I Am Legend and Other Stories

by Richard Matheson

  It was no use. The world shimmered through endless distorting tears while he pressed back the hot earth, patting it around her still body with nerveless fingers.

  He lay fully clothed on his bed, staring at the black ceiling. He was half drunk and the darkness spun with fireflies.

  His right arm faltered out for the table. His hand brushed the bottle over and he jerked out clawing fingers too late. Then he relaxed and lay there in the still of night, listening to the whisky gurgle out of the bottle mouth and spread across the floor.

  His unkempt hair rustled on the pillow as he looked toward the clock. Two in the morning. Two days since he’d buried her. Two eyes looking at the clock, two ears picking up the hum of its electric chronology, two lips pressed together, two hands lying on the bed.

  He tried to rid himself of the concept, but everything in the world seemed suddenly to have dropped into a pit of duality, victim to a system of twos. Two people dead, two beds in the room, two windows, two bureaus, two rugs, two hearts that…

  His chest filled with night air, held, then pushed it out and sank abruptly. Two days, two hands, two eyes, two legs, two feet…

  He sat up and dropped his legs over the edge of the bed.

  His feet landed in the puddle of whisky and, he felt it soaking through his socks. A cold breeze was rattling the window blinds.

  He stared at the blackness. What’s left? he asked himself. What’s left, anyway?

  Wearily he stood up and stumbled into the bathroom, leaving wet tracks behind him. He threw water into his face and fumbled for a towel.

  What’s left? What’s…

  He stood suddenly rigid in the cold blackness.

  Someone was turning the knob on the front door.

  He felt a chill move up the back of his neck and his scalp began prickling. It’s Ben, he heard his mind offering. He’s come for the car keys.

  The towel slipped from his fingers and he heard it swish down onto the tiles. His body twitched.

  A fist thudded against the door, strengthless, as if it had fallen against the wood.

  He moved into the living room slowly, his heartbeat thudding heavily.

  The door rattled as another fist thudded against it weakly. He felt himself twitch at the sound. What’s the matter? he thought. The door is open. From the open window a cold breeze blew across his face. The darkness drew him to the door.

  “Who,” he murmured, unable to go on.

  His hand recoiled from the doorknob as it turned under his fingers. With one step, he backed into the wall and stood there breathing harshly, his widened eyes staring.

  Nothing happened. He stood there holding himself rigidly.

  Then his breath was snuffed. Someone was mumbling on the porch, muttering words he couldn’t hear. He braced himself; then, with a lunge, he jerked open the door and let the moonlight in.

  He couldn’t even scream. He just stood rooted to the spot, staring dumbly at Virginia.

  “Rob… ert,” she said.

  Chapter Ten

  THE SCIENCE ROOM WAS on the second floor. Robert Neville’s footsteps thudded hollowly up the marble steps of the Los Angeles Public Library. It was April 7, 1976.

  It had come to him, after a half week of drinking, disgust, and desultory investigation, that he was wasting his time. Isolated experiments were yielding nothing, that was clear. If there was a rational answer to the problem (and he had to believe that there was), he could only find it by careful research.

  Tentatively, for want of better knowledge, he had set up a possible basis, and that was blood. It provided, at least, a starting point. Step number one, then, was reading about blood.

  The silence of the library was complete save for the thudding of his shoes as he walked along the second-floor hallway. Outside, there were birds sometimes and, even lacking that, there seemed to be a sort of sound outside.

  Inexplicable, perhaps, but it never seemed as deathly still in the open as it did inside a building.

  Especially here in this giant, gray-stoned building that housed the literature of a world’s dead. Probably it was being surrounded by walls, he thought, something purely psychological. But knowing that didn’t make it any easier. There were no psychiatrists left to murmur of groundless neuroses and auditory hallucinations. The last man in the world was irretrievably stuck with his delusions.

  He entered the Science Room.

