Kiss of Blood

When John moves to the city with his family he has no idea quite how much his life is about to change. He befriends Gino and everything seems pretty normal. That is until they meet the girls at the local pool hall, when life starts to spiral alarmingly out of control. Attacks by strange flying creatures, weird visions, and everything seemingly centred around an abandoned house on the edge of town. After getting stuck there in a wild storm and coming across a few things they'd rather not have seen, it looks like the boys might not leave the house alive. Or even dead for that matter.

Cover illustration by Ryan Murphy.

Strephyn Mappin was born in Perth and has worked in a wide range of p rofessions, from slaughterman to advertising creative director. His stories, articles and cartoons have been published throughout Australia and have won numerous awards. Under the name S R Martin he has had sixteen novels published for young adults including the Insomniacs series and the Swampland t r i l o g y. These have been translated into many languages and several have been optioned for film development. His books for adults include Heart Murmurs and Chiaroscuro, and he is the writer of a number of short films. He is married with three children and currently lives in Adelaide.

A NOVEL BY

STREPHYN MAPPIN illustrations by Ryan Murphy

FREMANTLE ARTS CENTRE PRESS

First published 1999 by FREMANTLE ARTS CENTRE PRESS PO Box 320, South Fremantle Western Australia 6162. http://www.facp.iinet.net.au Copyright © Strephyn Mappin, 1999. This book is copyright. Apart from any fair dealing for the purpose of private study, research, criticism or review, as permitted under the Copyright Act, no part may be reproduced by any process without written permission. Enquiries should be made to the publisher. Consultant editor Janet Blagg. Production coordinator Cate Sutherland. Cover designer Marion Duke Typeset by Fremantle Arts Centre Press. Printed by Sands Print Group, Bassendean. National Library of Australia Cataloguing-in-publication data Mappin, Strephyn, 1956- . Kiss of blood. ISBN 1 86368 264 3. I. Title. A823.3

The State of Western Australia has made an investment in this project through ArtsWA in association with the Lotteries Commission. Apart from any fair dealing for the purposes of research or private study, or criticism or review, as permitted under the relevant copyright, designs and patents acts, this publication may only be reproduced, stored or transmitted, in any form or by any means, with the prior permission in writing of the publisher. eBooks Corporation

TO WHOM IT MAY CONCERN

Something happened to me once. A long time ago. I am now approaching what people quaintly call middle age. This does not bother me especially, but it does make me view many things in a new light. You see events with diff e rent eyes, I guess, and your mind tends to rearrange memories, putting them in a more rational way. The result of this is that I have found myself disbelieving what I have always thought to be the truth.

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So before this particular memory diffuses into something mature and completely understandable, I have decided to write down exactly what happened, without trying to give any reasons or explanations. Then I will commit the story to floppy disk, seal the disk in an envelope, leave it in my safety deposit box and forget about it. I will never look at this disk again after I have locked it away. When I die, someone will take it from my belongings and read it. I guess that person is yourself. Good luck. Believe what you will. Because I have always found it easier to expre s s things when they are in the form of a novel (I have earned my living by writing in one form or another for over twenty years now), I will divide this into chapters. It may make it easier for you to come to grips with. But I have to warn you, I never have. Not completely. Even though I was there. I didn’t even believe in vampires in the first place.

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ONE

I WAS BORN in the early fifties, not long after the end of World War Two, and grew up in a country town of about five hundred people. That’s a pretty small town, by the way, when you consider that at least half of the people who counted as townsfolk actually lived on farms that were, in those days of Imperial measurements, miles away. Most of the people from the area either worked in the timber industry, grew apples, raised cattle or provided services for the people who did. My father was a school teacher. We lived in a small weatherboard house at one end of

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town and our back yard went all the way down to a creek that used to chuckle its way across small granite rocks and gravel. I can remember falling asleep to that sound on hot summer nights, lying there under a sheet with the moon streaming through my open bedroom window, a sheen of sweat on my skin. It was a time when, especially in the country, no one locked their doors or windows during the day, let alone at night. Everything felt safe and peaceful. The only monsters that existed were those that were created in books and slept under my bed, and even at that young age I felt capable of getting the better of them. We knew most of the people in town, and with my father being a teacher at the only school, the other children tended to try and stay in my good books. Large gangs of us would hang around at the river pool after school, skylarking about on a long piece of rope which swung us far out over the water. I hardly ever remember it raining. There was always laughter and sunshine and the flavours of fruit and ice-blocks. I even got on well with my younger brother. Then we moved to the city and everything changed.

A USTRALIA ITSELF was going through a period of 8

dramatic change at this time, with a massive influx of migrants arriving from all over Europe. There were Latvians, Dutch, French, Spanish, a great many English and, most obvious to myself, Italians. It was the Italians I found most fascinating. The suburb we moved to had a great many new migrants, and as you walked along the streets and alleys it was possible to hear conversations in several different languages floating over the backyard fences or from open doorways. At times I almost felt I could understand what some of the people were saying, but in most cases the words were as alien as listening to Aunty Nonni after she’d had too many shandies at Christmas. Though t h e re was something musical about what I heard as well, unusual liltings and cadences which seemed to be more like song than speech. Ever since that time I’ve always been entranced by the sound of people speaking, and because of this am considered to be a good

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listener. Strangers tend to tell me things because they sense an attentive audience. To me, the experience of moving to the city was as if I had moved to an entirely new country, one of strange customs, sights, sounds and smells. I wanted to experience everything I could and became something of a wanderer, a sponge for all the new sensations that were going on around me. I guess it was the result of having been, in a sense, isolated for so long in a country town; though Australia itself had been isolated and this sudden influx of cultures was as mind-boggling to the nation as the move to the city was to myself. My experience was not a unique one by any means. Due to the fact that we’d spent so long in the c o u n t r y, where children were allowed to wander pretty much at will because everyone knew them and there was little chance of you getting lost, my p a rents didn’t seem to mind my lone excursions through the city suburbs, as long as I was home in time for meals and whatever chores I’d been assigned. Things were pretty safe and people trusted each other. Mind you, these days I won’t even let my children go to the shop on their own, let alone stroll around the streets in the evening, but that’s another subject altogether. We had an old house that at some stage in its life had been a child-care centre, and the back yard contained

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a huge covered sandpit and the rusting remains of an old metal swing set. My brother and I were banned from the sandpit because it had become a favourite stopping off place for the neighbourhood cats and contained a great many unpleasant surprises just under the surface. We also stopped using the swings after one of the chains broke one afternoon and catapulted my brother across the back lawn, depositing him in a screaming heap at my mother’s feet. The house, though, was large and solid and the yard enormous, so we were able to enjoy ourselves there without disturbing our parents more than necessary. There was a massive wood pile behind the garage and it was one of my chores to chop kindling for the hot water heater, which I’d do most evenings before d i n n e r, wielding the axe with the skill and confidence that comes from a lot of practice. I’d always chopped the wood in the country, from the time I was about eight, and could handle an axe much better than any city kid. We moved in just before Christmas and I had over a month of holidays to go before I was to start at my new high school. Naturally, I didn’t know a soul apart from the relations we had in the city and was looking forward to making friends in the new year.

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TWO

GINO BOTTICELLI was my age and lived in the house that backed onto ours. He’d been born in Australia, but only just, his mother going into labour as their ship entered the port of Fremantle. He was born to the sound of the ship’s horn and the cheering of the people aboard as they prepared to disembark in their new country. Because of this he was Australian, even though his mother and father were still coming to grips with the English language and his grandmother — who’d accompanied the family when they migrated — had no intention whatsoever of learning it. His parents operated the deli across from our house where I’d go to buy bread and milk.

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During our years in the country, the local deli had been a rather uninspiring place which sold white bread (unsliced, of course), bottled milk, a selection of mixed lollies, polony (a sort of gr e y - p i n k processed meat), pressed chicken and various odds and ends which I had little interest in. The one which Gino’s parents owned was completely foreign, and I had no idea what most of the goods on display were f o r. There were large sacks of coffee beans (most people in Australia drank tea in those days, and c o ffee was a nasty brown powder made fr o m something called chicory, a leftover from the war years), a fascinating array of pastas, shelf after shelf of strange pickled things in glass jars, dried and smoked meats, sausages and salamis, boxes full of fresh vegetables which they grew in their own back yard, and long strings of something which I later found out was garlic. Garlic was to play a large part in my life, which was odd when you think of it, because it was something I had never seen, smelt or heard of until that time. People simply didn’t use garlic in Australia in those days. But I am getting ahead of myself. I didn’t even know it was garlic at this stage, it was just another weird and wonderful thing that I saw whenever I went across the road to the deli, and there were so many of them my parents were sick to death of answering my questions, though in a lot of cases

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they didn’t know what the answers were either. I met Gino one afternoon while I was out the back chopping wood for the heater. Or maybe I should say that I became aware of Gino, because we didn’t actually meet each other until some time later. Chopping wood is a matter of rhythm. You have to get into the swing of things, if you’ll excuse the bad pun, become an extension of the axe. I found that when I was by myself at the wood pile, swinging the axe, removing the chopped wood and placing another piece in place on the block, then swinging again, my mind would be somewhere else. My imagination would take me to wonderful places which I’d read about in books, making me the central character, and I would flit from adventure to adventure, always the hero, never bettered by any adversary. My favourite books were collections of horror stories compiled by a man called Alfred Hitchcock, who is better known as a director of films. On this particular day I’d just finished reading a rather nasty piece called The Tell Tale Heart by Edgar Allan Poe, about a guy who murders an old man because he can’t cope with looking at his ‘pale blue eye, with a film over it.’ It’s all about insanity, which Mr Poe was something of an authority on. Even today, after the thousands of books and billions of words I’ve read, nothing has ever disturbed me as

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much as that story. I get shivers just thinking about it. A n y w a y, there I was at the wood pile, chopping away, mind travelling along the dangerous paths of Mr Poe’s imagination, when I got the very uncomfortable feeling that I was not alone. I spun a round, expecting to find my younger br o t h e r sneaking up on me, but there was no one there. A light breeze shuffled a few leaves around and I could hear the sounds of grasshoppers, but apart from that I was alone. Taking another lump of wood, I raised the axe, and just at that second caught a movement along the fence. It was a tiny thing, but enough to throw my swing right out, and I ended up nearly cutting my foot off. What I’d seen was an eye peering through a large knothole in the back fence. It was brown, but that didn’t make a lot of difference to me. I let out a half-strangled shriek and would have turned and ran, but the eye immediately disappeared. My heart felt like it was about the burst out of my chest, which wasn’t a good thing because there was a lot in the story I’d just read about hearts beating rather loudly, so I calmed myself by taking deep, slow breaths. ‘Hello?’ I said, hoping that no one would reply. No one did. Still holding the axe, I moved towards the hole in the

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fence, crouching down so I approached it fro m underneath. As I carefully eased myself up and peered through to the Botticelli’s back yard, I caught a glimpse of a boy in baggy brown clothes disappearing behind a row of tomato plants. ‘Hey!’ I called. ‘Hey you!’ But he was either out of ear-shot or chose to ignore me. I had a pretty good idea of who he was though, as I’d seen a kid my own age lurking in the back of the deli a couple of times when I’d gone over to pick up something for my parents. The relief I felt was enormous. It was a week later that I met Gino in person.

B A C K T H E N , Australians weren’t exactly complimentary about migrants. In fact, they were downright racist (an attitude which seems to have re a red its particularly ugly head again in re c e n t years). Italians especially caught the brunt of it, and were re f e r red to as wogs, dagos, greasers and an assortment of other names which were, at the very least, offensive. I think a lot of it was just fear of something new, but that didn’t make it pleasant. In the case of the Italians, it also had something to do with the war. They had started out supporting one side and then swapped to the other. This got them

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branded as cowards, though to my mind it takes a lot more courage to admit you were wrong and do something about it than it does to go on with the original mistake. But I am not writing this to discuss race and racism. That is a subject best left to those who actually have ‘views’ about it. I have never had an opinion on the subject. People are just people to me, no matter what their customs or colour or political views. Always have been, always will be. To think otherwise just seems stupid. For Christmas that year I’d got my first ‘adult-sized’ bike. It was a green Malvern Star and had been owned by my uncle, who was about to get married and was getting rid of all the junk he had left over from being a kid. The bike had hardly been ridden and looked brand new, still with gleaming paint and plastic ribbons on the handlebars. It made me as proud as punch to ride it around the neighbourhood, even though it was larger than I was used to and I was a little wobbly on it to begin with. It was a stinking hot day and I’d decided to ride to the local pool, which was a couple of miles away from our house, though I hadn’t gone very far before I nearly ran over Gino. I was cruising down a side street a couple of blocks from where we lived when he came belting out of an alley that ran between the houses. Even though I had

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to brake hard to avoid an accident, Gino didn’t appear to see me. He ran straight across in front of me, not looking right or left, and disappeared down the alley on the opposite side of the street. I was about to shout something angry after him, when the reason for his flight became apparent. Charging out of the alley behind him came three older boys, who were screaming names and flinging stones at the terrified boy. They were so intent on pursuit they almost knocked me over, and hurled a few unpleasant words in my direction, though they weren’t as insulting as those they directed at Gino. It was all over in a couple of seconds, and I was left wondering if it had actually happened. Then I did

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something without thinking. I hopped back on my bike and peddled as fast as I could around the block to where the alley exited at the other side. Just as I got there Gino came running out, his breath coming in short, painful gasps. He stopped dead when he saw me this time, too exhausted to continue. The look he gave me was filled with resignation and I realised that he thought I had joined his tormentors. ‘Hop on the bike,’ I said. ‘I’ll give you a dink.’ Gino glared at me. ‘What did you call me?’ ‘I didn’t call you anything,’ I replied, confused at his response.

