The Reformed Vampire Support Group

by Catherine Jinks

  ‘We can’t leave those ashes, either,’ I said. ‘It might not be obvious what they are, but the police have all these forensic people nowadays. They might be able to analyse stuff like that.’

  ‘Anyway, vampire dust is very valuable,’ Gladys piped up. When everyone stared at her in amazement, she was prompted to elaborate. ‘Vampire dust has alchemical properties,’ she went on. ‘People do things with it. Curses, mostly.’

  ‘Oh dear.’ Father Ramon wrinkled his nose. He’s always had an absolute horror of witchcraft. ‘In that case, we shouldn’t let poor Casimir fall into the wrong hands.’

  Finally, after much fretful dispute, our plans were laid. Father Ramon would first collect the generous supply of emergency sleeping-bags that were stored in his presbytery. He would then deliver them to my house, before returning home for a well-earned sleep. Finally, in the morning, he would proceed to Casimir’s apartment, where he would destroy the computer and dispose of Casimir’s ashes.

  ‘You’ll either have to dump them out the window or flush them down the toilet,’ Horace recommended. ‘You won’t be so memorable if you leave the place empty-handed.’

  ‘But—’

  ‘If you come out with anything at all, you’ll look like a burglar,’ Horace said impatiently, dismissing Father Ramon’s objections. To which Sanford’s response was, ‘Surely not, if he’s dressed as a priest?’

  Horace snorted. And I couldn’t help butting in.

  ‘Are you kidding?’ I cried. ‘If he’s dressed as a priest, someone’s bound to remember him.’ I was so sure of this that I leaned over to grip the priest’s arm. ‘Don’t wear your cassock, Father,’ I begged. ‘Just put on something bland.’

  Wearily he agreed. Then Sanford began to delegate the various other tasks that faced us. Back at my house, Father Ramon’s sleeping-bags would be distributed over my mother’s basement floor. Meanwhile, Dave would use my computer to track down the manufacturer of the silver bullet. Horace would also use my computer to communicate with Fangseeker, if possible. With any luck, some progress would have been made by daybreak.

  If not, we would continue our search the following night. And the night after that. We simply wouldn’t give up until Casimir’s killer had been identified.

  ‘As long as he’s out there, we’re in mortal danger,’ Sanford insisted, addressing us all in a solemn, self-important manner that – for once – didn’t seem overblown or inappropriate. ‘We have to act as a team and work together for as long as it takes. Because if we don’t, we might not get through this.’

  It’s funny – I hate so much about my life. I hate the cramps, and the nausea, and the boredom, and the listlessness. I hate surviving on guinea pigs, and not being able to get a decent haircut. But that night, when it came to choosing between life and death, I didn’t hesitate. Not for one second.

  I didn’t want to end up as a pile of ashes on a bedroom floor.

  5

  There’s an abiding myth that vampires are afraid of garlic. This, of course, is a lie. The garlic myth was triggered hundreds of years ago, when a nameless vampire joked about not attacking some woman because she smelled of garlic.

  I mean, how could anyone be terrified of a culinary herb?

  It’s true that garlic makes vampires sick. But in that respect it’s no different from bread or bacon or brussels sprouts. A vampire’s stomach isn’t capable of digesting normal food; one slice of watermelon could put half a dozen vampires in bed for a week. Even stale blood can result in some pretty gruesome side effects: not just stomach cramps and migraines, but continual vomiting, extreme dehydration, and a kind of slimy red discharge from the gums.

  I’ve heard tell that Gladys once begged for a stake through the heart, after she stupidly dosed herself with horse chestnut. The skin was peeling off her in powdery flaps, and her joints swelled up like balloons.

  So it’s important to be very, very careful. The only thing a vampire can absorb is fresh blood, straight from the vein (and even then, if it’s animal blood, it has to be taken with special enzymes to counteract the impurities). But you try looking for a constant supply of live animals, and see how far you get. It isn’t easy – not unless you live on a farm.

  Sanford’s solution was guinea pigs. He made the choice about sixty years ago, and has stuck with it ever since. Guinea pigs are small, so their drained cadavers can be concealed without much effort. They’re also fast breeders, and they aren’t fussy about their food. Even more importantly, they can be kept indoors. And they’re tough little things, in many ways. You don’t have to be a genius to raise them.

