Page:Weird Tales Volume 8 Number 3 (1926-09).djvu/126

Rh She nearly drained you of blood the other night. She made sure that you were asleep, and she thought I was, too. But I saw her!” cried the girl wildly.

Ewan let her go from his arms, backed off, and slumped into a chair, speechless for a moment.

“She’s crazy. That’s all,” he pronounced with finality.

“No, Gillespie, she isn’t,” disputed the doctor. “She’s as well poised and as sane as you or I.”

“And you told me I’d been bitten by something that might ruin me body and soul!” disgustedly.

“It is true. An awful fate awaits you, unless”

Ewan interrupted.

“And this awful fate?” he queried with an assumption of bored attention.

“And that fate is, Gillespie, that you are even now at her beck and call, unless constantly guarded by occult means. It is that when she has had her fill of your blood, and your body dies because it is quite, quite drained, you yourself will become a wandering night thing, that can not rest in peace even in the arms of Death, but must forever go on—undead—infecting those whom you love, as Gretel infected you.”

Ewan stood up. He was colorless. His eyes were blazing.

“Bessie, do you believe this folderol?” he demanded between set teeth.

“Dale says it is so,” began the girl.

The doctor gave a grieved exclamation.

“So you, too, have turned against me? Well, God has evidently decreed that I must carry my burden alone. And somewhere in the woods is hidden the body of what was once Gretel Armitage,” he said solemnly. “It is my bounden duty to find that body and so do to it that the Evil which now animates it can no longer move it to obey its behests. Little as you may believe it, Gillespie, your own life in the hereafter depends entirely upon whether I am able to find her body,” declared he in measured accents.

“How do you know she is dead?” demanded the artist truculently.

“Because she has frequently threatened to kill herself, in order to be freer to carry out her wicked designs,” answered the doctor with marked and gentle patience.

“Why should she kill herself?” pursued Ewan.

“Because only by passing through the portals of Death can she gain the freedom which I denied her earthly body, at her own request.”

"Still I do not understand.”

“I see that I must tell you the whole story from the very beginning,” said the doctor thoughtfully.

Ewan sat down with an air of patient resignation, but triumph shone in his eyes. At last the doctor was forced to yield and tell the fairy-tales with which he had been trying to stuff Bessie, Ewan told himself scornfully.

“Coffee, Bess,” said he prosaically. “Have some coffee, doctor, before you begin. Now go to it! No interruptions.”

in Munich,” said the doctor. “In 1923. I’d gone there after the war, to assist in special researches bearing upon certain strange outbreaks of ghoulism in a number of adjacent hamlets. To explain my being asked to help our former enemies in this work, I may say that my studies and research along occult lines had given me sufficient material for a small pamphlet on the sporadic prevalence among peoples of a certain type of mental development, of vampirism and lycanthropy. This booklet