A 1984 short story Rice wrote for Redbrook that expanded her sense of the vampire.

The story opens inauspiciously with the date; it is the spring of 1888 and the year of Jack the Ripper. Told in the first person by a young woman writer/poet named Julie, it describes a visit she and her brother, Richard, made to their family's four-hundred-year-old estate in the village of Rampling, England. Their father had decreed on his deathbed that its manor house must be torn down, but they cannot abide the thought.

At one point in the story, Julie flashes back to a time when she was six years old. She remembers seeing the striking face of a dark-haired man on a train; he represented to her the ideal of masculine beauty. Yet her father had reacted negatively to the sight of this man, describing him as an "unspeakable horror," and the memory of this stays with Julie.

At their estate, Rampling Gate, Julie and Richard spend serene days by the gardens and the lakes, becoming more convinced each day that they should not destroy the house. One night, however, Julie awakens, and feeling a sense of emptiness and need, wonders what the house is doing to her soul. Rising from her bed, she discovers a man sitting in a chair reading her typed manuscripts. To her surprise, he is the beautiful man she saw years ago on the train. When he calls her by name, she screams in fright and the man leaves. Richard awakens and Julie tells Richard about the man, but he does not believe her.

"Just a little kiss Julie. I mean you no harm."
The Master of Rampling Gate
~ Innovation Books ©1991

The vampire tells her he is the master of Rampling Gate, and the reason Julie's father had wanted the house demolished. He gives her visions of how he became a vampire - he took the Dark Gift to save himself from the plague - and of how the two of them might have been together in past eras. The vampire asks Julie to help him embrace modern life and makes her a vampire to be his eternal companion. Julie takes over Rampling Gate from her brother in a clever move that saves it from destruction. Then together she and her vampire lover go to London to hunt, presumably setting off the crime spree attributed in history to Red Jack.

Rice's original version of this story had a twist that Redbrook cut, but was then restored when Innovative Corporation made it into a graphic novel. There is a blind housekeeper who is aware of the vampire, and her long tenure at the mansion is a metaphor of endurance that parallels the vampire's existence. When Richard finds ominous diary entries his dying uncle wrote describing the presence in the house of a demon, he mentions tearing the house down, and the housekeeper warns him not to do it.

The Vampire Companion ~ Katherine Ramsland