Lencey showed me the contents of his tattered black bag. He laid each item out on my coffee table while I laughed at him.
  "Hammer," he said. "Mallet, really. Three short wooden stakes. Ten heads of garlic. Wild rose branches. Phial of consecrated water. Bible. Silver crucifix. Torch. The hell you laughing about?"
  I paused, since you never could tell with Lencey, and then decided it was far too ludicrous to even be considered, so I laughed again. He stiffened in the way he had, like you had just likened his favourite old granny to a smelly sock. He sniffed.
  "This is a heavy issue, dude," he said. "Vampires. You laugh at a vampire all you want, it's still gonna suck your lungs out."
  "This would be an actual mythological animal, you mean," I said. "A reanimated corpse that rises from the grave to suck the blood of the living. Usually a disgruntled minor aristocrat."
  He waved one hand and adjusted his shades with the other. "That's all tripe," he said. "Dracula and so on. I'm talking about genuine biological anomalies. Every culture attests to them. Bloodsuckers, dude. It's real."
  "So they're not dead?"
  "No. They're undead."
  "So they were dead."
  "They were living. Now they're undead. The point is to nudge them a bit and teach them how to be dead. Don't laugh at me, man."
  "I don't know what else to do," I said.
  I poured us both more wine. It was late and I was on my way to bed when he arrived. Tiredness crackled in my ribs. It was easy to laugh.
  "Let's suppose," I said, "that these things exist. What makes you think you're going to stumble across one? I mean, why get all this paraphernalia? It's not as if you're in any danger of meeting one of them."
  "That," he said, slurping merlot, "is where you are mistaken."
  I laughed again. He just looked at me intently, patiently, waiting for me to give up and listen to him. I lit a cigarette.
  "Proceed."
  "Right. As you have probably guessed, I have located one of these nefarious creatures. I have, in fact, become the object of its attention.   It is seeking me out. Hence the paraphernalia."
"For someone who is the potential victim of a bloodsucking animal from hell, you look pretty chill."
  "That is because I have acquired these defenses," he said. He smiled at me.
  "And you drove over here to tell me this because?"
  He grinned. "Because you, china, are going to help me hunt the bitch down and pop some death in her pants."