My Hot 21-Year-Old Neighbour Is a Vampire

The young man next door appeared in a photograph taken almost eighty years before he should have been born.

I had the negative under a magnifier when he knocked. Even through a century’s grit and silver bloom, the resemblance was impossible to miss: the same severe eyebrows, the same slight crook in the nose, the same mouth that made an apology sound like a dare.

The estate had paid my business to stabilize a box of images before an archive took custody. It was the kind of work I loved: patient, quiet, full of small reversals. A scratch that looked fatal at noon might prove to be dust by two. A face that appeared to belong to the photographer could turn out to be a reflection in a shop window. I did not believe in announcing miracles over an uncleaned negative. I believed in taking another exposure and writing down what changed.

This one had been logged as a street party, June 1926. I had checked the date on the edge against the estate inventory and photographed the seals before opening the sleeve. My client wanted a condition report, not a family revelation. If the boy in the back row was my neighbor, either someone had altered the photograph with uncommon skill or my ordinary method was about to give me an extraordinary answer. Neither possibility let me skip the condition report.

My neighbour couldn’t be older than twenty-one. I was forty-three. For three weeks I’d been telling myself that the interest in his eyes was an amusing mistake best left uncorrected, and that the interest in mine was none of his business.

My divorce had been final for two years. My son Leo lived across town, worked nights at a recording studio, and had better things to do than supervise his mother’s desires. The problem was mine: Adrian looked younger than Leo. A glance across a landing could feel like flirting; a conversation through an open door could make me forget the arithmetic until I saw my own reflection beside his. I was not ashamed of wanting a beautiful man. I wanted to know whom I was wanting before I let a moment become a story other people told about us.

I slid the photograph beneath a sheet of neutral paper before opening the door.

Adrian Bell stood in the corridor with a jar of coffee. “Your machine is broken,” he said. “It sounded offended with the world.”

“It has excellent judgment.”

He smiled. He wore a dark shirt with the sleeves rolled to his elbows and an expression that would have got him invited inside by a less cautious woman. I remained in the doorway.

“I borrowed too much sugar yesterday,” he said. “I thought coffee would be a better repayment.”

“You’ve never borrowed sugar from me.”

For the first time, the smile faltered. “Then I’ve made a spectacular entrance at the wrong apartment.”

“You live opposite. I know.”

His gaze flicked past me to the covered worktable. It was a small movement, but I had spent twenty years looking for things other people wanted hidden. I saw it.

“The archive sent more photographs?” he asked.

I hadn’t told him about the archive. I hadn’t told anyone in the building.

“Why do you care?”

He looked back at me, and his face seemed suddenly older than the rest of him. “Because if it’s the lot from the Bell estate, one of them has been altered.”

The name on the intake form was Bell. I had accepted the commission from an attorney, through my business, without knowing that my new neighbour shared it. A conflict of interest, perhaps. Or an elaborate coincidence. I disliked both.

I kept one hand on the door. The estate attorney had not listed a living Bell family member as a source. Adrian’s surname might be coincidence; there were enough Bells in this city to fill a phone directory. But he had named a private commission while standing in a hallway he had no right to enter. I asked how he knew the lot had been assigned to me. He said he had heard I was a conservator. That answered how he knew my trade, not how he knew the client. He watched me notice the gap and did not try another story. I marked that silence for the provenance call.

“You need to leave,” I said.

“Fair. But don’t use water on the portrait with the blue ribbon. The emulsion will lift.”

I shut the door before he could say another word. The portrait with the blue ribbon was one of fourteen envelopes still sealed in a transport crate. The intake sheet didn’t describe the images. He either knew the collection intimately or had been through my materials.

I checked the window latch, then the crate seals. They were intact. The coffee machine gave a terminal click from the kitchenette. I left it alone and lifted the paper from the photograph under the magnifier.

There was no matching print in the day’s intake list, only the negative and the unopened envelopes. I made a fresh working image with the camera mounted above the table, leaving the old surface in its sleeve. The digital enlargement kept the grain continuous across the young man’s face. That did not rule out an earlier manipulation of the negative; it ruled out the lazy kind of composite I could detect in five seconds. I saved both the raw capture and my notes before changing the contrast. A claim that remarkable should not depend on a version I had adjusted until it resembled the man next door.

The image showed a street party in June 1926: hats, bunting, a dog with one ear up. In the rear row stood the man from across the hall, head turned a fraction toward the camera. The negative’s edge carried a handwritten date and the photographer’s small crescent mark, both embedded beneath old varnish. A modern face spliced into an old photograph might fool a casual viewer. This would take more work.

My pulse went silly. I had thought of kissing a stranger who might be the subject of a century-old negative. That should have cured the impulse. Instead I found myself remembering the gravity in his voice when he warned me about water.

I called the attorney. Voicemail. The contract said no client disclosure outside the commission; it said nothing about being threatened by a handsome neighbour with specialist knowledge. I photographed the original seals, the negative, and the log sheet, then sent the attorney a restrained note asking for a provenance call.

Something slid across the hall floor.

I didn’t open the door immediately. I listened, counted to ten, then looked through the peephole. The corridor was empty. A single glossy print lay on the mat.

I used a clean sleeve to pick it up. It showed Adrian, or the man who looked like him, outside this very building at dawn. New image, new paper. The fire escape cast the correct shadow for this morning’s clear sky.

No courier label accompanied it, no return address, not even a folded note pretending to be a warning. I photographed it where it lay before carrying it to the worktable. Whoever had placed it there knew which apartment held the Bell negatives. They also knew I might compare a current face with the older one. A prankster would have been satisfied with surprise. This person had brought paperwork. I looked for the violet edge mark some modern event-print stock carried and found none. That did not make the paper rare; it gave me a feature to compare when I called local labs.

On the back was a reproduction release bearing my signature.

I hadn’t signed one. The ink was still wet.

My own release forms lived in a locked folder on my business drive, and the estate agreement had no permission to reproduce my signature for publicity or sale. I turned the print sideways under the lamp. The capital C on the false signature looked as if someone had traced a picture of my name and stopped where the image ended, rather than writing with my hand. I did not touch the ink. I slid the sheet into a larger sleeve and wrote the time on a separate label. If the attorney later asked whether I had authorized it, I wanted a clean answer and the paper to support it.

Across the hall, Adrian’s door stood half open. I could see the edge of his dark shirt, but not his face.

“Someone is trying to make you responsible,” he said.

“You knew this would happen.”

“I knew they would try me. I didn’t know they would find you.”

The early sunlight reached through the landing window. Adrian retreated until it no longer touched his shoes. He was looking at my door as though the threshold were a line he could not cross.

I held up the forged release. “Then tell me why a man in my 1926 photograph is hiding from the sun.”

He swallowed. “Because that man is me.”