“Is this really Lucy’s body, or only a demon in her shape?”
“It is her body, and yet not it. But wait a while, and you shall see her as she was, and is.”
She seemed like a nightmare of Lucy as she lay there; the pointed teeth, the bloodstained, voluptuous mouth—which made one shudder to see—the whole carnal and unspiritual appearance, seeming like a devilish mockery of Lucy’s sweet purity. Van Helsing, with his usual methodicalness, began taking the various contents from his bag and placing them ready for use. First he took out a soldering iron and some plumbing solder, and then a small oil-lamp, which gave out, when lit in a corner of the tomb, gas which burned at fierce heat with a blue flame; then his operating knives, which he placed to hand; and last a round wooden stake, some two and a half or three inches thick and about three feet long. One end of it was hardened by charring in the fire, and was sharpened to a fine point. With this stake came a heavy hammer, such as in households is used in the coal-cellar for breaking the lumps. To me, a doctor’s preparations for work of any kind are stimulating and bracing, but the effect of these things on both Arthur and Quincey was to cause them a sort of consternation. They both, however, kept their courage, and remained silent and quiet.
When all was ready, Van Helsing said:—
“Before we do anything, let me tell you this; it is out of the lore and experience of the ancients and of all those who have studied the powers of the Un-Dead. When they become such, there comes with the change the curse of immortality; they cannot die, but must go on age after age adding new victims and multiplying the evils of the world; for all that die from the preying of the Un-Dead become themselves Un-Dead, and prey on their kind. And so the circle goes on ever widening, like as the ripples from a stone thrown in the water. Friend Arthur, if you had met that kiss which you know of before poor Lucy die; or again, last night when you open your arms to her, you would in time, when you had died, have become nosferatu, as they call it in Eastern Europe, and would for all time make more of those Un-Deads that so have filled us with horror. The career of this so unhappy dear lady is but just begun. Those children whose blood she suck are not as yet so much the worse; but if she live on, Un-Dead, more and more they lose their blood, and by her power over them they come to her; and so she draw their blood with that so wicked mouth. But if she die in truth, then all cease; the tiny wounds of the throats disappear, and they go back to their plays unknowing ever of what has been. But of the most blessed of all, when this now Un-Dead be made to rest as true dead, then the soul of the poor lady whom we love shall again be free. Instead of working wickedness by night and growing more debased in the assimilation of it by day, she shall take her place with the other Angels. So that, my friend, it will be a blessed hand for her that shall strike the blow that sets her free. To this I am willing; but is there none amongst us who has a better right? Will it be no joy to think of hereafter in the silence of the night when sleep is not: ‘It was my hand that sent her to the stars; it was the hand of him that loved her best; the hand that of all she would herself have chosen, had it been to her to choose?’ Tell me if there be such a one amongst us?”
We all looked at Arthur. He saw, too, what we all did, the infinite kindness which suggested that his should be the hand which would restore Lucy to us as a holy, and not an unholy, memory; he stepped forward and said bravely, though his hand trembled, and his face was as pale as snow:—
“My true friend, from the bottom of my broken heart I thank you. Tell me what I am to do, and I shall not falter!” Van Helsing laid a hand on his shoulder, and said:—
“Brave lad! A moment’s courage, and it is done. This stake must be driven through her. It will be a fearful ordeal—be not deceived in that—but it will be only a short time, and you will then rejoice more than your pain was great; from this grim tomb you will emerge as though you tread on air. But you must not falter when once you have begun. Only think that we, your true friends, are round you, and that we pray for you all the time.”
“Go on,” said Arthur hoarsely. “Tell me what I am to do.”
“Take this stake in your left hand, ready to place the point over the heart, and the hammer in your right. Then when we begin our prayer for the dead—I shall read him, I have here the book, and the others shall follow—strike in God’s name, that so all may be well with the dead that we love, and that the Un-Dead pass away.”
