from madness. Here was a different sort of man—armored, calculating. She didn’t know just what the change signaled, but she felt her own excitement stirring, and that meant she was on the track of—something.
“I have a hunch,” she said slowly, “that this vampirism extends further back into your past than you’ve told me and possibly right up into the present as well. I think it’s still with you. My style of therapy stresses dealing with the now at least as much as the then; if the vampirism is part of the present, dealing with it on that basis is crucial.”
Silence.
“Can you talk about being a vampire: being one now?”
“You won’t like knowing,” he said.
“Edward, try.”
He said, “I hunt.”
“Where? How? What sort of victims?”
He folded his arms and leaned his back against the window frame. “Very well, since you insist. There are a number of possibilities here in the city in summer. Those too poor to own air-conditioners sleep out on rooftops and fire escapes. But often, I’ve found, their blood is sour with drugs or liquor. The same is true of prostitutes. Bars are full of accessible people but also full of smoke and noise, and there too the blood is fouled. I must choose my hunting grounds carefully. Often I go to openings of galleries or evening museum shows or department stores on their late nights—places where women may be approached.”
And take pleasure in it, she thought, if they’re out hunting also—for acceptable male companionship. Yet he said he’s never married. Explore where this is going. “Only women?”
He gave her a sardonic glance, as if she were a slightly brighter student than he had at first assumed.
“Hunting women is liable to be time-consuming and expensive. The best hunting is in the part of Central Park they call the Ramble, where homosexual men seek encounters with others of their kind. I walk there too, at night.”
Floria caught a faint sound of conversation and laughter from the waiting room; her next client had probably arrived, she realized, looking reluctantly at the clock. “I’m sorry, Edward, but our time seems to be—”
“Only a moment more,” he said coldly. “You asked; permit me to finish my answer. In the Ramble I find someone who doesn’t reek of alcohol or drugs, who seems healthy, and who is not insistent on ‘hooking up’ right there among the bushes. I invite such a man to my hotel. He judges me safe, at least: older, weaker than he is, unlikely to turn out to be a dangerous maniac. So he comes to my room. I feed on his blood.
“Now, I think, our time is up.”
He walked out.
She sat torn between rejoicing at his admission of the delusion’s persistence and dismay that his condition was so much worse than she had first thought. Her hope of having an easy time with him vanished. His initial presentation had been just that—a performance, an act. Forced to abandon it, he had dumped on her this lump of material, too much—and too strange—to take in all at once.
Her next client liked the padded chair, not the wooden one that Weyland had sat in during the first part of the hour. Floria started to move the wooden one back. The armrests came away in her hands.
She remembered him starting up in protest against her proposal of touching him. The grip of his fingers had fractured the joints, and the shafts now lay in splinters on the floor.
Floria wandered into Lucille’s room at the clinic after the staff meeting. Lucille was lying on the couch with a wet cloth over her eyes.
“I thought you looked green around the gills today,” Floria said. “What’s wrong?”
“Big bash last night,” said Lucille in sepulchral tones. “I think I feel about the way you do after a session with Chubs. You haven’t gotten rid of him yet, have you?”
“No. I had him lined up to see Marty instead of me last week, but damned if he didn’t show up at my door at his usual time. It’s a lost cause. What I wanted to talk to you about was Dracula.”
“What about him?”
“He’s smarter, tougher, and sicker than I thought, and maybe I’m even less competent than I thought, too. He’s already walked out on me once—I almost lost him. I never took a course in treating monsters.”
Lucille groaned. “Some days they’re all monsters.” This from Lucille, who worked longer hours than anyone else at the clinic, to the despair of her husband. She lifted the cloth, refolded