“Don’t know.” I looked at him. “But keep asking me things. Whenever you think of a question, ask me. Sometimes it helps.”
He nodded, then kissed me. “I’ve got to go.”
“Breakfast?” I said.
“I ate it last night. I’ll pick something up on the way to work. I’ve got to go grocery shopping this evening. It’s a good thing you don’t eat.”
And he went out the door and was gone.
Five
I spent most of the day at the computer making no real progress. There were diseases that people might once have mistaken for vampirism. One of them was called porphyria. It was probably what Wright thought of as a sun-allergy disease. In fact, it was a group of diseases caused by pigments that settled in peoples’ teeth, bones, and skin. The worst of the porphyriac diseases made people so vulnerable to light that they developed huge sores as parts of their flesh eroded away. They might lose their noses or their lips or patches of their cheeks. They would look grotesque.
That was interesting, but it awakened no memories in me. After all, I had already proved that if I were badly burned or wounded, I would heal.
There were river-borne microorganisms that caused people to develop problems with their memories just as there were microorganisms that could cause people to look hideous and, in the past perhaps, be mistaken for vampires. But that had nothing to do with me either. Whoever and whatever I was, no one seemed to be writing about my kind. Perhaps my kind did not want to be written about.
I wandered from site to site, picking up more bits of interesting, but useless, information. Finally, I switched to hunting through information about recent fires. I found a couple of articles that probably referred to what I was coming to think of as “my fire.”
They said the houses had been abandoned. The fire had happened three weeks ago and had definitely been arson. Gasoline had been splashed about liberally, then set alight. Fortunately, the fire had not spread to the surrounding forest—as it probably would have if the houses had truly been abandoned. There would have been plenty of bushes, vines, grasses, and young trees to carry the fire straight into the woods. Instead, there had been a broad clearing around the houses, and there had been farm fields, stubbly and bare.
The houses had not been abandoned. I was not wrong about the scents of burned flesh that I had found here and there in them. Those houses were close to the cave where I had awakened. I had gone straight to them from the cave as though my body knew where it was going even though my memory was gone. I must have either been living in one of those houses or visiting one. And there had definitely been other people around at the time of the fire. Why would the articles deny this?
Wright had said we could go back to the ruin on the weekend. According to the computer, today was Thursday. The weekend was only a day away.
I wanted to go back now, on foot, and comb through the ruin again. I was more alert and aware now. My body had finished healing. Maybe I could find something.
But it was daytime, almost noon. I felt tired from all my running around the night before and stiff from sitting for hours at the computer. I turned it off, got up, and decided to soak for a while in the tub before I went to bed. That may have been a mistake. Someone knocked on the door while I was filling the tub. I turned the water off, afraid they’d already heard it, afraid they would know someone was in the cabin when it was supposed to be empty.
The knock came again, and a woman’s voice called out, “Wright? Are you home?”
I kept quiet. After a while, I heard her go away. I soaked nervously in the water I had already drawn and went to bed.
When Wright got home—long after sunset—he brought groceries, an “everything” pizza, a library book about vampires written by an anthropologist, and some clothing for me. There were two pairs of jeans, four T-shirts, socks, underwear, a pair of Reebok athletic shoes, and a jacket with a hood. Everything except the shoes were a little big. Somehow he’d gotten shoes that were just the right size. He’d held each of my feet in his hands, and that must have helped. And he’d bought a belt. That would keep the jeans up. The rest of it worked fine even though it was a little large.
“You’re even smaller than I thought,” he said. “I’m usually pretty good at estimating the size of things I’ve seen and handled.”
“I’m lean,” I said. “I feed on blood most of the time. I don’t think I could get fat.”
“Probably not.” He stowed the groceries in his refrigerator, then turned and looked at me. “My neck is completely healed.”