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‘You called me a dink!’ ‘I did not. And anyway, a dink’s not a name. Get on the bike before you get your head beaten in.’ Gino shot a quick glance down the alley and what he saw made up his mind for him. He hopped onto the crossbar of the bike and I rode like I’d never ridden before, my legs straining under the unaccustomed weight. Behind us I heard the boys come thundering out of the alley, screaming angrily at their escaping prey. Gino looked back over my shoulder and made some sort of gesture with his arm which I couldn’t quite see, but it brought a fresh round of shouting from the gang. Then I got hit in the back of the head so hard I thought my eyeballs were going to pop out. The bike careered out of contr o l , slamming us into the side of a picket fence and then bouncing back upright again. Some-how we were still on it, but my arms

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had gone to jelly and I had lost all sense of what I was doing. We were wobbling all over the place and I could hear the sound of running feet rapidly a p p roaching from behind. Gino cursed loudly in Italian and grabbed the handlebars. ‘Keep peddling,’ he shouted in my ear, and my legs obeyed. My mind, however, was reeling from the impact to my head and it was all I could do to stay upright on the bike. We rode like this for some minutes, with me now hanging on to my passenger, the sound of pursuit gradually fading behind us, and eventually Gino told me to stop. It took a while for the message to get through, however, and when it finally did and I stopped pedalling the bike tipped over to one side and deposited us in a heap on the verge. I lay there groaning, not quite sure what had happened to my head, and not really wanting to find out. I could feel something sticky and unpleasant trickling down the back of my neck and my knees w e re skinned from the fall. Gino, however, was laughing his head off. ‘What’s so funny?’ I eventually asked. ‘Those morons,’ he replied, grinning at me. ‘They really thought they had me this time, and then you came along. You should have seen the looks on their faces. They were spewing.’ ‘That’s nice,’ I said, and then spewed myself. My

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head was spinning so badly I could see thousands of multi-coloured stars spearing out of the corners of my eyes and exploding over everything in front of me. I was not a well puppy. ‘Are you okay?’ Gino said, picking himself up from the ground and coming over to me. ‘Just peachy.’ Then I vomited again. C a re f u l l y, so that he stayed well away from the g rowing pile of vomit in front of me, he moved around so that he could see the back of my head. ‘Oh,’ he said quietly. ‘I’d better get you back to my place.’ I hate it when people say things like that, and don’t tell you why. ‘Why? What’s the matter with my head?’ ‘It’s bleeding. You must have been hit by one of the stones. There’s a nasty cut and your collar is all soaked in blood.’ I’m not good with blood, especially my own.

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THREE

BY THE TIME we’d staggered the distance to Gino’s house, my head was starting to clear. There had been no real pain to begin with, just shock, but as we walked along wheeling my bike I started to feel an unpleasant throbbing which seemed to gro w with each step. It was so painful I almost wished that I was still dizzy, nauseous and seeing stars. Their house, however, was such an assault on my senses I momentarily forgot that I was bleeding. We’d gone down the side and around the back, entering by the kitchen where his mother and grandmother were cooking pasta sauce. I had

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never smelt anything like it before. The two women froze. His mother was holding a long wooden spoon, while the grandmother clutched an evil-looking knife that was more like a machete than something you used in a kitchen. They stared at me for a second, then both started gabbling at Gino in Italian. He rattled off a few words in the same language then switched to English. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said to me, ‘but my grandmother doesn’t speak any English, so I’ll have to explain everything in Italian. I’m not being rude. Have a seat while I sort it all out. You want something to eat? A glass of water?’ ‘No thanks, I’m not hungry.’ ‘You don’t have to be hungry to eat, not at our place anyway. We always feed people when they visit.’ ‘No thanks. Really.’ I gingerly eased myself into a chair and sat there while the three of them all seemed to talk at once. They waved their hands around a lot as well, which was something I got used to the longer I knew them. Italians seem to do a lot of that, as if the language itself depends as much on gesture as it does on the spoken word. Even if they had been speaking in English I don’t

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think I would have heard a word of it, I was too fascinated by their kitchen. Apart from the wonderful aromas floating from the various pots bubbling on the stove, I was assaulted by the fragrance of herbs drying in bunches along the window sill, spices and a general pungency which seemed to originate from the women themselves. (This, I was later to find out, was the odour of garlic, which, when taken in lar g e quantities, seeps through the skin. It was not an unpleasant smell, just unusual, as it was something I had never been in close contact with. I’d also noticed it on Gino when we were riding the bike, but at that time there were other things on my mind, such as staying in one piece.) A round the walls there were many re l i g i o u s pictures, often surrounded by ornate gold frames. There were several crosses nailed to the wall and strings of garlic bulbs everywhere. Suddenly, I realised that no one was speaking, and when I looked around I found that both women w e re staring at me. Gino had disappeared. That made me a little nervous. ‘Gino has gone for his papa,’ the mother suddenly said. ‘He will want to thank you himself.’ Then she went across to the bench, fiddled around for a few seconds, then returned with a small plate covered in what looked like soggy vegetables which she placed

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in front of me. ‘Eat. It will take your mind off your wound.’ ‘My wound? Oh that, it’s nothing.’ The grandmother had moved around behind me and I suddenly felt her fingers probing gently at the back of my head. She was muttering to herself, then said something to the mother. ‘My mother says that there is a lot of blood from the head. Is natural with heads.’ ‘That’s a relief.’ ‘S’cuse? My English, you understand?’ ‘Yes, I understand it very well.’ She looked at me strangely and I was about to say something more to cover the fact that I wasn’t sure what we were talking about when the grandmother did something to my head which made me let out a yelp. There were a few more backwards and forwards in Italian and then the grandmother got a bowl of water and a cloth and began to bathe the cut. I sat there as she rinsed the cloth in the bowl, watching the water turn pink with my blood, and listening to the lilting sounds of the two women as they talked. Absent-mindedly, I picked up a piece of vegetable from the plate and popped it into my mouth. It was the first time I ever ate antipasto, and though the first shock of vinegar in my mouth nearly

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made me spit it out again, after a couple of chews I found myself quite enjoying it. I continued eating until the plate was empty, which seemed to bring enormous pleasure to Gino’s relations, who immediately filled the plate with antipasto again. Then the grandmother smeared something on the back of my head which did make me spit. It felt like she was treating the wound with fire and I let out a yell, which made them both mutter soothingly at me until I had calmed down. By the time Gino and his father came into the house I was sitting there with a white bandage wrapped a round my entire head and another bowl of antipasto in front of me. My third. I felt as though I must look like a returning war hero. Gino’s father was exactly like Gino, though about twice the size. They were close to the same height, but his father was br o a d e r. Built like a brick shithouse was the term many people used. He came straight up to me and shook my hand, looking deeply into my eyes. ‘Thank you,’ he said, ‘for saving my son.’ ‘I just gave him a ride on my bike,’ I r e p l i e d modestly. ‘It was nothing really.’ He snorted and said something in Italian which made everyone laugh. I laughed along with them even though I didn’t have the faintest idea what they

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were talking about. Then the grandmother started trying to take off my shirt, which made me panic a bit, but then Gino explained what was happening. ‘She just wants to wash it for you. There’s blood on it. It’s the least we can do. She’s very good with blood stains.’ ‘Yeah, right,’ I replied. ‘But my mum’ll throw a fit if I arrive home without my shirt, blood-stained or not.’ Gino translated and everyone started laughing again. I realised that I was enjoying myself.

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WHEN MY MUM answered the front door and found me standing there shirtless with a bandage around my head accompanied by a large Italian with his arm around my shoulder, she did a perfect imitation of Faye Wray in King Kong. She screamed. Just as I knew she would. This gave Gino’s father such a fright he nearly ran, and I had to do some fast talking before Mum calmed down enough to understand what had happened. For some reason she thought that I’d done something across the road in the deli and had s u ff e red some instant Italian justice. Mum had a habit of jumping to strange conclusions. ‘I got hit by a rock,’ I finally said when she’d stopped screaming. ‘Some guys were chasing Gino and I gave him a lift on my bike. It’s nothing, okay.’ ‘Who’s Gino?’ she asked. ‘And where’s your shirt? Don’t tell me they stole your good shirt.’ All my shirts were good, according to my mother, even the ones with holes in them and stains everywhere. ‘Gino is my son,’ his father said solemnly. ‘We are in John’s debt.’ That’s my name by the way, John Michael Thomas. It caused me no end of problems through high school. Then he handed my mother a large cardboard box brimming with vegetables, jars of antipasto, salami

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and a dozen or so fresh eggs from their backyard chook pen. He shook my hand again and headed off back to the deli. ‘We will return his shirt tomorrow,’ he said by way of goodbye. ‘What the hell have you gone and done this time?’ Mum asked. She was a little confused by the box of stuff she was holding, and couldn’t quite work out what had happened. ‘And why have they got your shirt?’ ‘I’ve done something right, Mum. They’re trying to be nice. And you must try some of that stuff in the jars, it’s sensational.’ ‘It looks like vegies in snot.’

GINO AND I became friends after that, spending a lot of time down at the pool or riding around the neighbourhood on our bikes. He knew a lot more about living in the city than I and did his best to get me acquainted with the area before I started at the new school when the holidays were over. I also started spending quite a bit of time at his house, enjoying the huge amounts of strange food that would always be pressed on me when I visited, annoying my mother no end when I was unable to finish the meals she served at dinner time. I was also accused of stinking of garlic whenever I

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returned from Gino’s place, which was something I hardly noticed any more, having acclimatised very quickly to all the new smells and sensations which came from knowing an Italian family. I became, in some ways, part of their family. Gino explained that this was to do with honour, a subject I was not too familiar with. ‘ You see,’ he said to me one day while we were wolfing down ice-creams, ‘when you saved me from those idiots, you put me in your debt. I owe you until I can return a favour of the same kind.’ ‘I hardly think I saved your life, Gino. All I did was give you a ride on my bike.’ ‘Yeah. And got yourself cut up at the same time. I now have to do the same for you.’ ‘Okay then,’ I said as I picked up a rock from the ground. ‘You stand over there with your back to me and I’ll hit you in the head with this. Then we’ll be even. You won’t have to go around saying that you owe me anything.’ ‘You don’t understand.’ He was laughing when he said this, and I’d been joking about the rock, but I still didn’t like him thinking he had to do something for me. I just felt that I’d done what was natural, and would have done it for anyone. The idea of debt and repayment didn’t seem right to me.

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‘I’ve had enough food at your place to repay fifty rocks in the back of the head, so let’s just call it even stevens.’ ‘Not the same thing,’ he replied. ‘That’s just hospitality. We do it for everyone.’ ‘I can’t see it ever coming to anything more than that, can you?’ ‘You’d be surprised,’ he said with a grin. And I was. But that happened some time later.

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FOUR

THERE WAS A lot of commercial development going on around this time, people building and investing during the golden decades of plenty that followed the war. Though the corner deli was still most people’s source of everyday goods, and you could find one every couple of blocks, they were starting to get some competition from the malls which were springing up everywhere. The one nearest our place was called The Forum. It was nothing like the massive shopping centres you find these days, which are like cities unto themselves, containing everything from supermarkets to cinema complexes. Instead, it had about a dozen shops, a games hall with pool

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tables, pinball machines and a ratty air hockey game, and a confectionary store which also sold milkshakes and stayed open until about eight-thirty every evening. Since the games hall was the only source of entertainment in the area, it had become the local hangout for most of the kids in the district. During the holiday period especially, you’d find the area a round the games hall and confectionary shop crowded with kids and bikes, everyone eying each other off and sorting out their pecking orders. It was relatively safe in daylight hours, but once it slipped into the evening the atmosphere could become a little tense, with a lot of the older boys aggressively trying to impress the girls that went there by pushing around the younger kids. This was basically schoolyard bullying on a different stage, but that didn’t make the end result any less unpleasant. Of course, I didn’t know anything about this, having only recently arrived, so when Gino suggested we visit the games hall one evening after dinner so that he could teach me to play pool, I was eager to go. My parents didn’t mind either, since they were delighted that I’d made friends so quickly, and only asked that we come back home as soon as the place closed. Because both our families ate early, Gino and I were parking our bikes outside the hall by six-thirty. The place was already crowded and a lot of people were

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spilling out over the footpath, the air thick with the smell of hamburgers and chips. You could hear the clanging and bells from the pinball machines mixed with the collisions of pool balls and the whacking noise of the air hockey game. Every now and then a loud cheer or bellow of disgust would come from the groups around the pool tables or someone would angrily slam one of the pinball machines because they felt it had tilted unnecessarily. There was laughter and conversation and the busy sound of change being given for the various games. By pooling our money, Gino and I had a whole dollar between us, which gave us enough for five games of pool — at ten cents a pop — a couple of milkshakes and a game or two of pinball. Things were cheaper then. A lot cheaper. We grabbed our change and milkshakes, then hung out along the walls waiting for a vacant table, which looked like it might take a while as they were all occupied and there were coins arranged along the edge of each, designating people in line for their turns. We put our money down on a table that didn’t look like it would take us too long to get on to and stood there watching the game in progress. T h e re were four older boys on the table playing doubles, and they hit the coloured balls so hard they flew around the green felt, ricocheting off the cushions and other balls with a sound like giant knuckles cracking. Not a lot of balls ended up in the

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pockets, however, and Gino whispered to me that the guys playing weren’t all that good. They looked impressive to someone like myself, though, as I’d never held a pool cue in my life. ‘If they hit the ball gently,’ he said, ‘they’d end up with a few more in the pockets, but they’re more interested in effect.’ What they were trying to affect was a group of five girls of about Gino’s and my age who were g a t h e red around one of the nearby pinball machines. They’d come in a little after we had, just as the sun slipped away and the sky had begun to get darker. There were a lot of looks going in both directions and whispered conferences between the members of each group, though the boys never actually said anything to the girls and vice versa. It was like some strange ritual which I knew nothing about and had very little interest in. Girls weren’t something I spent a lot of time thinking about. Eventually, the coins alongside the table were all used up and it was our turn with the balls and cues. The older boys flung their cues onto the table, slapped some more coins down after ours and leant against the wall, alternating between sneering at Gino and I and leering in the direction of the girls. I found it difficult to tell the difference between the two expressions. Not that I was spending a lot of time looking at them, I was too embarrassed by my

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clumsy attempts at playing pool. After Gino had set the balls up on the table and shown me how to hold my cue corr e c t l y, he proceeded to break with a loud clatter, sending balls f rom one end of the table to the other. I was impressed, of course, and did my best to line up a half-decent shot, sighting down along the cue the way I’d been shown. Because I’d been watching the older boy’s game, however, I tried to imitate their style of play, hitting the ball as hard as I could. This lifted the ball right off the table, sending it skittering between the legs of players several tables away and forcing me to run after it in a half-crouch, my face red with embarrassment and my ears ringing with the jeers of the boys who’d been watching me. I felt like a right moron. And when I finally returned with the ball even Gino looked put out. ‘ S o f t l y,’ he hissed at me. ‘Yo u ’ re not playing baseball.’ ‘Sorry.’ My next shot was better. It stayed on the table for starters.

