Avon Fantasy Reader No. 8 — page 125: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

THE CANAL 01 had been inside unlit caverns, and had heard there the squeaking of the things, felt and heard the flapping of their wings—but never in all my life before had I seen bats as large as men and women! Sick and dizzy from the blow on my head, and from disgust, I crept along the way they were going. If I touched one of them, I felt that I should die of horror. Now, at last, the storm abated, and a heavy darkness made the whole world seem bike the inside of a tomb. - Where the tents stood in a long row, the number of the monster bats seemed to diminish. It was as ie forse thought!—they were creeping into the tents, with their slumbering occupants. At last Lcame to a lighted tent, and paused, crouching so that the dim radi- ance which shone through the canvas did not touch me in the shadows. And there I waited, but not for long. There was a dark form silhouetted against the tent; a rustle and confusion, and the dark thing was.again in silhouette— but with a difference in the quality of the shadow. The dark thing was inside the tent now, its bat wings extending across the entrance through which it had crept. Fear held me spellbound. And as I looked, the shadow changed again, im- perceptibly, so that I could not have told how it changed. But now it was not the shadow of a bat, but of a woman. “The storm, the sinrm! I am lost, exhausted! I crept in here, to beg for refuge until the dawn!” = That low, thrilling, sibilant voice—too well I knew it! Within the tent I heard a murmur of ar quiescent voices. At last I began to understand. I knew the nature of the woman I had carried over the river in my arms, the woman who would not even cross the canal until the water should have ceased utterly to ow. I remembered books I had read—Dracula—other books, and stories. I knew they were true books and stories, now—I knew those — horrors existed for me. I had indeed kept my oath to the creature of darkness—I had brought her to her kind, under her guidance. I had let them loose in hordes upon the pleasure camps. The campers were doomed—and through them, others. . . . I forgot my fear. I rushed from my hiding-place up to the tent door, and there I screamed and called aloud. “Don’t take her in—don’t let her stay—nor the others, that have crept into the other tents! Wake all the campers—they will sleep on to their destruction! Drive out the interlopers—drive them out quickly! They are not human—no, and they.are not bats! Do you hear me?—do you understand?” I was fairly howling, in a voice that was strange to me. “She is a vampire—they are all vampires. Vampires!” Inside the tent I heard a new voice. comicbooks.com