Scared to Death--Ten Sinister Stories by the Master of the Macabre Read online

  Now I remembered that vampires had been around for hundreds of years, that thousands of stories had been written about them. If vampires didn’t exist, why had so many writers taken an interest? And there was something else. Dracula, the king of the vampires, had certainly been a real person. We’d once talked about him at school, in history. What was his first name? Oh God! It was Vlad. Vlad the Impaler, born in Transylvania (Eastern Europe) in the fifteenth century. Historical fact!

  Even then, standing on my own, I tried to convince myself that I was wrong. There had to be a simple explanation. Lots of people don’t like garlic. It could just be a coincidence that Vladimir’s surname was so close to Vlad the Impaler’s. I told myself that he didn’t even look like a vampire. But then I remembered the long hair, the pale skin, the clothes that were at least fifty years out of date and I knew it wasn’t true. If there had been a magazine devoted to vampires, he would have made the front page.

  My first instinct was to run, to get away from the house and somehow find my way to a local police station. But I knew that was crazy. The police would never believe me. They’d think I was a stupid fifteen-year-old English boy and they would drive me straight back to the house, and if there was one sure way for me to end up with my throat torn out and my blood drained, that was it. Could I contact my parents? The mobile wouldn’t work but there was still my laptop. Yes. That was what I would do. I glanced at my watch. It was five past eight. I was already late for dinner. But the family could wait.

  I grabbed my laptop and wrenched it open. My hands were trembling so much that I had to jab down three times before I hit the power button. And then the computer seemed to take an hour to boot up. But at last the screen was glowing in front of me. The house had no Wi-Fi but I’d be able to connect over the telephone line. I’d already done so half a dozen times.

  But this time it didn’t work.

  I double-clicked on the AOL icon and managed to get the home page on the screen. There was nothing wrong with the computer. But every time I tried to dial out, I got an engaged tone. I must have tried twenty times before I suddenly heard Nathalie Duclarc’s voice, calling me from upstairs.

  “Jack? Dinner is ready!”

  Once again I froze. The computer bleeped uselessly in front of me. What was I to do? Join the family and try to pretend nothing had happened? Or make a break for it? There was only one answer to that. The gate was locked and, unlike Vladimir Duclarc, I couldn’t turn myself into a bat and fly over the top. And even if I did manage to get out into the lane, they’d catch up with me before I reached the main road. Right now it was night. The darkness was my enemy. If I could somehow hold myself together until sunrise, if I could survive, then I could take action. Maybe they’d take me into Nice tomorrow. I could slip away and check in at the airport before they knew I’d gone. All I had to do was to pretend that nothing had happened. Vladimir Duclarc had seen me outside his room. But despite what I had feared earlier, there was always a chance that he believed his secret was safe. I just had to be very, very careful.

  I left the room and climbed up the concrete stairs that led to the main living room, feeling I knew exactly how a condemned man must feel on his way to the scaffold. The entire family was already around the table and nobody seemed to take much notice of me as I sat down. I noticed Vladimir Duclarc was eating more hungrily than usual. Dinner that night was steak. My own meat had already been served. It was sitting in the middle of the plate with blood all around it. Patrick said something and passed me the vegetables. I didn’t understand his words, in fact they echoed in my ears. I helped myself to a few pieces of broccoli and some potatoes. I had no idea how I would get through the next hour.

  Fortunately, nobody seemed to notice that I was freaking out. Or maybe they were just pretending. Vladimir glanced at me a couple of times but said nothing. Nathalie asked me if I was feeling well and I told her that I might have had too much sun.

  “You’ve hardly eaten anything, Jack,” she said.

  “I’m sorry.” I’d barely had two mouthfuls of the steak. “I’m not very hungry.”

  “You don’t like your steak sanglant?”

  Sanglant. The French for bloody.

  “It’s fine…” But it wasn’t. I’ve always liked meat but right then I could have become a vegetarian in the blink of an eye. When I sliced off a piece of the steak with my knife, I didn’t feel hungry. I felt like a surgeon in an operating theatre.

