on it.
“May I try it?”
Mr Prior took Desmond’s place, turned the key, pulled it out, and stood up. Then the key and the candlestick fell rattling on the stone floor, and the old man sprang upon Desmond.
“Now I’ve got you,” he growled, in the darkness, and Desmond says that his spring and his clutch and his voice were like the spring and the clutch and the growl of a strong savage beast.
Desmond’s little strength snapped like a twig at his first bracing of it to resistance. The old man held him as a vice holds. He had got a rope from somewhere. He was tying Desmond’s arms.
Desmond hates to know that there in the dark he screamed like a caught hare. Then he remembered that he was a man, and shouted “Help! Here! Help!”
But a hand was on his mouth, and now a handkerchief was being knotted at the back of his head. He was on the floor, leaning against something. Prior’s hands had left him.
“Now,” said Prior’s voice, a little breathless, and the match he struck showed Desmond the stone shelves with long things on them – coffins he supposed. “Now, I’m sorry I had to do it, but science before friendship, my dear Desmond,” he went on, quite courteous and friendly. “I will explain to you, and you will see that a man of honour could not act otherwise. Of course, you having no friends who know where you are is most convenient. I saw that from the first. Now I’ll explain. I didn’t expect you to understand by instinct. But no matter. I am, I say it without vanity, the greatest discoverer since Newton. I know how to modify men’s natures. I can make men what I choose. It’s all done by transfusion of blood. Lopez – you know, my man Lopez – I’ve pumped the blood of dogs into his veins, and he’s my slave – like a dog. Verney, he’s my slave, too – part dog’s blood and partly the blood of people who’ve come from time to time to investigate the ghost, and partly my own, because I wanted him to be clever enough to help me. And there’s a bigger thing behind all this. You’ll understand me when I say” – here he became very technical indeed, and used many words that meant nothing to Desmond, whose thoughts dwelt more and more on his small chance of escape.
To die like a rat in a hole, a rat in a hole! If he could only loosen the handkerchief and shout again!
“Attend, can’t you?” said Prior, savagely, and kicked him. “I beg your pardon, my dear chap,” he went on suavely, “but this is important. So you see the elixir of life is really the blood. The blood is the life, you know, and my great discovery is that to make a man immortal, and restore his youth, one only needs blood from the veins of a man who unites in himself blood of the four great races – the four colours, black, white, red, and yellow. Your blood unites these four. I took as much as I dared from you that night. I was the vampire, you know.” He laughed pleasantly. “But your blood didn’t act. The drug I had to give you to induce sleep probably destroyed the vital germs. And, besides, there wasn’t enough of it. Now there is going to be enough!”
Desmond had been working his head against the thing behind him, easing the knot of the handkerchief down till it slipped from head to neck. Now he got his mouth free, and said, quickly: “That was not true what I said about the Chinamen and that. I was joking. My mother’s people were all Devon.”
“I don’t blame you in the least,” said Prior, quietly. “I should lie myself in your place.”
And he put back the handkerchief. The candle was now burning clearly from the place where it stood – on a stone coffin. Desmond could see that the long things on the shelves
“I wish I’d brought you here the first day – it was Verney’s doing, my tinkering about with pints and half- pints. Sheer waste – sheer wanton waste!”
Prior stopped and stood looking at him.
Desmond, despairingly conscious of growing physical weakness, caught himself in a real wonder as to whether this might not be a dream – a horrible, insane dream – and he could not wholly dismiss the wonder, because incredible things seemed to be adding themselves to the real horrors of the situation, just as they do in dreams. There seemed to be something stirring in the place – something that wasn’t Prior. No – nor Prior’s shadow, either. That was black and sprawled big across the arched roof. This was white, and very small and thin. But it stirred, it grew – now it was no longer just a line of white, but a long, narrow, white wedge – and it showed between the coffin on the shelf opposite him and that coffin’s lid.
And still Prior stood very still looking down on his prey. All emotion but a dull wonder was now dead in Desmond’s weakened senses. In dreams – if one called out, one awoke – but he could not call out. Perhaps if one moved – But before he could bring his enfeebled will to the decision of movement – something else moved. The black lid of the coffin opposite rose slowly – and then suddenly fell, clattering and echoing, and from the coffin rose a form, horribly white and shrouded, and fell on Prior and rolled with him on the floor of the vault in a silent, whirling struggle. The last thing Desmond heard before he fainted in good earnest was the scream Prior uttered as he turned at the crash and saw the white-shrouded body leaping towards him.
“It’s all right,” he heard next. And Verney was bending over him with brandy. “You’re quite safe. He’s tied up and locked in the laboratory. No. That’s all right, too.” For Desmond’s eyes had turned towards the lidless coffin. “That was only me. It was the only way I could think of, to save you. Can you walk now? Let me help you, so. I’ve opened the grating. Come.”
Desmond blinked in the sunlight he had never thought to see again. Here he was, back in his wicker chair. He looked at the sundial on the house. The whole thing had taken less than fifty minutes.
“Tell me,” said he. And Verney told him in short sentences with pauses between.
“I tried to warn you,” he said, “you remember, in the window. I really believed in his experiments at first – and – he’d found out something about me – and not told. It was when I was very young. God knows I’ve paid for it. And when you came I’d only just found out what really had happened to the other chaps. That beast Lopez let it out when he was drunk. Inhuman brute! And I had a row with Prior that first night, and he promised me he wouldn’t touch you. And then he did.”
“You might have told me.”
“You were in a nice state to be told anything, weren’t you? He promised me he’d send you off as soon as you were well enough. And he
“But why didn’t you come out before?”
“I didn’t dare. He could have tackled me easily if he had known what he was tackling. He kept moving about. It had to be done suddenly. I counted on just that moment of weakness when he really thought a dead body had come to life to defend you. Now I’m going to harness the horse and drive you to the police-station at Crittenden. And they’ll send and lock him up. Everyone knew he was as mad as a hatter, but somebody had to be nearly killed before anyone would lock him up. The law’s like that, you know.”
“But you – the police – won’t they—”
“It’s quite safe,” said Verney, dully. “Nobody knows but the old man, and now nobody will believe anything he says. No, he never posted your letters, of course, and he never wrote to your friend, and he put off the Psychical man. No, I can’t find Lopez; he must know that something’s up. He’s bolted.”
But he had not. They found him, stubbornly dumb, but moaning a little, crouched against the locked grating of the vault when they came, a prudent half-dozen of them, to take the old man away from the Haunted House. The master was dumb as the man. He would not speak. He has never spoken since.
The Light in the Garden
E. F. Benson
Location: West Riding, Yorkshire.
Time: July, 1921.
Eyewitness Description:
