As in the case of Autiel Duryea we observe that this specimen of vrykolakas preys only upon the blood in its own family. It possesses none of the characteristics of the undead vampire, being usually a living male person of otherwise normal appearances, unsuspecting its inherent demonism.
But this vrykolakas cannot act according to its demoniacal possession unless it is in the presence of a second member of the same family, who acts as a medium between the man and its demon. This medium has none of the traits of the vampire, but it senses the being of this creature (when the metamorphosis is about to occur) by reason of intense pains in the head and throat. Both the vampire and the medium undergo similar reactions, involving nausea, nocturnal visions, and physical disquietude.
When these two outcasts are within a certain distance of each other, the coalescence of inherent demonism is completed, and the vampire is subject to its attacks, demanding blood for its sustenance. No member of the family is safe at these times, for the vrykolakas, acting in its true agency on earth, will unerringly seek out the blood. In rare cases, where other victims are unavailable, the vampire will even take the blood from the very medium which made it possible.
This vampire is born into certain aged families, and naught but death can destroy it. It is not conscious of its blood-madness, and acts only in a psychic state. The medium, also, is unaware of its terrible rôle; and when these two are together, despite any lapse of years, the fusion of inheritance is so violent that no power known on earth can turn it back.
3
The lodge door slammed shut with a sudden, interrupting bang. The lode grated, and Henry Duryea’s footsteps sounded on the planked floor.
Arthur shook himself from the bed. He had only time to fling that haunting book into the Gladstone bag before he sensed his father standing in the doorway.
“You—you’re not shaving, Arthur.” Duryea’s words, spliced hesitantly, were toneless. He glanced from the table-top to the Gladstone, and to his son. He said nothing for a moment, his glance inscrutable. Then,
“It’s blowing up quite a storm outside.”
Arthur swallowed the first words which had come into his throat, nodded quickly, “Yes, isn’t it? Quite a storm.” He met his father’s gaze, his face burning. “I—I don’t think I’ll shave, Dad. My head aches.”
Duryea came swiftly into the room and pinned Arthur’s arms in his grasp. “What do you mean—your head aches? How? Does your throat—”
“No!” Arthur jerked himself away. He laughed. “It’s that French stew of yours! It’s hit me in the stomach!” He stepped past his father and started up the stairs.
“The stew?” Duryea pivoted on his heel. “Possibly. I think I feel it myself.”
Arthur stopped, his face suddenly white. “You—too?”
The words were hardly audible. Their glances met—clashed like dueling-swords.
For ten seconds neither of them said a word or moved a muscle: Arthur, from the stairs, looking down; his father below, gazing up at him. In Henry Duryea the blood drained slowly from his face and left a purple etching across the bridge of his nose and above his eyes. He looked like a death’s-head.
Arthur winced at the sight and twisted his eyes away. He turned to go up the remaining stairs.
“Son!”
He stopped again; his hand tightened on the banister.
“Yes, Dad?”
Duryea put his foot on the first stair, “I want you to lock your door tonight. The wind would keep it banging!”
“Yes,” breathed Arthur, and pushed up the stairs to his room.
* * * *
Doctor Duryea’s hollow footsteps sounded in steady, unhesitant beats across the floor of Timber Lake Lodge. Sometimes they stopped, and the crackling hiss of a sulfur match took their place, then perhaps a distended sigh, and, again, footsteps.…
Arthur crouched at the open door of his room. His head was cocked for those noises from below. In his hands was a double-barrel shotgun of violent gage.
…thud…thud…thud…
Then a pause, the clinking of a glass and the gurgling of liquid. The sigh, the tread of his feet over the floor.…
“He’s thirsty,” Arthur thought—Thirsty!
Outside, the storm had grown into fury. Lightning zigzagged between the mountains, filling the valley with weird phosphorescence. Thunder, like drums, rolled incessantly.
Within the lodge the heat of the fireplace piled the atmosphere thick with stagnation. All the doors and windows were locked shut, the oil-lamps glowed weakly—a pale, anemic light.
