HORROR THRILLERS-A Box Set of Horror Novels (39 page)

Vampire! How dare
they. He'd fired them immediately, threatening to have their
practices sued for millions. He then carried through with a suit for
defamation. Not that he'd win, but it gave him satisfaction to haul
his doctors into courtrooms. He had had to find other doctors as
replacements, of course, who behind closed doors probably joked about
him in the same way. Doctors couldn't help him any longer anyway, if
ever they could. He kept finding sores on his body that would not
heal despite having been prescribed every known antibiotic on and off
the market. His flesh was riddled with oozing, red, open wounds. He
had bandages on both arms where the sores were the worst, and there
was a patch across the back of his neck that, without covering, would
stain his pillows.

He went closer to
the mirror and stared deeply into his own eyes. His gaze was strong
and determined, but the shell that housed the eyes was deteriorating
rapidly. He began to glare at his own teeth, his stiff lips that were
pulled back from the gums, and he snarled like an animal, cursing
mentally the thing he had become.

His eyes and his
skin had become ultrasensitive to sunlight, so he stayed indoors and
hid behind drawn drapes. They told him his body would be harmed if he
were out in the sun for any length of time. As if it weren't already!
The bottom half of his face had slowly grown rigid and his lips had
pulled back into a rictus that made him look like a decayed mummy.
His thin hair fell out in tufts, and scalded-looking spots covered
the pink skin on his skull.

Charles snarled
once more before returning to the bed and plopping down on the side
of the mattress. He clenched one fist. Raised it above the covers and
let it fall. Raised it again, higher, and hit the bed with a solid
thump. He would like to pound something more than the mattress. If he
could get his hands around the throat of God, he'd strangle him and
bring him to his knees. He'd pound him into oblivion for this curse
placed upon him.

Porphyria they
called it. "The Old Vampire," they called him, because he
was pale and his teeth showed like glistening wet fangs. And as he
aged and retreated from the world, his thirst for revenge grew like a
strange, alien wildflower in a fertilized pasture.

Charles reached to
the opened book lying on the covers. He lifted the leather volume
carefully, smoothing the cream-colored pages. He squinted his eyes
and began to read about the legend of the vampire. At first, his
reading in this area had just been something to do, a diversion to
keep his mind off his infirmities. He had researched the vampire myth
to keep his mind busy. Since even his doctors referred to him as one
of those creatures, perhaps he could find something within the
literature to use to frighten them with. It was one more instance of
an old, sick man reaching for a straw, he knew that, but he thought
it would be grand to know enough about the myth to play into it when
around the specialists who handled his case.

You want a vampire,
he thought. I will give you a vampire.

After a few months
of reading, however, his reason for reading about vampires began to
change. Revenge against the medical community went by the wayside. He
slowly began to discover traces of what might be truth tucked away in
articles and books about vampires. In among the ridiculous fiction,
he began to notice bits and pieces of reports in some more scholarly
tomes that left him wondering. In one such article, published in a
respected journal, he found reports of a "real" vampire who
had been discovered. He flipped through the book in his hand until he
found the page that contained the reprint.

A True Vampire
Story

How It All Began …

This is the story
of Arnod Paole, one of the few vampire histories that has been
sufficiently documented over the years to lend it historical
validity. In the spring of 1727, Arnod Paole returned home from the
military to settle in his hometown of Meduegna, near Belgrade. He
bought some land, built a home, and began work as a farmer. After a
short time, he married a local girl. Her father's land bordered his,
and would be a fine addition, so the two were wed. Paole confided to
his wife that he was haunted by nightmares. He dreamed that he would
die early. In the military, he had been in Greece. Local beliefs
there included myths about how the dead came back to haunt the
living. They came back in the form of revenants or vampires. While in
Greece, and hearing those tales, Paole believed he had been visited
by an undead being. Afterward, he hunted down the unholy grave, on
the advice of locals. He burned the corpse. However, what he'd done
seemed so horrible to him, so frightening, he had to flee Greece. He
resigned from the military and went home.

Soon after
marrying, Paole fell from a hayloft, and was brought, comatose, back
to his home. Within a few days, and without regaining consciousness,
he died and was buried in the town cemetery. A month later reports
began to filter through the townspeople claiming Paole had been seen.
Some said they'd seen him in their own homes, wandering like a ghost.
Some weeks after those reports, many of the people who had seen Paole
in their homes died under inexplicable circumstances. This caused the
town fathers to sign a petition to exhume Arnod Paole. They must make
sure he was dead.

Two military
officers, two army surgeons, and a local priest were called to the
task. Upon opening the coffin they found Paole, but there was no
decomposition of the body. He had new skin and nails, the old ones
having fallen away. And on the corpse's lips they saw wet, fresh
blood. They decided they must drive a stake through the body. They
swore that when they did it, Paole screamed and fresh blood spilled
out. Then they scattered garlic around the remains, and around each
of the graves where Paole had sent his newest victims.

All was quiet until
1732, when more inexplicable deaths began to occur. This time, the
whole town went to the graveyard. What they found was written up in
books over time, the reports given by three army surgeons, cosigned
by a lieutenant colonel, and a sublieutenant. Eleven disinterred
corpses showed the same traits as the Paole corpse had earlier. No
decomposition, new skin grown, fresh blood in the body. There was
never an explanation for the second instance of vampirism, although
one theory was that Paole had feasted on local cattle as well as
people during his walking dead phase. Perhaps, they said, when the
cows were killed for meat, the vampire qualities were consumed and
came alive in anyone who ate the meat. It was the only conclusion
they could find.

