“I must get out of this,” he told himself, and blundered out of bed toward the silken bell-pull that he had noticed the night before hanging near the door.
As he pulled it, the bed and the wardrobe and the room rose up round him and fell on him, and he fainted.
When he next knew anything someone was putting brandy to his lips. He saw Prior, the kindest concern in his face. The assistant, pale and watery-eyed. The swarthy manservant, stolid, silent, and expressionless. He heard Verney say to Prior: “You see it was too much—I told you—”
“Hush,” said Prior, “he’s coming to.”
—
Four days later Desmond, lying on a wicker chair on the lawn, was a little disinclined for exertion, but no longer ill. Nourishing foods and drinks, beef-tea, stimulants, and constant care—these had brought him back to something like his normal state. He wondered at the vague suspicions, vaguely remembered, of that first night; they had all been proved absurd by the unwavering care and kindness of everyone in the Haunted House.
“But what caused it?” he asked his host, for the fiftieth time. “What made me make such a fool of myself?” And this time Mr. Prior did not put him off, as he had always done before by begging him to wait till he was stronger.
“I am afraid, you know,” he said, “that the ghost really did come to you. I am inclined to revise my opinion of the ghost.”
“But why didn’t it come again?”
“I have been with you every night, you know,” his host reminded him. And, indeed, the sufferer had never been left alone since the ringing of his bell on that terrible first morning.
“And now,” Mr. Prior went on, “if you will not think me inhospitable, I think you will be better away from here. You ought to go to the seaside.”
“There haven’t been any letters for me, I suppose?” Desmond said, a little wistfully.
“Not one. I suppose you gave the right address? Ormehurst Rectory, Crittenden, Kent?”
“I don’t think I put Crittenden,” said Desmond. “I copied the address from your telegram.” He pulled the pink paper from his pocket.
“Ah, that would account,” said the other.
“You’ve been most awfully kind all through,” said Desmond, abruptly.
“Nonsense, my boy,” said the elder man, benevolently. “I only wish Willie had been able to come. He’s never written, the rascal! Nothing but the telegram to say he could not come and was writing.”
“I suppose he’s having a jolly time somewhere,” said Desmond, enviously; “but look here—do tell me about the ghost, if there’s anything to tell. I’m almost quite well now, and I should like to know what it was that made a fool of me like that.”
“Well”—Mr. Prior looked round him at the gold and red of dahlias and sunflowers, gay in the September sunshine—“here, and now, I don’t know that it could do any harm. You remember that story of the man who got this place from Henry VIII, and the curse? That man’s wife is buried in a vault under the church. Well, there were legends, and I confess I was curious to see her tomb. There are iron gates to the vault. Locked, they were. I opened them with an old key—and I couldn’t get them to shut again.”
“Yes?” Desmond said.
“You think I might have sent for a locksmith; but the fact is, there is a small crypt to the church, and I have used that crypt as a supplementary laboratory. If I had called anyone in to see to the lock they would have gossiped. I should have been turned out of my laboratory—perhaps out of my house.”
“I see.”
“Now, the curious thing is,” Mr. Prior went on, lowering his voice, “that it is only since that grating was opened that this house has been what they call ‘haunted.’ It is since then that all the things have happened.”
“What things?”
“People staying here, suddenly ill—just as you were. And the attacks always seem to indicate loss of blood. And …” He hesitated a moment. “That wound in your throat. I told you you had hurt yourself falling when you rang the bell. But that was not true. What is true is that you had on your throat just the same little white wound that all the others have had. I wish”—he frowned—“that I could get that vault gate shut again. The key won’t turn.”
“I wonder if I could do anything?” Desmond asked, secretly convinced that he had hurt his throat in falling, and that his host’s story was, as he put it, “all moonshine.” Still, to put a lock right was but a slight return for all the care and kindness. “I’m an engineer, you know,” he added, awkwardly, and rose. “Probably a little oil. Let’s have a look at this same lock.”