  That’s why George Mumford was given the job of supplying each of us with our daily ration: one guinea pig, taken in the evening, with supplements. One guinea pig seems to be enough; as Horace often says, ‘A guinea pig a day keeps Sanford away.’ (If only it were true!) Thanks to George’s excellent breeding program, none of us have missed a meal for the last twenty-six years.

  George moved in with Horace Whittaker some time around 1961. The residence they bought together was a spacious and solid brick bungalow with a wine cellar, a dilapidated conservatory, and six enormous bedrooms – so it was perfectly suited to raising guinea pigs. I went there once and it freaked me out; I certainly wouldn’t want to live my life surrounded by animal pens. Nevertheless, despite all the droppings and the bad smells and the clouds of fur, it was an ideal set-up.

  In fact the whole system’s worked very well, right from the beginning. George discovered a new way of earning money, the rest of us secured a reliable source of live animals, and when Dave appeared on the scene, he started making deliveries twice a week (for a modest payment).

  There was only one drawback. Fresh blood can be messy stuff, and no one likes living in an abattoir.

  You probably haven’t seen a vampire fanging a guinea pig. For your sake, I hope you never do, because it’s not a pretty sight. Guinea pigs tend to wriggle around, you see; since adulterated blood isn’t good for us, we try not to drug them if we can possibly help it. That’s why we sometimes miss the right spot, and end up with arterial sprays all over the wall. That’s also why we tend to consume our meals alone, in tiled bathrooms. In fact I usually try to do it when Mum is asleep. And I always clean up afterwards.

  Nevertheless, it’s been hard for my mother – in all kinds of ways. Vampires make untidy house guests. They litter their domiciles with animal corpses. They stay up all night watching television, and surfing the Net. They’re always having medical emergencies. They’re often too tired to pick up after themselves. And not all of them (let’s face it) can be trusted. I mean, you only have to look at Casimir.

  So although my mother is used to vampires, even she baulked at the idea of having seven of them sleeping in her basement.

  ‘For Chrissake,’ she said, after our dire situation had been explained to her, ‘this isn’t a bloody hotel. Why don’t you go to Rookwood Cemetery and find yourselves a nice mausoleum?’

  She was only half joking. I could hear a cranky note in her voice, and she stubbed out her cigarette as if she were squashing a cockroach.

  Sanford, however, took her seriously. He has no sense of humour.

  ‘A lot of very questionable people frequent Rookwood Cemetery, especially at night,’ he said. ‘Vandals and drug dealers and so forth. You wouldn’t want Nina exposed to them.’

  Mum blew a mouthful of smoke at his face. ‘Nina wouldn’t be exposed to anyone like that,’ she retorted. ‘Because Nina would be sleeping at home. As usual. I wouldn’t throw out my own daughter, would I?’

  ‘Give it up, Mum.’ I wasn’t feeling strong enough to sit through one of her rants. ‘Either the others stay here or they all get staked. End of story.’

  My mother grunted. She was sitting at the kitchen table, wearing a disgusting old nightie under her hideous quilted dressing-gown. Though her dentures were in, she hadn’t done anything about her hair.

  My mother is only seventy-six, but at that precise momen
t she could have been ten years older. She’s never at her best in the middle of the night.

  ‘Well, all right, then,’ she growled at last. ‘I suppose I can’t really say no.’ From the arrangement of her features, I could tell that she was wondering how on earth it had come to this: how she, of all people, had ended up with a kitchen full of vampires. But the funny thing is that the kitchen and the vampires were a perfect match, because Mum isn’t a granite-benchtop, stainless-steel-appliance kind of person. Her kitchen is all peeling linoleum and cracked tiles. It’s clean, but it’s not cheery. Everything that isn’t black or brown is pale green, except the fridge – and that’s so covered with trashy fridge magnets, you can hardly work out what colour it is.

  In a dingy, well-worn, utilitarian environment like my mother’s kitchen, vampires tend to fade into the background. They’re all of a piece with the discoloured grouting, the ancient electric jug, and the baked-on grease stains in the oven.

  ‘How long will you be staying?’ Mum asked, eyeing Horace as if he were a baked-on grease stain. But it was Sanford who replied.

