by Bob Leman
For a time he kept a journal recounting the measures he was taking and the invariable failure of his efforts. This journal was discovered by, and is now in the possession of, Dr. E. M. Burbank of the Grailing Foundation, and is available for examination by qualified scholars. We discover from the journal that Clifford M. subscribed to every newspaper published in the United States and Canada, and employed a considerable number of people — retired schoolteachers for the most part — to read all of these papers carefully and to clip any matter relating to inexplicable deaths and disappearances under certain circumstances.
He placed in charge of the office where these people worked an alert young man named Robertson, to whom he confided that he believed in vampires and werewolves (he added astrology, theosophy, and vegetarianism for verisimilitude) and that he was seeking proof of their existence. Robertson, knowing the purpose of the search, was able to select from the sea of clippings those items offering hope, and to dispatch private detectives to make a preliminary investigation of the occasional likely occurrence. Robertson also stayed in touch with Saltzman, in a continuing search for books that bore on the matter, and kept a number of graduate students in pocket money by commissioning work in the great libraries.
During the first ten years of the search, there were seven incidents that seemed to Clifford M. to be worthy of investigation, but all of them proved, in the end, to be ordinary murders or suicides or kidnappings. The twenty years following were the years of the Great Depression and the Second World War, with great numbers of people in restless movement in novel patterns, and the incidence of cases requiring his attention increased; but again nothing was found. Robertson had by now contrived a pipeline into the national network by which police departments exchange information, and during the fifties and sixties the number of likely prospects went up to several per year, although the number of successes remained at zero.
Clifford M. was by this time frequently tempted to give up his search, almost persuaded that his conviction that he was a vampire was nothing more than the delusion of a lunatic. The loss of consciousness during the daylight hours might be only a symptom of an illness, he thought, and his strange organs of reproduction nothing more than a mistake of nature, and his terrible need of blood just criminal insanity. But these thoughts would not stand up under scrutiny. He recognized that the other imperative need that he felt, a need fully as powerful as his craving for blood but quite impossible to satisfy, was simple lust; but lust for whom, for what? Not any woman that he had ever met; not any man or child or beast. This most urgent drive was toward a female of his own kind. And he had to find her. Life would sooner or later become altogether unbearable otherwise.
This exposition of Clifford M.'s thoughts is not invention; it is taken from his entry in the Burbank journal for June 3, 1972. This was, as it happens, the last entry save one (dated August 7,1972). At that point he either gave up the journal or began to keep it in a different form. If he did so, the later entries have not been found.
From various sources we can put together a fairly complete picture of the way Clifford M. was living at this time. We must remember, first of all, that he lay in a coma each day from sunrise to sunset, so that his life was lived entirely at night. Remember also that his castlelike house stood in an isolated spot several miles from the dingy smell town where Robertson maintained his office. The house was not visible from any road, and the only visitor who ever came there was Robertson, who once a week appeared an hour after sunset to make his report.
Robertson was in his seventies by now, and had spent more than fifty years in the employ of Clifford M. He had been very well paid, but no doubt he sometimes had night thoughts about the value of a lifetime spent gathering pointless data for a rich monomaniac. He had become very skilled in separating the wheat from the chaff of the clippings, so that by this time he seldom had anything to show his master on the occasion of his weekly visits; but when he did bring something, Clifford M. invariably found it to be worthy of further investigation.
If our calculations are correct, Clifford M. was, in the mid-1970s, about a century old. He appeared to be in his middle thirties, a handsome, pale man with jet-black hair and eyes, slim and athletic. He wore conservatively cut, expensive clothing that never fit exactly right, because he bought it by mail. He kept two servants, a couple now elderly, peasant immigrants from some Balkan mountainside. This pair had a very good idea of Clifford M.'s true nature, and they catered to his nocturnal habits and bizarre quotidian diet without apparent qualms. They were putting by a good deal of money.
He kept a car, a specially built dependable vehicle capable of high speeds, disguised by the nondescript body of an aging car of medium price. Monthly, or perhaps a little oftener, he would drive off after sunset and return shortly before dawn, having obtained the necessary human blood once more. He was prudent and foresighted in these forays, never taking so much blood from one victim as to cause death, or even symptoms serious enough to send the victim to the doctor. His hunting ground was a circle with a radius of about a hundred miles, centered on his house.
During those years he also made sixty or seventy longer journeys, to various parts of the country (and four times to Canada and once to Mexico) to follow up investigations that had uncovered a possibility of the presence of vampires. These trips required a careful preparation, to ensure that there was a secure place for him to sleep each day, both on the road and at his destination. Robertson acted as advance man for these expeditions, arranging for a day's use of a vacant house at each stage of the journey, and renting a house under a regular lease agreement at the destination. The Balkan couple would accompany Clifford M. in the car, sleeping in the back seat as he drove through the night, and during the day standing guard as he slept. On none of these complicated safaris did he find what he was seeking.
