With a matter of days between himself and the death match, anxieties began to plague Jared in force. He went over—and over—what he knew. He had in his arsenal a silver necklace—

—which barely does anything—

—a bag full of talismans—

—mostly untested—

—an evil-warding string—

—which doesn't keep me from getting the shit beat outta me—

—a newly found faith—

—God help me—

—and a few observations.

The vampire came out after dark. It could climb walls and ceilings. It had superhuman strength and remarkable speed. Hot weather didn't seem to bother it, or at any rate to affect its choice of dress. Silver was at least annoying, not that he had the money for that. Punching was ineffectual. Possible additional strengths included shapeshifting, command of weather and animals, and turning to mist. Possible weaknesses included crossing running water, entering homes uninvited, things he didn't have, and a stake to the heart.

The vampire, apparently unsettled, had retreated in the face of the Seal of Solomon, but the more Jared thought about their respective assets, the less of a match he felt. Amid the less useful and more graphic questions that swirled in his mind came a few actionable ones, and so it was that he began to look more than usually forward to Friday, and to seeing Aunt Judy.

As for Suzanne's "vampire cover-up" files, she wasn't letting him anywhere near them. They were all needed, she claimed, for her follow-up article, which he would get to edit soon enough.

But as the days went by, sitting idly by was sitting poorly with him. Should he go to see Judy before Friday? What if there wasn't enough time to talk after dinner? What if she didn't have anything further to tell him that could help? What if she imparted knowledge of some obscure weapon or protection that he needed more than a day to find? What if she got sick and he couldn't see her at all before the fight?

Shut up! It's not like you even hafta go.

But somebody had to take care of this.

Sue's mood deteriorated along with his, with each passing day she was unable to find the informant for her promised article. As far as Jared was concerned, she wasn't by any means the canniest can in the pantry, but she had quickly reached the most paranoid conclusion, and for once, he suspected, she was right. A vampire had buried her lead.

Come Thursday morning she couldn't put off editing any longer, and grudgingly handed her work over to Jared. He popped in the floppy disk and surveyed the document. Judging by the resulting article, those files weren't going to be very useful. At the very least there was nothing, or so he hoped, that risked bringing the vampire back to their door.

Beginning with a recap of last week, it descended into pointed intimations on the fate of the missing eyewitness, followed by speculation on New York City vampire culture and snippets from a string of reported sightings, and concluded with a call for vigilance around ambulances and vampires in general. Of the incidents expounded on, based on Jared's experience, most were pure fantasy, while at least one sounded like nothing more than an altercation with a Goth. There were a few assaults by tall, pale figures, disappearing at the approach of a passerby, and several much older anecdotes, these from around the country and the world, of the bodies of those fallen to disease being sighted up and out of their tombs, followed by further deaths. The steps taken to seal these revenants ranged from cramming bricks in their mouths to cutting out their hearts and burning them. The last account made no direct mention of vampires but related only to an urban legend around a phantom ambulance.

Jared went to find her at her desk.

"Hey Sue."

"Hey..." She was busy scrounging for stock photos on a CD.

"Can I see those files now?"

She looked up at him. "The vampire files? Why do you need them?"

"I just, uh, I was wondering about some details. Like the ambulance sightings. ...where were those?"

Sue shook her head, her ponytail bouncing. "That was off some internet forum. I reached out to the guy, but he never got back." She scowled at the reminder of this further setback, then her eyes widened. "Ohmigod. They silenced him too!"

"Uh, can I see those files anyway?"

"Yeah, whatever." She waved at a folder on a stack beside her and waved him off, her attention elsewhere.

Retreating to his desk, Jared set to work finishing his editing tasks. Sue stopped by with a revision on the probable fate of the ambulance mythographer. The day wore on as he struggled to untangle her sentences, the text festooned with red squiggles she hadn't seen fit to correct.

Maybe she's colorblind...

Switching to work on Lou's articles gave him greater coherence and less experimental spelling at the cost of a more pronounced moral dilemma—if Sue's writing sounded like it came from under a tinfoil hat in a bunker, Lou's, despite being akin in subject matter, sounded like it came from under the baseball cap across the table. Rife with sports metaphors and written in an easy tone, it reminded you that it really wasn't unreasonable to think that the government could be hiding things, or that there could be truth in minority opinion. Finding the flaws in Lou's arguments, Jared thought, required a lack of blind trust in Lou, a lack of blind distrust in institutions, and critical thinking skills. He often wondered if it wouldn't be better to leave some of the misspellings in, to help forestall any sense of credibility in the paper.