  ‘That depends,’ he said. And Dave added, with a sidelong glance in my direction, ‘The sooner we find this maniac, the sooner we can leave.’

  He was prodding me, and I knew it. He wanted to start an Internet search as soon as possible.

  So I hauled myself out of my chair.

  ‘Come on,’ I said. ‘You’ll be needing my password.’

  ‘Wait.’ Mum’s voice cracked on a cough. ‘Wait just a minute,’ she croaked. ‘No one goes anywhere until I lay down the rules.’

  She went on to declare that her bedroom was out of bounds, that no one would be permitted to touch the washing machine, and that all guinea pigs were to be confined to the basement. Fanging was to take place in the bathroom only. No calls could be made from the kitchen phone. There would be a very strict policy about the distribution of keys, and every exterior door had to be deadlocked at all times.

  ‘You can clean up your own bloodstains,’ she finished, ‘and work out a shower schedule. Two extra showers a night are the absolute limit – I’m not made of hot water. As for the lights, you can leave them off. Nina does, and I don’t want the neighbours thinking I’ve opened a bloody backpackers’ hostel.’

  ‘But Nina has exceptional night-vision,’ Sanford objected. ‘I’d be worried that Bridget might fall downstairs if she has to walk around in the dark.’

  ‘Then she can stay in the basement.’ Mum rose abruptly, pocketing her lighter and her cigarettes. ‘In fact you can all stay in the basement, unless you absolutely have to be somewhere else. I don’t want people banging around upstairs while I’m trying to sleep.’

  Gladys pouted. Before she could start talking about her inalienable right to a daily scented bath, however, Dave was able to head her off.

  ‘We’ll try not to make too much noise, Mrs Harrison,’ he promised, placating Mum with his husky voice and spaniel eyes. My mother has always had a soft spot for Dave, and you can’t really blame her. To begin with, he’s the sort of bloke mothers tend to like; he’s neat, polite and soft-spoken. What’s more, he really admires my mum. His own mother abandoned him when he was two months old, so he’s very respectful of mothers who stick by their kids. And to give Mum her due, she’s always stuck by me. She might treat me as if I’m still fifteen, and bitch about everything I wear, and give me haircuts that make me look like Judith Durham from the Seekers, but at least she’s stuck by me.

  ‘I know I can trust you, love,’ she assured Dave. ‘It’s not you I’m worried about.’ And she fixed Sanford with a baleful glare, because she’s never liked him much. In fact from the very beginning she’s regarded George as a moron, Bridget as a wimp, Gladys as a pain and Horace as a ‘nasty piece of work’. (Can’t say I disagree with her there.) Sanford lost her good opinion the minute he told her to stop smoking, and as for Casimir … well, I’d better not tell you how she used to describe Casimir. You might be shocked. My mother’s an ex-barmaid, you see, so she’s picked up a lot of bad language over the years.

  Incidentally, if you’re wondering how an ex-barmaid managed to afford a big old terrace house in Surry Hills, don’t forget that Surry Hills used to be a real dump thirty years ago. Besides which, until I was infected, my mother used to help pay the bills by taking in boarders. At one time we had three other people living with us: two country girls and a very shy Pakistani student.

  Ordinary boarders are one thing, though; vampires are another. Reformed or not, they’re still vampires. I couldn’t blame Mum for being cross.

  ‘We wouldn’t ask you if we weren’t desperate,’ I pointed out, as she began to shuffle off towards the stairs. ‘I mean, you do realise that it’s a matter of life and death, don’t you, Mum? You do realise how serious this is?’

  ‘Of course I do, I’m not senile!’ she snapped. ‘I understand what’s going on! I’m just not very happy about it, that’s all.’

  ‘Neither are we,’ said Gladys, sounding resentful. Sanford, too, seemed put out.

  ‘Casimir was killed today, Estelle,’ he reminded her. ‘Surely that merits a little sympathy? It was a very great shock for all of us.’

  Mum sniffed. ‘Should have happened a long time ago,’ was her blunt rejoinder, which made Gladys gasp, Horace snicker and Dave choke.

  ‘It could just as easily have been Nina!’ Sanford protested. But my mother didn’t agree.

