Still naked, Jules leaned against the side of the couch and covered his privates by squeezing together his trunklike thighs. What Doodlebug was implying made him dizzy. “Come again?”

“You heard me. It’syou. And I think you suspected it yourself while you were a wolf. I watched your nose twitch very sharply while you were leaning over into the box.”

Jules rubbed his forehead wearily. His life was taking yet another turn toward the bizarre, and he wasn’t sure he liked it. “Yeah, I heard you. I’m just not sure Ibelieve you.” The whole notion made him nauseated, as if he’d just watched himself having open-heart surgery. “How come no vampire I ever met knew about this-this slug-thingie?”

“There’s a very simple reason. How many vampires bother to peek back inside their coffins after they’ve transformed into another shape? Not many. And vampires tend to be solitary. Most large predators tend to keep to themselves, with the notable exceptions of lions and killer whales. So it’s not as if many vampires would have a companion who might notice this unusual phenomenon. My Tibetan teachers, however, have lived in very close quarters with one another for untold centuries. On a wintery night in the very distant past, one among them made the shocking discovery of where all that extra mass goes when vampire-man becomes vampire-other.”

Jules was more perplexed than ever. “‘Extra mass’? Whoa! Don’t forget, you’re talkin‘ to a guy with a ninth-grade education here. And half ofthat was in catechism. Keep it simple, will ya?”

Doodlebug smiled gently and helped Jules to his feet. “Come back into the kitchen and I’ll make a pot of coffee.”

Jules pulled his pants and shirt back on, then sat at the kitchen table. Soon the air was alive with the blessed odor of chicory.

“Have you ever read anything about Einstein’s theories regarding mass and energy?” Doodlebug asked.

Jules scowled. “Does the pope bless abortions in a whorehouse?”

“Ohh-kay. I’ll do my best to keep this, uh, basic, then.” He poured two mugs of coffee and joined his friend at the table. “One of Professor Einstein’s most famous theories regarding how the universe works is called the Conservation of Mass. All of the ‘stuff’ in the universe can be classified as either matter-like you or me-or energy, like sunlight. All things that are made of matter have mass.”

“You mean weight, right?”

“Well, that’s a limited way of looking at it. But if it’s easier for you to think about it that way, yes, mass can be thought of as weight. Getting back to our friend Einstein, the good professor said that mass can neither be created nor destroyed. Under certain very unusual circumstances, such as a nuclear chain reaction, mass can be converted to energy, but mass can never simply disappear. Now, when you just changed to a wolf, not only your shape changed. Your mass, or weight, changed, too. You went from a man of approximately four hundred and fifty pounds to a wolf of, oh, I’d guesstimate about two hundred. That extra two hundred and fifty pounds or so didn’t disappear. And it wasn’t converted into energy, either. Or else the entire state of Louisiana and a good part of Mississippi would be a smoldering crater now. The mass had togo somewhere.”

Jules took a long, deep gulp of coffee. “So you’re sayin‘ it went into my coffin.”

“Yes. You saw it and smelled it yourself. It didn’tlook anything like you because it was undifferentiated proto-matter, temporarily separated from the conscious and subconscious organizing power of your brain. But I could tell that your supersensitive wolf nose found the proto-matter’s odor intimately familiar.”

Jules winced. “Jeezus… I reallystink, then.” He took another swallow and was lost in thought for a minute. “So you’re tellin‘ me thisalways happens, every time I change into somethin’ else? My extra mass, or whatever, goes back to my coffin, like a batter runnin‘ to home base?”

“Yes. Actually, to be more exact, your extra mass goes back to the last place you slept. If you’d slept last night in the trunk of your Lincoln, that’s where we would’ve found that slug-thingie. This behavior is most likely what originated the custom of vampires putting soil on the floors of their coffins. Maybe some prehistoric vampire discovered that the isolated proto-matter needs soil’s nourishment to remain viable.”

Jules waved his hands in front of his face as if he were swatting pesky mosquitoes. “Whoa! Just when I think I’m startin‘ to follow what you’re sayin’, you zoom up into the clouds again. Look, this is real interesting and all; it’s like watchin‘ an episode ofThe Outer Limits and discoverin’ that I’m the special guest star. But why the heck does this matter right now? You said you was gonna teach me to be a better vampire, somethin‘ that could help me fight Malice X better.”

Doodlebug smiled again, but his eyes betrayed glimmers of irritation. “Jules, you’re not letting me finish. There’s more. Alot more. You’re capable of feats you’ve never even imagined. Let me show you an example.”

Doodlebug’s face hardened with concentration. His slender form began wavering, and a thick mist escaped from his blouse and skirt. A moment later he stood in front of Jules as a little girl-complete with pigtails-who looked about eight years old. With his clothes all billowy, Doodlebug might have been a cross-dressing tyke who’d snuck into his mother’s closet and tried on her fancy party outfit.

“Oh, I see how this could bereal useful in a dustup with Malice X,” Jules said.

Doodlebug didn’t smile. “Just go to the bedroom and look inside my coffin.”

Jules got up from the table, edged around the piano case in the living room, and walked to the four-poster bed in the next room back. He opened the lid of Doodlebug’s coffin. Inside was another pulsating slug-thingie. Only this slug-thingie was much smaller than his own had been; if his proto-matter had weighed 250 pounds, this blob had to be about a tenth that size, maybe 25, 35 pounds.

Suddenly the proto-matter began to vanish from the coffin, disappearing down a nonexistent drain just as the other one had. When it was entirely gone, Doodlebug called to Jules in a high, childlike voice, “All right, now come back into the kitchen.”

The mini version of Doodlebug was sitting on one of the kitchen chairs with a large black cat purring contentedly on his lap. Two other cats, a big orange tabby and a white Siamese, rubbed against the loose folds of hosiery bunched around his skinny legs.

The tabby trotted over to Jules and began rubbing aggressively against his leg. The big vampire’s nose twitched. His sneeze made the windows rattle.

“Ohh maannn… get these damn catsoutta here! I got pet allergies like you wouldn’t believe.” He rubbed his nose and tweaked it from side to side. “Where the hell’d they come from, anyway? They the owner’s?”

Doodlebug called to the tabby with a nod of his head. The big orange cat left Jules’s leg and hopped up on Doodlebug’s lap. “No. They’re mine. More precisely, they’reme.”

“Huh?”

“You watched the proto-matter in my coffin disappear, didn’t you?”

“Yeah, sure, but… since when could a vampire change into acat? Much lessthree cats?”

“Didn’t you tell me that Malice X changed into a black panther?”

“Well, yeah. But I figured that was just ‘cause he was a black guy. I figured, y’know, maybe black vampires follow different rules or somethin’ from us white vampires. Like I can change to a couple of animals from Europe, where my people come from, so I guess he could change to a couple of animals from Africa.”

Doodlebug’s hands kept the two cats on his lap satiated with pleasure. The third cat, the Siamese, sniffed and scratched at the cottage’s back door, perhaps sensing the pondful of fat goldfish waiting outside. “That’s not a bad supposition, Jules. Actually, there’s a germ of truth in what you said, although not in the way you’d think. Let me ask you this: After you became a vampire, how did you first learn that you could transform into a bat, a wolf, or mist?”