  Patrick poured himself a glass of red wine. As I saw the liquid tumbling out of the bottle I could only imagine something very similar pouring from my own neck. “You must get an early night, Jack,” he said. “We need to look after you.”

  And this is what I was thinking: were they all vampires or was it just cousin Vladimir? True, the others were all very pale. They all had the same, uncomfortable eyes. But surely they were normal? After all, Adrien and his parents had come out with me into the sunlight. Perhaps it was only Vladimir who was the vampire and the rest of them were, as they had told me, distant relatives. They were similar to vampires but they weren’t actually vampires themselves. That would make sense. But even if they weren’t blood-guzzlers, they still knew about their cousin. Their blood relative. They were protecting him. And that made them as bad as him, however you looked at it.

  I had to fight my way to the end of the meal. But at last I was able to stand up and go to bed. There was one last thing I had to know. “Is there a problem with the telephone?” I asked.

  Patrick Duclarc glanced sharply in my direction.

  “I tried to send an email…” I added. “I just wanted to tell my parents about the market we visited today. My mother loves markets. It was a great market.” I realized I was babbling and shut my mouth.

  “Yes,” Patrick nodded. “The telephone line is broken.”

  Nathalie smiled at me but her eyes were cold. “The engineers will come tomorrow.”

  “You can telephone your parents then,” Adrien added, although there was no need.

  “Right.” I forced a smile. “Good night, then.”

  “Good night, Jack.”

  They were still watching me as I went back downstairs to my room.

  I went to sleep. It took me four hours to drop off and by the time I finally closed my eyes the bed felt like a sack of potatoes that had been left out in the rain, but somehow I managed it. The next thing I knew, incredibly, it was ten o’clock and the sun was streaming in through the window. My clothes were scattered across the floor where I had left them. And there were no punctures on my neck, my wrists or anywhere else.

  And here’s the funny thing. With the coming of light, I began to doubt myself. My dad had always said that I had an overactive imagination, and I really did wonder if I hadn’t allowed my thoughts to run away with themselves the night before. The garlic, the hatred of light, the absent reflection, the name … it was true that they all pointed to only one conclusion. But vampires didn’t really exist. Everyone knew that. What would my parents say if I asked them to take me home because I was scared? My sister would never let me live it down.

  When I went up for breakfast, Nathalie was in the kitchen and she looked utterly normal, pleased to see me. “Are you feeing better, Jack?” she asked me.

  “Yes, thank you.”

  “Please. Help yourself!”

  There were croissants and honey on the table. Coffee and orange juice. I glanced out of the window and saw Adrien, already in the swimming pool. An ordinary family on an ordinary day.

  “We thought we would go to Antibes this afternoon,” Nathalie went on. “There is the Musée Picasso which may interest you. Also, there is a very beautiful cathedral, which we can visit.”

  It was almost as if she had said it on purpose, to prove to me that I had imagined everything the night before. “A cathedral?” I repeated. “Are you coming?”

  “But of course. Adrien and I will come with you.”

  If she and Adrien were vampires, if they had even a drop of vampir
e blood in them, they wouldn’t possibly be able to enter a holy place like a cathedral. That was when I decided that I wouldn’t make a break for it after all. It was also when I made my single worst mistake: I decided that I would put Vladimir Duclarc to the test. One small experiment and I would know exactly what he was. And if I was proved right, then I would contact my parents and nobody would be able to argue with me.

  I spent the morning swimming and sunbathing with Adrien. We played ping-pong – there was a table in the garage – and chatted as if nothing had happened. Just after lunch we drove down the coast to Antibes, which was an impressive, densely packed town shielded from the water by a huge sea wall. The cathedral was a striking, strangely modern-looking building – all orange, white and yellow – next to the musée Nathalie had mentioned, but to be honest I don’t remember much about it. Because this was where I was going to put my plan into action. And I had to do it without being seen.

