heart couldn’t stand anything but a saline infusion.”
"I’d have given him the hemorrhage emergency treatment,” agreed Cummings. "Fifty grains of sodium chloride and sodium sulphate in boiling water by hypodermoclysis. Pumping all that blood into him was risky as hell. But I suppose heroic measures are sometimes justified.
"Stockwell says he was almost drained —and Stockwell ought to know. He’s stained more leukocytes than any bloodhound in America.”
"Stow the shop talk,” interjected Limerick. "We’re facing a grim situation. I don’t believe Simeon Hodges came to life and broke through that screen. I don’t believe it was him we saw streaking it across the campus. O’Rourke thinks it was. Okay, O’Rourke believes in vampires. If we want to grovel we couldn’t ask for a better explanation.
"Old Simeon was a vampire. We dug up a vampire. He attacked Freddy, bit into his neck and sucked him dry. You saw the teeth marks on Freddy’s throat. Blood all over poor Freddy, and we’re to blame. We dug up a limp, blood-hungry vampire.”
Limerick’s lips were twisting in a sneer. "Okay, if you want it that way. We’ll put our brains in hock and throw away the loan ticket.”
"Limerick,” said O’Rourke, his voice strained. "You’ve got to listen. I’m appealing to you not as a student of medicine, remember. I’m just a run-of-the-mill guy who has done a lot of reading on his own.
"I’ve read books you’ve never heard about, by writers with a lot of sound scholarship behind them. Plenty of educated people believe in vampires today. There’s an English scholar named Summers who cites hundreds of cases of vampirism in the twentieth century. A few of them have come under his own personal observation.
"He believes in vampires, ghouls, werewolves, and incubi. You can’t laugh away the findings of a man like that. He’s got more on the ball than any prof in this college. When I read his six-hundred page books for the first time it was as though a hundred ton weight had descended on my brain.”
“Yeah, and crushed it,” sneered Limerick. "What do you take us for? It’s easy to understand why that sort of tripe was taken seriously in the Middle Ages—people had nothing better to do than sit around and wait for something to happen.”
"Perhaps someone was spying on us when we dug Simeon up,” hazarded Cummings. "Perhaps he tried to scare hell out of us by stealing the corpse, and turning our little joke against us. I wouldn’t put it past a couple of seniors I know.”
"That wouldn’t account for Freddy’s loss of blood or the cuts in his throat,” objected Slater.
"Stockwell says that Freddy was anaemic,” buttressed Limerick. "He was treating Freddy for a mild oligocythemia. How do we know he lost so much blood? Maybe he cut himself while shaving, or something.”
Cummings was pacing the room. "All this is getting us nowhere,” he muttered. "It isn’t far to the cemetery. I move we adjourn to Simeon Hodges’ grave.”
There was a chorus of assents.
"Maybe Simeon has come home to roost.”
"Yeah. Whoever snatched him may have put him back.”
"We’d better take our spades along— just in case.”
RETURNING to the cemetery was a
nightmare ordeal to O’Rourke. His
companions seemed to share his forebodings, for they approached Simeon Hodges’
grave in complete silence.
Their heavy brogues made a crunching
