“How well do you know this vampire?” I asked.
Binky ducked his head. “I didn’t say I knew him.”
I’d figured as much.
“I just said I thought he was a vampire. You’re the one who wanted to come out here.”
I looked up the road. The trees grew right up to both sides, and their branches hung over it and joined in the middle, so it looked like a green and gold and orange tunnel. It was so shady that it was almost dark under there. The house was at the end of the road, and it looked kind of spooky, to tell you the truth, like one of those houses you see in the posters for my sister’s favorite movies. Maybe it even looked like the house in the Dracula movie she liked so much. I wasn’t at all sure going to the house was a good idea now that I’d had a better look at it, but we’d come this far. I pushed my bike on down the dirt road. Binky followed along.
When we got closer to the house, something flew out of an upstairs window. It looked a little like a bat, but I didn’t really know what it was. It was too early for bats to be flying around, I thought, not that it mattered. I got this kind of a chill on the back of my neck like somebody had touched me there with a cold hand. I looked at my watch. It was only four-thirty, but it got dark kind of early at that time of year. The dirt road was covered with fallen leaves, and a little breeze came up from somewhere and blew them along in front of us.
“Probably nobody’s home,” I said. “Maybe we should just go on back.”
“We’re already here,” Binky said. “You might as well see if anybody’s home.”
That sounded like a bad idea to me, but I didn’t want to chicken out. My crummy sister would never let up if she found out. Neither would Binky, probably, and he was just the type to spread it all around school. If that happened, I’d get crammed into a locker more often than even Binky did. So I kept on going.
The house didn’t look any better when we got to what had once been the front yard. It looked worse, to tell you the truth. There was no glass in any of the windows that I could see, and I think there were holes in the roof. I for sure saw a couple of holes in the stone walls where they weren’t covered by the vines and bushes. Trees grew all over the place, but they weren’t very tall.
The front door of the house didn’t look too bad. It was made of heavy wood, and it didn’t look as old as the rest of the house, which looked older than a hundred years. It even smelled old and moldy. If there was ever a place a vampire might pick to hide out, this would be it, all right.
The breeze had brought some clouds from somewhere, not storm clouds, but big puffy ones with black bottoms, and they blocked out most of the late afternoon sun. We might as well have been standing out on some old English moor somewhere.
Neither one of us made a move to get any closer to the house. I thought Binky should go knock on the door. He didn’t agree.
“You’re the one with the invitation,” he said.
“He wouldn’t answer, anyway,” I said. “Not if he’s a vampire. It’s not nighttime yet.”
Binky gave me a disgusted look. “You don’t know much about vampires, do you?”
“I saw Horror of Dracula,” I said, which was a lie, but Binky didn’t know that.
“Big deal. So did I. Have you ever read Dracula? The book, I mean.”
“I’ve read a lot of stuff,” I said.
“But not Dracula. If you had, you’d know the difference between the movies and real life.”
“You’re going to tell me that some made-up book is real life?”
“Bram Stoker knew what he was talking about,” Binky said, as positive as if he had a clue, which I was pretty sure he didn’t. “Anyway, his Dracula could come out in the daylight.” He pointed at the house. “I saw this guy in the daylight. So are you going to knock?”
“Why don’t you do it?”
“You have to give him the invitation. It’s your party, and it’s your house you’re inviting him to.”
It was my sister’s crummy party, and it was my parents’ house, but I had a feeling Binky wasn’t interested in fine distinctions like that. I laid my bike down on the ground and went up to the door. I didn’t exactly rush. I wasn’t feeling too good about things if you really want to know the truth about it. I mean, if the guy was really a goddam vampire, I could be in big trouble.
The wood of the door was dark and old, but solid. There was no bell, not even a knocker. Maybe whoever lived there wasn’t expecting any guests. Or maybe nobody lived there. Binky might not have even seen anybody. He could have just made it all up to get attention.
While I stood there trying to bring myself to knock, I heard something shriek up above me. It was the bat, or whatever it was, and it flew back into the house through one of the windows on the second story.
I got that chill again, and I almost turned around and went back. I didn’t, though. I wish I had, but I didn’t. I knocked on the door. Nobody came, so I knocked again. Nobody came that time, either. Maybe the vampire was shut up in his coffin and couldn’t hear me. Or maybe he was flying around the attic like a bat. I looked over my shoulder at Binky, who shrugged. I was about to leave, and I’d turned halfway around when I heard something. I turned back. The door started to open.
It didn’t open very much, just a crack, but there was somebody there, all right. Or I thought there was. I couldn’t hear anybody breathing, and I couldn’t see into the dark interior of the house.
I didn’t know what to say. I mean, I couldn’t just say, “Are you the vampire?” So I just stood there, feeling like an idiot.
Finally whoever was behind the door got tired of waiting for me to say something and decided he’d go first. He said, “Yes?” Except he didn’t say it quite like that. It was more like “Yessssss?”
I didn’t jump when he said it, but that was just because I was kind of paralyzed and could hardly move at all. I tried to talk, but my mouth was too dry. I swallowed a couple of times and said, “I wanted to invite you to a party.”
There was no answer for a while. Then, “You are quite sssure?” Like he couldn’t believe anybody would actually invite him somewhere.
I couldn’t believe it, either. I wished I was at home, even if it meant watching Frankie Avalon pantomiming to a song on American Bandstand or something just as lame. But I stayed right where I was and got the invitation out of my pocket. I’d written it out in study hall while old Mr. Garber sat at his desk in the front of the room and pulled on the hairs growing out of his ears while he pretended to read something in his history text. The invitation said, “You are invited to a Birthday Party!”, and it had the date and time and address and everything on it.
I held it out, and a hand reached out from behind the door and took it. It wasn’t a hand like any I’d ever seen before. It was pale white, and the nails were thick and long and yellow and sharp. That was what bothered me, how sharp they were.
The hand disappeared with the invitation in it, and after a second or two the voice said, “Thisss isss very nissse. I will be there. Will you be at the door to invite me in?”
He already had the invitation, so I didn’t see why I had to do any more inviting, but I said, “If I’m not, my sister will be.”
“That isss sssatisssfactory.”
And then the door closed. I stood there a minute, blinking like I’d just come out of a dream, and then I walked back to where Binky stood waiting.
“What about my invitation?” he said.
“I’ll ask my sister.”
“She’d better invite me.”
“We’ll see,” I said, because knowing my sister, I was sure she wouldn’t want Binky hanging around the way he did. She only liked the popular kids, who were all a bunch of phonies. Binky was weird, but at least he wasn’t phony, which was about all I could say for him.