  Nathalie and Adrien had both gone into the cathedral ahead of me – and I’d noticed that neither of them had so much as hesitated. I went in third and as I passed through the main door my hand slid into my trouser pocket and cradled the empty shampoo bottle that I had stolen from the bathroom earlier. I waited while the two of them walked ahead to the altar, which was surrounded by dozens of panels, each one showing a different biblical scene. Nathalie had told me that the altar itself was medieval. But I wasn’t interested. I found what I was looking for almost at once. A font, close to the main door. And I was in luck. Just as I had hoped, it held a couple of inches of water.

  Holy water. Do you get the idea? It was one thing that I knew a vampire couldn’t stand. And there was no need to call my parents. If I was protected with a bottle of holy water, even a bottle that had once contained anti-dandruff shampoo, I would be safe. Making sure that nobody was watching, I managed to half-fill it, then replaced the lid and slipped it back into my pocket. I was feeling much more comfortable when, ten minutes later, we went back out into the cobbled courtyard and stood in the sun. The night could bring whatever it pleased. This time I was prepared.

  In fact, the shadows were already stretching out by the time we got back to the house, and it was only then that I began to have second thoughts. Perhaps I should have legged it for the airport after all. Right now I could have been in the air, on my way home. But you have to put yourself in my shoes. This was a vampire I was talking about. A vampire in the South of France! If I ran all the way home to England with an accusation like that and was then proved wrong, my parents would think I was crazy. I’d never live it down.

  One way or another, I had to be sure.

  Patrick was working late that night and we didn’t eat until half-past eight. When I came up to the living room, there was no sign of Adrien. Nathalie was in the kitchen, putting the finishing touches to a coq au vin. And Vladimir was sitting in an armchair with some sort of leather-bound book balanced on his lap. I’ve already mentioned that one feature of the living room was a spiral staircase. It stood to one side and twisted up to a gallery with bookshelves behind. Patrick had a desk up here and the gallery stretched the whole length of the room. It couldn’t have been better. Making sure that nobody had seen me, I climbed quietly up and, keeping well back, continued along until I found myself directly above the reading man. The shampoo bottle was in my pocket.

  Here, at last, was the final test. A tiny drop of holy water would mean nothing to an ordinary man. But to a vampire it would be like being stung by acid. It would burn his flesh – I’d seen it often enough in films. Being careful not to fumble, I took out the bottle and poured as little as I could into the cap. Then I reached out over the balcony. Vladimir Duclarc was directly below me. I turned my hand.

  No more than two or three drops fell, but they hit him directly on the head. And that was when I knew, without any doubt at all, that I was right. Vladimir screamed and leapt out of his chair. The book tumbled to the floor. As Nathalie rushed across from the kitchen, he stood there, one hand pressed against his face. It was as if he was being burned alive. I couldn’t believe that a minuscule amount of water could have such an effect. But of course, this wasn’t ordinary water. And this wasn’t an ordinary man.

  Vladimir looked up angrily. I threw myself back, pressing my shoulders against the bookshelves. He couldn’t see me. He couldn’t possibly have guessed I was there. Nathalie was next to him, dabbing at his skin with a tea towel. She was muttering to him – but even if she had been speaking in English I wouldn’t have understood what she said. I stayed where I was, the bottle still in my hand. Eventually the two of them left the room, heading out into the garden, and I more or less tumbled back down the stairs. By way of an experiment, I dripped some of the holy water into my own hand. I felt nothing. It had no effect on me. But I wasn’t a vampire. Not yet. Nor did I have any intention of becoming one.

  I didn’t go back to my room right then although as it turned out, everything would have been different if I had. I was feeling hot. The night was utterly still and seemed to be weighing down on me. I went out into the garden to get some air.

  And that was when I saw them. Vladimir and Nathalie were kneeling close to the pool. He was splashing his face with non-sacred water. Neither of them heard me as I crept out behind them. But I heard them. And this time I understood at least part of what they said.

  “Jack…” They were talking about me. “Hier soir…” Something about the night before. “Le sang…” That was definitely a word I knew. Vladimir had mentioned blood.

