When John reached the street dawn was already beginning. A few day people were about, a girl in a white leatherette car coat clopping toward the W. T. Grant Building, a young man with a shade of moustache getting out of a cab. The second edition of the Times was being tossed off a truck at the corner newsstand.

Nobody noticed him. For now. His whole body was relieved as if of gravity itself. Later would come desolation as the new blood died, but for the moment he felt as if he could leap up into the spreading sunlight. As he proceeded along Forty-third Street the last of the night people crept away. There sighed from them all a weariness completely at odds with the spring dawn slipping down the office towers. They dragged themselves away while pink clouds glided westward in a luminous sky.

A fire engine blared past, the firemen clinging to it. Their faces were bored and determined, frozen with the expression common to men who are intimate with death.

Manhattan began to come alive more rapidly. People were pouring out of the Seventh Avenue subway, coffeeshops were getting crowded, buses were swinging past with windows darkened by the crush of passengers.

John could feel her in him. Her past seemed to whisper in his veins, her voice to jabber in his ears. In a sense, she haunted him; they all did. Was the hunger satisfied by their being or just their blood? John had often wondered if they knew, if they felt themselves in him. From the way he could hear them in his mind, he suspected that they did. Miriam angrily dismissed the notion. She would toss her head and refuse to listen when he brought it up. She would not accept that you could touch the dead.

As he walked he counted the hours since last he had closed his eyes. Thirty-six at least. And during that short time he had needed three victims. Their energy was some compensation for the lack of Sleep, but it couldn’t go on forever. Each one had less impact than the last.

He found that he could almost hate Miriam if he wished, she who had made him. It was not so much the fact that she had lied to him about his life-span as that she had trapped him in an isolation even more awful than her own. He had come to terms with his cannibal life, accepting it as the price of immortality. Even for that the price was high. But for this? His hunger had cheated him. For this he had paid too much.