“Well, you melt down the silver…”

“In what? You have an electric crucible somewhere? I don’t. I haven’t seen one since I toured the engineering lab back in college.”

Elias thought, and suggested, “What about an oven? I mean, how hot… no, I guess not, huh?”

“Ever left silverware in the oven?”

“No, and besides, ours isn’t silver, it’s stainless steel, but I get your point. But we could get…”

“And what about a mold?” Smith said, interrupting.

“Well, I don’t have one, but aren’t there hobbyists who make their own bullets?”

“Sure, there are – but I’m not one of them, and neither are you, and I don’t know where to find them, and doesn’t it seem to you that this is all going to one hell of a lot of trouble and expense for something neither of us really believes will work?”

Elias opened his mouth, then closed it again. Smith turned onto Diamond Park Avenue.

“You don’t think it’ll work?” Elias asked at last.

Smith shook his head. “I don’t know. I saw those wounds close up, and I don’t see why it would make any difference if the bullets had been silver instead of lead. I mean, they went right through.”

Elias didn’t answer, and after a moment Smith looked over to see what his passenger was doing.

Elias was staring at him, that was what he was doing.

“What’s your problem?” Smith snapped.

“They went right through?” Elias asked. “What… I mean, what happened? You didn’t say, and I’d sort of thought that the bullets just, you know, vanished, like in the movies or something…”

Smith snorted. His terror was completely gone now, worn away by the reassuring normality of driving. “I keep telling you, this isn’t some damn horror movie!” he said.

He drove on for a moment, then continued, “I shot it twice. The first time the bullet went through its chest, not right in the center, but up toward the right shoulder, and it came out the back and ricocheted around the stairwell. It left a hole in the shirt and… and the skin, and this grey slimy stuff filled up the hole and sealed it, like… like caulk or something. Then I thought it was going to kill me, so I fired again, and got it in the throat, and that one… well, I aimed high, or it got deflected or something, and went out through the skylight.”

“And that one closed up the same way?”

Smith nodded. “Exactly the same. Except I think maybe its voice sounded a little different afterward. And then I ran for it, and there was another one on the stairs but I got past it okay.”

“God,” Elias said, “you must’ve been scared shitless. How did… what did it do when you shot it?”

Smith shuddered at the memory. “It smiled at me, with those teeth.”

“God,” Elias repeated.

“Yeah,” Smith agreed. “Let’s take the gun back where we got it, all right?”

“All right,” Elias agreed. He glanced down regretfully at the pistol, lying on the floor of the car.

Smith reviewed the afternoon’s events, trying to recall if there was anything else he should tell Elias. Something occurred to him, not to tell, but to ask. “Hey,” he said, “Why’d you beep the horn?”

“Oh,” Elias said, “Well, that was because I thought I saw something climbing out of your bedroom window.”

“What?”

“Yeah, something climbed out. It didn’t look human, exactly, sort of like a big spider. It climbed down and then it went into one of the windows the next floor down. I didn’t really get a good look at it, and it was gone by the time you came to the window, so I figured it was too late to do anything about it.”

Smith blinked, and puzzled over that, trying to make it make sense.

The idea that came to mind at once was that the thing that had been in his apartment when Einar called actually had been there today, and had somehow slipped out the window and gotten away, so as not to confront him.

But why didn’t it want to confront him?

And Elias said it had looked like a spider, not like a person, when it crawled down the side of the building.

Could the things change shape?

Like vampires?

And what could kill them, if bullets couldn’t? Holy water? A stake through the heart? Sunlight couldn’t, obviously, although they didn’t really seem to like it much.

Had that thing he met on the stairs been his own familiar haunt, coming back up the steps by more normal means to investigate the gunshots?

He had so many questions, and so few answers, and no way to learn more.

Or was there really no way?

He was considering this as he pulled up in front of the Samaan house on Amber Crescent.

There might be one way to find out more about the things.

He could ask them.

5.

He drove back to the motel alone. He had told Elias to call if he had any news, or any ideas about how the creatures could be fought – but right now, he had no idea what the two of them could do, so there was no point in driving about aimlessly together.

Elias had agreed, a bit reluctantly.

They had to know more about the things before they could fight them effectively, that was all there was to it.

Once he was back in his motel room, he first checked to make sure that the maid hadn’t disturbed any of his belongings.

She hadn’t, nor had anyone else.

Reassured, he sat down on the bed and reached for the phone. He took a deep breath, and then dialed his own number.

He held the receiver to his ear. He heard the buzz that meant the phone in his apartment was ringing, and then someone picked up.

“Hello?” said a voice, a voice that was oddly familiar. He thought for a moment, and realized that it sounded not like his own voice as he ordinarily heard it, but as he had heard it on recordings. When he had called his own phone at work to test the answering machine, his taped message had sounded exactly like this.

It must be how he sounded to other people. The thing had his voice.

“Hello,” Smith said, “Who is this?”

“You dialed this number,” that familiar voice said. “Don’t you know who I am?”

Smith could almost hear the creature smirking.

“Yeah,” he said, “I know who you are, I guess. Or at least who you’re pretending to be. I don’t know what you are, though.”

The thing on the other end of the line snickered.

It was a really hideous snicker. Smith wondered if he ever sounded like that when he laughed; he fervently hoped not. He hesitated, trying to think how he should phrase his questions, how he could get the nightmare to tell him what he wanted to know.

The snickering died away, and the silence grew awkward, but Smith couldn’t get his questions out.

“Did you want something?” the thing asked at last, “or did you just call to taunt me?”

Smith blinked. “Taunt you?” he asked.

“I shouldn’t have said that,” the creature said hastily.

“But you did say it,” Smith said. “What do you mean, taunt you?”

“With the fact that you’re still alive, of course. I should have gotten you on Lammas Night. Damn stupid air conditioner!”

Hearing his own voice say that sent a chill down Smith’s spine. “I…” he began, then froze.

A thought trickled into the back of his mind – who was taunting whom? The creature might well be very much aware of the effect its words created, the revulsion its seemingly casual manner evoked.

Did it take pleasure in scaring him? Did it draw some sort of sustenance from terror?

Could it feed on emotion, like the monsters in some of the stories he’d read, or seen on Star Trek? “Vampire,” Smith muttered. Maybe Elias was right with his theories about the vampire legends.

“What did you say?” the voice on the phone asked eagerly.

“Nothing,” Smith said, his voice catching in his throat.

“Sounded like you said something,” the creature insisted. “Sounded like ‘vampire.’”

Smith hesitated. Then he asked, “Are you?”