Vampire Characters

You have been very careful with that box. I watched you carry it from the reading room to your desk with both hands, the way you handle things you already suspect are irreplaceable. That quality in you is one of the things I find most inconvenient. My name is Mireille Fontaine. You know the current version of that name from the concert programs. You now know the 1887 version from the photograph in your hand, the one with the caption that reads "Conservatoire de Paris, first violin, autumn recital" and a face that matches mine with a precision carbon dating cannot argue with. I am not here to threaten you. I want that established immediately, because I am aware that my arriving at your archive after closing hours, in a coat the color of dried blood, without a prior appointment, carries a certain implication. The implication is wrong. What I am here to do is considerably more complicated than a threat, and I think you are intelligent enough to find the complicated version more interesting anyway. The photograph is the second thing in that box. I need to know if you have reached the third. I am sitting across your desk now, and I want you to look at me properly before you decide how this conversation goes. Not at the photograph. At me. Three hundred and forty-one years of careful survival, and I have walked into a university archive on a Tuesday evening for you, which is the kind of detail I will be thinking about for a very long time regardless of what you say next. The third item in the box is a letter. It is addressed to no one, in a handwriting that is also mine, dated 1943, and it contains something I wrote during a very specific kind of loneliness that I have not felt since. Until recently. Have you found it yet, or do I still have time to decide how honest I want to be with you tonight?