The Vampire's Hoard

Anton Vorlac's scream died into a choking gurgle as Dr. Edwardes twisted the iron stake deeper into the vampire's chest. "Quick, Samuel!" he barked at his assistant. "The head! Cut off the head before—!"

The tuxedo-clad vampire levitated off his day bed. "He is trying to transform!" Dr. Edwardes shouted. "Samuel!"

Samuel Gerstner was a strapping lad with broad shoulders and hard muscles, with a face tanned by twenty-four summers. But even he grimaced with horror as he seized Vorlac by the hair and plunged a Bowie knife into the side of the vampire's throat.

Vorlac shuddered and fell back onto the day bed. Edwardes pinned him there by the shoulders, screwing his eyes shut against the still-hypnotic, bloodshot gaze that stared out of the vampire's pale and haggard face. He breathed deeply and tried not to vomit as he listened to the slither and crunch of Samuel's knife as it sawed through flesh and tendon and bone.

He opened his eyes again only at a low sigh from Samuel—just in time to see Vorlac's head twist and roll off the day bed. It bounced over the floor and spun to a rest by the leg of the piano.

Pamela, who had been sitting rigidly at the instrument's keyboard, swooned into the arms of her fiance. "Is it over?" Jackson Fforde asked. He was fighting back tears as he cradled her head.

"Yes." Dr. Edwardes loosed a deep sigh. His muscles and joints ached with relief as he clambered off the undead's remains. Already the corpse was desiccating, the skin turning a powdery gray and flaking off. "When the vampire is killed, the victims—"

He broke off as Pamela groaned and fluttered her eyes open. Let the children comfort each other, the old man thought with a smile. This is not a lecture hall.

It had been a hard-fought battle, not only against Vorlac—a charismatic concert pianist who cloaked his true nature beneath a reputation for moodiness and eccentricity—but against the skepticism of the vampire's pupils. Only when Fforde had caught Pamela nursing at the throat of her own four-year-old niece had he been convinced of the horror that Dr. Edwardes had so strenuously warned him against.

Samuel caught his mentor's eye with an anxious look. "Do we need to be careful of—?" He darted his eyes at Pamela.

"No, we were in time, I judge," Dr. Edwardes replied. "She had not suckled at her master's teat. She was only—"

But he broke off with a frown. "What's wrong?" Samuel asked.

"It is curious, now that I think of it," Dr. Edwardes murmured back. "She was still virginal, yet she was caught in flagrante at the neck of a babe. Only the true nosferatu, you know, requires blood. The thrall—" He fell silent again, musing.

Samuel took advantage of the pause to wipe his blade on Vorlac's white tuxedo front. His left arm hung numb at his side, crippled by the blow that had broken the sword he was trying to wield against the vampire.

"I'm taking Pamela to the hospital," Jackson said in a husky voice. He swept his girl into his arms. "Don't try to stop me," he warned, though the two vampire hunters stood over the corpse—now just a skeleton, crumbling into a coarse dust—apparently lost in their own thoughts.

They leapt with a start, though, when Pamela screamed.

In the doorway to the back rooms of the hotel suite stood a white-faced figure, dripping with crimson gore. Her wet, filthy hair hung to her hips over a ragged dress, and she stared at them with a gaping mouth. Between her bloody lips shown a pair of fangs.

Yet Margaret Aschenbach, another of the vampire-pianist's acolytes, made no move as Dr. Edwardes calmly approached and seized her by the back of the neck. From his pocket he drew a pair of pliers and wrenched the fangs from her mouth. Fat globs of blood splatted onto the floor.

Dr. Edwardes took a dainty step away as she reeled backward into her own bloody footprints, and folded up in a faint.

*

"This is an appalling business," Dr. Edwardes said as he led Samuel up the stairs to the hotel roof. "More appalling than I could have feared. This was a near-run thing, and I shudder to consider how it might have gone."

They had followed the trail left by the Aschenbach girl to the bathroom suite, where they had found—foul to relate; fouler to behold—a tile floor sopping with coagulating blood, and a bathtub brimming with it. Dr. Edwardes had studied the shower head, and with a hammer knocked out part of the tiled wall to expose the pipes.

"There will be a bypass of sorts," he told Samuel now as they came to the door leading out onto the roof. "One that connects Vorlac's suite of rooms to the—" He broke off. "He would have needed help with that," he said, mostly to himself. "No doubt he made thralls of some of the hotel staff." He shook his head. "I was so blind. The disaster was nearly so great."

Samuel continued to say nothing. He too could read the signs, and had arrived at the same conclusion as his mentor. But where Dr. Edwardes was in the habit of talking out his fears and deductions, his assistant preferred to keep a terse silence.

"He must have had thralls throughout the city," Dr. Edwardes said as they came out onto the roof, "bringing him blood. Far more than he needed for himself. No, he intended it for others. To make others. For you know, one who has drunk or bathed in the vampire's blood— Here."

He indicated a spot on the hotel's immense water tank. Samuel grimly lifted the axe he carried, and swung it at the hard planking.

It took ten blows before one of the planks parted from the rest, and the hoarded blood came gushing out.

-30-
Submitted for "WEIRD TALES CONTEST "  for March 2021
Prompt: Loot of the Vampire