Chapter Twenty-Nine.

"Those first forty-two years? There's really nothing to tell. I recall having a wife and seven children and we were rather poor, certainly by today's standards. But for the time, I suppose we were working class. There was such a chasm between the wealthy and needy back then, but I suppose there still is. America, land of opportunity. I can tell you that has not always been the case.

"I was a scrivener in Rochester, New York." The vampire let out a breath, an exasperated chuckle. "Paul, I'm not changing the subject, but how many photocopies have you made in your life? You can't even answer that, can you? You think nothing of slapping your document onto the glass and pressing a button for ten copies, whether you need them or not. What's interesting, Paul, is that while the talking heads keep insisting that the world's becoming more complicated, it's really become less so. But you'd need perspective to realize that."

Paul hadn't said a word since the old man had seated himself. He vowed to change that, to take back some of the control he'd lost, but he still couldn't force anything from his constricted throat.

The vampire said, "I was a scrivener for an insurance company, a human photocopier. I sat by a kerosene lamp all day writing longhand copies of letters, memoranda, policies, contracts, whatever was given me. Beginning at daybreak, I'd struggle through a stack of documents that never stood less than half a foot high. I was uneducated, so I scribbled all day to make neat sense of other men's more learned scribblings. Yes, beside a wood stove in the winter, my tools a pen and ink pot, at least in the earlier days. It sounds positively Dickensian, I know, but all true.

"Tell me, Paul: Did you make your own copies at that investment bank in Detroit?"

Paul shook his head, slowly. Hypnotically.

"No, of course not. You had a secretary for that. Probably called an administrative assistant in these more enlightened times, but she was almost definitely a she, and she invariably bitched at the occasional paper jam or complicated collating assignment. A greater sense of history would have reduced her complaints, don't you agree, Paul?"

Paul sat. Stared. Speechless.

"My old job has nothing to do with my story," the vampire grumped, as if chastising himself, "except that you must understand how dismal life was back then, mine no worse than anyone else's. Which might have a great deal to do with what was to become of me, or maybe it means nothing. I was bright, but, as I said, uneducated. My family before me had been poor, so I was to be poor. Remember, Paul, Horatio Alger's young rags-to-riches heroes of the nineteenth century were fictional characters. The poverty-stricken boys and young men reading those tales for inspiration would, for the most part, be further out the cost of the book as they lay dying in the same wretched poverty to which they'd become accustomed. Just a fact.

"Emily and I-Yes!" he cried, interrupting himself. "That was her name. Emily. I sometimes forget. Sometimes one's lifetime can exceed his memory capacity. But Emily and I, we had seven children, and that high number further accounted for our impoverished state, but there was no dependable solution for that back in my day. Unless, of course, you gave up the act altogether, but when you're poor..." he stretched his arms in mock-supplication "...what else is there?"

Tabitha Drake must have heard this story countless times. Paul watched her eyes wander to the bookcase, to one dark window, to the high ceiling...

"I'm listening," Paul said sharply, though the old man had barely paused.

"Thank you," Drake said with the mildest touch of sarcasm. He folded his long fingers in his lap, then splayed them flat on his thigh. "Consumption," he said. "You've heard of it?"

Paul nodded. "Tuberculosis."

"Tuberculosis," Drake agreed. "But the old word is the more accurate term. The disease consumes its victims in tiny, wet, messy increments, and finally eats even the will to live. You cough up lung tissue as you lay gasping, praying for just one more painful breath, and then another." A grin wobbled on the old man's face. "Very graphic, I realize, but if you fail me this early in my story, you'll miss the best parts."

Paul's face must have looked stricken. He wanted to wipe away the salty sheen he knew was gathering along his temples, but he wouldn't give Drake the satisfaction.

The vampire shrugged. "Let's just say that it didn't look as though I had a particularly serene death to look forward to."

"You were the one with TB?"

Drake slapped his thigh. "That's right, we don't even call it tuberculosis anymore, do we? TB. We'd done a fine job of cleaning up that nasty disease for public consump-" He stopped. "Sorry. The pun was unintentional.

"But to answer your question, yes, I was dying. Death was a given. Some went fast, some slower, but all died. I was forty-two, as I mentioned. The year must have been 1878. Naturally, there were no hospitalization benefits, no social security or welfare. And no life insurance to care for my family when I passed on. This despite the fact that-and the irony has only hit me now-I worked for an insurance company. Which, by the way, terminated my employment as soon as it became evident that I was gravely ill."

Miles Drake paused as he stared into the distance of memory.

