“Okay, are you ready?”
“Of course I am.”
Kelly Ann was unusually quiet. Jamie could not resist a dig at her.
“Huh! You look a bit scared.”
“Not half as scared as you’ll be, sitting next to a vampire’s tomb at midnight.”
“Yah! Vampires don’t bother me a bit.”
“Don’t they? We’ll see.”
Jamie felt nervous and excited, but not fearful, as he climbed over the heavy black wrought-iron gates. Monaghan stated the conditions. “Right, fifteen minutes altogether. Ten minutes sitting on the step, and five minutes allowed for getting to and from the tomb. Go!”
A half moon hung in the sky amid scudding clouds; the slight breeze swayed bushes, making dim shadow patterns shimmer across the gravel path. Jamie clenched his fists, willing his feet to move steadily forward, one in front of the other. White stone angels appeared to be watching him with sightless eyes from between the serried rows of crosses and granite headstones; a heavy cloud momentarily obscured the moon. Jamie admitted it silently to himself: there was no doubt at all, he was frightened now. So frightened that he could not bring himself to turn his head and look back to the gates where Monaghan and Kelly Ann stood watching him.
No matter how carefully he tried to walk, the gravel crunched noisily underfoot. He chanced a quick look back, but all he saw was the yellow light from a street lamp across the road from the cemetery. When he turned back again he was forced to blink rapidly to dispel the bright reflections of the light from his vision. Jamie stumbled off the path, tripping on a cornerstone. Picking himself up, hopping about rubbing at his grazed knee, and staggered sideways into a bush.
Fffrrrrrtttttt!
Jamie yelped and sprang backwards as a blackbird, disturbed from its rest, fluttered off low into the night. Gritting his teeth he made himself plod doggedly onward to where the foreign graves stood.
Bong! Bong! Bong! Bong!
The church bell tolled out the midnight hour as he arrived trembling at his destination.
The green-bronze door of the tomb loomed cold and forbidding in the moonlight. Wind sighed mournfully through the rhododendron bushes and clouds blew across the night sky like the shrouds torn from long ago corpses. Jamie walked to the steps, trying to keep his mind off the next ten minutes by carrying out the first part of his plan. The thought of revenge upon the pair outside the gates settled his nerves somewhat. Seating himself on the vault steps he pulled out the crumpled paper bag, mentally counting to six hundred as he applied the makeup. Damping his face slightly, Jamie dabbed white flour heavily across his features, even right up into his hairline; the wind blew a bit away, but there was plenty left on him. He chuckled softly to himself as he imagined walking back down the path toward them in about eight minutes’ time. Rolling yellow clay into two small stubby cones he affixed them to the side of his neck. Carefully he ringed the cones with purple felt-tip pen and dripped some of his mother’s red food coloring beneath the two imitation vampire fang bites. About six minutes left to go now. Jamie smeared black rings around his eyes with some mascara he had borrowed from his mother’s dressing table and used some dark blue eyeliner on his lips for the finishing touch. He shone a pencil light on his face as he made some final adjustments in his mother’s compact mirror, tittering at the dreadful apparition he could see in the glass. Golly! Would they run when he came staggering and moaning at them.
The bronze door at his back began creaking and groaning as it started to open.
Hairs on the back of Jamie’s neck stood up rigid. The blood in his veins turned to ice water; his heart pounded madly like a trip hammer, trying to fight its way up into his mouth. A pale bluish light radiated from the tomb, illuminating his quaking form. The hand that grasped Jamie’s shoulder was neither big nor hairy, but it was as cold as iron in a blizzard, white and slim with a strength not of this earth. The green fingernails with their blackened edges dug unmercifully into his flesh as he was pulled to his feet. All strength and will drained from Jamie’s body as the hand turned him forcefully to face the open door of the vault.
In the light from the grave Jamie saw he was face to face with a boy of his own age. His horrified eyes took in the strange boy’s evil appearance. He was dressed in a long, flowing dark cape, fastened at the neck by a scarlet silk cord. His face was whiter than new-fallen snow. The boy’s cruelly thin grey lips drew back, revealing a pair of sharp amber-colored fangs. His eyes had no whites, they were blazing red like some savage animal.
Jamie went completely stiff with terror as the vampire boy seized him by the hair, twisting his head agonizingly back to reveal the taut pulsating skin of his neck. Licking his lips with a black serpentine tongue, the vampire leered with devilish satisfaction at his petrified victim. Totally paralyzed, Jamie smelled vampire breath—musty, sweet, like long-dead flowers—as the needlelike fangs drew close to his unprotected neck.
“Yaaareeegh! Vladimir!”
Suddenly a huge female vampire sprang from the tomb and hurled Jamie bodily into the bushes. His eyes, wide with fear, were riveted on the scene before him. The large female gripped the boy vampire firmly by his waxlike pointed ear and shook him fiercely.
“Vladimir! What have I told you about drinking stale blood. Can’t you see that the filthy little wretch has already been bitten by another vampire—look at the marks on his neck. You don’t know what you could catch off him, sucking on an infected neck. Disgusting! That’s what comes of hanging about with that gang of werewolves in the woods. Just wait till your father wakes up, my lad, he’ll have a thing or two to say to you. I know you’re only a hundred and fifty years old, but you should have more sense. Hell below! Just look at the mess of this good cape. Stand still while I brush it.”
She turned upon Jamie with glittering eyes.
“And you! Get yourself off and die somewhere else, go on! Don’t let me catch you haunting around this cemetery. And keep away from my Vladimir. He comes from a proper stone tomb with a bronze door, not just any old common grave. Be off with you!”
Jamie stumbled along the gravel path, the female vampire’s wails drifting behind him on the night wind.
“You’re a disgrace to the family, young Vlad. You can forget any fancy ideas of vacation in Transylvania this year. Look at those teeth, they’re almost white. Stand still while I put some green on them from this vault door. Have you studied any bat flying lately? No, I’ll bet you haven’t. Well you can just stay in the tomb tonight and do some homework… .”
Monaghan peered through the wrought iron gates, trying hard to see along the gravelled path. Behind him Kelly Ann gnawed at a hangnail, her voice almost a sob.
“It’s more than twenty minutes since he went in. Can you see him coming yet? What’ll we say to his mother if he doesn’t show up?”
Monaghan held up a hand to silence her. He watched intently for several minutes before turning to Kelly Ann, his face a picture of bewilderment.
“Yeah, I can see him now, trying to scrub some kind of mess off his face. He’s sitting on a gravestone halfway down the path. … I think he’s gone crazy, he seems to be chatting away to a stone angel!”
“What’s he saying?”
“Dunno, can’t quite hear him.”
Kelly Ann tugged Monaghan roughly away from the gate.
“Here, I’ll find out what he’s talking about.”
She forced her head through a wide space in the
ironwork, and leaning to one side, she listened intently.
Monaghan thrust his hands deep in his pockets,
shuffling impatiently.
“Well, can you hear him? What’s he saying?” “He keeps laughing a lot and saying the same thing over and over. Now I’m sure he’s gone loony.”