sleep
together.

Arthur came back downstairs dressed in his bath-robe and slippers. He
stood on the fifth stair, rubbing a two-day's growth of beard. "I think
I'll shave tonight," he said to his father. "May I use your razor?"

Henry Duryea, draped in a black raincoat and with his face haloed in the
brim of a rain-hat, looked up from the hall. A frown glided obscurely
from his features. "Not at all, son. Sleeping upstairs?"

Arthur nodded, and quickly said, "Are you--going out?"

"Yes, I'm going to tie the boats up tighter. I'm afraid the lake will
rough it up a bit."

Duryea jerked back the door and stepped outside. The door slammed shut,
and his footsteps sounded on the wood flooring of the porch.

Arthur came slowly down the remaining steps. He saw his father's figure
pass across the dark rectangle of a window, saw the flash of lightning
that suddenly printed his grim silhouette against the glass.

He sighed deeply, a sigh which burned in his throat; for his throat was
sore and aching. Then he went into the bedroom, found the razor lying in
plain view on a birch table-top.

As he reached for it, his glance fell upon his father's open Gladstone
bag which rested at the foot of the bed. There was a book resting there,
half hidden by a gray flannel shirt. It was a narrow, yellow-bound book,
oddly out of place.

Frowning, he bent down and lifted it from the bag. It was surprizingly
heavy in his hands, and he noticed a faintly sickening odor of decay
which drifted from it like a perfume. The title of the volume had been
thumbed away into an indecipherable blur of gold letters. But pasted
across the front cover was a white strip of paper, on which was
typewritten the word--INFANTIPHAGI.

He flipped back the cover and ran his eyes over the title-page. The book
was printed in French--an early French--yet to him wholly
comprehensible. The publication date was 1580, in Caen.

Breathlessly he turned back a second page, saw a chapter headed,
_Vampires_.

He slumped to one elbow across the bed. His eyes were four inches from
those mildewed pages, his nostrils reeked with the stench of them.

He skipped long paragraphs of pedantic jargon on theology, he scanned
brief accounts of strange, blood-eating monsters, _vrykolakes_, and
leprechauns. He read of Jeanne d'Arc, of Ludvig Prinn, and muttered
aloud the Latin snatches from _Episcopi_.

He passed pages in quick succession, his fingers shaking with the fear
of it