Picking up the thread of storyline, he said, "It was Amanda, the second of my seven, who inadvertently arrived at a solution for the family's survival-and mine as well. Amanda, you see, had grown enamored of a pale and rather bland-featured young man who would only call upon her in the evenings."

The vampire's lips stretched into a passable smile. "I'll bet you see where this is going, Paul. But I had too much on my mind to give her Frederick Darrow more than a passing thought. I was dying, don't you see? I never heard the whispers from my wife and four other daughters or the unconcealed glares of my sons when Frederick came calling."

"Are you saying-?"

Drake nodded distractedly. "Yes. That he was a vampire."

Of course this was where the evening had been headed from the moment that morning when Chief Sandy had issued an invitation that had sounded more like a summons. Paul had blocked it from his rational mind as much as possible, much as he'd ignored the long-term economic viability of investment instruments with suspiciously generous returns.

His blood slowed in his veins as he listened and desperately tried to discount all that he'd heard that evening and over the last couple days. But at that moment he felt the presence of an ancient vampire sitting and stroking his knees, and the vampire's sulky daughter, and he wished for a drink to drink or a cigar to handle. Or just a cat to stroke. Anything to divert his attention from the sinister flow of words.

And that flow continued.

"He was a name to me, a vague impression, that's all. Frederick Darrow, medium of height, dark brown hair worn rather long and tangled, light complexion and foppish build. Brown eyes in constant motion and a rather skittish presence. That's the sum impression Amanda's young beau made on me as I slowly died, hiding the bloody cough from my employers for as long as I was able.

"By the time I was bedridden and jobless, I was consumed-that word again-with self-pitying anger."

Frederick Darrow, said the vampire, had shuffled into his bedroom after what was to have been Drake's last meeting with his weeping second eldest.

"I was dimly aware of much harsh whispering as the girl prodded, cajoled, threatened. Despite my growing mental fog, I observed her gentleman friend shaking his head equally adamantly, the scene piquing my curiosity more than I might have admitted. Or perhaps it's that I had nothing else important to do but to die. Distractions were welcome, so I watched them fight. Naturally, Amanda won. She was, after all, a Drake."

He offered up a thin smile.

Frederick Darrow was all but dragged into the room to meet with Miles on his deathbed by his persistent daughter. The boy sat stiffly on the straw mattress while Amanda remained by the closed door like a posted sentinel. Keeping others out and her intended in. The dying Miles Drake figured he must be getting closer to the end, for he was now hallucinating. His reluctant guest's eyes seemed to glitter oddly, as though reflecting strong moonlight that couldn't be glimpsed through the closed drapes.

Fear went through his feverish and crumbling mind as Frederick Darrow bent closer.

"I can make you live," the strange young man whispered in a voice that coolly bathed Drake's hot body. "It's not free, and it's not eternal, but it's health and postponement. Do you want it?"

How could he not?

"Yes," the terminally ill man croaked.

"What would you have said?" the vampire demanded rather peevishly of Paul.

He blinked. "What?"

Paul felt as though the story-the very presence of the old man in his living room-had slowed his mental reflexes to the point that reception trailed dialog the way audio dragged behind video in a poorly dubbed film. The time was 1878, and he had to struggle back to present day to address the question.

"I asked you if you wouldn't accept the gift of life even with the price tag hidden. Of course I accepted his offer."

There it was again, the peculiar flash of white brilliance in the young man's eyes, but too quick for the dying Miles Drake to verify.

"Hurry, Frederick. Just do it," the girl hissed from her place in the doorway.

So strange...but Miles was accepting every curious event with a sort of incurious acceptance. So his daughter nervously guarded the bedroom door. So he'd been offered life and health. So her fluttery beau's eyes glittered as he loomed closer. Miles felt as though his consciousness detached to watch the ravaged, bedridden body and the tableau of daughter and lover and dying man with only mild anticipation.

"Now," Amanda commanded.

And Frederick's lips touched him as though it was he who was Darrow's lover, and not Drake's daughter.

"It's supposed to be deliciously erotic. Sensual. Enticing. Or so the books and movies would have it." Miles Drake leaned forward, letting his long arms dangle between his bony knees. "Now the truth, Paul. Vampire breath is hot and harsh and carrion-foul. More to the point, it hurts to have your jugular torn. It hurts very much."

Paul could see it. Could feel the teeth, the exploratory nibble that sent shivers down neck and arm. And then the bite. The excruciating bite.

"The bite," said the vampire, "is a repulsive, infectious, frenzying shot of pain, a screaming sensation that keeps intensifying until your senses finally overload and you're given the comfort of unconsciousness."

Drake tapped a knee and offered one more ghost-faint smile. "Not at all like it's described in the books and movies, is it, Paul? Not a Twilight encounter by half."