  It was a high-ceilinged room with tall, large-paned windows. Across from the doorway was the desk where books had been checked out in days when books were still being checked out.

  He stood there for a moment looking around the silent room, shaking his head slowly. All these books, he thought, the residue of a planet’s intellect, the scrapings of futile minds, the leftovers, the potpourri of artifacts that had no power to save men from perishing.

  His shoes clicked across the dark tiles as he walked to the beginning of the shelves on his left. His eyes moved to the cards between the shelf sections. ‘Astronomy’, he read; books about the heavens. He moved by them. It was not the heavens he was concerned about. Man’s lust for the stars had died with the others. ‘Physics’, ‘Chemistry’, ‘Engineering’. He passed them by and entered the main reading section of the Science Room.

  He stopped and looked up at the high ceiling. There were two banks of dead lights overhead and the ceiling was divided into great sunken squares, each square decorated with what looked like Indian mosaics. Morning sunlight filtered through the dusty windows and he saw motes floating gently on the current of its beams.

  He looked down the row of long wooden tables with chairs lined up before them. Someone had put them in place very neatly. The day the library was shut down, he thought, some maiden librarian had moved down the room, pushing each chair against its table. Carefully, with a plodding precision that was the cachet of herself.

  He thought about that visionary lady. To die, he thought, never knowing the fierce joy and attendant comfort of a loved one’s embrace. To sink into that hideous coma, to sink them into death and, perhaps, return to sterile, awful wanderings. All without knowing what it was to love and be loved.

  That was a tragedy more terrible than becoming a vampire.

  He shook his head. All right, that’s enough, he told himself, you haven’t got the time for maudlin reveries.

  He bypassed books until he came to ‘Medicine’. That was what he wanted. He looked through the titles. Books on hygiene, on anatomy, on physiology (general and specialized), on curative practices. Farther down, on bacteriology.

  He pulled out five books on general physiology and several works on blood. These he stacked on one of the dust-surfaced tables. Should he get any of the books on bacteriology? He stood a minute, looking indecisively at the buckram backs.

  Finally he shrugged. Well, what’s the difference? he thought. They can’t do any harm. He pulled out several of them at random and added them to the pile. He now had nine books on the table. That was enough for a start. He expected he’d be coming back.

  As he left the Science Room, he looked up at the clock over the door.

  The red hands had stopped at four-twenty-seven. He wondered what day they had stopped. As he descended the stairs with his armful of books, he wondered at just what moment the clock had stopped. Had it been morning or night? Was it raining or shining? Was anyone there when it stopped?

  He twisted his shoulders irritably. For God’s sake, what’s the difference? he asked himself. He was getting disgusted at this increasing nostalgic preoccupation with the past. It was a weakness, he knew, a weakness he could scarcely afford if he intended to go on. And yet he kept discovering himself drifting into extensive meditation on aspects of the past. It was almost more than he could control, and it was making him furious with himself.

  He couldn’t get the huge front doors open from the inside, either; they were too well locked. He had to go out through the broken window again, first dropping the books to the sidewalk one at a time, then himself. He t
ook the books to his car and got in.

  As he started the car, he saw that he was parked along a red-painted curb, facing in the wrong direction on a one-way street. He looked up and down the street.

  “Policeman!” he found himself calling. “Oh, policeman!”

  He laughed for a mile without stopping, wondering just what was so funny about it.

  He put down the book. He’d been reading again about the lymphatic system. He vaguely remembered reading about it months before, during the time he now called his ‘frenzied period’. But what he’d read had made no impression on him then because he’d had nothing to apply it to.

  There seemed to be something there now.

  The thin walls of the blood capillaries permitted blood plasma to escape into the tissue spaces along with the red and colorless cells. These escaped materials eventually returned to the blood system through the lymphatic vessels, carried back by the thin fluid called lymph.

  During this return flow, the lymph trickled through lymph nodes, which interrupted the flow and filtered out the solid particles of body waste, thus preventing them from entering the blood system.

