wrong with her family? Once and for all I determined to find out.
"I repeat," I said angrily, "I am going with you."
For a long moment there was silence. The veil dropped again over her eyes. Then, very low, she said: "If you insist..."
Would to God I hadn't! But in my madness, in my new-found determination to pierce the truth, I answered: "I do."
I DID not like the looks of Satanstoe. The gloom of approaching dusk hung thick on the wavering backdrop of mountains, and the red clay clung clammily to our shoes as we trudged up the snaky road. The bags were heavy in my hands. Dark, dilapidated cabins lined the path.
I was irritable, and more than a bit uneasy. Two days and two nights on the train had not helped. Nor the fierce restrained eagerness of my wife, the hectic flush that dyed her cheeks, the eerie, unfathomable look she turned on me. Nor the tense, electric atmosphere of this backwoods village. It dawned on me that I had not seen a soul—except one.
"What was the matter with that hack-driver?" I asked Elise. He had come forward eagerly enough as we left the train—the only arrivals. He had jerked a thumb toward a battered Model T.
"Any place I kin take ye, stranger?"
I motioned to Elise. "All right, honey. Here's our taxi."
My wife had emerged then from the shadows of the train shed, in which she had unaccountably lingered. The man jerked his eyes around. They widened. I thought at first it was because of her loveliness, because he was glad to see her.
Glad? Oh, my God! If ever I have seen terror limned indelibly on human countenance, it was on that lean, heretofore placid face. His eyes bulged, his lips writhed. His hands went up as if to fend off a thing of unutterable evil.
With a strangled incoherent moan he had whirled, darted for his ancient machine, and bounced off as if all the devils in hell were after him.
At my question the spots of color darkened on my wife's face. Her cheekbones were hard and glittering. She kept her eyes directly ahead.
"I am not responsible for all the fools in Satanstoe," she said with hard huskiness.
I did not mention the incident again, and we went on. But the strange unease grew on me. A little, half-naked child ran out of a cabin door with that natural curiosity which all children have in infrequently visited places. She dug her small toes in the clay and stared at me. Then she saw my wife.
A shrill baby cry split the silent air.
"Mammy! Mammy!" The tot wailed out its frightened little heart and tumbled back into the cabin. I thought I saw arms reaching out in the shadow doorway to clutch it tight, but no one came out.
Elise kept her face set straight on the road. She did not seem to have seen or heard. I said nothing, but strange thoughts wound like corpse-cloths around my flogging brain.
Boots made thumping sound behind a windbreak of trees. A man slouched into view. He was dressed in faded overalls and his face was long and sallow.
"Howdy, stranger," he waved friendly greeting. Then he stiffened, bit off something he was about to say. He whirled—face averted, he clumped down the road. The beat quickened; it was almost a run. Then it stopped.
I turned my head. He had hidden behind a tree. Only his face showed, peering whitely at me. There was fear, there was desperate warning in that glance.
Anger surged within me; anger—and something else. What the devil did it mean?
Before I could assemble my fumbling thoughts a wagon lumbered slowly down the road. Three men were in it, lean, hard-bitten, typical mountaineers. The horse plodded wearily along, ears drooping, too spiritless even to swish his tail at the buzzing flies that settled on his flanks.
The driver was telling a story. It must have been funny, for hoarse guffaws rose startlingly above the creak of ungreased axles. They had not seen us. I turned aside to let them pass. Elise stood quietly at my side.
The horse's heaving flanks almost brushed me. The large sad eye that fixed blankly on me was red and streaked with white. It was blind. Its head drooped more than ever.
Then it was abreast of my wife. The red-pitted nostrils sniffed, twitched violently. A long whinny of terror burst from the broken animal. It skittered away so violently that it all but overturned the wagon.
The driver grasped the lax reins, pulled.
"Whoa, consarn ye! What the devil...!"
Long trembling shudders ran over the horse's body. It fought with bared teeth against the bit. White lather flecked its mane.
The man next the driver swallowed the plug he was chewing. The stubble showed black against the sudden pallor of his skin.
"By God!" he blurted. "Seth! She's back!"
Then the horse bolted. The wagon careened from side to side down the red clay road. I gaped after it. Had I heard—or was it just imagination—chopped words from Seth: "Another... poor devil..."
SOMETHING clutched my throat. I turned. Elise was smiling a slow, strange smile.
"Something scared that horse," she said.
"Yes," I answered. And I said nothing more. God knows I should have stopped then and there, and demanded an explanation. Perhaps I should have gone back, caught up to that runaway team, found out things. My hair might yet be jet-black instead of grey; my face might still be youthfully unlined. And nights might be repositories of sleep, instead of gloating little animals with evil red eyes.
But I was at that moment afraid of Elise. I dared not ask. I was afraid of the answers. Besides, she was the woman I had married, had lived with, had embraced. How could one acknowledge to her the fearful, impossible thoughts that swirled in my brain—round and round, until I seemed twisted into hard, tight knots.
Night had fallen. Faint stars were out, but no moon. We went on. Elise said cheerfully: "We're almost there, darling." She walked with sure, quick tread. She seemed an uncanny shadow flitting at my side; she seemed to see in the dark.
At the next dim bend of the road she turned off into an overgrown path. I followed, stumbling. A house loomed across a weedy tangle. It was huge, somehow ominous. No lights showed.
