The first bell rang, and people started coming up the stairs and milling around. I could tell that Binky was going to make a run for it, so I grabbed the front of his shirt. He looked up at me with his sad black eyes and said, "I don"t think that would be a good idea, Carleton."
"I know it"s not a good idea," I told him. "It"s my sister"s idea, so it"s obviously pretty stupid."
I explained the situation in a low voice so n.o.body could hear me talking about a vampire in the hall. They"d think I was as crazy as Binky if they did.
I told Binky about the party. While I was talking, I held on to Binky"s shirt. He might make a break at any second, even though
there was plenty of time for him to get to cla.s.s before the second bell.
"That"s really dumb, Carleton," he said when I was finished telling him Kate"s plan. "Even for your sister, it"s dumb. You shouldn"t mess with a vampire. It"s dangerous."
"Yeah, but she"s going to do my geometry problems for a week, so we have to talk to the vampire."
"That wasn"t the deal you made with Kate."
I asked him what he meant by that. I was the one who made the deal, after all, so I should know what it was.
"She said she"d do the problems if you talked to me. Well, you talked to me. Case closed."
I thought about it, and he was right, technically speaking. Except that Kate"s mind didn"t work that way. She didn"t go in for
loopholes and technicalities. She"d never do the geometry problems if I didn"t try to get the vampire for the party. Not that I
needed her help. I can do geometry. It was just the principle of the thing. I was still trying to explain that to Binky when he noticed that the hall had just about cleared out. He gave a sudden jerk and pulled away from me. I guess he wasn"t as weak as I thought, and he was quicker than I"d have guessed. Before I could do anything about it, he was gone, escaping into Mr. Harkness"s cla.s.sroom. The ungrateful little b.a.s.t.a.r.d would be lucky if I ever let him out of his locker again.
Binky tried to make things right during lunch period by offering me his pudding, as if anybody would want pudding that he"d been sniffling over for ten minutes, not that he was sniffling today. n.o.body would have wanted it anyway because there were lumps in it. I knew that for sure because there were always lumps in the pudding they served in the cafeteria. There were plenty of rumors that explained what the lumps were, and all of them were unpleasant, to say the least.
"I"ve been thinking things over," he said. "I"m sorry I ran off this morning."
He put a couple of thin cafeteria napkins on top of his chili to soak up the grease. He"s probably the only one who does that. For that matter, he"s probably the only one who actually eats the chili. He kills me; he really does.
I wished he hadn"t come to sit at my table, but I couldn"t do anything about it, and the fact was that there was plenty of room there, and he knew n.o.body else was likely to be joining me. To tell you the truth, I wasn"t a whole lot more popular than Binky was, but at least I was too big to be stuffed into a locker.
"That"s okay," I said, hoping he wouldn"t say anything else. "I know you had to get to cla.s.s." But I was pretty cheesed off at him if you want to know the truth.
"I should never have told you about the vampire," he said. "That was a mistake."
"Too late," I said.
"Yeah. So I guess I"ll take you to him."
I stopped stirring my chili. That"s what I do: I stir it. But I never eat more than a couple of bites. If I do, I"ll have gas all during fourth period. I don"t eat much of the pudding, either. I just stick the spoon in it and stir that around, too, checking for lumps.
"So now you"ll take me to him?"
Binky nodded.
"What do you want from me, Binky?"
"Who says I want anything?"
I didn"t bother to answer that. Everybody wants something, and Binky was no different. After a couple of seconds he said, "I
want to come to the party."
Well, there it was. He was just a G.o.ddam soph.o.m.ore, and he wanted to go to a party thrown by a senior.
"Binky," I said, "even I might not be invited to the party."
"No party, no vampire."
"Okay, I"ll ask my sister. But no guarantees."
He thought it over. "I guess that"ll have to do."
"So we"ll go invite the vampire?"
"Yeah."
"You better not be kidding me, Binky," I said.
He gave me a hurt look. "Meet me outside the north door after sixth period."
"I"ll be there," I said.
"You want my chili?" he said. "I soaked the grease off."
First it was the pudding, and now the chili.
"What"s the matter with you?" I said.
"I guess I"m not hungry."
I looked down at my own chili, and I couldn"t really blame him.
See, the fact of the matter is that like I said, I didn"t really believe in vampires. Now, it"s a different story. Boy, do I believe in vampires now. But this was then.
Anyway, I need to tell you about the house where the vampire lived. Back in the nineteenth century sometime, a guy who had more dollars than sense, as my father liked to say, had an old manor house dismantled over in England. The workers numbered the pieces and rebuilt the place outside our little town.
I wasn"t around in those days, of course, and neither was my father, but he knew about stuff like that, local history and all. He said they put the house together like some kind of 3-D jigsaw puzzle. The guy even had the plans for the grounds, and he had gardens and all that kind of thing fixed just the way they"d been over in England.
That"s the way the story went, anyway. I never saw any of that myself because after a while, the guy died. He didn"t have any kin that anybody knew about except some cousins in New York. They inherited the house and property, and they kept right on paying the taxes year after year, but they never even came to visit. The house was abandoned, and vines grew up all over the walls. The gardens and the shrubbery overgrew the grounds, and then the trees closed in.
