I wasn't going to waste precious bullets on these two. I didn't need to. I drew back the curtains and ripped down the black plastic bin-liners they had taped over the windows. Then I dragged first Gunter, then Christine, out of their hidey-hole by the feet.
Even before I staked them they were charring at the edges, curling slowly away from the light, like phototropism in reverse. Gunter's eyelids flickered as the sharpened point pierced his chest, and I thought I heard him say something German and obscene-sounding as I whacked it further in. The air filled with a fine spray of blood and foul-smelling gas, but all he could muster in the way of retaliation was a reflexive snarl. Christine was even less formidable; she did nothing but squirt gore like a punctured sauce bottle. Luckily I was wearing Lulu's pink plastic raincoat.
For a long while I stood and looked at the blackening bodies, which were twisting into foetal positions around their wooden skewers, like giant shrimps on a big barbie. Time was playing strange tricks; there were peculiar gaps in my memory. I was always cranky for the first few days of my period, but it wasn't just that. I couldn't remember having had breakfast, for instance, even though I was sure I had had it, because there were small pieces of muesli lodged between my teeth. Gunter and Christine's flat took on a timeless, watertight quality, like an abandoned railway platform in the middle of nowhere. I wondered whether I'd dreamt the noises in the night; I had expected to find a pile of gnawed bones at the very least. But the only two corpses were my own handiwork. It was just as well they were decomposing; I would have had a hard time explaining them away.
Later, I found myself standing fully-clothed in the Krankzeits' bath with a shower attachment in my hand, hosing down the pink plastic until the water ran in thin red puddles at my feet, spiralling clockwise down the plughole in time-honoured Psycho tradition. When the raincoat was lightly streaked as opposed to thickly splattered. I clambered out, sloshing water all over the floor, feeling that surge of energy you sometimes get after an invigorating bout of physical exercise. I would need to consult a dietician about it, but I reckoned that staking vampires would burn off more calories than digging a ditch, swimming twenty lengths, or running a three-minute mile. Staking vampires would no doubt provide benefits of an aerobic nature, would keep you trim around the waist, would firm up the flab at the top of your arms — and would have the not inconsiderable side-effect of doing civilization an enormous favour as well. It had been rigorous physical exercise, but now the tough part was over, I found myself regarding it as fun, like squashing greenfly. I squelched downstairs, popped some Feminax, had a big toot of Ruth's sulphate, and wondered who was going to get it next.
Some of Weinstein's urban guerrilla enthusiasm had rubbed itself off on me. I drew the line at samurai headbands, but I dug out a khaki holdall and plundered Gunter's tool-box, which was better equipped than mine. To be honest, mine was little more than a biscuit-tin full of odd fuses and unstrung beads. From Gunter's, I took wire-cutters, pliers, a set of screwdrivers, wrench, hacksaw, nails. But I kept my own hammer; I'd chosen it carefully before buying and it was a hefty weight, with a rubber grip, nice and solid, good for driving nails into the wall or shattering the skulls of robbers and rapists. Even better for banging sharpened sticks through vampire ventricles.
Almost as an afterthought, I packed Grauman's gun as well, though there would be little point in wasting precious silver on opponents who were horizontal and hors de combat. I had a vague idea it might come in useful after sundown. What with time playing strange tricks, there was always a risk of the darkness sneaking up and catching me off balance. Squeezing the trigger would be easy, so long as I could stop my hands from shaking too much. They weren't shaking now, despite too much caffeine and not enough sleep. I studied them carefully; the skin was waxy, the nail-beds caked with dried blood, and the stump of my little finger was all puckered and dead. I wondered if these really were my hands; they could easily have belonged to someone else. It wasn't until I turned them over and saw the mushy palms that I knew for certain they were mine.
Lastly, I packed the envelope containing the air tickets and francs, and tucked my passport in beside it. I had rushed things yesterday. I had lost my head. I wasn't going to make that same mistake again today. Once I had presented Duncan with the facts, he was bound to see the light.
My vampire-hunting didn't go quite as smoothly as I'd planned. Next for the chop, I'd decided, would be the couple next door, the ones with a penchant for noisy all-night parties, but it wasn't till I'd forced the lock on their back door that I discovered they were out. Frustrated, I stalked up and down their living room, smashing small ornaments.
There were so many people who deserved to be staked, and I was beginning to realize I couldn't make more than a dent in their number on my own. There was the drug-dealer with the howling Alsatians. A few doors further down, there was the unemployed yob who spent his afternoons and evenings fiddling with the engine of his customized Ford Capri. Then there were all those people who wore leaky headphones on the tube. I didn't care whether they were vampires or not; I hated them all, and they deserved what was coming to them.
But they would have to wait. I headed west through the vegetable market, weaving between the heaps of rotting fruit as the stall-holders chanted their cauliflower bargains and two bundles of rhubarb for the price of one. Quite a few of the shops were boarded up, as though this were the aftermath of a ripping carnival weekend, but otherwise life seemed to be going on as normal, and I couldn't find any more vampires, not after Gunter and Christine. It was something of an anticlimax — all that carefully sharpened dowelling going to waste in my bag — but I couldn't work up much passion for the hunt when it was nothing personal. I'd been thinking it was an epidemic, but maybe they'd all upped and moved to the security of Molasses Wharf. I had no intention of going back there again, not without the protection of a Home Guard of Van Helsings.
I went past the end of Duncan's road. This was where I'd been heading all along, but I was putting off getting there, so I doubled back and tramped up and down the tree-lined crescents which forked off Ladbroke Grove, peering into windows and pressing doorbells willy-nilly. Whenever someone opened the door, I pretended to be a mail-order catalogue salesperson who had got the wrong address. One old lady insisted on taking a look at my catalogue and became quite angry when I confessed I didn't have one, though, unlike some of the other householders, she didn't seem at all perturbed by the streaky stains on my pink plastic raincoat. If no one answered the door, I cased the joint, unless there were bars on the windows or a visible alarm system. I must have broken into three or four basements in all, but they turned out to be a waste of time. No joy in the vampire department, none at all, but I left plenty of garlic strewed in my wake, and a lot of small ornaments got broken.
I kept an eye on the time. Or tried to, in between forgetting who I was and what I was supposed to be doing. The hour hand on my watch slipped nearer the bottom of the dial, and I found myself outside Jack and Alicia's flat. I gazed up at the windows, and saw that the curtains were drawn. Of course they were. I rang the bell, and waited. No answer, of course not, so I pressed all the other bells and said I had a package for Jack Drury, and one of the neighbours released the latch. I climbed up to the first floor and knocked. There was a long silence. I was wondering whether to take out a screwdriver and tackle the lock, when my ears picked up a gentle scuffling on the other side of the door. I rapped again, more insistently this time, and there was more scuffling, then a clunking as bolts were slid back, and the door opened a crack, and the security chain snapped taut across the gap.