We crunched over cinders, climbed the three steps that were blurs in the starlight. My clumsy footsteps thudded hollowly like a skeleton's. Elise made no noise.
The portico was supported by faded, sagging columns. Once they had been stately; now they were grey with death, ready at a touch to crumble into dust.
Elise was making doleful reverberations with a brass knocker on an arched door that hung crazily askew. There was still time for me to turn back, the maggots crawling in my brain seemed to whisper.
The door swung open with a squeak like that of a gibbering bat. A black hole yawned behind. There was a moment of dull silence in which the darkness peered out at us. Then a match scraped, burst into thin flame, and gave yellow luminance to a swinging lantern. The glow crept upward to disclose the holder.
The marrow seemed to freeze in my bones. What was it—monster or man? For a great hairy face leered out at us. Black greasy hair fell in a mop over a sloping forehead; a broken nose bulged darkly from squat, unformed features, and yellowish, malignant eyes drilled holes in my shuddering soul.
He held the lantern high. The light swept over my wife. He licked his lips and a slow grin spread over his evil countenance.
"Miss Elise!" he said, forcing the syllables out of his throat as if he were unused to speech. "So you come back!"
"Yes, Lem," she answered. Her brittle tone was a hardness that had been growing on her since we started South. "And this is my husband, Mr. Carson."
Lem's brutish eyes turned slowly on me. I did not like it; I felt a quick shudder at what I saw, or thought I saw, in those yellow flares.
"Take me to Uncle Philip," my wife said quickly. "I want to see him before he—dies."
A low growling chuckle, that raised the hackles on my spine, rasped its way from Len's throat.
"Afore he dies, hey?" he cackled. "Yeah, Miss Elise, you sure would."
Without another word he turned and led the way through the cavernous reaches of the entrance hall. I looked stealthily at my wife, but her face was hard and rigid and pale with some strangely fixed determination. I found myself afraid to talk.
THE light made the shadows retreat, only to gather with more intense blackness in the corners. Dust was on everything, dust and the decay of death. I shivered and followed Elise.
We plodded up a winding stairs. The treads groaned hollowly under my feet. Blackness greeted us at the top, against which the little flare of the lantern beat with unavailing rays. Lem paused and cocked his brutish head to one side.
"Hey, there!" he shouted.
The echoes rolled shrieking through interminable darkness. Then there was silence, in which I could listen to the slow drip, drip of my heart's blood.
Abruptly I jumped back, almost fell down the stairs. A shape had materialized out of impenetrable gloom. It had come with uncanny silence, and now it rolled into the dull yellow light.
It was a wheel-chair on rubber tires, dexterously propelled by means of a lever. But the man who sat in it! Good God! If Lem had sent shivers down my spine, the man in the chair made my body one frozen mass of horror.
He slumped in its hollow like the sloughed skin of a snake from which the meat and flesh and bones had already wriggled. The fingers that rested loosely on the chair arms, the legs that dangled uselessly in the chair well were mere dried husks of blown thinness. But the head, that supported itself from the high stiff collar of an older day, was incredibly alive and incredibly malignant. Yellow parchment skin clung hairlessly to a small round skull and whispered like dry leaves in a wind. Deep sockets burned twin holes from which, as from the bottom of a well, something eyed us stealthily. His fleshless lips writhed in fixed laughter, baring red gums from which protruded long, startlingly white fangs. There was no other way to describe those four tusks, two on each side, that locked hideously on each other.
"It's Elise come back to her poor old uncle Philip," the old man whispered. His voice was like the creaking of a rusty gate.
Hard spots of color burned in my wife's cheeks. Her eyes flared with strange lights as they clashed with the almost invisible orbs that lay in the deep socket pools.
"Yes," she said in a flat, controlled voice. "I have come back."
"Ha! ha!" he cackled. "She must have heard I was dying, Lem. That's filial affection for you. First she goes away and leaves me. I call and call and she doesn't come. Tonight she comes. Why, Lem?"
The brutish servitor grinned thickly. "I think, Mister Delsart, 'cause she's the dark o' the moon t'night."
Philip Delsart cackled and wheezed. "Exactly, Lem. Dear Elise was twenty a week ago, and the moon is dark for the first time tonight."
He bobbed his horrible head so that it seemed about to drop from the confines of his collar. "And she brought a man with her, too, like a sensible child." His hollow sockets fixed on me. "Married her, didn't you?"
I TRIED to open my mouth to answer him, but my jaws refused to function. Cold, freezing horror swept over me in great waves. I wanted more than anything else in all my life to get out of this frightful house, away from these frightful denizens, yet I could not move.
Elise answered for me. For the first time I detected a tremble in her voice. "John Carson is my husband."
That little tremble—of concern for me was it?—was the spring that released my body from the stiff mold into which it had been poured. I turned halfway, to grab her by the arm, to flee with her into the night. Then down the black, unfathomed hall I heard the swift patter of feet.
A girl burst panting into the lantern glow that enveloped us all in a tiny island of light. Even in the first shock of her appearance I noted her slender prettiness, the deep blue of her eyes, the glint of gold in her wind-bobbed hair.
"Oh, Mr. Delsart," she cried. "You had no right to leave your room. It will be the death of you. I told you—"
She stopped abruptly as she saw us. Her eyes widened with alarm. She shrank back with quick, fluttering movements from my wife.
