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All night I had been combing Hollywood—without success. Neither the Chevalier Futaine nor Jean had been to the Grove, I discovered. And no one knew the Chevalier’s address. A telephone call to the studio, now ablaze with the excitement over the Hess Dcming disaster and the Forrest killing, netted me exactly nothing. I went the rounds of Hollywood night life vainly. The Trocadero, Sardi’s, all three of the Brown Derbies, the smart, notorious clubs of the Sunset eighties—nowhere could I find my quarry. I telephoned Jack Hardy a dozen times, but got no answer. Finally, in a “private club” in Culver City, I met with my first stroke of good luck.

“Mr. Hardy’s upstairs,” the proprietor told me, looking anxious. “Nothin’ wrong, I hope, Mr. Prescott? I heard about Deming.”

“Nothing,” I said. “Take me up to him.”

“He’s sleeping it off,” the man admitted. “Tried to drink the place dry, and I put him upstairs where he’d be safe.”

“Not the first time, eh?” I said, with an assumption of lightness. “Well, bring up some coffee, will you? Black. I’ve got to—talk to him.”

But it was half an hour before Hardy was in any shape to understand what I was saying. At last he sat up on the couch, blinking, and a gleam of realization came into his sunken eyes.

“Prescott,” he said, “can’t you leave me alone?”

I leaned close to him, articulating carefully so he would be sure to understand me. “I know what the Chevalier Futaine is,” I said.

And I waited for the dreadful, impossible confirmation, or for the words which would convince me that I was an insane fool.

Hardy looked at me dully. “How did you find out?” he whispered.

An icy shock went through me. Up to that moment I had not really believed, in spite of all the evidence. But now Hardy was confirming the suspicions which I had not let myself believe.

I didn’t answer his question. Instead, I said, “Do you know about Hess?" He nodded, and at sight of the agony in his face I almost pitied him. Then the thought of Jean steadied me.

“Do you know where he is now?” I asked.

“No. What are you talking about?” he flared suddenly. “Are you mad, Mart? Do you—”

“I’m not mad. But Hess Deming is.”

He looked at me like a cowering, whipped dog.

I went on grimly: “Are you going to tell me the truth? How you got those marks on your throat? How you met this—creature? And where he’s taken Jean?”

“Jean!” He looked genuinely startled. “Has he got—I didn’t know that, Mart—I swear I didn’t. You—you’ve been a good friend to me, and—and I’ll tell you the truth—for your sake and Jean’s—although now it may be too late.” My involuntary movement made him glance at me quickly. Then he went on. “I met him in Paris. I was out after new sensations—but I didn’t expect anything like that. A Satanist club—devil-worshippers, they were. The ordinary stuff—cheap, furtive blasphemy. But it was there that I met—him.

“He can be a fascinating chap when he tries. He drew me out, made me tell him about Hollywood—about the women we have here. I bragged a little. He asked me about the stars, whether they were really as beautiful as they seemed. His eyes were hungry as he listened to me, Mart.

“Then one night I had a fearful nightmare. A monstrous, black horror crept in through the window and attacked me—bit me in the throat, I dreamed, or thought I did. After that—

“I was in his power. He told me the truth. He made me his slave, and I could do nothing. His powers—are not human.”

I licked dry lips.

Hardy continued: “He made me bring him here, introducing him as a new discovery to be starred in Red Thirst—I’d mentioned the picture to him, before I—knew. How he must have laughed at me! He made me serve him, keeping away photographers, making sure that there were no cameras, no mirrors near him. And for a reward—he let me live.”

I knew I should feel contempt for Hardy, panderer to such a loathsome evil. But somehow I couldn’t.

I said quietly, “What about Jean? Where does the chevalier live?”

He told me. “But you can’t do anything, Mart. There’s a vault under the house, where he stays during the day. It can’t be opened, except with a key he always keeps with him—a silver key. He had a door specially made, and then did something to it so that nothing can open it but that key. Even dynamite wouldn’t do it, he told me.”

