I pulled my Gladstone from below the bed, strapped and locked it. Then for a moment I stared at my typewriter. It was doubtful that I would ever use her again, and she'd make an extra burden which I could scarcely afford to carry with me. I hated the thought of someone else's fingers on her keys. I had loved that cranky, faithful old mill. I opened her case and raising the machine above my head brought her face down onto a bedpost. Two crashes were plenty. They'd never repair my old girl now. I put her gently on the bed.
"Sleep well, lady." I said, and was obscurely glad to find that my metamorphosed self could still be whimsically sentimental.
I brushed the water glasses off the window sill, threw up the sash and climbed onto the fire escape, Gladstone in hand. I took off my felt hat and skimmed it out and down; it fell in the middle of the alley where anyone would be sure to see it. Then I climbed upward until I reached the roof. They would suppose I had lost my hat while running away down the alley.
Leaving the fire escape, brushing its flaky rust from my palm, I walked across the flat roof. The moon, very low in the gray-black sky, showed me the age-battered forms of chimneys and ventilators, with a shack-like structure looming foursquare among them: the entrance to the hotel. I thought of waiting till the searchers hared off on my false trail, then leaving by this obvious route. No good: my face and build were becoming too well known. I looked about me, deciding what to do.
And it seemed to me that I was not on the roof of a dingy third-rate hotel in an American city, but somewhere entirely different.
The cries of pursuers echoed in my brain. I was crouching amid tall buttress-tops, gargoyled rainspouts, coned tower-peaks; ancient tiles were slippery beneath my feet. I was scrambling round the roof of a castle, or at least what seemed a massive and castle-like building. Peering over the edge of the gutter, I could make out the sheen of moon-silvered water lying far below, with tiny wind-ripples on its surface. A moat?
No weapons were in my hands. I was hunted by fierce enemies. Yet I was not afraid. I was only hideously angry. I longed to get at them, but there were too many. Just let them come three or four at a time, armed however they wished, and I would meet them. But no, they must needs draw their game in great packs of howling humanity. Humans! How I loathed them!
What was I? I was myself, Bill Cuff, some centuries before. My vision was strangely two-fold. I could see the sooty hotel chimneys and could realize where I stood, and at the same time I was again creeping round among the gables and towers of the medieval castle. I could hear the cries of my seekers. A word was repeated over and over until it stood out from all the hubbub.
Vampire ... vampire ... vampire....
I knew I was no such thing. The undead—a superstition.