The only other time you ever heard it was on deep dreamless awake nights when you wakened and listened and heard first your nose taking and gently poking out the air, and then the dull deep dim red thunder of the blood in your temples, in your eardrums, in your throat, in your aching wrists, in your warm loins, in your chest. All of those little rhythms, gone. The wrist beat gone, the throat pulse gone, the chest vibration gone. The sound of the blood coming up down around and through, up down around and through. Now it was like listening to a statue.
And yet he _lived_. Or, rather, moved about. And how was this done, over and above scientific explanations, theories, doubts?
Hatred was a blood in him, it went up down around and through, up down around and through. It was a heart in him, not beating, true, but warm. He was--what? Resentment. Envy. They said he could not lie any longer in his coffin in the cemetery. He had _wanted_ to. He had never had any particular desire to get up and walk around. It had been enough, all these centuries, to lie in the deep box and feel but _not feel_ the ticking of the million insect watches in the earth around, the moves of worms like so many deep thoughts in the soil.
But then they had come and said, "Out you go and into the furnace!" And that is the worst thing you can say to any man. You cannot tell him what to do. If you say you are dead, he will want not to be dead. If you say there are no such things as vampires, by God, that man will try to _be_ one just for spite. If you say a dead man cannot walk, he will test his limbs. If you say murder is no longer occurring, he will make it occur. He was, _in toto_, all the impossible things. They had given birth to him with their damnable practices and ignorances. Oh, how wrong they were. They needed to be shown. He would _show_ them! Sun is _good_, so is _night_, there is nothing wrong with dark, _they_ said.
Dark is horror, he shouted, silently, facing the little houses. It is _meant_ for contrast. You must fear, you hear! That has always been the way of this world. You destroyers of Edgar Allan Poe and fine big-worded Lovecraft, you burner of Hallowe'en masks and destroyer of pumpkin jack-o-lanterns! I will make night what it _once_ was, the thing against which man built all his lanterned cities and his many children!