When we got to the address Polly Peck kept back and actually hid behind a tree, while I crept upon the side yard to the shabby bungalow in question and called in with my mind, in the format that the hospital watchman had suggested.

Allan Bielski, I am at your threshold. May I enter your home to speak?

There was silence. I listened hard. No television, no radio, no sound at all. I was about to turn around and go back when I detected quick movement in my periphery, and spun to see a little white dog marching its way through the early morning’s wet grass. The terrier wasn’t growling, and its tale wasn’t wagging, and it was looking at me too directly, too knowingly. I remembered the brown cat that had guarded Helen’s favorite store in Trois-Rivieres.

I watch this house, and you may enter to see Ally.

When permission was granted no locks mattered – I could lean against a window and somehow slide right through it, feeling a cold line of ice-water running through me. I had just become incorporeal. Jean-Claude’s files reminded me that Dracula could be a mist that might creep under a floor or slip through the smallest gap in a crypt’s door.

It was a mess inside the bungalow, and it stunk terribly. All evidence of one person, not moving around very much. I had a feeling of what was wrong, and my mental voice faltered.

What does he have?I asked the dog.

Depression.

The thought of turning around and leaving hit me again. Did I want the creator of this ruined home in my head?

The spectral white terrier grabbed my pant-leg, and pulled. It was giving me full-power puppy-dog eyes.

I watch this house because of him, and when he is gone I will be free like him. I was his dog when he was a boy. It is time for us both to go on. It has been time for many years.

When we came to the old, slovenly, obese man himself, in a stuffy bedroom on a crooked bed, deep in sleep and smelling quite drunk, telepathic questioning got only one clear thought.

Don’t care don’t care don’t care …

I wanted to ask what he knew, what his life had been before this. What his skills had been. But these seemed like rather heartless questions to ask, as if someone might be abandoned while wishing for death because they weren’t too bright or I already had a carpenter or a gardener.

I looked down to the terrier. You will go with him, into my head?

The dog nodded solemnly. Mr. Bielski’s launch companion might have its own practical value in my ‘army’.

Don’t care don’t care don’t care …

I spoke aloud. “Enough. The dog speaks for you.”

Allan Bielski burped in his sleep, sounding confused. I moved over to one side and confirmed what I had suspected from across the room – there were faint scars over the wrist. A human might not have caught them, but I saw them because the man had already put them there before I came to make them visible to the world.

I drew my finger over them one by one, half-hypnotized, somehow knowing what to do. The blood came, red and then so deep it was just black, pulsing out to the beat of a slow heart. It ran off his wrist and pattered on the dusty floor.

There was no struggle as I drank. The white terrier looked up the ceiling and howled with eerie softness when it was all over, slowly vanishing.

I started to know the man – diabetic, unmarried, no children. A long-term girlfriend had wanted kids and moved on in his forties, and he’d been deteriorating slowly since then. He’d been a chef since his twenties, but lost interest in it, moving to smaller and seedier restaurants, his care and cleanliness also in decline. Beer had made things better after he’d given up the kitchen, and he had worked in a grocery story for the last fifteen years, not really fit for lifting heavy loads but able to slide things around. With some alcohol in his system worrying stopped, melancholy stopped, and he could breeze through a truckload of crates and bags and get everything in its place with a zoned-out look in his eyes, with no interest or pain or stress or need to take a break. He wasn’t a leader or an artist, had never read a novel since high school. Under the right conditions he could work, and get the fruits and vegetables on one side of the building and the dairy on the other.

Well, moving things from point A to point B is always important, I told myself. Maybe the dog’s company would make him less dependent on booze.

As for the dog: it was a male Jack Russell terrier named Chester who had died almost fifty years ago. Jean-Claude’s dormant files had been picked up by Helen a little bit, and terriers had been good for hunting rats that Count Dracula sent against his hunters. If some telepathic rat tried to sneak into my mind, from outside or from within, an aggressive little white football would be flying to grab them.

Chapter 37: Keeping the Vow