"I can assure you, I am neither a liar, nor am I insane."
She studied me a moment. "If you're not lying, if you're not crazy - but what you tried to tell me, thatwas crazy."
I shrugged. "In a secular, materialistic world, yes, what I had attempted to tell you was crazy, was unbelievable, but tell me, Nicole, given a choice as to who you would believe is insane, who would it be? Me or Frank Nelson?"
"I don't know." Her voice cut like rapiers. "Christ, for all I know, this is just some joke between the two of you."
"I can assure you, we are not in league. More than likely, this fellow does wish to see me come to harm." A thought passed across my consciousness, and it made me laugh; amusing how the thought of hospitality could have come to me at such a time. But at least I then knew that she was not likely to betray me. Otherwise, she would not have visited me at my abode. "Please forgive me. I have been remiss as a host. Would you like something to drink? You must be parched."
"Yeah. Sure." My civility seemed to smooth her tone.
"What exactly did Frank say at the membership meeting?" I disappeared into the kitchen. Nicole followed, certainly to make sure that her drink would not be laced with something she would rather not ingest. I opened the refrigerator, but found it empty.
"Tap water is fine." She looked over my shoulder, inspecting the refrigerator, most likely curious as to the complete lack of contents. "It was toward the end of the meeting. The time when anyone who wants to speak about anything can. Frank stands up and says he's gotta warn us about this menace that would suck the life from all of us. He starts telling us about how a few months ago, this strange creature started bugging him. It came to him in his dreams, and it even started coming to his window at night. Then finally, the thing stopped bothering him, until recently. But he said he outsmarted it, tricked it into revealing its true form to him, but the thing doesn't know it did - "
"Until now," I interrupted, handing her a glass full of cold water.
"Whatever. Anyway, he says it's you. That this strange creature is a vampire, and it's you, and it's come for him and for everybody, but he'll get it first. He even showed us pictures."
"Pictures?"
She took a long sip of water. "Yeah, but by that time, he'd been pretty much shouted down. He tried to show people these pictures, but no one was listening anymore."
"Did you see these pictures? What did they look like?"
Nicole drained her glass. I refilled it and handed it back to her, then motioned for her to have a seat at the folding table covered with two week's worth ofThe Wall Street Journal .
"Thanks," she said, taking a seat.
"You were a bit overwrought. I trust you feel better now." I took a seat, but made a point of not sitting too close.
"Yes." She smiled, though she most likely did not really want to. "Anyway, Frank's pictures didn't look like much. All they showed was some guy with a woman, but you can't really see the guy, just pants and a black leather jacket standing up by themselves."
I arose and retrieved my leather jacket from the closet. "Did it look something like this?"
"A zillion leathers look like that."
Having hung up the jacket, I returned to my seat. "I can assure you that there is no deception in my words, Nicole. Iam a vampire."
She rolled her eyes. "I mean, that's nuts." She shook her head. "Jeez, you don't seem crazy, but Christ! Youare talking crazy. C'mon, Al. How the hell can you expect me to believe that?"
I shook my head sadly. "Secular materialism. There is a whole universe out there you people refuse to acknowledge."
"Nice words, Al, but they're only words."
Her bravado was commendable. She dared me to prove to her what I really was without knowing if indeed such a revelation would be dangerous. Of course, if I was lying, the danger would be relatively minimal. Being not much smaller than I, she most likely believed she could fight her way out of my apartment largely intact. Undernormal circumstances, that would most likely be true.
"I want you to watch very carefully." I lifted my upper lip and showed her my teeth. "They look like yours, do they not?"