W E HAD BEEN playing for about half an hour and were about to start out third game when one of the older boys came over and leant on the table, effectively barring Gino from making the opening 37

break. He was a good head taller than both of us, his face a veritable moonscape of acne with little black bristles showing here and there. I could tell that he’d tried shaving because the heads had been sheared off most of his pimples, leaving small red scabs on his chin and cheeks. There was a cigarette hanging from the corner of his mouth, the smoke curling up and making him squint. I gathered this was supposed to make him look cool or tough or both, but it just made him look short-sighted and a little silly. ‘You guys are pretty good players,’ he said with a laugh. ‘How’d you like to play doubles against us?’ ‘Nope,’ was all Gino replied. He lined up his shot as if acne face wasn’t even there, but the guy held his ground. ‘Maybe you should r e c o n s i d e r,’ Acne said, still grinning. ‘We’d like to get a couple more games in before the place closes.’ ‘So would we,’ Gino said without looking at him. ‘And the table’s ours now. You had your turns. Fair’s fair.’ The older boy leant down so that his face was almost touching Gino’s. When he spoke spittle flew everywhere. ‘I’ll give you fair in a minute, you little wop. Either play us or piss off. You don’t have a lot of choice here.’ Gino stepped back from the table and calmly turned

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his pool cue around the opposite way as the other three boys moved across from the wall, grouping themselves around us. The atmosphere had become suddenly very tense and I felt a nervous prickling at the back of my neck. I’d never been in a real fight and I didn’t want to start now, but it looked like I wasn’t going to have any choice in the matter. What frightened me most was the speed at which it had happened, the mood changing in just a matter of seconds, from a pleasant game between two people into an ugly confrontation between six. Acne face walked right up to Gino and started poking him in the chest with one finger, jabbing to emphasise each word. ‘So … do … you … want … to … play … doubles?’ It was two against one, but Gino wasn’t backing away. He lifted one hand and jabbed back once very hard. ‘No!’ Slowly, without taking his eyes off Gino’s face, the older guy dropped his cigarette on the floor and ground it out. He smiled. ‘Tough guy, huh? Let’s see how good you are then.’ I nervously looked at the two guys standing over me, and they were both smiling as well. There was nothing friendly about it though. Nothing friendly at all. I gripped my pool cue very tightly, but didn’t think I’d use it. I thought I might try fainting convincingly instead.

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Just then another voice joined in, a laughing voice, though with a slight sense of challenge to it as well. ‘ H e y, why don’t you lot play doubles, then the winners could play two of us.’ It was one of the girls from the group over by the pinball machine. She was about my height with long black hair and rather startling green eyes staring out of a pale oval face. She walked up and stood next to Gino and the older boy, a smile on her face. ‘That’s a great idea,’ I said in a high, squeaky voice. ‘Why don’t we all do that.’

WE LOST, of course. Gino played his heart out. If he’d been on his own he probably could have won, as he played better than both the older boys, but I was just too much of a handicap for him to carry. In the end I sank the black ball by accident and put both of us out of our misery. We took our last few coins off the table under the laughing eyes of the older boys and slunk off, all the fight gone out of us. Gino was too embarrassed to even look at me, and I was just ashamed that I hadn’t been any better at pool. I vowed to myself to practice, not that I thought I’d ever get as good as Gino. Just as we got our bikes to leave, I looked back into the hall. The boys were setting up their game against

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the girls, strutting around like peacocks. But the girl with the green eyes was looking at us. When she caught me looking at her, she smiled and gave a little wave of her hand, but I felt too self-conscious to reply. That was the first time I met Elizabeth, but it was a few days before I found out her name.

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FIVE

IN SOME WAYS, the incident at the games hall was Gino’s and my first falling out. It wasn’t major, but it was enough to make him not see me for a while. I had let him down, even though it wasn’t really my fault. His pride was hurt. Gino was like that. He wouldn’t back off, no matter what the odds. It was a matter of national honour to him not to retreat, to never give anyone the chance to associate his actions with what his countrymen did during the war. To my mind, the fact that we’d got out of the hall in one piece was victory enough. I didn’t bother trying to contact him, knowing that

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he’d calm down in a few days, and spent my time riding in widening arcs through the neighbourhood. If I took my bike and rode north, the streets and houses of the suburb gradually thinned out, and I’d find myself travelling through an area of old factories, panel beating shops and car wre c k i n g yards. These, in turn, made way for acres of market gardens with row after row of green lettuces and cabbages lacing the dark earth. There were also tomato vines speckled with red fruit and sweet corn almost ready for harvest. The air was ripe with the smell of compost and fresh-turned soil, and huge sprinklers would spurt gouts of tea-coloured bore water across the crops, the spray drifting with the b reeze and coating your skin with fine, faintly unpleasant smelling beads of moisture. There was little traffic around and I’d ride my bike full pelt, the wind whipping my hair around my ears and bringing tears to my eyes. I felt adrift fr o m everything on these rides, alone and at speed, my thoughts floating freely. On long downhill stretches I would take my feet from the pedals and let the bike coast, picking up momentum, until it felt as if I would lift into the air and glide out across the fields, at one with the birds and clouds. I rather enjoyed being by myself at times like this, it made me feel as if I hadn’t left the country completely behind.

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On one of these rides, I went further afield than I ever had before, taking side roads whenever the mood took me. The few houses that were visible w e re small and run-down, little more than weatherboard shacks that had just about given in to the elements. Overhead, the sky was a hard pale blue, the heat relentless. I wasn’t wearing a hat, of course, no one did in those days, and I’d ridden a good fifteen or so miles. Because I’d been off somewhere in my thoughts, I hadn’t really noticed what direction I’d been taking or what time it was, and before long I began to realise that I was exceptionally thirsty. My T-shirt was soaked through with sweat and my throat felt as if the sides would stick together if I attempted to swallow. Stopping the bike, I took a look around. There were no houses at all now, just empty fields, and certainly no sign of a shop where I might buy something to drink. About a half mile away, though, I could see a thick cluster of trees on top of a small hill and what looked like a track of some kind leading up to it. At least there’ll be some shade, I thought, and got back on the bike and headed up towards it. By the time I reached the turn-off, I wasn’t feeling well at all. The sweat was pouring freely from me and I had begun to feel dizzy and nauseous. There were things that looked like transparent writhing worms at the edges of my vision, and I knew from

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bitter experience this heralded the beginnings of a migraine headache. I’d had one or two before when we lived in the country. They usually came on when I spent too much time in the sun. The track was little more than a walking path, though it obviously had been a proper graded dirt road sometime in its life. You could still see where the edges would have been, but they were now little more than indentations in the weed growth that had choked everything. It was impossible to ride the bike along the path, so I had to wheel it up the hill, the breath coming from my lungs in exhausted puffs. I was staggering and my legs felt like jelly, and all the time the worms wriggled further and further into my line of vision, as if I were looking out through some weird lens on a special effects camera. Any moment I felt as if I was going to vomit, and I hoped I’d make it to shade b e f o re that happened. I didn’t want to end up collapsing in the open where the sun would dehydrate me even further. The journey up the path and into the trees seemed to take forever, even though it could only have been a hundred yards or so, the distance seeming to stretch the sicker I became. At times it seemed as if the trees were at the end of a long tunnel, one that went on in f ront of me until the end of everything, and the foliage was a green mirage that refused to come completely into focus.

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Then I was suddenly underneath branches, the heat of the sun taken away. My head swirled alarmingly and I managed to toss the bike aside before fainting away. Just as I fell onto the carpet of leaves I thought I saw something a little further ahead, a large dark shape which was strangely familiar. Then everything dissolved into deep, painless darkness.

IT MUST HAVE been at least three or four hours before I regained my senses, coming back to reality as the sun departed the skies, leaving behind an impossibly warm twilight. My skin prickled with drying sweat and my mouth and eyes felt gummed together. At least the migraine had gone, having exhausted itself while I slept. There was a carpet of dead leaves which crackled gently as I moved around trying to get my senses back in working order. That’s one of the things about headaches like that, they leave you drained and quite gro g g y, as if you’ve just come out from an anaesthetic. I ran a tongue which felt twice its normal size over cracked and peeling lips, the need for water my main priority. After a couple of minutes I was able to raise myself f rom the ground and look around. I had maybe

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another hour or so of half-light before the night descended completely, and I peered through the thicket of trees to try and get my bearings. My bike was where I’d dropped it and I could see the path I’d taken up the hill through the weeds and low bushes. I must have been staggering quite a bit as I made the final few yards to the shelter of the trees, because the track made by my bike tires weaved all over the place. Something kept nipping at the edges of my memory, a faint recollection of a shape or presence just before I passed out. It had been further up the hill, set back amongst the trees. Leaving my bike, I lurched a few steps further into the trees, and as I did so began to make out the lines of a large house. The closer I got, the larger it became, though it was obviously unoccupied. Trees were growing right up to the walls and it looked as if the entire place was covered in ivy. You could make out where the front door should have been and there were areas which must have contained windows, but they were just shapes now, defined by their covering of tightly growing leaves. From its size, I imagined that it would have been considered a mansion in its day, perhaps the original pioneer farmhouse for the district. There were four or five chimneys poking up out of the moss-covered slate roof and a few crumbling smaller buildings which must have been sheds, maybe even a laundry

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and dunny (outdoor toilets were still quite common in those days, though I’d never had to use one myself). I did a slow circuit of the house, hoping to find some way in so that I could search out a tap, but everything had been sealed tight by the ivy. Out the back, though, there was a rusty old horse trough and hand pump which looked like they hadn’t been used in a hundred years. After a few tries with the pump, the metal screeching loudly in protest, I was r e w a rded by a far - o ff gurgling noise, and eventually a trickle of rust-black water. I kept pumping, but that trickle was all I was going to get. The colour never changed either, so I had to content myself with damping down my face and head. I didn’t want to take the risk of drinking it as I’d probably come down with something like cholera or the black plague. At the very least I’d give myself a stomach ache, and I really didn’t need that on top of sunstroke and a migraine. I recovered quickly under the cooling caress of the water and was just about to return and pick up my bike for the ride home when I had the distinct feeling that I was not alone. Casually, not wanting to appear spooked or nervous, I turned and looked at the silent house. There were no lights showing — and it was certainly getting dark enough to need light inside a house by this time — and no sound other than my breathing. But the feeling was definitely there. In fact, it intensified the

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moment I turned in the direction of those blank, ivycovered windows, as if I’d exposed myself fully to a set of eyes. If there was someone inside then I was trespassing and I had no desire to encounter the police. ‘Hello?’ I called out, my voice cracking from my parched throat. ‘Is anyone there? I just wanted to get some water. I’m sorry if I disturbed you. Hello?’ My enquiries were greeted by silence, but I still couldn’t shake the feeling that I was being watched. It was unsettling and my skin crawled uncomfortably. Behind me, the pump gave out a sudden loud gurgle and I leapt a couple of feet into the air in fright. It had sounded like some very large person clearing their throat. I laughed nervously when I re a l i s e d what it was, and that seemed to break the tension. Scooping up a bit more water from the trough and splashing my face once again, I headed back towards my bike, saying my goodbyes to the creepy old mansion. I could feel its windows watching me as I moved through the trees.

I REALISED THAT by now my parents would be having a fit. They knew I was out on my bike, but I’d told them I would be home in plenty of time for dinner,

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and it had to be well past that by now. There was already a huge full moon hanging in the sky, even though you could still see some of the last blood red d regs of the sunset on the horizon. Stars were starting to appear. After walking my bike down the hill I remounted and pedalled as fast as I could, the cooling air helping to revive me even more. I knew that if I headed back the way I’d come eventually I’d be able to work out my bearings and make my way home. The only source of comfort I had was the yellow glow of the bike headlight. I hadn’t gone all that far, though, before I started to hear laughter. When you’re moving as fast as I was, if you hear a noise it tends to fade quickly away behind you, but that wasn’t the case this time. The laughter came f rom behind me and seemed to be getting closer instead of falling away. It also sounded like it was coming from above my head, which was impossible. I tried looking back across my shoulder, but all I could see was the hill disappearing into the distance. The sound of the laughter was quite clear, seeming to come from the sky, though not from one direction. It appeared to be moving about, high above, and the sound of it changed all the time, one second seeming like a group of girls giggling to each other, the next like a flock of birds or something similar.

