The Mammoth Book of Modern Ghost Stories

“Attend, can’t you?” said Prior, savagely, and kicked him. “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 colours, 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 towards 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?”