The Last Vampire

by Whitley Strieber

  Declaring that the creatures were human meant that a whole different approach would be necessary. There would have to be due process and trials and prison sentences, and the vampire would like nothing better than this type of leverage. The vampire was powerful and quick and so damn smart. It could get away from prison.

  They were almost unkillable. Something about their blood gave them extraordinary powers of recovery. You had to blow that head apart, then burn the creatures to ash, to be absolutely certain they were dead. Then the lair had to be washed in acid.

  How could you ever call anything that lived in a filthy hole like a vampire lair human?

  But he couldn’t stop the wheels of the bureaucracy from turning as they turned. “What is this bunch of agents doing out in Asia killing people?” “Who are these ‘vampires,’ a terrorist group? A secret society? What in hell is going on here?”

  Some Thai were passing the car, banging gongs and chanting. Funerals made Paul physically ill. He had to drown out that sound, and not with a Thai radio station because the Asians, God love ’em, had not figured music out yet, not in any way whatsoever. “Are there any CDs in this car?”

  “Destiny’s Child, Santana, Johnny Mathis. Some kind of opera.”

  “Put in the opera, turn it up to full volume.”

  “Yes, sir.” The boy sounded crestfallen. Which one would the kid have preferred? Destiny’s Child, no doubt.

  “Full volume! I want my ears to bleed! You got any cigars?” Paul was a creature of appetites. Fine wines, lots of them. The best vodka in the world, lots of it. The strongest opium, the most exotic, the sweetest, the most delicious of whatever the world had to offer. One of his great regrets was the failure of either the Company to assassinate Castro or, better, of the U.S. to just come to terms with him. The loss of the Cuban cigar had been a blow.

  Well, good god damn, that was Callas!

  “Louder!”

  “It’s as loud as it gets!”

  He reached forward, turned the knob all the way up.

  Oh, God, Lakmé. Oh, God, the “Bell Song.” That she had lived, this goddess Maria Callas, was proof that human beings were of interest to the good Lord. Nothing so fabulous could have come about by accident. “Hey, kid!”

  No answer.

  “KID!”

  “Yessir!”

  “That goddess is called Maria Callas. You ever worshipped a woman?”

  “Sir?”

  “It is a very special pleasure, I assure you. To worship something so gentle, so soft, so willing as a good woman.”

  “Okay.”

  He’d worshipped at the altar of the female all of his life. Three marriages, six mistresses, and whores enough to populate a small army were testament to that fact. Jesus, but she could sing. “Death, be not proud!”

  “Yessir!”

  “Do you fear death?”

  “Yessir!”

  “The goddamn Pathet Lao stuck an electric cattle prod up my ass and left it on so long steam came outa my nose. You know what I told them?”

  “Name, rank, and serial number?”

  “I told them, if they filled out the forms, they could get Visa cards from the Thai Farmer’s Bank. The deal was, let me go and I would help them fill out those forms. When they got their credit cards, that was the end of that Pathet Lao cell. Who wants to run around in the jungle covered with leeches when you could be sipping a Singapore Sling at the Poontang Hilton, am I right?” “I guess so, sir.”

  He could see the kid’s eyes rolling in the rearview mirror. Well, let ’em roll.

  Let the DCIA and the president whine about whether or not the damn vampires had human rights or whatever. Paul decided that he’d like to taste vampire. Probably like — not chicken, no, they’d taste like something else. Snake maybe, except he’d eaten snake in Cambo, and it did taste like chicken. They made dynamite snake curry in Kuala backstreets. Little pieces of sour asp meat marinated with asafetida and fried in ghee. Oh, that is good.

  They reached the hotel at long living last. It was a pretty place, luxurious. What was a vampire doing in a place like this? Vampires didn’t go to hotels. They didn’t sleep in beds. They were animals, God for damn it! The thing must have been crawling around in the ducts or something.