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It seemed to swoop and swirl — if you can say that about a sound — and whatever was making it stayed just out of my range of vision. I suddenly realised that my hair was standing on end and my skin crawling with goose flesh. Down below, my legs were pumping the pedals so hard I could have been competing in the bike leg of a triathalon; not that there would have been any competition, I would have outdistanced everyone easily. The bike flew along between the fields, the tire s hissing on the bitumen, the air around my head filled with sounds that terrified me. What made them so scary was the fact that I couldn’t quite work out what was making them, as if their origin was somewhere between animal and human. And then they were all over me. It was as if a noisy cloud of darkness had suddenly descended to swirl around my head, attacking my ears and eyes. At first I thought they were starlings or some other type of plague bird, but as soon as their wings started to touch my face I knew I was wrong. They felt like clammy leather and there was a hideous smell that went with them, the musty reek of something long dead and decaying. Clutching the handlebars I tried to ride on through

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them, hoping that I could outdistance the fluttering wings and sharp stabbing claws that were battering at my face and shoulders, but the faster I rode the more excited the creatures seemed to become, as if my panic was something they thrived on. I tried waving an arm above my head, but when I did this one of the creatures grabbed onto my hand and I felt a sharp pain as it started tearing at my wrist. With a shriek, I brought my hand down hard against the handlebars, and just for a brief second, illuminated by the headlight of my bike, I saw something indescribably ugly, all red eyes and teeth and black leather wings capped by nasty-looking hooks. It was a bat. A very large one. And it had a flap of skin from my wrist in its teeth. The next thing, I was flying through the air. It’s p retty easy to lose control of a bike when you’re moving at speed, and that’s exactly what happened. My left hand must have automatically clamped on the front brake, catapulting me over the handlebars. For a second I rolled through the air, turning at least once completely, the sky around me seeming to be filled with chattering, flapping bodies, then I hit the ground so hard all the breath was forced from my lungs in a massive whoosh. This didn’t slow me down, though, my body was fully charged with adrenalin. Without seeming to

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pause, I was back on my feet and running down the dark road in the direction I’d been riding, my arms flapping frantically about my head to try and keep the bats away. But they seemed to be everywhere, moving faster than anything I had ever seen. No sooner would I shake one loose from my arm or head than another one would take its place, their maddened screeching filling my ears. The smell of decay was everywhere. I was screaming too by this stage, confused and absolutely terrified. And then I was bathed in light.

THE UTE WAS coming out of a side road and it caught me full in its high beam. I must have made quite a sight, suddenly appearing out of the darkness, leaping about and waving my hands over my head. When it pulled up, I was still doing my strange little performance, letting out the occasional shriek in between trying to get the breath back into my lungs. How I managed to do both — breathe and scream — I have no idea, but it’s amazing what panic can do to the human body. I hardly heard the sound of the engine or the tires crunching as it stopped next to me. ‘This is not a good place to practice your dancing,’ a familiar voice called from the darkness of the cab, and when the door swung open and the inside light went on I saw that it was Gino’s father. He looked

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worried as he stepped down onto the road, which was understandable. It’s not often you find your son’s best friend doing the mashed potato in the middle of the night in the middle of nowhere. ‘Are you okay, John?’ he asked. I was unable to reply, my eyes darting wildly about in search of the bats. The creatures had disappeared the second the light had caught me, but though I could no longer hear their sounds I was sure they were just out of sight, watching from the darkness. ‘John?’ Gino’s father was looking at me cautiously. ‘Maybe you better get in the car and I’ll drive you home. How did you get here?’ ‘Bike,’ I finally gasped out. ‘Back down the road. Bats. Had an accident.’ It didn’t make a lot of sense, but he picked up the gist of it and we retraced my steps and picked up the bike. It was quite a way back down the road, lying like roadkill, the front wheel twisted back like a broken neck. He was silent during the drive back home, looking across at me occasionally but not trying to interest me in any conversation. I guess he thought I’d probably had enough for one night. My clothes were torn and there were large patches of skin missing from my elbows and knees. I was the last thing he’d expected to find on his trip back from picking up a case of cabbages from one of the market gardens.

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When my mother opened the door to our house she let out a gasp and took me straight to the bathroom to wash my new collection of grazes, cuts and scratches, leaving my father to question Mr Botticelli about what had happened, not that he could shed any light on it. I could still hear them muttering to each other as my mother helped me to bed and closed the door behind her. It took me a long while to go to sleep, exhausted though I was. Every time I closed my eyes I thought I could hear female laughter and the faint flapping of leather wings against the bedroom window.

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SIX

T H E N E X T M O R N I N G, after I had done my best to explain to my parents what had happened the night before, and they’d managed to rationalise the whole thing away by putting it down to sunstroke, I was eating my breakfast at the kitchen table when Gino appeared at the back door. ‘How you doin, Batman?’ he enquired, a broad grin on his face. ‘My old man told me what happened. Said you were hopping around on the road next to my cousin’s farm, looking like you’d gone a round or two with Cassius Clay.’ ‘And lost,’ I added mournfully.

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‘ G ’ d a y, Mrs Thomas,’ he said as he eased the squeaky flyscreen door open and joined me at the table. ‘Nice day, isn’t it?’ ‘Hey Gino, lovely morning,’ my mum replied. She was rather fond of my friend and enjoyed having him over at our place. She placed a large glass of freshly squeezed orange juice down in front of him. ‘ H e re, you keep our wounded warrior company. I’ve got to go into town to do a bit of shopping. I just love these post Christmas sales. I’ll take Darryl with me so you won’t have him hanging off your coat tails all day.’ Darryl is my younger brother. I get along fine with him, but he’s just eight years old and can be a nuisance when he wants to be, especially if he feels he’s being left out of something. ‘I don’t wear a coat, Mrs Thomas,’ said Gino, winking across at me. Mum gave me a peck on the cheek and grinned as she left the room. ‘Just a figure of speech, Gino. And you behave yourself, John. Your father will be out looking over his new school, so there’s just going to be the two of you. Try not to lose any more skin, you’ve hardly got any left as it is. See you this arvo.’ I heard my brother complaining bitterly about having to go shopping and my mother making soothing noises to calm him down, then the sound of the front door closing. They’d catch the bus into the city and be gone for at least four or five hours.

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Gino looked at me across the top of his glass as he drained the juice, banging it down on the table when he’d finished. There was a bright orange ring around his mouth, making him look something like a circus clown. He licked what juice he could away with his tongue and wiped the rest off on the back of his sleeve. ‘Okay then, let’s see a few of these injuries.’ I shovelled another mouthful of scrambled eggs into my mouth. ‘They’re mostly grazes. I’d hardly call them injuries.’ ‘Bat bites, then. And how’d you manage to run into them in the first place? I’ve never seen a real bat.’ ‘Neither have I. Not like this, anyway. We used to see a few of them when we lived in Manjimup, but they were tiny. More like mice with wings.’ I held my arms apart. ‘The one that had hold of my wrist must have been this big.’ ‘The one that got away,’ Gino said grinning. ‘Ha, ha. I’m not joking, it was huge.’ ‘Yeah, right. Show me.’ I stood up from the table and did a slow turn so that he could inspect the damage, which was easy to do as I was only wearing footy shorts and a T-shirt. Both my knees were scabbed as were my elbows and the heels of my hands. There was also an array of scratches across the back of my neck and a long

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strip of skin missing from inside my right wrist. Gino gave a long whistle of appreciation. ‘Nasty. Makes that cut you got on your head look pretty pathetic. You’re going to qualify for a Purple Heart soon.’ ‘Thanks for the sympathy. What are you so interested in my injuries for, anyway? You haven’t been over here for days.’ ‘Oh, it’s not me. I couldn’t give a stuff. It’s my gran.’ ‘What’s it to her?’ ‘No idea. When Dad came in last night and mentioned what had happened, Gran got all upset and started waving her arms around and making this funny sign with her fingers, and then Dad told her she was a silly old woman who ought to stop being so superstitious. Said something about living in the past, and that things changed when you changed countries. I couldn’t make out a lot of what they were saying, because they were talking in Gran’s dialect and I only understand about half of what she says. They were both pretty angry, though, especially Gran. Called Dad all sorts of names.’ ‘Just how many languages do your parents speak?’ Gino looked at me strangely. ‘Two. Italian and English.’ ‘But you just said that you only understood half of

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what your grandmother says, and you speak Italian just fine.’ ‘I speak Dad’s dialect. Mum’s family comes from a d i ff e rent part of Italy, so some of their words are different. Even some of the words they say the same actually mean something else, so it gets confusing, but it’s still the same language.’ ‘Now I’m confused. Thank God I only speak English. I don’t know what I’d do if my relations all spoke differently.’ ‘You get used to it,’ said Gino as he picked the last piece of bacon from my plate and scoffed it down. ‘Help yourself.’ ‘Ta.’ After that we just sat around shooting the breeze for a while, our mutual disappointment over the game of pool behind us. Then we collected our bikes — mine not looking as bright and shiny new as it had previously — and rode over to the high school for a look around. It had a huge oval off to one side of it where we could whack a baseball around, which was something we both enjoyed. It wasn’t until well after lunch time that we returned to Gino’s house and ran into his grandmother, which was when things really got strange.

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GINO’S GRANDMOTHER was one of the shortest adults I’d ever met, not even close to five feet. And she always wore black from top to bottom, even resorting to a black veil when she went out of the house. She was in mourning for her dead husband, Gino’s grandfather, he explained to me, and would wear black for the rest of her life. It was a custom f rom back in Italy, and something she refused to give up. He said it was a mark of respect. I knew that people were supposed to wear black to funerals, but I thought that doing it for the rest of your life was overkill, if you’ll excuse another accidental pun. At least it would save on shopping, though. We came tearing down the side of his house on our bikes, all charged up and excited from the game of baseball and the ride back, slamming on our brakes and leaving great skid marks in the loose gravel. This caused a huge, rust-coloured cloud of dust to swirl about in the air around us, and as it cleared a small, dark shape moved through it towards us, one hand extended out in front of it. It was also muttering dramatically. ‘Oh Gran, cut it out, will you?’ Gino said. ‘He’s a friend of mine, you know that, so stop all this Evil Eye stuff.’ Then he broke into rapid-fire Italian and waved his arms all over the place, quite obviously annoyed at the woman.

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She snapped right back at him, and I wished I could understand Italian to know what was going on. Each time the Botticelli’s did this, I always ended up standing around with an incredibly dumb look on my face, embarrassed by my lack of language skills. It would be great to be able to speak more than one language, I thought, you could really run rings a round your parents and teachers. As soon as I started at high school, I was going to enrol in Italian, so that Gino could give me a hand. My dad wanted me to learn French, which was what everyone from his generation learned at school, but I didn’t know anyone else who spoke it, so it seemed like a waste of time. (These days, people seem to learn Japanese or Chinese. It’s amazing how things change.) While all these thoughts were going through my head, Gino and his grandmother were going at it hammer and tongs, though through the entire exchange she kept making these weird gestures at me, holding out her right hand with the index and little finger extended and the others clenched into a fist. It looked like she wanted to poke both my eyes out at the same time. Eventually, they seemed to come to an agreement, because all the shouting and gestures stopped and the grandmother grabbed me by the hand and started to drag me along towards the house. I looked pleadingly at Gino, who just laughed and leant his bike up against the side of the house.

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‘It’s okay,’ he said reassuringly, ‘she just wants a look at those scratches. Says she’s got just the thing for them.’ ‘What’s this?’ I said, making the strange stabbing gesture with my fingers. ‘Why’s she keep doing it at me?’ Gino kept laughing. ‘It’s the sign of the Evil Eye. You do it to ward off bad stuff, things that have to do with the devil.’ ‘She thinks I’m the devil! Oh, great, thanks a lot. What the hell did you tell her?’ ‘Just what you told me. I said you got bitten by a big bat. That’s what got her all upset and started her off babbling in that damn dialect of hers. I didn’t understand most of it, but she reckons there’s some special medicine she can make up especially for bat bites.’ ‘I can’t wait. And I wasn’t actually bitten, more like skinned and scratched. There are no actual teeth marks. Make sure she understands that, will you?’ I faced Gino’s grandmother, madly shaking my head and gnashing my teeth at the same time, which made her drag me even faster towards the house, a look of genuine panic on her face. Gino laughed. ‘I’ll make us some cordial while she’s at it,’ he said as he followed us into the kitchen.

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B OTH OF G INO’S parents were working at the deli and all his older brothers and sisters were off doing the things that older brothers and sisters do, so we had the place to ourselves. While Gino fiddled a round with cups and syrups and chilled water from the fridge (the Italians, I had found, made the best cordial I’d ever tasted), his grandmother made a close inspection of the scratches on the back of my neck and wrist. She clucked her tongue and muttered to herself while she did this, then rattled on to Gino for a while. ‘She says you’re okay,’ he said when she stopped talking. ‘You haven’t actually been bitten, just scratched and peeled a bit.’ ‘I already told her that.’ ‘And I told her, but that doesn’t make any difference, she had to see for herself. She’s like that. Now drink your cordial while Gran prepares your medicine.’ ‘I don’t think I need any medicine, Gino. All I’ve got a re some scratches and stuff, and Mum’s put antiseptic on them already.’ Gino raised an eyebro w. ‘You want to tell her? I reckon if we both sit here and don’t say anything, it’ll all be over before we know it. If we argue, we’ll be here all afternoon. It’s your choice, though.’ ‘Some choice,’ I muttered darkly.

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In the corner of the kitchen, the old woman was placing a selection of dried herbs into a mortar. Then she added a couple of peeled bulbs of raw garlic and started mashing away at it all with a stone pestle. All the while, she alternated between muttering what sounded like prayers and looking over at me and nodding and smiling. She was obviously happy that I’d agreed to the treatment. ‘What’s she got against bats anyway?’ I asked Gino out of the side of my mouth. He half-choked on his cordial before r e p l y i n g . ‘You’re not going to believe this, but she reckons they were vampires.’ ‘Vampire bats! Oh, give me a break, you only get them in Africa or South America or something. There’s no such thing in Australia.’ Gino winked at me as his grandmother approached with the gunk she’d prepared in the mortar. ‘She never said anything about bats, just vampires. I guess the words mean the same thing in her dialect. I told you I didn’t understand a lot of what she was saying.’ I gave a start as the old woman began smearing her medicine all over the back of my neck, rubbing it right into the scratches, and was almost overwhelmed by the odour of garlic which r o s e from it.

