This is it, Kevin thought to himself. He knew there was no way he could be mistaken. This was the exact same place he’d discovered earlier.
He steeled himself. His hand, very slowly, raised up in the candle-lit dark, and then he pushed against the panel.
And, just as he’d remembered, the panel moved, and—
click!
The panel nudged forward, then began to move inward, with a slow and steady creeeeeeak…
A moment later, Kevin found himself standing before a pitch-black, open doorway.
The secret passage, he thought.
Here it was, right in front of him.
The candle shadows seemed to move faster, like a flurry of birds. Kevin felt his heart suddenly begin to beat more quickly, like an impatient fist pounding on the inside of his chest. Total silence wrapped around him—he didn’t even hear the thunder and lightning anymore. All he could hear now were his own thoughts:
Here’s the secret passage…
And he knew there was only one thing left to do.
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
When Kevin entered the great, black mouth of the passageway, he immediately felt the drop in temperature. Outside in the hallway, it was cozy and warm. In here, though, it was cold enough to make him shiver. And the floor of the passage wasn’t carpeted, it was flat, smooth cement which felt cold as ice against the bottom of his feet.
Second thoughts began to occur to him:
Maybe this is stupid, he thought. Maybe there’s nothing back here. Maybe I’m being an idiot and I shouldn’t be fooling around back here at all…
But Kevin somehow knew that none of this was true. There was something very wrong about the things going on around his aunt’s lodge, and he was determined to find out what those things were. And he knew something else, too:
This passageway is the perfect place to start.
And with that thought, he continued down the chilly passageway. The air felt damp; when he coughed once, the sound echoed. After about ten more yards, he came to a large, wooden door.
There must be another room behind it, he considered. The room that Bill Bitner was in…
Kevin knew it wasn’t locked—he could see it standing open an inch. His teeth ground together when he pulled back on the rusted, iron handle; the door’s hinges suddenly sounded like a cat with its tail stepped on.
What faced him now was a pitch-black chamber.
Kevin cautiously moved into the room, holding the candle out in front of him. The walls were made of old, red bricks with yellowed cement oozing out from the gaps. What kind of a room is this? he asked himself, moving forward a few steps. He didn’t see any lamps or light fixtures, nor did he notice any electrical switches on the walls, and suddenly this made sense because then he remembered that when he and Jimmy had seen Bill Bitner coming out of the passage this morning, Bill had not only been holding a shovel, he’d also been holding a lantern. The darkness here seemed so thick it was like wading through a cold, black pond. The candle threw a fluttering shape of light before him, and eventually, he could see things. A rickety wooden table, several chairs, a dented coffee pot, and—
Kevin stopped when he turned.
Shovels, he realized.
There, propped up in the corner, were two long-handled shovels with large blades, almost like—
Almost like gravedigging shovels, he pondered, like the ones he’d seen in so many vampire movies…
He and Jimmy had seen Bill Bitner with a shovel just out in the hall, hadn’t they? And they’d also seen Wally digging in the wood earlier. With a big shovel like one of these, Kevin recalled.
And, again, he wondered about something else:
What were they digging for?
In another corner, he noticed a bunch of old rolled up tents, sleeping bags, and lanterns, and on the wall opposite, hanging on a large piece of pegboard, was an assortment of regular tools, like the kind his dad had int their garage. None of this was any big deal.
Kevin, next, approached the wooden table in the middle. There was a coffee cup on it, and a newspaper. But then he noticed something else.
Kevin stopped again when he turned to face the last corner of the room. His eyes bloomed in the dim light. On the floor, shoved all the way into the corner, lay an old, oil-stained cardboard box full of…
Kevin leaned over, peering down. He wanted to make sure he wasn’t mistaken, and when he realized that he wasn’t mistaken, a nervous sweat broke out on his brow in spite of the room’s damp chill.
The box was full of wooden stakes.
Kevin picked one up, examining it in the candlelight. It was crudely made, a two-inch by two-inch stick with a sharpened point. Just like—
Just like the wooden stakes in the vampire movies, Kevin thought, and with that thought came a wave of scary images in his head, all the movie scenes he’d seen: the good guys, at the very last minute before sundown, finding the vampire’s coffin, forcing it open, and hammering a wooden stake into the vampire’s heart. And Aunt Carolyn, when she’d been telling her story, had verified it herself: a wooden stake hammered through the heart was about the only way to kill a vampire.
And there was something else he noticed then:
Two hammers lying next to the box of wooden stakes.
This is just getting too wild, Kevin thought, and too scary. All this stuff—it all points to one thing…
Vampires.
But he needed to get out of here; he’d been down here too long, and if he didn’t get back upstairs to his room soon, someone might find out that he wasn’t where he was supposed to be—in bed. He knew he had a lot of thinking to do, and a lot of things to figure out.
There were some other things in the room, too. More cardboard boxes, a file cabinet, an antique rolltop desk. Kevin wanted to examine all of these things but he knew there wasn’t time now, and the candle was burning down. He turned away from the box of stakes, was about to step out of the hidden room, but before he could actually leave and go back upstairs, he—
Wait a minute…
There was something else, lying under the table that the coffee cup and newspaper were on. Something small, shapeless, and white. But what was it?
Kevin got down on one knee, lowered the candle, and stared under the table.
There, in the flickering light, he finally realized what the thing was:
A white rag with blood all over it…
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
Terror and dread made Kevin feel light-headed as he stumbled out of the secret room, closed the door behind him, and raced back down the dark corridor. All at once he felt more confused—and more scared—than he probably ever had in his whole life. Nothing made sense now. According to Aunt Carolyn, and according to everything else he understood, vampires didn’t exist. They were just part of a myth.
But…
If vampires don’t exist, he thought, moving down the hall, then what else can explain all the things I’ve found so far?
It was a terrifying question.
Secret panels, secret rooms. Creepy paintings all over the place, paintings of a vampire. Strange people digging in the woods. Shovels and hammers and—