He followed Mr. Prior through the house to the church. A bright, smooth old key turned readily, and they passed into the building, musty and damp, where ivy crawled through the broken windows, and the blue sky seemed to be laid close against the holes in the roof. Another key clicked in the lock of a low door beside what had once been the Lady Chapel, a thick oak door grated back, and Mr. Prior stopped a moment to light a candle that waited in its rough iron candlestick on a ledge of the stonework. Then down narrow stairs, chipped a little at the edges and soft with dust. The crypt was Norman, very simply beautiful. At the end of it was a recess, masked with a grating of rusty ironwork.
“They used to think,” said Mr. Prior, “that iron kept off witchcraft. This is the lock,” he went on, holding the candle against the gate, which was ajar.
They went through the gate, because the lock was on the other side. Desmond worked a minute or two with the oil and feather that he had brought. Then with a little wrench the key turned and re-turned.
“I think that’s all right,” he said, looking up, kneeling on one knee, with the key still in the lock and his hand on it.
“May I try it?”
Mr. Prior took Desmond’s place, turned the key, pulled it out, and stood up. Then the key and the candlestick fell rattling on the stone floor, and the old man sprang upon Desmond.
“Now I’ve got you,” he growled, in the darkness, and Desmond says that his spring and his clutch and his voice were like the spring and the clutch and the growl of a strong savage beast.
Desmond’s little strength snapped like a twig at his first bracing of it to resistance. The old man held him as a vice holds. He had got a rope from somewhere. He was tying Desmond’s arms.
Desmond hates to know that there in the dark he screamed like a caught hare. Then he remembered that he was a man, and shouted, “Help! Here! Help!”
But a hand was on his mouth, and now a handkerchief was being knotted at the back of his head. He was on the floor, leaning against something. Prior’s hands had left him.
“Now,” said Prior’s voice, a little breathless, and the match he struck showed Desmond the stone shelves with long things on them—coffins, he supposed. “Now, I’m sorry I had to do it, but science before friendship, my dear Desmond,” he went on, quite courteous and friendly. “I will explain to you, and you will see that a man of honor could not act otherwise. Of course, you having no friends who know where you are is most convenient. I saw that from the first. Now I’ll explain. I didn’t expect you to understand by instinct. But no matter. I am, I say it without vanity, the greatest discoverer since Newton. I know how to modify men’s natures. I can make men what I choose. It’s all done by transfusion of blood. Lopez—you know, my man Lopez—I’ve pumped the blood of dogs into his veins, and he’s my slave—like a dog. Verney, he’s my slave, too—part dog’s blood and partly the blood of people who’ve come from time to time to investigate the ghost, and partly my own, because I wanted him to be clever enough to help me. And there’s a bigger thing behind all this. You’ll understand me when I say”—here he became very technical indeed, and used many words that meant nothing to Desmond, whose thoughts dwelt more and more on his small chance of escape.
To die like a rat in a hole, a rat in a hole! If he could only loosen the handkerchief and shout again!
“Attend, can’t you?” said Prior, savagely, and kicked h
im. “I beg your pardon, my dear chap,” he went on, suavely, “but this is important. So you see the elixir of life is really the blood. The blood is the life, you know, and my great discovery is that to make a man immortal, and restore his youth, one only needs blood from the veins of a man who unites in himself blood of the four great races—the four colors, black, white, red, and yellow. Your blood unites these four. I took as much as I dared from you that night. I was the vampire, you know.” He laughed pleasantly. “But your blood didn’t act. The drug I had to give you to induce sleep probably destroyed the vital germs. And, besides, there wasn’t enough of it. Now there is going to be enough!”
Desmond had been working his head against the thing behind him, easing the knot of the handkerchief down till it slipped from head to neck. Now he got his mouth free, and said, quickly: “That was not true what I said about the Chinamen and that. I was joking. My mother’s people were all Devon.”
“I don’t blame you in the least,” said Prior, quietly. “I should lie myself in your place.”
