Vampire lips biting a thorned rose stem

There was a woman came out to the station in a hired trap with one trunk and a rose wrapped in oilcloth. Nobody asked her name. She asked the keeper, Tobias Pyle, for the loan of his lamp-room after dark, and he gave it, because in those days a keeper gave what he was asked and counted the cost later. She sat at the glass with the stem held between her teeth, that rose all thorn and no bloom, and she bit down slow, the way a woman bites thread.

Every night the light turned and every night the sea came up a hand's breadth higher on the steps. Ships steered clear by a flash that had gone red. Pyle went up with a lantern and found her sucking the thorns clean, the leaves gone black as tar, the petals opening white on the stalk. "It's not the blood I want," she said, "it's the holding on."

He didn't put her out. He took the rose from her, carried it down to the cellar, and buried it in the salt beside the cistern, where a rose will not grow. The tide has never come up those steps since, and the lamp burns clear. Mind the third stair going down. Old Pyle is still under it, and he never once asked to be let out.