  The problem he was here to solve was twofold: First, he had to get a line on the whereabouts of this animal. Second, he had to contain the curiosity of the local cops, who had a corpse on their hands they could not understand at all. They also wanted to know why an Interpol officer was operating in their country without their knowledge. Of course, the problem there was that he was on CIA’s payroll.

  Kiew Narawat was a precise, solemn man from Sri Lanka, an excellent operative and a profound friend of the United States. But Narawat wasn’t a member of Paul’s team, just a garden variety asset who had been detailed to observe any nocturnal comings and goings at a certain temple in Chiang Mai.

  Paul went into the hotel.

  If they hadn’t messed up the corpse somehow, that would be one good outcome from this tragedy. Not only would there be a useful forensic and medical yield, the condition of the body would help him make his case that the vampire killings should not be declared crimes. “This was the act of an animal,” he could hear himself saying. “This man was not murdered, he was fed upon.”

  If they could just get a little more vampire DNA, that would be it. The discovery of the vampires had taken place in 1989, when the Japanese government had asked for help with a very strange murder. They had the attack on videotape from a traffic control point. It was three in the morning and the streets were empty.

  An old man was struggling along the sidewalk. He was the only person in the area. Then this strange creature came loping along, and grabbed the man. It had put its mouth on his neck and suddenly the entire body had withered, disappearing into its own clothing. The creature had stuffed it into a satchel and walked off.

  The man was unattached, very poor, and normally wouldn’t have been missed even in that very careful country. But the police made an effort, because what they had seen was so disturbing. They identified the old man. They went to the spot where the crime had taken place and took careful samples of everything. A hair had appeared in the debris they vacuumed up from the sidewalk that was not human, and not from a known animal.

  It had taken years for the mystery to percolate into CIA’s pot. Paul got it because he was an old Asia hand and had his own father’s mysterious death in his file. The way the old man looked after his blood had apparently been sucked out of him and the way Paul’s dad had looked when he’d been discovered had been strangely similar.

  They gave it to him because they thought he’d be interested. Well, he wasn’t. And damn them for dredging up his father’s memory like that.

  Nothing more was done, not until 1998, when a crime reporter, Ellen Wunderling, had disappeared in New York while innocently doing research for a Halloween spoof about vampires. She had delved too deep into the gothic underground, an eerie, subtly murderous subculture that would be an ideal place for real vampires to conceal themselves. He’d begun his own investigation of the disappearance, but then came Tokyo and an opportunity to take immediate and direct action. He had been finding and killing vampires ever since.

  Paul got into the elevator. He hated riding elevators. It opened on a wide corridor, with rooms open here and there. The management had cleared the whole floor. In front of one of the open rooms, a small crowd of Thai police, medical personnel, and plainclothes officers came and went.

  The instant Paul entered the room, the smell hit him. What was it? A human odor, maybe. But so strange — salty, dry, distressingly organic. He looked down at the yellow flowered sheet with the angular lump under it.

  “Thailand will expect extradition of the perpetrator, if he is found elsewhere, Mr. Ward,” the colonel inspector said in his heavy, careful English.

  Paul grunted, wishing that the man could be made to go away.

  Kiew Narawa
t had been ordered to report if he saw anybody enter the temple. So why had he ended up in this room like this, instead? Paul took the sheet and pulled it back.

  He actually had to stifle a scream. This was the most spectacularly destroyed human body he had seen in his adult life. But not in his whole life, and that was what made it so terrible for him.

  He was twelve again. He was awakened by a sound like the last water getting sucked down an eager drain.

  The sleepy-eyed boy looked out the window, gazing into the glowing dark. The prairie grass was dancing in the moonlight, and there was a dark figure moving through the field with a burden of some kind on its shoulder.

  Paulie stared. Who was that out there? But Big Boy wasn’t barking and Big Boy was a hair-trigger watchdog.

  The figure disappeared off into the woods. Tomorrow, Paulie would get Dad and go down there, see what had happened.