And he put back the handkerchief. The candle was now burning clearly from the place where it stood—on a stone coffin. Desmond could see that the long things on the shelves were coffins, not all of stone. He wondered what this madman would do with his body when everything was over. The little wound in his throat had broken out again. He could feel the slow trickle of warmth on his neck. He wondered whether he would faint. It felt like it.
“I wish I’d brought you here the first day—it was Verney’s doing, my tinkering about with pints and half-pints. Sheer waste—sheer wanton waste!”
Prior stopped and stood looking at him.
Desmond, despairingly conscious of growing physical weakness, caught himself in a real wonder as to whether this might not be a dream—a horrible, insane dream—and he could not wholly dismiss the wonder, because incredible things seemed to be adding themselves to the real horrors of the situation, just as they do in dreams. There seemed to be something stirring in the place—something that wasn’t Prior. No—nor Prior’s shadow, either. That was black and sprawled big across the arched roof. This was white, and very small and thin. But it stirred, it grew—now it was no longer just a line of white, but a long, narrow, white wedge—and it showed between the coffin on the shelf opposite him and that coffin’s lid.
And still Prior stood very still looking down on his prey. All emotion but a dull wonder was now dead in Desmond’s weakened senses. In dreams—if one called out, one awoke—but he could not call out. Perhaps if one moved … But before he could bring his enfeebled will to the decision of movement—something else moved. The black lid of the coffin opposite rose slowly—and then suddenly fell, clattering and echoing, and from the coffin rose a form, horribly white and shrouded, and fell on Prior and rolled with him on the floor of the vault in a silent, whirling struggle. The last thing Desmond heard before he fainted in good earnest was the scream Prior uttered as he turned at the crash and saw the white-shrouded body leaping toward him.
“It’s all right,” he heard next. And Verney was bending over him with brandy. “You’re quite safe. He’s tied up and locked in the laboratory. No. That’s all right, too.” For Desmond’s eyes had turned towards the lidless coffin. “That was only me. It was the only way I could think of, to save you. Can you walk now? Let me help you, so. I’ve opened the grating. Come.”
Desmond blinked in the sunlight he had never thought to see again. Here he was, back in his wicker chair. He looked at the sundial on the house. The whole thing had taken less than fifty minutes.
“Tell me,” said he. And Verney told him in short sentences with pauses between.
“I tried to warn you,” he said, “you remember, in the window. I really believed in his experiments at first—and—he’d found out something about me—and not told. It was when I was very young. God knows I’ve paid for it. And when you came I’d only just found out what really had happened to the other chaps. That beast Lopez let it out when he was drunk. Inhuman brute! And I had a row with Prior that first night, and he promised me he wouldn’t touch you. And then he did.”
“You might have told me.”
“You were in a nice state to be told anything, weren’t you? He promised me he’d send you off as soon as you were well enough. And he had been good to me. But when I heard him begin about the grating and the key I knew—so I just got a sheet and—”
“But why didn’t you come out before?”
“I didn’t dare. He could have tackled me easily if he had known what he was tackling. He kept moving about. It had to be done suddenly. I counted on just that moment of weakness when he really thought a dead body had come to life to defend you. Now I’m going to harness the horse and drive you to the police station at Crittenden. And they’ll send and lock him up. Everyone knew he was as mad as a hatter, but somebody had to be nearly killed before anyone would lock him up. The law’s like that, you know.”
“But you—the police—won’t they—”
“It’s quite safe,” said Verney, dully. “Nobody knows but the old man, and now nobody will believe anything he says. No, he never posted your letters, of course, and he never wrote to your friend, and he put off the Psychical man. No, I can’t find Lopez; he must know that something’s up. He’s bolted.”
But he had not. They found him, stubbornly dumb, but moaning a little, crouched against the locked grating of the vault when they came, a prudent half-dozen of them, to take the old man away from the Haunted House. The master was dumb as the man. He would not speak. He has never spoken since.
