Bistritz the magnificent castlebat glided through the night sky, ever heading for parts ever darker. His condominium-sized wings needed only flap once to guarantee an hour’s worth of flight. Truly he, and the castle on his back, constituted the most impressive home in the world.

The monstrous friends would soon dine within this bat’s hallowed halls. In a posh dining room was seated Adam, duly amazed. He enjoyed a roaring fireplace and the sight of a mystery staircase from his position at one end of a meters-long table. On the walls were hung medieval relics, swords and banners which predated even he. But the pièce de résistance waited on the table, where an exquisite cornucopia offered plentiful fresh fruit.

Adam’s side screamed with ham sandwiches, Turkish delights, roast beef, turkey legs, an entire ham, string beans, chicken pot pie, robber steak, a spiced ham, and a coffee cake. Never in all his days had he seen so much food, much less in such garnished array!

Dracula’s side, far at the other end, was barren, by contrast, of plates. It was also barren of Dracula. But not for long.

All down the table’s length, from Adam’s end to the empty one soon to be Dracula's, standing at attention, were cups of wine...wine for vampires, which would be blood. As Adam sized up his food, a strange yet familiar mist passed slowly over the table. Any wine it passed, it slurped, saying “mmm,” “slllllurp,” and “schleeeyerp mmmyumyumyummy.” Soon the cups were empty—and Dracula, full, materialized, sated from sip in his seat.

“What a delightful meal,” he said. “I used to do this trick on battlefields, you know.”

The act had made Adam nervous. He inquired, “Are you most definitely sure you do not want any of this extravagant, overlarge meal you have graciously prepared?”

“Do not worry about my wellbeing. You have only just started your Baptism of Blood, which is what we call the first stage of vampirism. While I do not need to sup on much supper due to my more advanced condition, I acquired food as well as blood in case you would, in fact, like to sup. So sup away; I have sipped, and will sup on your presence alone.”

“Then surely I shall sup.”

So sup he did. At intervals throughout, he turned, with his mouth meat-laden, to the spaces on the walls where windows should have been.

“So I notice that your castle is closed to the outdoors,” he said.

“That it is! In case I have need to protect my condition.”

“And what of the steps by thine fireplace?” A carpet-clad stairway of mystique led up to a tiny deck; when Adam leaned, he could clearly see that deck, complete with an old-fashioned sailing vessel wheel, poised behind a grand circular window. From that window’s girthy width and tallness, one could see all that lay before Bistritz in the sky, possibly including the sun.

“Without it, how could I steer my bat?”

“Ah. But of course.”

Yet more supping ensued.

After consumption of the second pork dish: “I wish to thank you from the bottom of my heart,” said Adam.

“Quite again there is no need! It was my pleasure to extomb you from beneath Egypt.”

“Not for that. For this most delectable selection of dishes, the likes of which I could have only dreamed of. For I have spent a life subsisting on nothing but roots, fruits, and wild brutes, and this meal is the most scrumptious I have ever had in my long and yet short life!”

“You do not need to consume it all just to show your appreciation,” Dracula advised. “I have had a long life in which to practice the culinary arts with few to enact my skills upon. In fact...by the end of our friendly relations, you may be apt to reject this sup with anger.”

“Why should I want to rescind this supper? Has this something to do with your reason for retrieving my unhappy corpse from the sweltering sands of the north Sahara?”

Dracula, a mite less playful, reached beneath the table and lifted a bottle of red wine: true wine, that being the blood of grapes. “Do you sip wine with your sup?”

“I should say I desire a sip, please.”

He tossed the bottle. It sailed over the cornucopia and, with the perfect landing of a gold-medal gymnast, landed tilted against the rim of the wine glass closest to Adam. The cork popped off as if by command; the cup was filled to the ideal volume.

“My thanks. Do you sip?”

“No, I neither sip nor sup. And now, my books.” Dracula flicked his arms like a ninja launching dangerous stars. Past his shoulders sailed two books, straight from the dining room library. One landed in the coffee cake, the other against the wine glass, which knocked the bottle off the table. “Drat. But please inspect the volumes.”

Adam, who with his fork had just hoisted the entire spiced ham, lowered it sadly and turned to the first novel: Frankenstein. “What manner of volume is this?”

“I apologize for recalling bad memories, but please, verify the ending for me.”

