Jerome Bixby

“ Hofmanstahal chuckled at it, and seemed disappointed when Craig did not. There was a certain sensitive shyness about the big Rumanian, Craig thought . . . a sensitive vampire! Aware of Craig’s revulsion, he was camouflaging the situation with a flood of words.
“—And when the gendarme saw that the bullet which had killed her was an ordinary lead one, he said, ‘Messieurs, you have done this pauvre jeune fille a grave injustice.’ Ha! The moment was a sad one for me, but—”
“Stop it!” Craig gasped. “Go turn yourself into a bat or something and fly away. Just get out of my sight . . . ”

“ We have been persecuted, imprisoned, burned alive; we have been classified as maniacs and perverts—all because our body chemistry is unlike that of man. We drink from the fountain of life while man feasts at the fleshpots of the dead; yet we are called monsters.” He crumpled a biscuit in his powerful hand and cast the pieces upon the water, which immediately boiled with sharks.
“Man!” he said softly.
LIFE went on. Craig ate. Hofmanstahal fed. ”

“ Normalcy and sanity, cities and machines and half-forgotten values, coming nearer and nearer over the tossing sea, beneath the brassy sky, from the real world of men that lay somewhere beyond the horizon . ”

“ Hofmanstahal smiled. “You mustn’t look at me that way. I’m almost harmless, I assure you.” He laughed gently. “Things could be much worse, you know. Suppose, for example, I had been a werewolf. Eh?”
He waited a moment.
“Oh, yes, Lycanthropy is real—as real as those gulls out there. Or—more fitting, perhaps—as real as those sharks. Once, in Paris, I lived for three months with a young woman who was a public bath attendant by day and a werewolf by night. She would choose her victims by their—”
CRAIG listened numbly, aware that Hofmanstahal was merely making idle talk. ”

“ He was glad of that. He knew the Navy. The men would be healthy. Strenuous duty would make them sleep soundly.
And at the end of its voyage lay the whole pulsing world.
Craig licked his lips.
This work is in the public domain in the United States because it was legally published within the United States (or the United Nations Headquarters in New York subject to Section 7 of the United States Headquarters Agreement) before 1964, and copyright was not renewed.
For Class A renewals records (books only) published between 1923 and 1963, check the Stanford University Copyright Renewal Database. ”