Henry Duryea walked to the foot of the stairs and stood looking up.
Arthur sensed his movements and ducked back into his room, the gun gripped in his shaking fingers.
Then Henry Duryea’s footstep sounded on the first stair.
Arthur slumped to one knee. He buckled a fist against his teeth as a prayer tumbled through them.
Duryea climbed a second step…and another…and still one more. On the fourth stair he stopped.
“Arthur!” His voice cut into the silence like the crack of a whip. “Arthur! Will you come down here?”
“Yes, Dad.” Bedraggled, his body hanging like cloth, young Duryea took five steps to the landing.
“We can’t be zanies!” cried Henry Duryea. “My soul is sick with dread. Tomorrow we’re going back to New York. I’m going to get the first boat to open sea.… Please come down here.” He turned about and descended the stairs to his room.
Arthur choked back the words which had lumped in his mouth. Half dazed, he followed.…
In the bedroom he saw his father stretched face-up along the bed. He saw a pile of rope at his father’s feet.
“Tie me to the bedposts, Arthur,” came the command. “Tie both my hands and both my feet.”
Arthur stood gaping.
“Do as I tell you!”
“Dad, what hor—”
“Don’t be a fool! You read that book! You know what relation you are to me! I’d always hoped it was Cecilia, but now I know it’s you. I should have known it on that night twenty years ago when you complained of a headache and nightmares.… Quickly, my head rocks with pain. Tie me!”
Speechless, his own pain piercing him with agony, Arthur fell to that grisly task. Both hands he tied—and both feet…tied them so firmly to the iron posts that his father could not lift himself an inch off the bed.
Then he blew out the lamps, and without a further glance at that Prometheus, he reascended the stairs to his room, and slammed and locked his door behind him.
He looked once at the breech of his gun, and set it against a chair by his bed. He flung off his robe and slippers, and within five minutes he was senseless in slumber.
4
He slept late, and when he awakened his muscles were as stiff as boards, and the lingering visions of a nightmare clung before his eyes. He pushed his way out of bed, stood dazedly on the floor.
A dull, numbing cruciation circulated through his head. He felt bloated…coarse and running with internal mucus. His mouth was dry, his gums sore and stinging.
He tightened his hands as he lunged for the door. “Dad,” he cried, and he heard his voice breaking in his throat. Sunlight filtered through the window at the top of the stairs. The air was hot and dry, and carried in it a mild odor of decay.
Arthur suddenly drew back at that odor—drew back with a gasp of awful fear. For he recognized it—that stench, the heaviness of his blood, the rawness of his tongue and gums.… Age-long it seemed, yet rising like a spirit in his memory. All of these things he had known and felt before.
He leaned against the banister, and half slid, half stumbled down the stairs.… His father had died during the night. He lay like a waxen figure tied to his bed, his face done up in knots.
Arthur stood dumbly at the foot of the bed for only a few seconds; then he went back upstairs to his room.
Almost immediately he emptied both barrels of the shotgun into his head.
&nb
sp; * * * *
The tragedy at Timber lake was discovered accidentally three days later. A party of fishermen, upon finding the two bodies, notified state authorities, and an investigation was directly under way.
Arthur Duryea had undoubtedly met death at his own hands. The condition of his wounds, and the manner with which he held the lethal weapon, at once foreclosed the suspicion of any foul play.
But the death of Doctor Henry Duryea confronted the police with an inexplicable mystery; for his trussed-up body, unscathed except for two jagged holes over the jugular vein, had been drained of all its blood.
The autopsy protocol of Henry Duryea laid death to “undetermined causes,” and it was not until the yellow tabloids commenced an investigation into the Duryea family history that the incredible and fantastic explanations were offered to the public.
Obviously such talk was held in popular contempt; yet in view of the controversial war which followed, the authorities considered it expedient to consign both Duryeas to the crematory.…
IN THE DARK, by Ronal Kayser
The watchman’s flashlight printed a white circle on the frosted-glass, black-lettered door:
GREGG CHEMICAL CO., MFRS.
