Page:Weird Tales Volume 6 Number 5 (1925-11).djvu/15
"That the ghastly extremes of agony are endured by man the unit, and never by man the mass—for this let us thank a merciful God."—Edgar Allan Poe, The Premature Burial.
To have died—and yet to be undead! What a horrible thought! And yet, what a fascinating story, albeit one that fairly set every nerve in my pain-racked body trembling with the frightful suggestion contained in it! And to think that this book that I had just finished reading told, in the form of fiction, what the poor devil of a German also had told me as he lay there beside me in shell-scarred "No Man's Land," waiting for his ticket to "go West," only a few months before.
"Yes, there are wehr-wolves;" he assured me, solemnly, his face contorted with pain the while he talked—in his own language, which I spoke almost as well as himself; "they are the slaves of the vampires—the undead—those beings who claim their victims after death, and who carry on their terrible act of mutilation and desecration"—he paused to cross himself and murmur a word of prayer—"forever and forever! Doubt it not, Kamerad. My brother, now, knew a man, an Austrian, who had met a wehr-wolf at midnight, in the forest district of his own homeland. Shortly after that, in our own Black Forest, my brother himself encountered a wehr-wolf. In the following year, my brother died; and as he lay on his death-bed, he called me to his side.
"'Karl,' he declared, laying his hand on my arm, 'remember what I have told you in the past. The undead are as swift in their movements and as immune to harm from human hands as were the valkyries of old. I am marked by a being, a vampire—one of the undead host; an overlord of wehr-wolves—and he—it—has given me the sign. Therefore, brother of mine, heed what I say; and, as you love me, carry out this, my last request, even as you hope for the death of a Christian and for salvation after death. After they have buried me, you must take my body out of the ground—on the day of my burial, remember, and before sunset. Do not forget that—before sunset. You must have help; Heinrich Arndt will assist you; I have spoken to him as I am now speaking to you. Take me from the coffin, and plunge the old sword of our great-great-grandfather straight through my heart. Leave the sword in my body; bind it there with wire. Then, bind the crucifix in the clasp of both my dead hands. Return