  Now.

  There were two things that activated the lymphatic system: (1) breathing, which caused the diaphragm to compress the abdominal contents, thus forcing blood and lymph up against gravity;

  (2) physical movement, which caused skeletal muscles to compress lymph vessels, thus moving the lymph. An intricate valve system prevented any backing up of the flow.

  But the vampires didn’t breathe; not the dead ones, anyway. That meant, roughly, that half of their lymph flow was cut off. This meant, further, that a considerable amount of waste products would be left in the vampire’s system.

  Robert Neville was thinking particularly of the fetid odor of the vampire.

  He read on

  “The bacteria passes into the blood stream, where…”

  “-the white corpuscles playing a vital part in our defense against bacteria attack.”

  “Strong sunlight kills many germs rapidly and…”

  “Many bacterial diseases of man can be disseminated by the mechanical agency of flies, mosquitoes…”

  “-where, under the stimulus of bacterial attack, the phagocytic factories rush extra cells into the blood stream.”

  He let the book drop forward into his lap and it slipped off, his legs and thumped down on the rug.

  It was getting harder and harder to fight, because no matter what he read, there was always the relationship between bacteria and blood affliction. Yet, all this time, he’d been letting contempt fall freely on all those in the past who had died proclaiming the truth of the germ theory and scoffing at vampires.

  He got up and made himself a drink. But it sat untouched as he stood before the bar. Slowly, rhythmically, he thudded his right fist down on the top of the bar while his eyes stared bleakly at the wall.

  Germs.

  He grimaced. Well, for God’s sake, he snapped jadedly at himself, the word hasn’t got thorns, you know. He took a deep breath. All right, he ordered himself, is there any reason why it couldn’t be germs?

  He turned away from the bar as if he could leave the question there. But questions had no location; they could follow him around.

  He sat in the kitchen staring into a steaming cup of coffee. Germs. Bacteria. Viruses. Vampires. Why am I so against it? he thought. Was it just reactionary stubbornness, or was it that the task would loom as too tremendous for him if it were germs?

  He didn’t know. He started out on a new course, the course of compromise. Why throw out either theory? One didn’t necessarily negate the other. Dual acceptance and correlation, he thought.

  Bacteria could be the answer to the vampire.

  Everything seemed to flood over him then. It was as though he’d been the little Dutch boy with his finger in the dike, refusing to let the sea of reason in. There he’d been, crouching and content with his iron-bound theory. Now he’d straightened up and taken his finger out. The sea of answers was already beginning to wash in.

  The plague had spread so quickly. Could it have done that if only vampires had spread it? Could their nightly marauding have propelled it on so quickly?

  He felt himself jolted by the sudden answer. Only if you accepted bacteria could you explain the fantastic rapidity of the plague, the geometrical mounting of victims.

  He shoved aside the coffee cup, his brain pulsing with a dozen different ideas. The flies and mosquitoes had been a part of it. Spreading the disease, causing it to race through the world.

  Yes, bacteria explained a lot of things; the staying in by day, the coma enforced by the germ to protect itself from sun radiation.

  A new idea: What if the bacteria were the strength of the true vampire? He felt a shudder run down his back. Was it possible that the same germ that killed the living provided the energy for the dead?

  He had to know! He jumped up and almost ran out of the house. Then, at the last moment, he jerked back from the door with a nervous laugh. God's sake, he thought, am I going out of my mind? It was nighttime. He grinned and walked restlessly around the living room.

  Could it explain the other things? The stake? His mind fell over itself trying to fit that into the framework of bacterial causation. Come on! he shouted impatiently in his mind. But all he could think of was hemorrhage, and that didn’t explain that woman. And it wasn’t the heart…He skipped it, afraid that his new-found theory would start to collapse before he’d established it.

  The cross, then. No, bacteria couldn’t explain that. The soil; no, that was no help. Running water, the mirror, garlic…He felt himself trembling without control and he wanted to cry out loudly to stop the runaway horse of his brain. He had to find something! Goddamn it! he raged in his mind. I won’t let it go!

