“The place from my nightmare? Which I only just told you about? How on earth can you take us there?”

“Because I saw it too.”

Sally was excited and annoyed. “You mean, just now? When you were all…” She waved her hand and waggled her fingers.

“Naw, naw, weeks ago. In my half of the nightmare. Remember, until you blasted in and rescued me, I was trapped in that awful stuff. Right at the start of it, I saw the same thing you did.”

“You did? Why didn’t you tell me?”

“Same damn reason you didn’t tell me. Got driven out of my mind. When the nightmare started, I drifted toward this huge fucking cloud of yuck. Told you that. Well, when I got in, first thing I saw was this sad-faced dork with a scraggly goatee and thick hiking boots lying dead by the ruined wall in that grove in the Black Forest –”

Sally sat bolt upright, puzzle pieces clicking into place. “I thought he was lying in “a black forest,” but it wasn’t actually black, I see that now. It was the Black Forest? In Germany?” Her mind filled with ominous images of the vast mythical forest where Hansel and Gretel met the evil witch, where… She realized that she didn’t really know any other legends about the Black Forest, just that the name sounded ominous.

But Lavinia nodded and proceeded to poke holes in what she thought she knew. “When I was in Germany, young and dumb and full of amrita, me and my girlfriend Poky, we did some hiking. Black Forest is mostly a tourist trap, full of clock towers and gingerbread and overpriced restaurants. But there’s some places, backwaters. We stayed with this chick Helga, golden-skin blonde. In fact we… never mind.”

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Sally nodded tightly. Lavinia had been about to jolt her with yet another casual threesome. (The long-ago girlfriend had been named Poky?)

“Anyway,” Lavinia continued, “Helga, she told us about this side trail that people usually avoided. So of course, Poky and me had to try it.”

Lavinia went from smacking her lips annoyingly over Helga to disturbed quiet. “Spooky place alright. And I don’t spook easy. We brought along food, leaned against that wall, made it a picnic but there was no debate about leaving as soon as we finished eating. You know, before there was the least chance of it getting dark.

“And that’s all I can tell you, really. Nothin’ happened. But that’s where the kid was lying dead. I saw it just like you did. Didn’t hear any moans or screams, but I did feel the kid was talking to me, this steady godawful drone. And it grew into the numbing despair I told you about.”

They looked at each other with mouths open.

“So somewhere in Germany…” Sally began.

“I could find that place again, no question…”

“And there’s a man lying dead there…”

“Or at least in some state of suspended whosis whatsis…”

“Who may be, what, spreading his despair over the whole world and somehow triggering this vampire plague?”

They shook their heads at each other. “Time to get on Expedia, book us some travel,” Lavinia said. “You got a passport?”

As Sally thought, you can be intimate with someone for months and not know whether they have a passport, the low dreadful moan rose again. The hairs on Sally’s arm prickled but this time she understood that the sound meant they were on the right track.

But why did only she hear it?