miss Mass on Sunday, or bite down on the Communion Host? Or steal a loaf of bread…or sleep with a neighbor’s wife?’

“ ‘No….’ I shook my head. ‘No.’

“ ‘But if evil is without gradation, and it does exist, this state of evil, then only one sin is needed. Isn’t that what you are saying? That God exists and.…’

“ ‘I don’t know if God exists,’ I said. ‘And for all I do know…He doesn’t exist.’

“ ‘Then no sin matters,’ he said. ‘No sin achieves evil.’

“ ‘That’s not true. Because if God doesn’t exist we are the creatures of highest consciousness in the universe. We alone understand the passage of time and the value of every minute of human life. And what constitutes evil, real evil, is the taking of a single human life. Whether a man would have died tomorrow or the day after or eventually…it doesn’t matter. Because if God does not exist, this life…every second of it…is all we have.’

“He sat back, as if for the moment stopped, his large eyes narrowing, then fixing on the depths of the fire. This was the first time since he had come for me that he had looked away from me, and I found myself looking at him unwatched. For a long time he sat in this manner and I could all but feel his thoughts, as if they were palpable in the air like smoke. Not read them, you understand, but feel the power of them. It seemed he possessed an aura and even though his face was very young, which I knew meant nothing, he appeared infinitely old, wise. I could not define it, because I could not explain how the youthful lines of his face, how his eyes expressed innocence and this age and experience at the same time.

“He rose now and looked at Claudia, his hands loosely clasped behind his back. Her silence all this time had been understandable to me. These were not her questions, yet she was fascinated with him and was waiting for him and no doubt learning from him all the while that he spoke to me. But I understood something else now as they looked at each other. He had moved to his feet with a body totally at his command, devoid of the habit of human gesture, gesture rooted in necessity, ritual, fluctuation of mind; and his stillness now was unearthly. And she, as I’d never seen before, possessed the same stillness. And they were gazing at each other with a preternatural understanding from which I was simply excluded.

“I was something whirling and vibrating to them, as mortals were to me. And I knew when he turned towards me again that he’d come to understand she did not believe or share my concept of evil.

“His speech commenced without the slightest warning. ‘This is the only real evil left,’ he said to the flames.

“ ‘Yes,’ I answered, feeling that all-consuming subject alive again, obliterating all concerns as it always had for me.

“ ‘It’s true,’ he said, shocking me, deepening my sadness, my despair.

“ ‘Then God does not exist…you have no knowledge of His existence?’

“ ‘None,’ he said.

“ ‘No knowledge!’ I said it again, unafraid of my simplicity, my miserable human pain.

“ ‘None.’

“ ‘And no vampire here has discourse with God or with the devil!’

“ ‘No vampire that I’ve ever known,’ he said, musing, the fire dancing in his eyes. ‘And as far as I know today, after four hundred years, I am the oldest living vampire in the world.’

“I stared at him, astonished.

“Then it began to sink in. It was as I’d always feared, and it was as lonely, it was as totally without hope. Things would go on as they had before, on and on. My search was over. I sat back listlessly watching those licking flames.

“It was futile to leave him to continue it, futile to travel the world only to hear again the same story. ‘Four hundred years’—I think I repeated the words—‘four hundred years.’ I remember staring at the fire. There was a log falling very slowly in the fire, drifting downwards in a process that would take it the night, and it was pitted with tiny holes where some substance that had larded it through and through had burned away fast, and in each of these tiny holes there danced a flame amid the larger flames: and all of these tiny flames with their black mouths seemed to me faces that made a chorus; and the chorus sang without singing. The chorus had no need of singing; in one breath in