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energy ensuring that I would have somewhere to live and things to live by.
    The tunnel and the other chambers, the stairs to the floor of the crypt, all were much the same then as they are now. I have added furniture and comforts, most of them removed from the church above during our long shared history, but much was already there.
    Yet for all the efforts that had been made on my behalf, no word had been left for me, no guide to tell me what I’d now become or how I would live, what powers were mine, what dangers lay ahead. As I look back, I can only conclude that my ignorance, too, was part of the design, that it was always intended I should find my own way.
    As I bathed in my pool for the first time, I slowly began to take note of the changes that had taken place in my person. For one, the functions of my body seemed somehow suspended. I felt no hunger for food. Nor, for all my exertions in freeing myself, was there any odor about me.
    My hair and nails and my canine teeth had all grown, though the rest of me remained as on the day I’d fallen sick. And then I saw the source of my sickness, the faint scars on the inside of my forearm where once there had clearly been puncture wounds, as if some animal had bitten me.
    I rubbed at the wound, which was already a ghost of itself and has now long since disappeared. Then I bit lightly on the back of my hand and saw the indentations left by my own teeth. I understood immediately that I had not been bitten by an animal, but by a person, and that whatever kind of person had bitten me, so that was the kind of person I had now become.
    I had been made a demon, that was how it seemed to me, and I thought back to the strange atmosphere that had pervaded the city on the night the witches burned and in the weeks building up to it. It was as if the Devil himself had walked abroad that night and taken me for one of his own.
    Many centuries passed before I first saw references to my own kind. Much of the detail was wrong, and is wrong even to this day, but there could be no mistake that the superstitions and Gothic stories referred to people who had been struck down by this very same sickness.
    I do not like the name vampire —it seems so melodramatic, so fanciful. I have long preferred the word undead , and have thought of myself in that way for at least two hundred years. Is it not what I am? I have been treated as someone dead—buried, my death recorded—yet here I am, still alive, suspended in time.
    I am the undead Earl of Mercia. I try to live as well as I can under difficult circumstances. I didn’t choose to be this way, and for most of what I can only call “my life” I considered it no more than an unfortunate accident—only now am I coming to understand that although I did not choose to be undead, I was indeed chosen.
    In the time after my first awakening, I thought it would be a matter of only days or weeks before I met the demon who’d so chosen me, who’d punctured my flesh and infected me with sickness. When he did not appear, I came to believe that I was of no interest to him, that he had selected me at random, but I still lived in the hope that one day we would encounter each other.
    But we didn’t. The centuries progressed and I must confess I often harbored violent fantasies about this creature. I imagined countless ways in which I might repay him for the torment I have suffered.
    Even now, with the promise that this was not all for nothing, that my curse has been part of some greater plan, I pray that the discomfort in my arm is a portent, telling me that I will soon meet him whose actions sentenced me to this eternal half-life.
    And I think I must kill him if I am able, if for nothing else, for my honor and the honor of my family. But above all, even above the need for revenge, I wish to ask him one simple question: why? Why me? Why then? Why all of this?

6
    The church was not in total darkness. There were no lights on