The Innsmouth Heritage and Other Sequels. Brian Stableford
Devil lick his lips, as if to moisten them against the dry and bitter wind that blew from the dunes.
“The scriptures are a gift from the Lord,” Anthony said, although he knew that no defense was necessary. “The commandments are preserved there, as they need to be now that the Ark of the Covenant is lost.”
“Writing is an awkward instrument,” the Devil remarked. “Without measurement and calculation, linear reasoning and syntactical complexity, science is impossible—but the learning of letters and numbers requires specialist teachers, and the custodians of culture inevitably become jealous of the privilege the control, establishing themselves as arbiters of faith. Their empire is fragile, though; once a man is taught to read, he is better equipped to think...and to doubt.”
Anthony’s eyes were scanning the eastern horizon, searching for the twilight that would precede the dawn, but there was no sign of it. There must still be several hours of night remaining. He licked his own lips, thirsty now for more than blood.
“I want to show you the answer to the Sphinx’s riddle,” the Devil said, softly. “The riddle of life and death, of growth and ageing, of competition and selection. I cannot force you to read its significance, but I shall write it in your eyes regardless.”
“I am weary,” Anthony admitted, “but you cannot defeat me. My thirst may be a torment, but it keeps me alert to your wiles.” “Look,” said the Father of Lies, pointing out into the shadowed desert, where the dunes had begun to stir and shift.
Anthony knew that moonlight could play tricks in the desert night. The haze that blurred the air by day seemed to disappear by night, but the fugitive light was deceptive nevertheless.
It seemed to him that the fine sand eddied into life, and that its motes, at first dissociated, began to cleave together into imitations of complex organic forms: leaves and tubers, worms and mites, slugs and crabs, trees and snakes. He saw all these creatures growing from tiny seeds and eggs into complex forms that produced more seeds and eggs, each generation dying off as the next emerged. He saw that, in order to grow, the creatures fed upon one another, not randomly but in measured and defined ways. Even the sedentary plants, whose only necessary nourishment was wind and sunlight, accepted the substance of the decaying dead into their own flesh, so that nothing that might be incorporate in flesh was lost or wasted, but always recycled and transfigured. He saw that the feeding was always competitive, and that there was also competition to delay the moment when the living became food, so that no succeeding generation was exactly the same as the one that had gone before.
Everything was changing, and would continue to change. Creation was continuous, and would never be complete.
Anthony saw, then, that the human species was a product of this process of ceaseless change, and deduced that the human species was no more immune to further change than any other. He understood that human beings were merely a part of a much larger pattern: a temporary artifact of the irresistible organic flux; a momentary fancy of the interminable restlessness of the molecules of life, which were forever in the process of consumption and excretion, hurrying from form to form with only the merest pauses for sleep, death, thought and faith. The answer to the Sphinx’s riddle, the hermit determined, was that life had its own energy, its own circulation and its own busy complexity. It did not need a sculptor—and he sensed that any sculptor who ever tried to tame its innate exuberance would surely fail.
“What is this to me?” Anthony said to the Devil. “I came to the desert to escape tumult, not to conjure it up in my dreams. It is in loneliness that one finds the Lord, and becomes close to the Lord. Life’s transactions are not uninteresting to me, nor are they irrelevant, but my first concern is the immortal soul, which rests immune to all of this confusion.”
“And yet, my friend,” the Devil said, “you thirst for water and you thirst for blood. Your flesh has no immunity to need, and your mind can have no immunity to the thirst induced by that need.”
The disguised Father of Lies took a dagger from the folds of his clothing, rolled up his sleeve, and cut his forearm from the crook of the elbow to the junction of his palm. “Come and drink,” he said, as the blood welled out and began to rain down on the rocky escarpment. “Drink of my blood, and be content.”
“I will not,” Anthony replied. “Not now, or ever. You cannot terrify me, demon that you are, for I am armored by my faith in the Lord, and in Jesus Christ my savior. You cannot tempt me, demon that you are, for I am armored by the certainty of my salvation, and the inviolability of my immortal soul. Water I shall drink as the need arises, but blood I never shall; I shall bear my thirst to the grave, no matter how long it might take to arrive there.”
The Devil lifted his arm, and licked his own blood, seeming to take considerable comfort therefrom. Then he turned, and looked behind him.
Anthony had not seen the four human figures that were creeping through the night until the Devil looked directly at them, but that did not mean that they had not been there all along, moving forward surreptitiously, as men who are abroad at night are wont to do.
“Ah!” the Devil said, as if he were not surprised to find them there, even though he had not suspected their presence until some tiny sound caused him to turn around. “Here are some who won’t refuse a drop of blood, though I dare say they haven’t thirsted quite as long as you, my friend.” He held out his arm, inviting the four to approach.
They did so, warily. They, at least, were surprised. They were not used to such offerings—or, indeed, to any offerings at all.
Anthony stared at the shadowed figures as they came closer, illuminated by a moon that was less than half full but whose light served nevertheless to augment the feeble glimmer of the distant stars. The newcomers were so thin as to seem like walking skeletons, their clothing reduced to mere ribbons—but their eyes were large and bright and greedy, and their thin lips were pursed in anticipation.
The Devil offered his arm freely. The cut was long enough to allow them all to drink simultaneously, two on each side; if the Devil had as much blood in him as a common man, they might have taken a stomach-full apiece and still left a residue behind—but that was not what happened.
The four vampires leapt upon their prey like a pack of jackals, clawing and snapping at him and at one another. Maddened by the combination of their thirst and their proximity to the means of slaking it, they lashed out in every direction, each of them seemingly more intent on keeping his companions away from the prize than to claim it for himself.
They bit and sucked, lapped and swallowed—but for every drop they claimed a dozen were spilled on the rocky ledge. The Devil went down beneath their assault, bitten on both his legs as well as his arms, and about his face and throat as well. He sustained a dozen new wounds within a minute, a hundred within five. All of them bled with what seemed to Anthony to be unnatural copiousness—as if the vampires’ saliva had some agent within it that prevented the blood from clotting.
In his home town of Coma, and in Alexandria too—within the shadow of the library wall—Anthony had seen starving dogs fighting over a bone, but this was different. Even starving dogs retained some vestige of respect for one another, snarling and howling at the expense of inflicting deadly bites. The four vampires knew no such restraint. They did not howl and they did not snarl, but they clawed and they bit. They gouged at one another’s eyes and aimed deadly blows at one another’s throats. Their intentions were rarely fulfilled, in the immediate sense, but, as time went by and the Devil’s blood leaked away unharvested, the destruction they sought to wreak could hardly be avoided.
They were close to the edge of the cliff. One went sprawling over the edge, and then another. That left two—at which point the conflict became far less chaotic, more sharply focused.
The two vampires fought with all their might, and the Devil’s precious blood continued to ebb away.
Anthony watched, dumbfounded.
Eventually, one vampire went down for the last time—not dead, but broken in his limbs and stunned into unconsciousness. The survivor, who was by