Urcombe had
been silent too, indeed he hardly spoke again till she departed. “That was unfortunate,” he said, “for the outbreak of--of a very
mysterious disease, let us call it, took place at Peshawar, where she
and her husband were. And----”

“Well?” I asked. “He was one of the victims of it,” said he. “Naturally I had quite
forgotten that when I spoke.”

The summer was unreasonably hot and rainless, and Maxley suffered much
from drought, and also from a plague of big black night-flying gnats,
the bite of which was very irritating and virulent. They came sailing
in of an evening, settling on one’s skin so quietly that one perceived
nothing till the sharp stab announced that one had been bitten. They
did not bite the hands or face, but chose always the neck and throat
for their feeding-ground, and most of us, as the poison spread, assumed
a temporary goitre. Then about the middle of August appeared the first
of those mysterious cases of illness which our local doctor attributed
to the long-continued heat coupled with the bite of these venomous
insects. The patient was a boy of sixteen or seventeen, the son of
Mrs. Amworth’s gardener, and the symptoms were an anæmic pallor and a
languid prostration, accompanied by great drowsiness and an abnormal
appetite. He had, too, on his throat two small punctures where, so Dr.
Ross conjectured, one of these great gnats had bitten him. But the odd
thing was that there was no swelling or inflammation round the place
where he had been bitten. The heat at this time had begun to abate, but
the cooler weather failed to restore him, and the boy, in spite of the
quantity of good food which he so ravenously swallowed, wasted away to
a skin-clad skeleton. I met Dr. Ross in the street one afternoon about this time, and in
answer to my inquiries about his patient he said that he was afraid
the boy was dying. The case, he confessed, completely puzzled him:
some obscure form of pernicious anæmia was all he could suggest. But
he wondered whether Mr. Urcombe would consent to see the boy, on
the chance of his being able to throw some new light on the case,
and since Urcombe was dining with me that night, I proposed to Dr.
Ross to join us. He could not do this, but said he would look in
later. When he came, Urcombe at once consented to put his skill at
the other’s disposal, and together they went off at once. Being thus
shorn of my sociable evening, I telephoned to Mrs. Amworth to know if
I might inflict myself on her for an hour. Her answer was a welcoming
affirmative, and between piquet and music the hour lengthened itself
into two. She spoke of the boy who was lying so desperately and
mysteriously ill, and told me that she had often been to see him,
taking him nourishing and delicate food. But to-day--and her kind eyes
moistened as she spoke--she was afraid she had paid her last visit. Knowing the antipathy between her and Urcombe, I did not tell her that
he had been called into consultation; and when I returned home she
accompanied me to my door, for the sake of a breath of night air, and
in order to borrow a magazine which contained an article on gardening
which she wished to read. “Ah, this delicious night air,” she said, luxuriously sniffing in the
coolness. “Night air and gardening are the great tonics. There is
nothing so stimulating as bare contact with rich mother earth. You are
never so fresh as when you have been grubbing in the soil--black hands,
black nails, and boots covered with mud.” She gave her great jovial
laugh. “I’m a glutton for air and earth,” she said. “Positively I look forward
to death, for then I shall be buried and have the kind earth all round
me. No leaden caskets for me--I have given explicit directions. But
what shall I do about air? Well, I suppose one can’t have everything. The magazine? A thousand thanks, I will faithfully return it. Good
night: garden and keep your windows open, and you won’t have anæmia.”

“I always sleep with my windows open,” said I.

I went straight up to my bedroom, of which one of the windows looks
out over the street, and as I undressed I thought I heard voices
talking outside not far away. But I paid no particular attention, put
out my lights, and falling asleep plunged into the depths of a most
horrible dream, distortedly suggested no doubt, by my last words with
Mrs. Amworth. I dreamed that I woke, and found that both my bedroom
windows were shut. Half-suffocating I dreamed that I sprang out of
bed, and went across to open them. The blind over the first was drawn
down, and pulling it up I saw, with the indescribable horror of
incipient nightmare, Mrs. Amworth’s face suspended close to the pane
in the darkness outside, nodding and smiling at me. Pulling down the
blind again to keep that terror out, I rushed to the second window on
the other side of the room, and there again was Mrs. Amworth’s face. Then the panic came upon me in full blast; here was I suffocating in
the airless room, and whichever window I opened Mrs. Amworth’s face
would float in, like those noiseless black gnats that bit before one
was aware. The nightmare rose to screaming point, and with strangled
yells I awoke to find my room cool and quiet with both windows open
and blinds up and a half-moon high in its course, casting an oblong
of tranquil light on the floor. But even when I was awake the horror
persisted, and I lay tossing and turning. I must have slept long before
the nightmare seized me, for now it was nearly day, and soon in the
east the drowsy eyelids of morning began to lift. I was scarcely downstairs next morning--for after the dawn I slept
late--when Urcombe rang up to know if he might see me immediately. He
came in, grim and preoccupied, and I noticed that he was pulling on a
pipe that was not even filled. “I want your help,” he said, “and so I must tell you first of all
what happened last night. I went round with the little doctor to see
his patient, and found him just alive, but scarcely more. I instantly
diagnosed in my own mind what this anæmia, unaccountable by any other
explanation, meant. The boy is the prey of a vampire.”

He put his empty pipe on the breakfast-table, by which I had just
sat down, and folded his arms, looking at me steadily from under his
overhanging brows. “Now about last night,” he said. “I insisted that he should be moved
from his father’s cottage into my house. As we were carrying him on a
stretcher, whom should we meet but Mrs. Amworth? She expressed shocked
surprise that we were moving him. Now why do you think she did that?”

With a start of horror, as I remembered my dream that night before, I
felt an idea come into my mind so preposterous and unthinkable that I
instantly turned it out again. “I haven’t the smallest idea,” I said. “Then listen, while I tell you about what happened later. I put out
all light in the room where the boy lay, and watched.