  ‘If you think I’d let anyone into this house with a stake and a silver bullet, then I don’t know why you’re here,’ she said contemptuously. ‘Nina’s perfectly safe as long as I’m around. I once held off six drunken bikers with a cricket bat and a bottle of Guinness, so don’t talk to me about self-defence.’

  I can’t tell you how many times I’ve heard about the infamous cricket-bat-and-bottle-of-Guinness affair. It’s one of Mum’s favourite stories. But before I could even roll my eyes, the doorbell rang.

  ‘That must be Father Ramon,’ Sanford conjectured.

  It was. The priest had finally arrived. With him were Bridget, George and seven alpine sleeping-bags, which were promptly carried downstairs and arranged across the basement floor. Sanford supervised this job, while Gladys complained about the smelly sleeping-bags, and Mum made the priest a cup of tea.

  I took Dave and Horace upstairs to my room. There I showed Horace my computer, which he hadn’t seen before. To tell you the truth, he hadn’t so much as set foot in Mum’s house for at least twenty years; it was Dave who installed my computer, because Mum had always discouraged Horace from coming around. She’s never been able to stand Horace. ‘That slimy little bastard belongs in a spittoon,’ was how she once expressed her feelings about him.

  When he spotted my David Bowie poster, Horace smirked.

  ‘This bedroom hasn’t changed much,’ he remarked. ‘Anyone would think you were still fifteen.’

  ‘Anyone would think you were still eight,’ I snarled, as Dave settled into my office chair and booted up the machine in front of him. ‘Just keep your greasy mitts off my things, will you?’

  ‘Why do you still have a bed up here, when you sleep downstairs in an isolation tank?’ Horace queried. It was the sort of question you should never ask a vampire. It was hurtful. It was cruel. You might as well ask a paraplegic why she keeps her old sports equipment.

  But despite the fact that Horace had hit a nerve, I wasn’t about to let him know it. I folded my arms and said, ‘Why do you still bother brushing your hair, when no one would possibly want to look at your ugly mug anyway?’

  Horace narrowed his eyes. Before he could think of a comeback, Dave interrupted us.

  ‘Come on, guys,’ he pleaded. ‘Lay off. I know it’s hard, but show some respect, eh?’

  ‘For Casimir?’ Horace scoffed, and Dave regarded him gravely.

  ‘Casimir’s dead, mate. We could all be dead soon, if we don’t stop wasting time.’ Dave shifted his attention. ‘You want to log on, Nina?’

  ‘Onl
y if nobody looks,’ I said, then glowered at Horace.

  Dave got the message, of course. He averted his gaze. But I wouldn’t enter my password until Horace was safely out in the corridor. It was Horace, after all, who once terrified the rest of us by pretending to be an obsessed fan of the Bloodstone Chronicles. Having ‘discovered’ my street address, he kept sending me creepy letters until Mum and I were on the point of moving house. And when he finally came clean, he didn’t apologise or anything. Oh, no. According to Horace, he’d only been trying to demonstrate how risky it was, publishing books when you were a vampire.

  After that, I decided never to cut him any slack ever again.

  So he was only allowed back in after Dave had launched an online search for silver bullets; within minutes, we were all three peering at the official website of an American company called Ranger’s Inc.

  You could order Ranger’s Inc. silver bullets over the Internet, for fifteen dollars each plus postage.

  ‘Here it is,’ said Dave. ‘Here’s the trademark. This is where he got ’em – whoever he might be.’

  ‘But who else buys them?’ It troubled me that the demand for silver bullets was big enough to sustain a viable business. ‘I mean, surely every customer isn’t a vampire slayer?’

  ‘Of course not,’ Horace rejoined. For a moment I actually thought that he might have something insightful to contribute. But then he drawled, ‘Most of these people must be after werewolves. Though they probably wouldn’t draw the line at shooting the odd vampire. What do you reckon, Dave?’

  Horace has an irritating habit of teasing people as a form of stress relief. He was certainly teasing Dave, who had always maintained that werewolves might very well exist, though not necessarily in the form that populates most films and comic strips.

  No one else shared this opinion. Not back then.

  ‘Well … I reckon if there are any werewolves out there, they’d better watch out,’ Dave replied. (As usual, he didn’t rise to the bait.) ‘Someone must be buying silver bullets, because this mob don’t seem to supply anything else.’