Shellinger pressed his face close to the windshield and tried to decipher the picture of brown mud amid weeds that his headlights gave him. “What a road! Your folks are really starting from scratch. Well, the only way to kill a vampire is with a silver bullet. Or you can drive a stake through the heart and bury it in a crossroads at midnight. That’s what those men are going to do tonight if they catch it.” He turned his head as he heard her gasp. “What’s the matter—don’t you like the idea?”

“I think it’s horrid,” she told him emphatically.

“Why? How do you feel—live and let live?”

She thought it over, nodded, smiled. “Yes, live and let live. Live and let live. After all—” She was having difficulty finding the right words again. “After all, some people can’t help what they are. I mean,” very slowly, very thoughtfully, “like if a person’s a vampire, what can they do about it?”

“You’ve got a good point there, kid.” He went back to studying what there was of the road. “The only trouble’s this: if you believe in things like vampires, well, you don’t believe in them good—you believe in them nasty. Those people back in the village who claim three children have been killed or whatever it was by the vampire, they hate it and want to destroy it. If there are such things as vampires—mind you, I said ‘if’—then, by nature, they do such horrible things that any way of getting rid of them is right. See?”

“No. You shouldn’t drive stakes through people.”

Shellinger laughed. “I’ll say you shouldn’t. Never could like that deal myself. However, if it were a matter of a vampire to me or mine, I think I could overcome my squeamishness long enough to do a little roustabout work on the stroke of twelve.”

He paused and considered that this child was a little too intelligent for her environment.