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‘I’m going to be popular when I get home,’ I said to Gino, and we both burst out laughing, much to his grandmother’s annoyance.

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SEVEN

I WAS SO POPULAR, mum made me have a bath. Twice. And even then the odour of garlic remained strong. ‘Why’d you let her smear it all over you?’ she asked. ‘You never know what sort of infection you’ll get from it.’ ‘It’s supposed to be medicine or an ointment or something,’ I replied. ‘It’s not going to infect me. It just smells a bit odd. After a while you get used to it. And anyway, it couldn’t be worse than what I’d catch from bats.’ ‘You may be used to it, young man, but the rest of us have to live with you, and you’re a bit too potent for

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our liking. Under no circumstances are you to come back home smelling like an Italian restaurant again, do you understand? The Botticellis are lovely people, but their customs are a little different from ours, and you’re a bit too young to go getting all cosmopolitan on us yet. There’ll be plenty of time for that when you go to university. And enough about bats. I think a combination of sunstroke and an overactive imagination was the cause of that episode.’ ‘What makes you think I’m going to university? I haven’t even finished high school yet.’ ‘ Your father makes me think you’ll be going to university. You want to take the question up with him?’ I shook my head. The question of my education was not something I had a huge say in at that stage of my life, and university was a goal a lot of parents had for their children. To say anything to the contrary was just plain silly. Though, to my mind, planning a stint at university before you even knew what you wanted to do with your life was a bit premature, but I wasn’t going to argue the fact. ‘I didn’t think so,’ Mum said with a smile. ‘Now go dry your hair and get ready for dinner. I’m doing lamb chops, your favourite.’ Mum was correct about the lamb chops, they were

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my favourite, but only when she got them right. Lamb chops have to be burnt to a crisp, so that the tails crunch and splinter in your mouth. My chances of getting them exactly the way I liked were about fifty fifty. As it was, my luck was out. The chops were seriously underdone, and I had to plough my way t h rough them, the pinkish blood and gr e a s e congealing on the plate like the aftermath of violent crime, while my father and brother made jokes about how fragrant I smelled. The mashed potatoes were sensational, however. Mum made them with melted b u t t e r, cream and grated cheese; what you’d call heart attack material today.

AFTER DINNER, Gino and I met up at my front gate and headed down to the games hall, figuring that enough time had passed since our last encounter down there, and the possibility of running into the same group of boys was slight. Mind you, I think Gino wouldn’t have minded another meeting, so that he could patch up the holes in his injured pride. We cycled along back streets through the gathering darkness, the air so hot it felt as if we were slicing into it with our bikes. Every now and then we’d pass someone walking a dog or couples out for an evening stroll. You could smell the dust in the air mixed with the pungency of bore water fr o m

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sprinklers, and the noise of cicadas rose and fell, undulating to a pattern only the insects could discern. ‘So where’d you run into the bats?’ Gino asked as we rode along side by side. ‘I know you were out by my cousin’s farm, but there aren’t many places they could hole up around there, it’s all fields.’ ‘Some old house,’ I replied. ‘Big place that’s all boarded up. On top of a small hill. There’s trees all around it.’ Gino rode for a while in silence, his face thoughtful. After a couple of minutes he shook his head as if to clear something from his mind and started to whistle a tune which I recognised as ‘Amazing Grace’. ‘What?’ I asked. ‘What what?’ he said with a grin. ‘Don’t give me that. You were thinking about something, something to do with the old house and the bats, weren’t you?’ ‘No.’ ‘Liar!’ ‘It’s nothing,’ he said as he started to weave his bike f rom side to side. ‘My grandmother mentioned something about a house out off Bleaker Road, that’s all. Said it was a bad place.’

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‘Bad in what way?’ He laughed. ‘She didn’t really say, just kept going on about evil having been there a long time, or an old evil being there. I told you I can’t make out a lot of what she says. There was something mixed up in there about the war as well, but I don’t see how that could relate, since the war didn’t really get here.’ ‘The Japanese bombed Darwin,’ I said defensively. ‘I have an uncle who was stationed up there at the time. And mini subs got into Sydney harbour.’ ‘You know what I mean. It’s not like you had armies marching from one side of the damn country to the other, destroying everything in sight.’ ‘We didn’t let them,’ I said triumphantly. ‘We took the fight to them.’ ‘You did whatever the British told you,’ he muttered. Luckily, before we really started to disagree about our views on recent world history, we arrived at the games hall. It was crowded, like always, and there were dozens of bikes resting against the walls of the building or thrown haphazard on the footpath. From inside we could hear the rumble of voices and games being played with too much enthusiasm. There was the smell of frying onions and chips from the takeaway joint and the air was charged with fluorescent light. Putting aside out discussion — we seemed to have

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lost track of the old house and the bats as well as the war — Gino and I walked into the noise and heat of the games hall. There were so many people we had to shoulder our way through them before we could even see the pool tables, and it looked as if we’d have to wait a long time for the chance of a game. The crash of the balls was so loud we had to shout to make ourselves heard. ‘Maybe we should just grab a milkshake,’ I bellowed into Gino’s ear. ‘We’ll never get a game in tonight.’ He nodded in agreement and we turned to force our way back out through the crowd when I felt a hand grab me by the elbow. It was a strong hand, one which was hard to deny, and it pulled me away from Gino, dragging me between others who complained and swore at my jostling. I couldn’t see who was holding me, and the best I could do was apologise madly to everyone as I bumped my way through them. ‘Sorry! Sorry! Sorry!’ I had the ghastly feeling that when I discovered who was at the other end of the hand on my elbow I was not going to be too pleased. Images of the group of older boys were foremost in my mind. Then I was in a relatively clear space next to a pool table and looking into the green eyes of the girl I’d seen before. She was smiling, her head slightly to one side. Behind her I could see the other girls she’d been with firing balls around the table like professionals.

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‘Hello John,’ she said. Or at least I thought she said, because I was certain her mouth hadn’t moved at all, just remained fixed in that welcoming smile. ‘Hi,’ I said nervously. She looked me up and down, her eyes taking in my fresh scratches and bandages. ‘What happened to you?’ This time her mouth did move, though she didn’t appear to be shouting like everyone else in the place, and I seemed to be able to hear her without effort. I shrugged, not wanting to get into the story about the bats. ‘Fell off my bike yesterd a y. It’s nothing really.’ She raised one eyebrow as if she didn’t believe me. ‘ You want that game of doubles now?’ she continued. ‘I would have liked to play with you last time, but things didn’t work out that way.’ ‘How did you go? Did you beat the other guys?’ ‘Oh yes,’ she grinned. ‘The girls and I just ate them right up.’ ‘That’s great! That must have really put their noses out of joint. Serves them right. Yeah, we’ll play you. I’ll just go and find Gino.’ ‘He’s coming, you don’t have to worry.’ I looked around and couldn’t see any trace of Gino amongst the crush of bodies. How she knew he was

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on his way was beyond me, but I wasn’t too worried about it. I felt quite comfortable in her presence and w o n d e red if it was the right time to intro d u c e myself, then I remembered she already knew my name, though I couldn’t for the life of me remember telling her. And then, weirdly, I seemed to know hers. Elizabeth. It literally popped into my mind. ‘I saw you the last night,’ she continued. ‘You were out along Bleaker Road.’ ‘Huh?’ I was confused. There hadn’t been anyone else around from what I could remember. Though I have to admit that I wasn’t paying a lot of attention most of the time. I’d either been ill with sunstroke or in a mad panic, except for when I was up at the house itself, and surely no one lived there. It was possible that she’d passed me in a car while I was still on my way out to the house, or maybe even on my way back from it, though I didn’t remember any other vehicles except Gino’s father’s ute. ‘ You probably didn’t recognise us,’ Elizabeth continued. ‘I think you might have been in a hurry.’ ‘Yeah, I was.’ ‘Here’s your friend,’ she said without taking her eyes off mine, and right on cue Gino burst through the crowd with a puzzled expression on his face. ‘There you are. I’ve been looking everywhere for

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you,’ he said. And then he caught sight of the girl. ‘Ah ha! No wonder.’ ‘This is Elizabeth,’ I said. ‘Elizabeth. Gino. The girls want to play us at doubles.’ Gino looked across at the other four girls, who had finished their game and were watching us expectantly. He grinned broadly. ‘That would be our pleasure, ladies.’ ‘Oh, we’re not ladies,’ Elizabeth said with a wink. ‘We’re girls.’

GINO’S PRIDE TOOK another battering, but this time he didn’t seem all that bothered. Out of the five games played, we lost four. And I think we only won the last game because they let us. Nothing seemed to matter, though, as we clicked balls across the green felt, laughing and talking between shots. Gino even went and bought a round of milkshakes for everyone, which the girls accepted g r a c e f u l l y, though for some reason didn’t bother drinking them. Maybe they weren’t fond of spearmint. Gino was particularly taken with a girl called Lavinia who had flaming red hair and a laugh like a machine gun. I noticed that they played very close together and Gino was extremely fond of her jokes, joining in her laughter as if she was the funniest

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thing since Graham Kennedy. Mind you, I couldn’t talk. Everything I did seemed to be focused on Elizabeth, as if there was something between us, unspoken but binding, like fish hooks joining my brain to hers. At times I almost felt as if we were having entire conversations without having to use our mouths, talking on a plane which was over and above everything else in the hall, removed from the cacophony of heat and noise. We played until closing, unaware of the passing time. Afterwards, we stood out on the pavement as they pulled the folding metal shutters across the front of the hall, watching others walking off down the road or riding away on their bikes. In a few minutes we were the only ones left on the street. ‘That was fun,’ I said to Elizabeth. ‘Which way do you go home?’ ‘ Yeah,’ Gino added, ‘we’ll ride along with you. Where are your bikes?’ ‘We’re under our own steam,’ Lavinia said. ‘But we go in the same direction as you do.’ ‘And how do you know that?’ asked Gino. ‘We only met you tonight. Have you been spying on us or something?’ The group of girls burst into laughter, which reminded me of something I couldn’t quite put my

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finger on. ‘Not really,’ Elizabeth answered, ‘but I’ve seen John around a bit, so we’ve got a pretty good idea of where you live. Come on, we’ll walk along with you.’ ‘But I thought you said you saw me out near Bleaker Road?’ I queried. ‘That’s nowhere near my place.’ Elizabeth turned away from me, but before she did it seemed as if her eyes flashed angrily, as if my question had caught her unprepared. ‘Bleaker Road?’ Gino joined in. ‘That’s the place my Gran was talking about the other day, out near my cousin’s farm. It’s miles away. Your parents drive you or something?’ ‘Parents!’ Lavinia shrieked, almost falling over from laugher. ‘That’ll be the day. Our parents!’ ‘Ever heard of public transport?’ Elizabeth interrupted, giving Lavinia a look which would have curdled milk. Then she turned and favoured me with a smile that pretty much made me forget her earlier flashes of anger and we headed off down the road. She hadn’t actually answered my question, though. In fact, she’d answered Gino’s in a way that made it seem as if she’d been answering both of us. Gino and I started to wheel our bikes along the street after Elizabeth, the other girls in a rough cir c l e around us. There was a strong sea breeze blowing by this time, and it tossed rubbish, dust and leaves

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around us as we walked along, whipping the girls’ hair about so that their heads appeared crowned by swirling nests of snakes. Occasionally, a car would drive past, but apart from that we were alone. I felt strangely happy, slightly disconnected and adrift, as if the events of the last hour or so had been a dream which I hadn’t quite woken from. Gino, Lavinia and the other girls started to drift ahead, while Elizabeth dropped back to walk with me. We held my bike upright between us and every now and then her hand would brush mine across the handlebars, making me start very slightly at the strange coolness of her skin. When this happened we would smile at each other; me nervously, her with a slightly knowing look, as if the touches were a little m o re than accidental. We were talking quietly to each other, but I have no idea what the conversation was about. About a block from where Gino and I lived, we took a short cut down an alley, and I noticed that Elizabeth put slightly more pr e s s u re on the handlebars of the bike, slowing us down so that the others drifted even further ahead. I felt my heart suddenly beating faster, and when I looked across she was smiling at me. Her eyes seemed to gleam greenly in the half-darkness and I was sure that her tongue flicked out and licked the corner of her mouth.

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Elizabeth pulled the bike to a halt and stared into my eyes. In the distance I could faintly hear Gino and the others girls still laughing and talking as they moved on through the alley, but they were rapidly fading from my attention. All I could see were her two eyes coming closer, and then I felt her lips briefly brush across mine. It was just the hint of a touch, but it felt as if someone had rubbed an ice block over my mouth. When she pulled away, I found myself breathing even more rapidly, my head t h rust forward in anticipation of another kiss. Elizabeth leant forward again, but this time her head moved to the side, and I felt her lips br u s h i n g slowly along my face, moving down t o w a rds my neck, and my skin started to prickle with goose flesh. I held my breath and closed my eyes, almost fainting

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away, my mind filling with dreams of cool running water and green fields and the sound of laughter.

