tottering with sickness. Compared with that wreck down there and others like him, how sick could this “vampire” be, with his cultured baritone voice, his self-possessed approach?
“And you won’t consider handing him off to somebody else,” Lucille said.
“Well, not until I know a little more. Come on, Luce—wouldn’t you want at least to know what he looks like?”
Lucille stubbed out her cigarette against the low parapet. Down below a policeman strolled along the street ticketing the parked cars. He didn’t even look at the man lying at the corner of the building. They watched his progress without comment. Finally Lucille said, “Well, if you won’t drop Dracula, keep me posted on him, will you?”
He entered the office on the dot of the hour, a gaunt but graceful figure. He was impressive. Wiry gray hair, worn short, emphasized the massiveness of his face with its long jaw, high cheekbones, and granite cheeks grooved as if by winters of hard weather. His name, typed in caps on the initial information sheet that Floria proceeded to fill out with him, was Edward Lewis Weyland.
Crisply, he told her about the background of the vampire incident, describing in caustic terms his life at Cayslin College: the pressures of collegial competition, interdepartmental squabbles, student indifference, administrative bungling. History has limited use, she knew, since memory distorts; still, if he felt most comfortable establishing the setting for his illness, that was as good a way to start off as any.
At length his energy faltered. His angular body sank into a slump, his voice became flat and tired as he haltingly worked up to the crucial event: night work at the sleep lab, fantasies of blood-drinking as he watched the youthful subjects of his dream research slumbering, finally an attempt to act out the fantasy with a staff member at the college. He had been repulsed; then panic had assailed him. Word would get out, he’d be fired, blacklisted forever. He’d bolted. A nightmare period had followed—he offered no details. When he had come to his senses he’d seen that just what he feared, the ruin of his career, would come from his running away. So he’d phoned the dean, and now here he was.
Throughout this recital she watched him diminish from the dignified academic who had entered her office to a shamed and frightened man hunched in his chair, his hands pulling fitfully at each other.
“What are your hands doing?” she said gently. He looked blank. She repeated the question.
He looked down at his hands. “Struggling,” he said.
“With what?”
“The worst,” he muttered. “I haven’t told you the worst.” She had never grown hardened to this sort of transformation. His long fingers busied themselves fiddling with a button on his jacket while he explained painfully that the object of his “attack” at Cayslin had been a woman. Not young but handsome and vital, she had first caught his attention earlier in the year during a festschrift—an honorary seminar—for a retiring professor.
A picture emerged of an awkward Weyland, lifelong bachelor, seeking this woman’s warmth and suffering her refusal. Floria knew she should bring him out of his past and into his here-and-now, but he was doing so beautifully on his own that she was loath to interrupt.
“Did I tell you there was a rapist active on the campus at this time?” he said bitterly. “I borrowed a leaf from his book: I tried to take from this woman, since she wouldn’t give. I tried to take some of her blood.” He stared at the floor. “What does that mean—to take someone’s blood?” “What do you think it means?”
The button, pulled and twisted by his fretful fingers, came off. He put it into his pocket, the impulse, she guessed, of a fastidious nature. “Her energy,” he murmured, “stolen to warm the aging scholar, the walking corpse, the vampire—myself.”
His silence, his downcast eyes, his bent shoulders, all signaled a man brought to bay by a life crisis. Perhaps he was going to be the kind of client therapists dream of and she needed so badly these days: a client intelligent and sensitive enough, given the companionship of a professional listener, to swiftly unravel his own mental tangles. Exhilarated by his promising start, Floria restrained herself from trying to build on it too soon. She made herself tolerate the silence, which lasted until he said suddenly, “I notice that you make no notes as we speak. Do you record these sessions on tape?”
A hint of paranoia, she thought, not unusual. “Not without