I was up late that night. Real late. I was plowing through the stack of well-thumbed library books Janie had left. Mostly Hollywood movie stuff. The usual nonsense, but here and there there was a gem of real information that might prove useful. I no longer doubted the existence of vampires.

There was one really old book Janie had dug up somewhere. It was so old it creaked when you turned the pages. This one had some woodcuts and transcriptions of old medieval tales from somewhere in Eastern Europe. A region called Transylvania. It means "the place that's across the forests". It seemed like vampires went way back in Transylvania. I already heard of the place, of course, at the movies, but this book had stuff I never heard of before. It made the little hairs on my neck and back stand up stiff. It was the feelin' you get when a leopard is checkin' you out, but you don't know where he is yet.

I had never been so glad my office didn't have any windows. Not even when the North Side Gorillas and the South Side Baboons had put me on the hit list and every hatchet monkey in central Chicago was out lookin' to ventilate me with a hot tommy gun. Not even then. There was somethin' out there in the Chicago night and it had my name and address. I wanted to be ready when Vlad came callin'.

I staying up till dawn, readin' manuscripts written by monks that had gone slowly mad in mouldering old castles whose names have long been forgotten. I read stories of things that came out of the night and carried off women...beautiful women...just like Kong did.

It figures. If you're gonna carry off somethin', you sure can't beat carryin' off a classy babe. A real looker. Like Magenta. That got me thinkin' about her legs again. This wouldn't do. I had a case to crack and a bottle of whiskey to kill.

I woke up when Janie came in at 8 AM sharp, like she always does, cheerful like she always is. Janie is a good kid, but who needs good cheer at 8 AM when he's got a hangover the size of Manhattan?

I groaned, glared at the empty whisky bottle and shuffled off upstairs. "Wake me at 11:30," I croaked, as I went out the door. "Thank Kong them stinkin' vampires go to bed at dawn..."

- Chongo