sweet. 'I am here, and I have watched you ever since you came.'
'Yes…'
My eyes were closing. In a dim flash, as of a match being struck, I saw my father, heard his voice.
'Only a little kiss,' said the voice of the one who was really here. I felt his lips against my neck. 'I would never harm you. No harm ever for the children of this house. Just the little kiss, Julie, and the understanding that it imparts, that you cannot destroy Rampling Gate, Julie — that you can never, never drive me away.'
The core of my being, that secret place where all desires and all commandments are nurtured, opened to him without a struggle or a sound. I would have fallen if he had not held me. My arms closed about him, my hands slipping into the soft, silken mass of his hair.
I was floating, and there was, as there had always been at Rampling Gate, an endless peace. It was Rampling Gate I felt enclosing me; it was that timeless and impenetrable secret that had opened itself at last…
But in a violent instant he had released me. 'Too innocent,' he whispered.
I went reeling across the bedroom floor and caught hold of the frame of the window. I rested my forehead against the stone wall.
There was a tingling pain in my throat where his lips had touched me that was almost pleasurable, a delicious throbbing that would not stop. I knew what he was!
I turned and saw all the room clearly — the bed, the fireplace, the chair. And he stood still exactly as I'd left him and there was the most appalling anguish in his face.
'Something of menace, unspeakable menace,' I whispered, backing away.
'Something ancient, something that defies understanding,' he pleaded. 'Something that can and will go on.' But he was shaken and he would not look into my eyes.
I touched that pulsing pain with the tips of my fingers and, looking down at them, saw the blood.
'Vampire!' I gasped. 'And yet you suffer so, and it is as if you can love!'
'Love? I have loved you since you came. I loved you when I read your secret thoughts and had not yet seen your face.'
He drew me to him ever so gently, and slipping his arm around me, guided me to the door.
I tried for one desperate moment to resist him. And as any gentleman might, he stepped back respectfully and took my hand.
Through the long upstairs corridor we passed, and through a small wooden doorway to a screw stair that I had not seen before. I soon realized we were ascending in the north tower, a ruined portion of the structure that had been sealed off years before.
Through one tiny window after another I saw the gently rolling landscape and the small cluster of dim lights that marked the village of Rampling and the pale streak of white that was the London road.
Up and up we climbed, until we reached the topmost chamber, and this he opened with an iron key. He held back the door for me to enter and I found myself in a spacious room whose high, narrow windows contained no glass. A flood of moonlight revealed the most curious mixture of furnishings and objects — a writing-table, a great shelf of books, soft leather chairs, and scores of maps and framed pictures affixed to the walls. Candles all about had dripped their wax on every surface, and in the very midst of this chaos lay my poems, my old sketches — early writings that I had brought with me and never even unpacked.
I saw a black silk top hat and a walking-stick, and a bouquet of withered flowers, dry as straw, and daguerreotypes and tintypes in their little velvet cases, and London newspapers and opened books.
There was no place for sleeping in this room.
And when I thought of that, where he must lie when he went to rest, a shudder passed over me and I felt, quite palpably, his lips touching my throat again, and I had the sudden urge to cry.
But he was holding me in his arms; he was kissing my cheeks and my lips ever so softly.
'My father knew what you were!' I whispered.
'Yes,' he answered, 'and his father before him. And all of them in an unbroken chain over the years. Out of loneliness or rage, I know not which, I always told them. I always made them acknowledge, accept.'
I backed away and he didn't try to stop me. He lighted the candles about us one by one.
I was stunned by the sight of him in the light, the gleam in his large black eyes and the gloss of his hair.
Not even in the railway station had I seen him so clearly as I did now, amid the radiance of the candles.
He broke my heart.
And yet he looked at me as though I were a feast for his eyes, and he said my name again and I felt the blood rush to my face. But there seemed a great break suddenly in the passage of time. What had I been thinking!
He had drawn me to the window. And as the lights of Rampling were subtracted from the darkness below, a great wood stretched out in all directions, far older and denser than the forest of Rampling Gate.
I was afraid suddenly, as if I were slipping into a maelstrom of visions from which I could never, of my own will, return.
There was that sense of our talking together, talking and talking in low, agitated voices, and I was saying that I should not give in.
'Bear witness — that is all I ask of you, Julie.'
And there was in me some dim certainty that by these visions alone I would be fatally changed.
But the very room was losing its substance, as if a soundless wind of terrific force were blowing it apart.
The vision had already begun…
We were riding horseback through a forest, he and I. And the trees were so high and so thick that scarcely any sun at all broke through to the fragrant, leaf-strewn ground.
Yet we had no time to linger in this magical place. We had come to the fresh-tilled earth that surrounded a village I somehow knew was called Knorwood, with its gabled roofs and its tiny, crooked streets. We saw the monastery of Knorwood and the little church with the bell chiming vespers under the lowering sky. A great, bustling life resided in Knorwood, a thousand voices rising in common prayer.
Far beyond, on the rise above the forest, stood the round tower of a truly ancient castle; and to that ruined castle — no more than a shell of itself any more — as darkness fell in earnest we rode. Through its empty chambers we roamed, impetuous children, the horses and the road quite forgotten, and to the lord of the castle, a gaunt and white-skinned creature standing before the roaring fire of the roofless hall, we came. He turned and fixed us with his narrow and glittering eyes. A dead thing he was, I understood, but he carried within himself a priceless magic. And my companion, my innocent young man, stepped forward into the lord's arms.
I saw the kiss. I saw the young man grow pale and struggle and turn away, and the lord retreated with the wisest, saddest smile.
I understood. I knew. But the castle was dissolving as surely as anything in this dream might dissolve, and we were in some damp and close place.
The stench was unbearable to me; it was that most terrible of all stenches, the stench of death. And I heard my steps on the cobblestones and I reached out to steady myself against a wall. The tiny market-place was deserted; the doors and windows gaped open to the vagrant wind. Up one side and down the other of the crooked street I saw the marks on the houses. And I knew what the marks meant.
The Black Death had come to the village of Knorwood. The Black Death had laid it waste. And in a moment of suffocating horror I realized that no one, not a single person, was left alive.
But this was not quite true. There was a young man walking in fits and starts up the narrow alleyway. He was staggering, almost falling, as he pushed in one door after another, and at last came to a hot, reeking place where a child screamed on the floor. Mother and father lay dead in the bed. And the sleek fat cat of the household, unharmed, played with the screaming infant, whose eyes bulged in its tiny, sunken face.
'Stop it!' I heard myself gasp. I was holding my head with both hands. 'Stop it — stop it, please!' I was screaming, and my screams would surely pierce the vision and this crude little dwelling would collapse around me
