attacked while asleep by one of those huge bats. Next morning he was so weak he couldn’t walk. That awful thing had sucked his life blood away. He arrived here, but was sickly until his death, a few weeks later.” So says Remson Holroyd, who is left the sole survivor of the family, and who has summoned his old college friend to help him solve the secret of the hideous doom which is taking toll one by one. The grandfather was not buried in the usual way; but, as his will directed, his remains were interred in the vault built near the house. Remson Holroyd continues: “Then my dad began failing and just pined away until he died. What puzzled the doctors was the fact that right up until the end he consumed enough food to sustain three men, yet he was so weak he lacked the strength to drag his legs over the floor. He was buried, or rather interred with grand-dad. The same symptoms were in evidence in the cases of George and Fred. They are both lying in the vault. And now, Jack, I’m going, too, for of late my appetite has increased to alarming proportions, yet I am as weak as a kitten.” The next morning the visitor finds himself so weak that he is hardly able to rise and he feels a slight pain in the neck. “I rushed to examine it in the mirror. Two tiny dots rimmed with blood—my blood—and on my neck! No longer did I chuckle at Remson’s fears, for it, the thing, had attacked me as I slept.” The host himself is in a state of utter exhaustion. That night watch is kept by the friend, and as from his concealment he is gazing into Remson’s room he notices “a faint reddish glow outside one of the windows. It apparently emanated from nowhere. Hundreds of little specks danced and whirled in the spot of light, and as I watched them fascinated, they seemed to take on the form of a human face. The features were masculine, as was also the arrangement of the hair. Then the mysterious glow disappeared.” After a few moments there appears a vague form of which the watcher is able to distinguish the head, and to his horror he sees that the features are the same as those of a portrait of the grandfather which is hanging in the picture gallery of the house. “But oh, the difference in expression! The lips were drawn back in a snarl, disclosing two sets of pearly white teeth, the canines over developed and remarkably sharp. The eyes, an emerald green in colour, stared in a look of consuming hate.” The horror is revealed. The house is infested by a vampire. In the morning
