He also had a new hunger. It had taken him years to get used to it, to reach a point where his moral revulsion was at least equaled by his sense of acceptance. At first the hunger had propelled him, wild with need, through the streets of London.

She had caused that.

Finally he had learned, bitter and desperate and trapped, to satisfy the demands of his hunger.

She had taught him how.

He had to reach her!

A last frantic heave brought him clear of the water and he sucked in air at last. He could hear his heart clattering, feel exhaustion in every muscle and bone. For how long he did not know, he lay where he had fallen, his head and arms entangled in a thick mass of roots, his legs still in the muddy water.

But he was free of Miriam’s tomb.

Free. An image of the steel box waiting for him in the attic flashed in his mind. He gasped air, coughed, spat froth from his lungs. A cold steel box in a stack of such boxes.

And in each—one of his predecessors.

She had always said that he was her only one.

Now that he saw the truth, he was horrified by the sheer coldness of the creature, the depths of its indifference, the extent of its power. Some of those boxes were old! The thing itself must be ancient, some dreadful exponent of Satan himself. He no longer thought of it as male or female. It chose to call itself “Miriam” but that was doubtless only a matter of convenience.

John’s hands clutched up among the roots, seeking some further passage out of the prison. Everything that he believed about Miriam had proved to be false. All that she had told him was a monstrous lie.

One among many. Miriam had been doing this since the beginning of time.

He had to break the chain of destruction in some way. His revenge was due him a thousand times over. The very earth around him seemed to seethe with the restless souls of those he had killed in service to his own immortality.

Indeed. The 180-odd years he had lived seemed only a moment now that the end was near. Certainly there were no eternity. If he had known that he was only delaying the inevitable he would never have wasted the lives of others. “Or so I tell myself,” he said aloud.

Something brushed past him. He remembered the awful sense of movement in the attic. Clawing frantically at the roots that surrounded him, he screamed. This was a wet, stinking grave if ever there was one. It wasn’t quite as confining as the stone chamber, but it was just as deadly in the long run. He pushed at the roots, trying to progress toward the surface. His mind contracted to a single thought: hurt Miriam. If possible, destroy Miriam. If not, then die trying.