* * *
It was nearing sundown on the second day of their stay at Timber Lake. Six miles away the dirt road wound on toward Houtlon, near the Canadian border. So it was lonely there, on a solitary little lake hemmed in closely with dark evergreens and a sky which drooped low over dusty-summited mountains.
Within the lodge was a homey fireplace, and a glossy elk’s head which peered out above the mantel. There were guns and fishing tackle on the walls, shelves of reliable American fiction—Mark Twain, Melville, Stockton, and a well-worn edition of Bret Harte.
A fully supplied kitchen and a wood stove furnished them with hearty meals which were welcome after a whole day’s tramp in the woods. On that evening Henry Duryea prepared a select French stew out of every available vegetable, and a can of soup. They ate well, then stretched out before the fire for a smoke. They were outlining a trip to the Orient together, when the back door blew open with a terrific bang, and a wind swept into the lodge with a coldness which chilled them both.
“A storm,” Henry Duryea said, rising to his feet. “Sometimes they have them up here, and they’re pretty bad. The roof might leak over your bedroom. Perhaps you’d like to sleep down here with me.” His fingers strayed playfully over his son’s head as he went out into the kitchen to bar the swinging door.
Arthur’s room was upstairs, next to a spare room filled with extra furniture. He’d chosen it because he liked the altitude, and because the only other bedroom was occupied…
He went upstairs swiftly and silently. His roof didn’t leak; it was absurd even to think it might. It had been his father again, suggesting that they sleep together. He had done it before, in a jesting, whispering way—as if to challenge them both if they dared sleep together.
Arthur came back downstairs dressed in his bath-robe and slippers. He stood on the fifth stair, rubbing a two-day’s growth of beard. “I think I’ll shave tonight,” he said to his father. “May I use your razor?”
Henry Duryea, draped in a black raincoat and with his face haloed in the brim of a rain-hat, looked up from the hall. A frown glided obscurely from his features. “Not at all, son. Sleeping upstairs?”
Arthur nodded, and quickly said, “Are you—going out?”
“Yes, I’m going to tie the boats up tighter. I’m afraid the lake will rough it up a bit.”
Duryea jerked back the door and stepped outside. The door slammed shut, and his footsteps sounded on the wood flooring of the porch.
Arthur came slowly down the remaining steps. He saw his father’s figure pass across the dark rectangle of a window, saw the flash of lightning that suddenly printed his grim silhouette against the glass.
He sighed deeply, a sigh which burned in his throat; for his throat was sore and aching. Then he went into the bedroom, found the razor lying in plain view on a birch table-top.
As he reached for it, his glance fell upon his father’s open Gladstone bag which rested at the foot of the bed. There was a book resting there, half hidden by a gray flannel shirt. It was a narrow, yellow-bound book, oddly out of place.
Frowning, he bent down and lifted it from the bag. It was surprisingly heavy in his hands, and he noticed a faintly sickening odor of decay which drifted from it like a perfume. The title of the volume had been thumbed away into an indecipherable blur of gold letters. But pasted across the front cover was a white strip of paper, on which was typewritten the word—INFANTIPHAGI.
He flipped back the cover and ran his eyes over the title page. The book was printed in French—an early French—yet to him wholly comprehensible. The publication date was 1580, in Caen.
Breathlessly he turned back a second page, saw a chapter headed, Vampires.
He slumped to one elbow across the bed. His eyes were four inches from those mildewed pages, his nostrils reeked with the stench of them.
He skipped long paragraphs of pedantic jargon on theology, he scanned brief accounts of strange, blood-eating monsters, vrykolakas, and leprechauns. He read of Jeanne d’Arc, of Ludvig Prinn, and muttered aloud the Latin snatches from Episcopi.
He passed pages in quick succession, his fingers shaking with the fear of it and his eyes hanging heavily in their sockets. He saw vague references to “Enoch,” and saw the terrible drawings by an ancient Dominican of Rome…
Paragraph after paragraph he read: the horror-striking testimony of Nider’s Ant-Hill, the testimony of people who died shrieking at the stake; the recitals of grave-tenders, of jurists and hangmen. Then unexpectedly, among all of this munimental vestige, there appeared before his eyes the name of—Autiel Duryea; and he stopped reading as though invisibly struck.
Thunder clapped near the lodge and rattled the window-panes. The deep rolling of bursting clouds echoed over the valley. But he heard none of it. His eyes were on those two short sentences which his father—someone—had underlined with dark red crayon.
…The execution, four years ago, of Autiel Duryea does not end the Duryea controversy. Time alone can decide whether the Demon has claimed that family from its beginning to its end…
Arthur read on about the trial of Autiel Duryea before Veniti, the Carcassonnean Inquisitor-General; read, with mounting horror, the evidence which had sent that far-gone Duryea to the pillar—the evidence of a bloodless corpse who had been Autiel Duryea’s young brother.
Unmindful now of the tremendous storm which had centered over Timber Lake, unheeding the clatter of windows and the swish of pines on the roof—even of his father who worked down at the lake’s edge in a drenching rain—Arthur fastened his glance to the blurred print of those pages, sinking deeper and deeper into the garbled legends of a dark age…
On the last page of the chapter he again saw the name of his ancestor, Autiel Duryea. He traced a shaking finger over the narrow lines of words, and when he finished reading them he rolled sideways on the bed, and from his lips came a sobbing, mumbling prayer.
“God, oh God in Heaven protect me…”
For he had read:
As in the case of Autiel Duryea we observed that this specimen of vrykolakas preys only upon the blood in its own family. It possesses none of the characteristics of the undead vampire, being usually a living male person of otherwise normal appearances, unsuspecting in inherent demonism.
But this vrykolakas cannot act according to its demoniacal possession unless it is in the presence of a second member of the same family, who acts as a medium between the man and its demon. This medium has none of the traits of the vampire, but it senses the being of this creature (when the metamorphosis is about to occur) by reason of intense pains in the head and throat. Both the vampire and the medium undergo similar reactions, involving nausea, nocturnal visions, and physical disquietude.
When these two outcasts are within a certain distance of each other, the coalescence of inherent demonism is completed, and the vampire is subject to its attacks, demanding blood for its sustenance. No member of the family is safe at these times, for the vrykolakas, acting in its true agency on earth, will unerringly seek out the blood. In rare cases, where other victims are unavailable, the vampire will even take the blood from the very medium which made it possible.
This vampire is born into certain aged families, and naught but death can destroy it. It is not conscious of its blood-madness, and acts only in a psychic state. The medium, also, is unaware of its terrible role; and when these two are together despite any lapse of years, the fusion of inheritance is so violent that no power known on earth can turn it back.