The rain drummed against the nursing home window like skeletal fingers, and I watched it streak down the glass as I gathered what little courage remained in these old bones. At seventy-three, I've learned that some secrets grow heavier with time, pressing down on your chest until you can barely breathe. This one has been suffocating me for fifty-seven years.

My name is Thomas Cook, and I need to tell you about the man with the top hat I met at Westminster Cemetery in the winter of 1967. I need to tell you because the dreams have started again, and I fear my time is running short. The doctors say it's just my heart, but I know better. Some debts can't be escaped forever.

I was sixteen then, full of that reckless bravado that makes boys think they're immortal. London was different in those days, still scarred from the war but healing, full of music and possibility. I lived with my grandmother in Pimlico after my parents died in a car accident, and she worked nights cleaning offices in Westminster. Money was tight, tighter than a violin string, and I'd taken to supplementing our income in ways that would have horrified the old woman.

Westminster Cemetery was my hunting ground. Not for the living, mind you, but for the dead. The recently buried often went to their rest with jewelry, watches, sometimes even cash tucked into their pockets by grieving relatives. I told myself I was providing a service, that the dead had no use for such things. Young men are remarkably skilled at justifying their sins.

It was a Thursday night in December when I first saw him. The fog had rolled in thick from the Thames, turning the cemetery into a maze of gray shadows and looming monuments. I'd been working for three hours, my hands numb despite the wool gloves, when I noticed the figure standing perfectly still beside the Pemberton family mausoleum.

He was tall, perhaps six and a half feet, wearing a long black coat that seemed to absorb the meager light from the gas lamps along the cemetery's main path. But it was the top hat that caught my attention first. In 1967, nobody wore top hats anymore, not even to funerals. It sat atop his head with an almost supernatural precision, as if it had been placed there by invisible hands.

I should have left then. Every instinct I possessed was screaming at me to drop my tools and run. But poverty makes cowards of us all in different ways, and I had two more plots to investigate before the night was through. I convinced myself he was just another mourner, perhaps an eccentric old man visiting a family grave.

I was wrong.

He didn't move for twenty minutes. Not once. He stood there like a statue, hands clasped behind his back, facing away from me. I kept working, glancing up periodically to check his position, but he remained motionless. The fog swirled around him but never seemed to touch him directly, as if even the mist was afraid to get too close.

When I finally worked up the courage to look again, he was gone.

I should have taken that as a sign to leave, but I was young and stupid and had already invested too much time in the night's work. I made my way to the Carstairs plot, a fresh grave marked with expensive flowers and a headstone that promised the departed had lived a life of luxury. My spade bit into the soft earth with a satisfying crunch.

"Grave work on a winter's night."

The voice came from directly behind me, so close I could feel breath on my neck. I spun around, my heart hammering against my ribs, and found myself face to face with the man in the top hat.

Up close, he was even more unsettling. His skin was pale as parchment, stretched tight over sharp cheekbones and a jaw that looked like it could crack walnuts. His eyes were the color of old blood, and they seemed to glow with their own inner light. When he smiled, I saw teeth that were too white, too sharp, too perfect.

"I... I was just..." I stammered, trying to think of some reasonable explanation for why I was standing in a cemetery at midnight with a shovel in my hands.

"You were just robbing the dead," he said, and his voice was like silk drawn across a razor blade. "No need for pretense, young Thomas. I've been watching you for some time."

The fact that he knew my name should have terrified me more than it did. Instead, I felt a strange calm settling over me, as if I were sinking into warm water. His eyes held mine, and I found I couldn't look away.

"You have a gift," he continued, circling me slowly. His footsteps made no sound on the gravel path. "Most people fear the dead, but you dance among them like an old friend. That's rare. That's valuable."

"What do you want?" I managed to ask, though my voice sounded distant and hollow.

"I want to offer you a proposition," he said, stopping in front of me again. "You see, I have need of someone with your particular talents. Someone who can move freely in places like this, who won't be questioned or suspected. Someone young and strong and hungry."

He reached into his coat and withdrew a leather pouch that jingled with the sound of coins. "More money than you've ever seen. Enough to care for your grandmother properly, to buy yourself a real future. All you have to do is work for me."

The pouch was heavy in my hands, heavier than it should have been. I opened it and saw gold coins, old ones, with markings I didn't recognize. There had to be hundreds of them.

"What kind of work?" I asked, though part of me already knew I wouldn't like the answer.

His smile widened, revealing more of those predatory teeth. "The kind that's best done in darkness. The kind that requires discretion. The kind that feeds on the boundary between life and death."

The fog seemed to thicken around us, and I realized we were completely alone in the cemetery. The sounds of the city had faded to nothing, as if the world outside had simply ceased to exist.

"I don't understand," I said, though I was beginning to.

"Don't you?" He stepped closer, and I caught a scent like old roses and copper pennies. "Look at me, Thomas. Really look."

I looked, and the calm I'd been feeling shattered like glass. His reflection wasn't visible in the polished surface of the headstone behind him. When he breathed, no vapor escaped his lips despite the cold. And those eyes, those terrible red eyes, they weren't human at all.

