Alain didn't crawl out on the seventh night. He'd had that sense of being okay at the start of the sixth night in the infirmary, and again this sixth night, followed by the most intense pain and craving he'd ever felt. When he woke feeling okay on the seventh night, he just wasn't sure he could trust it. He was afraid he'd get out, rush to tell Marie he was cured, and then be struck with a craving that put his prior suffering to shame. So he waited, expecting the other shoe to drop, expecting the pain to start, expecting the craving to come.

But it didn't. When Alain finally slept, he fell asleep happy. And when he woke again, he decided he was ready.

Getting unburied wasn't easy. When you're digging a hole, you just throw the dirt to the side. When you're digging a tunnel, the dirt gets thrown behind you. But when you're completely surrounded by dirt, it's a matter of inches, even fractions of inches, slowly trading places with the dirt as you move up and it moves down to fill the space behind you. Even a coffin would have been a blessing, providing a structured empty space for some of the dirt to move into as he got a head start on digging upward. Thank goodness he'd been buried on his back so he had some idea of which way was up. Even so, he continuously feared he was digging to the side or even farther down.

One of the indications of going in the right direction was that the dirt above him gradually got lighter. When he was able to shove an arm through and feel open air with his fingertips, he felt elated. At that point, it became like swimming in very slow motion, pawing his other hand up as he tried to bend his legs and get some push-off against the dirt below him. Instead of getting pushed upward, the force of his push compacted the dirt, opening up space which the dirt around him flowed down to fill. On the other hand, it freed up some space around his head, chest and arms, allowing him to better dig out with his hands.

Even though it was mere forest dirt, trying to climb through it was like trying to swim upward through quicksand. Not breathing became a mixed blessing, because the dirt filled every crook and crevice, down his pants and up his nose. Packed into his nostrils and up against his sinuses, it felt like the worst head cold he'd ever had, and there was no breath in his lungs to snort it out. The first thing he did after rising from the grave was take a deep breath and sneeze.

Though he'd told Marie not to come back to the grave, fearing for her safety, he found her sitting on the ground a few yards away, napping against a tree, a shovel beside her. Every night at dusk she'd come out and pounded the shovel against the dirt to let him know how many days he'd been buried. If it was two days, she'd pound twice, pause, then pound twice again in a rudimentary morse code. Alain was thankful she'd thought to do that, because it was easy to lose track of time.

He hadn't thought about that before they executed their plan to bury him. He hadn't thought about breathing either. When she was shoveling in the dirt, as the weight of the dirt pressed heavier and heavier against his chest, he began to panic because it was getting harder and harder to take in breaths. He took a deep breath and held it, and held it, and held it. Nothing burned, nothing ached. The only sensation he felt was the weight of the dirt trying to press the breath out of him. Eventually he let it out. He felt a brief panic again screaming at him to inhale, but he did his best to ignore it and eventually it went away.

He'd found a number of places where folklore and reality disconnected. Thankfully, in this one, they didn't. He couldn't suffocate. But it was small consolation when, under the crushing weight of six feet of dirt, his butt cheek itched. That was one part of the discomfort he hadn't paid attention to when the Army denied him blood.

Back in the infirmary, the itching was a minor irritant. He scratched, it went into remission, and he could concentrate on the pain in his joints and his muscles. Buried "alive," the itching added a whole new dimension to his suffering. When it was on his nose or hands, he could rub it against the silk in small movements. The butt cheek wasn't even the worst of it. He could flex it and get some minor relief. There was one spot, though, between his shoulder blades, that he could do absolutely nothing about. Somewhere during the fifth night, he swore that if he got through this, he was going to get a knife and carve out that section of his back, burn it, and piss on its ashes.

Despite the itching, despite the pain, he endured. Marie coming to pound on his grave each night helped in more ways than just keeping track of the time. It gave him hope. Each night he heard that pounding, it reminded him that she waited for him. If he could just make it through, he could be with her and she wouldn't have to fear him or be revulsed by him. He would be like a regular man, or at least as regular as he could be.

He nudged Marie's foot with his and she woke from her doze. She looked up at him, covered with dirt, a shadow of a shadow in the night. "Did it work?"

He nodded.

She held out a hand to him and he helped her up. As he tried to let go, she held his hand fast. She picked up the shovel with her other hand and led him back to the farm. She was quiet as they walked, but occasionally, she would look back at him and smile, giving his hand a squeeze.