  He made himself sit down. Trembling and rigid, he sat there and blanked his mind until calm took over. Good Lord, he thought finally, what’s the matter with me? I get an idea, and when it doesn’t explain everything in the first minute, I panic. I must be going crazy.

  He took that drink now; he needed it. He held up his glass, it was shaking. All right, little boy, he tried kidding himself, calm down now. Santa Claus is coming to town with all the nice answers. No longer will you be a weird Robinson Crusoe, imprisoned on an island of night surrounded by oceans of death.

  He snickered at that, and it relaxed him. Colorful, he thought, tasty. The last man in the world is Edgar Guest.

  All right, then, he ordered himself, you’re going to bed. You’re not going to go flying off in twenty different directions. You can’t take that any more; you’re an emotional misfit.

  The first step was to get a microscope. That is the first step, he kept repeating forcefully to himself as he undressed for bed, ignoring the tight ball of indecision in his stomach, the almost painful craving to plunge directly into investigation without any priming.

  He almost felt ill, lying there in the darkness and planning just one step ahead. He knew it had to be that way, though. That is the first step, that is the first step. Goddamn your bones, that is the first step.

  He grinned in the darkness, feeling good about the definite work ahead.

  One thought on the problem he allowed himself before sleeping. The bitings, the insects, the transmission from person to person-were even these enough to explain the horrible speed with which the plague spread?

  He went to sleep with the question in his mind. And, about three n the morning, he woke up to find the house buffeted by another dust storm. And suddenly, in the flash of a second, he made the connection.

  Chapter Eleven

  THE FIRST ONE HE got was worthless.

  The base was so poorly leveled that any vibration at all disturbed it. The action of its moving parts was loose to the point of wobbling. The mirror kept moving out of position because its pivots weren’t tight enough. Moreover, the instrument had no substage to hold condenser or polarizer. It had only one nosepiece, so that he had to
remove the object lens when he wanted any variation in magnification. The lenses were impossible.

  But, of course, he knew nothing about microscopes, and he’d taken the first one he’d found. Three days later he hurled it against the wall with a strangled curse and stamped it into pieces with his heels.

  Then, when he’d calmed down, he went to the library and got a book on microscopes.

  The next time he went out, he didn’t come back until he’d found a decent instrument; triple nose stage, substage for condenser and polarizer, good base, smooth movement, iris diaphragm, good lenses. It’s just one more example, he told himself, of the stupidity of starting off half-cocked. Yeah, yeah, yeah, he answered disgustedly.

  He forced himself to spend a good amount of time familiarizing himself with the instrument. He fiddled with the mirror until he could direct a beam of light on the object in a matter of seconds. He acquainted himself with the lenses, varying from a three-inch power to a one-twelfth-inch power. In the case of the latter, he learned to place a drop of cedar-wood oil on the slide, then rack down until the lens touched the oil. He broke thirteen slides doing it.

  Within three days of steady attention, he could manipulate the milled adjustment heads rapidly, could control the iris diaphragm and condenser to get exactly the right amount of light on the slide, and was soon getting a sharply defined clarity with the ready-made slides he’d got. He never knew a flea looked so god-awful.

  Next came mounting, a process much more difficult, he soon discovered. No matter how he tried, he couldn’t seem to keep dust particles out of the mount. When he looked at them in the microscope, it looked as if he were examining boulders.

  It was especially difficult because of the dust storms, which still occurred on an average of once every four days. He was ultimately obliged to build a shelter over the bench.

  He also learned to be systematic while experimenting with the mounts. He found that continually searching for things allowed that much more time for dust to accumulate on his slides. Grudgingly, almost amused, he soon had a place for everything. Glass slips, cover glasses, pipettes, cells, forceps, Petri dishes, needles, chemicals-all were placed in systematic locations.