“So did you?” I asked, breathless myself for the first time in the vampire's telling.

  “Oy,” said the vampire, miffed. “No skipping ahead in the story.”

  I stared at him, my face the very picture of a lack of amusement, and plopped the last fence post in the ground. After burying the broken automaton (with the vampire’s help) I had gone about to some of the more recently messed up fence posts, fixing them, in a bid to make the graveyard look like I hadn’t neglected every directive given to me.

  “What do you think?” I asked. “It looks okay, eh? They won’t know anything untowards happened, eh?”

  The vampire scanned the hills, where numerous destroyed trees could be seen littering the ground, scorch marks still clear on their trunks. “Uh huh. Sure.”

  I groaned.

  “Say,” the vampire idly observed, “you’re not being charged for damages, are you?”

  I froze fearfully. I hadn’t considered this.

  “Enh,” the vampire said airily, having successfully induced anxiety throughout my entire person. “It’s probably fine.”

  I just stared at the graves, and wished I could slowly sink into the earth to join their inhabitants, rather than confess to the gravekeepers that I had systematically failed at following their instructions.

  “In any event,” the vampire cheerily remarked. “I can’t yet tell you whether I did get the moon back, but I can tell you that both of us were willing to take the quest on, albeit with trepidation. The brief threads the Man in the Moon had traced out for us indicated a conspiracy stretching across the better part of half a continent, which was hardly the sort of thing that two creatures who inhabited the margins of civilisation might be expected to track down.

  “Nevertheless, he was insistent, and after some further discussion managed to seed sufficient thoughts in us that the princess saw it as her duty to intervene as a future lawfully-if-hereditarily-elected mayor, and I considered it, if not strictly necessary to my own investigations, than certainly highly beneficial. The only question was the how.”

  “So, how did you track the man down?”

  The vampire looked mistily into the night.

  ***

  I had arrived in the graveyard for the first time, seeking a night’s rest on my way into the city. This the gravekeepers were happy to give me, for the purpose of a graveyard is to bring rest to the dead (and also I had lots of money).

  The princess was not with me. We split up when we descended the thread of moon moth silk that lay to the back of the Most Westerly Point, each of us with our dedicated tasks, and after a long journey (largely unworthy of remark) I had arrived back in the Northern Wastes, alone.

  I assumed it would be a quiet night, spent meditating in peace before I continued my journey to Galton on the morrow. I was wrong.

  First there was that young thief. I don’t know what that woman wanted or what she was expecting to get, but find something she did, when she disturbed the nest of the graveyard’s resident corpse raven, Crusty.

  Crusty of course felt very sorry for what he had done, but by that time it was already too late, and so we had to work fast to erase the evidence - very fast, for at that time they did not have you as their night watchman, but still did the work themselves, and thus it was only a matter of time until one of them tripped over us.

  We had buried the woman and erected a gravestone - John, perhaps unwisely, had supplied us one at random from his supply - and after that we all dispersed, so as not to look as if we had anything to do with the grave.

  I returned to my meditation, determined to look as harmless and unprepossessing as I could. Yet again I failed in my venture, but this time it was I who caught wind of the disturbance.

  It was the sound of shovels, impacting the earth. It could not be the gravekeepers, who after all did not dig after dark, and while they allowed the undead to do so I had only just returned the shovels to the office, and knew that nobody else was using them.

  Accordingly I groaned to myself and went to check out the disturbance, hoping it would just be some ghoul out adding an extension to his grave, or remodeling his subterranean swimming pool. Once more I was wrong.

  This time it was an entire gang of thieves. They were digging up - can you believe this - the very body we had just buried, dragging the poor woman out of the redug hole and tossing her onto a cart filled with exhumed bodies in varying stages of decomposition.

  They were muttering and murmuring to themselves, motioning every which way, clearly on edge. And why wouldn’t they be, when they were desecrating the dead?

  I should have run for the gravekeeper. If not them, then at least the other denizens of the graveyard, who had lived there for years and were just as much its masters as the gravekeepers.

  Stolen from its original source, this story is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

  I did neither. At the sight of them removing that body white hot rage filled me - irrational, I know, not only to feel such emotion but to feel such emotion about a human being, who after all is nothing at all - but it filled me all the same, and before I knew it I had leapt for the nearest of the men.

  My fangs sank into his shoulder, my claws scrabbled against his back. He cried out and fell back, alerting his fellows.

  To their credit they gave no hue nor cry, preserving their secrecy. Three men fanned out about me while two of them sought to push away the cart at speed. I could not see their faces, only crazed eyes spinning madly under their masks, and each of them carried a short sword.

  It was three men, but what sort of vampire would I be if three men were enough even to slow me down? In two leaps and a bound they were dead on the ground, necks snapped, bodies eviscerated, and I was chasing after the men with the cart.

  To their credit, they managed to evade me for thirty seconds, running at speeds far faster than any human was capable of, were they unaided by magic. Still, they were but human, and eventually I closed the distance after propelling myself from the earth in a jump, dismembering one of the men upon my landing.

