The Count

"The dead travel fast."

-Bram Stoker, "Dracula"

***

As soon as they were done with the polite part of the conversation, Laura went for the throat. "I read your message about your new book idea," she said. "And it sounds interesting, but you'll have to explain: What exactly is a 'vampire?'"

Aubrey saw her agent's mouth twist around the unfamiliar word, which sounded particularly strange in the tranquil, chic atmosphere of Scarpia-like sitting a medieval yeoman down to dine next with them.

She'd known this question was coming, of course, but even so she needed a few seconds to formulate her answer; Aubrey took a bite of her risotto (rich and garlicky) and picked over her words while chewing thoughtfully. "It was a peasant superstition in some parts of Europe, centuries ago," she said. "People believed-feared-that after someone died, they might come back from the dead as a kind of ghostly creature that creeps into homes in the middle of the night. She paused. "To drink their blood."

Laura froze-she'd been just about to sip from her red wine, but now her eyes flicked to the contents of the glass and she put it down. "Sounds charming," she said, her voice flat.

"It is!" said Aubrey. "Well, it's fascinating is what I mean: There was a whole index of superstitions about what kind of person might become a vampire-and how to get rid of one."

"Is this what you spent all week in the library about?"

"And the week before," Aubrey said. "They didn't have as much material as I'd like-for the really good stuff I'll have to go back east for a week or two. But what I did get was exactly the kind of raw material I-we-need for this book."

Reaching behind her chair, Aubrey pulled a black leather notebook from her purse. It was an expensive LeStallion number with gold-edged pages, a one-time present from her ex-husband. She still remembered the way his hands riffled the pages when he gave it to her...but it was perfectly good stationary, and she wasn't about to let it go to waste. Her tiny, looping handwriting now filled up more than half its pages with scribbled bits and pieces of vampire lore, and the nattering edges of other tables' conversations drifted up to them as she leafed through it.

The restaurant had seated them in a private space, above the main dining room and behind a screen, so that Aubrey could eat without anyone approaching. Even so, she'd already signed autographs for the maitre'd and one of the servers, and she assumed there'd be more by the time the check came; interruptions like these bothered Laura, but Aubrey took them in stride. All part of paying the bills.

Finding the page she wanted, Aubrey alternated glances from Laura to her notes. "The easiest way to get singled out as a vampire was just to have a bad reputation while you were alive: thieves, drunks-landlords," she said. "People particularly liked to imagine their creditors as vampires after they died."

She saw Laura snicker in spite of herself.

"And of course, a dead witch might become a vampire if you weren't careful-or a dead werewolf."

At this Laura's eyebrows raised; she'd made it clear several times that she thought a werewolf story was the way to go for Aubrey's next book.

"But there were other ways: Everyone might be afraid that a suicide would come back as a vampire, or an executed criminal, or anyone else who wasn't given a good Catholic burial. Sometimes it was just bad luck: People with disabilities or chronic illnesses or even something as harmless as a birthmark might be singled out. A curse could do it too: Supposedly if a cat jumped over your corpse while they were waiting to bury you, that could be all it took."

"So what does a vampire do?" Laura asked. She'd finished her own dinner-red meat as usual-ten minutes ago; Laura always ate twice as fast as everyone else and then spent the rest of dinner looking somehow surprised that her plate was empty. Aubrey waited for the server to refill their wine before answering.

"In most stories they sleep in coffins all day-most stories," she explained. "You'll find some accounts of daylight vampires, but I guess it wasn't very common. At night though, they dig their way out their graves, find an open window or unlocked door, and creep into where their sleeping victim lies..."

Aubrey felt a little frisson run up and down her body, and she pursed her lips in pleasure.

"That's where the money is with this story," she continued. "The nighttime intruder, sidling up to your bed in your sleep, leaning down over you, your bare neck exposed in the dark...it's sexy, don't you think?"

"Dead people aren't sexy," Laura said immediately.

"UN-dead," Aubrey corrected. But she wasn't surprised Laura wasn't going for it-Laura was the most unromantic person Aubrey had ever met. If Laura had written the movie "Titanic," Rose would have married the rich guy.