Until the last one, of course. And that one, as it happened, was only at a distance of a single night's driving, off in the western part of the state in the pleasant small city of Sturkeyville. An examination of the files of the Herald newspaper of that city makes it possible to determine almost precisely the events that alerted first Robertson and then Clifford M.: a rising incidence of an inexplicable malady among the inhabitants of the county, and then, after a time, deaths and disappearances. Robertson went ahead, as usual, and found a derelict house to rent; Clifford M. and the servants followed soon after.
***
It is necessary now to turn away for a moment from our scrutiny of Clifford M., and to examine the situation in Sturkeyville at the time of his arrival. There is no need for any sort of conjecture here, for we have the direct testimony of the three chief human participants in the events that followed Clifford M.'s success in his long quest. The three are Blanche Tolliver, Edmund Hodge, and Frank Polder, who are, respectively, a physician, an industrialist, and the principal of East High School. Blanche Tolliver took over her father's practice in 1958, and she practices much as he did; that is, she makes house calls at any hour of the day or night, knows all her patients well, and never presses for the payment of bills.
She and Edmund Hodge have been lovers for the past twenty years; they cannot marry because Hodge's wife is still alive in the mental asylum where she has been confined for a quarter of a century. Hodge is one of the heirs to the Hodge Brothers Foundry, the city's chief industry. Frank Polder is his cousin. The three have been friends since childhood.
They became involved in the case of Clifford M. because Blanche, whose practice extends to fairly remote sections of the county, began to believe that a new disease had come to the area, a disease with symptoms identical to those indicating a loss of blood, but which she found in persons without wounds or internal bleeding. It was a little time before she spotted the puncture marks on the throat of one of the sufferers, and a while longer before she found a second set and began to make a connection. After that she looked for, and found, the punctures wherever she found the symptoms, whereupon she canvassed earlier patients,
and learned that they, too, had had such marks, which, however, soon healed without a scar.
She and Hodge have for many years had the habit of discussing their work with each other, and Hodge thought her account of the new disease interesting enough to mention it to Polder, who immediately reacted as one would have expected the other two to have done: "Dracula!" he said. They laughed.
But there were more cases, and then a woman died, and shortly thereafter two children; the woman's autopsy showed that she had indeed lost most of her blood. The three of them talked about it over dinner one night, and as they talked Polder's jest began to seem not very funny, after all. Before the evening was over, it was decided that Polder, who had some time to spare just then — it was July, and preparations for the fall term were still moving at a leisurely pace — would spend a week or two interviewing Blanche's patients and seeking unreported incidents.
Two weeks later, they met again. Polder said, "Somebody's doing it, all right, sucking blood. About half of these people have kind of a memory — or a dream — of somebody starting to do it, or approaching to do it. Everything's pretty confused, and they all think it was only a dream. But twenty-three people couldn't have such similar dreams, with the same characters in it. We're looking for a man and a woman, or two men and a woman. And get this: they're hillbillies. That's something that turns up in all the stories. Dreamlike and hazy though it is, one memory stayed with them all: a man in dirty bib overalls, a greasy black felt hat, and clodhopper shoes; and with him a partner, either another man dressed the same way, or a woman in a filthy gingham dress wearing sneakers and red ankle socks. The descriptions turned up over and over, and half the people I talked to called them mountain people or hillbillies. I think we ought to call the police now."
"I suppose so," Hodge said, "but it'll be hard to make a case against them, if the victims think they were dreaming, and the wounds have healed up. But they have to be stopped. At least it's kind of a relief to learn that they're just criminal lunatics. It's better than believing in vampires."
"I think I do believe in them," Blanche said. "I think these are vampires."
"But you heard the descriptions, Blanche."
"And why shouldn't those be descriptions of vampires? Can you tell me what a vampire looks like? Why not like a hillbilly? A vampire's protection is his resemblance to human beings, if the stories have any truth in them. And they live to be extremely old. Imagine a vampire two hundred years ago, living somewhere back up in the mountains. What kind of people would he look like, act like? Mountain people, of course. Does a vampire have to look like Bela Lugosi? Would an Appalachian vampire wear evening clothes?"
The two men thought about that. After a time Polder said, "I think you’re right. The way those people talked about their 'dreams' — they had a sense of something extraordinary, something they couldn't describe, something that was even more terrifying than a bloodthirsty madman. All in their dreams, of course."
"That's another thing," Blanche said, "that feeling they all had that it was a dream. They’d remember, all right, if they were attacked by bloodsucking crazies."
"All right, then, say it's true, say they're vampires," Hodge said. "What do we do now?"
"Call the police," Polder said. And almost immediately added, "and they'll lock us up in the booby hatch."
"Yes," Blanche said. "Why don't we see if we can find them ourselves, catch them in the act, or something?"
"Why not?" Hodge said. "It's probably dangerous, and we haven't the least idea how to go about it, and in the end they'll turn out to be plain murderous maniacs, if they exist at all. Sure, let's go."
They began with a map of the county and the dates and locations of Blanche's cases and the cases of other physicians, who cooperated with her in a rather puzzled way. These data were entered on the map, and Polder undertook a fresh round of interrogation, quizzing families living in the vicinity of dots on the map; he uncovered a dozen cases of people who had never taken the problem to a doctor, but who had nonetheless recovered.
