Whirling, he saw a middle-aged woman on her arse on the ground. She had obviously walked into him and fallen. He bent to help her up, but she ignored his proffered hand, levering herself up with some difficulty, and looking around in consternation as if trying to work out what had happened, what she had hit, how she had fallen.

Oh Christ! He thought. Perhaps she’s blind! That would explain how she didn’t see me.

Well, that and the fog was getting thicker. But that must be it, he decided, and that would also solve the mystery of why she refused to be helped up: she couldn’t see his outstretched hand.

But then, just as he was beginning to feel better about himself, just as he was ready to admit that it was merely a combination of the weather, the time of night, and the general rudeness of people that had made three encounters with him turn out as if he wasn't there, he noticed that the woman was bending to pick up her bag, which had become separated from her as she fell and disgorged its contents on the hard, cold ground.

An assortment of items had fallen out of it, and she had picked up a small hairbrush, some letters, a pencil, a cigarette lighter with something engraved on it, a tiny nail scissors and two packets of peppermint sweets. All of these had been returned to the bag with speed, as if she feared someone might come along and step on them, or rob them, or her, or both. She either wasn’t blind or she had adapted to her disability incredibly well.

Only one item remained on the ground, and as she reached for it, he saw it was a book.

He knew it well. Glaring at him with a sullen expression from the cover was a face he knew well, his arms around the neck of a nubile teenager, red stylised blood pouring down her naked neck and onto her naked breasts. The eyes that looked over the young woman’s shoulders, glowing red and surrounded by a green mist, were those of his best-known character, Erasmus Vintaglia.

It was the cover of Rhapsody in Red, his ninth novel in the Gray Hunter series.

“I guess it’s your lucky day, ma’am!” A wide grin split his face as the woman turned around, having picked up the book, and faced him. “Your eyes are not deceiving you,” he assured her, his voice thick and oily, as he always made it when he spoke to fans. “It’s me, Maurice Stafford, in the flesh! How do you do?”

He had met many thousands of his fans in his time; most, it’s true, at book signings and conventions, but their reactions could usually be divided into three categories: those who screamed and gushed how much they loved his work (mostly younger women, and he had no problem with that, especially when they jumped up and down and hugged him; he didn’t like being hugged normally, but happily made exceptions for anything over a 32C), those who were calmer and tried to engage his interest in their own work - they were “a writer, too”, and had of course been inspired by his work (most of these he put off by explaining that sadly his contract forbade him from sponsoring any new writers - which it did not) - but one or two he had taken, either out of curiosity or because the tits were particularly big. He loved his tits, did Stafford.

Of those, ninety percent was garbage, a further eight percent basically ripped him off in one way or another, which left him with a small handful of work that showed some promise. If it showed enough promise, he robbed it, changing the details just enough to be able to avoid any accusations, and anyway, with his top lawyers on his side, nobody dared take him on in any court in the land, and the ones who basically fainted, overcome by meeting their hero in person.

But to his amazement, this woman did not exhibit any of these characteristics, and fit into none of the three categories. She, in fact, ignored him, walking almost into him, before he, worried about knocking her down again - this time face to face, where he could possibly be looking at a civil case for injuries caused (perhaps that was her game in the first place) - stepped aside, and she walked off into the fog.

“What the -?” Words failed him, and as a writer, that happened but seldom. And as a writer, he soon found the words and thrust them after her, where the uncaring fog ate them like some amorphous monster looking for its next meal, then, as if that monster had had an attack of indigestion, spat a fragment of its meal back out, and it took the form of a man, walking slowly and purposefully towards Stafford.

He noted the blue uniform, and sighed in relief.

“At last!” he swore, as the cop drew up in front of him. “About time! I pushed that alarm - (how long ago now was it? Standing in this fog, undergoing the very strange experience of being ignored by everyone he had met, he seemed to have lost track of time. In fact, a cold chill ran down his spine as he admitted that he was beginning to even feel detached from reality itself) ages ago! I suppose,” he allowed, calming somewhat now that the police had finally arrived, “it’s the fog, isn’t it? Roads dangerous, got to be careful? Well, you’re here now, so he’s in here.”

