By Blood We Live

She stalked me most of that first night, for she had a constitution of iron; I was eventually reduced to donning an inconspicuous pair of trousers and a tweed jacket and hiding out on the third-class deck among the Irish.

At sunrise I retired to my coffin-trunk again, but I did not sleep with anything resembling peace.

All through that day and the next I heard her footfalls, smelled her blood and dusting-powder, in the dark of my dreams as she moved through the holds.

I dreamed about her.

And I dreamed about the sea.

As Mr. Stoker so obligingly pointed out in his book

Dracula, we-the UnDead-cannot cross running water, except at the hour of astronomical midnight, and at the moment when the tide turns. He is quite right. It was more than dread that seized me, when I and my vampire master stood on the threshold of London Bridge and he ordered me across. It was a sickness, a weakness that paralyzed me, as if death itself were rising from the moving river below us like poisoned mist. My master laughed at me, the bastard, and we took a hackney cab across the river to hunt. In later years we'd take the Underground. He'd keep me talking, to school me to focus my mind against the panicky disorientation that flowing water produces, but like all vampires I hate the temporary loss of my powers over the minds of the living.

That was the thing that most worried me during that April voyage. That while I could cajole, or manipulate, or charm, or bribe those luscious-smelling, warm-blooded, rosily glowing morsels with whom I was surrounded every night, I couldn't alter their perceptions of me, or of what was going on around them.

I couldn't make them fall in love with me, so they'd be eager to do my bidding.

I couldn't lure them in a trance into nooks and corners of the hold, nor could I stand outside their cabin doors and tamper with their dreams.

Except for the fact that I retained some, though not all, of the superhuman strength of a vampire, I was to all intents and purposes human again, and indeed a trifle less so. The touch of silver would sear and blister my flesh; the touch of sunlight set me ablaze like a screaming torch.

And if this wretched young woman-who was as tall as I, and strong for a mortal-managed somehow to tip me overside, once in the water I would be paralyzed. I would sink like a stone, Simon had warned me, for the vampire state changes the UnDead flesh and we become physically perfect: all muscle, no fat.

Fat is what floats a body. (Simon knows things like that. He's made a scientific study of our state, and is fond of parading his knowledge, solicited or not.) Even in the sunless black of the deep ocean, I would not die, though crushed by the pressure of the water and frozen by its cold. Nor would I be able to move, save for the few minutes after midnight, or when the moon passed directly overhead and turned the tidal flow. Then the magnetism of the moving water would conquer again, and the sluggish currents push me where they would.

I would be conscious, Simon had assured me. (How the hell would

he know?) I could think of no state closer to those described by Dante in his book of Hell.

And if Miss Paxton shot me with a silver bullet, even if it did not strike my heart, the logical place for her to dump my then-unresisting body would be into the drink.

All these things wove in and out of my dreams, with the clack of her shoe-heels on the storage-hold deck.

It was altogether not a pleasant voyage, even

before 11:39 pm on the night of April 14.

I'd put in a brief appearance in the dining-room that Sunday night, enough so that no over-solicitous fellow-passenger or cabin steward would come inquiring for my health during the daytime. My story was that I was too sea-sick to eat. Most older vampires come to despise the stench of human food. I enjoyed it, and enjoyed too the spectacle of my table-mates shoveling away quantities of poached salmon with mousseline sauce, roast duckling, squabs and cress, asparagus vinaigrette, foie gras and éclairs-to say nothing of gallons of cognac and wines. The flavors linger for many hours in the blood, another reason, incidentally, that we prefer to sup when we can on the rich rather than the poor.

My custom on the

Titanic was to spend most of my night moving from place to place in the first-class accommodation. I hadn't seen Miss Paxton anywhere on the A or B Decks since Thursday night, but twice, once in the Palm Court outside the First-Class Smoking Room and once in the corridor near my suite, I'd caught the lingering whiff of her dusting-powder. She was still finding her way up onto the First-Class Decks.

She could be waiting for me, gun in hand, around any corner

For that reason I was on the bow deck of the ship-as far forward on B Deck as I could get and a goodly distance from what might have been supposed to be a gentlemanly lurking-place in the First-Class Smoking Room-when I saw a dark mass of almost-clear ice lying straight in the path of the ship.