Regretfully, he maneuvered around on the road, got the car turned and started back. He’d miss the hunters, but you couldn’t drag an impressionable child into that sort of grim nonsense. He might as well take her home first. Besides, he wouldn’t get anything out of those uncommunicative farmers with their sharpened stakes and silver bullets in their squirrel rifles.

“What kind of crops do your folks raise—tobacco or cotton?”

“They don’t raise nothing yet. We just came here.”

“Oh.” That was all right: she didn’t have a mountain accent. Come to think of it, she was a little more dignified than most of the children he’d met in this neighborhood. “Isn’t it a little late to go for a stroll? Aren’t your folks afraid to let you out this late with a vampire around?”

She shivered. “I—I’m careful,” she said at last.

Hey! Shellinger thought. Here was the human angle. Here was what Randall was bleating about. A frightened little girl with enough curiosity to swallow her big lump of fear and go out exploring on this night of all others. He didn’t know how it fitted, just yet—but his journalistic nose was twitching. There was copy here; the basic, colorful human angle was sitting fearfully on his red leather seat.

“Do you know what a vampire is?”

She looked at him, startled, dropped her eyes and studied her folded hands for words. “It’s—it’s like someone who needs people instead of meals.” A hesitant pause. “Isn’t it?”

“Ye-es.” That was good. Trust a child to give you a fresh viewpoint, unspoiled by textbook superstition. He’d use that “People instead of meals.” “A vampire is supposed to be a person who will be immortal—not die, that is—so long as he or she gets blood and life from living people. The only way you can kill a vampire—”

“You turn right here, mister.”

He pointed the car into the little branchlet of side road. It was annoyingly narrow; surprised wet boughs tapped the windshield, ran their leaves lazily across the car’s fabric top. Once in a while, a tree top sneezed collected rain water down.