Paul forced his tight jaws to loosen enough for a few words. "Why didn't you bleed to death?"

The vampire straightened up and sat back. He looked faintly disappointed, as though he'd expected something deeper. "Properties of the blood and saliva," he said with an impatient hand gesture. "The immune system which contributes to the vampire's long life goes to work on its host, stoppering the wound and swiftly rejuvenating the body." He shrugged as though both acknowledging and dismissing the suspect science of his explanation.

"What the vampire kiss meant to me," he said, "was the cessation of death. I can't put it in less melodramatic terms. I don't know how my Amanda explained the puncture marks at my throat, for I remained in a groggy state until my injury had healed. Which didn't take all that long, for I now shared the rocket-boosted immune system of the man who'd saved my life."

"But your family," said Paul.

"The topic never came up, although there was much whispering among family members and young Darrow was never invited back to the house."

The vampire showed his teeth in a brief flash of yellow and brown. "I suppose Amanda and I became the black sheep of our family, and much blacker than most."

"So they...knew?"

The vampire created a part in his white-yellow hair with his fingers. "If they didn't suspect at first, they must certainly have had misgivings by the time the children started disappearing."

The vampire must have seen a look of revulsion cross Paul's face, for he added quickly, "No, no. Not my children. I exhibited perfect self-control at all times when it came to my own brood."

A brand new threesome hit nighttime Rochester in the winter of 1878-79. Miles Drake, his daughter Amanda and young Frederick Darrow inseparably traveled the most forlorn streets and alleys, the seediest bars, the deepest and darkest woods and loneliest harbors of the Gennessee River.

"Life grew stereophonic that winter, multi-layered with sights and sounds and odors and textures I'd never before experienced. Every coal-blackened snowflake was sculpted of the purest ice and smelled as blue as cloud frost." The vampire's eyes had gone glossy with the memory, and now focused back on Paul. "To be us," he murmured, "is to see, feel, hear, smell, touch life for the first time. Every delicious sensation a virgin experience."

Paul's tongue roved his lips, wetting and unfastening them. "You were telling me about...the children."

"Ah. You must first understand that there were no better friends anywhere than Miles and Amanda and Frederick. I no longer thought of her as my daughter, the child I'd never found time to know. She was now my dearest friend, as was her lover. We were all lovers, though not in the traditional sense, so you needn't purse your lips so. Our love was the sort that might be enjoyed by the three final souls inhabiting a breathtakingly alien world.

"No," said the vampire, correcting himself with a shake of the head. "As usual when revisiting the past, I've only seen what I want to see. There was another side as well, for as we turned away from all others, they turned from us. My wife-yes, Emily-and the other children-I'd have to think much harder to come up with all of their names-knew more than they cared to consciously admit. They avoided my presence, steering clear of the heavily cloaked bedroom where I slept alone and insentient during the day. Initially I suppose I could have explained my odd hours as some vague by-product of my illness and its miraculous cure, but no one asked. No one wanted to know.

"Money was a bigger problem, as it is to many families today. While my health had returned, my new lifestyle made it impossible to obtain traditional employment. And, to be perfectly honest, I had no desire to do so. My mind soared so far above the bosses with their smudgy little lives that to set pen to paper to document their petty thoughts was unthinkable. So I found other means of sustenance.

"Bloodthirst, like lust, is as useful as it is instinctive," the vampire said.

His matronly daughter watched him with hooded eyes, as unimpressed with his words as Paul was thunderstruck.

"I was strong, Paul. Unimaginably so. And I could see so much. With moral constraints gone, I was a force of the night. I'd like to say that my first kill was an emotionally wrenching experience, but I can't. I remember it, just as you remember your first girl, but it's lost its larger-than-life feel with the passage of years. He was a man, small and weak with diseased, imperfect blood. He had a few dollars in his pockets, though. My dear wife learned surprisingly quickly to accept without question the small piles of money I left on her nightstand before retiring to my own room at dawn. She didn't ask, and I didn't tell, and in this way we were able to keep the hovel we called a home."

Oddly, Paul felt greater terror sitting with a thief and serial killer than upon hearing Drake's claim to be a vampire. The supernatural could be shrugged off. Murder, though, was horrifyingly mundane.

"But what I've told you so far still doesn't explain the children," Drake said. He scrunched himself deeper into the deep sofa and let his long legs stretch to the glass tabletop. He seemed to enjoy having found a new audience, perhaps his first in years. "As Frederick explained it, children only briefly quenched my bloodthirst, but they could be dispatched swifter and easier than adults. That was like my timid friend, to take the safest route.

