Dead End

by Mack Reynolds

You’ll never believe this but Emil Carraway, Ph.D., M.D., even D.D., wanted to be bitten by a vampire.

What Carraway desired above all was to achieve immortality. He’d wanted it since early teenhood and he’d been working on it ever since. That was the reason for the degrees. Ph.D., M.D., even D.D.—and, believe me, that last couldn’t have been hung on a less appropriate scholar—had all been attained in his search for everlasting life.

Before his freshman year was out he had read all the standard works on longevity. At that point he was being very scientific about the whole thing. He investigated the yogurt-eating centenarians in Georgia and Armenia but decided they didn’t have the answer. To longevity, maybe, but not immortality and Carraway wasn’t interested in living to be a mere hundred and fifty.

He decided science wasn’t the answer and began to extend his studies into the occult, into mythology, metaphysics and theology, and it was along in there he picked up the D.D. degree.

It took him no time at all to run into the vampire-wampyr-nosferatu-un-dead legends and to realize that here, at least in myth, was immortality.

It had been a thousand years since a serious, thorough student of Carraway’s caliber had delved into the vampire myth. And the further he delved, and it took decades, the more convinced he became that it was more than myth.

When the iron curtain lifted to the point he could visit the libraries of Budapest, Belgrade and Bucharest, he finally found that for which he was searching.

He was seventy years of age when at last, in the ruins of an ancient Croatian castle in Transylvania, Emil Carraway stood above a crumbling coffin and looked down upon the last vampire in the world.

“What do you want?” it snarled. Its face was gray and thin, its body emaciated.

“I want immortality. I want you to bite me. To make me in turn a vampire. I want to be un-dead.”

The vampire growled, “You’ve come to the wrong place.”

“But you’re a vampire! Aren’t you thirsty for blood?”

“Parched!” the vampire snarled.

“But then...?” Carraway didn’t get it.

The vampire screamed, “I’m allergic to all but Rh-Negative, the rarest blood type of all! You’re type “O”. If I bit you I’d break out in a million hives!”