“Yes.” Angleton briefly touches his Memex. “If I’ve been trying to teach you anything it’s to always look for the gaps, boy. The blind spots. The nightmares that lurk in the holes nobody peers into.”

My mind’s spinning. “Are you suggesting that there is a reason why everybody around here knows vampires don’t exist? Like, perhaps, a person infected with PHANG who, shall we say, is thoroughly embedded within the organization and makes a point of suppressing knowledge of their existence?”

“I couldn’t possibly say.” Angleton leans back and contemplates the cobwebs in the corners of the ceiling. “What do you think?”

“Well, let’s see. If such a person exists, they’re obviously very secretive and a very powerful ritual magician. It’s not you or me, obviously, or we wouldn’t be having this conversation. Presumably they’ve been working here for a long time to get their geas bedded in so deeply. Long enough that you can’t identify them directly.” (I suddenly realize something.) “And, um. The arrival of a bunch of newbie vamps– sorry, PHANG cases, with no sense of secrecy, would presumably put their nose out of joint because it would risk blowing their cover. Whatever the reason for maintaining it might be. Um. The K syndrome analog? If they have to feed periodically, then, um, that would imply killing people. On an ongoing basis. Obviously if they’re official then Mahogany Row would have something to do with keeping them supplied”—I really don’t like where this train of thought is leading me, but Angleton is nodding along from time to time, listening silently, which leads me to believe I’m on the right trail, however gruesome and body-strewn it might be—“with victims.”

“Not that common, actually,” Angleton volunteers at last. “The frequency of vampirism has historically been low. The sane ones usually kill themselves as soon as the implications sink in, and the insane ones are, shall we say, not well adapted for survival in the human society they are dependent on.”

“So they do exist! Officially.”

“We may be on the verge of an unprecedented outbreak, Bob. A side effect of CASE NIGHTMARE GREEN: with the stars in alignment and the potentiation of all magical powers, it’s becoming increasingly easy for the V-parasites to break through and acquire new hosts.”

“Jesus.”

“Yeshua ben Yusuf won’t save you, boy, for that you need to be fast and smart and move in daylight. Vampirism may be contagious, but it is memetically so, rather than genetic: before you can acquire it you need to be a practiced logician, if not a practitioner in your own rights. You and I are, of course, immune to that particular cognitive parasite—we have our own abnormality. But I assume you are aware of the Black pre-prints? Areas of research that are discouraged due to the high frequency of spontaneous human combustion among people who think too hard about certain questions? One might wonder why a group of quantitative analysts were pointed in the direction of those particular algorithms, and by whom. If someone was considering the possibility of raising an army of vampirism-augmented sorcerers, perhaps they might start by conducting experiments on a limited scale . . . It is in any event a complex jigsaw and if you wish to assemble it fully you will first need to locate the source of that troublesome and ubiquitous disbelief that pervades our organization.”