"Trust me, people will go for it-if the book is good," Aubrey continued. "And you know I can make the book good."

"I would never suggest otherwise," said Laura. "But some ideas take a lot less work than others: Witchcraft, haunted houses-those are ideas that already sell, like your first two books. If you keep giving readers what they like, they'll stay loyal. This new idea though-I get that you're enthusiastic about it, and I guess it's kind of an interesting old myth; weird, but interesting. But even if it's good, I just can't imagine a big market for vampire books."

"But there was one once," Aubrey said. She'd now almost completely forgotten about her risotto, letting it grow cold while she leaned over her plate. "There were old vampire books, published around the 18th and 19th centuries, and they were successful."

Her notebook included a few scribbled titles and authors: "Polidori," "Varney," "Carmilla,"--but these meant nothing to Laura.

"They went out of fashion after a while. But there's one that I'm really interested in-one that was never published. Have you ever heard of an Irish writer named Stoker?"

"Who represents him?"

"Nobody-he died over 100 years ago. Or really he didn't die-I mean, he must have at some point obviously, but at the time he just disappeared-very mysterious, big scandal in the Victorian days. He had been pretty successful for a while; he wrote what I guess you could call Gothic literature."

"What's this got to do with your new book?"

"Before he died-disappeared-Stoker was working on a book about a vampire. It's kind of a holy grail for certain rare book collectors; people are always chasing after what they think are long lost manuscripts of it. But probably there aren't any-probably he never even got around to writing hardly any of it at all. But he WAS getting ready to write it-he'd researched it for years."

"How do you know?"

"I read it-his research, I mean. He kept a lot of it in a diary-you know how those Victorian writers were mad for journaling. The way he writes about the history, the folklore, you can tell it was going to be a hell of a book-a HELL of a book. If only he'd gotten the chance to finish it..."

Aubrey tried to hold eye contact with Laura as long as she could, as if she could by force of will push the other woman to take her seriously. They'd had talks like this before, about each of Aubrey's first two books, and about almost every stop along the way of making them a success; being a skeptic was what made Laura a good agent, but it didn't make her necessarily easy to work with.

That was fine by Aubrey though; after notching back-to-back best sellers, a lot of people would just default to letting a writer do whatever she wanted. The fact that Laura didn't cave was a great asset-even if it was also incredibly annoying.

"I'll believe it when I see it," Laura said after some time, and she folded her hand on the table. "Be that as it may, I'm obligated to tender my advice, and-wait a minute: How did YOU get your hands on the diary of this very mysterious vanished Victorian writer-one that just happens to lay out his plans for his equally mysterious vanished book? Don't tell me you found that just lying around the library?"

Seeing the other woman's eyes narrow, Aubrey retreated a bit to her side of the table. "Well..." she ventured after a second. "A fan sent it to me. He was working on a biography of Stoker but gave up on it-I think he'd been hoping to solve the disappearance after all these years."

"Aubrey!" Laura's voice rose such that several people below heard and looked their way. She lowered it to a hiss. "You can't go taking book ideas from fans; people get sued over that kind of thing! This guy could be signing his name to your royalty checks for the next ten years."

"I know-I know! But I'm not writing a book about Stoker-I'm writing about his vampire. We'll never get back the book he would have written, but with the stuff I've got I think I can write the next best thing. And I think people will really love it. There won't be any liability exposure over the Stoker diary-I won't even mention it. It's just my muse."

With that, she set her silverware on her plate and motioned for the server. It was a signal: negotiation was over. Laura knew it, and she nodded.

"Okay then. You know what I think-but if you write it, I'll sell it; that's the deal."

"Same as it ever was."

They toasted. They made small talk. They ordered dessert. The rest of the meal passed without incident. Aubrey always knew that no matter what, Laura would be onboard in the end: Nobody had fought harder for her first book, and when the publishers tried to lowball her on royalties for her second, Laura went to ground for her again. She might not believe in much of anything-but she WOULD fight for it.

