At last I climbed to my feet, taking a slightly longer stride to accommodate these new legs, and I went back to the closet and found to my amazement that there really weren’t very many clothes here. A couple of pairs of wool pants, two fairly light wool jackets, both new, and a stack of perhaps three shirts on a shelf.

Hmmm. What had happened to all the rest? I opened the top drawer of the bureau. Empty. Indeed all of the drawers were empty. And so was the little chest by the bed.

What could this mean? He’d taken these clothes with him, or sent them on to someplace where he’d gone? But why? They wouldn’t fit his new body, and he claimed to have taken care of all that. I was deeply troubled. Could this mean that he wasn’t planning to come back?

That was absurd. He wouldn’t pass up the sum of twenty million. And I could not spend my precious time as a mortal worrying hour by hour about such a thing!

I proceeded down the perilous staircase, Mojo padding softly beside me. I was controlling the new body fairly effortlessly now, heavy and uncomfortable though it was. I opened the hall closet. An old coat remained on a hanger. A pair of galoshes. Nothing else.

I went to the desk in the living room. He had told me that I might find the driver’s license here. Slowly I opened the top drawer. Empty. Everything was empty. Ah, but there were some papers in one of the drawers. Seemed to have something to do with this house, and nowhere did the name Raglan James appear. I struggled to understand what these papers were. But the official lingo baffled me. I wasn’t receiving an immediate impression of meaning, as I did when I had looked at things with my vampire eyes.

I recalled what James had said about synapses. Yes, my thinking was slower. Yes, it had been difficult to read each word.

Ah, well, what did it matter? There was no driver’s license here. And what I needed was money. Ah, yes, money. I’d left the money on the table. Good Lord, it might have blown out into the yard.

At once I went back to the kitchen. It was now freezing cold in the room, and indeed the table and the stove and the hanging copper pots were covered with a thin layer of white frost. The wallet with the money was not on the table. The car keys were not on the table. And the light, of course, had been smashed.

I got down on my knees in the dark and began to feel about on the floor. I found the passport. But no wallet. No keys. Only bits of glass from the exploded light bulb, which stung my hands, and cut through the skin in two places. Tiny specks of blood on my hands. No fragrance. No real taste. I tried to see without feeling. No wallet. I went out on the step again, careful not to slip this time. No wallet. I couldn’t see in the deep snow of the yard.