She made no sound except for a sudden, hoarse intake of breath. As he walked into the bedroom, he could hear a sound like the sound of water running. Well, what else can I do? he asked himself, for he still had to convince himself he was doing the right thing.
He stood in the bedroom doorway, staring at the small bed by the window, his throat moving, breath shuddering in his chest. Then, driven on, he walked to the side of the bed and looked down at her.
Why do they all look like Kathy to me? he thought, drawing out the second stake with shaking hands.
Driving slowly to Sears, he tried to forget by wondering why it was that only wooden stakes should work.
He frowned as he drove along the empty boulevard, the only sound the muted growling of the motor in his car. It seemed fantastic that it had taken him five months to start wondering about it.
Which brought another question to mind. How was it that he always managed to hit the heart? It had to be the heart; Dr. Busch had said so. Yet he, Neville, had no anatomical knowledge.
His brow furrowed. It irritated him that he should have gone through this hideous process so long without stopping once to question it.
He shook his head. No, I should think it over carefully, he thought, I should collect all the questions before I try to answer them. Things should be done the right way, the scientific way.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, he thought, shades of old Fritz. That had been his father’s name. Neville had loathed his father and fought the acquisition of his father’s logic and mechanical facility every inch of the way. His father had died denying the vampire violently to the last.
At Sears he got the lathe, loaded it into the station wagon, then searched the store.
There were five of them in the basement, hiding in various shadowed places. One of them Neville found inside a display freezer. When he saw the man lying there in this enamel coffin, he had to laugh; it seemed such a funny place to hide.
Later, he thought of what a humorless world it was when he could find amusement in such a thing.
About two o’clock he parked and ate his lunch. Everything seemed to taste of garlic.
And that set him wondering about the effect garlic had on them. It must have been the smell that chased them off, but why?
They were strange, the facts about them: their staying inside by day, their avoidance of garlic, their death by stake, their reputed fear of crosses, their supposed dread of mirrors.
Take that last, now. According to legend, they were invisible in mirrors, but he knew that was untrue. As untrue as the belief that they transformed themselves into bats. That was a superstition that logic, plus observation had easily disposed of. It was equally foolish to believe that they could transform themselves into wolves. Without a doubt there were vampire dogs; he had seen and heard them outside his house at night. But they were only dogs.
Robert Neville compressed his lips suddenly. Forget it, he told himself; you’re not ready, yet. The time would come when he’d take a crack at it, detail for detail, but the time wasn’t now. There were enough things to worry about now.
After lunch, he went from house to house and used up all his stakes. He had forty-seven stakes.
“The strength of the vampire is that no one will believe in him.”
Thank you, Dr. Van Helsing, he thought, putting down his copy Of “Dracula.” He sat staring moodily at the bookcase, listening to Brahms’ second piano concerto, a whisky sour in his right hand, a cigarette between his lips.
It was true. The book was a hodgepodge of superstitions and soap-opera cliches, but that line was true; no one had believed in them, and how could they fight something they didn’t even believe in?
That was what the situation had been. Something black and of the night had come crawling out of the Middle Ages. Something with no framework or credulity, something that had been consigned, fact and figure, to the pages of imaginative literature. Vampires were passe; Summers’ idylls or Stoker’s melodramatics or a brief inclusion in the Britannica or grist for the pulp writer’s mill or raw material for the B-film factories. A tenuous legend passed from century to century.
Well, it was true.
He took a sip from his drink and closed his eyes as the cold liquid trickled down his throat and warmed his stomach. True, he thought, but no one ever got the chance to know it. Oh, they knew it was something, but it couldn’t be that-not that. That was imagination, that was superstition, there was no such thing as that.
And, before science had caught up with the legend, the legend had swallowed science and everything.
He hadn't found any doweling that day. He hadn’t checked the generator. He hadn’t cleaned up the pieces of mirror. He hadn’t eaten supper; he’d lost his appetite. That wasn’t hard. He lost it most of the time. He couldn’t do the things he’d done all afternoon and then come home to a hearty meal. Not even after five months.
He thought of the eleven-no, the twelve children that afternoon, and he finished his drink in two swallows.
He blinked and the room wavered a little before him. You’re getting blotto, Father, he told himself. So what? he returned. Has anyone more right?
He tossed the book across the room. Begone, Van Helsing and Mina and Jonathan and blood-eyed Count and all! All figments, all driveling extrapolations on a somber theme.
A coughing chuckle emptied itself from his throat. Outside, Ben Cortman called for him to come out. Be right out, Benny, he thought. Soon as I get my tuxedo on.
He shuddered. and gritted his teeth edges together. Be right out. Well; why not? Why not go out? It was a sure way to be free of them.
Be one of them.
He chuckled at the simplicity of it, then shoved himself up and walked crookedly to the bar. Why not? His mind plodded on. Why go through all this complexity when a flung open door and a few steps would end it all?
For the life of him, he didn’t know. There was, of course, the faint possibility that others like him existed somewhere, trying to go on, hoping that someday they would be among their own kind again. But how could he ever find them if they weren’t within a day’s drive of his house?
He shrugged and poured more whisky in the glass; he’d given up the use of jiggers months ago. Garlic on the windows, and nets over the hothouse and burn the bodies and cart the rocks away and, fraction of an inch by fraction of an inch, reduce their unholy numbers. Why kid himself? He’d never find anyone else.
His body dropped down heavily on the chair. Here we are, kiddies, sitting like a bug in a rug, snugly, surrounded by a battalion of blood-suckers who wish no more than to sip freely of my bonded, 100-proof hemoglobin. Have a drink, men, this one’s really on me.
His face twisted into an expression of raw, unqualified hatred. Bastards! I’ll kill every, mother’s son of you before I’ll give in! His right hand closed like a clamp and the glass shattered in his grip.
He looked down, dull-eyed, at the fragments on the floor, at the jagged piece of glass still in his hand, at the whisky-diluted blood dripping off his palm.
Wouldn’t they like to get some of it, though? he thought. He started up with a furious lurch and almost opened the door so he could wave the hand in their faces and hear them howl.
Then he closed his eyes and a shudder ran through his body. Wise up, buddy, he thought. Go bandage your goddamn hand.
He stumbled into the bathroom and washed his hand carefully, gasping as he daubed iodine into the sliced-open flesh. Then he bandaged it clumsily, his broad chest rising and falling with jerky movements, sweat dripping from his forehead. I need a cigarette, he thought.
In the living room again, he changed Brahms for Bernstein and lit a cigarette. What will I do if I ever run out of coffin nails? he wondered, looking at the cigarette’s blue trailing smoke. Well, there wasn’t much chance of that. He had about a thousand cartons in the closet of Kathy’s- He clenched his teeth together. In the closet of the larder, the larder, the larder.