WHAT HAPPENED next is a bit of a blur. All of a sudden I was thrown against the fence, my back and head slamming into it so hard I was almost knocked unconscious, which probably accounts for everything seeming strange at the time. I have this vision of Elizabeth rearing back from me, her face contorted and snarling, her fingers clawing at her lips as though the very touch of my skin had burned them. I can remember her eyes were filled with light so intense it appeared as if they were on fire, but a cold fire, something artificial like the dials on those glow-in-the-dark watches everyone used to wear then (before everyone discovered just how nasty even small doses of radiation could be). Then everything seemed to swirl briefly, and Gino was there next to me instead of Elizabeth. ‘What are you doing down there?’ he asked. ‘What was all that snarling about? There a dog around here or something?’ Gino kept looking up and down the alley with a puzzled expression on his face. I found that I was sitting on the ground with my back against the fence and my bike on top of me. My head was clear again, though. ‘What are you talking about?’ I muttered, pushing the

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bike away and looking about for Elizabeth. ‘Where’s Elizabeth?’ ‘I don’t know,’ he snapped. ‘You were the one with her.’ ‘What happened?’ I asked. Gino shook his head. ‘I asked you that. I was at the end of the alley with the girls when I heard this horrible snarling from down here. Sounded like a big dog going nuts, so I came belting back and you were sitting on the ground under your bike. Don’t ask me what happened.’ ‘Did you see Elizabeth?’ ‘I already said I didn’t. What did you do to her?’ I shook my head, but it didn’t help. Everything still seemed strange, as if I’d blacked out or something, but I couldn’t remember doing that. Things just seemed to have got sort of blurry for a bit. Blurry, and kind of … scary. ‘I kissed her,’ I finally replied. ‘Well, she kissed me, actually.’ ‘Oh yeah,’ Gino said, shaking his head. ‘That would explain it then.’ ‘Explain what exactly?’ I asked. He was beginning to annoy me now. There was a little smirk on his face which was sort of knowing and superior, and I had this overwhelming urge to wipe it away with something seriously abrasive, like steel wool.

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Gino’s smirk had developed into a full blown grin by n o w. ‘There could be two explanations,’ he said, holding up his hand and counting on his fingers. ‘One … you’ve got really bad breath.’ I snorted angrily and turned away, then cautiously put my hand up to my mouth and blew in it. My breath was just fine. ‘Or two,’ he continued. ‘You tried to grab a quick feel.’ ‘And you’re a bloody idiot.’ I snatched my bike off the ground and stormed up the alley, Gino hot on my heels. ‘Well did you?’ he went on, totally ignoring how angry I was. ‘No!’ I snapped. ‘I did not try and grab a feel.’ ‘Well I would have,’ he muttered from behind me. ‘Try and slip your tongue in then?’ I threw my bike down, turned and waved one clenched fist at him. ‘I’ll slip this at your nose in a minute. I didn’t do anything. Will you stop saying that. Ask her yourself, if you can find out where she went.’ Gino was giggling madly by this time, which only made me angrier. ‘Hey, calm down,’ he spluttered. ‘I’m joking, for Christ’s sake. Take it easy.’ I put my fist down and took a deep breath. ‘It was probably that stupid garlic your Gran smeared all

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over me. Makes my mother nearly throw up.’ ‘There you go,’ he said. ‘Simple. Elizabeth’s probably with the other girls. You can tell her it’s all my grandmother’s fault.’ ‘You said you didn’t see her.’ ‘I didn’t,’ he said, heading back up the alley again. I picked up my bike and followed. ‘But it was dark and I was running. Maybe I missed her. Come on.’ Perhaps it was the garlic. Perhaps she did push me into the fence and run off, I didn’t know for sure. But it certainly seemed like one hell of an over-reaction on Elizabeth’s part, and it didn’t explain the snarling. I’d never met a girl who snarled before, but then I’d never really kissed one either. As far as I knew, maybe they all snarled the first time you kissed them. But Elizabeth wasn’t there when we got to the end of the alley. Neither were the others. All we could see was empty street stretching off in both directions. ‘That’s strange,’ Gino said, looking all around. ‘They were here just a couple of minutes ago. I wasn’t gone that long. They must have had to run to catch their bus.’ He gave me a questioning look, but all I could do was shrug. He was right about one thing however, it was strange. But things were to get a whole lot stranger.

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EIGHT

I AWOKE AT about midnight from a dream in which I was flying high above the earth, almost as if I was in a spaceship. The planet was a blue and green globe circling slowly through clouds, and I felt that if I reached out my hands I’d be able to pick it up like a beach ball and bounce it along in front of me. The ball seemed to be crawling with tiny figures, and when I looked closely I could see people running everywhere like ants. There was more to the dream, but the elements faded the moment I woke up. I lay there staring at the ceiling, still half-immersed in

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the dream, expecting to drift back into it again at any second, when I heard a noise in the bedroom. There were no lights on in the house but enough moonlight was streaming through the thin calico curtains for me to see most things clearly. My brother’s bed is right underneath the window, and when I looked across I found that he was standing on his bed behind the curtains with his arms up against the glass staring outside. He was also muttering to himself, seeming to be in conversation with someone outside the window. ‘Darryl?’ I said blearily. ‘What are you doing up?’ He jumped when I said this and peered nervously back across his shoulder. ‘How does she do that?’ he asked. ‘Do what? Who?’ I rubbed my eyes and rolled over to try and fall back to sleep. ‘You’ve been dreaming, get back into bed.’ ‘The girl. How can she fly like that?’ He was bouncing up and down on his bed, looking first at me then back out the window. ‘I’m not dreaming, I can see her. She’s pretty.’ ‘What are you on about?’ ‘The girl!’ He was getting frustrated now. ‘How come she can fly like that?’ ‘You’re dreaming, go back to bed!’ I hate being woken

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up at night, even worse than I hate having conversations with people who aren’t quite awake either. ‘But I’m talking to you! I’m not dreaming if I’m talking to you, am I? Come and have a look at her, she’s near the sandpit now. She’s got really green eyes.’ That got me out of bed faster than a full bladder. ‘Did you say green eyes? Where is she?’ ‘Right there,’ he said pointing. ‘Oh …’ By the time I got to the window there was nothing to be seen outside, not that I really thought there had been in the first place. I mean, there couldn’t be. And especially she wouldn’t be. I had to look though, just in case. The back yard was flooded with moonlight and very definitely empty. There was still a touch of the sea breeze blowing, and it moved the trees about, causing shadows to grow and retreat across the yard. ‘There’s nothing there now,’ I said as I peered about the yard. ‘Told you it was a dream. Or maybe you were looking at the shadows.’ ‘It wasn’t a dream,’ Darryl muttered sulkily as he eased himself back under his sheet. ‘She just went away when you got up.’ ‘I see. And you reckon she was a pretty girl with green eyes?’

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‘And black hair.’ ‘Yeah, right. And she could fly as well?’ ‘Um … yes,’ he said as his eyes closed and his head turned sideways on the pillow. Darryl could fall asleep faster than anyone I knew. ‘She didn’t have any clothes on.’ ‘WHAT? Darryl, wake up!’ But I was too late, he’d dropped over the edge of sleep. I looked outside again just to make doubly sure that there was no one there. ‘Wish I had more dreams like that,’ I said to myself. ‘Eight year olds get all the luck.’ Just as I turned from the window, however, I caught sight of something out the corner of my eye, something not quite there. I moved closer and thought I could see two smallish handprints on the glass, hand-prints that were fading away as I looked at them. For a second I thought they must have been Darryl’s, but then realised that they were on the other side of the glass. As I bent my head towards them, though, they disappeared. Maybe Darryl and I are sharing a dream, I thought to myself. Or bits of our dreams have got mixed up together. I knew I was out of my bed and sitting next to my brother because I could feel the breeze through the window, but now that he was asleep I couldn’t really be sure I hadn’t been dreaming myself.

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I hoped I’d been dreaming. And I really, really hoped Darryl had been too. Any other possibilities didn’t bear thinking about.

THE NEXT DAY, everything was scattered about in my head, as if someone in hob-nailed boots had gone stomping through my memories of the night before, pushing things this way and that, even cru s h i n g some underfoot so that they were no longer recognisable. Dreams are like that, I thought, you can’t trust them. T h e re were some things that did stick, however: Flying, my brother at the window, handprints and naked girls. What they meant or how they fitted together was beyond me. When I asked Darryl what he remembered, all he did was look at me strangely and say something about having dreams. ‘You don’t remember a girl with green eyes?’ I asked incredulously. ‘You said she didn’t have any clothes on. There’s no way you could forget that.’ ‘I never forget nightmares,’ he said, looking down at his breakfast. ‘You want my eggs?’ ‘It wasn’t a nightmare. At least I don’t think it was. We were talking about something, and you were standing at the window. You must remember.’ ‘I haven’t seen any girls without clothes on!’ Darryl

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said rather loudly as Mum walked into the kitchen. ‘I should hope not,’ she said, looking at me as if I’d done something particularly horrible to my brother. ‘What have you been saying to Darryl?’ ‘Nothing,’ I replied hurriedly. ‘The sooner you get back to school the better, young man,’ Mum said glaring in my direction. ‘Naked girls are not something you talk about over b reakfast. Or lunch or dinner, for that matter. Especially not at your age. Has Gino got anything to do with this?’ ‘No, Mum,’ I whined. I was feeling re a l l y embarrassed by this stage, and it was being made worse by the look Darryl was giving me from behind Mum’s back. ‘We were talking about dr e a m s . Darryl’s dreams. It had nothing to do with Gino.’ ‘I can’t have dreams like that,’ Darryl declar e d loudly. ‘I don’t know what girls look like without their clothes on.’ ‘Exactly!’ Mum agreed, her eyes drilling into me. ‘I’m talking to your father about this when he gets home, you mark my words.’ Then she stormed out of the kitchen and down the hall looking for all the world like a willy-willy had blown in off the street. ‘I’ll get you for that,’ I muttered darkly at my brother.

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‘I really don’t feel like these eggs any more,’ Darryl said, looking at me blankly.

A F T E R B R E A K FA S T, I couldn’t get away from my mother’s glare fast enough. Since the incident with my brother she’d been stomping around the house, slamming doors or pots or whatever she could get her hands on, and I knew I’d be in for it when my father got home. It was a conservative time and people’s attitudes were very different about sex from what they are now — you just didn’t mention it, especially not to eight year olds. Not that we were even talking about sex to begin with. I grabbed my bike and headed over to Gino’s house. I found him out the back weeding the tomato patch, one of the chores he did daily. ‘You wanna go for a ride?’ I asked. ‘Maybe we could head out to your cousin’s place, I’ve never been to a market garden.’ He leant on the rake he was holding and grinned at me. ‘You mean out along Bleaker Road, don’t you? Out where the girls live?’ I shifted about uncomfortably. ‘No, not really. I just felt like going for a ride.’ ‘Okay, I’ll believe you. Millions wouldn’t, but I will. I wouldn’t mind catching up with Lavinia again myself.’

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‘I just wanted to see a market garden,’ I continued stubbornly. ‘The girls have nothing to do with it.’ ‘Yeah, yeah,’ he said as if he didn’t believe a word of what I was saying. ‘Just let me finish up with these stupid tomatoes and we’ll get going.’ As we rode along, I tried to explain to Gino what I thought had happened the night before with my b ro t h e r, but even as I spoke I knew it sounded ridiculous. ‘How did you manage to turn into a naked girl outside your own bedroom window?’ he asked after I stumbled to a finish. ‘It wasn’t me,’ I said. ‘I think it was Elizabeth.’ ‘Oh, you do have a high opinion of yourself. One little kiss — which, I might add, ended in disaster — and you’ve got girls flinging themselves at your b e d room window stark naked! Give me a bre a k . Anyway, you said you were the one flying.’ ‘At one stage I was. Or at least I think I was. It’s all confused with what Darryl was going on about.’ ‘That’s if he was going on about anything. He’s denied it all, remember? It could all have been a dream of your own.’ ‘Yeah, I suppose you’re right.’ ‘Too right I’m right.’

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I wasn’t as certain of myself as Gino, that was one of the reasons I wanted to take another look at the old house. It seemed to be the place where things had started to get weird, after my bout with sunstroke. The bats were right after that, then that odd incident in the alley, and finally the mixed up dream with Darryl. There were just too many strange things happening all at once for there not to be a connection, not that I had the faintest idea what it would be. The house just seemed to be the place to start. At the same time, I didn’t want to mention it to Gino until the last minute, not after what his grandmother had said. He didn’t really believe all that ancient evil stuff, but you never could tell. It might just have been enough to stop him coming, and I didn’t want to be out at that place on my own again, just in case there was something evil, ancient or otherwise. We were riding along Bleaker Road by this stage, right out where the fields stretched away from us on either side, the big sprinklers shooting glittering s t reams of water out over the crops, their choof, choof, choof the only sound apart from the noise of our tyres on the asphalt. I thought we were close to where I’d been attacked by the bats, but I couldn’t really be sure. About a half mile away I could see the hill where I’d found the old house sticking up out of the landscape. Gino pulled over and stopped. ‘When you go for a

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ride, you really mean a ride, don’t you,’ he gasped. ‘This is where we turn off to my cousin’s place.’ ‘Let’s stop and eat those rolls first,’ I said. ‘We can take a break under those trees over there.’ I pointed to the hill. Gino looked where I’d indicated and shook his head. ‘That’s not even in the direction we’re going. It’s miles further on. Let’s just eat at my cousin’s place.’ ‘I’m hungry now,’ I said stubbornly. ‘And that’s the only shade around.’ Gino stared at me like I’d gone mad, then he shook his head like he was clearing it. He lifted and slapped himself on the forehead. ‘No, I’m the mad one, aren’t I? How could I have been so stupid?’ I looked away, pretending I didn’t know what he was talking about. ‘I knew it,’ he muttered. ‘Knew what?’ When I turned back to him he was staring up at the hill, a strange look in his eyes. ‘It’s where that house is, isn’t it?’ he said quietly. ‘The place my grandmother reckons is infested with evil or something?’ ‘It’s just an old house.’ Gino chuckled. ‘That’s what they say in horr o r

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movies, just before something really horrible happens.’ ‘Nothing’s going to happen,’ I said reasonably. ‘I just want to have another look at it, that’s all.’ ‘You reckon that’s where the bats came from?’ ‘Maybe. I don’t know. But crazy things have been happening to me ever since I stopped there.’ This time Gino shrugged. ‘Hey, like you said, it’s just an old house. Let’s stop and eat anyway, I’m starving.’

