Page:Weird Tales Volume 6 Number 5 (1925-11).djvu/16

my body to the grave, and rest content that you have done what I most desire, in life and death, for so only can you save me from everlasting torment.'"

I had been unconscious, from the pain of my wound and from the horrible thirst, when the scouting party picked me up that night. The dead German was left where he had fallen. When I returned to consciousness, it all seemed like a bad dream; and when sober realization of all that I had been through, and all that he had told me, came to me, the poor fellow's story seemed to be only the raving of a thirst-tortured brain. Human vampires! Beings that lived forever upon the blood of others; wehr-wolves; the damnable clan of the undead! Such things never were, I assured myself, in heaven, earth, or hell itself!

And yet, now, in this small-town hospital in New York state, where a sudden attack of appendicitis had been the cause of my enforced confinement to a hospital cot for the second time in my career, I had again come upon that horrible suggestion.

You have read Bram Stoker's Dracula? Nothing that Poe, or Doyle, or Ambrose Bierce, or even Marion Crawford ever wrote quite equals it in undiluted horror. It deals—in case you have not read it—with the strange and terrible adventures of a young Englishman who goes into the mountains of Carpathia to purchase for the firm by which he is employed a certain extensive estate, belonging to a Count Dracula, a mysterious individual who lives secluded in his ancient castle in the mountains. Dracula is greatly disturbed by the sight of blood, when his guest happens to cut himself, in his host's presence, while shaving. He warns the young man never to let him see blood of any kind, asserting that it has a terrible effect upon him.

Subsequently, his visitor learns to his horror that the count is one of what the author—like my acquaintance of the battlefield—refers to as the undead. Throughout the day, Dracula lies in an open coffin in the vaults of the castle; at night—as soon as the sun has set—he, as it were, returns to life, when he becomes, while retaining his human form, a blood-sucking vampire, with the power to climb the outer walls of the castle after the manner of a fly, and to transport himself, as if by magic, from place to place about the countryside.

The "undead," the story explains, nightly seek a victim, from whom, while asleep, they suck the life blood, drawing it from two minute holes which they bite in the throat. When the person eventually dies as a result of this draining of the vital fluid—the operation of sucking the blood is not completed in one night, but continues, perhaps, for a week or more—the victim, also, after death, becomes one of the horrible society of the undead and, although buried, nightly comes from the tomb to draw the life blood from others—men, women, and little children—thus always increasing the terrible breed of human vampires and propagating their hellish practises.

My reading of this absorbing though terrifying book had been greatly disturbed by the unending cries, moans, and uncontrolled expostulations of a child in the outer ward. The little hospital was crowded to the limit, an epidemic of typhoid having broken out in the town' only a few weeks before my admission. My own case being an unusually acute and dangerous one, requiring, as the doctors agreed, a great deal of special treatment preliminary to the operation, Dr. Spalding had insisted upon a private room, and the only one then vacant was situated just off the women's general ward, which was on the upper floor of the little, two-story