He closed the door behind them, the lights around the door frame going dark. The installed fixtures ran the height and length of the door—purple tubes Eph recognized as ultraviolet lamps—arranged around the door like a force field of light.

To prohibit germs from entering the room? Or to keep something else out?

“No,” he continued, “the reason I chose it as my profession was because it afforded me ready access to an underground market of esoteric items, antiquities, and tomes. Illicit, though not usually illegal. Acquired for my personal collection, and my research.”

Eph looked around again. This looked less like a museum collection than a small arsenal. “Your research?”

“Indeed. I was for many years a professor of Eastern European Literature and Folklore at the University of Vienna.”

Eph appraised him again. He sure dressed like a Viennese professor. “And you retired to become a Harlem pawnbroker-slash-curator?”

“I did not retire. I was made to leave. Disgraced. Certain forces aligned against me. And yet, as I look back now, going underground at that time most certainly saved my life. It was in fact the best thing I could have done.” He turned to face them, folding his hands behind his back, professorially. “This scourge we are now witnessing in its earliest stages has existed for centuries. Over millennia. I suspect, though cannot prove, it goes back to the most ancient of times.”

Eph nodded, not understanding the man, only glad to finally be making some progress. “So we are talking about a virus.”

“Yes. Of sorts. A strain of disease that is a corruption of both the flesh and the spirit.” The old man was positioned in such a way that, from Eph’s and Nora’s perspective, the array of swords on the wall fanned out on either side of him like steel-bladed wings. “So, a virus? Yes. But I should also like to introduce you to another v word.”

“What’s that?” he said.

“Vampire.”

A word like that, spoken in earnestness, hangs in the air for a while.

“You are thinking,” said Setrakian, the former professor, “of a moody overactor in a black satin cape. Or else a dashing figure of power, with hidden fangs. Or some existential soul burdened with the curse of eternal life. Or—Bela Lugosi meets Abbott and Costello.”

Nora was looking around the room again. “I don’t see any crucifixes or holy water. No strings of garlic.”

“Garlic has certain interesting immunological properties, and can be useful in its own right. So its presence in the mythology is biologically understandable, at any rate. But crucifixes and holy water?” He shrugged. “Products of their time. Products of one Victorian author’s fevered Irish imagination, and the religious climate of the day.”

Setrakian had expected their expressions of doubt.