B E F O R E W E ’ D L E F T Gino’s house he’d grabbed a couple of fresh bread rolls from the kitchen and we’d s t u ffed them full of everything we could salvage f rom their fridge: salami, antipasto, cheese and tomato slices. The rolls were so full they looked like they’d suffered from some kind of violent internal h a e m o r rhage which had forced their innards out their sides. Gino put the rolls and some other stuff into the carrier bag on his bike. The rolls were delicious, and after we’d made the slow climb up the hill to where the house lay hidden behind the trees we parked our bikes and sat under the shade eating them and drinking from a plastic container of cordial. With the light dappling through the branches and

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the soft carpet of dead leaves underneath us, we could have been somewhere in a Euro p e a n storybook, a place populated by elves and fairies and things out of legends. It was hard to believe that all we had to do was step out from under the shade and we’d be right back into the middle of an Australian s u m m e r, into one hundred degree plus heat and cicadas and the faint smell of roadkill putrefying along gravel verges. We sat there chatting and chewing for an hour, recovering from our long ride, hardly even looking at the tumbledown house way back in the trees. It was as if we’d lost the purpose of our journey and were caught in a strange time warp or some kind of dimensional shift which had placed us in another century where things were more relaxed and lazy. I suppose it was the food and exhaustion from the ride that eventually combined to send us both off to sleep. One moment I was chatting to Gino about what life had been like in the country, about the river pool and how I’d had a creek at the end of our block where you could catch gilgies and frogs, and the next I was talking to myself. He’d eased himself from a sitting position down to lying propped up on one elbow, and when I looked across at him he had his eyes closed and his face was relaxed in sleep. He was snoring gently and a thin trickle of drool had appeared at the edge of his mouth. I remembered falling asleep the last time I visited the

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old house, and wondered if it was the quiet stillness which surrounded it that encouraged visitors to close their eyes and drift off. But then I remembered that the last time I’d been here I fainted. ‘Wimp,’ I said quietly, and a second later I dropped off myself.

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with a start. All around the air crackled as if it was alive. It was also very dark, though I had the feeling that it had been light which had woken me. Then there was a sudden brilliant flash of lightning and I saw Gino’s eyes staring wildly in my direction. J E R K E D AWA K E

‘What the …’ was all he said before the thunder rolled across the sky above us, drowning out the rest of his sentence. Its rumble seemed to fill the air completely. ‘It’s a storm,’ I shouted. ‘It must have come in while we were asleep.’

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‘What time is it?’ Gino said as he raised himself from the ground. In the gloom I could make out leaves stuck to the side of his face like huge flakes of dried skin. I tried to look at my watch but it was too murky to see the dial. ‘Who cares. Let’s get out of here before it really starts to piss down.’ And then, as if the storm had been waiting for my announcement, the rain suddenly came down in sheets, driving hard and icy-cold against our skins. We grabbed our bikes and moved further back into the trees, the wind and rain whipping against our backs, stirring the leaves under our feet as if they were alive. By the time we reached the shelter of the old house we were both soaked through, our clothes clinging to us like an extra layer of skin a few sizes too big. We managed to get the bikes up on the sagging verandah, tossing them down and collapsing alongside, our hair and faces streaming with water. ‘Oh, this is great, just great,’ Gino blustered. ‘Now we’re caught out in the middle of nowhere, soaked to the skin and no way of getting back home. This was a brilliant idea, John, thanks very much.’ ‘Go to hell,’ I replied as I pulled the drenched shirt over my head. ‘If you hadn’t fallen asleep we’d be on our way home by now.’

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‘So it’s my fault, is it? Who the hell wanted to come out here in the first place?’ We continued to argue while we both stripped down to our underwear, hanging our wet clothes anywhere it looked like they might dry out. Then we sat there shivering while the storm raged above and around us. In one of the brilliant flashes of lightning I managed to get a look at my watch, discovering that it was already past six. ‘Christ, Gino,’ I said, ‘we’ve been asleep for over five hours. Mum’s going to throw a serious fit.’ ‘Ever seen an Italian mother lose her bananas?’ he said mournfully. ‘You think you’ve got problems! I’m not going to be allowed out of the house again until I’m twenty-one.’ ‘Maybe we should cut our losses and ride back anyway,’ I said. ‘It’s not as if we can get any wetter than we already are. My parents are likely to call the police and report me missing.’ ‘No way,’ he replied. ‘It would be crazy to ride in this. If we didn’t get struck by lightning, we’d be run down by some crazy farmer in a truck. They drive like lunatics out here at the best of times, and there’s no way they’d see us in the rain. I’d rather face my mother than the front grill of a truck driven by a half-blind market gardener any day.’ Gino had a good point, and after moping about on

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the verandah for a while we decided to see if we could get inside the old house. The two of us must have made quite a sight, scrabbling about at the ivy-covered windows in our soaked and baggy Y-fronts. We didn’t have much luck, either. Behind the ivy we found boards across the windows, the nails rusted into the frames, and no amount of tugging would shift them. The doors were rock solid as well. We did a circuit of three sides of the house, following the verandah. It was impossible to get to the back of the place as there was no shelter and the rain was whipping in from that direction, driving almost horizontally at us from the teeth of the storm. Eventually we made it back to where we started, even wetter than we’d been at the outset, and slumped down next to our bikes. ‘That was a waste of time,’ I mumbled, wiping raindrops from my forehead. ‘You give up too easily,’ Gino said, eyeing off the two large picture windows that flanked what had once been the front door. ‘Those boards had some give in them when I tried them earlier. I reckon with a bit of effort we could get through. All we need is a lever of some kind.’ On our hands and knees we searched around on the verandah for something solid that we could use to pry the boards off the window. Eventually Gino

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found a length of pipe in a small pile of planks and rubble and we madly started stripping the ivy away from an area where we could get a good hold on the boards. After forcing the pipe into the only crack lar g e enough, Gino and I tried to pull the lever back towards us, but there simply wasn’t enough room for the both of us at the window. ‘This isn’t working,’ Gino said after we’d made a couple of tries. ‘There’s only enough room here for one, and since I’m stronger I’d better do it.’ ‘Who says you’re stronger?’ I asked indignantly. ‘If I remember correctly, it’s usually me that saves you!’ ‘I never said I was smarter,’ Gino grinned, ‘just stronger.’ I had to think about that one, and by the time I’d worked out that he’d tricked me with logic, Gino was up at the window putting all his weight behind the lever. He had both feet up against the sill and was literally hanging off the piece of pipe. ‘ C a reful you don’t …’ was all I managed to say b e f o re there was a sharp ‘crack!’ and Gino came flying back from the window, the pipe and board following close behind. He landed on his backside on the verandah, giving out a cry of pain and surprise, and the area he landed on fell away beneath him with a loud splintering of wood.

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IT LOOKED LIKE the verandah was trying to eat Gino. Because he’d landed on his backside, it was this part of his anatomy that had been swallowed by the rotten planks, so that his legs and arms and head were still ‘above ground’. In effect, the verandah had him trussed up like a Christmas turkey. Naturally, I burst out laughing. ‘Oh, thanks a heap, John,’ Gino spluttered as I rocked backwards and forwards, my sides aching with laughter. ‘You think you might help me out of h e re when you’ve finished giggling your stupid head off?’ This only made me laugh even harder, which made Gino nearly apoplectic with anger. He was lunging u p w a rds, trying to free himself from the wood’s clutches, words exploding from his mouth like firecrackers. ‘GET! ME! OUT! OF! HERE!’ And I just kept on laughing and laughing. That was until Gino’s face changed.

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He was madly straining upwards, the veins on his forehead bulging with the effort, when he suddenly stopped, a look of true horror on his face. It froze the laughter in my mouth. ‘Gino?’ I said as I leant down to give him a hand. ‘Gino? What is it?’ His eyes swivelled in my direction, almost as if he’d just realised that I was there. ‘There’s something down here,’ he whispered. ‘Something alive. It just touched me on the back. John … get me out of here. It was furry, and I’m pretty sure it’s got teeth.’ ‘Oh, God, the bats,’ I whispered back, which was not a clever thing to do to someone who’s trapped in a verandah with something furry and toothy touching their back. Gino gave a very girl-like squeal of terror and attempted to levitate from the hole, his arms, legs and head stretching upwards as if he could detach them from the rest of his body, his eyeballs looking like they were going to leave their sockets at any second. Every part of him seemed to develop a life of its own, as if by deserting the trapped section of Gino’s body they might have a chance of survival. I had a quick mental flash of arms and legs running off in different directions — a rather nasty image when you’re stuck at a deserted house in the middle of nowhere during a storm — before I leant down and grabbed both his hands.

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‘Take it easy, mate,’ I said as reassuringly as possible. ‘I’ll have you out of there in no time. Try not to think about the bats.’ Which was a dumb thing to say because it immediately had him thinking about bats again. ‘AHHHHHHHHH!’ he screamed, thrashing and bucking about in the hole. ‘AHHHHHHHHHH, AHHHHHHH, AHHHHHHH …’ ‘Jesus, you go on, Gino. Just shut up and relax for a second and I should be able to help you. If you keep jumping about you’ll be stuck here forever.’ This last statement of reassurance did nothing to help at all. ‘They’re all over me, I can feel them. John, they’re eating me, I can feel their teeth. JOHN! JOHN! You’ve got to help me. Get me out of here, get me out NOW!’ And with a sound like rotting timber tearing, Gino popped out of the hole, landing on me full-length, his terror-filled eyes just an inch or so from mine. ‘Happy now?’ I asked as I shoved him away. ‘You bloody great sook.’ ‘Are they following me?’ ‘Of course they are,’ I replied. ‘Can’t you see them pouring out of the hole, all madly pursuing your arse?’ He glanced nervously at the hole in the verandah,

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but there were no winged, furry bodies crawling out after him. I started to move across to the splintered boards, but as I did there was flash of lightning, and what it illuminated made me rock back on my heels in shock. ‘Oh, Gino,’ I whispered. ‘What?’ he said, spinning around so that he could look behind him. ‘What? What?’ ‘Just relax,’ I said. ‘Sit down for a minute, will you, while I take a look at you.’ ‘What’s wrong with me?’ he almost scr e a m e d . ‘What’s happening?’ ‘I think you’ve gone and cut yourself, there’s some blood on your back.’ What I didn’t want to tell him was that his entire back was bloody, a red, glistening mass that looked like something straight out of a Hammer horro r movie. Gino bent his arm back across his shoulder and felt around, a nervous expression on his face. When his fingers came in contact with the blood, he murmured, ‘I’ve been bitten.’ Then his eyes rolled back in his head and he fainted away, landing with a soggy scattering of arms and legs at my feet. ‘A true Roman soldier,’ I said, then bent down to see what I could do about his injuries. In the intermittent flashes of lightning I could see

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that he wasn’t that badly hurt. The fall through the verandah had caused some cuts at the back of his neck and the blood had flowed down, making the wounds look a lot worse than they actually were. I took my wet handkerchief from my drying pants and used it to wipe most of the blood away. There was still a bit oozing from the cuts, but the main flow of blood seemed to have stopped, and once I’d removed the mess from his back he didn’t look too bad. After a while, his eyes flickered open again. ‘Hello, mate,’ I said with a reassuring grin. ‘Welcome back to the land of the living.’ ‘I’m not dead?’ he asked. ‘Not unless I’m an angel and you’ve gone to Heaven.’ ‘Then I’m definitely not dead, there’s no way I’d run into you in Heaven.’ ‘Thanks for the compliment,’ I replied. He carefully felt around behind his neck, flinching when his fingers came in contact with the cuts. ‘Is it bad?’ ‘Nah, just a couple of cuts. You must have done it when you went through the floor. No sign of any bites, though, so I think you’re safe. Smile, will you, just so I can be certain.’

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‘Why do you want me to smile?’ ‘Just checking for fangs. Your grandmother may be right, you know, they could be vampire bats.’ Gino grinned at that. ‘Yeah, you’re fine,’ I said with a laugh. We were both still laughing when the front door of the house suddenly flew open, a shaft of golden light spilling out across the verandah. Our mouths dropped open in surprise. ‘Ooohhh,’ came an excited squeal, ‘naked boys. And in two different flavours. Yummy.’

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O U R I M M E D I AT E reaction was to hold our hands cupped across our groins. To say that we were naked was not exactly accurate, but kneeling there in damp Y- f ronts in front of a group of giggling girls was about as close to it as I ever wanted to be at that stage in my life. Embarrassment doesn’t come near to describing how I felt just at that second, and I wouldn’t even take a guess at what a good Catholic Italian boy must have been going through. Framed in the light from the doorway was the group of girls we’d been with at the games hall the night

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before. As a matter of fact, they were all dressed exactly the same as well, not that I noticed right at that moment. They were lounging about by the doorframe, broad smiles on their faces. ‘Is this how you dress when you go a’callin’ on young ladies?’ Lavinia, who was the girl who’d first spoken, continued. Next to me, Gino spluttered loudly. ‘Hi Elizabeth,’ I said nervously. ‘Fancy meeting you here.’ I shuffled about on my knees, my hands held tightly in front of me. My mind was trying to sort out if there was any way I could position myself so that I wouldn’t be quite so exposed. ‘ H e y, Skinny,’ Lavinia suddenly said, lunging towards me, her face contorted in an angry snarl. ‘I was talking to your friend here. Don’t interrupt me while I’m talking, you hear me? I’ll empty you so fast you’ll look like a rubber chicken!’ ‘Pardon?’ I gulped. The mood had seemed to change so quickly I wasn’t even sure if I’d heard her right. She was leaning right in my face, so close that I could smell her breath, which wasn’t all that pleasant. Mind you, it wasn’t her breath that made me recoil, it was the certainty that Lavinia was about to do me a great deal of damage. There wasn’t a scrap of macho in me at that second. Girl or not, she looked ready to do some serious damage, and I didn’t think for a second I’d be able to stop her.

