Stephin led Doug into a sort of study or den, and invited him to sit in a worn leather chair. He fell into it, suddenly tired. He had been pushing himself a bit out there, actually. All that biking in the daytime. His back was sticking to his shirt, and now his shirt was sticking to the chair. He tried to steady his breathing as he looked around.
Small book stacks ringed his chair like a cul-de-sac. Suburbs. The chair Stephin chose was more like downtown Bookville — literary high-rises, thirty stories tall. In the amber glow of two small lamps the whole room took on the sepia blur of an old photograph. It was steeped in the musty but unaccountably pleasant smell of old paper.
They stared at each other a moment. There was something gnomish and subterranean about Stephin, Doug decided. Maybe he had been an accident, too.
'So,' said Stephin. 'I haven’t done this in a very long time. You’ll forgive me if I’ve misplaced all my old lesson plans.'
'Well, should I — Should I just ask questions?'
'That would be fantastic.'
Now Doug was being asked to dive in headfirst, and Doug had never learned to dive. He thought perhaps he should start with Stephin himself.
'Are you…American?'
'I was born in Scotland. But we came here when I was three.'
'Have you lived here long? In Philadelphia I mean. Do you have to move around a lot?'
'About twenty years,' said Stephin. 'This is not my only residence.'
'So how long have you been…ennobled?'
Stephin’s expression did not change, but when he answered, there was a sour note to his voice. 'I’m not as fond as you might imagine of Miss Polidori’s delicate little euphemisms. Can we perhaps call the thing what it is?'
'You mean I should just say ‘vampire’?'
'If it walks like a bat and quacks like a bat…'
'All right, so how long have—'
'One hundred and forty-six years.'
'Oh. Well, that’s pretty good,' said Doug. He hoped he didn’t sound disappointed. He kind of wanted Stephin to be hundreds of years old. Even thousands. He didn’t think Signora Polidori was more than two or three hundred. He didn’t know anything about Alexander Borisov. All the other vampires he knew were recent hires like himself.
'Who’s the oldest?' asked Doug. 'Like, who’s the oldest vampire you know.'
Stephin mulled this over a moment. 'I suppose the oldest…the oldest I’m certain is still in this world is Cassiopeia herself. Born the year of Victoria’s coronation, as she likes to tell anyone who will listen. Alexander is only seventy or eighty.'
Doug nodded and looked at his feet. There was another pale rectangle here, this one in the center of the floor like the chalk outline of a dead coffee table.
'Are there many vampires?' he asked. 'My friend Jay likes to work these things out and — and there were only three vampires here in the Philadelphia area up until a month ago. That’s three vampires for six million people. So maybe a hundred and fifty vampires in the whole country. Three thousand in the whole world. And we’re guessing there wouldn’t be as many in rural areas.'
'I suspect it’s something like that. I don’t have better numbers than you do. I would definitely agree about less populated areas, the countryside…It’s far riskier to hunt in such places.'
'So why aren’t there more vampires? Why don’t you know any really old ones? It’s not like they’re dying out or anything—'
With a jolt Doug realized that Stephin was in his pajamas. They were a loose pair of pants and a shirt with large buttons. The top and bottoms didn’t match so he’d mistaken it for an outfit. Pajamas.
'Don’t fool yourself, Doug. We can die. We’re not as difficult to kill as the movies would have you believe. We heal quickly, true, and we don’t strictly need a fair number of our organs anymore, but a close shotgun blast to the chest will put us down as decisively as a stake in the heart.'
Stephin was suddenly lively, like this was a favorite topic. Like he’d been asked about his great-great- great-great-grand-kids.
'Though not as quickly,' he added. 'A sharp piece of wood will end it more quickly, for reasons that have never been adequately explained to me. Also, we still need to breathe. We still prefer not to be on fire. And though we might heal from a bayonet in the ribs we can’t regenerate a whole limb. How long,' he said, edging forward, 'how long has any of us got before the big accident comes? The loss of arms, or legs? How do we hunt, then, with no wings? How much blood could a bloodsucker suck if a bloodsuck — and now I see I’m scaring you.'
'What?' said Doug with a start. 'No.'
'I am. I’m sorry. I’m no longer practiced at human interaction. I’ve talked to so few people during the last fifteen or twenty years. I spent the whole of 1996 and part of ’97 speaking nothing but a language of my own invention called Stephinese, just to see if it would make life more diverting.'
'And?'
'And what?' Stephin drawled.
'Did it? Make life more diverting,' Doug reminded him.
Stephin didn’t answer. Doug glanced around at the small room, at the books and newspapers and dry furniture. There was a bell jar with a pocket watch inside. There was a small tin globe of the moon next to a cast- iron bank shaped like a slave holding a slice of watermelon. There was a picture frame on the floor, leaning against the wall. Behind the glass was something like a bouquet of dried flowers but fashioned from loops and braids of a fine brown thread.
'It’s made from human hair,' said Stephin. Doug frowned and leaned closer, and Stephin added, 'It seemed like a good idea in the nineteenth century. So. You’ve told a friend about your affliction. Jay, was it?'
Doug flinched. His stomach lurched. Had he mentioned Jay? He had. What happened now? Did they fight? Did Doug have to fight to protect his friend?
'I frankly consider such complications unavoidable,' said Stephin. 'Of course you’ve told someone — How can one bear this half life alone? For your sake I hope you’ve chosen well. Would you like to try some peyote?'
'The rest of the hour went a lot like that,' Doug reported to Jay afterward. The two boys sat heavily on Jay’s backyard swing set, not swinging. 'Less like school than like a school dream — you know: hazy, difficult to follow, full of weird surprises and wardrobe choices.' When Doug had finally emerged, blinking, into the West Philadelphia afternoon, it had been like waking, and the memories of Stephin David faded in the sun. They’d agreed to meet again on Monday.
'Did you ask any of our questions?' said Jay. 'Did you ask how to turn into a bat?'
'Sort of. He said if I really wanted all that kind of stuff to happen, it would probably just happen. It would happen when I needed it to.'
'Like, by instinct,' Jay offered.
'Yeah. He said I’d change whether I wanted to or not.'
Doug squinted up at the deck, where Jay’s sister, Pamela, had just emerged from the kitchen door holding a watering can. She squinted down at the swings.
'Shouldn’t one of you be pushing the other?' she called out. 'That’s how it always is with you young lovers, isn’t it?'
On their best days Pam approached Doug as if he were a kind of hereditary illness — just something unpleasant she had to deal with because of family, like eczema. On their worst days, they had a sort of troll-hobbit relationship.
'I can come push you off the deck if you like,' Doug answered.
Jay sighed. 'Can you guys maybe not fight?'
Pamela was six feet tall and curly haired and now, in light of Friday night’s movie, looked a little like Dr. Frank-N-Furter. Doug tried not to imagine her in fishnets, but you can’t really try
