Aunt Dimity: Vampire Hunter

by Nancy Atherton

  “Not at all,” said Miss Archer. “I don’t wish to upset their routine. I will, however, ensure that Miss Brightman curtails any storytelling in which they might engage today.” She removed her glasses and gazed thoughtfully into the middle distance. “It would be helpful if you would discuss the true stories—that is, the stories that do not involve vampires—with Miss Brightman at some point in the near future. She would then be able to discuss them with the class as a whole, in a way that might alleviate the other children’s fears.” She bent her head toward Bill. “May Miss Brightman contact you?”

  “I look forward to her call,” said Bill. “In the meantime please extend our sincere apologies to Mrs. Lawrence. Tell her that our sons never meant to give Matilda or any other child nightmares.”

  “I will,” said Miss Archer. “Once I’ve described your sons’…er, unusual experiences to her, I’m sure she’ll understand. I hope that you, in turn, will accept my apology for making assumptions I had no right to make. In light of what you’ve told me today, your sons are astonishingly well adjusted.”

  “They’re good boys,” I agreed.

  “We’ll have a serious talk with them tonight,” Bill promised. “And we’ll keep you and Miss Brightman informed on the vampire situation.”

  “Thank you,” said Miss Archer.

  She pressed a buzzer on her desk, and Mrs. Findle entered the office, carrying our raincoats. We took them from her, said good-bye to Miss Archer, and headed for the door, but before we reached it, the headmistress spoke again.

  “As a matter of curiosity,” she said, “what do your sons want to be when they grow up?”

  I grinned. “At the moment, they want to be horses.”

  “Oh, no.” Miss Archer shook her head. “With so much good material to choose from, they’re bound to be bestselling novelists.”

  A glimmer of amusement lit Miss Archer’s creepy eyes as she closed the file folder. I shuddered and escaped into the corridor.

  Three

  I wonder where our sons heard about vampires?” I mused aloud as we drove back to the cottage.

  “Don’t look at me,” said Bill. “I’ve never mentioned the v-word in their presence.” He gave me a sidelong glance. “What about you?”

  “Not so much as a syllable,” I replied, and when he pursed his lips doubtfully, I protested. “Credit me with some sense, Bill. I’ve never criticized Miss Archer in front of them. I certainly haven’t told them that she reminds me of a bloodsucking fiend. Are you sure you haven’t been entertaining them with your cheesy Dracula act?”

  “Vhy vould I?” said Bill. “It is for your ears only, my dahlink.”

  “Hilarious,” I said grimly.

  “Come on, Lori,” Bill cajoled, “you have to admit that it’s at least a little bit funny. Our sons, the fearless vampire hunters.” He shook his head, chuckling. “I’m with Miss Archer. I admire their inventiveness.”

  “I will, too, once I’m sure they made it all up,” I said.

  “Well, of course they made it up,” said Bill. “They ran out of true stories to tell, so they manufactured a thrilling tale to impress their friends.”

  “Is that what you think of our sons?” I asked, scandalized. “That they’re a pair of lying show-offs?”

  “I think our sons are perfectly normal little boys who are learning how to get along with other children,” Bill said calmly. “They’re bound to make mistakes now and them. How else will they learn what’s right?”

  “We’ll tell them,” I said resolutely. “There won’t be time for a proper talk after lunch, so we’ll sit them down after dinner, when we have their full attention. Agreed?”

  “Agreed,” said Bill.

  “I just hope Miss Brightman can keep them from spooking their classmates this afternoon,” I said. “You may think the whole thing’s a big joke, but I don’t want any more Matilda Lawrences on my conscience.”

  “Nor do I,” said Bill, patting my knee.

  I reviewed the situation in silence for a moment, then burst out plaintively, “Why haven’t the twins told us about the vampire?”

  “Maybe they didn’t want to scare us,” Bill reasoned. “Or maybe they’ve gotten so used to strange things happening that they didn’t think a vampire sighting was worth mentioning.”

  “Oh, Bill,” I moaned. “Our poor babies. What have we done to them?”

  “We haven’t done anything to them,” Bill stated firmly. “Except make them strong enough to cope with situations that give other children nightmares.”

