Page:Weird Tales Volume 8 Number 3 (1926-09).djvu/136

 thing into the funeral chamber, thus opening the way for It to utilize her own father's dead body. Incredible? Not to the evil thing that Gretel had become.

"In her fury of disappointment, she discovered all this to me, so filling me with horror that the mere thought of her kiss was sufficient to fill me with sick nausea. She was the more bitter, because that Power to which she had given herself had taken toll of her, as I have told you, at the very first opportunity, planning no doubt to take me, through her, later. Now she was marked by her terrible and ruthless master, and would remain a living fountain of blood for his unslaking thirst, and at her death she could not die, but would join the sad ranks of those whom we call vampires; forced to prey upon her nearest and dearest to keep alive the spirit of evil that would occupy her helpless

"Her feeling of rage against what she now termed her useless sacrifice almost consumed her. She called down against that dread Power all the evil of which her strange knowledge had given her cognizance. She invoked against me all the pride of her proud nature; all the strength of her physical passion; all the cunning in her twisted brain that might serve to swerve my standards of right and wrong and deliver me into her hands.

"In vain. I had seen all only too clearly. There is in my soul the upward striving for the triumph of Light which forbids, in every fiber of my being, any compromise with the powers of Darkness. Once convinced of my determination, Gretel became suddenly meek, but not before she had warned me in her fury that she would yet make me her very own, in a far different sense from what she had expected when she believed herself loved by me. And she warned me that she would, to keep herself strongly alive for my future torment, and to prepare her own body against other visits from that dread and greedy-lipped master of hers, take toll of other human beings when and where she could.

"After that there was but one thing to do, and I did it. I kept constant watch over her. At night I arranged so that she should never be beyond surveillance. Yet she has evaded me, as that newspaper clipping told you. To save that poor child from a wretched fate, I was obliged to perform the bizarre but merciful acts that gave the poor thing's soul peace.

"In her better moments Gretel agreed to my precautions, but she would undo them by telling acquaintances that I was brutal and jealous, until I often found my hands tied by her evil cunning. Your brother, for example, considers her a persecuted angel," he remarked abruptly.

"And now, Bessie, we are almost at the end of the story. We came out here, after I found that she had impregnated that poor child, with the intention of working the thing out by ourselves, away from other people. I knew that this might conceivably end by my becoming her victim, but I had taken precautions to leave a will which provided for such a contingency. I refer, Bessie, to the cleanly practise of cremation, which would put an end, if universally practised, to very nearly all the hauntings and the cases of vampirism and lycanthropy which arise from time to time.

"We had hardly been here a month, before you and your brother came. Gretel was aflame with obscene thirst; it had been some time since she had tasted blood. When you told me you intended to remain near us all summer, an intolerable psychic apprehension amounting to actual pain, arose within me. I struck at the wooden railing with my fist,