When at last the editing was finished, he delivered the articles to Lou's office for the final review before publication. Lou acknowledged the disk with a grunt, then, as he turned to leave:

"Stern."

"Yeah?"

"You, ah, going to the beach this weekend?"

Jared turned back to stare at him. "Uh, no, actually, not this weekend. Next Saturday, seems like. ...you were invited?" he added, wondering whether Rose and Lou were back together again. It could be hard to keep up.

"You look like you could use some time to unwind is all."

The mechanical nature of this utterance, along with its trampling of his question and entirely out-of-character presumption of sympathy for him made Jared conclude it had been constructed to excuse Lou's prying.

"Y'know, you're right. I should take care before going to the beach party. It'd be bad to wind up crashing."

"Out."

Jared obliged.

The next couple of hours he spent going over the vampire files. There was a surprising amount of material, although most of it Sue had printed off the internet, and most of that looked to be from the sorts of sites his attempts at research inevitably turned up. He flipped through the garishly hued pages, imagining the scrolling text, the streams of confetti (or in this case, perhaps, blood droplets) billowing after the cursor, before beginning to read in earnest.

To the top of the stack Sue had added a printout on sightings of a suspicious ambulance, recent and without mention of vampires. A one-off comment in a forum, possibly intended as a joke, on a modern urban legend, a sort of ghost train known to appear and disappear in a nonresidential area without a hospital nearby, but not mentioning the area by name.

Beneath that was the vampire material. The vampire may not have been exaggerating in its claim that it disappeared those who "noticed" it, but a lack of physical evidence had never stopped folks from noticing boogeymen. Most of the accounts were very short, and most of those had little substance. Remembering to temper his skepticism, he considered that any of them might be legitimate, but at any rate they didn't feature the vampire he was after, and provided no insight besides. Among the ones he could conceivably credit, however, he found one that gave him pause—a photograph of a microfilm newspaper article, taken from a gazette published in the early 1800s. The print was barely legible, cramped and faded in places, and made worse by the fact that some of the lowercase s's were difficult to distinguish from the lowercase f's. He tried not to read it with a lisp.

HORRIBLE SAVAGE MURDERS

Our readers will recollect how ſome time ago the ſleepy countryſide that lies off the Wallabout was ſhaken awake by a crime without parallel in the hiſtory of civilized man : the butchering of ſome dozen perſons in a ſlaughter which is ſuppoſed, by the witneſſes who eſcaped diſaſter, to have been cauſed by a ſingle man.   And what a horrid ſpectacle was to be encountered by the militia that was raiſed !   Men, women, and children, their throats punctured and torn from ear to ear as if by the fangs and claws of an enormous beaſt, and the cornfields ſo ſodden with blood it yet pooled in places where the ground could not receive it.   There has ſince been ſome renewal of ſuch antiquated concerns as witchcraft and vampires, and other ſuch bloodſuckers, but the affair remains enveloped in myſtery, and the law has as yet no evidence upon which to apprehend the perpetrator or perpetrators of this ferocious depravity.   It is further reported that ſome of the corn harveſt of the year is marked by a ſanguine hue.

Jared laid off squinting at the text and scratched his neck. He found the article gruesome, but it didn't scream vampire, fang marks or no—why would a vampire cover a cornfield in blood instead of drinking it?

Some psycho killer?

Working with Sue had taught him a thing or two about sensationalism, but if half of this were true...

It musta been a huge scoop. There gotta be more articles.

He made note of the date and publication scrawled on the back of the photograph and went back to the rest of the stack.

More underwhelming or over-the-top sightings. Some enthusiastic necking at a bar, an encounter with Dracula dated October 31st. He noted with interest there were a couple of articles on the disappearance of a woman investigating human vampires—people who take blood or "energy" from willing donors to maintain their health. None of these had been implicated in the disappearance, however, as the community was deemed harmless.

Another item caught his attention. It was a printout of a page from a website, taken up by a grainy photocopy of a passage from an old book. The title "The Vampyre" headed the page, followed by some commentary about a compendium of diary entries collected by a son, among which a particular page had stood out, rendered below. The print on the image was too small to read easily. He went back to Sue's desk.

"Where'd you find this?" He held up the paper.

She turned to stare at him. "What are you still doing here?"

"Reading some corny stuff. Where'd you find this?"

She glanced at the page. "I dunno. Some online diary. Search for it."

He padded back to his desk and pulled up a search engine. Multiple reworded questions later, he found the page. It was on the website of a doctoral student working on a thesis on German immigration and U.S. internment during the Second World War, who had taken to posting interesting trivia and tidbits, many quite morbid in nature, documenting her journey through the public and private libraries. He zoomed in on the morbid tidbit in question.