"Oh! Oh!" she gasped. "Miss Elise! You've come back! I thought—you were gone—forever!"
A long shudder had rippled over my wife at sight of the girl.
"Nancy Tennant!" she said sharply. "What are you doing here?"
The girl threw back her head defiantly and moved closer to the horrible old man in the chair.
"I'm taking care of poor Mr. Delsart," she said. "He is dying, and needs a woman's care." Strange, the intonation she placed on that word!
My wife laughed. The sound of that laugh sent shivers of apprehension down my back.
"He has died before this, you poor fool!" she cried wildly. "He will die again, when you won't be here to witness it. Get out of here, Nancy Tennant! Get out before it is too late!"
The old man huddled in his chair like an empty sack, but I felt his hidden eyes staring—staring. Lem rocked his apelike head with foul, fierce merriment. He was in back of us, blocking the stairs, cutting off the flight I had meditated.
The girl, Nancy, gripped at the arm of the wheel-chair for support. Her bosom heaved and her breath was coming very fast. But crawling fear gave way to anger born of desperation.
"Elise Delsart!" she shrilled. "You—you have no power over me. I know you—everyone in Satanstoe knows you. You want me out of the way so you can work your hideous deeds without hindrance." The words were tumbling from her lips in a blazing fury of haste.
"You, Elise Delsart, dare accuse your uncle!" She was laughing wildly, and it was more terrible than Lem's sinister cackle had been. "Poor old man, he has but hours of life left. You, you have done that to him. You have drained him of life, you who have lived, a loathsome, despicable creature since the world began. We know your history, we people of Satanstoe. We know you for what you are—a hideous, blood-lusting vampire!"
VAMPIRE!
The dreadful word exploded in my skull and shattered my reeling brain into a thousand shards of flesh. All the strangeness of my married life came back to me in flooding horror; all the fearful suspicions, the swift alterations of mood on the part of my wife, the pierced blood from my neck that had lain salt on her tongue, her strong even teeth...
Vampire! I had married a vampire! God in Heaven! The shattered fragments of my being cried out frantically in denial, absolving, defending—but the dim spark of reason rose up in me with horrid, damning, conclusive evidence.
And the voice of the girl, the accuser, went on inexorably, with hysterical speed, crushing me with her young, shrill tones farther down into the depths of hell.
"Yes, a vampire!" she cried. "You were Sheba's Queen, the Lamia, the Medusa who turned men to stone; you were Lilith herself, who drained Adam of immortality and flaunted her love for the Devil. Every twenty years you must renew yourself, otherwise you die a mortal. Every twenty years you seek a victim, and, in the dark of the moon, you suck his blood to fatten your own filthy body, so fair of surface."
The dark of the moon! It was that tonight! I was going mad, stark, ravening mad. I had loved this woman—there had been times when she had been so warm and loving and sweet. God! Were they but webs of deceit to enmesh me further until the appointed time, when the moon was dark, unable to see the foul deeds perpetrated on a shadowed earth?
Nancy Tennant whirled on me. She was exalted with her accusing passion, she was beyond fear now.
"Go, poor fool!" she cried, "before it is too late! Run from her while there is time. Hide from her as you would from the face of destruction itself. Don't you see—don't you understand—why she has brought you, her victim, to Satanstoe? This is the seat of her power, the place of her filthy re-creation!"
I reeled like a drunken man. I felt the evil eyes of Lem boring into my back; Philip Delsart nodded and cackled approval like a horrible bird of prey. And Elise—my wife—A great groan burst from me. If I believed this I would surely go mad. I turned desperately to her who had lain at my side—to her who, in spite of everything, had shown flashes of what, to my deluded mind, had seemed true love.
"Elise!" I cried. "In the name of all that is sacred, deny these frightful things! Tell me they are not true. Tell them all to their gloating faces they are foul, damnable liars. I shall believe you, Elise. Do you hear? I shall believe you!..."
I waited a moment. "Only your word," I begged abjectly, "only two little words. Say only: 'They lie!' and we shall go out of this house of evil, together."
I gazed into the face of my wife imploringly, while my heart's-blood pounded madly and the cold sweat rolled on my clammy forehead. All about us the blackness of hell beat down with engulfing wings.
Lifetimes passed and no one moved. Then, very slowly, Elise turned her shapely head, the head I had loved to fondle. Her olive face was drawn and white, her lips a livid gash of red against the pallor. Her eyes, jet black, deep-shadowed pools, met mine.
I staggered back. I must have cried out, though I do not remember. The world, the universe itself, crashed in flaming destruction about my tortured brain.
I had read the truth in her eyes! Elise—my wife—was a vampire!
I MUST have gone mad then, completely, ravening mad. Bursts of idiot laughter shrilled from my lips; I cursed, I yelled, I screamed. I called on the heavens to fall and blast us all to destruction.
Then the fit left me, and cold, weakening horror wrapped me in a shroud. Nancy pitied me with fear-struck eyes. Delsart cackled like an obscene chorus. Elise had not moved or said a word under the floodgates of my loathing.
"I am going!" I said. "I leave this accursed place to the demons of hell. And I'll kill the one, vampire or mortal, who tries to stop me!"
It seemed to my bewildered mind that Elise's head dropped at that, but no word issued from her tight-locked lips. Then a thought pierced the haze. "Nancy Tennant," I whispered fiercely, "come with me. You, too, are mortal and in danger. Come..."
