Vampire.
From the German word wampyre, meaning devil. Night-creature, pallid as the moon. Seriocomic hero of a thousand poorly-photographed B-pictures, destined to their own nighttime living death at drive-in theaters across the United States. Mainstay of the comic books of the 50s, when Ben had grown up, and now of the 70s, when he had returned to the place of his growing-up.
Vampire.
Dweller in cold marble tombs and crypts of earth and stone. Propitiating its own legend, even in the face of cold science, thriving even in an age of rockets, computers, DNA analysis. Flittering into ten thousand bedrooms of the mind, where voluptuous teenage girls lay in the grip of nightmares with their nightgowns twisted above their alabaster thighs.
Vampire.
The old men—and Eva—were looking at him, but he hardly noticed them going out. The word clanged in his mind like a churchyard bell.
In the original ending toSusan (II), Count Barlow (who is called Sarlinov in the original manuscript) and Straker meet out near the end of town to discuss how the novel’s heroes had been faring.
The Deep Cut Road skirts the marshes to the southwest of the town’s center, and then winds crazily through a series of folded ridges and sudden, knife-cut dips, and here the country was so wild that even the ubiquitous trailers were left behind. It was here that the big fire of 1951 burned at its most feverish, destructive pitch, and the growth has come back and formed into fervid tangles and nightmare patterns which lurch over and under huge deadfalls like a drunkard’s stagger. This country continues for only five miles or so, but it is five miles of the wildest land in the area. Now, with much of the fall foliage dashed from the trees and the wildly-leaning trunks painted by the moonlight, the woods looked like nothing so much as a three-dimensional maze constructed by a madman.
At nearly midnight on that Friday night, a black Packard—either a ’39 or a ’40—was parked somewhere along this stretch of road, idling quietly. The exhaust drew a wavering line in the dark. A tall shadow—Straker—stood with one foot on the driver’s side running board, smoking one of his Turkish cigarettes.
Something stirred in the air, darker even than the pines that formed the scene’s backdrop. A large crow, or perhaps a bat. Its form seemed to shift, elongate, and change. For a moment it seemed oddly insubstantial, as if it might disappear altogether. And then there was a second shadow, standing beside the first.
“Our father has been kind,” Straker remarked.
“Be it ever so,” remarked the other. His hair was now a vigorous black, with the faintest speckles of gray at the temples. “Mr Ben Mears?”
“In the hospital.”
“And Mr Tibbits?”
“In the constable’s lock-up. Mr Bush will attend to him later.”
“Burke is out of the way?”
“Yes. Not dead, but also in the hospital. He had a heart attack.”
“It is sufficient. He had the most knowledge; and a certain…persuasiveness.”
“But no zealotry.”
“Ah, no.” The figure with the vigorous black hair laughed softly. He did not in the least look like Bela Lugosi or Christopher Lee. “No zealotry there.”
“Is Master Glick—”
“Master Glick is about his business. Yes. Yes, indeed.” The dark man laughed again.
Straker asked humbly: “Is it my time yet?”
“Almost, my good servant. It is almost time.”
“Our father is kind,” Straker said, and there was the faintest touch of resignation in his voice.
“Be it ever so.”
Together, in the darkness, they seemed to merge into a single shadow.
InThe Lot (III), we have this scene of Ruthie Crockett being visited by Dud Rogers, and another of the McDougall baby visiting his mother.
Ruthie Crockett’s shortie nightgown had twisted up above her thighs, showing a darker patch at their juncture that had been there for less than two years. Her perfect adolescent breasts rose and fell slowly in her deep sleep.
It took a long time for the soft beating on her window to awaken her, and even then she never woke fully. It was in a dream that she saw the oddly cocked head and behind it the twisted, hunched back of Dud Rogers.
His eyes glittered over her, filling with the night-reality of her slumbrous vitality, so deep that even in deepest sleep no cool hint of mortality could touch it. Her breasts pressed against each other in milky curves at the bodice of her nightdress.
“Ruthie…please, Ruthie, let me in a minute. Let me in.”
And she, still dreaming of the boy who had just the previous evening parked with her and run his hands over her body until it seemed ready to shriek aloud with painful pleasure, seemed to see his clear face and his straight back instead of Dud’s, and as she slid the window open and held out her sleeping arms, the flame leaped up in her like coal oil splashed into an open hearth and his arms were around her and there were no negatives now, negatives were swept away, impossible. His lips found the soft column of her throat, and for a single, darkly enchanted moment, she could hear the soft and eager champing of his tongue against her skin, laving it, preparing it for some unknown and unexpected entry.
His teeth dented against her throat…paused…pierced.
Orgasm shook her. Fierce, alien, compelling beyond all compulsion. And again. And again. So, on and on, down dark hallways, until all thought of her flesh was lost, drowned in a sweet green singing that rose and rose, bearing her down into darkness, unbearable in its sweet repulsiveness.
In her dream, her son had come back to her.
She lay in her own bed again, because Roy had taken her home. He had driven her home heavily sedated, sitting on the far right-hand side of the front seat with her hands in her lap. Roy asked her if she would like something to eat. She said no thank you. Her eyes, moving listlessly around the dining nook of the trailer and the living room beyond, saw that all sign of the baby was gone: Playpen, toy basket, Raggedy Andy doll, the caterpillar, the high chair where she had tried to feed him back to life.
No thank you, she had said, I want to go to sleep.
And now in this dream Randy was scratching at the window and she rushed to let him in because it was night and cold and her baby boy was naked.
She opened the window and he crawled into her arms—never mind how he got up to that high window, it doesn’t matter in dreams—and nuzzled at her neck like a little puppy dog.
And he was cold, so cold—but alive, not like this morning. His eyes were open and they were so pretty that you could hardly look away from them and he had been cutting new teeth, too.
Come to bed, baby, cover up warm with Momma.
And as she pulled the blankets over them a heavy sweetness—fulfillment—came to her and it was all right again because this was real and the rest had been a dream.
But you’re so cold, she said, hugging Randy to her, and her body heat did not seem to bring any vitality to him.
Teeth, nuzzling her neck.
Is oo hungwy? Want Momma to fix oo a wittle snackie?
But too hard to get up. And surely she was meant to nourish her own, and let him grow strong. She was going to be a good mother from now on. Such a scare she had had!
Leaning back on her pillow, drowsing off, she gave her son suck. In a last moment of belated fright, of near reality, she glanced over at the mirror which ran the length of her dressing table and in the glimmering light saw her own ecstatic face, eyes burning with a dark love that verged on fanaticism, and her arms cradling—nothing.
Her eyes searched for him in the crook of the arm and found him, her son with his tiny body lying on the swell of her breast, his working mouth pressed to her throat.
I’m never going to hit you again, Randy, she thought, just before drowsing off.