They ended with seventy-eight instances of deprivation of blood, spread over a period of thirteen months. They arbitrarily selected calendar months as a data base, and drew lines connecting the dots for all cases that occurred within a given month. They ended with a picture not unlike a topographer's contour map of a fairly symmetrical mountain peak.
"Circles," Hodge said. "Concentric, damn near. And the smallest one's dated a year ago in May. That's the earliest."
"That probably means they started fairly close to home, and moved out farther as time passed," Blanche said.
"It doesn't make sense," Hodge said. "I thought those things lived practically forever. Why would they start drinking blood just thirteen months ago? What have they been doing all these years?"
"Maybe they just moved here. I suppose they can move from place to place, just like people."
"Maybe so. Where's the center? Where's 'home'?"
"Dobie's Store is a junction of three mountain roads. A general store and blacksmith shop had flourished there in the days when the roads were too primitive to accommodate automobiles, but today it is only an uninhabited collection of tumbledown buildings. Within a mile or so there are three or four abandoned houses, all but one of which have fallen down, and are nothing more than piles of rotting boards. The remaining house, the old Sharpless place, is a roofless set of stone walls in the middle of a dead apple orchard."
"It's appropriate," Blanche said. "What do we do now?"
"Why, we find 'em," Hodge said. "Find 'em and—" He stopped.
"That's it," Polder said. "If we find them, what will we do?"
They stared at each other. Blanche said, "It seems simple enough to me. If they are... what we think they are, we give them the wooden stake treatment."
"And if they're not?"
"Then we're in trouble. I don't think we're up to handling three homicidal maniacs."
"If we spot them in the daylight, we'll know they're just loonies, and call the sheriff," Hodge said. "Now, how are we going to go about flushing them?"
They discussed it until late at night, without agreeing on a plan; and the next evening Clifford M. called on Blanche, who was fascinated by what he had to say. She called her two partners, and before the night was over they had agreed on what was to be done.
Clifford M. was suave, diplomatic, and persuasive; he contrived to leave with the trio an impression that here was a rich man of laudable character and high intelligence, who happened to have an eccentric conviction that vampires did in fact exist, and who spent his time and money hunting for them. Since that conviction was rapidly becoming their own, they welcomed his advent and offer of cooperation. He described to them, accurately enough, his clipping bureau and the criteria he had developed for sifting clues out of the raw data, and how this method had led him to Blanche. He hoped that they would permit him to join their search. The discovery and dispatch of these unnatural felons would at last vindicate him and reveal to the whole world that his tenacious belief that these creatures existed was not after all a laughable delusion, but simple truth.
He was pretty much of a night owl, he said, and he had made a lifelong study of vampirism, and he possessed a very fine night telescope. He proposed that he undertake night observation of the area they had so cleverly located, and that the two men, who were avid hunters and represented themselves to be capable outdoors-men, should arm themselves and make a thorough search of the area during the daylight hours. All agreed that it was a practical scheme.
And now this account must abandon for a space its restriction to matters that are fully documented, and indulge in certain inferences and inventions. All of the undocumented material in what follows is based upon established, verifiable facts, and if what is recounted is not precisely and in every detail an accurate account, it most certainly captures the tenor of these events; they must necessarily have been very close to what is here set down.
For this much, at least, we have
sworn testimony: for three days Hodge and Polder, bravely turned out in red caps and jackets, carrying shotguns and wearing sidearms, searched Dobie's Store and the forest round about without success. Each evening after their return to town, they met with Blanche and Clifford M. (no one had yet taken notice that they saw him only after sundown) and reported their failure. Clifford M. would then give an account of his efforts of the previous night — also reporting no luck — and the hunters would retire to a well-earned night's sleep, while Clifford M. was, presumably, back up the mountain, searching with his night glass for vampires.
On the third evening Clifford M. did not appear for the meeting, and the next morning Hodge and Polder went to the house he had rented. Clifford M.'s car was gone, and the house was empty, but taped to the front door was an envelope addressed to "Dr. Tolliver." They immediately took it to Blanche, who read the note to them: 'They are under the old Sharpless house, and there are four, not three. Use the stakes."
Another letter to Blanche from Clifford M., delivered to her by Robertson after the whole thing was over, tells what Clifford M. was actually doing on those warm July nights. It gives only a skeleton, however, and this account will somewhat flesh out that skeleton; the reader should, from time to time, supply for himself such formulations as "it may be supposed..." and “it is reasonable to assume that—"
It is plain that the work done by Tolliver, Hodge, and Polder was a great help to Clifford M., and saved him a good deal of time. They had very competently narrowed the area to be searched, so that he was able to spot his quarry on the first night he went to Dobie's Store. He had parked his car a couple of miles from the road junction and proceeded on foot from that point. He believed that he had the ability to transform himself into a bat, but he did not know how to go about it; he had concluded that the technique of such transformations was something taught to the young by their elders, and he had had no one to teach him. So he walked, padding silently along the dusty road, sniffing as he went. He was not sure that he would recognize fellow vampires when he met them, but he hoped that he had been born with some instinct that would make the identification, and he had an idea that his sense of smell might trigger the operation of the instinct.