  They talked for a couple of minutes. It was infuriating that I could only hear a few words of what they said and could only understand about half of those. But then came a sentence that rushed out of the darkness as if projected onto a screen.

  “Il doit être tué…”

  And that I did understand.

  He must be killed.

  Vladimir Duclarc spoke again.

  “Cette nuit…”

  Tonight.

  What a fool I had been! I had managed to prove beyond any doubt that Vladimir Duclarc was indeed a vampire but in doing so I had exposed myself and left myself a prisoner in the house at the very worst time, after sunset, with at least six hours of darkness ahead. As I stood there, it seemed to me that the heat of the night had drained away and been replaced by an Arctic chill. I was on my own with them. There was no way out. And by the morning I would be dead – or worse. Suppose they turned me into one of them? What would it be like to live for a thousand years, condemned to hide in the shadows, feasting on the blood of other human beings?

  Why had my parents sent me here? What did French GCSE matter anyway? How had I let this happen to me?

  There was a storm that night: one of those fat, heavy, spectacular storms that you only get in tropical climates when the heat of the summer becomes too much to bear. There was no wind, but the thunder was deafening, the lightning so fierce that it seemed to rip the whole world in two. The rain held off for as long as it could. Then it all came down at once, smashing into the house and turning the dry earth into livid, splattering mud. The wolves were howling too – at least, I thought I heard them. But it was the thunder that I remember most, great fists of it, slamming into the side of the house as if it wanted to smash down the walls.

  I was awake. Even without the storm I wouldn’t have slept a wink. I watched the shadows leaping across the room, the intense white light blasting against the brickwork, lingering for a few seconds and then disappearing as fast as it had come. Where were Adrien and the others? I had no idea. Crouching, miserably, on the bed, still fully dressed, I cursed my own stupidity. I should have left when I had the chance. There was nothing natural about this weather. Vladimir Duclarc had somehow summoned it up.

  “Il doit être tué…”

  He must be killed. Tonight. Before he can tell anyone what he knows. We will make him one of us and he will serve us for ever. Suddenly afraid, I reached out and turned on the lights. Nothing happened. The power supply had been cut.
Of course. That would have been simple to arrange.

  The door crashed open.

  And there he was, on the other side. Vladimir Duclarc. He was wearing his black jacket. His long hair streamed behind him. His face, caught in another burst of lightning, had no colour at all, a snapshot from a cemetery. His eyes blazed. His mouth was open, his teeth glistening white. I knew he had come for me. I had been expecting it. But this time I was ready for him. “Go back to Hell!” I screamed. I had the shampoo bottle and I hurled the contents directly into his face, then followed them, hurling myself onto him.

  There was only one way to get rid of a vampire. I had known what I had to do and, horrible though it was to contemplate, I had prepared myself.

  The wooden stake had come from the garden. I had found it in a flowerbed and had sharpened it with a knife stolen from the dinner table. With all my strength, I rammed it into Vladimir Duclarc’s chest, slanting down towards his heart. Another bolt of thunder struck at that precise moment. Vladimir screamed, but I heard nothing. The sound was drowned out by the elements. I pulled the stake out and struck a second time. I felt nauseous. But I had to be sure. One last time I ripped the stake out and then stabbed down again. This time I found his heart. I saw the light go out in his eyes. Blood, lots of it, gushed out of his mouth. He fell to his knees and I stood over him, knowing that in seconds he would crumble into ash.

  Except that he didn’t.

  He was dead. That much was certain. There was blood all over the walls and floor. Then the lights blazed on. The return of the electricity was so sudden and the lights so bright that I was startled. I looked round. Patrick and Nathalie Duclarc were standing in the corridor, both wearing dressing gowns. Patrick was staring at me, his face filled with horror. Then his wife began to scream.

  There is not much more to tell.

  It seems that I was wrong about Vladimir Duclarc. He wasn’t a vampire after all.

  First of all, he came from Slovakia, which is nowhere near Transylvania. He had a little house in a place called Kežmarok where he worked as an antique’s dealer, specializing in traditional Slovakian clothes, which he himself liked to wear.