A quick inspection afforded the conclusion to the novel. Victor Frankenstein passed away in the far north aboard a sailing vessel, and Adam himself forged a funeral pyre at the very tip of the world to burn himself to death—at least, such had been the intent.

“This is a real account,” said Adam.

“And examine the second.”

Bram Stoker’s Dracula.

“That account was invented, they say,” Dracula prefaced, “by a man who lived in Whitby, England, when I had come to roost there. They call it a fable, an assemblage of fabricated memoirs from the various heroes involved in my slaying. But in truth, this Mr. Stoker looted real journals and printed them under guise of speculative fiction!” He scoffed. “So it is the genuine article, accurate down to the letter.”

Adam flipped to Dracula’s end. A Romanian mob found his coffin in the forest. His macabre seat of slumber was pried open, his chest pierced with a common Bowie knife, and his body became dust and scattered in the sun. Also, his head was removed with a kukri knife! Very impressive.

“Beheaded as well as staked through the heart?” Adam fact-checked.

Dracula drew an X over his heart with a finger and chuckled. “Do you think a common dagger owned by some random Englishman is guaranteed to be made of silver? It simply must be made of silver, or a vampire will not pass on. Otherwise, if we are substantially harmed, we simply revert to ash, blow away in the wind, and are reborn as the phoenix, only more bat-like.”

“Fantastic. But why this exercise in literary history?”

“I have waited many moons to ask you this, my friend...” The heckish host loosened his collar and took a long breath. Several meters away sat Adam, who might have been perfectly content if not for his memories, some of them vicious, others yet vague and awash in ominous mist. Dracula leaned forward and asked, “What happened after the end of Frankenstein? What was your fate?”

“It certainly was not a happy doom, nor one as exciting as burning to ash. Nor did I succeed in returning to the ashes from which I crawled in my loathsome genesis. For you see, I did hold to the promise I made the sailor that frozen day!

"I took myself to the pinnacle of the icéd wastes, carrying kindling which I had procured at the start of my journey. Then I set them all ablaze and laid myself in the pyre. I let the flames overtake me! I howled under the Northern Lights for an eternity of pain! And my nerves savored every second, every miniscule particle of that flesh-rending time. It was a banquet of suffering—but I deserved every serving. For it was I who rampaged through Europe, I who murdered Victor's brother, his friend, his wife, and even Victor himself! And yet no matter how long I remained on the pyre, my body, harbor of my sins, would not burn away!

“By next morning, the kindle was utterly spent. I examined myself. To my utter shock, though my flesh continued to scream with anguish, I myself was unseared, unmarked. I was not only naturally cold-resistant, immune from the day of my creation to frostbite and pneumonia; I was also too tough to burn. I long considered seeking death through other means, but ultimately lacked the resolve to do so. Instead, I slowly returned to the land of the living, and...”

“And right after that, you were seen by the monster hunter Van Helsing, initiating a lengthy manhunt that spanned the planet, I presume?”

“Ah. Ah! Ah. Yes, I shall, shall confirm that, yes that is what happened most indubitably,” Adam confirmed incredibly credibly. There was a strange, sad truth he could not reveal, that he scarcely knew himself, which smarted at the touch like a new wound. “And how did you know, oh correct one?”

The host brandished a thick stack of highly yellowed pages, tied with twine. Even with his vampire eyes, Adam still had to squint to see it, thanks to the gargantuan length of their fabulous dinner table. “This,” said Dracula, “is the manuscript to the unpublished work Frankenstein 2. It may as well have been a treasure map leading to your formerly final resting place! If not for your would-be killers,” he explained, fondly remembering the recent jaunt which already made him wax nostalgic, “I would have never revived you.”

“Prodigious,” Adam gasped. “Such an incredulous series of events both fortunate and un-!”

Dracula then tossed him a copy of The Invisible Man. It curved wrong and flew directly into the fireplace. Then it burned up. “Whoops. Looks like we will not be reading that story.”

Adam eyed his spiced ham.

“Yes, eat away. I implore you, simply enjoy your meal and rest your voice. Allow I your servant to regale you with the true tale of Dracula’s life since his own story ended. And though his tale shall be both tall and long, it is replete with circumstances that shaped his person as well as the world beneath his home’s wings. May it be most insightful to thy person, and pleasing to thine ear...