The School of the Undead

by Michael Woods

  Amanda sat back for a moment and finished the remaining blood in her cup. Though she could not quite put her finger on exactly what it was, the drink had tasted somewhat different to what she was used to.

  “Perhaps you could help me answer a few other questions, Mr Packard.”

  “I have time, as you well can tell. And it is more than a welcome change to spend a few moments with a young vampire, especially one as pretty as yourself. Ask away.”

  “I see,” replied Amanda, who was not sure if the compliment had been given only to make her feel ill at ease once more. “And thank you, of course. There is one vampire that I have not been able to locate, but I believe that he resides in the area?”

  “Ha, well, you must be talking about Johann Milch. I would be most surprised if it turned out that he had been our attacker, for that little Tierblut is often more than a little upset for having to kill the rats and other vermin that he lives on. No, no, that is quite the wrong man to chase after.”

  “Nevertheless, I would be grateful if you could give me some information on him, just so I could see if he has anything to say.”

  “Well, of course, I would be happy to oblige. Though it is not the case that I’m keeping a track of the man, it would not surprise me at all if you were to come across Mr Milch near the mess of trees beyond that terrible sight of a car park which services the collection of out-of-town stores on Radcliff’s outskirts. But as I say, I’m not sure that you will find anything of use from the man, even if he did have something to tell you. No, no.”

  Packard paused for a moment and fixed his hard gaze on the drops of blood that remained in his cup.

  “Have you already been to see Mrs O’Hare, by any chance?”

  “Yes, in fact, I paid her a visit only yesterday.”

  “A most interesting woman, wouldn’t you agree?”

  “Unfortunately, there was not really time for us to get to know one another. She said she had work to do.”

  “Oh no, really? Such a shame, I receive guests so infrequently from members of the - what do they say now? - the community out here in Radcliff that I always make sure to invite my fellow sufferers in. It’s not just the company, you know, but the getting to know what’s going on in the little world of the school and elsewhere. But of course, that’s just me.

  “Now, speaking of such things, would you mind indulging me a little?” continued Packard before Amanda could ask a question about what he knew about Mary O’Hare. “I believe it’s the case that Martin Chester is still running the place down there? Still letting the rather unfortunate members of the undead roam around our old haunt, is he? Even though, of course, there is no point in giving them any instruction as they cannot even remember their own names. No need to answer, I can see from your face that this is still the case.” In a quieter tone, he then added, “It also seems that he’s still doling out some of the school’s petty jobs - and the funds that come with them - as if the place were a charity, but no matter.

  “Well, Amanda. It’s been a pleasure having you here, but I think that it is time for me to let you go. As much as I might like to keep you here, I know you have many duties to attend to, so I’d best not keep you.”

  ***

  Amanda listened to the rain beating on the roof of her car as she sat staring at the thick cluster of trees that she assumed that Packard had referred to when she had asked him about Milch over an hour and a half before. She had returned to her hotel, but as soon as she had stepped through the door, she had known it would be best to act on the information Packard had given her without delay. Despite her suspicions about the youthful-looking Packard, she could not see why he would lie to her about Milch. Furthermore, his information on both Mary and Johann seemed to suggest that the man knew quite a bit about what was happening in the town and it would be foolish of her to not follow a lead when she had so little to go on otherwise. So, despite having to head out into the pouring rain, she left the warmth of her hotel room behind to drive to a car park that, as far as Amanda could tell from a hurried internet search, best reflected Packard’s description of Milch’s location; one that serviced the town’s cluster of large, white, cheaply constructed stores, including office supply and card shops, a cut price sports outlet and a generic supermarket.

  A glance at her phone informed Amanda that it was ten minutes to two in the morning. She had been waiting now for over half an hour, but she had seen no sign of anyone coming in or out of the trees. Indeed, apart from a small group of teenage boys, who had huddled under the supermarket’s plastic canopy to enjoy some cheap booze, she had not seen a soul. A little frustrated, she pressed her head hard against the driver’s seat headrest and mumbled a few choice swear words as well as Packard’s name.

  A selection of half-formed retorts to Packard’s insinuation that she was a just a charity case occurred to her when she spoke the man’s name, but she drove them away by telling herself that though Packard had clearly meant to insult her, he had probably just done so as part of a game he was playing with her. This idea led Amanda to consider what Packard had meant by his comments about Mary O’Hare, but before she got anywhere on this track of thought, she saw something large moving through the car park out of the corner of her eye. She turned her head abruptly to look out over the rain covered tarmac, which was illuminated with a grim orange glow, but she was not quick enough to see what it was that had distracted her.

  A little reluctantly, Amanda retrieved her umbrella from the back seat of her car and stepped out into the rain before making her way over to the small wood that had been the object of her stake-out.

  Not far beyond the first line of trees, it became apparent to Amanda that she could no longer find her way by the light emanating from the car park behind her alone. Once again, she used the LED on her phone to reveal what was before her, only to reveal a clearing not so far from where she stood. She made her way into the open space and looked around at a clump of dirty blankets, the remains of an extinct fire and a pile of dead animals in various states of decay. What she saw suggested she was in the right place to find Milch, but also undermined her desire to meet the man.

