Incandescent Mordi,

You are under the Tuscan sun, and I give you the sweep and arch of the sky to answer the difficult question – have you been out in it. For I have. For five full seconds I stared into the sun, and this is what I saw …

I give you this in lieu of travel and gossip – the clean sun, in a remote heaven, expelling all. I come from a time when man owned his domain in a certain … mental way. Mine is an unmediated vision, Mordi, so there will be little to watch here except my every move.

If you find my tone of voice suddenly … rarefied, removed, cold even. Well, you will find Ilona Darvasti the very picture of permafrost. Would that we could only take a photograph of her! As it seems we cannot, I have resorted to my nib of coal to catch her likeness for you … 

Sublime succubus, with bone straight hair of raven black and skin as white as ice.

It was on a matter of business that I happened to glimpse her again. As I told you, Mordi, I’d vacated our floor at Maiden Lane on account of it being occupied by the Croat and his brood, Ilona among them. It is not that I especially mind riff raff barging uninvited into a place. A place is a place is a place, and at my age I am beyond caring about these things. The city is full of vacuous caverns that are nothing but vacant. People come and go and are welcome anywhere as far as I’m concerned. No, it is not their simple presence that vexes me. It is his porcine eye. The Croat I mean.

If a man walks into your skyscraper in a leather shirt and a waxed head and stinking of Chanel, you expect some entertainment. But in half a year I’ve had one hermaphrodite from the cheapskate. He goes in for cocktail hour more than anything else, and like most humans has not got a grip on his cravings. And he is altogether too bourgeois for my taste. 

In other words, the floor was a bore, so I left. And what of it. I am now ensconced in Soho, and it is just as well. As it happens, though, our "Mr. Ratner" is now making noises about the lease on Maiden Lane. "Are Mr. Kildare and yourself intending to sub-let the place?" This compelled a meeting with the Croat and Mr. Ratner, whereof I managed the sketch of Ilona.

You’d have thought the Croat had bought the place. It is now a sprawl of half-built marble and glass, Japanese walls and French doors in the middle of nowhere, coiled stairways, decks jutting out among the gargoyles, bathing tanks hither and yon, and heaps of electronics everywhere. And all in such disarray and indecisiveness about anything except what might be the next fashion.

The Croat was so happy to see me, he paid barely any attention to Mr. Ratner and the business at hand. He always treats me to unctuous smiles and knowing winks, as if he and I were in cahoots over some pharaonic mystery.

Purposefully, Mordi, I have not hacked them all to pieces and gorged myself. Praise my restraint. Hail my patience.

I shall not concern myself with this "College of Mutants" the Croat jokes about inaugurating at Maiden Lane. I’m sure it will all amount to a lurid brag, and it will make a thrilling fireside story one day, like your Dunsinks of Dublin or my Bloodhound of Baltimore.

Recall that the vampire is a sentient being. We, much as the human, can be freed from the tyranny of our species. It is a curse as much as any other: where sits a Mind, there the frothing lupine appetite will be chained. And this is no monkish palaver, but a fact that can leave a good story stale, if we are not vigilant of .. little things. If we do not notice, in the course of a tale, when a certain piquant essence takes flight for greener pastures.

I speak of course of Ilona Darvasti. And I mean that she has suddenly moved to Brooklyn.

And I am not in love with her, Mordi. Please! Would I forswear the spooky bedtime story, as I have just done, only to replace it with a lugubrious romance? That is not my point. Something is afoot with her and it puts me ill at ease, and it may have nothing to do with anything I think I’ve seen and suppose I’ve written.

I am prepared to pay Mr. Ratner two months rent to rid us of Maiden Lane without a fuss. Do you agree? I say a dab of unction to buy absolution without explanation. The meeting went nowhere. I found myself unable to extend the Croat the dignity either of my approval or disapproval of him, sensing a trap either way. And since it is a commercial lease, no one was angling for gentility anyway. Mr. Ratner in any case views the "renovation" with an even mix of trepidation and greed, and so I’ve left him for now with both.

But here behind me, Mordi, just beyond the peripheral vision, is the mauve gloom, the auguring air, and that certain baleful cast of things. You know what I mean, Mordi, as young as you are at a mere 133 years of age. (When I was your age, my country was still in the British Empire. And your fair island still has a foot stuck in the door there.)

But you are about past that age, Mordi – some twenty or so years after outliving the longest reasonable lifetime of a natural man – when, in the Vampire, premonitions become undistinguishable from the weather.

I bring it up because the weather has been very strange indeed. Something is not right. Though nothing, really, has happened.

I am 371 years old, Mordi. So many "events" have occurred in my life that nothing short of a declaration of war rates a diary entry any more. I have learned to second guess the world on most days of the week, and I have learned to live, as much as I can, in the future. So here I sit at the hearth of modernity, and things come and go.

And then suddenly, on really no pretext at all, comes the raven, hoary and ancient. The beady eye, insensate, jolts every nerve in my body and chills my bones.

There is a sense of loss, yes, that of course. Always that. But there is foreboding here as well, and the latent shadow of a figure beautiful, monstrous, and contemptuous. What it is I don’t know yet.

I wonder, Mordi, could History itself constitute a Mind, a Mundus Invidiosus, that would notice the Vampire, resent us, and collude against us? Or am I just paranoid.

Withal, I trust nothing I’ve seen or said to point to anything. But I smell a sickly sweet evil. I don’t think it has anything to do with Maiden Lane. But I can’t help thinking it odd that she should just up and leave for Brooklyn like that, without gossip or ado. It is as if some cast of inclement weather were with her too.

My dwarf, Albrecht, who is also my valet and my chauffeur and my very good friend (does this make him, altogether, my "dwarves"?) is driving us slowly through empty streets now as I write, late at night. I think I have not been here in a hundred years. Quite amazing. It is a wasteland today. But here and there a youthful figure walks briskly in the spare light of a street lamp. Young people, of good quality, out of place in these surroundings. This would be good feeding ground, Mordi, it makes my mouth water. I confess I am a little shocked that she would move here, if she is here, as we hear.

Luminously, Casper Freake

Casper Freake, 1st August 2001, New York, New York.