A Coven of Vampires Read Online Free PDF

in the Mediterranean, and new fast-drilling techniques cracking the ocean floor and allowing it to leak and leak and leak - and even Red Adair shaking his head in dismay. How do you plug a leak two hundred fathoms deep and a mile long? And that jewel of oceans turning black, and Cyprus a great white tombstone in a lake of pitch. ‘Aphrodite Rising From The High-Grade.’
    “Then ’85 and ’86; and they were strange, too, because they were so damned quiet! The lull before the storm, so to speak. And then—
    “Then it was ’87, ’88 and ’89. The American space-bug leaping to Australia and New Zealand and giving both places a monstrous malaise. No one doing any work for six months; cattle and sheep dead in their millions; entire cities and towns burning down because nobody bothered to call out the fire services, or they didn’t bother to come…. And all the world’s beaches strewn with countless myriads of great dead octopuses, a new species (or a mutant strain) with three rows of suckers to each tentacle; and their stink utterly unbearable as they rotted. A plague of great, fat seagulls. All the major volcanoes erupting in unison. Meteoric debris making massive holes in the ionosphere. A new, killer-cancer caused by sunburn. The common cold cured!—and uncommon leprosy spreading like wildfire through the Western World.
    “And finally—
    “Well, that was ‘When?’. It was also, I fancy, ‘Where?’ and ‘How?’. As to ‘Why’—I give a mental shrug. I’m tired, probably hungry. I have some sort of lethargy—the spacebug, I suppose—and I reckon it won’t be long now. I had hoped that getting this down on paper might keep me active, mentally if not physically. But….
    “Why?
    “Well, I think I’ve answered that one, too.
    “Ma Nature strikes back. Get rid of the human vermin. They’re lousing up your planet! And maybe that’s what gave Her the idea. If fire and flood and disease and disaster and war couldn’t do the trick, well, what else could She do? They advise you to fight fire with fire, so why not vermin with vermin?
    They appeared almost overnight, five times larger than their immediate progenitors and growing bigger with each successive hatching; and unlike the new octopus they didn’t die; and their incubation period down to less than a week. The superlice. All Man’s little body parasites, all of his tiny, personal vampires, growing in the space of a month to things as big as your fist. Leaping things, flying things, walking sideways things. To quote a certain Irishman: ‘An’ Christ—they suck like crazy!’
    “They’ve sucked, all right. They’ve sucked the world to death. New habits, new protections—new immunities and near-invulnerability—to go with their new size and strength. The meek inheriting the Earth? Stamp on them and they scurry away. Spray them with lethal chemicals and they bathe in them. Feed them DDT and they develop a taste for it. ‘An’ Christ—they suck like crazy!’
    “And the whole world down with the creeping, sleeping sickness. We didn’t even want to fight them! Vampires, and they’ve learned new tricks. Camouflage…. Clinging to walls above doors, they look like bricks or tiles. And when you go through the door…. And their bite acts like a sort of LSD. Brings on mild hallucinations, a feeling of well-being, a kind of euphoria. In the cities, amongst the young, there were huge gangs of ‘bug-people!’ My God!
    “They use animals, too; dogs and cats—as mounts, to get them about when they’re bloated. Oh, they kill them eventually, but they know how to use them first. Dogs can dig under walls and fences; cats can climb and squeeze through tiny openings; crows and other large birds can fly down on top of things and into places….
    “Me, I was lucky—if you can call it that. A bachelor, two dogs, a parakeet and an outdoor aviary. My bungalow entirely netted in; fine wire netting, with trees, trellises and vines. And best of all