baby. He wondered how long a light portrait took to make, how one wielded the light, and how much pain it inflicted on the subjects during the process. This last thought made him smile. He would have to look into becoming a photographist.
While Yulric’s mind swam with misguided ideas of how photos were made, Amanda was summoning up powers of her own, powers that she possessed in abundance, powers that her brother called “pure undiluted contrariness.”
“So, over three hundred years go by, and they just hand your money back like
that
?” she snarked.
Yulric’s head snapped around at her words. “Three hundred years?”
Amanda smiled at finally having made a dent in this thing’s impenetrable superiority. “
Over
three hundred years.”
Yulric stared at her as if the words themselves hung in front of her face. Could it really have been so long? Surely not. Deep beneath the earth, he had been vaguely aware of events: a war or two, some Quakers, that English mystic with his love of orgies, and those long-haired children who giggled and did not bathe.
So, fifty years then,
he thought before looking again at the automatic candle in the ceiling and the portrait of light.
Maybe one hundred.
Utterly bemused, Amanda pressed her victory. “For over three centuries, no one wondered. No one questioned. No one suspected you were even here. How is that possible?”
“Cheap rent.”
Amanda’s triumph, striding fast and confident, smacked into the easily given answer like a toddler’s head into a kitchen table: there was a moment of wonder and confusion before realization set in and the child fell to the floor, crying for its mommy. Meanwhile, Yulric examined the room once more with new eyes. Here and there, his seventeenth-century gaze found twenty-first-century technology. Lights lit by themselves. Machines moved on their own. Missing were familiar trappings of household life, like churns and looms and body odor. Those that remained, like tables and chairs, were composed of strange materials and even stranger designs.
And then there had been the horror from last night. The mechanical metal behemoth that had appeared in a flash and trampled him horribly beneath its wheels. How long had it taken to invent such a weapon?
A hundred and fifty years!
he thought.
No more!
Between her utter defeat and the pathetic old man this creature had suddenly become, Amanda couldn’t bring herself to be combative anymore. She left him to his increasingly frantic analysis of his surroundings and got herself a beer.
If there had been any lingering doubts as to the nature of the thing in her living room, those were settled upon her return.
Yep, it’s definitely a man,
she thought.
Yulric Bile had found the TV.
• •
The vampire moped for a week. Not in the way that one might expect him to—with fire and death, blood running red in the streets, and a dark miasma blotting out the sun. No, the vampire moped pretty much the same way everyone else does—he watched television.
Unlike everyone else, though, his legs didn’t get stiff and his butt didn’t get sore. He didn’t have to get up to grab a beer or order a pizza. He didn’t bathe, shave, or excrete any euphemistic number, without which he had absolutely no reason to ever set foot in a bathroom. He didn’t even sleep, or at least that’s what he told Amanda from his position on the couch. She couldn’t help but notice that he did occasionally close his eyes and that he was much crankier when he hadn’t.
Day and night, he watched. Even late at night, when the only programs were infomercials and phone-sex ads, he watched. Every so often, he would appear in a doorway or from around a corner to ask such things as why some movies were in black and white while the rest were in color. He kept the remote in hand and returned quickly to the couch, uttering perfunctory death threats as an afterthought.
It wasn’t that he was intrigued or mesmerized or entranced. Honestly,
While Yulric’s mind swam with misguided ideas of how photos were made, Amanda was summoning up powers of her own, powers that she possessed in abundance, powers that her brother called “pure undiluted contrariness.”
“So, over three hundred years go by, and they just hand your money back like
that
?” she snarked.
Yulric’s head snapped around at her words. “Three hundred years?”
Amanda smiled at finally having made a dent in this thing’s impenetrable superiority. “
Over
three hundred years.”
Yulric stared at her as if the words themselves hung in front of her face. Could it really have been so long? Surely not. Deep beneath the earth, he had been vaguely aware of events: a war or two, some Quakers, that English mystic with his love of orgies, and those long-haired children who giggled and did not bathe.
So, fifty years then,
he thought before looking again at the automatic candle in the ceiling and the portrait of light.
Maybe one hundred.
Utterly bemused, Amanda pressed her victory. “For over three centuries, no one wondered. No one questioned. No one suspected you were even here. How is that possible?”
“Cheap rent.”
Amanda’s triumph, striding fast and confident, smacked into the easily given answer like a toddler’s head into a kitchen table: there was a moment of wonder and confusion before realization set in and the child fell to the floor, crying for its mommy. Meanwhile, Yulric examined the room once more with new eyes. Here and there, his seventeenth-century gaze found twenty-first-century technology. Lights lit by themselves. Machines moved on their own. Missing were familiar trappings of household life, like churns and looms and body odor. Those that remained, like tables and chairs, were composed of strange materials and even stranger designs.
And then there had been the horror from last night. The mechanical metal behemoth that had appeared in a flash and trampled him horribly beneath its wheels. How long had it taken to invent such a weapon?
A hundred and fifty years!
he thought.
No more!
Between her utter defeat and the pathetic old man this creature had suddenly become, Amanda couldn’t bring herself to be combative anymore. She left him to his increasingly frantic analysis of his surroundings and got herself a beer.
If there had been any lingering doubts as to the nature of the thing in her living room, those were settled upon her return.
Yep, it’s definitely a man,
she thought.
Yulric Bile had found the TV.
• •
The vampire moped for a week. Not in the way that one might expect him to—with fire and death, blood running red in the streets, and a dark miasma blotting out the sun. No, the vampire moped pretty much the same way everyone else does—he watched television.
Unlike everyone else, though, his legs didn’t get stiff and his butt didn’t get sore. He didn’t have to get up to grab a beer or order a pizza. He didn’t bathe, shave, or excrete any euphemistic number, without which he had absolutely no reason to ever set foot in a bathroom. He didn’t even sleep, or at least that’s what he told Amanda from his position on the couch. She couldn’t help but notice that he did occasionally close his eyes and that he was much crankier when he hadn’t.
Day and night, he watched. Even late at night, when the only programs were infomercials and phone-sex ads, he watched. Every so often, he would appear in a doorway or from around a corner to ask such things as why some movies were in black and white while the rest were in color. He kept the remote in hand and returned quickly to the couch, uttering perfunctory death threats as an afterthought.
It wasn’t that he was intrigued or mesmerized or entranced. Honestly,
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