  I took some consolation from his words, but as we cruised through the mist-shrouded countryside, I couldn’t help wishing that Will and Rob didn’t have to be quite so strong.

  The rest of the day passed in a typical blur of activity. After lunch, Annelise whisked the boys off to school, I attended a Guy Fawkes Day committee meeting at the village hall, and Bill juggled paperwork, phone calls, and e-mail at the cottage while Mr. Barlow, the local handyman, attempted to repair the malfunctioning furnace at the office in Finch.

  Due to a lengthy debate as to whether the Guy Fawkes Day bonfire should be moved from its traditional location on the village green to a new spot nearer the church—a debate that was entirely pointless, because Finch’s traditionalists always won—I returned to the cottage much later than I’d expected. By the time I got there, the twins were already home from school and playing with their train set in the solarium.

  After calling a quick hello to Bill, who was sharing desk space in the study with a deeply contented Stanley, I put a roast into the oven, set the kitchen table for dinner, and went looking for Annelise. I found her upstairs, in the boys’ room, folding clean laundry and putting it away. While she sorted socks, I filled her in on our meeting with Miss Archer.

  Annelise usually knew everything that was going on in the twins’ lives, but the vampire story came as a complete surprise to her.

  “I’ve never discussed vampires with them,” she assured me, “or werewolves or banshees, for that matter. But childhood’s filled with terrors,” she went on matter-of-factly. “The bogeyman under the bed, the goblin in the garden…The boys were bound to hear about vampires sooner or later. Very popular these days, vampires.”

  “Not in this house,” I declared. “I don’t want Will and Rob filling their heads with ghoulish nonsense.”

  “I don’t know if you can stop them,” said Annelise. “They’re out in the world now, Lori. They’re going to hear all sorts of things they don’t hear at home. The best we can do is help them to sort out the truth from the nonsense.”

  “That’s exactly what we’re going to do after dinner,” I said. “And by ‘we’ I mean all of us. I want you to be there, too. We have to present a united front on this issue.”

  “You can count on me,” said Annelise.

  “I always do,” I said, and returned to the kitchen to cut up vegetables to put in with the roast.

  After dinner, Annelise took the twins upstairs for their baths, then settled them in the living room with crayons and drawing paper. Bill and I spent their bath time in the kitchen, clearing the table and devising a game plan for the big talk. We decided that I would start the ball rolling and Bill would follow my lead.

  We entered the living room to find Will and Rob kneeling at the coffee table, drawing pictures of their favorite subjects—their gray ponies, Thunder and Storm. Annelise sat quietly by the fire, reading a novel, but she closed the book and set it aside when we came in.

  Bill had to evict Stanley from his armchair before he could take possession of it. As usual, Stanley waited until Bill was seated comfortably, then leapt gracefully into his lap, where he curled into a purring black ball. I sat on the chintz sofa, facing the boys across the coffee table.

  “Daddy and I were at your school this morning,” I said to them. “We had a little chat with Miss Archer. She told us that you’ve been telling stories to the other children at school.”

  “Uh-huh,” Will agreed,
adding strands to Thunder’s tail.

  “Daddy and I know that most of your stories are true,” I said, “but we wanted to ask you about one of them.”

  “Okay,” Rob said equably.

  “Did you…” I looked uncertainly at Bill, who gave me a supportive thumbs-up, and then I got down to the business at hand. “Have you been telling your school friends that you saw a vampire at Anscombe Manor?”

  “Yes,” said Will as he filled out Thunder’s mane. “We saw Rendor, the Destroyer of Souls.”

  I don’t know if Bill’s jaw dropped, but mine did, almost to my knees.

  “You saw who?” I asked, sitting bolt upright.

  “‘Whom,’” Bill corrected automatically.

  “Oh, Lord,” said Annelise with a tired sigh. “I should have guessed.”

  I turned to her, round-eyed, wondering what she should have guessed.

  “It’s a comic book,” she explained, reading the question in my eyes. “Or a graphic novel, as they’re called nowadays. Rendor, the Destroyer of Souls. I’ve seen it at the bookstore in Upper Deeping. It’s not meant for young children.” She turned her attention to the twins. “Did someone bring a comic book to school, Rob?”

