Chapter Seven: The Book of Garrett, Part 3
There, in that dank and disused cellar, were the mortal remains of the young wastrels who we had thought fled in the night, together with those of several of the young man’s servants who we had thought peacefully moved on to other employment; everyone who had vanished into the night, and some who had left openly, all cast willy-nilly in a heap like so much trash. I recognized Mrs. L_____, the cook, then turned and could look no more. She must have seen too much, poor woman.
Some had simply been killed and drained of blood, according to Dr. H_____; others had been kept alive for some time, and used for ongoing supply until they died; these were the ones who were emaciated, like the young man, whose unclothed body was in a place by itself, lying against a wall, to which, for some reason, he was attached by an iron chain that ran to a collar around his neck. Dr. H_____ ran to him, felt for a pulse, listened to his chest, then looked up at us and shook his head.
Then the young man stirred and sat up. No one was more surprised than Dr. H_____, who sprang away with a cry. Only the Dutch professor was unperturbed. He waved us to silence as the young man shook his head and rubbed his eyes. His chin was covered with a dark stain; my heart froze as I realized it was dried blood. He felt the collar and the chain, then looked straight at me.
“Pastor, what is the meaning of this? What has happened?” I began to reply, but the professor lifted a hand, and I held my peace.
“First, young sir,” said the professor, “we must from you hear what you remember.”
“I remember being very ill, and Nao—Miss Mc_____ leaning over me. She kissed my neck, and I became very dizzy, and fell asleep. Then I awakened; she was pouring something sweet, like wine and honey, into my mouth, but she had no cup in her hand. How could that be?”
“It doesn’t matter,” said the professor, “please go on.”
“I cannot remember anything further but terrible nightmares. There must have been some drug in the drink she gave me.”
“What kind of nightmares?” asked the professor.
“Screams, and terrible pain across my entire body. I was covered with burning leaves, and couldn’t rid myself of them. Another time I dreamed I was cutting myself with a knife, but every cut I made closed instantly. That’s all. Oh, I remember one other: I dreamed that Mrs. L_____ called to me for help. I tried to go to her, but couldn’t move.”
We all stood in silence for a moment, staring at him. We were standing between him and the pile of bodies, but of course we were an imperfect screen. His eyes widened with shock.
“O merciful God,” he whispered. “What has happened here?” No one spoke for some time; even the professor seemed nonplussed.
“Son,” I finally said, “there is dried blood all over your chin.” He felt it and began to shake. Then something else came into his eyes.
“O God, now I remember,” he said. “After I drank, she licked her wrist…I was drinking from her wrist! How can that be? How can I…” he buried his face in his hands and sobbed.
The professor stepped forward, tugging the collar away from the shaking neck; by doing so he revealed a fading bruise. “This man has been no more than five days ago bitten,” he said, then turned back to the young man. “Who else have you fed upon? Whose blood have you drunk?”
“Only hers,” said the young man through his sobs, “only hers, I swear to you.”
“This we can test,” said the professor, and drew his knife. I stepped forward, intending to intervene, but he was only scraping some of the dried blood from the young man’s chin. “I am taking this out into the sunlight,” he announced. “Do nothing until I return.”
It did not take long. He returned shortly with a clean knife.
“He speaks the truth,” the professor admitted, and it seemed to me that he was reluctant to do so. “This was the last blood he drank, and it was hers. She would not have permitted him to take from her except for the initial change, and even if he somehow managed to bite her she would not bleed unless she willed it. This is unfortunate.”
Since it had seemed he was proclaiming the young man innocent of wrongdoing, I was startled by this. “Unfortunate! Why?”
“Because, Pastor,” he replied, “it makes it much more hard to do that which must in any case be done.” It took me some moments to comprehend what he meant, and to take in the grim silence in the room. Then came the dawn.
“But you can’t kill him! You said yourself, he didn’t kill these people!”
“Ah, Pastor, you have correctly spoken. Indeed we cannot kill him.” With this he turned to Dr. H_____. “You have examined him, Doctor, have you not? Had he any pulse or heartbeat?” The doctor shook his head. “You can see for yourself that he draws no breath except to speak. So you see, Pastor, we cannot kill him—because he is already dead.”
“But I’m not!” exclaimed the young man, looking up at him. “You can see that I’m not dead! How could I be speaking to you if…” He trailed off suddenly, staring at his hands. After all his sobbing into them, they were dry. So were his eyes.
“You see,” said the professor quietly, “you are no longer quite human.”
“I don’t know what’s wrong with me,” said the young man. “Please don’t kill me, please don’t kill me.”
“I am very sorry, young sir,” said the professor, “that I did not in time to save you from her reach you. What she did to you, she did first to my beloved daughter; but my daughter spent the three days of her transformation in a crypt, for we thought her dead until we found it empty. By then she had become a wild animal, killing the first person she saw every night, and slipping back into her crypt to hide by day. There was nothing we could do for her; she had to be put down like the ravenous predator she had become.
“For that reason I have tracked the terrible monster you knew as Naomi Mc_____ up and down and across and across Europe. I almost caught her in Budapest, but she was too strong; again in Seville, but she was too swift. She took ship from England, and I followed her across the ocean, and halfway across this great continent. Even then I could not have caught her, had not one of your former companions become disgusted and come to a town where I was staying; under the influence of drink he allowed that his friend had become flogged by a cat, or some such phrase, and was no fun any more. Her name, of course, meant nothing, for she never used the same one in any two places; but the description was true enough. It was the creature I have pursued for nearly two decades.
