From the moment Alex had walked in the first evening, he had understood the situation by the way Merrill & Merrill arranged themselves, Bill standing like an unhappy guard, Steven leaning against a bookshelf and staring at the floor. They wanted a three-man room to themselves. For the first blissful weeks of the term, the brothers had been lucky; whatever curious fate had failed to fill their room, they had grown used to the luxury, stacking the third bed with DVDs and magazines and books. And then Alex had arrived to disrupt their paradise.

By now he had already learned to stay out of the room as long as possible. Let the Merrills have it. Let them study or not study, watch movies on Bill’s portable player or not, but for the love of all that was holy, don’t go back there until it’s time for everyone to go to sleep.

Tonight he hit the library. The school was quiet in the evening, and the largest group he saw as he passed through the halls was gathered in the student lounge, watching local news on a large TV. Alex lingered at the entrance for a second, catching some of what apparently Mrs. Hostache had been whispering to the headmaster. A boat painter had been murdered in the woods, the third seemingly random attack in the past month.

That was the dead painter he had seen himself. He felt a pang of remorse over not reporting it, and yet for the life of him he had no idea how he would describe what he had seen—and what he had done. How can I explain that I impaled someone with a tree branch—but don’t bother looking for her? He blinked it away. Now the incident was drifting into the past, into what he had to admit was denial that had taken him through the day without thinking about the girl with the eyes and the fangs, and oh yes, the cloud of dust. Come on. Maybe that had been an illusion—some sort of hoax. It simply, absolutely could not be what he feared it was. Like Dad said, “Those things don’t happen.”

The painter’s murder itself was far from unique. Alex had heard that people disappeared around here, not constantly, but a steady trickle. He had felt sure this was probably true but no more true than around any large lake. Now he was lost in too much knowing with no explanation.

Great place to send me, Dad. Sure can pick ’em.

The going wisdom on TV seemed to be that everyone should be extra careful at night. That advice sounded wise.

Alex found a table off to the side of the dark-paneled, shelf-lined library and hauled out his books. He cracked into Frankenstein first, reading the introduction and then moving into the novel, trying to drop into Mary Shelley’s prose.

His eyes were bleary. After a moment he stopped reading and reached into his pack, pulling out his contact lens case, a bottle of cleaner, and his glasses. Delicately he began the process he had only recently learned, prying each eye open with his fingers and pinching the contact off his eyeball. “That’s just weird,” his younger sister had said when she first saw him doing this over the summer when he got them. “Nothing about touching your own eye is normal.”

This was true. Putting the contacts in was agony, taking them out defied all instinct to not touch your own eye. He had to grab at the left one, the one that felt comfortable, three or four times before his thumb and forefinger found traction, and finally he felt the contact slip off his eye, now red with irritation.

Alex closed the contacts into their tiny case and donned his glasses, feeling much younger. Wasn’t that what the contacts were really about, after all? He was just a boy with glasses, and then his mom had offered to get him these things. He looked older with them, strangely, and for the first time in memory he had peripheral vision. But was seeing a door before you bonked into it worth the punishing ritual of poking your own eye?

“I didn’t know you wore contacts.” Sid plopped down in the seat across from him. He had with him an enormous black-and-red paperback book, An Encyclopedia of Vampires, and a small stack of magazines and source books that Alex saw ran the gamut from horror to the supernatural to mythology, and segued as if in some geekish solidarity into science fiction and fantasy. He had no apparent school-related material at all.

“Well, I’ve only been here three days,” said Alex.

“Does it hurt, touching your eye like that?”

“Yes,” Alex said ruefully.

“Why do you do it?”

“I have no idea.”

“What are you lot talking about?” said Paul, joining them. He had his copy of Frankenstein with him as well but dropped it as he sat, and started thumbing through Sid’s magazines. “You got any Cinescape?”

“Do they even make Cinescape anymore?” Sid smirked. He was flopping open his massive encyclopedia and Alex saw that he had several sheets of graph paper inside. Each graph page had been divided into four sections, presenting a complete history on a person, and Alex looked closer: a picture, a name, and various descriptors like age, height, weight, and paragraphs on history, powers, and abilities. Sid selected a couple and said, “I was asking Alex why he wears contact lenses, if he hates poking himself in the eye.”

“For the girls, mate, for the girls,” Paul said. He looked around. “Oh, wait…”

“I don’t wear them to get girls.”

“Well, then you shall not be disappointed.” Paul looked at Sid’s graph paper and picked up a sheet, waving it at Alex. “Do you believe this? Look at this paper.”

“What is it?”

“It’s a character.” Sid took the graph paper back.

“He spends hours—bloody hours, every day—designing characters. And not just characters, but vampire characters. For the Red World.”

“The Scarlet World,” Sid corrected, irritated. “It’s an RPG.” Alex vaguely knew what he meant: a role-playing game, the old paper-and-dice kind.

“Scarlet World,” Paul acknowledged. “Now, no one else here plays this game, so he doesn’t actually play the characters, he just makes more of them up. Each one has a race—”

“Class,” Sid said.

“Sorry, a class. Smart vampires, dumb vampires, zombie vampires. This one is a rat vampire, I think.” He held up a character.

