The phone rang in Nick Miller’s office. “The director wants you down at Santa Rosa. He will meet you there at ten o’clock. Nick paused, “That’s off-limits for us.” “Not anymore,” the voice informed him. In a vague way Nick Miller had been expecting the call, he was with Randolph Harris.

As chief archaeologist for the reporter, he was one of several people who had been warned against taking the young man out. “They must have dug something up,” Nick thought. He walked out a private exit of the mansion and from the belvedere on the north side caught the sunlit panorama of Norway.

Already Winter was in the air. Nick, forty-two, moved at a brisk pace. He was a trim man with sandy hair and a thick mustache, and his tweed jacket and bring green tie set him apart from the aging corps of mansions functionaries. Nick had been hired as director of antiquities and paleo-Christian art in 1993 after a career that included excavations throughout the Mediterranean and Turkey.

Nick soon learned, however, the he would be allowed to do very little digging in the mansion. In urban areas, archaeology typically thrives on new construction—it is the window of opportunity into the subterranean record.

However, whenever a building project began in the mansions, the engineers did their best to keep the archaeologist out. We must have the courage to embrace the beauty of science in the name of the Lord. Nick listens. He smiles. I continue.

The image of God Incarnate, become Man out of fascination with His Own Creation, will triumph in the Third Millennium as the supreme emblem of Divine Sacrifice and Unfathomable Love. It takes thousands of years to understand the Crucified Christ, I say. Why, for example, did He come down to live thirty-three years?

Why not twenty? Why not twenty-five? You could ponder this stuff forever. Why did Randolph have to start as a baby? Who wants to be a baby? Was being a baby part of our salvation? And why choose that particular time in history? And such a place. Who was that dashing dude, anyway?

But I could not leave Randolph. Randolph was in a real snare with these mortals. And I was greatly in love with Randolph. Randolph, aged twenty-one when Baptized in the Blood, was a seer of visions and a dreamer of dreams, unconsciously charming and unfailingly kind, a suffering hunter of the night who thrived only on the blood of the damned, and the company of the living and the uplifting.

(The loving and the uplifting??? Like me, for instance??? So the kid makes mistakes. Besides, I was so in love with him that I put on a damned good show for him. And I can be damned for loving people who bring out the love in me I that so awful for a full-time monster? You will shortly come to understand that I am always talking about my moral evolution! But for now: the plot.)

I can fall in love with anybody—man, child, vampire, Randolph. It does not matter. I am the ultimate Christian. I see God’s gifts in everyone. I do not understand why Ryan would ignore him, however; anyone would love Randolph. Loving people like Randolph is easy.

Now, back to the question at hand: Which brings me back to Randolph’s bedroom, where Randolph was at this delicate moment. Before either of us had risen tonight—and I had taken the six-foot-tall, brown-eye red-haired boy to one of my secret hiding places with me—a mortal man had arrived at the Manor House and affrighted everybody.

This was the matter that had Ryan looking up the steps, and Tyler muttering, and Stephanie worried sick as she went about in her high-heel stilettos, wringing her hands. And even Mathias Harris was excited about it, still dashing up and down their circular stairs.

Even Scott and Dale had broken off their mourning laments earlier to have a glance at this mortal man and offer to help him in his distress. It was easy enough for me to scan their minds and get a picture of it, this grand and bizarre event, and to scan Randolph’s mins, for that matter as to the result.

And I was making something of an assault on the mind of the mortal man himself as he sat on Randolph’s bed, in a huge random display of flowers, a truly marvelous heap of helter-skelter flowers, talking to Randolph. It was a cacophony of minds filling me in on everything from the beginning. And the whole thing sent a little panic through my enormous brave soul. Work the Dar Trick? Make another one of us? Woe and Grief! Sorrow and Misery! Help, Murder, Police!

Do I really want to steal another soul out of the currents of human destiny? I who want to be a saint? And once personally hobnobbed with angels? I who claimed to have seen God Incarnate? Bring another into the—get ready!—Realm of the Undead? Comment: One of the great things about loving Randolph was that I had not made him.

The boy had come to me free of charge. I had felt a little like Socrates must have felt with all those gorgeous Greek boys coming to him for advice this is, until somebody showed up with the Burning Hemlock.

Back to now: If I had any rival in this World for Randolph’s heart it was this mortal man, and he was up there offering him in frantic whispers the promise of our Blood, the fracture and incomplete gift of our immortality. Yes, this explicit offer was coming from the lips of Randolph.

Good God, kid, show some backbone, I thought! You saw the Light of Heave last night! And no one was there for you! So okay, where was I? The analogies I have drawn, if they are valid, should serve to sketch that other fullness Randolph World that I surmise we are drawn to and in some way rely on.

What justifies the sense of mystery I, in the end, that quality of the mysterious event that makes it seem, not a teasing and unresponsive puzzle, but a breaking-through of transcendental reality.

Some such experience may be provided reputably by the spirits, the vision, all the strange existences and events beyond nature that Randolph keeps coming back to and setting forth for our contemplation. Through mystery, that is, we grasp a little more of the totality which we hazard is the felt essence of Randolph. And in reminder: mystery and totality are attributes of the reality ordinarily called religious.