Dread flamed in Nancy's blue eyes. She shivered, yet she made no move. I could hardly hear her voice, so low it was. "I cannot. I must take care of Mr. Delsart. Go, please, quickly, and do not think of me. I am safe."
I groaned and turned on my heel. I took swift strides toward Lem, who blocked the stairs. My fists made desperate balls, ready to lash out if he tried to stop me. God! How I yearned for the clean, fresh air of night, for the feel of icy water on my fevered skin!
I heard Delsart's rusty, grating voice behind me. It was harsh with urgency.
"Elise Delsart, your husband escapes you and it is the dark of the moon. You die tonight—a mortal. Do you hear, dear niece?" He chuckled hideously. "For thousands of years you have lived, yet tonight you die for want of a husband's blood."
I felt the impact of something almost like a physical blow on my back. Lem, hairy face aflame with cruel quiverings, crouched at the head of the stairs, awaiting my onset. Yet it was not that which stopped me dead in my tracks.
Elsie would die tonight! Even in my maddened state it came as a shock. She had been my wife.
Then realization of what she was, of what she had intended, flooded my being. I exulted, I bathed in fierce joy. The face of the world was well rid of this idiot, of this foul cancerous thing that had roamed its surface too long, taking hideous toll. I turned to tell her so, to scream the last dregs of my loathing.
Something seemed to snap, some invisible web of influence of which I had not been aware. A strange smile fluttered over the skull-like features of Delsart.
Elise swung slowly from her locked gaze. I shouted something—what it was I do not know. Then her eyes met mine. No longer masked, no longer veiled, but filled with longing, with a yearning that enveloped me and tingled down to the very depths of my being. Her arms went out in imploring gesture, even as they had done so many times when I had thought she loved me.
"John!" she murmured, and there was a sweetness in her tones that I had never heard before. "John! Do not leave me! I need you, John; I shall die if you go."
Her face glowed with a strange light, her voice tugged at me with queer harmonies. I felt myself filled with a surge of strange sensation. Her voice was sweet—too sweet. It was cloying, with a poisonous syrup that seemed to cling round my heart. I knew that it was evil, I knew that I was doomed to destruction if I stayed; yet all the madness, all the revulsion, flowed like water out of my being.
Elise, who was my wife, had called on me. Tonight she would die, die for lack of blood to revivify her and make her beautiful and glowing and immortal. Only I could furnish that blood.
But I suddenly did not care. I read more than lust for my blood in her tender eyes. She loved me! Elise, vampire or not, loved me! Loved me, I was sure, more than she had ever loved anyone else through the centuries.
ALL my loathing turned to love. God! She was beautiful! She had a right to live, to exist for all eternity. What did it matter what means she employed to achieve immortality? What did it matter that I should die, that hundreds of other men had died before me, would die after me? We were mortals and our terms were limited. A few years more or less meant nothing.
But she, the glorious, the beautiful, would go on forever, a shining being through the ages. And she loved me, would pity me even as she drank deeply at the wellsprings of my being.
I would stay, I cried inwardly, and offer up the wine of life to her luscious, poisonously sweet lips. A surge of self-sacrifice tingled ecstatically in my veins.
Philip Delsart darted his shriveled head around to me. He seemed to read what was in my mind.
"Go, fool!" he shrilled. "She has you in thrall again. Lem, let him pass."
"John, darling!" the woman I had married called to me. Her head was thrust back and the pale yellow light of the lantern made a sinuous curve of the line of her throat. "Don't leave me. I love you, I want you!..."
Unutterably vibrant, compelling that voice—filled with the tenderness of our unclouded moments. I knew that evil crawled underneath; I knew that I had but a little while to live; yet I did not care.
"Elise!" I cried. "I am staying; I am yours. Do with me what you will!"
She swayed a little at that. For one instant her eyes were full on me with strained fear, with dreadful warning. Then she was rigid again and subtly alluring, with red parted lips that panted and showed the white line of her teeth.
I took a step toward her.
Like a small beating whirlwind Nancy Tennant was upon me. She pounded upon my chest with frantic fists, she pushed me with all the quivering strength of her slender body.
"Blind! Blind!" she cried passionately. "You are lost if you listen to her. Run, run for your life!"
Then I saw Elise, arms still outstretched. I thrust the frantic girl violently away. She stumbled and crashed against the wheel-chair. I even laughed.
"Life!" I cried. "What is my life compared to the immortal loveliness of my bride?"
Nancy righted herself with difficulty. Her eyes were wide on me, her face death-pale.
"Oh!" she gasped. "I see it all now. The whole damnable thing! It is too late—we are doomed, both of us!"
She whirled suddenly and ran down the hall. The darkness swallowed her. But I heard the desperate drumming of her feet on the pine-board floor, the sobbing of her fading voice: "Too late! Too late!..."
A door slammed, and there was silence.
Delsart took his cavernous eyes off his niece. His hairless skull was ghastly with sweat, as if the flickering life within him were exuding its ichor under groaning pressure.
"Nancy is tired and overwrought, poor child," he whispered. "And no wonder. Lem!"
The apelike man shambled forward. "Yes, Mister," he snarled.
"Leave the lantern here. Go watch over Miss Nancy. See that she is safe."
