gleamed in the light; and then above her there emerged into focus the lacquered and shimmering painting of a medieval devil, horned and hoofed, his bestial figure looming over a coven of worshipping witches. Her head was just beneath it, the loose curling strands of her hair just stroking it; and she watched the brown-eyed vampire with wide, wondering eyes. I wanted to pick her up suddenly, and frightfully, horribly, I saw her in my kindled imagination flopping like a doll. I was gazing at the devil, that monstrous face preferable to the sight of her in her eerie stillness.

“ ‘You won’t awaken the boy if you speak,’ said the brown-eyed vampire. ‘You’ve come from so far, you’ve travelled so long.’ And gradually my confusion subsided, as if smoke were rising and moving away on a current of fresh air. And I lay awake and very calm, looking at him as he sat in the opposite chair. Claudia, too, looked at him. And he looked from one to the other of us, his smooth face and pacific eyes very like they’d been all along, as though there had never been any change in him at all.

“ ‘My name is Armand,’ he said. ‘I sent Santiago to give you the invitation. I know your names. I welcome you to my house.’

“I gathered my strength to speak, my voice sounding strange to me when I told him that we had feared we were alone.

“ ‘But how did you come into existence?’ he asked. Claudia’s hand rose ever so slightly from her lap, her eyes moving mechanically from his face to mine. I saw this and knew that he must have seen it, and yet he gave no sign. I knew at once what she meant to tell me. ‘You don’t want to answer,’ said Armand, his voice low and even more measured than Claudia’s voice, far less human than my own. I sensed myself slipping away again into contemplation of that voice and those eyes, from which I had to draw myself up with great effort.

“ ‘Are you the leader of this group?’ I asked him.

“ ‘Not in the way you mean leader,’ he answered. ‘But if there were a leader here, I would be that one.’

“ ‘I haven’t come…you’ll forgive me…to talk of how I came into being. Because that’s no mystery to me, it presents no question. So if you have no power to which I might be required to render respect, I don’t wish to talk of those things.’

“ ‘If I told you I did have such power, would you respect it?’ he asked.

“I wish I could describe his manner of speaking, how each time he spoke he seemed to arise out of a state of contemplation very like that state into which I felt I was drifting, from which it took so much to wrench myself; and yet he never moved, and seemed at all times alert. This distracted me while at the same time I was powerfully attracted by it, as I was by this room, its simplicity, its rich, warm combination of essentials: the books, the desk, the two chairs by the fire, the coffin, the pictures. The luxury of those rooms in the hotel seemed vulgar, but more than that, meaningless, beside this room. I understood all of it except for the mortal boy, the sleeping boy, whom I didn’t understand at all.

“ ‘I’m not certain,’ I said, unable to keep my eyes off that awful medieval Satan. ‘I would have to know from what…from whom it comes. Whether it came from other vampires…or elsewhere.’

“ ‘Elsewhere…’ he said. ‘What is elsewhere?’

“ ‘That!’ I pointed to the medieval picture.

“ ‘That is a picture,’ he said.

“ ‘Nothing more?’

“ ‘Nothing more.’

“ ‘Then Satan…some satanic power doesn’t give you your power here, either as leader or as vampire?’

“ ‘No,’ he said calmly, so calmly it was impossible for me to know what he thought of my questions, if he thought of them at all in the manner which I knew to be thinking.

“ ‘And the other vampires?’

“ ‘No,’ he said.

“ ‘Then we are not…’ I sat forward, ‘…the children of Satan?’

“ ‘How could we be the children of Satan?’ he asked. ‘Do you believe that Satan made this world around you?’

“ ‘No, I believe that God made it, if anyone made it. But He also must have made Satan, and I want to know if we are his children!’

“ ‘Exactly, and consequently if you believe God made Satan, you must realize that all Satan’s power comes from God and that Satan is simply God’s child, and that we are God’s