“For a short time only,” the vampire advised him, “I have - well, let’s say I’ve cut you out of time. Removed you from the present. Hidden you, perhaps, might be a better way of looking at it.” He sighed, reading the incomprehension in the writer’s eyes.

“It’s hard, trying to explain what is to my people a simple process, to such unimaginative beings as yourselves. Very well: think of it this way. Let’s say that - oh I hate using heavy-handed metaphors, but I can only use the tools that are to hand - I have taken a magic scissors, and with that scissors cut you out of the world. You’re not dead, but you’re sort of not alive either. I suppose it would be best to describe your current situation as, you are held in abeyance.”

“Abeyance?”

“Yes. I’m sure you’re familiar with the term. You have been - oh, what is that quaint expression you mortals use, with reference to those communication devices you use: telephones, I think you call them?”

“Tele-?”

The vampire ignored him, snapping his fingers. “On hold!” He exclaimed triumphantly. “Yes, that’s it: on hold. You have been placed on hold. On hold from the world. When one of your kind puts another on hold, that other cannot be heard or make themselves be heard until the other releases them from being on hold. You are on hold. Nobody can see or hear you, until I release the hold button.”

He growled to himself, shaking his head. “Of course, it’s far more complicated than that, but you wouldn’t understand, and this is the best way I can explain it in a way your feeble mind can comprehend.”

Despite his words, there was nothing actually condescending or supercilious in the vampire’s tone. Stafford could see, somehow, in his eyes that he believed it to be a pure and unalterable fact that mortal minds - as he called them - were vastly inferior to those of vampires. He meant no slight by it, it was just how things were.

A typical mortal, Stafford reacted with a typical mortal claim: “Impossible.”

The vampire inclined his head. “Is it?” he asked rhetorically. “Can you explain why you were outside for three hours six minutes, but did not feel like it was that long? Can you tell me why several people - including, I believe, a group - seemed to ignore you? Why, do you think, did the police officer not accompany you back to your door, but disappear as if, well, as if he had never even seen you? And why do your watch and the clock in this house show different times now? Can you explain it?”

Stymied, Stafford had to admit that he could not. As a writer, as a novellist, he was of necessity more open to the fantastic and the immense possibilities presented by the imagination than others would be, but even this was stretching it beyond his capacity to grasp.

And yet, everything this vampire said was true. All had happened as he related. And while one or two incidents could be perhaps explained away, rationalised, as he had been doing while out there in the fog (and where had that fog come from, so suddenly, anyway?), not all of them could.

What about the woman who seemed to be a fan, who had a copy of one of his novels in her bag? Why would she ignore him? And the cop? And again, going right back to the remembrance of his first encounter, why would that guy - why would anyone - allow a minor assault of that nature without responding, even verbally? But no: when he had knocked the guy’s headphones off his head, the man had just picked them up, looking around as if for an assailant he could not see, and had continued on his way. Who would do that? Why would anyone do that?

Unless he really was somehow out of phase with reality, as the vampire insisted he was.

And why? Why would he have done such a thing?

“Because,” said the vampire, as if divining his thoughts, even though he had not voiced them aloud, “I do not wish our game to be interrupted, by the police or by anyone else. I am, actually, quite intrigued. You are not the amateur I had taken you for, Maurice Stafford.”

His eyes flashed again, and the author did not like what he saw. Against all logic, against all he knew to be true, against all his instincts and his scorn for such thinking, he found himself forced to begin to believe that rather than being some lunatic who had come here claiming to be a vampire, an undead creature, a figure from the pages, almost, of one of his bestsellers, the creature who sat in his house, poring over the chessboard with the most intent concentration … what if he was a vampire?

Vampires don’t exist.

But what if they do?

Was it not mere hubris to deny the existence of something whose existence - or lack of - you could not empirically prove? He found himself thinking, there are plenty of stories in ancient lore, legends and even history, to suggest the possibility that perhaps vampires, or at least something like them, may have existed. The legends, the folklore, couldn’t all be made up. Of course, Count Dracula, Lestat and Bill Compton were not real; writers like him had taken the vampire myth and created their own version, first for books, then television and then movies.

But what if, among the fiction and the fantasy, there was to be found a grain of truth? What if the vampires had deliberately kept themselves hidden, fearful of being hunted to extinction, crouching in shadows and only striking so seldom that their attacks were either taken as those of crazed murderers or wild animals, which would be part of their plan?

What if vampires existed, he asked himself again, and found it hard to dismiss the question as he would have done a few hours ago. He had made a living writing about these monsters. What if his writing had attracted, or angered one, one such as this, who had come to - what? Set the record straight? No: he had read Interview With the Vampire, and this was no Louis who sat at his table, ready to pour out his (extremely long) life story to a reporter, or in this case, a writer.

What then? Revenge? But if he had wanted to merely kill him - or, god forbid, he thought, as the sudden willingness to believe established itself in his mind, turn him into one of them - then surely he had had ample opportunity to do so? To warn him, then; threaten him that if he did not stop writing about vampires then this one would see to it he wrote no more? That was a possibility, and one he had now to entertain, given that the vampire had already made it clear that he knew who Stafford was. And surely he had not come here out of mere chance; there was purpose, reason, destiny even in his arriving on the writer’s doorstep.

Might even be a new book in it, he heard his mind say, and forced the thought from it. New avenues for his writing should be the furthest thing from his mind now. He must figure out why this - well, let’s call him what he calls himself, despite the absurdity of it - this vampire had chosen to visit him, what he wanted.

And suddenly it came to him.

A match of wits.

The vampire had been quite candid in his claim that his kind were more intelligent than humans - mortals, as he called them - and must see the chess game as a perfect metaphor for the disparity between the mental evolution of the two races. He no doubt knew - Stafford had no idea how he knew, but he was beginning to accept fatalistically that the vampire had a vast breadth of knowledge, and that there was little he did not know, or could not find out - about his past as a chess champion.

“Your move, I believe,” said the vampire (somehow, though it defied all logic, all reason, he was convinced that this was a vampire now, not just some nut playing at being one). The creature turned its unearthly eyes full upon him. “It’s been your move,” he remarked patiently, “for over three hours now.”

Like a man being dragged to his own execution, Stafford watched as his feet, which seemed to be behaving independently, refused to obey his silent command to take him back out the door and away from this - this monster! - and hauled him towards the desk, whereat waited his opponent.

Philosophically, he considered where he might have gone anyway, had he run: if the vampire was telling the truth - and his experience outside seemed to confirm that, however fantastical a claim it might appear - then he was basically trapped in some sort of personal bubble in which only he and his visitor existed, and should he run even into a crowd of people, nobody was likely to see him. How could he exist like that?

A thought came to him, and he voiced it, somewhat nervously. “What happens when you go? Will I be visible to everyone again?”

“You will,” intoned the vampire, keeping his attention on the board. “If you live.”

“So.” It was almost a relief to hear it. “You’re here to kill me, then.”

The cold eyes looked up. He doubted this creature could be surprised, but that was what seemed to him to register in the red eyes of his opponent.
“Of course,” he said almost pleasantly. “I thought you understood that.”

“I guess, deep down, I did,” admitted Stafford, now turning his own attention to the remaining chess pieces on his side, far outnumbered and outflanked by those of the vampire. “This game for my life, then?”

A very strange sound issued from the vampire. In anyone else, Stafford would have recognised it as being laughter, but since such an emotion would be alien to a creature of the darkness such as his visitor, it sounded more like a choked bark, like something that might issue from the throat of a dog who had swallowed something too large for him. The red eyes came up again, and the thin, black lips quirked up in what he assumed was the vampire attempting to imitate a smile.