Eventually the place got a kind of a reputation. You probably know the kind of thing I"m talking about: funny lights, strange noises, ghosts. I didn"t believe in any of that kind of c.r.a.p myself, but I didn"t ever go out there to see if any of it was true. It wasn"t that I was scared. I just didn"t want to go. Hardly anybody else ever went out that way, either.
Except for Binky, who was, as I think I"ve said already, weird. He liked hanging around places like that. That"s how he found the vampire.
I met Binky after school, and we rode our bikes out of town for about two miles and turned down a little dirt road for another half mile. It"s hard going on dirt, and I was hot and sweaty. Binky didn"t seem bothered. He was wearing a long-sleeved shirt and a cap pulled down low. I could hardly even see his eyes.
"I hope this guy"s not a real vampire," I said when we stopped to rest. "I think it would be a big mistake to invite some guy to a party and have him rip open our throats and drink the blood of virgins and stuff. I don"t think it"s what Kate has in mind. That wouldn"t be any fun at all."
"Speak for yourself," Binky said. "All that sounds pretty good to me."
He sounded almost wistful, like he really believed it. He was weird, all right, but I didn"t think he meant it. He"d nearly pa.s.sed out in biology cla.s.s when we were dissecting the frogs.
"It sounds messy," I said, trying to make a joke of it. I did that sometimes when things made me nervous. "My parents would have a snit fit if the house got all messed up."
Binky took me seriously, though. "It wouldn"t be like that. Vampires are pretty fastidious."
I wasn"t surprised that Binky knew a word like fastidious. He read a lot, and besides being weird he had what you might call a well-developed imagination. He read magazines with t.i.tles like Amazing and Astounding and Fantastic, the kind that had stuff like flying saucers and giant bugs on the covers. Sometimes on the same cover. Vampires, too, probably.
"How well do you know this vampire?" I asked.
Binky ducked his head. "I didn"t say I knew him."
I"d figured as much.
"I just said I thought he was a vampire. You"re the one who wanted to come out here."
I looked up the road. The trees grew right up to both sides, and their branches hung over it and joined in the middle, so it looked like a green and gold and orange tunnel. It was so shady that it was almost dark under there. The house was at the end of the road, and it looked kind of spooky, to tell you the truth, like one of those houses you see in the posters for my sister"s favorite movies. Maybe it even looked like the house in the Dracula movie she liked so much. I wasn"t at all sure going to the house was a good idea now that I"d had a better look at it, but we"d come this far. I pushed my bike on down the dirt road. Binky followed along.
When we got closer to the house, something flew out of an upstairs window. It looked a little like a bat, but I didn"t really know what it was. It was too early for bats to be flying around, I thought, not that it mattered. I got this kind of a chill on the back of my neck like somebody had touched me there with a cold hand. I looked at my watch. It was only four-thirty, but it got dark kind of early at that time of year. The dirt road was covered with fallen leaves, and a little breeze came up from somewhere and blew them along in front of us.
"Probably n.o.body"s home," I said. "Maybe we should just go on back."
"We"re already here," Binky said. "You might as well see if anybody"s home."
That sounded like a bad idea to me, but I didn"t want to chicken out. My crummy sister would never let up if she found out.
Neither would Binky, probably, and he was just the type to spread it all around school. If that happened, I"d get crammed into a
locker more often than even Binky did. So I kept on going.
The house didn"t look any better when we got to what had once been the front yard. It looked worse, to tell you the truth. There was no gla.s.s in any of the windows that I could see, and I think there were holes in the roof. I for sure saw a couple of holes in the stone walls where they weren"t covered by the vines and bushes. Trees grew all over the place, but they weren"t very tall.
The front door of the house didn"t look too bad. It was made of heavy wood, and it didn"t look as old as the rest of the house, which looked older than a hundred years. It even smelled old and moldy. If there was ever a place a vampire might pick to hide out, this would be it, all right.
The breeze had brought some clouds from somewhere, not storm clouds, but big puffy ones with black bottoms, and they blocked out most of the late afternoon sun. We might as well have been standing out on some old English moor somewhere.
Neither one of us made a move to get any closer to the house. I thought Binky should go knock on the door. He didn"t agree.
"You"re the one with the invitation," he said.
"He wouldn"t answer, anyway," I said. "Not if he"s a vampire. It"s not nighttime yet."
Binky gave me a disgusted look. "You don"t know much about vampires, do you?"
"I saw Horror of Dracula," I said, which was a lie, but Binky didn"t know that.
"Big deal. So did I. Have you ever read Dracula? The book, I mean."
"I"ve read a lot of stuff," I said.
"But not Dracula. If you had, you"d know the difference between the movies and real life."
"You"re going to tell me that some made-up book is real life?"
"Bram Stoker knew what he was talking about," Binky said, as positive as if he had a clue, which I was pretty sure he didn"t.
"Anyway, his Dracula could come out in the daylight." He pointed at the house. "I saw this guy in the daylight. So are you going to knock?"
"Why don"t you do it?"
"You have to give him the invitation. It"s your party, and it"s your house you"re inviting him to."
It was my sister"s crummy party, and it was my parents" house, but I had a feeling Binky wasn"t interested in fine distinctions like
that. I laid my bike down on the ground and went up to the door. I didn"t exactly rush. I wasn"t feeling too good about things if