Page:Weird Tales Volume 10 Number 6 (1927-12).djvu/83

Rh creeping into the tents, with their slumbering occupants.

At last I came to a lighted tent, and paused, crouching so that the dim radiance that shone through the canvas did not touch me in the shadows. And there I waited, but not for long. There was a dark form silhouetted against the tent—a movement of the flap of the tent—a rustle and confusion, and the dark thing was again in silhouette—but with a difference in the quality of the shadow. The dark thing was inside the tent now, its bat wings extending across the entrance through which it had crept.

Fear held me spellbound. And as I looked the shadow changed again—imperceptibly, so that I could not have told how it changed.

But now it was not the shadow of a bat, but of a woman.

“The storm—the storm ! I am lost, exhausted—I crept in here, to beg for refuge until the dawn!”

That low, thrilling, sibilant voice—too well I knew it!

Within the tent I heard a murmur of acquiescent voices. At last I began to understand.

I knew the nature of the woman I had carried over the river in my arms, the woman who would not even cross the canal until the water should have ceased utterly to flow. I remembered books I had read—Dracula—other books, and stories. I knew they were true books and stories, now—I knew those horrors existed for me.

I had indeed kept my oath to the creature of darkness—I had brought her to her kind, under her guidance. I had let them loose in hordes upon the pleasure camps. The campers were doomed—and through them, others

I forgot my fear. I rushed from my hiding-place up to the tent door, and there I screamed and called aloud.

“Don’t take her in—don’t let her stay—nor the others, that have crept into the other tents! Wake all the campers—they will sleep on to their destruction! Drive out the interlopers—drive them out quickly! They are not human—no, and they are not bats. Do you hear me?—do you understand?”

I was fairly howling, in a voice that was strange to me.

“She is a vampire—they are all vampires. Vampires!”

Inside the tent I heard a new voice. “What can be the matter with that poor man?” the voice said. It was a woman’s, and gentle.

“Crazy—somebody out of his senses, dear,” a man’s voice answered. “Don’t be frightened.”

And then the voice I knew so well—so well: “ I saw a falling rock strike a man on the head in the storm. He staggered away, but I suppose it crazed him.”

I waited for no more. I ran away, madly, through the night and back across the bridge to the city.

Next day—today—I boarded the sunken canal-boat. It is the abode of death—no woman could have lived there—only such an one as she. The old man’s corpse was there—he must have died long, long ago. The smell of death and of decay on the boat was dreadful.

Again, I felt that I understood. Back in those awful houses, she had committed the crime when first she became the thing she is. And he—her father—less sin-steeped, and less accursed, attempted to destroy the evidence of her crime, and fled with her, but died without becoming like her. She had said that one of those two was always on watch—did he indeed divide her vigil on the boat? What more fitting—the dead standing watch with the undead! And no wonder that she would not let me board the craft of death, even to carry her away.

And still I feel the old compulsion. I have been spared her kiss—but for a little while. Yet I will not let the