TURKISH DELIGHT
Roberta Lannes
Roberta Lannes has been publishing in the science fiction, dark fantasy, and horror genres since 1985, including her acclaimed collection of short stories, The Mirror of Night, from Silver Salamander Press. Her work has been translated into numerous languages, and South African filmmaker Aryan Kaganof’s 1994 movie Ten Monologues from the Lives of the Serial Killers included an adaptation her short story “Goodbye, Dark Love.”
Her digital artwork has appeared in Cemetery Dance magazine, and her photographs in JPG Magazine, and she has exhibited in galleries and designed iPhone App splash screens, CD covers, calendars, and greeting cards. More recently, she collaborated with author Christopher Conlon as illustrator for his epic zombie poem When They Came Back, contributing over fifty horror photographs to the book.
“Traditional vampire stories only intrigue me in one way,” reveals the author, “that being the seduction. Nowadays, even that has been superseded by the impulsive, compulsive vampires who attack, drink, and run. I wanted to write something more subtle, more about the vampires we meet in our everyday lives. Those that take something vital to ourselves against our will, yet by seduction or manipulation, are far more real and frightening than the bloodsuckers.
“In the following tale, Andrew has something of value to himself and to those whose lives are empty of that which keeps us delighted and full of wonder. I liken Andrew to a Turkish Delight—merely a chocolate sweet without its prized aromatic, succulent rose jelly inside. And so a vampire story was born …”
THE WALK HOME from school took Andrew up Long Row to Green Street where he lived with his mother and Aunt Molly. Two doors down from Andrew’s house was an old nailer’s cottage. Tourists sometimes stopped to look into its dusty windows and see the old tools and furnishings of the eighteenth century nail-maker’s shop. It had little historical interest to tourists, what with the famous mill in the same town, but once in a while someone other than the schoolchildren who’d learned of it in school stopped by.
Today, as Andrew trudged up the cobbled road, he saw an unfamiliar old man and a boy about his own age staring into the cottage window. They had the look of tourists with cameras slung around their necks, small clean backpacks and hiking boots that still looked new, stiff, and uncomfortable. When they heard Andrew’s footsteps, they turned.
The boy was pretty, Andrew thought, almost like a girl.
His dark hair was cut scraggily so that it fell over his eyes and ears in a fashionable way. His eyes were large, round, and luminous on his pale face. He didn’t smile. The man had small eyes, very light in color, almost like pale aquamarine quartz, and large fuzzy eyebrows just like Andrew’s Granddad. He was tall and thin, with a long flat nose and around very thin lips, the skin wrinkled in vertical ravines, reminding Andrew of a cartoon skull.
“Do you live around here, son?” The man spoke as the boy turned his stare back into the cottage. He had an accent. German or Danish. Andrew wasn’t good at telling one accent from another unless it was American, Spanish or French.
Andrew frowned at the man and continued walking. It didn’t occur to Andrew to walk past his house that day and turn onto another street, but later he would think about how different things would have been if he had. He walked right up to the door, eyes still on the tourists, turned the doorknob, and went in.
“That must be Andy. Guess what your Aunt Molly made?” The air was full of the aroma of butter, flour and currents.
“You made scones, Auntie, I could smell them outside.” Andrew set down his book bag and took off his blazer and cap.
“Go up and change your clothes, Andy, then come down and have one before they cool down.”
There wasn’t much better than warm Molly scones and a cup of cocoa. He hurried upstairs and changed into a sweatshirt and jeans. As he put his school shoes on the chair by the window, he looked down at the nailer’s cottage. The old man had stepped away from the building into the street and was staring right up at Andrew’s window. At Andrew. He thought of the scones, the hot cocoa, of his Aunt waiting downstairs, but somehow he found the stranger’s curious stare compelling. Then the man smiled. His teeth were very straight, large, and white. Like Chiclets, Andrew thought, like dice without the dots.
The Mammoth Book of Vampire Stories by Women Page 35