ASA GREGG, PRES.
PRIVATE
The watchman’s hand closed on the knob, rattled the door in its frame. Queer, but tonight the sound had seemed to come from in there.… But that couldn’t be. He knew that Mr. Gregg and Miss Carruthers carried the only keys to the office, so any intruder would have been forced to smash the lock.
Maybe the sound came from the storage room. The watchman clumped along the rubber-matted corridor, flung his weight against that door. It opened hard, being of ponderous metal fitted into a cork casing. The room was an air-tight, fire-proof vault, really. His shoes gritted on the concrete floor as he prowled among the big porcelain vats. The flashlight bored through bluish haze to the concrete walls. Acid fumes escaping under the vat lids made a haze and seared the man’s throat.
He hurried out, coughing and wiping his eyes. It was damn funny. Every night lately he heard the same peculiar noise somewhere in this wing of the building…like a body groaning and turning in restless sleep, it was. It scared him. He didn’t mention the mystery to anyone, though. He was an old man, and he didn’t want Mr. Gregg to think he was getting too old for the job.
“Asa’d think I was crazy, if I told him about it,” he mumbled.
* * * *
Inside the office, Asa Gregg heard the muttered words plainly. He sat very still in the big, leather-cushioned chair, hardly breathing until the scrape of the watchman’s feet had thinned away down the hall. There was no light in the room to betray him; only the cherry-colored tip of his cigar, which couldn’t be visible through the frosted glass door. Anyway, it’d be an hour before the watchman’s round brought him past the office again. Asa Gregg had that hour, if he could screw up his nerve to use it.…
He took the frayed end of the cigar from his mouth. His hand, which had wasted to mere skin and bone these past few months, groped through the darkness, slid over the polished coolness of the dictaphone hood, and snapped the switch. Machinery faintly whirred. His fingers found the tube, lifted it.
“Miss Carruthers!” he snapped. Then he hesitated. Surely, he could trust Mary Carruthers! He’d never wondered about her before. She’d been his secretary for a dozen years—lately, since he couldn’t look after affairs himself as he used to, she had practically run the business. She was forty, sensible, unbeautiful, and tight-lipped. Hell, he had to trust her!
His voice plunged into the darkness.
“What I have to say now is intended for Mrs. Gregg’s ears only. She will take the first boat home, of course. Meet that boat and bring her to the office. Since my wife knows nothing about a dictaphone, it will be necessary for you to set this record running. As soon as you have done so, leave her alone in the room. Make sure she’s not interrupted for a half-hour. That’s all.”
He waited a decent interval. The invisible needle peeled its thread into the revolving wax cylinder.
“Jeannette,” muttered Asa Gregg, and hesitated again. This wasn’t going to be easy to say. He decided to begin matter-of-factly. “As you probably know, my will and the insurance policies are in the vault at the First National. I believe you will find all of my papers in excellent order. If any questions arise, consult Miss Carruthers. What I have to say to you now is purely personal—I feel, my dear, that I owe you an explanation—that is—”
God, it came harder than he had expected.
“Jeannette,” he started in afresh, “you remember three years ago when I was in the hospital. You were in Palm Beach at the time, and I wired that there’d been an accident here at the plant. That wasn’t strictly so. The fact is, I’d gotten mixed up with a girl—”
He paused, shivering. In the darkness a picture of Dot swam before him. The oval face, framed by gleaming swirls of lemon-tinted hair, had pouting scarlet lips, and eyes whose allure was intensified by violet make-up. The full-length picture of her included a streamlined, full-blossomed and yet delectably lithe Body. A costly, enticing, Broadway-chorus orchid! As a matter of fact, that was where he’d found her.