November 30

To-day a most singular event occurred.  We were out with the dogs in the east wood, when they came upon a patch of disturbed earth.  I should have thought little of it, and made to ride on, but Prinz was adamant, whining, pawing and snuffling and ignoring my commands.  So, I had a few of the men excavate the patch.  It was slow going, and Kanstein, who had dismounted and was pacing about impatient as ever, began to complain of cold.  The men found nothing, digging down, and wanted to give up, but Prinz was so attendant on the work I ordered them continue.  One of the shovels made a peculiar sound, and on inspection von Hassell began shouting and had to retire.  Acker was also an embarrassment, though at least he managed to help get the thing in the open.  Only Kanstein managed to keep his head.  A corpse, in my woods!  And the smell—!  They had mangled it in the uncovering, but they scarcely could have done such damage as it presented.  The throat was torn out entirely, the shoulders lacerated and the arms chewed and clawed as if by a large animal and the skin pale for one of that race.  The clothes, such as they were, were soaked with blood.  One has come to expect a lack of civility from this country, yet it would be difficult to imagine such animal savagery from a man.*  Such brutality may be necessary in the world, and yet it need not find itself on my grounds.  It simply was such an outrage as should remain buried.

Jared grimaced. It offended him on more than one level, but this one didn't scream vampire either. The post's title may have been tongue-in-cheek, though of course Sue hadn't taken it as such. He read on down the webpage, where another asterisk attached the translated footnote: "*But not, perhaps, impossible. Some men have too much ice in their souls to be troubled by the cold. On a visit to the site after rumor of it spread, no body was to be found."

A man not bothered by the cold? Resistance to weather...?

Jared copied down the book's title and location. The Weiss Diaries. The Brooklyn Public Library. He glanced at the clock. The library would be closed by the time he got there. On Friday he wouldn't have time to go between work and Judy's, and on Saturday he'd be otherwise occupied. On the off chance it held anything useful, he'd have to do without. He pored over the remaining files, but finding nothing else of interest, Jared stuffed the promising material in his satchel and the rest back in the folder and headed for the door.

✶✝✶✝✶✝✶✝✶✝✶✝✶✝✶✝✶✝✶✝

Since he'd been small Jared had always looked forward to Fridays at Judy's. While the adults talked he'd be set in front of a pile of children's books, able to read and avoid his father's attention. When Meyer Stern had stopped coming, he had Judy to himself, and she would regale him with stories of the patriarchs' adventures before dinner. Once he got older, she promised, he could read of them himself, indicating the mysterious tomes that stacked her shelves, with the aroma of old books wafting off them.

But they had only ever been stories to him.

He had liked the dinners somewhat less, with their host of strange adults and their often patronizing questions, often posed in Yiddish, making him strain to understand. His mother, to whom the language came less readily, had stopped coming even before his father. She was more disconnected from their heritage than he was, and though she'd been happy enough to name him "Yared," her interest in Stern family tradition had waned with his father's business prospects, as the bookstore fell on hard times. So Jared came with Meyer, and then he came alone.

For he loved to hear them sing. The darkness of the apartment driven out into the corners as Judy lit the candles, her friends' voices harmonizing with hers. And his own voice, rising up with them, first high and uncertain, later deep and strong. The pouring of the wine and the blessing of the bread in the flickering candlelight, a portion salted and cut and passed down to him.

Shabbos dinners were a fixed point in his life, a connection bound in ritual and song joining every prior such into the present one, back along the spiral of time. He was a boy again, while still a man, and though the faces around him had changed, in this moment they were all again together as they had been.

Tonight, Jared was distant over dinner and the chatter following, his mind jumping forward to tomorrow's confrontation at the plant. The vampire files hadn't yielded much—they might, but now he didn't have time to find out.

I screwed up. I shoulda started looking stuff up sooner.

If he could use the Seal of Solomon to keep the creature at bay, then corner it, maybe he could get in close with a stake, but how to get around the wall climbing? Needing two hands to hammer a stake? How could he deal with all those powers? He needed something more.

Jared hung back as the other guests left.

Judy saw the last friend off, then turned to him. "Yared?"

"I, uh, I had some questions."

"Of course!"

"Some of the charms you gave me, you said were for blocking demons. Whaddaya know about demons? Are there specific types of demons? Are there other ways of stopping them?"

She held up her hands. "One thing at a time."

"Sorry. I just—whaddaya know about demons?"

"Demons? Yared, what is this about?"