Aubrey was the opposite: She hated confrontation and would accept almost any offer if it spared her the agony of bargaining. Except when it came to a story: A really, really good story was the one thing she was always willing to fight for.

And despite Laura's skepticism, Aubrey knew that the vampire was a really good story-the kind of story that, once it inhabited people's brains, would never fully go away, a story that would appeal to readers a hundred years from now just as much as those a hundred years ago. She was willing to stake her next book on it.

That night, she stayed up late, reading by a single lamp; something about these old papers made it feel like she was only safe reading them in private. Truth be known, she hadn't been completely honest when she told her agent the story about her mysterious fan and the Stoker diary...

Actually, she wasn't even really sure it WAS a fan; the package came with only a very brief note from the person who sent it-"You should see this," and no signature or return address. The failed biography story was just a guess-why else would someone collect this much material about an obscure writer and then just give it away?

Still, more than likely no harm done. Now she lay alone in bed, every room in her townhouse dark and quiet except for the hum of the ice machine in the kitchen and the sentinel glow of the burglar alarm downstairs-had she remembered to lock all the windows, she wondered now? Surely she had.

The papers she was looking over were loose and unbound but had been bundled together for so long that they almost had to be pried apart. The elegant, antique handwriting on them was faded but still distinct, and as she read she imagined the loops and whorls of it twining themselves around her and holding her in place, like a grandfather spider spinning its web tighter and tighter.

They said:

"I was not able to light on any map or work giving the exact locality of Castle Dracula, as there are no maps of this country as yet to compare with our own. But I found that the town named by Count Dracula in his correspondence is a fairly well-known place. I shall enter here some of my notes, as they may refresh my memory when I talk over my travels with Florence..."

***

Aubrey cleared her desk of everything except her gold-lined notebook and her laptop; stacks of books, papers, odds and ends, and keepsakes went onto the floor, onto chairs, onto bookshelves-anywhere they'd fit, just so she could have a clean slate on the desktop.

Her writing room was off the back of the ground floor of her townhouse; too small to legally be called a bedroom, the realtor who sold her the place tried to play up its potential as a yoga room. That was back when she'd just sold her first book,

Grimm House

, which had done well but hadn't yet made her recognizably famous to most people.

She could afford to build a bigger office for herself now-could afford to buy an even bigger place, in fact. But she liked the room the way it was, and when it started to feel confining she cleared away the mess to focus only on what mattered.

Today it was her notes; most of the material she'd gathered came from old books and older manuscripts, the kind that you could look at only in specialized reading rooms under the watchful eye of an archival librarian whom, one suspected, had at least a few times killed the reader of a particularly valuable and fragile edition for sneezing in the wrong direction.

Photocopies were out of the question; photographs were at least a venial sin. So she'd had to copy the material she needed word by word, and now came the laborious process of copying it all again into her laptop. Not everything, of course; only what she thought she'd need.

Leafing through pages, Aubrey tapped her bottom lip, reading her own ungainly handwriting and, whenever relevant, pausing to type out what she'd just read again. She was pouring over notes taken from an 18th century church pastor who had reckoned himself something of a scholar in vampiric myths, back in the days when there might have been demand for such things:

"There is no doubt that the self-murderer, or the doer of some atrocious deed of violence, murder, or lust, was buried by some lonely roadside, in a road-crossing, or by the wild wood side, and that the aspen stake was driven through his breast.

"These are the characters who (to use an expression common enough among us to this day, though perhaps we do not trouble to think of its origin or meaning) could not 'rest in their graves.' They had to wander. Thus the body was made secure by pinning it to the bottom of the grave by aid of the driven stake.

"Aspen wood was the wood of Christ's cross, and thus a protection against all evil things, but hawthorn and oak was also a favorite wood for staking vampires, along with cedar, maple, black thorn, or white thorn. It is advisable to wash the stake with boiling wine or molten iron; fill also the coffin with garlic or with poppy seeds, and decapitate the corpse, if possible with a gravedigger's spade. The body must be covered with a sheet to protect bystanders from the blood, which will kill or drive them mad."