Arthur took the stake and the hammer, and when once his mind was set on action his hands never trembled nor even quivered. Van Helsing opened his missal and began to read, and Quincey and I followed as well as we could. Arthur placed the point over the heart, and as I looked I could see its dint in the white flesh. Then he struck with all his might.
The Thing in the coffin writhed; and a hideous, bloodcurdling screech came from the opened red lips. The body shook and quivered and twisted in wild contortions; the sharp white teeth champed together till the lips were cut, and the mouth was smeared with a crimson foam. But Arthur never faltered. He looked like a figure of Thor as his untrembling arm rose and fell, driving deeper and deeper the mercy-bearing stake, whilst the blood from the pierced heart welled and spurted up around it. His face was set, and high duty seemed to shine through it; the sight of it gave us courage, so that our voices seemed to ring through the little vault.
And then the writhing and quivering of the body became less, and the teeth ceased to champ, and the face to quiver. Finally it lay still. The terrible task was over.
The hammer fell from Arthur’s hand. He reeled and would have fallen had we not caught him. The great drops of sweat sprang out on his forehead, and his breath came in broken gasps. It had indeed been an awful strain on him; and had he not been forced to his task by more than human considerations he could never have gone through with it. For a few minutes we were so taken up with him that we did not look towards the coffin. When we did, however, a murmur of startled surprise ran from one to the other of us. We gazed so eagerly that Arthur rose, for he had been seated on the ground, and came and looked too; and then a glad, strange light broke over his face and dispelled altogether the gloom of horror that lay upon it.
There, in the coffin lay no longer the foul Thing that we had so dreaded and grown to hate that the work of her destruction was yielded as a privilege to the one best entitled to it, but Lucy as we had seen her in her life, with her face of unequalled sweetness and purity. True that there were there, as we had seen them in life, the traces of care and pain and waste; but these were all dear to us, for they marked her truth to what we knew. One and all we felt that the holy calm that lay like sunshine over the wasted face and form was only an earthly token and symbol of the calm that was to reign for ever.
Van Helsing came and laid his hand on Arthur’s shoulder, and said to him:—
“And now, Arthur, my friend, dear lad, am I not forgiven?”
The reaction of the terrible strain came as he took the old man’s hand in his, and raising it to his lips, pressed it, and said:—
“Forgiven! God bless you that you have given my dear one her soul again, and me peace.” He put his hands on the Professor’s shoulder, and laying his head on his breast, cried for a while silently, whilst we stood unmoving. When he raised his head Van Helsing said to him:—
“And now, my child, you may kiss her. Kiss her dead lips if you will, as she would have you to, if for her to choose. For she is not a grinning devil now—not any more a foul Thing for all eternity. No longer she is the devil’s Un-Dead. She is God’s true dead, whose soul is with Him!”
Arthur bent and kissed her, and then we sent him and Quincey out of the tomb; the Professor and I sawed the top off the stake, leaving the point of it in the body. Then we cut off the head and filled the mouth with garlic. We soldered up the leaden coffin, screwed on the coffin-lid, and gathering up our belongings, came away. When the Professor locked the door he gave the key to Arthur.
Outside the air was sweet, the sun shone, and the birds sang, and it seemed as
if all nature were tuned to a different pitch. There was gladness and mirth and peace everywhere, for we were at rest ourselves on one account, and we were glad, though it was with a tempered joy.
Before we moved away Van Helsing said:—
“Now, my friends, one step of our work is done, one the most harrowing to ourselves. But there remains a greater task: to find out the author of all this our sorrow and to stamp him out. I have clues which we can follow; but it is a long task, and a difficult, and there is danger in it, and pain. Shall you not all help me? We have learned to believe, all of us—is it not so? And since so, do we not see our duty? Yes! And do we not promise to go on to the bitter end?”