“I won’t make any excuses for myself,” Asa Gregg said harshly. “I might point out that you were always in Florida or Bermuda or France, and that I was a lonely man. But it wasn’t just loneliness, and I didn’t seek companionship. I thought I was making a last bow to Romance. I was successful, sixty, and silly, and I did all the damn fool things—I even wrote letters to her, Popsy-wopsy letters.” The dictaphone couldn’t record the grimace that jerked his lips. “She saved them, of course, and by and by she put a price on them—ten thousand dollars. Dot claimed that one of those filthy tabloids had offered her that much for them—and what was a poor working-girl to do? She lied. I knew that.
“I told her to bring the letters to the office after business hours, and I’d take care of her. I took care of her, all right. I shot her, Jeannette!”
He mopped his face with a handkerchief that was already damp.
“Not on account of the money, you understand. It was the things she said, after she had tucked the bills into her purse.…vile things, about the way she had earned it ten times over by enduring my beastly kisses. I’d really loved that girl, and I’d thought she’d cared for me a little. It was her hate that maddened me, and I got the gun out of my desk drawer—”
* * * *
Asa Gregg reached through the darkness for the switch. He fumbled for the bottle which stood on the desk. His hand trembled, spilling some of the liquor onto his lap. He drank from the bottle.…
This part of the story he’d skip. It was too horrible, even to think about it. He didn’t want to remember how the blood pooled inside Dot’s fur coat, and how he’d managed to carry the body out of the office without leaking any of her blood onto the floor. He tried to forget the musky sweetness of the perfume on the dead girl, mingled with that other evil blood-smell. Especially he didn’t want to remember the frightful time he’d had stripping the gold rings from her fingers, and the one gold tooth from her head.…
The horror of it coiled in the blackness about him. His own teeth rattled against the bottle when he gulped the second drink. He snapped the switch savagely, but when he spoke his voice cringed into the tube:
“I carried her into the storage room. I got the lid off one of the acid tanks. The vat contained an acid powerful enough to destroy anything—except gold. In fact, the vat itself had to be lined with gold-leaf. I knew that in twenty-four hours there wouldn’t be a recognizable body left, and in a week there wouldn’t be anything at all. No matter what the police suspected, they couldn’t prove a murder charge without a corpus delicti. I had committed the perfect crime—except for one thing. I didn’t realize that there’d be a splash when she went into the vat.”
Gregg laughed, not pleasantly. His wife might think it’d been a sob, when she heard this record. “Now you understand
why I went to the hospital,” he jerked. “Possibly you’d call that poetic justice. Oh, God!”
His voice broke. Again he thumbed off the switch, and mopped his face with the damp linen.
The rest—how could he explain the rest of it?
He spent a long minute arranging his thoughts.
“You haven’t any idea,” he resumed, “no one has any idea, of how I’ve been punished for the thing I did. I don’t mean the sheer physical agony—but the fear that I’d talk coming out of the ether at the hospital. The fear that she’d been traced to my office—I’d simply hidden her rings away, expecting to drop them into the river—or that she might have confided in her lover.…yes, she had one. Or, suppose a whopping big order came through and that tank was emptied the very next day. And I couldn’t ask any questions—I didn’t even know what was in the papers.
“However, that part of it gradually cleared up. I quizzed Miss Carruthers, and learned that an unidentified female body had been fished out of the East River a few days after Dot disappeared. That’s how the police ‘solved’ the case. I got rid of her rings. I ordered that vat left alone.
“The other thing began about six months ago.”
A spasm contorted his face. His fingers ached their grip into the dictaphone tube.
“Jeannette, you remember when I began to object to the radio, how I’d shout at you to turn it off in the middle of a program? You thought I was ill, and worried about business.… You were wrong. The thing that got me was hearing her voice—”
He gripped the cold cigar, chewed it. “It’s very strange that you didn’t notice it. No matter what station we dialed to, always that same voice came stealing into the room! But perhaps you did notice? You said, once or twice, that all those blues singers sounded alike!
“And she was a blues singer.… It was she, all right, somewhere out in the ether, reminding me.…
“The next thing was—well, at first when I noticed it in the office I thought Miss Carruthers had suddenly taken up with young ideas. You see, I kept smelling perfume.”
The Weird Fiction Megapack Page 49
