olomon McAveny was a vampire. Everyone knew it. No one had ever seen him do anything, so to speak, or heard him speak of it, but nobody needed to. It was one of those things that was simply understood.
No one knew how old he actually was. He looked, for the most part, like a clean-cut man of about thirty, but somehow, at the same time, there was something about him that felt like it belonged a hundred or so years back. It was difficult to tell what it was—something about the way he held himself, maybe, or the way his smooth voice was so precisely articulated. In any other person it would have been charming. In him it was charming. But it was also vaguely unsettling, and at the same time as you felt yourself being drawn to him in conversation you had an odd feeling that something was terribly out of place.
He was not the kind of person one would call friendly, but he was polite and careful and civil to a degree that, in this day and age, was almost shocking. He had lived in the same city for twenty-four years and nobody had once heard him raise his voice. He was calm and composed to a fault. He was gentle.
Children were terrified of him.
It was one of those things that everyone figured out without really realizing it. There were signals that everyone just got used to before they put them together, like the odd fact that the front window to his bookstore was covered with a heavy velvet curtain. The sign on the other side of the curtain, the one that could be flipped over to show whether the store was "closed" or "open," was rigged with a chain and a pulley so that, when he wanted to flip it over, he only had to pull the chain and the mechanics would turn the sign over in the bright window. There were the slightly strange hours of the store, which ended shortly after dark, even in the winter when it got dark before five o'clock.
Morgan had seen him a few times. The first time was when she was quite young, and in the way of a young child all she had really noticed was that he was wearing a suit. This was not really unusual at all, when she thought about it later, but at the time it struck her as odd because it was a saturday night and he was obviously nowhere near a church, and in her small mind suits and church were somehow synonymous.
The whole event was largely unimportant, and the only reason it had any significance was that she remembered it years later when she saw him for the second time. This time was even more forgettable, and forget it she did, but the third time she saw Solomon McAveny she was fifteen years old, and she turned to the friend standing nearest to her and said, "You know, every time I see that guy he looks exactly the same. I swear he's been in his thirties since I was two years old."
"Duh," said the friend, who would be just as forgotten in ten years, and she snapped her gum to punctuate the word. "That's Mr. McAveny, from that bookstore. He's a frickin' vampire."
"Oh," said Morgan, a little taken aback but growing less and less so the more she thought about it. "Huh."
Years later she thought back on this event and was a little embarrassed, felt a little stupid for having been so stupid herself. She pushed the event into her memory and told herself she wouldn't think of it again.
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Just an oldish fragment. I had a middle school art teacher who was a vampire, you know.
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