“This is not a contest,” the Devil said, again. “I have nothing to gain or lose by tempting you. I do not need and do not want your soul, your heart or your affection.”
“And yet, you seem to have a thirst of some sort,” Anthony observed. “Perhaps you are a vampire too, avid for human blood in spite of your best intentions.”
“There is a thirst,” the Devil admitted, “and it might be mine. Have you ever met the Sphinx, my friend, in your lonely fort? Has she ever asked you her riddle? Her true riddle, I mean; not the one contrived by Sophocles.”
“I have never met a Sphinx,” Anthony said, rising to his feet and brushing the dust from the hem of his ragged coat, “but if I ever did, I would know you in that guise, and I would answer you then as I answer you now: I trust in the Lord, and Jesus Christ is my savior. I fear no possible consequence of that declaration.”
“And yet there are heretics already within the Christian company,” the Devil said. “There is division, disharmony and distrust even among those who worship the One God and accept the same savior. If you could see the future...but I dare say that you would see it as selectively as you see the present, filtered by the lens of faith. They will call you saint if you preach in Alexandria and write letters to the Emperor Constantine when you are done here. You will be the stuff of legend, and I shall not be entirely blameless in that, should I fail in my endeavor—but the vampire’s bite is your secret and mine, and will remain so. History always has its secrets, and a world like yours has more than its share, since it uses writing so sparingly.” Anthony could look into the Devil’s eyes again now, and could see that they were as restless as they had been before, although their pain seemed to have been dulled. He saw the Devil lick his lips, as if to moisten them against the dry and bitter wind that blew from the dunes.
“The scriptures are a gift from the Lord,” Anthony said, although he knew that no defense was necessary. “The commandments are preserved there, as they need to be now that the Ark of the Covenant is lost.”
“Writing is an awkward instrument,” the Devil remarked. “Without measurement and calculation, linear reasoning and syntactical complexity, science is impossible—but the learning of letters and numbers requires specialist teachers, and the custodians of culture inevitably become jealous of the privilege the control, establishing themselves as arbiters of faith. Their empire is fragile, though; once a man is taught to read, he is better equipped to think...and to doubt.”
Anthony’s eyes were scanning the eastern horizon, searching for the twilight that would precede the dawn, but there was no sign of it. There must still be several hours of night remaining. He licked his own lips, thirsty now for more than blood.
“I want to show you the answer to the Sphinx’s riddle,” the Devil said, softly. “The riddle of life and death, of growth and ageing, of competition and selection. I cannot force you to read its significance, but I shall write it in your eyes regardless.”
“I am weary,” Anthony admitted, “but you cannot defeat me. My thirst may be a torment, but it keeps me alert to your wiles.” “Look,” said the Father of Lies, pointing out into the shadowed desert, where the dunes had begun to stir and shift.
Anthony knew that moonlight could play tricks in the desert night. The haze that blurred the air by day seemed to disappear by night, but the fugitive light was deceptive nevertheless.
It seemed to him that the fine sand eddied into life, and that its motes, at first dissociated, began to cleave together into imitations of complex organic forms: leaves and tubers, worms and mites, slugs and crabs, trees and snakes. He saw all these creatures growing from tiny seeds and eggs into complex forms that produced more seeds and eggs, each generation dying off as the next emerged. He saw that, in order to grow, the creatures fed upon one another, not randomly but in measured and defined ways. Even the sedentary plants, whose only necessary nourishment was wind and sunlight, accepted the substance of the decaying dead into their own flesh, so that nothing that might be incorporate in flesh was lost or wasted, but always recycled and transfigured. He saw that the feeding was always competitive, and that there was also competition to delay the moment when the living became food, so that no succeeding generation was exactly the same as the one that had gone before.
Everything was changing, and would continue to change. Creation was continuous, and would never be complete.