Aubrey paused; "bystanders," yes-the gruesome work of disinterring and eviscerating a vampire corpse always drew a crowd in those days, and potentially even the entire town. Ostensibly this was done so that everyone could assure themselves that the creature had been suitably dispatched, and also so that many hands would be available for the hard work of digging up the grave and breaking into the coffin.

However, Aubrey suspected that the primary instinct remained exactly what it would be in all ages: rubbernecking. If someone's going to chop a head off, there's always going to be certain people who just plain don't want to miss out, regardless of circumstances. She continued:

"The severed head should be stuffed with garlic. It's best to rebury the body at a crossroads, or perhaps bury the pieces in different locales; alternatively, many swear the body must be burned, though this only provokes additional debate over what to do with the ashes.

"The burial customs prior to Christianity to prevent vampirism usually involved carrying the corpse out feet first to prevent the dead from coming back home again, severing the head from the body and placing it between the legs or between the arm and the side of the coffin, and tying the feet and legs together with a strong rope to prevent the revenant from walking.

"Signs of vampirism: bloating of the corpse, oozing blood, ruddiness, bright blood, warmth, erection, movement in the coffin, new skin and nails, chewed shrouds and limbs, noises from the grave during the day or night..."

She paused again; so-called experts in latter-day vampire hunting-most often priests or other clergy in more recent centuries, but before that any sufficiently worldly or persuasive person could stake a doubtful reputation as an "exorcist" of unruly burials when the need came-would indeed search for such signs to identify the culprit corpse.

Finding the grave in the first place could involve any sort of magical or superstitious means: Many swore, for example, that a white horse would refuse to cross a vampire's grave, and thus rooting one out was a simple matter of leading such a beast through the churchyard. Others were more practical, simply searching for graves with uneven headstones and disturbed earth, or those dug just before the vampire outbreak began.

And that was the real sign of vampirism: The complaints of the victims, their nightmare recollections, their increasing disability, and, many times, the spread of disease in the creature's wake.

"The corpse of the fearful malefactor, cast out of hallowed ground, belonged to the devil and not to the saints, and thus must be disabled from further mischief-doing.

"Later sources suggest additional ways to prevent vampirism, for instance, burying the corpse facedown so it will not be able to find its way out; severing the tendons and muscles in the legs; or driving nails through its heart, hands, and feet. Such precautions accompanied the traditional burial rites of the church, for although the everyday people trusted God to protect them from such demonic influences, it was assumed that God would not be moved to help those who did not help themselves, and thus all manner of folk magic solutions were employed to keep the restless dead at bay"

Aubrey continued like this throughout the entire afternoon. All of these old sources were wonderful for revealing what common people used to believe (and fear) about vampires, but there seemed to be few texts that bothered to speculate about the nature of the vampire itself. What, Aubrey wondered, would it be like for a once-living person to become one of these "un-dead?" Was it like living again-or did the process of death and unholy resurrection change who the vampire was as a person? Very often the first victims of a suspected vampire were its still-living family members, so it seemed such creatures retained certain links to their life.

But everybody was only interested in detecting and destroying a vampire; nobody ever cared to interview the vampire. As such, Aubrey could only speculate about such things; leaning back in her chair as the sun crept low on the horizon, she wondered what might it be like to speak with a vampire all those centuries ago-or even today?

When the phone rang, Aubrey jumped. She reached for it on the second ring, but paused halfway; hadn't she turned it off? She always did when she was writing. This time she couldn't remember. There was no incoming number displayed, so it was probably some scam...but at the last second she pushed to answer, and when the screen lit up she managed a tentative "Hello?"

The voice that greeted her was totally unfamiliar but immediately assuring; the caller's accent was light but unplaceable, a certain stress on the first syllables of words, and an occasional swapping of vowel sounds. Despite these errors, the speaker's English sounded smooth and nearly effortless-indeed, this was a voice perfectly suited for whatever words needed saying, an ideal tool for any kind of speech, and in spite of herself she found her breath catching a little when she heard it. After a token greeting and a momentary pause, what it said was: