“Everyone knows you catch vampirism by being bitten by a vampire,” she explains. “So, they drink your blood—and then you rise as a vampire, don’t you? But answer me this—if every vampire drinks blood, how come we aren’t all vampires? It stands to reason! Vampire number one drinks from a victim. Then there’s two of them. The next night they both drink from victims. That makes four.” She subvocalizes for a few seconds, counting up powers of two on her fingers. “After a month, there are nearly a billion of them! And a week later, we’re all vampires!” She twitches around triumphantly. “So they can’t exist. Can they?”

“Nonsense!” announces Bill Heath. Bill is at least a decade north of the mandatory retirement watermark—unfortunately abolished some years back, under cover of the last government’s campaign against ageism in the workplace. He clears his throat, making a disgusting gurgling noise reminiscent of a kitchen waste disposal unit chewing on a week-dead rat, then continues before I can get a word in: “If they don’t exist, what are we doing here? It wasn’t like this during the war. We ’ad no time to discuss nonsense and nightmares back then! Not with Jerry threatening to drop basilisks on us from V-1s. So this is either a waste of time or we should be stockpiling garlic-impregnated stakes. Which ain’t my department. So can I go ’ome now?”

Sally Carlyle clears her throat loudly. “Not yet, Bill!” By virtue of age and duration of service Bill gets to sit near the head end of the table, but Sally is chairing the session and keeping minutes. She’s a forty-ish, no-nonsense woman whose occasional impish smile predisposes me to like her, against my better judgment—for she is another denizen of the catacombs of Human Resources, and her usual specialty is mediating disciplinary hearings. Minor stuff—nothing involving the Auditors, much less the Black Assizes—but she’s got the Administrative Procedure Manual and the Staff Ethics and Guidance Handbook memorized flat, so the effect is a little like being in a meeting chaired by an officer of the Gedanken-Geheimpolizei. “Doris, I’m afraid the, um, media portrayal of this condition is somewhat off-target. I am informed”—Sally’s eyes narrow ever so slightly as she looks down the table, directly at yours truly—“that there is some truth behind the legend, although exactly how much may, shall we say, be a matter for debate.” She grins. “What would you say, Mr. Howard?”

I take a deep breath. “Vampires exist,” I begin. “I’ve met—”

Basil Northcote-Robinson, sitting at the opposite end of the boardroom table, fiddles with his hearing aid. It makes a hideous high-pitched whistling feedback noise, like fingernails on a blackboard shifted several octaves towards the ultrasonic. “Vampire blancmange!” he shouts, completely derailing my train of thought.

“Would you mind—” I begin.

“Vampire blancmange!”