  And then came the terror of the next morning and of the haunted life of Paul Ward: Where’s Dad? he had asked his mom. I don’t know honey, she had said. When is he coming back? I don’t know! I don’t know!

  Flash forward four years: Paul is walking along the stream beside their pear orchard when he sees something strange down among the roots of a tree. Again, Big Boy notices nothing.

  Now, Paul knows why. He knows that they secrete a blocking pheromone that makes it impossible for animals to pick up their scent. The remains of their victims are covered with it.

  When he saw the skeleton of his father in a casement of dry and disintegrating skin just like this, he had run back to the house screaming in terrified agony, Big Boy gamboling beside him.

  The dental records had been definitive. It was Dad. But Dr. Ford, their local medical examiner, could not figure out what had happened to him. The state police couldn’t figure it out. The FBI finally issued a report: death by misadventure unknown.

  Little Paulie had become obsessed with secrets. What had killed Daddy? An animal? Space aliens? Nobody knew. Daddy had been strong and big and good, so why had he ended up like that down in the roots of a tree?

  Some years later, Paul had awakened to see a woman standing at the foot of his bed, a woman dressed all in black, with golden hair and an angelic face. She looked at him out of sweet eyes, eyes that made the heart melt. But when he sat up, when he called out to her, she faded like a dream.

  “The woman in here with him was French,” the policeman said, breaking Paul’s reverie. “We have determined that her name was Marie Tallman. She took the Air France flight to Paris. She will be detained there when she gets off the plane.”

  “It was a female?” Paul responded. “You’re sure?”

  “A woman, yes,” the Thai said, his voice gone sharp with surprise at Paul’s odd use of the word “it.” But Paul couldn’t help himself. Paul hated these animals whether God had made them or not, and he was damned if he would dignify them with personal pronouns.

  “Under no circumstances is she to be detained.”

  “Excuse me, but that is a violation of our sovereignty. I am sorry.”

  Paul really noticed the officer for the first time. “Ask the French to photograph her and follow her. But not to detain her.” The Thai smiled. Paul could only hope that they would cooperate. He could not push the matter further, not and risk an inquiry to the embassy about the nature of his activities. The Thai were hair-trigger friends. They did not like CIA operations taking place on their soil without their knowledge.

  At high levels in the government, he was golden. But these cops were strictly low-level, and they didn’t know one damn thing about Paul’s secret brief and his secret powers.

  He gazed down at the remains, almost willing them to speak. But they said nothing. The face was stretched so tight against the skull that it looked like something you might buy for Halloween.

  “Turn him over,” he said. “I want to look at the back.”

  Two of the cops obliged. Paul knew that the vampires used human skin for articles of clothing — gloves and such — because you found such things in their lairs. He’d thought maybe the back of this man would be as neatly skinned as his own father’s had been.

  He’d held some of those gloves and purses in his hands for a long, long time. He’d wondered which of the creatures had worn garments made from his dad. Whenever he and his crew found these things, they collected them with reverence and they blessed them and they cremated them and made a little ritual of scattering the ashes.

  Melodramatic? You could say so. Sentimental. Sure. But his crew were united on two things: Any human remains they located would be respected, and no vampire would be left alive. Scorched-earth policy. Absolute.

  Think if they had to read Miranda warnings. Think if the vampires were allowed legal defense, say, in India, where the prisons leaked and it could take years before a case came to trial? What if they claimed murder as their natural right, and proved that they were created by God to prey upon the human being? Presumably, laws would then have to be written allowing them to take a certain number of humans as prey each year, much as we allow ourselves to take whales.

  And what about the endangered-species acts in various countries, most especially Europe and the U.S.? If the vampire was declared an endangered species — and it was conceivable, given their comparative rarity — then Paul and his crew would be out of business altogether. Governments would end up in the business of encouraging the vampire to breed and protecting its habitat — the ghetto, the teeming slum, the homeless shelter.