  To drown out her internal voice’s insistence that she should just run back to her car, Amanda sat herself down on a damp tree stump situated near the centre of the clearing. By doing so, she noticed that although she could still hear drips of water falling through the leaves of the trees around her, she could no longer detect the sound of the rain hitting her umbrella. She closed her eyes and, for a fleeting moment, the sound of the continued descent of the fallen rain through the trees enabled her to forget about what she was and why she had travelled to Radcliff.

  “You shouldn’t be here!”

  Amanda stood and turned all in one motion and ended up stepping on the bones and bodies of the creatures Milch had gathered to stave off his hunger. At the edge of the clearing, only six or seven feet away, she saw him standing with a torch in one hand and the kicking, bloodied body of a rabbit in the other. When she did not answer, he just grunted and turned his attention to the rabbit, first placing the torch between his teeth, then breaking the creature’s neck.

  Milch chucked the now limp form of the rabbit so that it landed on some of the other animals he had killed, just in front of Amanda. He then removed the torch from his mouth and shone it directly into his own face.

  “Have you come to gawp?” said Milch in a rough voice that carried more than a hint of a German accent. “Well take a good look, then get lost.”

  For a further few seconds, Milch kept the light on his face, revealing not only his hard expression but also his receding hair of dark brown curls, uneven beard, bulbous nose and clear, ice-blue eyes. Amanda was surprised by the sight of the man, but it was not his strange features or the man’s imposing height and build that affected her so. Instead, it was the absence of the effects of his diet. Indeed, Milch seemed to not be suffering from any of the side-effects she expected to see in a vampire avoiding the drinking of hu
man blood.

  “You’re not running away,” continued Milch as he took the light away from his face. “So, I guess you must be one of them. Why else would you be here?”

  “I’ve come from the school,” Amanda finally managed to say.

  “That’s no concern of mine,” said Milch, before walking past her to get to the pile of sodden, dirty blankets, which he kicked aside to reveal a blue tarpaulin. He then peeled back the blue sheet, sat down on the dry patch the tarpaulin had protected from the rain, planted his torch in the ground and, finally, surprised Amanda again by removing a laptop from a previously concealed rucksack.

  “I don’t really want to disturb you.”

  “Then don’t!”

  “But,” continued Amanda, determined to go on, “I’ve come from the school to find out if you can tell me anything about the attack: the vampire attack, that happened here about a week ago.”

  Milch placed his warming up laptop to one side and fixed his piercing eyes on Amanda to communicate to her that she was clearly wasting his time.

  “This may come as a surprise to you, but I don’t know anything about the attack. Happy now? Now, can you leave me alone?”

  “Please, Mr Milch,” said Amanda, who interpreted Milch’s lack of a physical response to her presence as reason enough to carry on. “I just want to discover who carried out the attack. I mean, I assume if you want to avoid drinking people’s blood, you would want to try to help us catch someone who would kill for such a thing.”

  Milch grumbled something and returned his attention to his laptop.

  “Okay, even if you don’t know anything directly about the attack, can you tell me about the other vampires in town? Anything could help.”

  “Look, Miss whoever you are, I don’t know whether you’ve noticed, but I don’t exactly go out of my way to socialise. In fact, I would think it better if there were no vampires to talk to at all.”

  “Then why did you visit Mary O’Hare?”

  “Oh, so you’ve already been to see her, have you?”

  “She said you used to visit her every so often.”

  “I might have, what of it?”

  “Look, Mr Milch,” said Amanda, who was finally getting tired of Milch’s attitude, and that of all the inhabitants of Radcliff she had met, “I’m not here to make any accusations. In fact, I think it’s probably quite clear that I don’t really know what I’m doing. I just want to see if I can find anything to help prevent a possible attacker from escaping, leaving him free to do what he did again. I don’t know if you care about such things, but I do. I’m only a vampire myself because some bastard did the same thing to me as they did to the boy who was attacked. As far as I know, the school probably sent someone out as experienced as me to try and find out who took my life. And what happened? Nothing! No one was found and it was just forgotten about. I couldn’t help as I didn’t even see who it was; like in almost every other such case that I know, whoever did the thing got away.”

  The contrast between the level of volume of Amanda’s last words and the silence that followed made Amanda feel as if she had left a ringing in her own ears. However, she did not regret what she had said to Milch, and when she finally looked into his face once more, it was plain for her to see that she had gotten through to the man as for the first time since he had joined her in the clearing, his face softened.

  “I suppose I used to go there because of the company,” said Milch, who then paused a moment to sweep his thick, dirt encrusted fingers through his curls. “To Mary’s, I am referring. It was not so much that I sought her company out; no, it was the reverse. She must have heard about me from someone. I am not so difficult to locate, as you have discovered for yourself, and she came and asked me, again and again, to come and see her in her kitchen.”

