But he did not fear. Fear he had banished long ago.
The Master of Sinanju tucked his hands into the sleeves of his kimono and disappeared into the gathering dark, where owls stared and called their eternal question.
"His neural activity just went off the charts!" Dr. Lance Drew studied the brain-wave monitor screen next to The Master of Sinanju's bed. On the screen a series of gently flowing waves had become a collection of sharp, almost vertical lines. They shot up, dropped down, and shot up again. Several disappeared off the top of the monitor, as if to escape their own frenetic energy.
A second doctor and three nurses had joined Dr. Drew at Chiun's bedside. Frantically, they pored over printouts and EKGs.
"What is it?" Remo asked anxiously. Smith lay docile where Remo had laid him, on the room's spare bed. Chiun's condition had gone critical just as Remo entered the room.
"I don't know," Dr. Drew said. "He was stable until just this minute. Now . . ." He shook his head. "I don't know what it is." He noticed Smith's prone form for the first time.
"What's the matter with Dr. Smith?" he asked.
"Same thing that's wrong with him," Remo said, nodding to Chiun.
One of the attending physicians went to Smith, checked his vital signs, and said, "He'll keep."
"Then give me a hand here," the doctor said, shaking his head. "We're in for a rough night."
A crisp professional voice interjected itself. "Doctor . . ."
It was one of the nurses. Chiun's face had twitched slightly, then returned to its parchment calmness. It resembled a death mask.
The doctor examined the monitor. The lines continued to spike dangerously. "If this keeps up, we're going to lose him," the doctor warned, glancing up at his colleagues. "He could burn out his entire nervous system."
Remo stood helplessly at Chiun's bedside. One of the nurses attempted to shepherd him to one side, but it was like pushing smoke. Each time he somehow shifted away without, apparently, moving his feet. She spoke gently of the need to give the physicians room to work. Two thick-wristed hands grasped hers and clapped them together. Not hard. But she couldn't separate her palms afterward.
She hurried off to her jeweler. Surely he would know how to un-weld her wedding ring from the one on her right ring finger.
"His heart rate's increased," the other doctor was saying.
"Respiration, too."
Remo hovered over Chiun's bedside, a spectator to a battle he could barely understand. The Master of Sinanju's life hung in the balance. Now Smith's as well. He'd probably be next.
"If only we knew what kind of infection we're dealing with," the doctor lamented at one point, "we'd have something to go on."
"It's Chinese," Remo said.
"Can you do better than that?" Dr. Drew demanded, not looking up.
"No," Remo admitted. What could he tell them that would help? They wouldn't believe the truth. And if they did, so what? Vampirism had no cure. Its victims were neither dead nor alive.
Remo's anxious eyes went to his mentor's face.
The Master of Sinanju was peaceful in repose. It was as if the medical team had forgotten there was a patient in the room, so busy were they monitoring their equipment. Languishing amid this nest of high-tech machinery, surrounded by white-clad Folcroft doctors and nurses, Chiun looked old and frail.
His face twitched spasmodically once again, then settled back into its normal pattern.
"If this is good-bye, Little Father," Remo said softly, "I swear no gyonshi will celebrate this day."
"What's that?" Dr. Drew asked distractedly. No answer. He looked up to see the door swinging shut behind Remo's resolute back.
After Remo had gone, Harold W. Smith sat up stiffly in bed. The pain in his stomach and throat were gone, although there was a slight tightening in his chest.
"Dr. Smith!" Dr. Drew exclaimed. "Please do not exert yourself! We will get to you in a moment!"
"Nonsense," Smith croaked, tightening the knot of his Dartmouth tie. "I feel fine."
"But the young man who brought you in here . . ."
"Do not concern yourself," he insisted, waving his hand in dismissal. "He is too prone to worry. I feel fine. Now if you will excuse me, I have a telephone call to make." He slid from the bed and stepped briskly from the room.
One of the nurses cocked an eyebrow. "Did he sound strange to you?" she asked the others.
"He always sounds strange," said the other nurse.
"Actually, that was the first time he ever sounded normal to me," said Dr. Drew. "And I've been on staff ten years."
"Why do you suppose he kept rubbing his fingernail?" the first nurse whispered to the second, as they resumed ministering to the old Korean.
He did not know why he had come here. He only knew that he had felt compelled to do so.
The night air was heavy with moisture. The dampness clung to his kimono. The dew on the freshly mowed grass collected in dollops on the tops of his feet.
Long Island Sound stretched out into infinity behind the sanitarium. No boats bobbed on its surface. No lights were visible. No starlight reflected in the lapping waves. The Sound was totally black, like spilled crude.
Chiun, Master of Sinanju, peered into the distance. Not totally black after all, he saw now.
Wallowing somewhere on the far horizon, there was a grayness. It swirled there for a moment in eternity and then shot out to either side, spreading outward from that single finite point until it had become great gray wings.
Wings which began to beat remorselessly toward shore, spreading and widening.
They became a tidal wave, covering the vast distance to the shore in mere seconds.
The gray wings of fog enveloped Chiun's legs, rolling in around him in thick currents, but not stirring the wispy hair clinging to his venerable chin and in puffs over his alert ears.
It moved across the shore, obscuring the huge building behind Chiun.
Soon there was nothing but fog all around. No sky, no ground, no sea. Just the fog.
And there was a blackness in it. Like an evil pit in a rotted peach. It was vague and indistinguishable one moment, solid the next. It leaped around Chiun in the protective haze of the swirling gray fog.
Chiun followed its movements impassively.
The black fog-within-the-fog split in two, then the two vaporous shapes became four, and the four, eight. They spun kaleidoscopic patterns around him, encroaching, then retreating, bold and timid by turns.