"'In a city like this,' Frederick would say, waving his arms to take in Rochester's cobbled streets, its granite flour mills and soot-blackened buildings, 'danger is everywhere and caution is paramount.'

"So we took adults when we had to, for cash, but children for nourishment. Ragtag urchins with too many siblings, and orphans with none. What I learned from Frederick is that if we only bait our hooks for the poor, there's rarely an outcry."

Drake shrugged. "Fewer mouths to feed. We'd dump the bloodless corpses overnight in the already polluted Lake Ontario or the Gennessee River. Perhaps some of the small, waterlogged bundles were found with injuries that confounded nineteenth century forensics, but I can recall no public outcry or close calls.

"Follow me so far? Frederick and I only took the weak and unwanted. Until the night my skittish friend slipped up."

Frederick had been seen, Drake explained. From a dance hall with a side door facing the alley chosen for his solo feeding erupted besotted witnesses to the frail young vampire's struggle to drag the squirming, squawking child into the night.

"Frederick panicked and abandoned the injured boy and ran," Drake explained. "He ran straight to my home and waited for me under the front porch. When I arrived hours later with my daughter, having first tidily wiped clean my lips and face and changed shirts in an alley, I found this babbling, hysterical man with blood-spattered frock coat under my house. He'd done the unthinkable: not only nearly getting caught, but dragging the police to within sniffing distance of my door.

"We fled with a single hastily packed trunk between the three of us," the vampire said. "We had a terribly close call at dawn, when we had to burrow into the darkest, smelliest corner of an abandoned chicken coop outside of town. I haven't been back to Rochester since. Not in more than a century. I hear it's changed."

Chapter Thirty.

Paul looked from Drake to daughter, and back to Drake. He had to keep the man-the thing-talking. When the vampire ran out of conversation...Paul swallowed the hard fear and refused to finish the thought.

He said, "Then you and Tabitha have been together..."

"No, no, no," the vampire replied with the briefest chuckle. "I have-or have had-many sons and daughters. Too many to recall through the years. This one..." he waved his hand dismissively at Tabitha Drake, who sat staring at nothing. "You weren't listening, Paul, or you'd know that my second daughter's name was Amanda. This one here is my eyes during the day, I suppose, but she's no Amanda."

The three-the two vampires and Amanda-followed the Erie Canal to the Buffalo Harbor, and from there boarded a Great Lakes steamer. They stopped for brief periods in Cleveland, Toledo, Detroit. They strayed into Canada, staying only in cities where children were both a plentiful and burdensome commodity, and they reduced the burden.

Large bodies of water were important for disposal, and most industrial cities of the upper Midwest sat on such stretches. Later, as they found their way to the Northwest, the three found deep woods with soft soil and remote mountain trails, and that worked as well.

Sometimes they'd befriend and recruit rather than plunder the night inhabitants of the alleys and saloons and flophouses. And, on very rare occasions, they found others like them.

"Frederick and I were never prejudiced, like some of our kind met along the way," said Drake. "There are those who consider all daylighters to be of blood value only. Not true." He fanned one long finger in the air to emphasize this point. "I might have been quite the liberal for my time, but our present-day social system could not have evolved under the weight of such tired beliefs."

As Drake explained it, the vampires' relationship with the daylighter Amanda was uniquely close. The three shared a bond of genuine affection for one another.

"As for conversion, sure, she wanted to become one of us. Who wouldn't? But we needed her in human state. We needed a guard when we slept, someone to handle the day-to-day logistics and to make sure we had shelter from the sun. And to arrange safe passage when we had need to travel quickly."

Despite a growing sense of dread that left his shirt soaked and body smelling of panic, Paul was deeply embedded in the story. He had to keep reminding himself how amazing it was that the old man had been able to share his delusion with so many. It was during long stretches of forgetting to remind himself of this-that it was only a story, an imaginative fairy tale-that the terror set in.

Having Amanda around for so long, Drake continued, the vampires had grown accustomed to traveling with humans. As their numbers grew, the two groups lived in symbiotic harmony, a relationship that benefited the night creatures and their band of amoral cutthroats who gained the most sadistic of thrills and the promise of eventual near-eternity.

"Ah, but who could be unimpressed with our ways?" the vampire purred. "Think of it, Paul. To live vibrant lives for centuries with godlike powers. To overcome most injuries and all disease. Of course we had followers, Paul. Of course."

To overcome most injuries, the vampire had said. Paul latched onto that thought, but asked another question altogether. "If everything was so great, why move to Babylon and settle down?"

The vampire froze in position as his daughter shifted uncomfortably behind him. "I need a drink," he said. Petulantly, it seemed. "Water. Just water. Perhaps your wife can..."