up and down the lane, not only to know about my illness—and far more about it than any other than my personal physician had been told—but claim that he had caused it? I asked him as much.
He told me who he was and I think I laughed. His face did not change, however, and my laughter died stillborn.
He told me that the others were all gone, that his last victim had been cremated at death and that now he was alone, and knew that sooner or later he would be found and destroyed by the old and proven methods, and that he had suddenly struck upon a way to propagate his kind. And he had done it.
He told me how to went to the national Blood Transfusion Service and gave a pint of his blood. How he ascertained to which hospital the blood was sent, and how he had stealthily prowled the hospital night after night until he had discovered the names of all the patients who had been given blood transfusions.
He had visited every one of them until he found me, and having seen me, he knew. He told me what I was and what I was becoming and he told me also that there was no hope, no cure; and I knew, as my heart died and my soul shrivelled that what he told me was the truth and that the books I had read for a cheap shudder, the films I had seen and laughed at as my fair Elizabeth clutched my hand in horror were no fiction but the truth, the evil, awful truth.
* * * *
He has just gone, although his haunted face seems still to hang in the silent space before my eyes…and now Elizabeth is standing at the head of the stairs in her nightdress, asking me who it was and what he wanted.
The light from the porch throws a faint light up the stairs, and her fair hair is tousled from sleep.
The slim column of her throat draws my eyes like a magnet and within me stirs a compulsion so intense, so awful, and so complete that I can only obey it.
I realize now that he is right, and only when all of them are like us will there be any escape from my terrors.
“Go to bed,” I tell my wife. “I’ll come up and kiss you goodnight.”
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