"You're..." I couldn't say the word. It felt too ridiculous, too impossible.

"I'm offering you a chance to serve something greater than yourself," he said. "To become part of something that has endured for centuries. To never again worry about money or security or the petty concerns of mortal life."

The pouch of gold suddenly felt like it weighed a thousand pounds. "And if I refuse?"

His expression didn't change, but the temperature around us dropped noticeably. "Then you'll leave this cemetery tonight and never return. You'll live your ordinary little life, grow old, and die forgotten. But you'll always wonder what might have been."

"And if I accept?"

"Then you'll help me acquire what I need. Young people, mostly. Runaways, drifters, people who won't be missed. You'll bring them to me, and I'll... well, let's just say I'll provide them with a different kind of eternal rest."

The horror of what he was suggesting hit me like a physical blow. He wasn't just a vampire. He was a predator who wanted to turn me into his hunting dog.

"I can't," I whispered. "I won't."

His laugh was like breaking glass. "Oh, but you will. You see, Thomas, I've been watching you for weeks. I know about your nighttime activities, your little thefts. I know about your grandmother's medical bills, about the notice from the landlord. I know you're desperate."

He was right, and we both knew it. But even at sixteen, even desperate and afraid, I knew some lines couldn't be crossed.

"No," I said, and dropped the pouch. The coins spilled across the gravel with a sound like falling stars.

His eyes flared with anger, and for a moment I thought he might simply kill me where I stood. Instead, he picked up one of the coins and held it up to the pale light.

"You disappoint me, Thomas. But perhaps that's to be expected. The young are often foolish."

He pocketed the coin and stepped back. "Very well. But understand this: you've seen me, spoken with me, refused me. That creates a bond between us, whether you want it or not. Someday, when you're older and wiser and more desperate, you'll remember this moment. You'll remember my offer. And when that day comes, you'll find me again."

"I'll never help you," I said, with more conviction than I felt.

"We'll see." He tipped his top hat with mocking courtesy. "Until then, Thomas Cook, remember that some debts compound with interest. And I am very good at collecting what's owed to me."

He turned and walked away, his footsteps still making no sound. The fog seemed to follow him, swirling around his retreating figure until both he and the mist had vanished into the darkness between the headstones.

I ran then, abandoning my tools and sprinting through the cemetery gates like the devil himself was chasing me. Maybe he was.

I never returned to Westminster Cemetery. I found honest work the next week, first as a delivery boy and later as a mechanic. I married Sarah when I was twenty-two, had three children, and lived what anyone would call a normal life. But I never forgot the man with the top hat, and I never stopped looking over my shoulder.

The dreams started in my thirties. Always the same: I'm back in that cemetery, standing in the fog, and he's there waiting for me. "Ready to accept my offer now?" he asks, and I always wake up before I can answer.

For decades, I convinced myself it had been a hallucination, a product of stress and hunger and a young man's overactive imagination. But then came the newspaper clippings.

The first one appeared in 1985, tucked under my windshield wiper after a particularly vivid dream. A small item from the local paper about a missing person, a young woman who had last been seen near Westminster Cemetery. Her name was circled in red ink.

More followed over the years. Always missing persons, always young, always last seen in or around Westminster. The clippings would appear in my mailbox, in my newspaper, sometimes even in my coat pockets. No postmarks, no return addresses, just a reminder that he was still out there, still waiting.

Sarah found a stack of them when she was cleaning out my desk in 2003. She asked me about them, and I lied. I said I was researching a book, that I'd always been interested in unsolved mysteries. She believed me because she loved me, but I saw the worry in her eyes.

The last clipping came three days ago. A teenager named Marcus Powell, reported missing after telling his friends he was going to Westminster Cemetery to meet someone about a job. The photograph showed a boy with my eyes, my jawline. My grandson, the one I'd never met because my son and I had quarreled years ago.

I called the police, but what could I tell them? That a vampire had taken my grandson as part of some decades-old revenge? They'd have me committed. Instead, I sat in my chair and wept for the first time since Sarah's funeral.

That night, the dream was different. Instead of the cemetery, I was in a grand library lined with leather-bound books. The man with the top hat sat behind an ornate desk, younger-looking than I remembered, as if the years had been kind to him.

"Hello, Thomas," he said, and gestured to a chair across from him. "I believe we have some unfinished business."

"Where is he?" I asked, though I already knew.

"Safe. For now. But time is a luxury I can't afford forever." He leaned forward, his red eyes gleaming. "I told you once that some debts compound with interest. You've had fifty-seven years to consider my offer. What's your answer?"

I looked around the library, at the shelves that stretched up into darkness, at the shadows that seemed to move independently of any light source. "If I agree, you'll let him go?"

"I'll let him go," he said. "But understand what you're agreeing to. Your soul belongs to me now. Your will is mine to command. You'll do what I ask, when I ask it, without question or hesitation."

"I'm seventy-three years old," I said. "How much use can I be to you?"

He smiled, and I remembered why that expression had terrified me so much as a young man. "Oh, Thomas. You still don't understand. Age is just a number. What matters is the hunger inside you, the willingness to do what others won't. And you, my dear boy, have been hungry your entire life."