“That would be a Nosferatu,” said Sid, “you know, like in the silent movie Nosferatu. And he does attract vermin, so Paul has apparently learned more than he lets on.”

“What’s that one?” Alex pointed at the one Sid was drawing, a tall vampire with Asian eyes.

“It’s a dhampyr,” Sid said, excited. “A half vampire, you know, with a human mom and vampire dad. Like in Vampire Hunter D.”

“What’s that?” Alex asked.

“It’s an anime. It’s awesome.”

Alex was amazed at the breadth of Sid’s hobby. “You really got into today’s class,” he said.

Paul beamed at his roommate with something like pride. “He could teach the class.”

Sid seemed to fold this over before him and then he sighed. “Mr. Sangster’s wrong, by the way,” he said finally.

“About what?” Alex said curiously.

“Byron and Polidori did write about vampires,” Sid said. “Mary just lies. That whole thing about Polidori writing a story nobody liked, about a skull-headed lady looking through a keyhole? That’s stupid. You can look that up and you won’t find it. Mary just put that into her introduction—sixteen years after the Haunted Summer—to make Polidori look like an idiot.”

“See?” Paul said. “Listen to that. Like they’re friends of his.”

Sid was looking down, laughing, small and wiry and sheepish. For a moment Alex wondered if Sid minded being teased.

Paul concluded, “How I ever wound up hanging with such a nerd is a mystery.”

“You’re the one who’s reading his space magazines,” Alex said, smiling.

“True.” Paul leaned back, the back of the wooden chair creaking with his weight. He kept the magazine open but looked at Alex. “So how on earth did you wind up rooming with Merrill and Merrill?”

Alex shook his head. “Luck of the draw.”

Sid was working on one of his characters, a young punk vampire with stylish black clothes and haunted, puppy-dog eyes. “What are you going to do about Secheron…are you going to go?” Sid didn’t look up from his drawing as he spoke. The very idea of the fight seemed to make him nervous.

“Am I going to go? That makes it sound like a sock hop.” Alex felt an overwhelming rush of sadness and dull defeat, as though he were caught in a river that ran from his old school all the way here. “I can’t not go,” he said finally. “I can’t. That would be …”

“Wussy,” Paul said.

“So I gotta. I’m going to show up and see what happens.”

“Can you fight?” Paul leaned forward.

“Not really,” Alex lied. “Can you?”

“You’ve got to be kidding,” said the giant boy. “I’m the size of a house, nobody ever tries.”

Alex exhaled. “How hard can it be?”

“That’s a good point,” said Paul as he turned to Sid. “After all, why should the Merrills know how to fight either?”

Alex had to admit this might be true; the Merrills’ bullying might be an elaborate front for cowardice. But somehow, given the penchant for violence they’d shown so far, he doubted that.

“They’re mean,” said Sid, as if reading Alex’s mind. “They’ll be able to hurt you whether they know any insane techniques or not.”

Alex thumbed his book’s pages like a flipbook and slapped the cover closed. “Gee, fellas, this has been swell.”

Paul laughed. “‘Swell’ and ‘sock hop’ in two minutes. Is that how all Americans talk, like an old movie?”

Sid looked up. “Maybe he’s an alien who learned to be a kid by watching old movies.”

“If I were an alien, maybe I’d know how to fight,” said Alex.

“If you were an alien,” countered Paul, “you wouldn’t tell us if you did know how to fight—otherwise you wouldn’t go to Secheron.”

Alex sat back. “You guys wanta come?”

Sid and Paul consulted each other silently. Finally Paul said, “Friday at Secheron, a fight and some ice cream? We wouldn’t miss it for the world.”

When Alex returned to the room for curfew it was ten o’clock and both Merrills were in bed awake, watching him from the bunk bed they shared—Steven above and Bill below. In the darkened room, lit only by streams of moonlight through the window, they watched Alex in silence as he removed the stacks of DVDs and books that they had placed on his bed once more. Their eyes followed him as he went in the bathroom and shut the door, and returned and crawled into bed. After a while, Alex felt the tension slip away. He lay awake until he was sure they were sleeping soundly, and then drifted into sleep himself.

At half past one Alex awoke with a start. He could still see the lingering vestiges of a dream of his own father, shaking his head sadly as he came out of the meeting that formally ended Alex’s career at his old school. Alex lay awake, staring at the ceiling.

It had been warm and sunny outside in the dream. He had been crying, honestly crying, wanting to feel his father’s hand on his shoulder. And then he was freezing—and it was the freezing that brought him awake.

The Merrills were accustomed to Switzerland in the fall and had probably set the AC on blast just to spite him, for now he lay awake and saw his own breath in the moonlit room. He had one blanket, and as he looked over he saw that the Merrills had bundled up just for the occasion. This was just petty. He wondered what they might have done with the extra blankets in the closet, and the various options made him shudder.

And then he felt it—that static, that jagged shock to the back of his eyes, a tinny and unintelligible voice calling out.

That feeling, more than the slight scratching sound at the window, caused him to dart his eyes across the room.

There in the window, forty feet off the ground, someone was watching him.