He made back towards his door (almost entirely hidden now by the thick banks of mist; he barely found his way back) saying over his shoulder “There a black-and-white on the way, yeah? They sent you on to let me know they were coming?”

Silence greeted him.

He turned, looked back. The fog obscured everything now, and a very real sense of fear was beginning to creep over him, as if the haze which rolled across the roads and the streets outside his Seventh Avenue home, and which had advanced to his very doorstep, was threatening to enter his body. He felt like it wanted to invade him, pervade him, take him over, choke him. The cop was nowhere to be seen. He shouted into the mist, but no answer came back.

He couldn’t even hear footsteps.

He couldn’t hear anything.

“What the hell?” he breathed, and grabbed the frame of his door like a man drowning who spots a piece of driftwood floating by, and grabs hold of it, recognising it to be the only thing that can save him. Staggering, his heart beating fast, he almost fell across the threshold, feeling as if he had been in outer space, and had just made it back to the airlock before his oxygen had run out. He leaned, gasping, against the wall, probably only for seconds, but it felt like hours, until a deep, rich voice enquired without the slightest inflection or hint of concern, belying the words “Are you all right, Mister Stafford? You seem to have been gone for some time.”

“What - what time - how long - what -?” Forestalling his half questions, and divining their gist, the vampire remarked

“I believe a total of three hours, six minutes has elapsed since you excused yourself. I hope,” said the vampire, turning in his chair and betraying not so much a smile as a flash of white, sharp teeth, “you have worked out your next move, yes?”

Disbelieving, Stafford glanced at the clock on the wall, then down at his watch. The one said 4:35 AM, the other 1:29 AM. There was a clear disparity between the two timepieces of, as the vampire had said, three hours and six minutes. But - but that wasn’t possible, he told himself. Sure, he had lost track of time out there; the thick fog had confused his senses, and everyone refusing to even acknowledge his existence muddled that further, and his brain must have … three hours? How could that be? And yet, the clock in his study, which he knew to be accurate and whose batteries he had only changed last week, was never wrong. His watch was also reliable to a fault; God knows he had paid enough for it. Swiss craftsmanship at its finest. Neither could be wrong.

And yet, one of them had to be.

Unless…

Unless the vampire was speaking the truth, and somehow he had passed over three hours out there in the fog. He shivered as he remembered how, just after he had met the cop (just now?) and had not been recognised, even acknowledged, he had had the feeling that reality itself was slipping away, and the panic that had gripped him as he lurched towards the doorway, as if it was an escape from … from what?

Something was very clear though: things were not as they should be. Why had nobody spoken to him, marked his presence, completely ignored him? Sure, there was the fog, and the dark, and this was New York, but if you knock someone’s headphones off the least you can expect is an exclamation and a demand for an explanation, at worst you might get your head kicked in. But to be treated as though you’re not there, as if you were ….

Invisible?

“If you were waiting out there in the hopes of greeting the officers of the law you alerted,” the vampire told him without a trace of smugness, “you should know that you wasted your time. They will not cross this threshold tonight.”

Anger rose in him, and in a way he was glad of it. This was something he could deal with, something he could understand, something that wasn’t bloody supernatural or weird. “You disabled the alarm?”

“No, Mister Stafford,” the vampire told him, turning his back on him as he spoke, returning his attention to the chessboard. “If I disabled anything, I suppose you might say I disabled you.”

It took a moment for the words to sink in, then, regaining his strength, and with it a rising indignation, he snapped “Excuse me?”

“Oh it’s nothing really,” the vampire told him airily, not deigning to turn around. “A small talent I acquired a very long time ago. It makes you - well now, let me think how I can say this.” He seemed, from the set of his shoulders, to be ruminating on how best to explain himself, while his gaze appeared to remain riveted on the remaining chess pieces. Finally, he turned around.

Having not seen him for - if the vampire was to be believed - over three hours now, Stafford had forgotten how penetrating those eyes were, how cold their gaze, how they drew you towards and into them, like a fish struggling on a line …

He shook his head, like a woman shaking out a dusty rug, and his thoughts cleared somewhat.