“Where you from?” the cabbie asked, eyeing Magnus in the rearview mirror.
“Oh, around. Here mostly.”
“You’re from here? You been away? You look like you been away.”
“For a while.”
“You hear about these murders?”
“Haven’t read a paper in a while,” Magnus said.
“Some loony-tune. Calls himself Son of Sam. They called him the forty-four-caliber killer too. Goes around shooting couples on lovers’ lanes, you know? Sick bastard. Real sick. Police haven’t caught him. They don’t do nothing. Sick bastard. City’s full of them. You shouldn’ta come back.”
New York cabdrivers—always little rays of sunshine.
Magnus got out on the tree-lined corner of Sixth Avenue and Christopher Street, in the heart of the West Village. Even at nightfall the heat was stifling. Still, it seemed to encourage a party atmosphere in the neighborhood. The Village had been an interesting place before he’d left. It seemed that in his absence things had taken on a whole new level of festivity. Costumed men walked down the street. The outdoor cafés were swarming. There was a carnival atmosphere that Magnus found instantly inviting.
Magnus’s apartment was a walk-up, on the third story of one of the brick houses that lined the street. He let himself in and sprang lightly up the steps, full of high spirits. His spirits fell when he reached his landing. The first thing he noticed, right by his door, was a strong and bad smell—something rotten, mixed with something like skunk, mixed with other things he had no desire to identify. Magnus did not live in a stinky apartment. His apartment smelled of clean floors, flowers, and incense. He put the key into the lock, and when he tried to push the door open, it stuck. He had to shove it hard to get it to open. The reason was immediately clear—there were boxes of empty wine bottles on the other side. And, much to his surprise, the television was on. Four vampires were crashed on his sofa, blankly watching cartoons.
He knew they were vampires at once. The draining of the color behind the skin, the languid pose. Also, these vampires hadn’t even bothered to wipe the blood from the corners of their mouths. All of them had dried bits of the stuff around their faces. There was a record spinning on the player. It had reached the end and was stuck on the blank end strip, hissing gently in disapproval.
Only one of the vampires even turned to look at him.
“Who are you?” she asked.
“Magnus Bane. I live here.”
“Oh.”
She turned back to the cartoon.
When Magnus had left two years before, he’d left his apartment in the care of a housekeeper, Mrs. Milligan. He’d sent money every month for the bills and the cleaning. Clearly she had paid the bills. The electricity was still on. But she hadn’t cleaned, and Mrs. Milligan probably hadn’t invited these four vampires to come and stay and generally trash the place. Everywhere Magnus looked there were signs of destruction and decay. One of the kitchen chairs had been broken and was in pieces on the floor. The others were piled with magazines and newspapers. There were overflowing ashtrays, and makeshift ashtrays, and then just trails of ash and plates full of cigarette butts. The living room curtains were cockeyed and torn. Everything was askew, and some things were simply missing. Magnus had many lovely pieces of art that he’d collected over the years. He looked for a favorite piece of Sevres porcelain that he’d kept on a table in the hall. That, of course, was gone. As was the table.
“I don’t want to be rude,” Magnus said, unhappily eyeing a pile of stinking garbage on the corner of one of his best Persian carpets, “but may I ask why you’re in my house?”
This got a bleary look.
“We live here,” said the girl at the end, the spunky one who could actually turn her head.
“No,” Magnus said. “I think I just explained that I live here.”
“You weren’t here. So we lived here.”
“Well, I’m back. So you’re going to need to make other arrangements.”
No response.
“Let me be more clear,” he said, standing in front of the television. Blue light crackled between his fingers. “If you’re here, you may know who I am. You may know what I’m capable of. Perhaps you’d like me to summon up someone to help you out? Or perhaps I could open a Portal and send you to the far side of the Bronx? Ohio? Mongolia? Where would you like to be dropped?”
The vampires on the sofa said nothing for a minute or two. Then they managed to look at one another. There was a grunt, a second grunt, and then they pulled themselves up from the sofa with tremendous difficulty.
“Don’t worry about your things,” Magnus said. “I’ll send them along. To the Dumont?”