  “Uh-huh.” He looked over his shoulder at her. “Clive Pickle did, but it’s Nigel’s comic.”

  “Who’s Nigel?” I asked.

  “Clive Pickle’s big brother,” Rob replied, sitting back on his heels. “He’s at university. Clive goes into his room and takes his things when he’s away.”

  I made a mental note to telephone Mrs. Pickle in the morning and ask her to put Nigel’s belongings under lock and key, then began the painstaking task of piecing the boys’ story together.

  According to them, Clive Pickle had sneaked his older brother’s comic book out of the house and brought it to school several times over the past few weeks. He’d shown it freely to his pals, but he’d been clever enough to conceal it from Miss Brightman and every other adult at Morningside.

  Rob and Will had regarded the comic as just another kind of storybook until they’d seen the Destroyer of Souls with their own eyes. They insisted that they’d seen Rendor in the flesh, lurking in the woods above Anscombe Manor, during their most recent trail ride.

  “That would have been on Sunday,” Annelise deduced. “Kit took them on a trail ride after church.”

  Kit Smith, the stable master at Anscombe Manor, was the boys’ riding instructor as well as their trail guide.

  “Clive Pickle said we didn’t see Rendor,” Will told us darkly, “but we did.”

  Further questioning revealed that Clive had made his accusation on Monday and that the twins had argued the point with him in the presence of several other children, including the highly impressionable Matilda Lawrence, who, Bill and I knew, had relayed the boys’ eyewitness report to her mother after awakening from a nightmare in the wee hours of Tuesday morning.

  “Did you tell Uncle Kit that you’d seen Rendor?” Bill asked.

  “Uh-huh.” Rob shrugged. “He didn’t believe us.”

  “He said we saw a tree,” Will clarified.

  “But it was Rendor,” Rob concluded placidly. “He swooped.”

  “Swooped?” Bill said.

  “Like this.” Rob pulled an afghan from the sofa, wrapped it around his shoulders, and twirled in a half circle toward Annelise. The afghan swirled around him.

  “Then he turned into a lot of little bats and flew away.” Rob let the afghan fall to the floor and returned to the coffee table.

  I gazed in fascination from his face to Will’s. “Weren’t you afraid?”

  “No,” answered Will nonchalantly. “We were on Thunder and Storm.”

  “They’re faster than bats,” Rob explained.

  Bill stroked Stanley’s sleek black fur for a moment, then asked, “What did Rendor look like, boys? Can you draw a picture of him?”

  Will obligingly pulled a clean sheet of drawing paper from the pile on the coffee table and picked up a black crayon. Five minutes and several crayons later, he presented us with a portrait that had, I suspected, been strongly influenced by the illustrations he’d seen in Clive Pickle’s comic book.

  The bone-thin figure had bloodred lips and canines like stalactites. Its face was deathly pale, and it wore a voluminous black cloak with a crimson lining. A cloud of tiny bats hovered around its grotesque head, and a lightning bolt split the sky above it. Although the drawing was primitive, it was powerful enough to give me nightmares.

  A moment of silence ensued while the grown-ups in the room pondered their next move.

  Finally Bill dislodged Stanley from his lap and motioned for the boys to come to him. After they’d climbed into his lap, he put his arms around them and explained gently but firmly that Rendor wasn’t real, that he was a make-believe character in a very silly book, and that Uncle Kit had been right to tell them that they’d mistaken a shadow for a vampire because vampires did not exist. Bill repeated the last point several times, to emphasize its importance.

  He concluded his fatherly lecture by asking, “Do you both understand what I’ve told you?”

  “Yes,” said Will, nodding.

  “Vampires are make-believe,” Rob confirmed.

  “But we saw one,” added Will.

  Bill sighed but responded patiently, “You saw something that looked like a vampire, boys. If you see something else that looks like a vampire, I want you to tell Mummy and Annelise and me about it. I don’t want you to tell the kids at school.”

  Will frowned slightly. “But, Daddy, we—”

  Bill cut him off. “Listen to me, sons. Some of your new friends are afraid of make-believe monsters. It’s not nice to frighten people. You don’t want to scare your friends, do you?”

