‘What the hell are you?’ Agursky asked the creature for what must have been the thousandth time since it came into his care. Frustrating to say the least, for if anyone should have known the answer to his question it was Agursky himself. Zoology and psychology were his ‘A’ subjects; he’d been brought in specifically to study the thing and find out what made it tick, but all he’d discovered so far was that it ticked. After he’d worked with it for only a month or so other scientists, supposedly better qualified, had come to see it. Agursky had been slacking, apparently. But they’d looked at it, studied his notes, shaken their heads and gone away baffled. And he’d been left to get on with it. But get on with what? He knew the creature as intimately as any man could possibly wish to know it, and still he didn’t know it.
Its blood was similar to the blood of all Earth’s myriad animals, but sufficiently dissimilar to any of them as to make it alien. On the scales of intelligence it was not a higher species – not in comparison with Man, the dolphins, canines, apes – and yet it did have a certain sly intelligence. Its eyes, for example, were near-hypnotic. Every now and then Agursky had to stop staring it down and look away, or he was liable to go to sleep. The thing had put him to sleep on several occasions. And nightmares had invariably brought him gibbering awake.
It could be taught but resisted learning: it knew, for instance, that when its keeper showed it a white card food was coming. Also that a black card meant it was in danger of receiving an electrical shock. It had learned, painfully, that white and black cards together meant: ‘Don’t touch the food until the black card is taken away’. But to show it those cards together would produce a great fury in it. When food was available it did not like being denied it, or threatened through it. These were a few of the things Agursky had learned about the creature, but he would get the uncomfortable feeling just looking at it that it had learned far more about him. Another thing he knew about it was this: that it had a capacity for hate. And he knew who it hated.
‘Feeding time,’ he told it. ‘I’m going to pump some vile, rancid, gone-off shit in there with you. And you’re going to slurp it up like mother’s milk and honey sweet from the comb – you bloody thing.’ Doubtless it would prefer a live white rat or two, but the sight (even the thought) of that had already given Agursky too many bad dreams. For that was something else he’d learned about the thing in the tank: that while it would take dead, clotted blood readily enough, it in fact preferred it straight from a perforated, pulsing artery. Namely, that it was a vampire.
As Agursky stood up and began to prepare the feeding apparatus, he remembered the first time he’d tried the thing with a live rat. That had meant first drugging the creature in the tank and putting it well and truly to sleep. A small amount of blood containing a massive dose of tranquillizing agent had seen to that; after the thing had groggily retreated beneath the sand of its tank to sleep, then the heavy lid had been undamped and lifted, and the wriggling rat inserted. Three hours later (a remarkably short spell for the drug dosage) the thing had regained its senses and surfaced to see what was going on.
The rat hadn’t stood a chance. Oh, it had fought as only a cornered rat can fight, but to no avail. The vampire had held it down, bitten through its neck and siphoned off its living blood. And it had formed a pair of fleshy, needle-tipped tubes to do so, actual siphons which it had slid into the rat’s severed vessels.
The ‘meal’ had taken only a minute or two to complete, and Agursky had never seen the creature so avid for its food. After that. . . occasionally the thing would take on certain rodent characteristics, which its keeper assumed it had ‘learned’ from the creature it devoured. Nor was ‘devoured’ too strong a word for it; for after leeching the rat’s blood, then the creature had consumed skin, bones, tail and all!