There are a number of things that an apartment building manager has to be concerned about in this day and age. And this goes beyond the general duties of the job.

For one thing it's not really easy to determine how good tenants are going to be. Whether they're going to get shot by an angry ex-boyfriend. Whether they're going to collect all their blood and painted all over their walls.

At least with those particular things, the level of common runs pretty short. Because there a lot of other issues. For instance one has to make sure that tenants are going to get along with each other across the hall as well as they do across the streets.

It’s growing harder to figure out who you can safely let into your building, as a neighbor, as a tenant. Especially with the kinds of inclusive laws that our well-meaning governments are eager to pass. It also helps to remember that the dead tend to vote at least as much as the living, and in ways that will benefit them, just as the living do.

You have concern yourself with the kind of neighbors that people wouldn't put up with, not to mention the general cost of maintaining a place in the world must not quite as simple as it used to be.

For those of you who was sitting in the bathroom of an apartment that's been occupied by a zombie or two or three or four have an idea what I mean. The howling of a werewolf two or three nights a month gets on the nerves of some people especially in a city where were all live in close and crowded quarters.

More than once I had to evict a ghoul because, to be perfectly fair, the stench of rotting meat and other of the required foodstuffs their condition requires them to eat tends to bother people who are just a few layers of drywall and an air conditioner away.

But all these former people, undead, re-animated or whatever you call them a have their own lobby groups, their choice for city council or even president or prime minister of the entire country. A friend of mine even suggested that this country will elect a prime minister without a heartbeat before it elects a woman. Sure, with the kind of world we live in, I guess even that’s possible.

Hell, they’ve even have had their million dead march a few years back, and wasn’t that a mess to clean up afterwards. 

This may sound harsh, but believe me, I’m a moderate where the undead are concerned.  I do my best to treat each and every one of them on a case by case basis.  I wouldn’t be able to keep my job, or many of my friends, living or not, I wasn’t or didn’t.

And to be perfectly honest, we had our fair share of advocates saying that we have no right to deny people whether they're traditionally of the living variety or not the right to a place to inhabit.

But of course all of that I can deal with, I dealt with it before and will deal with it again. In fact I much preferred to think about what was going to happen the next time one of these folks was applied for an apartment lease than anything to do with the reoccurrence of the number thirteen in my life.

I’m not triskaidecaphobic, exactly, and never have been. My fear isn’t irrational. I know what that number has done to people. I’ve seen it. I don’t want to see it happen again.

So I dutifully planned to get Fingers all the information that he asked for so that, hopefully the bloody little incident could disappear along with the drywall the carpets and whatever else we had to get out of 213. And I further hoped that the thirteenth anniversary coming up would pass painlessly and boringly.

Part of me even hoped that the tenant might re-animate in a few hours and explain that the whole thing was just a misunderstanding, maybe even a joke.  But the rest of me said, “Fat chance.”

I’d have to ask Vaclav about the man’s chances. Death by exsanguination most likely will cause the victim re-animate as a vampire, as I proceeded to check online..

But the odds, and I searched for a lot of second opinions, were pretty low. If re-animation was at all likely overall, we’d be awash in werewolves re-animated from violent deaths, ghouls re-animated from food poisoning and the like, zombies from our legions of couch potatoes and wage slaves.

And that doesn’t even cover gargoyles, a completely different story, and who supposedly served as the security of this building. If they’d allowed a murder on the premises, what good were they other than for giving me heart attacks on a weekly basis when their brickwork cracks the sidewalk when I’m coming or going. I didn’t really know what they were, or what their place in this crazy word really was.  There didn’t seem a lot of accounts online, even if Emily had demanded they be hired after the Grappo murder.

And did gargoyles even vote? Hmm.. they did have a union according to the contracts.