He was right, of course. I'd spent decades trying to fill a void that had opened in me that night in the cemetery. I'd worked harder than I needed to, saved more than was reasonable, always preparing for some disaster that never came. I'd pushed away my children because I was afraid of what I might do to protect them. I'd lived in fear of my own shadow for fifty-seven years.

"The boy," I said. "I want to see him first."

"Of course."

The library dissolved around us, and suddenly we were back in Westminster Cemetery. It looked exactly as I remembered it, down to the same gas lamps and the same creeping fog. But now I could see things I'd missed before: the way the shadows fell wrong, the way the air itself seemed to thicken with malevolent intent, the way the very ground pulsed with an unnatural hunger.

Marcus was there, sitting on a bench near the Pemberton mausoleum. He looked peaceful, almost serene, but his eyes were vacant and distant. Under the vampire's influence, no doubt.

"He's unharmed," the vampire said. "As promised."

I walked over to my grandson, this boy I'd never had the chance to know. He had my nose, Sarah's gentle smile. He was probably a good kid, the kind who helped old ladies cross the street and called his mother every Sunday.

"Marcus," I said softly.

He looked up at me with those empty eyes. "Grandfather?"

"I'm here, son. I'm going to get you out of here."

I turned back to the vampire, who was watching our reunion with amusement. "I accept your offer. But I want your word that you'll never touch my family again. Not my grandson, not my children, not anyone related to me."

"You have my word," he said. "Though I should warn you, the nature of our arrangement means you won't be seeing much of them anyway."

"What do you mean?"

"Well, you'll be dead, for one thing. Oh, not truly dead, but dead enough. Your heart will stop, your body will cool, and you'll be buried with all the proper ceremony. But you'll rise again, and when you do, you'll be something new. Something hungry."

The full horror of what I was agreeing to hit me then. He wasn't just asking me to work for him. He was asking me to become like him.

"I thought... I thought you just wanted me to find people for you."

"Oh, that too. But Thomas, my dear boy, I've been alone for such a very long time. Eternity is considerably less tedious when you have companionship."

I looked at Marcus, still sitting peacefully on the bench, and realized I didn't have a choice. I'd failed to protect him when he was sixteen, and I'd failed to protect my grandson now. But I could still save one of them.

"All right," I said. "I accept."

The vampire's smile widened until it split his face like a wound. "Excellent. Now, there's just one more thing."

"What?"

"The transformation requires a willing sacrifice. You have to invite me in, so to speak. You have to ask me to make you what I am."

I closed my eyes and thought about Sarah, about the life we'd built together, about the man I'd tried to be despite the darkness that had followed me. Then I thought about Marcus, about the future he deserved to have.

"Make me like you," I whispered.

"I'm sorry, I didn't quite catch that."

"Make me like you," I said louder.

"With pleasure."

He was on me before I could blink, his teeth sinking into my throat like razors. The pain was extraordinary, but it didn't last long. Soon there was only darkness, and cold, and the feeling of everything I'd ever been draining away into nothing.

But I'm not telling you this story from beyond the grave. I'm telling you because I woke up.

I woke up in my chair in the nursing home, gasping and clawing at my throat. The newspaper was still in my lap, opened to the article about Marcus Powell. But when I looked at it again, the boy in the photograph wasn't my grandson. He was just another missing kid, another tragedy in a city full of them.

I called my son anyway, the first time we'd spoken in five years. Marcus answered the phone, alive and well and working at a bookstore in Camden. He'd never been to Westminster Cemetery, never met anyone offering him a job.

It had been a dream. All of it. The vampire, the library, the terrible bargain, all of it just the fevered imagination of an old man haunted by a guilt he'd carried for more than half a century.

But I still have the newspaper clipping. It's real, physical, not something I could have imagined. And when I checked the date on the article, it was from 1967, yellowed and brittle with age. The same year I met the man with the top hat.

I've been thinking about that a lot in the days since. About the nature of dreams and reality, about the weight of secrets and the price of guilt. About the possibility that some encounters transcend the boundaries of time and space, that some meetings happen not in the physical world but in the spaces between heartbeats, in the shadow realm where nightmares are born.

The man with the top hat may have been real, or he may have been a manifestation of my own guilt and fear. But the lesson remains the same: some choices echo through eternity, and some debts can never truly be paid.

I'm dying now, I can feel it in my bones. The doctors say I have maybe a week left, maybe less. I've written this story down because I needed to tell someone, needed to unburden myself of this weight I've carried for so long. Whether you believe it or not doesn't matter. What matters is that it's finally been told.

Tonight, I'm going to Westminster Cemetery. Not to rob the dead, but to face whatever is waiting for me there. Maybe it's just my own mortality, the final settling of accounts. Maybe it's something else entirely.

But I'm not afraid anymore. I've carried this secret for fifty-seven years, and I'm tired of running from shadows. Whatever the man with the top hat was, whatever he represented, I'm ready to meet him again.

After all, some debts compound with interest.

And I suspect mine has finally come due.