Charles closed the
volume and rested it on his knees. The evidence was sketchy, but it
did point toward the possibility there might be something to the old
myth. If he'd only found this one piece of truth, he might have
dismissed it as hyperbole, as fancy, but he kept turning up more and
more information in his studies that claimed there were, in the past
and, even today, real vampires. People who had died and were yet not
dead. People who lived on as immortals.

He had brought it
up to David on a recent visit. David had scoffed at first, thinking
probably that his partner had finally lost his mind to the disease.
When he'd seen Charles was serious, he rearranged his face and said
quietly, "Is this what you believe?"

"I don't know
what I believe," Charles had responded, tossing aside the book
from which he'd quoted. Then he calmed himself and stared at David.
"But what if it's true?"

David had hunched
his shoulders as if to say, Well, what if it is?

Charles knew he'd
get nowhere with David. David was a brilliant businessman, shrewd and
quite competent, a diplomat with the foreign offices, a super
salesman of their oil tankers, but he was no scientist. He lacked
imagination. He wasn't open to anything he could not put his hands on
and know was real. He hadn't an idea about cell regeneration or the
damning effects the porphyria was having on Charles' body. He
couldn't imagine how desperate a man could become when the world
shunned him and he was shut off from view, hiding behind closed doors
and drawn drapes. He didn't know that a man needed . . . hope.
However small and illogical it might seem to others, Charles was
grasping for the hope he might survive his debilitating and fatal
disease. Some way. Any way. Even if it meant turning to old myths and
beginning to believe they might hold the secret of life for him.

Because Charles
could not personally get out and investigate this idea, he would need
someone healthy, trained in the sciences, and motivated to search and
seek out the truth in Charles' stead. He needed a man dedicated to
the hunt. But where could he be found and how could he be motivated?
Money would accomplish both tasks. Money had always been the best
weapon of all. There was not a man on the planet he could not
manipulate through money. He fervently believed that.

Charles let the
book rest on his lap. He closed his eyes, and in his mind he played
his favorite imaginary scene. He was taken and made into a vampire.
He thought it might be painful, but he was prepared for that after
years of living with pain. After his change, he lived forever, ruling
over his growing global empire with all the ruthlessness that had
brought him his great fortune. He had the strength for lovers again
and left them strewn in his wake, begging for him. He took over
corporations, crushing his competitors, running them into the ground.
He was impervious to disease and to the grave. He became a god,
worshiped and feared by millions. In the end of this fantasy, in a
future where technology had changed the face of everyday life and
countries were brought under his thumb, he ruled the world.

When he opened his
eyes, he tried to temper his fantastic visions by hitting himself
over the head with reality.

He was sick and
dying. He was old. He couldn't even run his own business anymore.

And he would not
live forever. In fact, his doctors did not give him long. A year or
two, if that.

George, his butler,
knocked softly on the bedroom door before entering with the serving
tray. Charles looked at him, a man in his prime living out his life
as a servant, and he hated him. He couldn't stomach peasants. The
subservient made him want to retch. The world was full of them! And
it was men like him who gave them all jobs and a means to survive.
Without the money from billionaires like him supporting the structure
of world economies, all the servants and peasants would die away.

He snatched the
tray from George's hands and jerked his head toward the door to
dismiss him. He would not say thank you. He would not admit that he
was dependent on the other man's generosity.

He ought to fire
the man and find someone older and slower and with less reason to
smirk behind his back. Not that he ever caught George smirking, but
if he ever did …

Raising the silver
coffee server to pour a cup of coffee, Charles caught a brief,
distorted reflection of his own face. He set down the server quickly
and glanced away from it. The rounded surface of the silver had
contorted his face even more. Oh, he was a monster, a monster in his
body and mind, and some days he did not want to be reminded of it.
Some days that knowledge was enough to send rage pumping through his
heart like a shot of adrenaline.

He balanced the
tray on his knees and clenched one fist. He raised it and began to
pound the bed. Slowly, carefully, so as not to tip over the tray,
methodically and relentlessly he hit the bed again and again and
again.

In time, Mentor
would explain to Dell that the disease itself was responsible for the
presence of vampires upon the Earth, but that the choice of what kind
of vampire one became was spiritual. Supernatural. The disease that
took human cells and caused them to mutate into those of a vampire
had nothing to do with the nature of the being who was finally
created. He had once tried telling this secret to a young person
before he entered the dream, before he died, but it caused such
horror and revulsion, Mentor decided it was best to let the dying
patient learn all that he must within the confines of the change
itself. Warning or explaining did not seem to do the good he had
hoped it would. He realized finally that one cannot explain away the
supernatural, cannot warn about the dangers of the spirit.

Over the years
Mentor had studied the writings of scientists and biologists hoping
to understand how the body could be overtaken and killed, yet made to
live again as something altogether new. All other diseases ravaged
the body, consuming and defeating it until the soul fled from it
forever. In contrast, the mutated disease of porphyria deformed the
body and took it to the brink of death, but at the last moment the
cells revived, becoming new cells that were neither human nor animal.
However, the human soul was left to struggle on, the mind remaining,
the memories intact. And on that brink of death was where the soul
determined what path it would follow. Closed off from heaven and
blocked from the gates of hell, the soul had but three choices. It
could embrace evil fully and become a Predator vampire, seeking to
take down humans in order to survive. It could fall back to the
weakest link of vampiric existence and hide from man as a Craven. Or
it could muster the strength to live on in human society, learning to
hide away its supernatural powers in order to go forward into history
as if truly human still.