But they thought me a vampire. I had slain and slain, brutally, and—yes, and lapped up blood from torn throats, hot and bubbling between my lips. Was I a vampire? Were my kind the origin of that legend?
The race-recollection died away. I heard the shouts of my twentieth century foeman, who had found the two dead policemen. I walked to the edge of the roof and gauged the distance to the next building, which was several feet lower than this one. There was a gap of no more than ten feet. I threw the suitcase across. Men appeared eighty feet below, running through the alley. I watched them, leaning fearlessly over the low parapet. Like single-minded hounds, they never looked up. I laughed and gathered myself and jumped across the yawning void, alighting easily on the next roof.
I was beginning to take a keen gratification in my agility. Even the lifting of my Gladstone, the feel of sentient muscles gliding over one another to apportion the work between them, gave me intense pleasure. Thus must an animal feel when he moves about his small enterprises, knowing his body will answer any call he cares to make upon it.
I crossed this roof and leaped again and crossed a third, and found myself overlooking a wide street. The sky was growing more gray than black, and the lamps were beginning to take on the futile appearance they have in the half-light of earliest dawn. I wanted to put plenty of distance between me and this city that was too aware of me within it. There was a rickety ladder leading down the side to a fire escape. I descended it one-handed, jumped to the metal framework, trotted-down to the street. Cars lined it, and the third I checked was unlocked. There are ways to start a car without the key. I hummed peacefully out of town. The sun found me driving along a broad straight highway between fields of shocked grain, singing a tuneless song. There was happiness in the song, and hatred; and I thought suddenly that I was happy because of the hatred, which I had found again after many years of ignorance and futility.
CHAPTER VIII
I stopped on the crest of a knoll and got out of the car. Off to the right lay the beginnings of a vast swampy tract of wilderness, green and steaming in the early morning air. I had never known of it before, had no idea of its name or nature, and yet I knew I had been heading for it ever since I left the museum. Somewhere in its somber depths I would find the voice that was calling to me.
I looked back the way I had come. I could see for miles. There was nothing moving on the road but I had the feeling that pursuit was on its way; there was a prickling at the nape of my neck that could not be denied. Getting into the car again, I ran it to the edge of the knoll opposite to the marsh. Stepping out, dragging my Gladstone after me, I put my shoulder to the car's side and shoved it over. It hurtled down and crashed into a tree at the bottom. Far beyond it, still shrouded in the morning mists, was a town. My followers might presume I had made for it. A primitive stratagem, the car, like the hat in the alley—primitive, but perhaps effective.
It was wonderful in the swamp. A cool, damp efflux of greenness emanated from the soggy earth, the watery pools and stretches of quagmire, the moss-dripping trees and hummocks of sharp-speared coarse grass. I hung my coat over my arm, swung along lithely, reveling in the green feel of things and in my own newfound brawn that made the heavy Gladstone a feather in my hand. Unerringly my feet chose the swiftest, safest path. I was a beast, with the simple pleasures of a beast, hunted or not. And always before me sounded the strange and powerful calling that drew me on and on, a far-wandering wolf returning to his all-but-forgotten lair.