Lem grinned thickly. Then he hesitated, looked at me with sidelong glance.
"Don't worry about him," Delsart said. "I've advised him to go, but Elise is too strong for him. It is a pity."
The slow sweet smile of my wife penetrated my heart.
"It is no pity," I said, and fell into her enfolding arms...
I OPENED thick-lidded eyes and peered vainly about me. There was nothing I could see. The darkness pressed on my burning eyeballs in dense folds. All light had been withdrawn from the universe.
I stirred my addled brains and tried to think. It was hard. Little hammers pounded sharp nails into my skull. Blood roared in my ears. My tongue was a great furry ball in my mouth.
I shifted a head that was sizes too large for me. It scraped over corpse-cold cloth. I twisted slowly on a lead-weighted leg. I was in a bed, somewhere.
The sickening sensation in my head slowly lifted. I flogged my brain into remembrance. Scenes pierced my consciousness like mocking ghosts. Horror beat soundlessly about me. As in a dream I saw a fantastic, endless procession of men—always men—death-pale, their starved lips working in the gloom.
A cold sweat bathed my limbs. I remembered now. My wife—Elise—I had cast myself into her arms; I felt a cloying sweetness enfold me. Then I had known no more.
Without knowing, I opened my mouth. I shrieked.
The tremendous sound beat gibbering at the darkness, sprang full-throated around encircling walls.
I jerked under the impact. God! I was not dead, I was still alive! Only the living could scream like that.
Then the truth flashed on me. I had been drugged, and brought to this unknown place. But why? Very quietly I told myself the answer. It was not yet time—it was not yet midnight.
Only at midnight could the awful ceremony take place. Only at midnight could Elise dip her eager mouth into my life blood, and arise, refreshed, for twenty years more.
I lay as in a shroud, savoring that with my tongue. I was not dead yet, but soon—horribly soon—the vampire would glide into the room. My skin was a tight mask, too tight for my body. I burned with bursting fever, yet I was cold as ice.
My lungs labored as if I were running; my flesh shrieked for life, for the warmth of a new sun, never to be felt again. I did not want to die! I half rose, to spring from my bed of death, to run blindly through halls and corridors, yelling, shrieking out my thirst for life.
I half rose, I say; I thrust a whipping leg over the side. Then, out of the clamoring silence, came a sound. A succession of sounds. I paused and listened.
Deep, guttural, clangorous. Somewhere in the hollow depths of forgotten time, a clock was striking. I hearkened to those sullen grim reverberations. My heart's blood ebbed with each succeeding stroke.
I counted. Twelve doomful hammerings...
Midnight! The dark of the moon! Death to me—or to Elise.
Even now I could have escaped. My body jerked forward under the irresistible urge for life. But in my mind's eye I saw Elise. Elise, who was my wife, whom I had sworn to cherish until death did us part. I laughed wildly—that vain oath held hideous meaning now.
I saw her lovely form. I remembered the pure gold of certain days. I beheld as in a glass darkly the pleading of her eyes, the pallid sadness of her face.
Click—click—tap—tap. Down some unknown corridor came a steady noise, closer and closer. Elise was coming to claim her sacrifice.
My heart was a thudding pile-driver, my blood a mill-race. Terror seized me. But I clenched my chattering teeth and forced my shrieking body back on the bed.
Elise—vampire though she was, must live!
I lay very still, waiting... waiting...
The tapping sounds were very close now. A tiny light ebbed into the room, making the darkness more terrible. Behind it loomed a form. The candle glowed brighter; and held in a round circle of illumination the gliding figure of Elise.
She moved silently toward me, her beautiful form half-revealed through filmy silk. Her exotic face was set in a queer stiff mask. She walked as one asleep. But her eyes were blazing coals. They reached out for me, held me shuddering in a fierce, unyielding grip. For the first time I noticed the long curve of her fingers as they closed around the candle.
DREAD of the final consummation swept like an avalanche over me. This was Elise, yet it to not Elise. It was a stranger whom I had never seen; it was some demon in her lovely form.
I shivered as with ague, yet I did not move. Soon, soon it would be over. And Elise, the real Elise, would be reborn.
Her stiff, too-red lips opened. "John, darling!" Her beautiful arms went out suddenly, bare to the shoulders. Warm breath fanned my cheek. The candle sputtered on a night table. My wife's arms pressed back, exposing the line of my throat.
My body squirmed in shuddering revulsion. Almost I burst that embrace of death, almost I smashed furious fists into the soft, strangely cold cheek that rested on mine. I lifted, and dropped back trembling and sick.
I could not break away! I could not! To gain life for myself, Elise must die! I knew then that I loved her, fully, completely. Even at this moment when the world was at an end. I loved this vampire, I loved her with my life! Had I twenty lives, she could have them one by one, to feed on and make herself whole.
I fell back, passive. Silence grew enormous wings and overlaid me. The candle guttered and hissed out. I heard only the slow beating of my death-sick heart, the faint rustle of the woman as she thrust her head closer to mine.
A muscle twitched in my bare neck. My head was rigid, my eyes were closed. A burning iron entered my throat, just above the jugular. A tooth! Warm stickiness flowed out of me, was draining...
In spite of steeled will, I jerked uncontrollably. The cold bare arms tightened on my body. Sharp teeth nuzzled hungrily deeper, closer to the jugular.
Her hand loosed its hold, then pressed my throat back. I felt the greedy crunch of bone through cartilage. My blood spurted. I felt faint, sick with irrepressible horror.
Yet still I did not move. Something deep within me sang and exulted. I was dying so that she might live. What happier fate for any man who loved!
Already unconsciousness was claiming me. The dimness of approaching death filmed my eyes, hazed my thoughts. Soon the rending pain would be gone, and I would know no more.
A shrill scream made a slashing sword across my consciousness! It slapped ice water over my face, hurtled my numbing brain back to normal. It was a woman's scream, filled with unutterable terror! Again and again it rose, in a wild crescendo of tearing agony. Then it was gone, wiped out as if no sound had ever existed.
The eager sucking mouth at my throat lifted, and warm blood flowed down my neck. Elise was taut above me, listening. It was deathly quiet.
But I—I had heard. I had recognized. It was Nancy Tennant who had screamed in the last extremity of terror. Life flowed back into my veins. The truth made blinding concussion inside my skull. I knew now what Nancy Tennant had discovered out there in the hall, when she had fled sobbing and shrilling: "Too late! We're both of us doomed!"
I leapt out of bed, from under the still-clinging arms of Elise. I heard her startled cry, natural, but filled with alarm: "John! What's happened? Don't go!"
I did not pause; I raced through the darkness, every nerve-end quivering, every drop of blood left in my body clabbered with fear. Somehow I found a door and flung it open. Far away, down a long black tunnel, a tiny flickering light made dim illumination. I smashed headlong for it.
Behind me my wife was crying: "John! John! Come back!"
But I did not stop. Nancy had called for help and there was no one else to save her.
For one thudding second I stared into that murky hell, frozen by the horror of what I saw. My skin crawled and my scalp prickled. The very blood dripping from my wounded throat congealed into thick clots.
"Oh my God!" I gasped.
The monster I saw there looked up quickly from his dreadful pleasure, stared past me. I slammed around on the balls of my feet, in time to see a huge black arm descending.
I tried to duck, but it was too late. The weight crashed against the side of my skull, and I went down in a shower of blinding stars.
I WAS like a swimmer coming up through green depths with lungs bursting and ears pounding with pressure. Light shot through the murkiness in my brain; light and the grumble of voices. Something acrid stung my nostrils. They twitched violently. I came to my senses.
I found myself flat on my back on a wooden pallet. A ghastly yellow-green light wavered over the dank, dripping walls of a stone chamber. Whitish fumes, sharply acid, billowed up endlessly from a vat in the corner. I turned my head and groaned from the splitting pain in my skull, from the raw, tearing ache in my throat. Then I forgot the pain in the horror of what I saw in that vat.
An oily yellow liquid bubbled furiously in its depths. The boiling vapors rose along the eroded stone of the wall to disappear into a black hole in the ceiling. My eyes smarted and twitched insupportably; my nostrils were raw from the wisps that floated over me.
I knew what that deadly liquid was. Sulphuric acid! Acid that could eat human flesh and bones into horrible dissolution without a sign that they had ever existed. I knew now what was in store for me in this subterranean chamber.
I screamed and tried to rise. Something was holding me down. I jerked vainly at the copper strands that cut cruelly into my flesh. My head seemed held in a vise that was squeezing with gigantic pressure. I fell back exhausted.
Then a shadow fell across my body. A huge bulk obscured the seething cauldron. I opened my pain-swept eyes to see Lem bending over me. His black greasy face leered at me, his black malignant eyes were darts of hate.
"So ye're awake, hey?" he grimaced through slobbering lips. "Good thing I didn' hit you harder; else I'd 'a' spoiled the fun."
I steeled my sick flesh. Blinding memory of the monstrous thing I had glimpsed before I had been struck down came to me.
"Where—where is Nancy?" I gasped.
Lem grinned with evil malice.
"Look the other side of you," he mocked.
I twisted my head painfully. At the farther end of the chamber, his wheelchair flush against corroded stone, sat Philip Delsart. Like an obscene vulture he sat, crouched over his prey. I groaned with sick revulsion.
For his snarling, writhing lips were dabbled with gore, and the curved tusks were no longer white. Thick red liquid dripped with horrible slowness from the corners of his mouth. Was it delirium or approaching madness that made me imagine a horrible similitude of plumped-out fullness in that skull-like head, in those empty, shriveled sacks that had been hands and feet? Was the hectic glow that dyed the parchment of his cheeks the dawn of a new and more hideous youth?
I shrank against the strands that held me, and groaned dully.
Vampire blood! The ageless monster had already feasted on, his living prey, and was renewed. I was too late! Nancy was dead!
As if he had read my thoughts, Lem thrust his foul face closer to my shuddering vision.
"She ain't dead—yet," he croaked. "The Master's jes' started when you came along. He wants you to see it all."
Just then I heard a faint, piteous moan, a whispering.
"Oh, my God! What are you doing to me? Why do you torture me so? I want to die. Kill me quickly. Oh!"
On the other side of Delsart, spread-eagled on a table, arms and legs lashed tightly to bolted iron rings, was Nancy Tennant.
Her dress had been stripped from her shoulders and her nude torso shook with terrible gulping sobs. Her blond head lolled over the edge of the table so that her bare throat was level with Delsart's avid, bloody mouth. There were four hideous punctures in the tender flesh, and the welling blood dabbled her shoulders with ghastly red.
I WENT mad again. I shouted, I screamed, I cursed that ageless vampire with every curse there was. I threatened horrible things if he did not release the girl; I called on all the devils in hell to drag their brother kicking and screeching back to the pit. I threw myself again and again against the cruel wire, until my body was a bleeding crisscross of gouged flesh.
Delsart sat like a green harpy in the ghastly light. Green flares burned in the hollow sockets of his eyes.
"I have been cursed before." He grinned, and the grin pierced my senses like the Gorgon's deadly smile. "I have been cursed for five hundred years. Ever since the scared villagers of Olain, in the south of France, forgot to drive a stake through the dead heart of Philippe Delsart, who had fed on their wives and daughters. Yet I still remain to mock at the world of stupid men who live their petty lives and die.
"I too would die, if I did not drink the warm rich blood of a young girl whenever I feel dissolution steal upon me." He laughed horribly, and bent his fiend's body over the half-conscious girl.
I was bathed in icy sweat. Wild loathing submerged my being. I strained futilely. Nancy was doomed. Already the snarling avid lips were close to the open wounds. I was doomed too. There was no escape for me. Searing, frightful dissolution in the oily bath of the acid was to be my lot.
Unless... and I froze at the terrible thought. Unless I was to be saved for Elise, the monster's niece, to complete the unfinished draining of my blood...
Taut cords snapped within my brain. God! I had forgotten that! Elise was a vampire too, fit mate for Delsart. Together they had roamed the world, together they had sought their victims.
In a twinkling all my love turned to unutterable loathing. I revolted at what I had done, at the dreadful sacrifice I had gladly made. Already my untainted blood was coursing through her veins. The gash in my throat throbbed with horror; I shuddered with agony at the thought of that contact. Not until now had I seen the whole hideous truth.
"You filthy beasts of hell!" I shouted insanely. "You and your mate—your pretended niece—who tricked me into blind sacrifice. With all my dying breath I curse you—curse you both to eternal damnation!"
I was raving, altogether mad. There was no doubt of it. But that last discovery, as I thought, of the pair of them linked through the ages in unholy couplement, had burst the last thin thread of my senses.
The vampire lifted his head from his dreadful feast. Nancy moaned slightly and lay very still. Her face and neck were marble white, and the dark red of her blood made ghastly contrast.
There was a gloating grin on Delsart's evil countenance. Lem, stirring the sizzling acid with a paddle, laughed harshly, as at some horrible jest.
"You poor fool!" cackled Delsart. "Still you do not know the truth. It is the cream of the jest, the last irony that makes an otherwise tedious eternity of existence worthwhile. I would not have you die without knowing the full impact of that truth. It would give the final delicate touch of my chucklings over the years."
Dimly I heard through the red haze that clouded my brain. I did not understand, did not comprehend at first. But as the cackling voice went on...
"Elise Delsart is no kin of mine," the vampire gloated. "The last of my race is dead five hundred years. Almost twenty years ago I fed on a woman, young, beautiful." He smacked his dripping lips with dreadful glee. "She had a little baby daughter. I took her and reared her. I would feed on her when the time came, I thought. But then a brilliant idea burst on my dazzled vision. It would be sport, gigantic sport to make me laugh and hold my sides for ages to come.
"I would make this little baby girl into a vampire, even as myself"
I LAY as one beyond madness. The words were like leaden weights, dropping into the shuddering pool of my consciousness.
"I set to work," Delsart went on gleefully. "I exerted the power of my ageless mind on her tender brain. She grew up, believing, thinking herself the female counterpart of me. She grew up, beautiful but damned. She thought herself doomed to drink blood in the dark of the moon on her twentieth birthday," he went on. "She became restless, moody as the time drew near. Then one day, somehow, she burst from my influence. She disappeared.
"I tried to bring her back by the force of my will. I failed. Then I felt myself dying. I too needed blood. I sent her a telegram, knowing she would come. I had told her what it meant." He laughed with hideous concatenation of sound. "She brought you, her husband, whom she had married to escape the nightmare taint in her blood. She has drunken, she will continue to drink, but the greatest jest of all is this: She is mortal still. She can never be a vampire!"
Waves beat upon my brain, crashing waves that somehow were flooded with delirious joy.
Elise was no vampire! My failing blood sang it over and over in a paean of happiness. I forgot my bonds, the cruel fate that awaited me, the cruder torture of Nancy; everything but that one overwhelming fact. That was why I had loved her, in spite of all the hideous evidence. She was mortal, and dear and sweet, and...
She had drunk my blood! But that didn't matter. Now that the vampire was engrossed in his frightful pleasure, she would emerge from his influence, even as the dawn came up with the kindly, blessed sun. She would escape into the normal world of men once more and live out her normal life, one among many.
Then Nancy shrieked. I jerked back to reality. Delsart had plunged his tusks into her neck. They were closing, crunching with hideous sound. The girl's head whipped from side to side like a broken-winged bird. Scream after scream of agony whipped from her tortured throat.
God! The sound went through me like red-hot knives. If only I could get my hands on that monster; if only... I threw myself against the wires in final desperation. My body shrieked its pain; it blazed with coruscating agony. Lem stopped his paddling to smirk brutishly over my vain twitchings. Nancy screamed horribly. It was almost over.
