I Am Legend

by Richard Matheson

For he was a man and he was alone and these things had no importance to him.

He looked at the bookcase across from him. All the knowledge in those books couldn’t put out the fires in him; all the words of centuries couldn’t end the wordless, mindless craving of his flesh.

Why do they all look like Kathy to me? he thought, drawing out the second stake with shaking hands.

Neville had loathed his father and fought the acquisition of his father’s logic and mechanical facility every inch of the way. His father had died denying the vampire violently to the last.

“The strength of the vampire is that no one will believe in him.”

The book was a hodgepodge of superstitions and soap-opera clichés, but that line was true; no one had believed in them, and how could they fight something they didn’t even believe in?

And, before science had caught up with the legend, the legend had swallowed science and everything.

His body dropped down heavily on the chair. Here we are, kiddies, sitting like a bug in a rug, snugly, surrounded by a battalion of blood-suckers who wish no more than to sip freely of my bonded, 100-proof hemoglobin. Have a drink, men, this one’s really on me.

There was no sound but that of his shoes and the now senseless singing of birds. Once I thought they sang because everything was right with the world, Robert Neville thought. I know now I was wrong. They sing because they’re feeble-minded.

He drank sparingly during those days, managing to pass almost the entire day without a drink, even allowing his evening drinks to assume the function of relaxing nightcaps rather than senseless escape.

He took that drink now; he needed it. He held up his hand until it stopped shaking. All right, little boy, he tried kidding himself, calm down now. Santa Claus is coming to town with all the nice answers. No longer will you be a weird Robinson Crusoe, imprisoned on an island of night surrounded by oceans of death.

Certain kinds of bacilli, when conditions became unfavorable for life, were capable of creating, from themselves, bodies called spores. What they did was condense their cell contents into an oval body with a thick wall. This body, when completed, detached itself from the bacillus and became a free spore, highly resistant to physical and chemical change. Later, when conditions were more favorable for survival, the spore germinated again, bringing into existence all the qualities of the original bacillus.

In a world of monotonous horror there could be no salvation in wild dreaming.

The man who died of thirst saw mirages of lakes. Why shouldn’t a man who thirsted for companionship see a woman walking in the sun?

He tried to understand that. But that didn’t work either. In spite of having lived with death all these years, in spite of having walked a tightrope of bare existence across an endless maw of death—in spite of that he couldn’t understand it. Personal death still was a thing beyond comprehension.

Then sudden silence, as though a heavy blanket had fallen over their heads. They all stood looking up at him with their white faces. He stared back. And suddenly he thought, I’m the abnormal one now. Normalcy was a majority concept, the standard of many and not the standard of just one man.

new terror born in death, a new superstition entering the unassailable fortress of forever. I am legend.