THE VAMPIRE SUNRISE
By ROBERT RUDD WHITING
THE coroner said that it must have been the shock; that he had been fished out before he had time to drown. Besides, they found no water in his lungs.
No, he did not drown. And when the sun is high and shadows are short, I know that the coroner must be right; he died of the shock. But sometimes in the eerie gray of the early morning when I awake thinking about it, I wonder if, perhaps, it really could have been—something else.
I first saw him in the back room of a little West Side saloon. I had been over in Jersey, and stopped in on my way from the Christopher Street ferry to get a bite to eat. He was sitting in a corner, with his elbows on the table, staring vacantly at the half-emptied glass in front of him.
“Peach of a sunset tonight,” I remarked cheerfully to the bartender who brought my beer and sandwich.
“Sure thing. The streets run due west here, and we get ’em good. If half of these guys who waste their sleep gettin’ up to see sunrises—”
Crash!
The man in the corner had knocked his glass on the floor.
“I—I'm sorry,” he stammered confusedly. “Yes, bring me another.
“Ugh!” he shuddered when the bartender had gone. “I hate sunrises!”
The terror in his voice was unmistakable. I looked at him in astonishment. He was tall and emaciated. His features were regular, but his white face was drawn and heavily lined, and his dull, brown eyes had a wild expression—no, not that, rather an expression of hopeless fear.
“Won’t you have your things brought over here?” he invited diffidently. “I—er—I should be very glad of company.” He was almost handsome when he smiled. I fear I had been staring at him.
How he came to bare his very soul before me, a man he had never seen before, I do not know. I remember that at times he seemed to be talking less to me than out of himself. That I was there was incidental.
I will not attempt to describe his anguish, his shrinking fear, his utter despair. I will merely set down his story as I have so often heard it in my dreams since then; as I have heard it when I awaken in the early morning, when the sun is low and the shadows are long. Here it is:
The first time was down in the Blue Ridge Mountains. It was a house party. The girl I loved was there. Tom—the other man—was there. Early one morning we were awakened by our host pounding on the doors.“Get down as quickly as you can—the house is on fire,” he told us with intense calm. The servants were working with buckets and a garden hose, trying to keep the fire from the stairs. We gathered on the lawn, a motley group, chattering with nervous cheerfulness.
“Good God!” the other man suddenly gasped. “Where’s Belle?” He had discovered that she was missing. We rushed back into the house. The stairs had caught. Some of the servants came with a ladder and placed it against her window. I was up it like
