I returned to the hotel. There was yet another package waiting for me. Another video tape. All of Me was the name of it, and once again, the description on the back of the plastic case gave a fair idea of what it was about.

I went to my rooms. No video player! Not even in the Ritz. I rang David, though it was now very near dawn.

“Would you come to Paris? I’ll have everything arranged for you. See you at dinner, eight o’clock tomorrow in the dining room downstairs.”

Then I did call my mortal agent, rousing him from bed and instructing him to arrange David’s ticket, limousine, suite, and whatever else he should need. There should be cash waiting for David; there should be flowers; and chilled champagne. Then I went out to find a safe place to sleep.

But an hour later—as I stood in the dark dank cellar of an old abandoned house—I wondered if the little mortal bastard couldn’t see me even now, if he didn’t know where I slept by day, and couldn’t come bring in the sun upon me, like some cheap vampire-hunter in a bad movie, with no respect for the mysterious at all.

I dug deep beneath the cellar. No mortal alone could have found me there. And even in my sleep, I might have strangled him if he had, without my ever knowing it.

“SO WHAT do you think it all means?” I said to David. The dining room was exquisitely decorated and half empty. I sat there in the candlelight, in black dinner jacket and boiled shirt, with my arms folded before me, enjoying the fact that I needed only the pale-violet tinted glasses now to hide my eyes. How well I could see the tapestried portieres, and the dim garden beyond the windows.

David was eating lustily. He’d been utterly delighted to come to Paris, loved his suite over the Place Vendôme, with its velvet carpets and gilded furnishings, and had spent all afternoon in the Louvre.

“Well, you can see the theme, can’t you?” he replied.

“I’m not sure,” I said. “I do see common elements, of course, but these little stories are all different.”

“How so?”

“Well, in the Lovecraft piece, Asenath, this diabolical woman, switches bodies with her husband. She runs about the town using his male body, while he is stuck at home in her body, miserable and confused. I thought it was a hoot, actually. Just wonderfully clever, and of course Asenath isn’t Asenath, as I recall, but her father, who has switched bodies with her. And then it all becomes very Lovecraftian, with slimy half-human demons and such.”

“That may be the irrelevant part. And the Egyptian story?”

“Completely different. The moldering dead, which still possess life, you know … ”

“Yes, but the plot.”

“Well, the soul of the mummy manages to get possession of the body of the archaeologist, and he, the poor devil, is put in the rotted body of the mummy—”