Each in turn, we took his hand, and the promise was made. Then said the Professor as we moved off:—
“Two nights hence you shall meet with me and dine together at seven of the clock with friend John. I shall entreat two others, two that you know not as yet; and I shall be ready to all our work and our plans unfold. Friend John, you come with me home, for I have much to consult about, and you can help me. Tonight I leave for Amsterdam, but shall return tomorrow night. And then begins our great quest. But first I shall have much to say, so that you may know what is to do and to dread. Then our promise shall be made to each other anew; for there is a terrible task before us, and once our feet are on the ploughshare we must not draw back.”
WHITLEY STRIEBER
(1945–)
Born in San Antonio, Texas, Louis Whitley Strieber is a graduate of the University of Texas at Austin and the London School of Film Technique. After a successful career as an advertising executive, he published the first of his horror novels, The Wolfen, in 1978. It was followed by the vampire novel The Hunger in 1981; both works became Hollywood films. Strieber has written extensively about a 1985 occurrence that defies easy description: his encounter with otherworldly beings who were possibly creations of his imagination. His experiences are the topics of Communion (1987), Transformation (1988), Breakthrough (1995), and The Secret School (1996). Among his numerous novels are Warday (1984), The Last Vampire (2001), Lilith’s Dream (2002), The Grays (2006), 2012: The War for Souls (2007), Critical Mass (2009), and The Omega Point (2010). His stories are collected in Evenings with Demons (1997).
Excerpt from The Wolfen
(1978)
6
They were hungry, they wanted food. Normally they preferred the darker, desolate sections of the city, but their need to follow their enemies had brought them into its very eye. Here the smell of man lay over everything like a dense fog, and there was not much cover.
But even the brightest places have shadows. They moved in single file behind the wall that separates Central Park from the street. They did not need to look over the wall to know that few of the benches that lined the other side were occupied—they could smell that fact perfectly well. But they also smelled something else, the rich scent of a human being perhaps a quarter of a mile farther on. On one of the benches a man was sleeping, a man whose pores were exuding the smell of alcohol. To them the reek meant food, easily gotten.
As they moved closer they could hear his breathing. It was long and troubled, full of age. They stopped behind him. There was no need to discuss what they would do; each one knew his role.
Three jumped up on the wall, standing there perfectly still, balanced on the sharply angled stone. He was on the bench below them. The one nearest the victim’s head inclined her ears back. She would get the throat. The other two would move in only if there was a struggle.
She held her breath a moment to clear her head. Then she examined her victim with her eyes. The flesh was not visible—it was under thick folds of cloth. She would have to jump, plunge her muzzle into the cloth and rip out the throat all at once. If there were more than a few convulsions on the part of the food she would disappoint the pack. She opened her nose, letting the rich smells of the world back in. She listened up and down the street. Only automobile traffic, nobody on foot for at least fifty yards. She cocked her ears toward a man leaning in a chair inside the brightly lit foyer of a building across the street. He was listening to a radio. She watched his head turn. He was glancing into the lobby.
Now. She was down, she was pushing her nose past cloth, slick hot flesh, feeling the vibration of subvocal response in the man, feeling his muscles stiffening as his body reacted to her standing on it, then opening her mouth against the flesh, feeling her teeth scrape back and down, pressing her tongue against the deliciously salty skin and ripping with all the strength in her jaws and neck and chest, and jumping back to the wall with the bloody throat in her mouth. The body on the bench barely rustled as its dying blood poured out.
And the man in the doorway returned his glance to the street. Nothing had moved, as far as he was concerned. Ever watchful, she scented him and listened to him. His breathing was steady, his smell bland. Good, he had noticed nothing.
Now her job was over, she dropped back behind the wall and ate her trophy. It was rich and sweet with blood. Around her the pack was very happy as it worked. Three of them lifted the body over the wall and let it drop with a thud. The two others, skilled in just this art, stripped the clothing away. They would carry the material to the other side of the park, shred it and hide it in shrubs before they returned to their meal.
As soon as the corpse was stripped it was pulled open. The organs were sniffed carefully. One lung, the stomach, the colon were put aside because of rot.
Then the pack ate in rank order.
