Sex and the Single Vampire

It was raining—a cold, nasty, sleety type of rain—as I galloped awkwardly down the road to the call box. It took me three tries to dial 999, but at last I was connected with an emergency dispatcher. Two minutes later, having described where I was and what the problem was with the man, I headed back to the old inn at a slower pace, worried that my escape might have sent the poor man over the deep end.

I crept into the hallway and stood with my back to a moldy wall, keeping an eye on the stairs to the basement. It seemed like it was an hour before the sound of a police car siren Dopplered against the building, but according to my watch it was only eight and a half minutes. I greeted the two policemen, explained quickly what I had seen, and followed them down the stairs to the now closed door. They switched on powerful flashlights and cautiously opened the door.

The room was empty.

Not only was the room empty, the table was gone, and the pool of blood on the floor had vanished. My bag and piece of chalk and flashlight were still there, but everything else was gone.

"Wait a minute—I… There was… He was right here! How could he… And the blood, it was right there—that table must have weighed a ton! How could he have moved it so quickly?"

"Madam," said the smaller of the two policemen, shining his flashlight right on my face. I heard him gasp as I turned away so I was in profile. "Madam," he said again, his voice a bit shaky. "Are you aware of the fact that it is a crime to call the police out on a nonemergency situation?"

"But…" I looked around the room, keeping my head tipped so they couldn't see directly into my eyes. There was nothing here but an empty room, two cops, and my bag of tricks. "He was here! I swear to you, he was here! Bleeding all over the place, and naked as the day he was born."

The taller policeman took a deep breath. It didn't take any psychic abilities to know I was in for a lecture. I gathered up my things as they took turns telling me what happened to tourists who turned in false alarms. By the time I explained what I was doing there, reiterated that I wasn't given to phoning in prank calls, and heard their second round of lecturing, they hustled me upstairs. I was more than willing to believe that I'd had some sort of weird episode in the inn, something related to its spectral inhabitants, and imagined everything with the handsome, if troubled, man.

Until I reached in my bag to pull out the key to lock the door behind us. Then I saw my notebook.

There were bloody fingerprints all over it.

I spent the rest of the night writing up my experience, in between watching the ghost cat sleep, groom itself, and hobble around the room poking into things. It didn't seem to be thrilled to see me, and after trying unsuccessfully to convince it to lie on the bed next to me (so I could take a picture of the two of us together), I ended up more or less ignoring it as it ignored me.

By the time dawn lightened the gray layer of clouds enough to indicate it was morning, I was exhausted and cranky, unsure whether I had witnessed some amazing spectral encounter with a ghost that could manifest a physical presence, or if I was delusional.

I fell asleep wishing the former. At least then I could touch him.

"No messages, Miss Telford," Tina the receptionist said that afternoon as she handed me the room key. I waited to see if she had anything else to add, anything along the lines of a complaint about the three-legged semitransparent feline that was inhabiting my room, but she just smiled and turned to deal with another customer.

"Curiouser and curiouser," I said as I limped over to the elevator, my bag clinking and rattling. I shifted it to the other shoulder and wished I were in a line of work that didn't require so much equipment, equipment that had to be taken everywhere, just in case it was needed. My day trip to a haunted abbey turned out to be one of the times when it was nothing more than a heavy albatross hanging off one shoulder. I punched the number for my floor, and wondered if the Summoning had faded enough to let the cat return to its previous existence. Maybe the maid hadn't seen the cat because it was gone.

"Oh, hello, kitty," I said as I unlocked my door. It was sitting on the windowsill, staring out the window. "I thought you'd gone. I'm glad to see you haven't, although…" I tugged on my lip. Between the tests I'd conducted early the evening before, and the ones I'd done during the dark hours of the night, I had about as much data as I could conceivably collect. Pictures, video, infrared and ultrasound readings, ion analysis, you name it, I had it, enough to give the analysts back at the office an orgasm. Perhaps it was time to Release the cat.