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rings stroked my hair nervously. “Do you know why, my Char?”
    “No,” I murmured. “Tell me.”
    “You are a great beauty. Do you know it?”
    I gazed up at his face. It was so perfectly chiseled,as if carved from stone. So white, waxy, masklike in this light. I didn’t know what he was yet, but I was beginning to understand. They say that vampires aren’t real, that they are a myth that came about during the time of cholera, when the dehydrated bodies looked as if they’d been drained by a beast, but I had always believed in monsters. William was beautiful, too, but he was also something more than that, something ghoulish, although I didn’t realize the extent of it. We continued to glide through the red water. He glared at the setting sun. Night was coming, and then he would relax. He was always less agitated in the dark.
    “My beauty doesn’t matter,” I said. “Charles was taken from me because he was too beautiful. Not of this world. Maybe the fallen angels stole him. Because any god worth believing in never would.”
    “You are too beautiful for this world,” he said. “You are perfect, even in your sorrow. Even without your brother.”
    “I am nothing without him.”
    “Listen, listen. I didn’t tell you the answer to my question. Maybe you are right about Charles. The fallen angels chose only the most beautiful humans to be their disciples because it was an even greater insult to God.”
    “Fallen angels,” I said. “Is that what you are?”
    He smiled, but he did not answer.
     
    We were in Rome when we finally succumbed. I say “we” because it seems to me that it was something we did together in Rome in the dark. Something both of us wanted at that time. I had figured out what Wiliam was and I wanted to join him. How can you not succumb to such a desire in Rome, in the dark with a fountain spurting outside your window, the shadows long from the white moon?
    I was like that moon to William’s demon sun. “The moon does not really emit light at all,” my father had told me. “It is the sun that is so bright.”
    I thought of these words as I entered William Stone Eliot’s chamber. It had been easy to get away. Gwendolyn Doolittle, my chaperone, was fast asleep. She and her husband had fallen under William’s spell. There was no furniture in William’s room; only the long black box. There was no one to protect me. From William Eliot. And, perhaps more relevantly, from myself. Maybe the dark trick of being changed into a vampire is not something that is wholly done to you. Is it something that comes when called by the subconscious? Thoughts are powerful. They can bring love. They can bring death. They can bring death in the guise of love, a dark-haired man in heavy trousers and a linen nightshirt less white than his skin, who bows his head to your breast, and bares, and punctures, and ruptures and drains until you are empty and he is full. Then death/love offers you his wrist and you drink until the reverse is true.

The Philosophical Egg
    W hy had William returned? Why now, so soon after Emily’s death? How had he found me? But more important, why? Was he going to try to take me away with him? I remembered when he and I last lived in Los Angeles together. It was 1994, the year of the Northridge earthquake. We were in a ranch house in Laurel Canyon at the time. It sprawled, multileveled, down the side of a smoggy, wild-flowered hillside. At about four thirty in the morningwe woke in a storm of glass.
    William mumbled, “Oh, fuck,” and went back to sleep. I stumbled around in my bare feet, picking up shards of windows and picture frames. Later William watched the destruction on TV, and he wanted to drive around and look at it, too. I remember the story of one old woman who was crushed to death by a chest of drawers. I kept thinking of her. There’s usually one who stands out in each disaster. One whose face I remember.
    After the earthquake we didn’t bother to fix the windows. We