As the helpless vampire watched the transformation, it started screaming. It was still screaming when his rows of razor sharp teeth sank into its throat.

You know what__ worse than burying your own child? Not burying your own child.

New beginnings come with the tail of the red-winged blackbird. Here__ to hoping my daddy was right.

The mind is a thing capable of destroying itself when deep grief sets in, and when left alone to muse over one__ misery, the most irreparable damage can be done. You need people to heal.

With horror he perceived that, by uniting himself as he had with the dead, he had cut himself off from the living. Stripped of all earthly hope, bereft of every consolation, he was rendered as poor as mortal can possiblybe on this side of the grave.

That done, I sank into an uneasy sleep wherein I dreamed of an assembly line of pale, bloodless girls walking down an endless dark street and moaning softly for help. Somewhere, toward the edge of my inner vision, a shadowy figure pursued them with long, beckoning arms.Goddamn booze!Somewhere in the midst of this ghoulish girl parade Cairncross materialized and hung a garland of garlic around my neck, glaring at me with his good eye and intoning, 'Go and sin no more.' Vincenzo appeared at Cairncross' side and together they laughed insanely, then vanished in a puff of sulphurous smoke.I made several high-minded resolutions, muttered half-heard but sincere-sounding prayers to all the recently deposed saints, thrashed and rolled clean off the bed.I might just as well have stayed up.