  Milch looked up into Amanda’s eyes, leading her to try her best to look as interested as she could to lead the man to go on.

  “I guess she was even lonelier than me. I don’t know what I can tell you about her; I never even saw anything of her house apart from her old-fashioned kitchen. We never talked about her either, just the weather and her garden. Oh, except for the times when Mary would challenge me on my reasons for not drinking the right kind of blood and how strange it was that I seemed to be able to live off animals without the side effects. She suspected I was lying; she would always ask if I had a secret, whether I was feasting on the locals.” Milch laughed, before continuing, “I thought she was joking at first, but she was not. I even laughed the first few times that she said it; she would just stare at me with a confused look on her face.”

  “Do you know why it is that you’re not affected by only drinking animal blood?” asked Amanda tentatively, worried that she might remind Milch that she was not wanted in his clearing, but just as concerned that he might stop talking.

  “That’s what you all want to know isn’t it?” replied Milch sharply, leading Amanda to fear she had broken the spell. But after taking a moment to recompose himself, he carried on. “That’s what I figured about her as well, about Mary. She also wanted to know how she could free herself from the high prices of human blood and the hunger, but I had nothing to tell her. When she finally realised that I had nothing to tell her, she stopped asking me to come.”

  “Did you never talk about it at the school? Or ask anyone else?”

  “Give me a break! That school of yours tried to hook me on their blood; just like every other institution, they’re after control. No, I only found out about my good fortune after I ran out of the stuff they supplied me with and I was unable to get a job. By that point, I’d had enough of them and never went back. Anyway, talking of such things, I think our conversation is almost at an end. I can honestly tell you that I know nothing about the other vampires here that will help you in any way.”

  “Well, thank you…”

  “Hang on a second, I said almost. Now there is one thing you will tell me: How did you find out where I was?”

  “Another vampire in the town, Samuel Packard, told me I might find you here.” In other circumstances, Amanda believed she would have had reservations about disclosing to Milch who had informed her of his location, however, she found she had no compunction about informing the man that it had been Packard.

  Milch became lost in thought for a moment, picked up his torch from the ground and then muttered something under his breath that Amanda thought might have been, “He would.” She waited for Milch to say something else, but he just sat on his patch of earth and slowly swivelled the torch around in one hand.

  “Well, thank you, Johann, I should go…”

  “Do you like it?” interrupted Milch. “Are you glad that you’re a vampire?”

  “I didn’t choose it; I guess now I just go from day to day.”

  The man grunted. Amanda assumed that the sound was as close as the man would come to an approval of anything she said.

  “You know, they would never admit it, but some time ago someone escaped from the Tunnels, hungry as hell. God knows how, but they ended up just outside Radcliff where I, poor sod, just happened to be visiting a farm building I’d bought to convert into housing. I never saw him, don’t know to this day what he looked like; he must have come up behind me. I remember it still, my last moments alive. I was making my way back to the beat-up Vauxhall I used to take on jobs and the next thing I knew my face was in the mud and a great weight was on top of me. I struggled as best I could, hitting out at his body and tearing at his clothing, but the shock of the attack and the draining of my blood from my body prevented me from doing anything much but spill my blood over the ground. After he’d almost finished the job, his hunger must have been sated enough that he realised what he was doing; the fool stopped drinking and started instead to sob. There I was dying before him and all he could do was cry and apologise for what he’d done; he did nothing to help me or even make me feel more comfortable in my final moments.

  “I still had enough strength in me to turn my head to
try to see if I could catch a glimpse of the pathetic creature, but he was standing just beyond the end of my feet; all I could make out was his general form. He started up again, choking out that he was sorry for what he’d done. He had never meant to hurt me, he spluttered, but the hunger had overtaken him and there was nothing he could do. He even had the audacity to claim that though what he said probably made no sense, I would understand what he had meant soon enough. He was wrong.

  “He ran away, still distraught at what he’d done to me and adding further apologies, just as the light of the day was starting to fade. I think I lived on, bleeding slowly into the ground, for a good few hours. I read later in the local paper that a builder I’d asked to come and look at the place had found my body the next day, my face lying in the mud.”

  Amanda tried her best to think of something to say to console the man, but the only things that came to her mind were questions about his attack. A couple of times she stopped herself from letting a question spill out from her lips, causing her to produce sharp inhalations of breath, but Milch paid her no regard as the telling of how he had become a vampire had left him drained and concerned only with how miserable he thought his life to be. As Milch sank deeper into his usual circuit between thoughts of self-loathing, hatred of the man who had turned him into a vampire and recognition of how he despised all vampire-kind, he forgot that Amanda was even there. As a consequence, he caught nothing but the sound of Amanda’s words when she finally asked a question.

  “What?” he spat out.

  “When did it happen?” repeated Amanda.

  “Who keeps track of time when you’re dead?” said Milch. “Why don’t you go back to your school; they probably know better than me.”

  “Just roughly then.”

  Milch ran one of his hands across his face and then once again through his remaining hair as he pondered over how to get rid of the girl so he could return to his own business.