“And now she is at long last destroyed, but too late for you, my young friend. You will thirst, and you will feed, and you will kill; and with each kill you will deeper into your animal nature sink, until you have no more mind than a mad dog. Then like a mad dog you must be destroyed.”
“But he must not be destroyed now!” I exclaimed. “He has done nothing, killed no one!”
“He will,” replied the professor.
“So you say. But no man knows the future. You want to kill him for a crime he has not committed, that you know full well he has not committed. That, sir, is injustice in its purest form.”
“We cannot kill him. He is already dead. We can only destroy his corpse, though it be animate.”
“You are chopping words, Professor. He is able to speak and move and reason. I say robbing him of that is murder, and I say again, if you would condemn him when you know he has done no crime, you are unjust.” Then I looked at the professor; and I confess that scales fell from my eyes. Each time I called him unjust, I wounded him. In the ferocity of my compassion for the younger man, I had failed in compassion to the elder—a man who had been forced, I recalled, to destroy his own daughter!
“Professor,” I therefore said, “I know you think you’re doing the right thing—”
“You are mistaken,” he said softly. “I have no such illusion. There is no ‘right thing’ left to us. We can only hope to choose, among wrong things, the least wrong—and pray that we may be forgiven.”
To this no one, least of all myself, had an answer. It was some time before anyone spoke.
“Is he— Will he become—” I could not go on.
“A creature like her? No. He was until a week ago human; she never was, not in all the thousands of years of her existence.”
“‘I am older than your Christ,’” I whispered.
“Yes, Pastor. I believe that in that one instance she spoke the truth. She may have predated human civilisation, even humanity itself. He will never be the terrible monster she was, but he will become wild, a dangerous animal to be destroyed.”
“But as I’m not an animal yet,” said the subject of our disputation, “may I have some clothing please?” We could not have been more startled if the wall itself had spoken; he had been sitting in such perfect stillness that we quite forgot he was there, though we spoke of him ourselves. I saw to it at once, while the professor’s men guarded him.
Once he was dressed, I saw that it was well done indeed to insist that he be clothed. It was hard to think of him as a feral beast now, even with the iron collar still in place. With a chill I wondered if that might not have been just what he intended—was he engaging in the same sort of masquerade and manipulation that “Naomi Mc_____” had attempted?
While I had been gone, Dr. H_____ had been conferring with other members of the Council; they now informed us that they were about to meet to determine what was to be done.
“Professor, please come and lend us your expertise,” said Dr. H_____. I was alarmed at that.
“Then I myself will also attend, to represent this young man’s interests,” I said.
“Pastor, this is not a trial,” said Dr. H_____, somewhat tiredly. “The professor will offer information and suggestions, nothing more.”
“Nonetheless, I feel I must—”
“Pastor,” said the young man, “will you stay with me here?” Dr. H_____ shot the young man an enigmatic look. “Since I may be executed before sundown, I find I want to pray. Will you help me?” So called upon, I could not refuse; we prayed together for the several hours that elapsed while the Council was meeting.
It was Dr. H_____ who explained the Council’s decision to me. I was overjoyed to hear that they had decided against killing the young man, but horrified to hear what they proposed instead.
“You’re going to lock him in a box forever? How is that better than killing him?”
“It will not kill him, the professor says. And it means we can change our minds if necessary.”
“Is this your solution?” I said, turning to the professor. “Since they wouldn’t let you kill him, lock him up to be forgotten forever?” The professor stared at me, white-lipped, then turned on his heel and walked out without another word. Nor did he and I ever speak again.
“In fact, Pastor, the professor opposed this solution,” said Dr. H_____.
“Why? Because you might decide to open the box? Because nothing but death will satisfy him?”
“No. Because he felt it was too cruel.” At this I was abashed, and confined my further comments to breaking the news to the young man—he accepted it with a simple nod, though his hands shook—and helping to prepare him for what lay ahead. He had a moment’s panic when he first saw the box, but soon recovered, and lay down in it, reciting the Lord’s Prayer and the Twenty-Third Psalm again and again while they closed the lid, nailed it shut, wrapped it with chains, and fastened the whole with a large padlock.
The cellar door, too, was resealed, after the corpses—nineteen in all—had been removed and given decent burial. The house was shuttered, never to be used; the Council passed an ordinance providing for its maintenance and exempting it from property taxes in perpetuity, so that no one would ever take possession of it or discover its terrible secret. I protested (in private) every one of these moves, though honestly I cannot see what else they could possibly have done.
The one concern I could not let go, finally, was my fear that the young man would be forgotten forever, and that no consideration would ever be given to letting him out, even if a cure for his condition could be found. That is why Council President Garrett finally asked me to write down everything that happened exactly as I remembered it. He swore to me that he would have it made into a book which would be passed from every Council to the next, so that all the Councils would be aware of what happened, for all the generations to come.
Nothing would grow on the large patch in Mr. J_____’s field where the terrible burning took place, nor on the two smaller patches near it. When we discovered that animals who wandered across it soon sickened and died (and thank God no child ever did so!), we piled large stones upon it, making a sort of stone hill or cairn. I say a prayer for the young man (and for the nineteen other victims of these terrible events) whenever I pass it.
May God have mercy upon us all. Amen.
Here ends the Book of Garrett. The calligraphy of the book is carefully designed to fill the entire penultimate page; there is no signature, no author’s name.
