myself, however, Professor James's face would have brought me up short.
"'The what?' he said, clearly astonished. He set down his fork and knife, abandoning his lunch. 'Did you say "The Ghost in the Amphora"?'
"'Yes.' I'd forgotten even about Helen and G篓¦za now. 'Why do you ask?'
"'But this is astounding! I think I must write to Professor Rossi at once. You see, I've recently been studying a most interesting document from fifteenth-century Hungary. That's what brought me to Budapest in the first place - I've been looking into that period of Hungary's history, you know, and then I tagged along at the conference with Professor S篓¢ndor's kind permission. In any case, this document was written by one of King Matthias Corvinus's scholars, and it mentions the ghost in the amphora.'
"I remembered that Helen had referred to King Matthias Corvinus the night before; hadn't he been the founder of the great library in the Buda castle? Aunt ?va had told me about him, too. 'Please,' I said urgently, 'explain.'
"'Well, I - it's rather a silly sounding thing, but I've been very interested for several years in the folk legends of Central Europe. It started as a bit of a lark, I suppose, long ago, but I've become absolutely mesmerized by the legend of the vampire.'
"I stared at him. He looked as ordinary as before, with his ruddy, jolly face and tweed jacket, but I felt I must be dreaming.
"'Oh, I know it sounds juvenile - Count Dracula and all that - but you know it really is a remarkable subject when you dig into it a bit. You see, Dracula was a real person, although of course not a vampire, and I'm interested in whether his history is in any way connected with folk legends of the vampire. A few years ago I started looking for written material on the topic, to see if there even was any, since of course the vampire existed mainly in oral legend in Central and East European villages.'
"He leaned back, drumming his fingers on the edge of the table. 'Well, lo and behold, working in the university library here, I turned up this document that Corvinus apparently commissioned - he wanted someone to collect all knowledge of vampires from earliest times. Whoever the scholar was who got the job, he was certainly a classicist, and instead of tramping around villages as any good anthropologist would have done, he began poking through Latin and Greek texts - Corvinus had a lot of these here, you know - to find references to vampires, and he turned up this ancient Greek idea, which I haven't seen anywhere else - at least not until you mentioned it just now - of the ghost in the amphora. In ancient Greece, and in Greek tragedies, the amphora sometimes contained human ashes, you see, and the ignorant folk of Greece believed that if things didn't go quite right with the burial of the amphora, it could produce a vampire - I'm not quite sure how, yet. Perhaps Professor Rossi knows something about this, if he's writing about ghosts in amphorae. A remarkable coincidence, isn't it? Actually, there are still vampires in modern Greece, according to folklore.'
"'I know,' I said. 'Thevrykolakas. '
"This time it was Hugh James's turn to stare. His protuberant hazel eyes grew enormous. 'How do you know that?' he breathed. 'I mean - I beg your pardon - I'm just surprised to meet someone else who - '
"'Is interested in vampires?' I said dryly. 'Yes, that used to surprise me, too, but I'm getting used to it, these days. How did you become interested in vampires, Professor James?'
"'Hugh,' he said, slowly. 'Please call me Hugh. Well, I - ' He looked hard at me for a second, and for the first time I saw that under his cheerful, bumbling exterior there glowed an intensity like a flame. 'It's dreadfully strange and I don't usually tell people about this, but - '
"I really couldn't bear the delay. 'Did you, by any chance, find an old book with a dragon in the center?' I said.
"He eyed me almost wildly, and the color drained from his healthy face. 'Yes,' he said. 'I found a book.' His hands gripped the edge of the table. 'Who are you?'
"'I found one, too.'
"We sat looking at each other for a few long seconds, and we might have sat speechless even longer, delaying all we had to discuss, if we hadn't been interrupted. G篓¦za J篓®zsef's voice was at my