Anthony saw, then, that the human species was a product of this process of ceaseless change, and deduced that the human species was no more immune to further change than any other. He understood that human beings were merely a part of a much larger pattern: a temporary artifact of the irresistible organic flux; a momentary fancy of the interminable restlessness of the molecules of life, which were forever in the process of consumption and excretion, hurrying from form to form with only the merest pauses for sleep, death, thought and faith. The answer to the Sphinx’s riddle, the hermit determined, was that life had its own energy, its own circulation and its own busy complexity. It did not need a sculptor—and he sensed that any sculptor who ever tried to tame its innate exuberance would surely fail.
“What is this to me?” Anthony said to the Devil. “I came to the desert to escape tumult, not to conjure it up in my dreams. It is in loneliness that one finds the Lord, and becomes close to the Lord. Life’s transactions are not uninteresting to me, nor are they irrelevant, but my first concern is the immortal soul, which rests immune to all of this confusion.”
“And yet, my friend,” the Devil said, “you thirst for water and you thirst for blood. Your flesh has no immunity to need, and your mind can have no immunity to the thirst induced by that need.”
The disguised Father of Lies took a dagger from the folds of his clothing, rolled up his sleeve, and cut his forearm from the crook of the elbow to the junction of his palm. “Come and drink,” he said, as the blood welled out and began to rain down on the rocky escarpment. “Drink of my blood, and be content.”
“I will not,” Anthony replied. “Not now, or ever. You cannot terrify me, demon that you are, for I am armored by my faith in the Lord, and in Jesus Christ my savior. You cannot tempt me, demon that you are, for I am armored by the certainty of my salvation, and the inviolability of my immortal soul. Water I shall drink as the need arises, but blood I never shall; I shall bear my thirst to the grave, no matter how long it might take to arrive there.”
The Devil lifted his arm, and licked his own blood, seeming to take considerable comfort therefrom. Then he turned, and looked behind him.
Anthony had not seen the four human figures that were creeping through the night until the Devil looked directly at them, but that did not mean that they had not been there all along, moving forward surreptitiously, as men who are abroad at night are wont to do.
“Ah!” the Devil said, as if he were not surprised to find them there, even though he had not suspected their presence until some tiny sound caused him to turn around. “Here are some who won’t refuse a drop of blood, though I dare say they haven’t thirsted quite as long as you, my friend.” He held out his arm, inviting the four to approach.
They did so, warily. They, at least, were surprised. They were not used to such offerings—or, indeed, to any offerings at all.
Anthony stared at the shadowed figures as they came closer, illuminated by a moon that was less than half full but whose light served nevertheless to augment the feeble glimmer of the distant stars. The newcomers were so thin as to seem like walking skeletons, their clothing reduced to mere ribbons—but their eyes were large and bright and greedy, and their thin lips were pursed in anticipation.
The Devil offered his arm freely. The cut was long enough to allow them all to drink simultaneously, two on each side; if the Devil had as much blood in him as a common man, they might have taken a stomach-full apiece and still left a residue behind—but that was not what happened.
The four vampires leapt upon their prey like a pack of jackals, clawing and snapping at him and
at one another. Maddened by the combination of their thirst and their proximity to the means of slaking it, they lashed out in every direction, each of them seemingly more intent on keeping his companions away from the prize than to claim it for himself.
They bit and sucked, lapped and swallowed—but for every drop they claimed a dozen were spilled on the rocky ledge. The Devil went down beneath their assault, bitten on both his legs as well as his arms, and about his face and throat as well. He sustained a dozen new wounds within a minute, a hundred within five. All of them bled with what seemed to Anthony to be unnatural copiousness—as if the vampires’ saliva had some agent within it that prevented the blood from clotting.
In his home town of Coma, and in Alexandria too—within the shadow of the library wall—Anthony had seen starving dogs fighting over a bone, but this was different. Even starving dogs retained some vestige of respect for one another, snarling and howling at the expense of inflicting deadly bites. The four vampires knew no such restraint. They did not howl and they did not snarl, but they clawed and they bit. They gouged at one another’s eyes and aimed deadly blows at one another’s throats. Their intentions were rarely fulfilled, in the immediate sense, but, as time went by and the Devil’s blood leaked away unharvested, the destruction they sought to wreak could hardly be avoided.