  The other reached in a panic for the sword at his belt, but I had already shattered his arm. He wheeled back, finally bursting into a scream, only to fall silent as I gently rapped him on the head.

  I bound him with a length of rope I had and went for assistance, contracting Crusty and Anselm, (an old acquaintance of mine who I’d been delighted to find in the graveyard) to help me rebury the bodies.

  We had only got around to reburying the woman when the gravekeeper, attracted by the noise, came upon us. It took him no more than a moment to take in the sight - the cart of corpses, the corpse thieves dead upon the earth, and us with our shovels standing above a recently disturbed grave.

  We dissembled, saying it was an old grave and only recently disturbed; a lie that was all too easily discovered when the gravekeeper himself took a shovel to the grave, and swiftly discovered that the young woman buried there by no means matched the ninety year old man whose name was on the tombstone. Then he saw the signs of the corpse raven’s presence.

  You should have heard the hiding he gave Crusty. It would have been quite embarrassing - to be rebuked in that manner, like a child, when one is a scholar at a university - but I stolidly waited it out, face assiduously neutral as his storm of criticism raged. I even said nothing when the gravekeeper, after chewing out Crusty for the better part of half an hour, told him to find out the woman’s last wishes and deal with her body appropriately, thank you kindly.

  Yes, I’m a patient soul that way.

  The initial unpleasantries dealt with, I borrowed a mausoleum from Gertrude for the further unpleasantries, hoping to talk to the man somewhere where no one could hear him scream.

  I was somewhat worried about getting him to talk - all I had with me was an old hairbrush - but it appeared such worries were unnecessary. Moments after waking up and gazing upon me, bleary eyed, he suddenly straightened and shouted “I’ll talk! I’ll talk!”

  And talk he did, at length, to the point that I nearly nodded off amidst his incessant drone. He gave me every detail about his life and his doings, and what had brought him to that point. It was a long story and a winding one, and generally uninteresting enough as to be unworthy of recounting.

  The only part of the story that was relevant to our tale - and the reason I brought it up in the first place - was his reason for being there, reasons that proved fortuitously tied to my own ventures.

  He explained that he was in charge of the company that provided cafeterias to such varied institutions as the university, the mayor’s office, the stock market, and several famous newspapers, and that his company specialised in hot dogs. You should be able to see where this story was going already.

  There was an old adage about hot dogs - let me see if I can remember it - ah! It goes, if I’m not mistaken, something like the following.

  When the gentlemen of Albion were coming up with names for all the words in the English language, they decided to give meat distinct names from the animals from which they derived. Said the eldest gentleman, “And we will call the meat of the cow, beef.”

  And the second eldest gentleman, “And we will call the meat of the pig, pork.”

  And the third eldest gentleman, “And we will call the meat of the sheep, mutton.”

  And the fourth eldest gentleman, “But of the chicken? What should we call that?”

  The gentlemen thought for a while and then the eldest said, “the chicken we can preserve, and call chicken.”

  “And hot dogs? What about them?”

  The gentlemen shrugged. “No one knows where they come from anyways.”

  Well - now I knew, and very much did I wish I didn’t. The man was utterly unrepentant for his part in the whole business, insisting that it was a prescient cost-cutting measure, which substantially reduced costs for both clients and customers while preserving a delicious and nutritious taste. Even better, he said, it was a form of recycling, and therefore was excellent for the environment.

  My revulsion alone was sufficient to dismiss this line of reasoning - as that other old adage said, ‘the greatest crimes are those born of logic’ - but I was intrigued by a subtle hint, dropped like a gleaming diamond in the midst of a sea of filth.

  The man mentioned that his hot dog business catered to the university, the mayor’s office, the stock market, and sundry papers. When asked about the nature of his contract, however, he informed me with an uncomfortable twitch that in spite of the plurality of locations, he had but one employer.

  Said employer had never given the man a name - said he didn’t need it, that it didn’t refer to anything - but he paid well, so the man remembered everything about him. He had wanted a contract for a large quantity of hot dogs to be delivered to ‘his’ various establishments, and for a kind of oil - a lubricant - to be made out of any extra… bits the man had once he was finished with processing.

  To make two sales with one product? Who would refuse? Certainly no sane person, or at least that’s how the man put it to me. He gave me one or two other details, enough for me to find my target; and then, done with him, I gave him another body for his stock. (Alas, the gift was never received.)

  Of course we felt so sorry about the whole mess that, even though she had been a thief, we didn’t exorcise the woman’s ghost - you know how it is, to have to watch while thieves steal your corpse to make hot dogs. If you ever stop by the columbarium again, ask to meet Ashley. She’s a sweet girl, really.

  Once she had been given a proper home and I had paid the deposit on a grave for the next several weeks - for I had no clue how long my journey would take, and I might need somewhere to sleep - I continued on my way, to the area indicated by my lead… Back, back to Galton.