I'm still not reflected in the lockers. Someone pa.s.ses by, and Rebecca looks up at them. I take the opportunity to move a few inches away so I won't be so near the metal. She turns back and looks at me quizzically.

I splutter, "It's . . . mucus. I have all these springtime allergies, and I get all filled up with mucus. My stomach and things. All mucus."

She's smiling lightly. "Mucus? Are you sure? Not phlegm or sputum?"

"Mucus." I nod. "Yes."

"Okay. I'm serious, though, about calling me," she says. She goes to pat me on the arm.

I'm terrified her eyes will stray sideways. I stumble backward, yelp, "Bye!" and turn around and walk so fast that I'm almost running. I can feel her staring at me from behind, confused.

Later, I can't believe I didn't thank her more. Here she came forward and tried to help this big social pariah (i.e., me) and I didn't even thank her. I don't believe it.

I run home through the deserted factory, where no one will be looking for me in car window reflections, or in plate gla.s.s windows. I run home and lie on my bed until the danger is past, and I am once again in mirrors.

That night, I cannot sleep.

I stare groggily at the ceiling, and I can hear their pulses. It is probably my imagination, but I think I can hear my family's pulses spread throughout the house. A matrix of tiny pulses throughout the house, like the movements of mice. I lie there in what should be silence, hearing each different heart kick in contraction. And again. Again. Again.

I lie awake and listen to the clattering of hearts, this festival of cardiac bongos to which I'm not invited. I can hear them through the plasterboard.

I've got to see if it is me hallucinating.

I get up. I open the door to the hallway.

I pause for a moment with my hands resting on the sides of the door frame. A thin breeze crawls up the shapeless, grimy T-shirt I wore to bed and pats my belly.

I can feel their heartbeats all around me. My brother in his bedroom, my mother in her king-size bed, my father tonight in the guest bed, each room with its own distinctive beat.

I choose my brother's room. His pulse is youngest.

I pad over, my feet soft against the carpet.

The k.n.o.b grates as it turns, but I am so careful it is not loud. The tongue of the door clasp retracts like the end of a kiss, and the door swings wide.

Of course, I am not going to do anything. I am just going to prove to myself that I am only hallucinating, that I cannot honestly hear those pulses. That is all I am going to do.

I slip in. I close the door behind me. I will just check.

A few stripes of streetlamp light from between the slatted blinds run across Paul's rumpled bed. I take two paces forward.

Silence. Nothing but silence and the pa.s.sing of a car outside on the street and a high whine of fear in my own head.

It was nothing. Half-sleep. Wishful thinking. A frantic dream. Now there is no heartbeat.

I step to the edge of the bed. To take a closer look. He is tangled in his covers. One gross hairy leg juts out. A hand-held video game is half-trapped under his pillow.

I reach out slowly to touch his neck. I can see his throat flexing with each breath.

Why am I doing this? I ask myself in panic. I ask myself in panic.

I step closer to him. His neck flexes as he turns away, muscles rippling across the surface. He has a mole on his neck. Like a target.

Blood. I can feel the blood skating through his skin, dashing like light on water. The liveliness of mortal flesh.

I lean toward him. Just to take a closer look.

I can almost touch his neck with my tongue.

I crouch there.

Panicked.

His mouth is open idiotically. A slug's trail of drool leads onto his pillow.

I move my hands up to my mouth.

Cover it. Both hands.

Start backing up. Like a broken wind-up toy. Step by step. Toward the door.

Carefully undo the latch.

Go back to my room.

For a while, I just sag there against my bed, breathing raggedly.

He is still just a room away.

I was not going to do anything. Nothing like that. I just went in to check if the pulses were real. They were a dream. That's it. I just wanted to check about the pulses, though.

That was it.

On the wall there is a portrait of someone with no skin. They still look like they're smiling for the artist, but that may be because they have no cheeks.

The doctor is pulling my records. That's what he told me, at least. "Wait just a sec. Let me pull your records." So I am sitting in a backless tunic with my bare b.u.t.t on the paper of the table, swinging my legs, and I've read most of the April issue of Highlights for Children. Highlights for Children.

The doctor comes in again.

"Feeling chilly?" he says.

"I have no pants on," I reply.

"That's true," he says. "You don't like the tunic?"

"I feel like I'm dressed for a science fiction film," I say. "Maybe this is why the Star Trek Star Trek team always beams up with their backs to the wall." team always beams up with their backs to the wall."

He stares at me, frowning, and sits down. He opens the file. For a long time, he looks over the file.

The doctor looks up. "I've asked for your dental records to be faxed over from Dr. Shenko's office."

"I had a bad accident," I explain.

The doctor regards me coldly.

"I ran into a large object. And hurt myself."

"Chris," he says, "you know your parents are very concerned. They say you're not sleeping much and you've become very different to them."

I'm starting to feel uncomfortable.

He continues, "They say you've seemed very tired and cranky recently."

"It's just a phase," I say. I'm hoping to fool him. "I was wondering if I could have some advice about what to do with my hormones and things. The confusing changes that are going on in my body."

"Chris." He sizes me up. He is looking at me and wondering something. I don't know what. "Chris, has anyone approached you recently and said anything strange to you? Touched you in an unusual way?"

I stare back at him. I've got to move carefully. "No. Are you saying . . . ? No, I mean, I don't think so."

"Do you wear any religious symbols about your person?"

"No," I answer. "I had a cross, but I lost it swimming."

"Please think. Has anyone spoken to you recently in a language that did not seem human? Made pa.s.ses in the air near your body with their hands or any kind of unusual prop? Has anyone bitten you, Christopher? Not even just on the neck. These are all avenues of inquiry I'd like to explore."

