Sex and the Single Vampire

"What a cozy little scene this is," she said, drifting in through the closed door. "I always did like this room; it has the best view of the park. The room proper, that is, not the WC. Dear, a word of advice—women who do not have large bosoms should never hunch their shoulders forward. It minimizes, and you want to maximize."

I sank my minimized bosom below the water and considered continuing on until my head was under as well, but if I drowned in the tub, no doubt my spirit would be trapped with Esme's, and the thought of eternity with her raised goose bumps on my arms.

"Esme, I'm taking a bath," I said finally, water lapping at my chin. I waved my sponge around. "See? Water. Bubbles. Tub. Me."

"Oh, don't mind me, dear; I'll just make myself comfortable over here. Now, what shall we talk about? Oooh, is this your cosmetics bag? Now, cosmetics I know. Just let me look at what you have. I can advise you as to what colors will look good with your skin tone and… erm… eyes."

Just what I needed, a motherly ghost.

"No, no, this shade of eyeliner is all wrong for you. Well, it might be fine for the dark eye, but it's much too harsh for your white eye."

"It's not white; it's silver. Or gray, if you prefer. The doctor said my left eye is actually just an extremely light version of gray, while the right is ordinary brown."

Esme looked up from where she was poking through my cosmetics case. "Allie, dear, your eyes are anything but ordinary."

"Well, the left one is a bit spooky, but the right—"

"Has color variations that just aren't human."

I dropped my chin into the water and made a face into the bubbles, where she couldn't see it. While I'd heard comments like that all my life, it didn't make them hurt any less.

"Oh, my, now I've hurt your feelings. That was unkind of me, Allie; please accept my apology."

I lifted my chin so I could speak. "Esme, you're standing in my legs. While I know you don't feel anything, you're making me lose all feeling in my toes."

"I won't move until you tell me you forgive me for that unkind comment."

"I forgive you. Believe me, I've heard worse."

She stepped through the edge of the tub and patted my head, making my vision go squirrelly for a minute. "Don't listen to anything unkind that people tell you. It just shows they're jealous. And ignorant. That's what caused me to say that cruel thing, I'm ashamed to say. Why don't you tell me about your eyes, and then I'll understand."

I had to give her credit; she was truly sorry she'd said what she did. It was hard to stay hurt when she felt so bad about it. I explained about the heterochromia irides, and tried to leave it at that, but she prodded and pushed until I spilled how hard it was to grow up so obviously different from anyone else.

"But that just makes you unique, dear! You should celebrate your differences, not hide them!"

"Easy for you to say; it doesn't make people skittish when they see your eyes coming."

She smiled and winked. "Now that isn't in the least bit true."

I laughed at her mischievous face and reached for the towel as I got out of the tub. "Oh, trust me, I've heard tales about the ghost of room one-fourteen. I know you like to pop out at couples when they are arguing, and you have a tendency to rearrange towels."

She made a little moue. "Girls these days have no idea how to properly fold a towel."

Eventually I managed to impress Esme with the fact that I needed to sleep, and she faded off into the nothingness that I gathered was a ghost's state of sleep. Before she dissolved away, I begged her to not bother the maid when she came in later to clean the room. She fussed about that for a bit, but in the end promised that she would make no untoward appearances.

Six hours later I was heading out the door to meet with the hermit. The SIP office had been reticent to give me her name and number (at least I knew it was a woman now), but promised to pass along my information. Ten minutes after I'd hung up, the hermit called and made an appointment to meet me at the British Library.

"I thought the whole purpose of a hermit was that they shut themselves away from everyone, not gallivanted around one of the most popular research libraries in the world," I told the then-quiet room. It didn't answer back.

The British Library is now housed in a huge building at St. Pancras, more than fourteen floors of books, manuscripts, periodicals, and other literary items. I had arranged to meet the hermit in the John Ritblat Gallery (which contains, amongst other things, the Magna Carta), as I didn't have a reader's card and couldn't access the reading rooms.

I wandered through the gallery looking at the missals and Leonardo da Vinci's notebook, and was about to join a demonstration of what a scribe's workshop was like when a middle-aged woman in a tweed skirt and jacket approached me.

"Allegra Telford? I'm Phillippa. I spoke with you this morning."