The mother took the brain. The father took a thigh and buttock. The first-mated pair ate the clean organs. When they returned from their duty the second-mated pair took the rest. And then they pulled apart the remains and took them piece by piece and dropped them in the nearby lake. The bones would sink and would not be found at least until spring, if then. The clothing they had shredded and scattered half a mile away. And now they kicked as much new snow as they could over the blood of their feast. When this was done they went to a place they had seen earlier, a great meadow full of the beautiful new snow that had been falling.
They ran and danced in the snow, feeling the pleasure of their bodies, the joy of racing headlong across the wide expanse, and because they knew that no human was in earshot they had a joyous howl full of the pulsing rhythm they liked best after a hunt. The sound rose through the park, echoing off the buildings that surrounded it. Inside those buildings a few wakeful people stirred, made restive by the cold and ancient terror that the sound communicated to man.
Then they went to a tunnel they had slept in these past four nights and settled down. By long-learned habit they slept in the small hours of the morning when men mostly did not stir. During daylight, man’s strongest time, they remained awake and alert and rarely broke cover unless they had to. In the evening they hunted.
This traditional order of life went back forever.
Before sleeping the second-mated pair made love, both to entertain the others and to prepare for spring. And afterward, father and mother licked them, and then the pack slept.
7
Carl Ferguson was horrified and excited at the same time by what he was reading. He seemed to drift away, to a quiet and safe place. But he came back. Around him the prosaic realities of the Main Reading Room of the New York Public Library reasserted themselves. Across from him a painfully pretty schoolgirl cracked her gum. Beside him an old man breathed long and slow, paging through an equally old book. All around him there was a subdued clatter, the scuttle of pen on paper, the coughs, the whispers, the drone of clerks calling numbers from the front of the room.
Because you could not enter the stacks and because you could neither enter nor leave this room with a book, its collection had not been stolen and was still among the best in the world. And it was because of the book that he had finally obtained from this superb collection that Carl Ferguson felt such an extremity of fear. What he read, what he saw before him was almost too fantastic and too horrible to believe. And yet the
words were there.
“In Normandy,” Ferguson read for the third time, “tradition tells of certain fantastic beings known as lupins or lubins. They pass the night chattering together and twattling in an unknown tongue. They take their stand by the walls of country cemeteries and howl dismally at the moon. Timorous and fearful of man they will flee away scared at a footstep or distant voice. In some districts, however, they are fierce and of the werewolf race, since they are said to scratch up graves with their hands and gnaw poor dead bones.”
An ancient story, repeated by Montague Summers in his classic The Werewolf. Summers assumed that the werewolf tales were folklore, hearsay conjured up to frighten the gullible. But Summers was totally, incredibly wrong. The old legends and tales were true. Only one small element was incorrect—in the past it was assumed that their intelligence and cunning meant that werewolves were men who had assumed the shape of animals. But they weren’t. They were not that at all, but rather a completely separate species of intelligent creature. And they had been sharing planet Earth with us all these long eons and we never understood it. What marvellous beings they must be—a virtual alien intelligence right here at home. It was a frightening discovery, but to Ferguson also one of awesome wonder.
Here were legends, stories, tales going back thousands of years, repeating again and again the mythology of the werewolf. And then suddenly, in the latter part of the nineteenth century, silence.
The legends died.
The stories were no longer told.
But why? To Ferguson’s mind the answer was simple: the werewolves, tormented for generations by humanity’s vigilance and fear, had found a way to hide from man. Their cover was now perfect. They lived among us, fed off our living flesh, but were unknown to all except those who didn’t live to tell the tale. They were a race of living ghosts, unseen but very much a part of the world. They understood human society well enough to take only the abandoned, the weak, the isolated. And toward the end of the nineteenth century the human population all over the world had started to explode, poverty and filth had spread. Huge masses of people were ignored and abandoned by the societies in which they lived. And they were fodder for these werewolves, who range through the shadows devouring the beggars, the wanderers, those without name or home.
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