When they reached the farm, she took him to one of the sheds next to the farmhouse, opening the door to reveal a large bathtub and a pipe coming in through the wall to feed it. He could smell a wood fire burning behind the far wall, and when she turned the tap, the water that poured from the pipe was steaming. She took a rag, dunked it in the water, and wrung it out.

Slowly, gently, she wiped some of the grave dirt from Alain's face. Working down his neck, she reached his shirt and unbuttoned it one button at a time, cleaning each newly exposed area, periodically stopping to get a new rag and dunk it in the hot water. When he was completely nude, she got a bucket and filled it from the tub. She handed it to Alain, then pulled a stool over next to him and climbed atop it, holding out her hand for the bucket. Alain returned it and she dumped it over him washing the dirt from his hair.

She repeated the process until she'd emptied the tub, periodically scrubbing him where he needed cleaning. Last she handed him a wet rag and told him "clean your privates." Alain did as she told him, not comfortable being naked in front of this woman he barely knew. The one advantage of being a vampire was that he had the image of the nurse from Hell in his mind. Thinking about her was better than thinking about baseball, the bible, and shoveling a stable combined.

While he washed, she opened the tap again, hot water sloshing into the tub. "Get in," she said.

She took the cloth from him and he got in the tub. The hot water felt amazing. If it took being buried alive to make a bath feel this good, he was willing to consider another dirtnap. He just closed his eyes and luxuriated in it, so lost in the sensation that he didn't know Marie was in the tub with him until he felt her flesh against his. Her hand stroked his leg while she kissed his chest. Her long hair flowed across his shoulders while her belly brushed his "privates," driving any thoughts of the nurse out of his mind, replacing them with a rush of alarm. Panic, unlike the nurse, did not prevent an erection.

She slid upward along him and began kissing his lips. He tried to think of all the reasons this was wrong. He wasn't forcing himself on her. In fact, she was forcing herself on him, if you could call being made love to by a beautiful woman you had feelings for "forcing." Maybe it was too soon after her father's death. Maybe she was doing it out of a need for human contact. Maybe he was just a convenient stranger and it meant nothing.

She gently guided him into her, gasping briefly as she slowly slid down him until he was engulfed by her. Slowly she rose back up, then down, getting a rhythm and burying her face on his shoulder, her breath hotter on his neck. The rhythm of her moving up and down on him felt so good. Being clean felt so good. The hot water felt so good. He gasped out the one thought on his mind. "Why?"

She moved upward until just the very tip of him was still inside her, and stretched toward his ear. "Because you are mine," she whispered, "and I am yours for as long as you will have me."

She began sliding back down, slowly, but he wrapped his left arm around her and arrested her motion. Tilting his face down, he cupped the back of her head with his right hand and pulled her into a kiss. He kissed her with the hunger of his conquered need, with the sadness of his stolen mortality, with the lust he had for her body, with the desire he had for her heart. He poured everything he felt, everything he was into that kiss and she returned it. He could taste her loss, her passion, her curiosity, her mortality... and her love. Her offer to be with him as long as he would have her was no mere pillow talk. She had chosen him.

When the kiss broke and they both drew back to stare at each other in awe, he reached forward and stroked her cheek, uttering just one word: "Forever."

Over the next sixty-four years he would regret that word only three times, and then only briefly. Marie died of a heart attack at the age of 86 in a basement apartment in Queens, New York, in the midst of a tirade over an "American Idol" result she thought patently unfair.

Alain had been out at the corner store buying her some Ben & Jerry's ice cream. She wasn't supposed to eat it. But at 86, her doctors didn't want her to eat anything that wasn't a shredded wheat biscuit mushed up in soymilk. So in defiance, or just out of her pure enjoyment of being alive and all its pleasures, she'd had half a ham and egg sandwich for breakfast with strong French coffee, goose liver and crackers for lunch with a glass of wine, and dinner was a simple salad nicoise that Alain had prepared for her, washed down with mineral water... a concession to the fact that there would be Ben & Jerry's for dessert.

When Alain returned home, she was gone. Her body lay on the floor, but her spirit had moved on. Alain knew that if there was any justice in the world, she'd find her way to Heaven.

He planned to join her there, and keep his promise of "forever," but there was something he needed to pick up in Hell first.