"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 not to imagine somebody in fishnets. And now Doug’s imagination was a slideshow of pornographic images starring himself and Pamela. The harder he tried to swap her out with a swimsuit model or something, the more his sweaty boy mind insisted on Pamela. Is this what being a teenager meant, that his fantasy life wasn’t even his own? Pamela did have one thing going for her — a big rack. Maybe that was two things. Okay, three — he supposed she was smart.
A year or two ago Doug and his friend Stuart got into a debate over whether Pamela was hot. Stuart said she was because of her tits, and Doug said that’s sexist, you can’t think a girl’s hot just because of bra size if she’s otherwise ugly, and then Jay overheard and shouted, "HOW IS IT NOT SEXIST TO CALL HER UGLY AND, BESIDES, SHE’S NOT UGLY," and then he started crying. It had been a really fantastic afternoon.
The secret key to their relationship was that Pamela had once kissed Doug while their mothers played tennis. When he was six and she seven. Neither of them ever referred to it directly, though when cornered, she still occasionally blamed him for giving her lice.
Now she stepped down into the yard with her watering can, the potted plants apparently forgotten, and silently studied Doug like his face was a chessboard. "You need more sun, you know," she said.
As if, thought Doug.
"You’re never going to grow any taller, hiding under that poncho all the time. Here, I’ll water you."
She tipped the can over his ponchoed head. His ears filled with the spatter of water on plastic. It didn’t get him very wet, but in his haste to escape he fell backward over the rubber swing.
"Gah — dammit!"
Pamela howled. Beside them, Jay said quietly, "Pam, Doug is my guest."
"Yeah!" said Doug once he was back on his feet. His eyes burned. He hoped Pam could feel the intensity of his stare, the conviction behind his hatred. "Jay’s guest! So why don’t you show a little hospitality, huh?"