They were close to the edge of the cliff. One went sprawling over the edge, and then another. That left two—at which point the conflict became far less chaotic, more sharply focused.
The two vampires fought with all their might, and the Devil’s precious blood continued to ebb away.
Anthony watched, dumbfounded.
Eventually, one vampire went down for the last time—not dead, but broken in his limbs and stunned into unconsciousness. The survivor, who was by no means uninjured, immediately set about trying to lick the last few rivulets of blood from the Devil’s wounds, and to lap up the few fugitive pools that the rock had cupped. It seemed to Anthony to be a rather meager meal.
When the vampire had finished he sat back warily, supporting himself with his scarred and twisted hands, and he looked up at Anthony. His eyes were bright and wild, but not devoid of intelligence.
“You can’t allow yourself to be paralyzed by fear, my friend,” the vampire said. “You’re one of us now.”
“Are you the one who bit me?” Anthony asked.
“What does that matter?” the vampire retorted, licking his lips avidly in search of one last drop of sustenance. “It’s done. You should come with us—we’re heading for Alexandria.”
“Us?” Anthony echoed. “I think you will be alone from now on—and deservedly so, given that you treat your friends so vilely.” “They’ll recover,” the vampire said. “They’ll be thirsty, but their bones will knit and their scratches will heal. They’ll bear me no ill will. They know that there’s strength in numbers, even if the contest that results when we find a lone victim can have only one winner. In Alexandria, it will be different. Cities were made for our kind. If you stay out here, though, alone, they’ll catch you eventually. Then they’ll behead you, and burn your body. There’s no way back from that. You’d best come with us—you have a great deal to learn.”
“You have the Devil’s blood in you now,” Anthony told the creature. “It might make you stronger, I suppose, but it’s poison nevertheless.”
“If that were true,” the vampire replied, “it would make little enough difference to me, who was damned a long time ago—but I know the blood of a philosopher when I taste it. An Epicurean, I believe—the least intoxicating of all.”
“He wore the guise of an Epicurean,” Anthony admitted, “but he was the Devil. He had been a cloud of transparent darkness only an hour or so before.”
“The desert’s full of djinn,” the vampire told him. “There’s no blood in them, but they can play tricks with your head. Thirst makes it easier. If he gets up again, he’ll be one of us—but they don’t always get up. I was lucky; so were you. Him too, although he won’t feel it when he wakes up.” The creature inclined his head briefly in the direction of his erstwhile companion and adversary, who was still unconscious.
“You cannot hurt me, monster,” Anthony said.
“I certainly could,” the monster replied, “but I’ve nothing to gain by it, and the thirst will punish you enough, if you insist in your stubbornness. You’re welcome to come with us if you wish. If not, do as you will.”
“I shall pray to the Lord for my salvation,” Anthony said, defiantly. “I shall bear my thirst proudly, grateful to be tried and not found wanting. I shall guard my immortal soul until I die, and then confide it to the loving care of my savior and my Lord. The Devil could not tempt me, and nor shall you.”
The vampire came to his feet, wincing at the pain in his limbs and spine. He leaned over the Devil’s body, then knelt down beside it. “He might come back, I suppose,” was the monster’s off-hand judgment, “but I doubt it. Too much damage done. They say that nothing short of beheading and burning will make certain, but that’s just superstitious dread. Don’t worry about inviting me back to the fort—I’ll camp out down there, in the shadow of the cliff, till nightfall comes again. Are you sure you won’t come with us to Alexandria? They’ll start hunting for us eventually, of course, and we’ll have to move on, but there’s plenty of blood to be had in the meantime. The city is our natural environment.”
Anthony gathered himself together and came to stand opposite the vampire, looking down at the body of the man who had consented to be murdered. Anthony had to agree that it was impossible to believe that the corpse would ever be reanimated—but the Devil was a master of deception. He turned round abruptly, and walked away, in the direction of the fort. He suspected that the vampire was staring at the back of his head, but he did not look back.
“The flesh is a distraction,” the hermit said to himself, formulating the words clearly although he did not pronounce them aloud. “Its mortification is an irrelevance. The spirit is capable of rising above such trivial matters. Prayer will sustain me, no matter how long I am forced to endure this torment. As God wills, I shall do, even if I live to be a hundred.”
According to history, he lived to be a hundred and five, but he knew what a liar history can be when legend-mongers get involved in it, and he had lost count long before he died. Once he was officially declared a saint, Anthony was able to ascend to Heaven and look back upon the Earth, so he was able to watch with interest when his old Adversary, the Devil, tried his luck again in Heidelberg thirteen hundred years later, with a slightly different result.
After that, the cities of the world began to grow in earnest, and vampires to multiply. Anthony estimated that it might soon be time to call a halt to the whole sorry mess, perhaps to try again somewhere else in the vast and various universe, but he was not privy to the Lord’s intentions.
“Personally,” Saint Leocadia said to him one day, as they watched the outbreak and rapid progress of World War Three, “I’m glad to be out of it. I don’t miss a single thing—except, I suppose....” She trailed off, as the saints always tended to do at that point in the conversation.
Anthony was too polite to finish the sentence for her, although he knew perfectly well what she meant. He certainly didn’t miss the terrible thirst for blood that the Devil’s minion had cruelly inflicted upon him, nor any of the thousand other shocks that flesh was heir to, pleasant or unpleasant—but every so often, he missed the little intellectual shocks that had stimulated his mind while his faith was yet to find its final justification.
The saint knew now that he had been right all along to trust in his savior and the grace of God, and that he would be right in everything he believed for all eternity. There was a certain undeniable satisfaction in the irresistibility of that confirmation—but he also understood, now, what the Devil had meant when he had insisted that it wasn’t a contest. The Devil really hadn’t had the slightest interest in winning his soul, and really had been trying to explain the a
nswer to the Sphinx’s riddle.
By virtue of that realization, every now and again—if only a little—Saint Anthony couldn’t help missing temptation.
THE UGLY CYGNET
by Hans Realist Andersen
It was glorious out in the country. All around the fields and the meadows were great forests, and in the midst of these forests were calm and glittering lakes. On the shore of one of these lakes a swan wife sat upon her nest, warming her eggs.
One by one, the eggs cracked and the cygnets came out to look around, wonderingly, at the blue water and the green trees. “How wide the world is!” they exclaimed, one after another.
“It’s much wider than it seems,” their mother told them. “When you’ve learned to fly, you’ll understand how wide it really is.”
When there was only one egg left unhatched, the swan husband came to take his turn at sitting on the nest. “It hardly seems worth it,” he said. “That last egg is much smaller than the rest.”
“If a job’s worth doing,” the swan wife said, “it’s worth doing well. Let’s give it a few more days.”
The small egg broke at last, and its occupant reluctantly emerged.
“I told you so,” said the swan husband. “Did you ever see such a scrawny cygnet? And it’s a boy, too.”
“Well, no,” admitted his wife, “but we must treat him as generously as our other children.”
The next day was spent teaching the cygnets to swim. They took to it readily enough, even the smallest one. The mother swan was greatly relieved to see that the late arrival was able to cope with the water, and she dared to hope that he might be able to grow fast enough to catch up with his brothers and sisters.
Alas, the smallest cygnet did not have half as much appetite as his older siblings, and he remained small. When the swans paraded their offspring around the shore of the lake politeness compelled the other birds to compliment them on their brood, but they all took a less-than-secret delight in adding their commiserations regarding the weakling of the family. “Pity about the little one,” they would say. “Quite lets the side down, doesn’t he?”
The Innsmouth Heritage and Other Sequels Page 5
