Page 80 of Never Invite a Vampire to Dinner

Julian’s face changes. Not much. Enough.

“Two years and four months. February of 1809. There was a great deal of croup that winter and nothing whatever to be done about any of it.”

“You remember her.”

“I remember all of them.”

I look back down at the page.

Mercy.

One child in one house in one winter two hundred years ago, and Julian wrote her name because somebody had to.

I turn several pages more carefully after that. The journals aren’t a history of Julian Volkov. Not really. They’re a history of everyone else. Weather and births. Ships and marriages. A roof lost in a storm. A fisherman who didn’t come home. A woman who made preserves and cheated at cards. A dog that apparently belonged to no one and slept behind the chandlery for fourteen years. Julian has written them all down in the same brown ink, one after another, as if the act of remembering them is a debt he owes.

And no one has done it for him. That’s the thought that finishes me. He has kept the names of people who would otherwise be gone. He has carried them through centuries in a hidden room where no one knew to look. And every few decades, he erased his own.

I close the journal.

“Tell me how you do it.”

Julian knows exactly what I mean.

“For most of the time I’ve been here, it was relatively simple. I would stay twenty years. Sometimes thirty. I grew older on paper because paper is accommodating. Eventually I became ill, or developed a desire to travel for my health, and went away.”

“And then?”

“The property passed to a cousin. Occasionally a nephew.”

“Who was you.”

“Always.”

“No funerals.”

“No.” His mouth tightens slightly. “A death requires a body, and a body requires explanations. There was simply a man who went to Lisbon and did not come back, and a lawyer in Boston who was paid to be extremely dull about the details.”

I almost smile.

“Did anyone notice?”

“Occasionally. People notice more than they are given credit for.” Julian glances towards the shelves. “But suspicion fades. Memory becomes uncertain. Eventually the people who remember the previous face are gone.”

“That’s horrible.”

“It was practical.”

“Those aren’t mutually exclusive.”

“No.”

He says it so simply that I put the journal down.

“How long would you stay away?”

“It varied. Twenty years. Thirty. Longer, sometimes.”

“And then you’d come back.”