He smiled, and the girl hugged him. She felt hot and alive in his arms. He allowed himself to remember, for the first time in decades, how a tiny human life felt as it fluttered and died in his arms, filling him with its richness and vivacity. He had kept himself from feeding for decades, but now a sweet meal had walked right into his embrace, and he could not just let her go. Friedrich leaned in until the girl’s tiny, soft neck was within reach of his fangs…
“Go ahead, Friedrich,” said one of the women.
“What are you waiting for?” said the other.
He looked up; in the smudged, dirty glass of the broken windows, he saw them, staring, watching him.
“Her blood will make you young again,” said one.
“Young, and strong,” said the other.
“Go ahead, Friedrich. We’ll look after her when you’re done. We’ll be mothers to her.”
“Much better than the mother who lost her.”
“We want her. Give her to us, Friedrich.”
“Give her to us.”
He stopped, and leaned away.
“What are you doing?” said one of the women, growing angry, but Friedrich ignored them. If Mary could hear them, she did nothing to indicate it. He made sure to face her away from the window, and their reflections in it.
“It’s all right, little dove,” he said. “It will all be all right. Do you have any family, without your poor mother?”
Mary shook her head.
“I have no family either. That makes us both orphans. It’s lucky that we have each other, now.”
She grabbed at his hand and said, “I’m hungry.”
“Ah dear,” he said, “so am I. Very hungry.” The air between them was thick with the scent of her pulsing blood. He watched her lower lip tremble with the effort of restrained weeping. She wanted food then, did she? Of course, he had none. Money wasn’t a problem, but he couldn’t send her out for food alone, nor could he very well go himself…
Taking Mary by the hand, Friedrich went to the old parlor on the second floor (her steps kicking up clouds of dust on the faded carpet, his leaving it undisturbed), leading her through the twisting halls and decaying rooms, past old paintings with their vacant eyes and ancient furniture under tattered sheets, like corpses with their shrouds. In the parlor they found the tarnished mirror over the mantle. Mary was not tall enough to see that he cast no reflection in the ruined glass, but she watched, fascinated, as he pulled the mirror down and opened the safe concealed behind it. Reaching in, he took out a gold bracelet set with three small diamonds. Inside there were more things like it, many more, glittering in the dark. He closed the safe and put the mirror back, then dangled the bracelet from his thin, chalk-white fingers. “Pretty,” he said. Mary giggled.
Together they went to the back door, opening into the blackened remains of the garden and the street, and he sent her off to look for someone. He gave a description of the sort of person to find, and cautioned her against talking to anyone else she met along the way. “Especially a policeman,” he said. She nodded earnestly and scampered away. Watching her go, he worried that she might escape, but in a few minutes’ time she came back leading a bewildered-looking young man. Not a man at all, really, Friedrich saw, but a boy, barely a teenager, with the lean and desperate look of someone who knew hunger, and need. Perfect.
Keeping to the shadows, Friedrich cleared his throat, and the boy jumped. Mary ran to his side and hid behind his legs. Friedrich held out the bracelet. “There once was a shop near here that bought pawned goods,” he said. His accent sounded thick and guttural. It was a cold night, but his breath did not fog the air. He hoped the boy wouldn’t notice.
The boy scratched the peach fuzz on his jaw, thinking. “Yeah, Ivan’s,” he said. “Been there for years.” The boy squinted, trying to make out Friedrich’s face in the shadows. Nearby, the whine of a car’s tires passed.
“Go there,” said Friedrich, handing the bracelet to the boy. “Sell that, and keep half the money for yourself. With the other half, bring me the things written on this list.” He handed over a yellowed sheet of paper filled with the spider-like crawl of his handwriting. “If you do this well, there’ll be more for you to do, every night, and more money to be made. If you cheat me, or if you tell anyone who sent you, that will be all you’ll get. The choice is yours.”
The boy looked at the list, then at Friedrich, and then at Mary, and his eyes looked hollow and frightened. But he took the list and the bracelet, and he left without a word, and Friedrich knew he would do as he was told. Now the girl would be accommodated, yes. He watched her as she explored the crumbling garden walls, skipping between the cracked stones surrounding the barren flowerbeds. In her excitement, she had forgotten her grief.
Friedrich felt a prickle on the back of his neck, and knew that if he looked he would see the faces of his dead wives in the glass of the attic window overhead. But he did not look. Let them wait, he thought. I’ll take as long with this one as I want. Yes, I’ll wait until tomorrow, or perhaps the night after that, or the night after that? I have all the time in the world. It’s been so long since a tasty morsel has fallen into my hands like this, why spoil it all at once? Mary ran up to him and smiled, her teeth brilliantly white in the gloom. Yes, he thought, all the time in the world.
Later, after Mary was fed and given clean clothes, Friedrich lit the stub of a candle and led her to an unused bedroom, fitting the bed with the new sheets that the boy had brought. He tucked Mary in, singing under his breath while he did, old Turkish lullabies in a dialect no one else knew anymore. He kissed her forehead, and though she flinched under his cold lips she smiled at him.
“Good night, sweet Mary, or good day, perhaps. I’m a very sick man, and the sun is bad for me, so I must sleep during the day, and so must you.”
She nodded, accepting this, but as he went to put out the candle he saw a glint of fear in her eyes, and she clutched his arm. He frowned. “What’s wrong?” he said.
“I saw them, over there, in the mirror!” she pointed.
“Saw who?”
“Two women,” she said. “They were standing by the bed, on this side, watching me. I don’t want them standing there while I sleep.”
“Ah, Mary,” said Friedrich, looking at the mirror, “those were just ghosts. Ghosts can’t hurt you.”
“Why not?” said Mary.
“Because they don’t love you,” said Friedrich, stroking her hair. “Now go to sleep.”
He snuffed the candle, and in the dark he watched her settle down and drift off. On the opposite wall the mirror moved, just a little, as if touched by an unseen hand. Friedrich ignored it. He closed the door as quietly as he could and padded down the hall to his own room, lying down in his coffin. Outside, behind the boarded windows, the sun would just be creeping over the horizon.
His last thought before falling into sleep was that the old flower bed where Mary had played would be an excellent place to hide her body.
***
It was just after sundown when he pried his coffin open again, one pale hand scuttling out from under the lid. His joints were even stiffer than usual, and his eyes had trouble adjusting to the darkness. Something seemed strange? Where was he? What room was this?