color did rise, and fade, until nothing but the tip of his nose still glowed with warm life. And as that little flame went out and night came on I imagined I’d watched Tom give up the ghost that very moment. A minute later they covered him, too.
'Soon the sounds of the camp dimmed and died away. I was forgotten, perhaps, but I could still see Tom’s stiff shroud in the moonlight, could still smell campfire and copper, and I knew I still lived. Then there came into my sideways world a horrible figure. He appeared at the edge of my sight, very tall, I think, unsteady at the knees as though they’d been savaged and dislocated. But what struck me most was his wide, bloated torso, which I believe was quite red, covered here and there with tatters. Atop this, his head seemed tiny and keen, and with his long, thin limbs he looked like a monstrous tick just emerged from the woods.'
At this Stephin focused on Doug’s face for perhaps the first time that day, and asked if he might fix Stephin another drink. Doug rose, thinking that the story sounded just a little rehearsed. Like a monologue. He filled the glass again, expecting as he did so that Stephin would continue, but he didn’t. In fact he didn’t speak again until Doug had retaken his seat and the glass was half empty.
'He hobbled like a grotesque marionette toward me. But not directly toward me, no — he paused, bobbing for a moment, at what must have been a body some feet away. Then he lingered longer over Tom, leaning close, maybe taking his scent. His eyes were dry slits, his black lips were drawn back over long teeth like a Jabberwock. He…worried the air over Tom’s shroud with long, white nails. Then he swiftly fell upon me.'
Stephin finished his drink.
'He must have been looking for soldiers like me, dead but not yet departed. The war must have given him fields of fallen apples.'
He looked for a while at the empty glass, then balanced it on the top story of a book stack like a water tower.
'This is not a story I enjoy telling. Do you understand why I thought you might find it instructive?'
Doug didn’t, but he wasn’t in the habit of admitting that sort of thing.
'Sure,' he said. 'But…there’s something I’m wondering about. I’ve done a lot of reading on vampires. Not just
'Yes,' said Stephin.
'But the books I’ve read just dis…dismissed those stories as a misunderstanding of how bodies decompose. When a dead person starts rotting, he often gets all bloated with gases like that. So it makes him look well fed, but it’s just gas. And the skin around the teeth and nails shrivels up, and that’s what makes them look longer. Stuff like that. If someone was dug back up when they looked like this, they could get mistaken for a vampire. But since I know a bunch of vampires now, and they just look like normal people…'
'You think I’m lying,' concluded Stephin.
'No! No, just…Why would your vampire look like that, if the rest of us don’t?'
'Exactly my point. You wanted to know the rules. I believe, sometimes, that the rules can change. That the rules are not rules at all. Why did ‘my’ vampire look like that?' said Stephin, sitting low and deep in his chair. 'I have no idea. Maybe because he thought he should? Maybe because that was what the world believed of vampires in his day? I only know that I didn’t become just like him. I was no treat in my early days, let me assure you, but I was never as loathsome as he. Then the years passed, and a notion of a different kind of vampire captured the popular imagination, and I sloughed off my dead skin, bit by bit. That’s a metaphor, you understand. Do they still teach metaphor?'
'Of course.'
'I’m glad to hear it. I thought perhaps school was all music videos and telephone messages. They teach books? I see from your face they do. So, shortly after our Mr. Stoker published
Doug assumed this was sarcasm. Stephin was clearly a moth, circling a dim light in a dusty closet, chewing holes in the world.
'So you see?' said Stephin. 'I changed. The conception of what a vampire is, what he looks like and how he behaves, changed. It can change again. No rules.'
Doug frowned, then realized he was frowning, and stopped. The whole idea seemed too unlikely. Too metaphysical.
'I wonder if we don’t all have this kind of influence over each other,' said Stephin. 'Do you know that everything in the universe has its own gravity? It’s not just planets that exert this force — it’s anything with mass. You have your own gravity. So does a feather.'
'I already knew that,' said Doug. 'We learn it in school. From books. But you have to be as massive as a planet or a moon or something in order to have enough of a gravitational pull that anyone’d notice.'
'Yes. Precisely. But there are other laws of attraction — are there not? The sort you don’t learn about in school? How often do we find ourselves pulled to other people, becoming a different kind of person whilst inside their aura? How often do we remake ourselves to suit the expectations of society?'
Doug shook his head, which felt suddenly numb and elastic. He was possibly drunk. 'I’m sorry. This sounds like touchy-feely crystal bullshit.'
He was met with silence, and Doug imagined he’d probably said something he shouldn’t have. He avoided the other man’s face until it was too obviously deliberate, then was treated to a look that could sour milk. Stephin made a little cage of his fingers.
'I was a devil. I mingled with worms and dank earth. I slept as if dead by day and wandered by night, and by night I was diverted only by pretty screams and blood. A devil.
'And then came our friend Dracula, and the world changed its mind. The memory of my life came back to me. The memory of my death, and what I’d lost. Tom North came back to me. There are so many more of them than us, Doug. They have a planetary influence. And the vampire was only ever what they needed it to be.'
Doug breathed and forced his head to clear for a moment. 'Can you stop being a vampire if you kill the one who made you?' he said quickly, before his mind went soft again.
Stephin raised his eyes. 'Ready to leave the belfry, so soon?'
'I’ve seen movies and read stories where you kill your vampire sire, or kill the one who started that vampire lin…lineage, and you change back to normal. Does it work? If so many people think it works, then maybe it works. Tell me.'
Stephin stared for a long time, face blank as an old hat, while Doug fidgeted. Stephin could probably figure things out about Victor. He’d tell Signora Polidori or Borisov. Doug had been stupid to ask.
'I’ve never heard of such a thing firsthand,' Stephin said finally, 'but I’ve come across such stories myself. I can tell you that I know with great certainty that Miss Polidori’s sire has gone to his final death, but she remains, up in her gilded birdcage.'
'But did she kill him herself?' said Doug, determined to see this line of questioning through now, screw the consequences. 'Maybe you have to be the one who does it.'
'Maybe. Maybe you’d even have to kill an ‘okay guy.’ One who was out of his mind when he made you,' said Stephin. Then he was quiet again, and appeared to be thinking. Doug let him think, and felt his body sag and marinate. But then the sun set outside and the night filled him up like his whole body had a hard-on. Stephin must have felt it, too, because he breathed suddenly and spoke.
'I think you would find it useful to do a little genealogy. Find out more about your vampire family tree. I will consider this question of yours and do my own study. But offhand, I’d say do nothing to the boy who made you. I think you want the head of the family, so to speak.'
'I guess — I guess the real question,' said Doug, 'is why would any vampire make another?'
'Why?' Stephin repeated. 'Loneliness, of course.'
'But I mean…why would a vampire create a younger vampire if there was a possibility the young one might end up destroying the old one?'
Stephin stared. 'If you can explain to me how this is different from parenting in general I might know how to answer that.'