  A man with glasses approached Paul. “We understand that you will be able to inform us of the manner of death.”

  “Death by misadventure.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “The man had a bad adventure, obviously. So that’s the conclusion — death by misadventure.”

  “You are coming all the way from KL to tell us this — this nothing?”

  “The corpse is U.S. property,” Paul said. “I’m going to remove it to the States.” He needed it. He needed any trace of nonhuman DNA he could find. The hair from Tokyo wasn’t enough. But two samples — that would end the human-animal controversy.

  “Now, wait,” the colonel inspector said, “now —”

  “It’s a done deal.” He pulled the fax he’d gotten from the Thai foreign office before he left KL. He unfolded it. “ ‘You will deliver the remains to Mr. Paul Ward of the United States Embassy.’ That is what it says.”

  The man nodded, reading the letter. Then his eyes met Paul’s. His eyes pleaded. “Please tell me in confidence what has happened.”

  “He met with a misadventure.”

  You rarely saw anger in the Thai. They were a reserved and very polite people. But the inspector’s eyes grew hard and small, and Paul knew that there was fury seething within him. Thailand had never been colonized for a reason. The Thai might be polite, but they would fight for their independence quite literally to the last man. No deals. “I would like to know, then, if I may, whether or not we are likely to see any more such murders.”

  Paul gestured toward the yellow, sticklike corpse. “I’m a scientist. I’m trying to figure it out.”

  “Is it, then, a disease?”

  “No, no, he was killed. You can count on that.”

  The room was full of police and forensics experts. Bangkok was not happy with this bizarre situation. Interpol was not happy, and asking all sorts of questions about who the hell had been running around with forged ID of that quality in his wallet, while at the same time pretending to Thailand that they knew who the guy was. Lots of secret handshakes being traded all around.

  Somebody was going to have to tell the widow and her three kids, too, and Paul suspected that he would be elected.

  “I am Dr. Ramanujan,” a compact man said, jostling up, gesturing with his sterile gloves. “What has done this? Do you know what has done this, because I do not know?”

  Paul hated to lie, and he did not lie now. He kept his secret and revealed it at the same time.“A killer did i
t, using a very special and unusual method of fluid extraction.”

  “And where are the body fluids? The blood, for example?”

  “The fluids are gone.”

  “Gone?” “We will not find the fluids.”

  Ramanujan grinned, shaking his head. “Riddles, sir, riddles instead of answers.”

  They bagged the body for him and delivered all their forensic gleanings in a series of plastic pouches, each neatly labeled in Thai and English.

  On the way down, the colonel inspector said, “Would you care to have a drink with me?”

  Paul would have loved a drink right now. Twenty drinks. But he had an urgent mission halfway around the world. As fast as humanly possible, he and his crew had to follow “Marie Tallman” to Paris. And not on tomorrow’s flights, either.

  “I’ll take a raincheck. I need to get to Paris as quickly as possible.”

  “There are no more flights from Bangkok to Paris today.”

  “There’s one.”

  “I know the schedules very well, I am sorry.”

  “This is off the schedule.”

  “The American embassy has its own flights?”

  Paul thought of the cramped USAF Falcon Jet that would carry them to gay Paree. “Just this one.”

  “Then that’s good for you.”

  He wondered. He had the sense that Paris was going to be a ferocious confrontation. For the first time, they would be facing vampires who expected them.

  The question was stark: Without the advantage of surprise, did he and his people — his brave people — have any chance at all?

  FOUR

  The Castle of the

  White Queen

  Miriam had been moving effortlessly through human society since before mankind had invented the arch, and she considered herself entirely capable of handling their customs, from the letters testament of the Imperial Roman Curia to the passports of the American Department of State. So she was surprised when the customs officer said, “Please come this way, Madame Tallman.”

  She stared at him so hard that he blinked and took an involuntary step back. Shaking his head, he glanced again at her passport, then up to her face. “Come, please.”