"I just—I feel like this whole world's opening up to me. There's so much I don't know."

"Faith...can bring questions."

"It's like I don't even know what might be real. I just wanna learn about everything."

"Well, I can tell you demons aren't real. Not in the sense of beings that go about possessing people or squatting on them in the night, at any rate. They're just folklore."

"I'm interested in folklore. D'ya know much about it?"

She pursed her lips. "Well, I...know some things. But it's all just stories, you understand. It's not as if there's some cohesive truth to it."

"Right, yeah. I'm just curious."

She shook her head and motioned him to a seat. He perched on the edge.

"What do you want to know?"

"What kinds of monsters are there? How d'ya get rid of them?"

Judy nestled into an armchair, the amber light of the candles glimmering on the rims of her spectacles. "Well I don't know about 'monsters,' but a dybbuk comes to mind. A lost soul, you know, trapped in this world by the weight of its sins, that possess another sinner's body."

"It's like a ghost?"

"Like a ghost. The typical approach for getting rid of a dybbuk would be to perform an exorcism. You'd need an appropriately learned person, and a minyan, you know, ten adults."

"Ten people...?" That was a lot to get together for such an endeavor. Something else occurred to him. "Could a dybbuk possess a corpse?"

"Well, I've never heard of such a thing, but"—she laughed—"I suppose that would be something like a zombie?"

Jared's heart skipped a beat. "Or...a vampire? Are those real? In—in our lore, I mean."

"Well, let me think." She clasped her hands and stared into the shadows. "There are the estries. Blood-sucking female demons, for lack of a better word, like succubi. And shapeshifters, able to fly. Legend has it you can seal their powers by binding their hair."

"'Binding their hair...?'" The vampire didn't have enough hair to bind, to say nothing of the impracticality.

"And of course there's Lilith."

"Lilith?"

"She's not a vampire, per se, but there are similarities. If you're interested in demonology, there are a few books I could lend you..."

"Yeah, that'd be great, thanks. But d'ya know much offhand...?"

"Some. Bear in mind, this isn't exactly rabbinic material, but, let me see..."

And she went on to tell him many stories, of the demons Solomon tamed with a magic ring and forced to aid him in building the Temple, of the class of demons known as "liliths," who prey upon males or strangle infants. Of the entity known as Lilith, who, in one story, quarreled with Adam over their equality, and, refusing to lie beneath him, flew from the Garden, and of how three angels were sent to retrieve her, else her children be doomed to die. And of how she scorned them and swore to kill the children of Eve instead. And how to earn her freedom she was made to vow also that an amulet bearing the names or forms of the pursuing angels, one such as Jared had taken with him, would cost her her power over a child. And so Lilith too came to prey upon newborns, making them sicken, and went on to become known as a mother of demons. And when Adam learned his children were to die, and he separated from Eve, and lived apart from his wife, there attached to him many night demons in dream, liliths who bore him hybrid children. And Lilith too came to prey upon men who lay alone, and upon the new moon roused them as they yet slept, and so grew to be known as the mother of all that is unholy, and Queen of the realm of evil, for on the day of judgement, it is foretold, she and her demon spawn will house themselves in the desolation.

"And let that be a lesson to you," Judy concluded, a wry glint in her eye, "against the idle spillage of seed. You'll beget hordes of demons."

Jared flushed.

"But that's really only scratching the surface. There are a lot of stories."

He sighed. Though Judy didn't betray it from her manner, the candles were burning low, and he was imposing. It had been interesting, but it didn't seem to be much use. He was on his own. Murmuring his thanks, he rose to go.

"Yared."

"Yeah?"

"Whatever's troubling you...you're a smart young man. Remember your faith, but don't forget to have faith in yourself as well."

He blinked and gave her a half-smile.

"And if you need anything, if you want to talk..."

"I know. Thanks."

Judy gave him a worried smile and a couple of books and bade him goodnight.

Jared headed out into the dark, doubts and worries swirling in his mind. His left hand, stuffed in the pocket of his pants, brushed the rough paper of the Seal of Solomon.

He stopped walking, the memory of his connection with the Seal flooding into focus.

He had been warm. He had been calm. And the monster had quailed before him.

Maybe...I already have everything I need.

He rubbed at the scroll, probing it for an answer.

There was none.

✶✝ And good night to you as well, my friend.

Now, yes, I know what you're thinking. "But Mel, that chapter had hardly any puns in it!"

Not to worry.

I'm going to make it up to you, as we head down to an abandoned power station in Brooklyn...to meet a monster. Next time, on Keen's Turn. ✶✝