The Innsmouth Heritage and Other Sequels. Brian Stableford

can’t allow yourself to be paralyzed by fear, my friend,” the vampire said. “You’re one of us now.”

      “Are you the one who bit me?” Anthony asked.

      “What does that matter?” the vampire retorted, licking his lips avidly in search of one last drop of sustenance. “It’s done. You should come with us—we’re heading for Alexandria.”

      “Us?” Anthony echoed. “I think you will be alone from now on—and deservedly so, given that you treat your friends so vilely.” “They’ll recover,” the vampire said. “They’ll be thirsty, but their bones will knit and their scratches will heal. They’ll bear me no ill will. They know that there’s strength in numbers, even if the contest that results when we find a lone victim can have only one winner. In Alexandria, it will be different. Cities were made for our kind. If you stay out here, though, alone, they’ll catch you eventu­ally. Then they’ll behead you, and burn your body. There’s no way back from that. You’d best come with us—you have a great deal to learn.”

      “You have the Devil’s blood in you now,” Anthony told the creature. “It might make you stronger, I suppose, but it’s poison nevertheless.”

      “If that were true,” the vampire replied, “it would make little enough difference to me, who was damned a long time ago—but I know the blood of a philosopher when I taste it. An Epicurean, I believe—the least intoxicating of all.”

      “He wore the guise of an Epicurean,” Anthony admitted, “but he was the Devil. He had been a cloud of transparent darkness only an hour or so before.”

      “The desert’s full of djinn,” the vampire told him. “There’s no blood in them, but they can play tricks with your head. Thirst makes it easier. If he gets up again, he’ll be one of us—but they don’t al­ways get up. I was lucky; so were you. Him too, although he won’t feel it when he wakes up.” The creature inclined his head briefly in the direction of his erstwhile companion and adversary, who was still unconscious.

      “You cannot hurt me, monster,” Anthony said.

      “I certainly could,” the monster replied, “but I’ve nothing to gain by it, and the thirst will punish you enough, if you insist in your stubbornness. You’re welcome to come with us if you wish. If not, do as you will.”

      “I shall pray to the Lord for my salvation,” Anthony said, defi­antly. “I shall bear my thirst proudly, grateful to be tried and not found wanting. I shall guard my immortal soul until I die, and then confide it to the loving care of my savior and my Lord. The Devil could not tempt me, and nor shall you.”

      The vampire came to his feet, wincing at the pain in his limbs and spine. He leaned over the Devil’s body, then knelt down beside it. “He might come back, I suppose,” was the monster’s off-hand judgment, “but I doubt it. Too much damage done. They say that nothing short of beheading and burning will make certain, but that’s just superstitious dread. Don’t worry about inviting me back to the fort—I’ll camp out down there, in the shadow of the cliff, till night­fall comes again. Are you sure you won’t come with us to Alexan­dria? They’ll start hunting for us eventually, of course, and we’ll have to move on, but there’s plenty of blood to be had in the mean­time. The city is our natural environment.”

      Anthony gathered himself together and came to stand opposite the vampire, looking down at the body of the man who had con­sented to be murdered. Anthony had to agree that it was impossible to believe that the corpse would ever be reanimated—but the Devil was a master of deception. He turned round abruptly, and walked away, in the direction of the fort. He suspected that the vampire was staring at the back of his head, but he did not look back.

      “The flesh is a distraction,” the hermit said to himself, formulat­ing the words clearly although he did not pronounce them aloud. “Its mortification is an irrelevance. The spirit is capable of rising above such trivial matters. Prayer will sustain me, no matter how long I am forced to endure this torment. As God wills, I shall do, even if I live to be a hundred.”

      According to history, he lived to be a hundred and five, but he knew what a liar history can be when legend-mongers get involved in it, and he had lost count long before he died. Once he was offi­cially declared a saint, Anthony was able to ascend to Heaven and look back upon the Earth, so he was able to watch with interest when his old Adversary, the Devil, tried his luck again in Heidel­berg thirteen hundred years later, with a slightly different result.

      After that, the cities of the world began to grow in earnest, and vampires to multiply. Anthony estimated that it might soon be time to call a halt to the whole sorry mess, perhaps to try again some­where else in the vast and various universe, but he was not privy to the Lord’s intentions.

      “Personally,” Saint Leocadia said to him one day, as they watched the outbreak and rapid progress of World War Three, “I’m glad to be out of it. I don’t miss a single thing—except, I sup­pose....” She trailed off, as the saints always tended to do at that point in the conversation.

      Anthony was too polite to finish the sentence for her, although he knew perfectly well what she meant. He certainly didn’t miss the terrible thirst for blood that the Devil’s minion had cruelly inflicted upon him, nor any of the thousand other shocks that flesh was heir to, pleasant or unpleasant—but every so often, he missed the little intellectual shocks that had stimulated his mind while his faith was yet to find its final justification.

      The saint knew now that he had been right all along to trust in his savior and the grace of God, and that he would be right in every­thing he believed for all eternity. There was a certain undeniable sat­isfaction in the irresistibility of that confirmation—but he also un­derstood, now, what the Devil had meant when he had insisted that it wasn’t a contest. The Devil really hadn’t had the slightest interest in winning his soul, and really had been trying to explain the answer to the Sphinx’s riddle.

      By virtue of that realization, every now and again—if only a lit­tle—Saint Anthony couldn’t help missing temptation.