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Tutankhamen’s tomb. The columns were gilded and decorated with acanthus leaves, and Egyptian hieroglyphs had been painted all over the walls. It was also dark and smelly and the tiled floor was gritty and wet, so that our boots made a scrunching noise.
    “Frank?” called Corporal Little.
    Frank turned around, and we saw his yellow eyes reflected in our flashlights, like some kind of hound from hell.
    “
There
,” said Corporal Little.
    Cowering in the corner, one hand clinging on to the bars of an elephant pen, the other hand raised to shield his face from my flashlight, sat a Screecher. He was tall and emaciated, with thinning brown hair, and a pallid, bony face. He was wearing a dirty gray overcoat with a deluge of brown stains down the front of it, and a cheap brown business suit, and his shoes had holes in the soles. Most people would have passed him on the street without a second glance, but Corporal Little and I had seen enough Screechers to recognize him immediately for what he was. It was the way he couldn’t look directly at the light, and the way that his eyeballs kept darting from side to side, like cockroaches. He looked anxious and scheming, rather than terrified. Like most of the Screechers we’d encountered, he obviously believed that humans couldn’t kill him, no matter what we did to him, but he did know that we could hurt him. What he was looking for with his shifty little eyes was a way to escape.
    “Well, well,” I said, walking right up to him. I sniffed, and I could smell the unmistakable odor of rotting poultry and dried dill. “Where are your friends, then?”
    He said nothing, so I holstered my .45, knelt down on the floor and opened up the Kit. I took out the shiny silver mirror and held it up at an angle so that I could see his face in it. Contrary to what you’ve seen in the movies or read about in
Dracula
, Screechers are clearly visible in mirrors. The only difference is that pure silver doesn’t reflect evil, so the mirror showed me the Screecher as he used to be, before he was infected.
    Sometimes, of course, you can make a mistake, and a smelly, homely-looking character that you suspected of being a Screecher looks just as homely in the mirror. In that case you apologize and let him go on his way without banging nails into his eyes. But what I saw in the mirror that night at the Antwerpse Zoo was a good-looking young man in his midthirties with wide-apart eyes and a heavy jaw. He looked German, or Austrian, or maybe Swiss.
    “
Wo sind deinen Freunden?
” I repeated, waving my flashlight from side to side to dazzle him. “If you tell me where your friends are, I might be able to save your life. If you don’t, then I won’t have any choice. I’ll have to kill you, here and now.”
    The Screecher kept his hands held up in front of his face, and didn’t answer me. Frank barked at him, but even Frank was sensible enough not to go too close. The Screecher may have looked like a down-and-out, but I knew from experience that he was quite capable of ripping Frank’s head off with his bare hands.
    “I’m giving you one last chance,” I said, in German. I took out my pistol again, and pointed it directly at his heart. “We can save you . . . give you back the life you used to have before. Think of it, your family, yoursweetheart. All you have to do is tell us where your friends are.”
    I was lying, of course. I didn’t know if it was possible to return a Screecher to normality, even if we were to give him a massive blood transfusion. We had never tried. Every Screecher by his very nature had committed mass murder, so we had never had much incentive.
    “OK, then,” I told him. I cocked my pistol and gripped it with both hands. Even if I hit him directly in the heart it wouldn’t kill him, but it would stop him long enough for us to put the thumbscrews on him, and prevent him from escaping.
    I was just about to fire when the Screecher suddenly performed a backward somersault.