The Mammoth Book Of Vampire Stories Written By Women

"Rupert Wyndham-Hayes." He shakes my hand half-heartedly. His cigarette is finished so I offer him another, a slim French one from a silver case. He accepts. I light it for him — an intimate gesture and he sits back, blowing smoke in sulky pleasure. "Over from Paris, one assumes? First visit?"

"I have been here before," I reply. "London always draws me back."

He makes a sneering sound. "I should prefer to be in Paris. Funny how we always want what we haven't got."

"What is preventing you from going to Paris, Rupert?"

I look into his eyes. He doesn't seem to notice that I am not smoking. He sees something special in me, a kindred soul, someone who will understand him.

He calls the waiter and orders drinks, although I tip mine into his while he isn't looking. Presently his story comes tumbling out. A family seat in the country, a father who is proud and wealthy and mean. Mother long dead. Rupert the only son, the only child, with a vast freight of expectations on his shoulders. But he has disappointed his father in everything.

"All the things he wanted me to be — I can't do it. I was to be a scholar, an officer, a cabinet minister. Worthy of him. Married to some earl's daughter. That's how he saw me. But I let him down. I tried and failed; gods, how I tried! Finally something snapped, and I refused to dance to his tune any longer. Now he hates me. Because what I truly am is an artist. The only thing I can do, the only thing I've ever wanted to do, is to paint!"

He takes a fierce drag on his cigarette. His eyes burn with resentment.

"Isn't your father proud that you have this talent?"

"Proud?" he spits. "He despises me for it! Says I'll end up in the gutter."

"Why don't you leave?" I speak softly and I am paying more attention to the movement of his tender throat than to his words. "Go to Montmartre, be an artist. Prove the old man wrong."

"It's not that easy. There's this girl, Meg"

"Take her with you."

"That's just it. I can't. She's the gardener's daughter. My father employs her as a maid. D'you see? Not content with being a failure at everything else, I go and fall in love with a common servant. So now the old man tells me that if I don't give her up and toe the line, he'll disinherit me! And Meg's refusing to see me. Says she's afraid of my father. Damn him!"

I have not been a vampire so very long. I still recall how hopeless such dilemmas seem to humans. "That's terrible."

"Vindictive old swine! I'll lose her and I'll be penniless! He can't do this to me!"

"What will you do about it, Rupert?"

He glares down into his whisky. How alluring he looks in his wretchedness. "I wish the old bastard would die tomorrow. That would solve all my problems. I'd like to kill him!"

"Will you?"

He sighs. "If only I had the guts! But I haven't."

So I smile. I rest my hand on his, and he is too numb with whisky to feel the coldness of my fingertips. I have thought of something more interesting to do than just take him outside and drain him.

"I'll do it for you."

"What?" His eyes grow huge.

I should explain, I am poor. It seems so cheap to go through the pockets of my victims like a petty thief. I do it anyway, but it yields little reward. The wealth I crave, in order to live in the style a vampire deserves, is harder to come by.

"Give me a share of your inheritance and I'll kill him for you. No one will ever link the crime to you. Natural causes, they'll say."

His breathing quickens. His hands shake. Does he know what I am? Yes and no. Look into our eyes and a veil lifts in your mind and you step into a dream where anything is possible. "My God," he says, over and over. "My God." And at last, with a wild light in his eyes, "Yes. Quickly, Antoine, before he has a chance to change his will. Do it!"

I am standing in the garden, looking up at the house.

It's an impressive pile, but ugly. Grey-brown stone, stained and pitted by the weather, squatting in a large, bleak estate. A sweep of gravel leads to a crumbling portico. No flowerbeds to soften the walls, only prickly shrubs. It's tidy enough but no love, no imagination and no money have been lavished upon it for many a cold year.

In the autumn twilight I traverse the lawns to the rear of the house. The gardens, too, are austere and formal, with clipped hedges standing like soldiers on flat stretches of grass. But there are chestnut and elm and beech trees to add sombre grandeur to the landscape. Brown leaves are scattered on the ground. The gardener has raked them into piles and I smell that English autumn scent of bonfires and wet grass.

Somewhere behind the windows of the house sits the father, the rat in his lair, Daniel Wyndham-Hayes.

It's growing dark. Rooks are gathering in the treetops. I am taking my time, savouring the experience, when a figure in a long black overcoat steps out of the blue darkness and comes towards me.

"Antoine, what are you doing?"