  “No, Daddy,” the boys chorused.

  “I want you to promise me you won’t tell anyone at school that you saw a vampire,” Bill said gravely. “Not even Clive Pickle.”

  The twins hesitated, as though the thought of letting Clive Pickle have the last word on vampires weighed heavily on them, but finally gave in.

  “Okay, Daddy,” said Rob. “We promise.”

  “And you’ll tell one of us”—Bill touched his chest, then gestured to me and Annelise—“the next time you see someone that looks like Rendor?”

  “Okay, Daddy,” said Will.

  “Good boys.” Bill pulled Will and Rob into hugs, then set them on their feet. “Time for bed, cowpokes. I can’t come up with you because I have a few telephone calls to make, but I’ll see you in the morning.”

  “G’night, Daddy,” the twins said, and trotted toward the stairs.

  While Annelise folded the afghan and tidied away the drawing materials on the coffee table, Bill headed for the study and I went up to tuck the boys in bed. Much to my relief, they expressed no interest whatsoever in discussing vampires, preferring instead to hear a chapter from Brighty of the Grand Canyon as a bedtime story. I’d have read the whole book to them if they’d asked. To my mind, Brighty, the brave and kindly mule, was the perfect antidote to Rendor, the Destroyer of Souls.

  On my way downstairs, I ran into Annelise, who was on her way up to her room.

  “What did you do with the drawing Will made?” I asked her quietly. “The drawing of Rendor.”

  “I was going to toss it on the fire,” she said, “but I thought you might want another look at it, so I put it in the drawer in the kitchen.”

  I nodded, bade her good night, and continued down the stairs.

  There were many drawers in the kitchen, but only one was universally referred to as “the” drawer. I went straight to it and extricated Will’s drawing from a miscellany of chopsticks, birthday-candle holders, tea strainers, mushroom brushes, bottle openers, toy cars, toothpicks, and small plastic dinosaurs. The homeliness of the drawer’s contents made the portrait of Rendor seem even more unsettling than it had when I’d first seen it.

  After a brief struggle with an unruly chopstick, I closed the draw
er, laid the drawing on the kitchen counter, and studied it intently. I was still gazing down at it when Bill emerged from the study, caught sight of me from the hallway, and joined me in the kitchen.

  “Mr. Barlow says it’ll take a week to ten days to get the parts he needs to fix the furnace,” he announced. He glanced down at the drawing, then leaned back against the counter and folded his arms. “I can’t work from home, Lori, not for more than one or two days. There are too many distractions, and the study isn’t a fully equipped office. I need more than a laptop and a telephone to do my job properly.”

  “You’re not thinking of going to London, are you?” I said, stunned. “For ten days?”

  “I have to,” Bill replied. “We’re in the middle of sorting out the Shuttleworth bequest, which, owing to Mrs. Shuttleworth’s deep and abiding love for her many, many cats, is insanely complicated. It’s all hands on deck at the London office, and I have to be there to make sure the paperwork flows smoothly. We mustn’t confuse Miss Muffin’s trust fund with Mr. Muddy-Buddy’s.”

  “You’d put a cat’s welfare before your sons’?” I said, appalled. “Don’t you understand? The boys could be in danger.”

  Bill sighed. “If I thought for one moment that the boys were in any kind of danger, I’d stay home.”

  I waved Will’s drawing under his nose. “What about Rendor?”

  “There is no Rendor, Lori,” Bill reminded me.

  “I know there’s no Rendor,” I said, exasperated. “But the boys saw someone. I’ll bet there’s a creepy pervert lurking in the woods above Anscombe Manor.”

  “You’d lose the bet,” Bill said complacently. “I just finished speaking with Kit. He checked out the place where Rendor allegedly appeared to the boys, and he didn’t find anything to indicate that anyone had been there—no footprints, no broken branches, no bat droppings. But there is a gnarly old tree that, on a misty October day, could be mistaken for a lot of things. He’s convinced that the boys mistook the tree for a vampire. That’s why he didn’t report it to us. He thought it was too trivial to merit a phone call.”