Indeed? That is so, and by whom?
I do not know. Some one has done it.
And yet she has been dead one week. Most peoples in that time would not
look so. I had no answer for this, so was silent. Van Helsing did not
seem to notice my silence; at any rate, he showed neither chagrin nor
triumph. He was looking intently at the face of the dead woman, raising
the eyelids and looking at the eyes, and once more opening the lips and
examining the teeth. Then he turned to me and said:--
Here, there is one thing which is different from all recorded; here is
some dual life that is not as the common. She was bitten by the vampire
when she was in a trance, sleep-walking--oh, you start; you do not know
that, friend John, but you shall know it all later--and in trance could
he best come to take more blood. In trance she died, and in trance she
is Un-Dead, too. So it is that she differ from all other. Usually when
the Un-Dead sleep at home --as he spoke he made a comprehensive sweep of
his arm to designate what to a vampire was home -- their face show what
they are, but this so sweet that was when she not Un-Dead she go back to
the nothings of the common dead. There is no malign there, see, and so
it make hard that I must kill her in her sleep. This turned my blood
cold, and it began to dawn upon me that I was accepting Van Helsing s
theories; but if she were really dead, what was there of terror in the
idea of killing her? He looked up at me, and evidently saw the change in
my face, for he said almost joyously:--
Ah, you believe now?
I answered: Do not press me too hard all at once. I am willing to
accept. How will you do this bloody work?
I shall cut off her head and fill her mouth with garlic, and I shall
drive a stake through her body. It made me shudder to think of so
mutilating the body of the woman whom I had loved. And yet the feeling
was not so strong as I had expected. I was, in fact, beginning to
shudder at the presence of this being, this Un-Dead, as Van Helsing
called it, and to loathe it. Is it possible that love is all subjective,
or all objective?
205