I said, “Such things—can be killed.”

“Not easily. Sandra Colter was a victim of his. After death she, too, became a vampire, sleeping by day and living only at night. The fire destroyed her, but there’s no way to get into the vault under Futaine’s house.”

“I wasn’t thinking of fire,” I said. “A knife—”

“Through the heart,” Hardy interrupted almost eagerly. “Yes—and decapitation. I’ve thought of it myself, but I can do nothing. I—am his slave, Mart.”

I said nothing, but pressed the bell. Presently the proprietor appeared.

“Can you get me a butcher knife?” I measured with my hands. “About so long? A sharp one?”

Accustomed to strange requests, he nodded. “Right away, Mr. Prescott.” As I followed him out, Hardy said weakly, “Mart.”

I turned.

“Good luck,” he said. The look on his wrecked face robbed the words of their pathos.

“Thanks,” I forced myself to say. “I don’t blame you, Jack, for what’s happened. I—I’d have done the same.”

I left him there, slumped on the couch, staring after me with eyes that had looked into hell.

It was past daylight when I drove out of Culver City, a long, razor-edged knife hidden securely inside my coat. And the day went past all too quickly. A telephone call told me that Jean had not yet returned home. It took me more than an hour to locate a certain man I wanted—a man who had worked for the studio before on certain delicate jobs. There was little about locks he did not know, as the Police had sometimes ruefully admitted.

His name was Axel Ferguson, a bulky, good-natured Swede, whose thick fingers seemed more adapted to handling a shovel than the mcchanisms of locks. Yet he was as expert as Houdini—indeed, he had at one time been a professional magician.

The front door of Futaine’s isolated canyon home proved no bar to Ferguson’s fingers and the tiny sliver of steel he used. The house, a modern two-story place, seemed deserted. But Hardy had said below the house.

We went down the cellar stairs and found ourselves in a concrete-lined passage that ran down at a slight angle for perhaps thirty feet. There the corridor ended in what seemed to be a blank wall of bluish steel. The glossy surface of the door was unbroken, save for a single keyhole.

Ferguson set to work. At first he hummed under his breath, but after a time he worked in silence. Sweat began to glisten on his face. Trepidation assailed me as I watched.

The flashlight he had placed beside him grew dim. He inserted another battery, got out unfamiliar-looking apparatus. He buckled on dark goggles, and handed me a pair. A blue, intensely brilliant flame began to play on the door. It was useless. The torch was discarded after a time, and Ferguson returned to his tools. He was using a stethoscope, taking infinite pains in the delicate movements of his hands.

It was fascinating to watch him. But all the time I realized that the night was coming, that presently the sun would go down, and that the life of the vampire lasts from sunset to sunrise.

At last Ferguson gave up. “I can’t do it,” he told me, panting as though from a hard race. “And if I can’t, nobody can. Even Houdini couldn’t have broken this lock. The only thing that’ll open it is the key.”

“All right, Axel,” I said dully. “Here’s your money.”

He hesitated, watching me. “You going to stay here. Mr. Prescott?”

“Yeah,” I said. “You can find your way out. I'll—wait awhile.”

“Well, I’ll leave the light with you,” he said. “You can let me have it sometime, eh?”

He waited, and, as I made no answer, he departed, shaking his head.

Then utter silence closed around me. I took the knife out of my coat, tested its edge against my thumb, and settled back to wait.

Less than half an hour later the steel door began to swing open. I stood up. Through the widening crack I saw a bare, steel-lined chamber, empty save for a long, black object that rested on the floor. It was a coffin.

The door was wide. Into view moved a white, slender figure—Jean, clad in a diaphanous, silken robe. Her eyes were wide, fixed and staring. She looked like a sleepwalker.

A man followed her—a man wearing impeccable evening clothes. Not a hair was out of place on his sleek blond head, and he was touching his lips delicately with a handkerchief as he came out of the vault.

There was a little crimson stain on the white linen where his lips had brushed