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came aboard, and Joshua always gave them cabins. At Bayou Sara, he and Valerie left the Fevre Dream one night and returned with a pale, heavy man named Jean Ardant. A few minutes downriver, they'd put in at a woodyard, and Ardant had gone and fetched this sallow-faced dandy named Vincent. At Baton Rouge, four more strangers had taken passage; at Donaldsonville another three.

And then there were those dinners. As his strange company began to grow, Joshua York ordered a table set up in the texas parlor, and there he would dine at midnight with his companions, new and old. Supper they took with everyone else in the main cabin, but these dinners were private. The custom started in Bayou Sara. Abner Marsh allowed once to Joshua how the idea of a regular meal at midnight took his fancy, but that didn't get him invited. Joshua only smiled, and the meals went on, the number of diners growing each night. Finally Marsh's curiosity got the better of him, and he managed to walk by the parlor a couple of times to glance in the window. There wasn't much to see. Just some folks eating and talking. The oil lamps were dim and subdued, the curtains half-drawn. Joshua sat at the head of the table, Simon on his right-hand side and Valerie to his left. Everybody was sipping from glasses of Joshua's vile elixir, several bottles of which had been uncorked. The first time Marsh wandered by, Joshua was talking animatedly and the rest were listening. Valerie stared at him almost worshipfully. The second time Marsh peeked in, Joshua was listening to Jean Ardant, one hand resting casually on the tablecloth. As Marsh watched, Valerie placed her own hand on top of it. Joshua glanced at her and smiled fondly.

Valerie smiled back. Abner Marsh looked quickly for Raymond Ortega, muttered "Goddamn fool woman" under his breath, and hurried away, scowling.

Marsh tried to make sense of it, of all these queer strangers, these odd goings-on, of all Joshua York had told him about vampires. It wasn't easy, and the more he thought on it the more confused he got. The library on the Fevre Dream had no books about vampires or anything like that and he wasn't about to go stealing into Joshua's cabin again. At Baton Rouge, he took himself into town and bought a few rounds at some likely grog shops, hoping to find out something that way. When he could, he'd introduce the subject of vampires into the talk, usually by turning to his drinking companions and saying, "Say, you ever heard anything 'bout vampires along the river?" He figured that was safer than raising the subject on the steamer, where the very word might start some bad talk.

A few folks laughed at him or gave him odd looks. One free man of color, a burly soot-black fellow with a broken nose whom Marsh accosted in a particularly smoky tavern, ran off as soon as Marsh asked his question. Marsh tried to run after him, but was soon left behind wheezing. Others seemed to know considerable about vampires, though none of the stories had a damn thing to do with the Mississippi. All the stuff he'd heard from Joshua's lips, about crosses and garlic and coffins full of dirt, he heard repeated, and more besides.

Marsh took to watching York and his companions closely at supper, and afterward in the grand saloon. Vampires didn't eat nor drink, he'd been told, but Joshua and the others drank copious amounts of wine and whiskey and brandy when they weren't sipping York's private stock, and all of them were only too glad to do justice to a nice chicken or pork chop.

Joshua was always wearing his silver ring, with its sapphire big as a pigeon's eye, and none of them seemed bothered by all the silver about the cabin. They used the silverware proper enough when they ate, better than most of the Fevre Dream's crew.

And when the chandeliers were lit by night, the mirrors all up and down the main cabin gleamed brilliantly and crowds of finely dressed reflections came to life on either side of them, and danced and drank and played cards just like the real folks in the real saloon. Abner Marsh, night after night, found himself looking into those mirrors. Joshua was always there where he was supposed to be, smiling, laughing, gliding from mirror to mirror arm in arm with Valerie, talking politics with a passenger, listening