"No. None of those."

"Has anything happened recently that you'd like to tell me about?" He looks almost like he's sneering. I can't calculate what's going on in his head, because I can't tell what he's like as a person. I try wildly to picture him at a cookout. I figure, if I can just picture him at a cookout, how he would smile and wave to people on a lawn and whether he would offer to work the grill, I can figure out what makes him tick, and I can give him the right answers.

I shrug. "No. What kinds of things?"

He's just looking at me. I feel very thin and naked and realize how awkward I am hunched over on the table with my ugly feet dangling and a copy of Highlights for Children Highlights for Children on my lap, open to Goofus and Gallant. on my lap, open to Goofus and Gallant.

He rolls his chair closer. He leans in toward me. Like a threat, he says in a whisper, "If anything - anything anything - strange . . . If anything strange happens to you." As he whispers low, one hand makes a sawing motion across the other. "If the slightest urge . . . If you have the slightest urge that you think might be unusual or unnatural . . . If that should happen, I want you to call me immediately. We'll come and pick you up. Do you understand, Christopher? You won't be hurt. It's for your own good. For your own good." - strange . . . If anything strange happens to you." As he whispers low, one hand makes a sawing motion across the other. "If the slightest urge . . . If you have the slightest urge that you think might be unusual or unnatural . . . If that should happen, I want you to call me immediately. We'll come and pick you up. Do you understand, Christopher? You won't be hurt. It's for your own good. For your own good."

I'm looking at his hands. His voice says, "Do you understand? For your own good." But his hand is sawing, and sawing, and sawing away at his fingers.

It is one week to the Sad Festival of Vampires.

In the city of Worcester, which is partially serviced by our reservoir, one day the water is turned to blood. There is no water anywhere in the northern part of the city. Faucets spit blood. Blood spatters out of spigots, splashes out of hoses to stain the bushes dark; gore begrimes stacks of greasy plates and shoots out of drinking fountains to make people gag.

Torrents of blood flow down drains and stain the gutters.

There are screams as it happens. People sobbing hysterically and grinding their b.l.o.o.d.y hands in dishtowels. People throwing up in restaurants. Sorcerers and psychics saying that it is a sign from G.o.d, an alien invasion, the anger of the Little People. I wish I could have been in Worcester.

It lasts for only an hour. Then sweet water flows. But by then, the damage is done.

The blood has clotted in the pipelines. Scabs five miles long.

Now I am sure. Chet is not coming. Tch'muchgar is coming. He is feeling his way into this world, preparing himself for the leap.

There is not much time left.

Darkness.

Down the street I walk. The streetlights are buzzing.

It is a hot night. People are cooped up in their houses. They are asleep, and I wonder if, even in sleep, they can tell they're cooped up, like zoo animals roused when they roll over against the bars.

I have to talk. I have to.

Rebecca Schwartz. Three o'clock is probably too late to drop by and shoot the breeze. But it is a warm night, and the thick leaves are restive and suggest to me that all the night is alive and I should be reveling in it.

If Rebecca were a vampire, if she were d.a.m.ned, we could be together. This is not a serious thought, but I think it anyway, how it would be for us to be together. We live in a high dark house in the woods; our walls hung with incomprehensible pieces of modern art by the friends we have and must leave when they notice that age does not wither us. At night, we stalk the grounds and lie together by the ebony fountain clogged with amber leaves. Sometimes we cry whole ages of darkness together because of our common sin, but there is no one else to whom we can turn, and so we understand each other completely. We know each strange motion that the other makes and what it means. As the eons pa.s.s, we come to be very genteel, and I am more suited to her and not so awkward all the time, and after a few centuries my athlete's foot clears up.

That all seems to make so much sense that I want to go speak to her now, and it takes me a moment to remember that I hardly even know her. That she would stare at me, aghast; that if she knew, she'd hate me and run inside and lock the door. That she is not my chilly queen of the night. That she wears jeans and loses her hair clips.

Tom I think about only briefly. I can't trust him.

So I head to Jerk's. Jerk may be Jerk, but he is the one person who is always loyal. He will always be loyal to me. I need to tell him and have him say that there's something we can do.

After a while, I reach his house. The lights are all off. There are bleached sand toys scattered around the front lawn. There's a wading pool with the hose dangling in it. I start to cross the lawn.

There's a low growl.

I look around, breathing the air in deeply. I see shrubs and a tree and the aluminum siding. Jerk's room is on the ground floor, but the window is around the back. The snarl comes again.

A dog is slinking toward me, growling like a crazy jackal.

"Bongo," I hiss. "Bongo."

He stops and shivers.

I look into his eyes.

I am so thirsty and so tired of all this. I'm tired of all this sneaking around and endless complaining. I want the d.a.m.n dog to get out of the way.

Carefully, I step toward it with my hands stretched out.

I find it cannot move. "Bongo," I repeat, quietly but coldly, almost like a warning. "Bongo. Bongo."

I take another step forward.

My hand shoots out and fastens on its head.

My thumb and pinkie slip down either side of its neck. I can feel the dog's pulse. I can feel the warmth of its blood. Its eyes are going wacko, shooting around looking for an escape. But its body can't move. My eyes are fixed on it. I know that if, for one second, I stop staring at it, it will start barking.

My saliva is running fast and thick. I can barely keep it in my mouth. I can feel this dog like a drink. Carefully, I rotate the head up. It tries to stop me, but my strength, I find, is great. I rotate the snout up by eighty degrees, until the dog is looking almost straight up. It is gulping with fear. I can see its throat flexing. I move my other hand, almost lovingly, to the soft down below its neck.