I turned my head away, deathly sick. My glaring eyes fell on the arch of the door. I choked incredulously.
Elise was framed in the doorway.
I shouted with frantic terror. "Elise! Go away! Run for your life, out of this place of hell. You are not a vampire, Elise! Do you hear me?" I screamed. "You are not a vampire!"
She stood there, immobile, her blank eyes on me. Her face was cast in a tight, rigid mold. Her lips were paper white, and unspotted with blood.
"Go away!" I cried again. But she did not seem to hear. She glided into the room with slow sinuous movements, straight for me.
"Oh God!" I gasped, as the full horror of it exploded in my brain.
Elise was coming to complete her frightful meal. She was coming to drink the last remnants of my blood.
Lem slapped his uncouth thighs and howled with hideous laughter. Delsart raised his gory head, licked with red pointed tongue at his blood-besmeared lips, and cackled.
"The cream of the jest," he gloated. "My will has prevailed. She believes she is a vampire; she will not hear you shout as loud as you wish. She will plunge her fangs into your throat; she will suck and suck. When she is through, and your drained body has vanished in the bath, then—" and he rubbed his dry hands together with a grating sound—"I shall have more blood for myself—from her pretty neck."
I watched with shrieking horror her slow, doomful approach. I cried out, I prayed, I pleaded with her, trying to pierce the dread spell that fogged her senses; I recalled our love, our happiness.
It did no good, even as Delsart had said. Her expression did not change; her head swept down to my neck, seeking...
In that last extremity of madness, I fainted...
I AWOKE to a sharp, needled pricking of my side. I opened my eyes dully. Elise was still bending over me. I shuddered and was about to cry out when she put a quick finger on my cracked, weary lips. Urgency was in her gaze, swift warning and human tenderness.
I started incredulously, thinking I was dreaming, or dead.
"Quick!" she whispered very low. "I've cut your bonds with a knife. You're free. Hurry, before they turn around. Get Lem. I'll take care of Delsart."
Still not believing, I tried my leg. It moved! Strength flowed through my shrunken veins. I leaped madly from my bed of death.
For a moment I staggered. In that instant, Lem, who was facing the vat, swung around. A great animal roar filled the room.
I roared in feral answer and charged. We locked in death embrace, his long apelike arms whipping around my weakened body. I felt a rib crack; I was being lifted off my feet. In another second I would be thrown bodily into that boiling vat.
I struggled, I clawed, I gouged. The hairy brute laughed and tightened his crushing hold. My senses swam.
Then I saw Elise, knife in hand, lunging for the vampire who had pretended to be her uncle. Delsart's startled face was lifted from his feast; he shrieked in terror.
For one infinitesimal moment Lem relaxed his grip, swinging around toward his master. One tiny moment—but that was enough. Mad strength surged through me. I crooked my leg behind his knee; I placed both palms against his massive chest, and shoved.
Lem staggered, tried to recover himself. I shoved again. There was a long-drawn howl of agony. He teetered and fell headlong into the deadly liquid!
There was a great splash, a gurgling shriek, followed by silence. I stared down, sick and trembling, at the gruesome sight
Then Elise's cry came to me. I whirled and pounded crazily for the other end of the room. Somehow the vampire had wrested the knife from her hands. He had my wife on her knees, one bony hand clutching her throat, the other with gleaming steel uplifted.
I crashed into him with a wild curse; my balled fist smashed with every ounce of my hatred and loathing into that evil countenance.
It crumpled almost like thin plaster under the impact. The knife dropped with a clatter. The vampire, with the horrible screech of a lost soul, collapsed like a pricked balloon.
Philip Delsart was dead!
AFTERWARDS, our wounds bound, we rested awhile before leaving that abode of Satan. Elise nestled warm and human and tender against my heart, stroking the bandages that swathed my neck with remorseful murmurings. Nancy Tennant, pale and drawn, her throat hidden under layers of wadding, lay on a bed.
"All the while I was married to you I struggled against the spell," Elise said with a shudder. "I wanted to die on my twentieth birthday, as Delsart had threatened, a normal human being. I thought your love would help me. But when I got that telegram, I knew that once he drank afresh of blood, his power over me would extend even to where I was. Then and there I determined to kill him before he could fill his shriveled veins with the blood of Nancy.
"When you insisted on coming, too, I was afraid, but dared not refuse. I realized you had uneasy suspicions. Once here, Delsart proved stronger than I anticipated. He willed me to hold you, and like a puppet in his hands, I did." She shivered. "I even drank your life blood as—as he willed."
"That makes you more than ever a part of me," I said softly.
She smiled tenderly into my eyes. "It was when Nancy shrieked, and you leaped up to rescue her," she added, "that I awoke to the full realization of what I was doing. I followed you here, and pretended I was still a—a—" Her tongue stumbled on the frightful word.
"I know the rest," I said. "Don't talk about it."
Nancy raised her bandaged head. "Delsart had spread tales about his supposed niece," she said weakly. "No doubt it was to divert suspicion from himself." She closed her eyes, as if reliving the horrors she had been through. "Do—do you think," she asked, "he was really and truly a vampire, or just a madman whose disordered brain had conjured up horrible imaginings?"
"I don't know," I said. Then I added grimly, thinking of the sharpened stake I had driven through the dead man's heart: "But I took no chances."
Roy Glashan's Library
Non sibi sed omnibus
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