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‘Lavinia,’ Elizabeth said, stepping forward and taking her friend’s arm. ‘Don’t be so tetchy.’ She looked over at Gino and I and smiled. ‘Lav’s always a bit grumpy when she first wakes up.’ ‘I know what that’s like,’ Gino suddenly squeaked from beside me. ‘My mum’s like that. It’s got to do with sugar levels in her blood.’ ‘Yes,’ Elizabeth agreed, ‘it’s something just like that.’ ‘ We’ve had a bit of an accident,’ I said when it looked like Lavinia had calmed down enough not to take my block off the second I opened my mouth. ‘Gino’s a bit cut up. He fell through your verandah I’m afraid. He’s bleeding.’ ‘I thought I could smell something,’ one of the other girls said excitedly. ‘Now, now,’ Elizabeth said calmly, ‘before everyone gets in a frenzy we should get the boys in out of the storm. They must be freezing, poor things.’ ‘Positively chilled,’ another girl added sweetly. ‘ We thought the house was empty,’ I said to Elizabeth as she helped me up from the verandah. ‘I wouldn’t have thought for a second that you lived here.’ ‘That’s why you were trying the windows, was it?’ she asked. ‘If the house was empty you were going to break in?’

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‘Well … umm.’ I couldn’t think of anything to say. ‘ We could hear you trying them just as we were getting up. I thought it might have been burglars for a second, then we saw you.’ ‘You were just getting up?’ ‘We all had a late night,’ she said dismissively. ‘It took ages to get home after we left you.’ ‘Yeees,’ I said slowly. ‘I’ve been meaning to ask you about that.’ It seemed as good a place to start asking questions as any. Mind you, by this time the number of questions I wanted to ask was beginning to mount up alarmingly: Why were they living way out here? Why were they all living together? Where were their parents? Where did they go to school? And so on and so on. ‘Really?’ Elizabeth patted my arm reassuringly. ‘I’m sure you must have a few things you want to ask me, but we’ve got plenty of time for that. Ages and ages …’ We were inside by this time and my mind was suddenly too taken up with what it was seeing to continue any line of questioning. Dressed as I was, I felt as out of place as a cow in a tea cup. Once through the front door, the house didn’t appear unoccupied. In fact, it looked the exact opposite.

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We entered a large lounge room so cram-packed with furniture it felt as if we’d walked into an antique showroom. There were at least four settees arranged around the walls, life-sized statues of black men and women in strange costumes, side tables, paintings of frowning people dressed in old-fashioned clothing hung in ornate gilt frames, knick-knacks by the bucketful, thick, soft carpets, and the windows were all covered in heavy drapes of red velvet. And strangely, everything was lit by candles. They were in holders all around the room, flickering and a little smoky, making the room appear as if it had emerged unscathed from another century. Everything apart from one painting, that was. It stood on a small easel in one corner of the room, and from a distance looked like something a small child would do.

I MUST HAVE had my mouth wide open because, after I’d been standing staring around the room for a minute or so, Elizabeth leant forward, placed one finger under my chin, and closed it with a loud snap. ‘That’s a … umm …?’ I pointed in the direction of the incongruous painting. ‘Picasso,’ Elizabeth said with a tight smile. ‘He’s a friend of the family.’ ‘Hooly dooly,’ Gino said in an awed whisper from behind me.

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‘I just love it when you speak Italian,’ Lavinia said. ‘It makes me think of home.’ It seemed like the perfect time to ask a question or two about Elizabeth’s family, but before I could she took my arm and led me across to one of the settees. ‘Here, make yourselves comfortable by the fire and we’ll see if we can find you some clothes to wear while yours dry out, something to get your blood moving again.’ There was a massive blaze going in a black marble fireplace which I hadn’t seen on my first inspection of the room. I’d re g i s t e red the fireplace, but I was certain that there hadn’t been a fire in it when I looked. It’s amazing how your mind can play tricks on you when you’re a little out of sorts, I thought as I settled in front of the warmth. Gino plumped down next to me, a smile of immense proportions on his face. The girls fussed and fluttered around us, some of them bringing our wet clothes and carry bag inside, while Elizabeth went to find us ‘something to get our blood moving again.’ ‘We’ll leave your bikes outside for the time being,’ Lavinia said sweetly. ‘We can work out what to do with them later.’ ‘Thanks,’ I replied, smiling and nodding madly. I’m a sucker for people who have already lost their temper at me, and will do virtually anything to try and stay

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in their good books. Now that she seemed to have accepted me — at least she wasn’t snarling and snapping at me like some rabid dog anymore — I was going to do my best to try and see that she remained that way, and if that meant treating her like Lady Muck then so be it. ‘Nice fire,’ Gino whispered in my ear. ‘Who lit it?’ ‘What do you mean?’ ‘It wasn’t going when we first came in, was it? I’d have remembered.’ ‘It must have been, stupid. A fire doesn’t just burst into being, change from wood to flame in a second. You’ve done science, it can’t happen like that. We just didn’t notice, that’s all, we’re tired and you’re hurt. Don’t get any blood on the settee, either, it’s not polite.’ ‘Oh, right,’ Gino said as he leant forward, trying to look back over his shoulder at his injuries. ‘I’d forgotten all about it in the excitement. Maybe we should ask if they’ve got a phone?’ ‘Maybe we should ask what the hell they’re doing out here first,’ I replied. ‘Don’t you think this is just the tiniest bit strange?’ ‘Strange? Yeah, okay, it is a bit, but I’m not complaining. How many times in your life do you reckon you’ll end up all alone in a house with five girls? Five girls and no sign of any parents! This is

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like some wonderful dream, so whatever you do, don’t pinch me.’ Gino still had that ridiculous smile on his face, and all of a sudden everything seemed too funny for words. We both burst out laughing. ‘Something amusing you?’ Lavinia asked, which only made us laugh even louder, though if everything hadn’t seemed so hilarious I might have noticed that her smile didn’t have any humour in it. It was a smile made with the lips, it didn’t go anywhere near her eyes. ‘That’s right,’ she continued. ‘You both relax and have a good laugh. Heaven knows, you need it.’ ‘I’m sorry, Lavinia,’ I spluttered. ‘It’s just that everything is so unexpected. We don’t mean to be rude. I guess we’re laughing from relief more than anything. You don’t happen to have a phone, do you? We really should call our parents and let them know that we’re okay.’ ‘ S o r r y,’ she said as she turned and left the ro o m . ‘There’s no phone, we’ve never had a need for one.’ All of a sudden we were alone. ‘There’s something wrong here, Gino,’ I finally said. ‘No phone, no parents, and this house is too weird for words. And no one’s going to let their kids sleep all day, even if it is the holidays. It’s not right.’ ‘Who cares?’ replied Gino. ‘Opportunity knocks only once, as they say.’

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‘Who says?’ ‘I do,’ he said with a wink. ‘I reckon we’re going to get a chance to do it.’ ‘It?’ He nodded excitedly. ‘Yeah, it.’ I settled back into the settee and tried to look knowledgeable. ‘Ahhh, it, of course.’

‘AND WHY ARE you two grinning like Cheshire cats?’ Elizabeth asked as she re-entered the room carrying a couple of glasses of water. Unlike everything else we’d seen in the house, which was old but in perfect condition, the glasses were chipped and grimy, looking as if they hadn’t been used in years. ‘No reason,’ I said a little too quickly. ‘Yeah, I bet.’ She smiled as if she knew exactly what we’d been talking about, which was more than I could say for myself. I was still pondering the deeper meaning of ‘it’. I had no intention of doing something I knew nothing about, even if everyone else seemed to want to. I took a glass and sipped from it, the water rolling thick and tepid across my tongue. ‘Sorry about the crockery,’ Elizabeth said when she saw the expression on my face. ‘We don’t get a lot of

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call for it. And I don’t seem to be able to find any clothes for you unfortunately. Everything that might fit you is in the wash.’ ‘No worries,’ Gino said. ‘Ours will dry really quickly in front of the fire.’ ‘ W h e re are your parents?’ I suddenly asked. The question had just shot out of my mouth without any encouragement from me, as if my brain was working way ahead of the rest of me, forcing it to do things it hadn’t considered. For a second she looked fazed. ‘Vietnam,’ she finally said. ‘They travel a lot. They’re in the diplomatic corps.’ ‘ T h e re’s a war on there,’ Gino said. ‘Sort of one, anyway.’ Elizabeth nodded. ‘Yes, they do a lot of business during war time. It’s sort of a speciality of theirs. They travel all the time.’ ‘What, and leave you alone here?’ I asked. ‘That doesn’t seem right.’ ‘Oh, we can take care of ourselves, we’re used to it. We all grew up in boarding school, so we know what we’re doing.’ ‘Are you all related?’ Gino said. He seemed to feel that something weird was going on as well now. The girls’ situation was strangely out of kilter, almost

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disturbingly so. Parents didn’t leave kids of our age alone while they went overseas to work. ‘Cousins,’ Elizabeth said hurriedly. ‘We’re staying together during the holidays. Someone comes in to do the cleaning and everything.’ ‘Yeah, of course,’ Gino smiled. The explanation was perfect, he knew all about cousins. I, on the other hand, didn’t. ‘It’s still a little strange. You’re out here in the middle of nowhere, the house is all boarded up on the outside, and you don’t even have a phone. I mean, how do your parents keep in touch with you?’ ‘My, you are a suspicious one,’ she said with a bright laugh. ‘I’ll answer all your questions after we’ve had breakfast. Will you boys be all right while we go off and eat? The girls and I are starving.’ ‘Yeah, we’ll be fine,’ Gino said happily. ‘Just make yourselves at home,’ she called over her shoulder as she flounced out of the room. ‘But don’t go wandering off. This is a big place and it’s easy to get lost. We don’t want you having an accident or anything.’ ‘Breakfast?’ I said after she’d disappeared. ‘Gino, I think we’d better leave. This is all wrong. I’m starting to feel really nervous.’ ‘Don’t be ridiculous,’ he said dismissively. ‘This is

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great. How could you possibly want to leave?’ ‘How about our parents, for starters?’ I snapped at him. ‘They’ll be worried sick. The police could be looking for us by now, for all we know. And there’s something wrong about the girls, can’t you see that?’ ‘If you think there’s something wrong with those girls, then there’s something wrong with you, old b u d d y. Wild horses wouldn’t get me out of here . We’re already in trouble with our parents anyway, so what’s a couple more hours going to do?’ ‘It’s wrong, that’s all. Remember what happened last time we were with them.’ ‘You got kissed and passed out. I wouldn’t complain about that.’ ‘Gino, you’re an idiot,’ I snapped. ‘Come on, calm down. I tell you what, let’s wait until they’ve finished their breakfast and just see how things pan out. Give it one hour, and if you’re still feeling strange about it we’ll go.’ I wasn’t happy about it at all, but it looked like this was going to be the best compromise I was going to get from Gino. Apart from that query he’d made earlier, he didn’t bat an eyelid about the fact that five seemingly normal teenage girls were about to settle down to breakfast at around seven in the evening, lived all alone in what appeared to be an abandoned mansion, didn’t have a phone, stayed up all night

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and slept all day, and had a habit of flying around my back yard in the middle of the night with no clothes on. His mind was somewhere else completely. ‘Okay then, an hour. Not a second longer.’ ‘Good. In the meantime, let’s take a look around.’

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ELEVEN

THE GIRLS HAD all left the lounge room through the same door, which, since they were heading off to breakfast, I presumed led to the kitchen. Everyone I knew ate breakfast in the kitchen, even if they had dining rooms. Gino and I chose another door, which opened up onto a long hallway with doors coming off either side. There were candles in holders all the way down the walls which illuminated more portraits of unhappy people. ‘They must save a fortune on electricity,’ I whispered as we crept along, our bare feet making no sound on

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the polished boards. ‘I haven’t seen a light globe or power socket since we arrived. Now, you’ve got to agree that that’s strange.’ ‘So? They’ve got weird parents, that’s all. They work for the government, so what do you expect? Anyway, just because they don’t live exactly the way you or I do, doesn’t mean there’s something wrong with it.’ I felt like saying that Gino and I didn’t live the same as each other, but there were enough similarities to be able to make comparisons. The girls, on the other hand, didn’t have a lot I could relate to. Then I realised that it wouldn’t be worth the bother, Gino had already made up his mind that they were just fine. As we walked down the hall, we tried the doors that led off it, discovering elaborate bedrooms complete with four-poster beds, mosquito netting, wooden tables with beautiful jugs and bowls for washing with, dressing tables, massive carved wardrobes, arm chairs, more depressing portraits on the walls and lots of flouncy lace all over everything. Each bedroom was almost an exact replica of the others, right down to where the pictures were placed on the walls and the level of water in the washing jugs. ‘They’re very neat, don’t you think?’ I asked Gino. ‘I mean, I’m supposed to be really neat, but even I leave a mess compared to these rooms. You wouldn’t think anyone lived in them.’

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‘They said someone came in to do the cleaning,’ he replied. ‘I guess that’s the reason.’ ‘But they’ve only just got up. They’re having breakfast!’ ‘Yeah, so?’ ‘So there hasn’t been time for anyone to come in and do any cleaning, not if they’re just starting their day. The beds are even made up, Gino.’ For a couple of seconds he looked confused, turning slowly around in the bedroom we had just entered, scratching his head and whistling softly to himself. Then his eyes lit up and he clicked his fingers. ‘ T h e y ’ re boarding school girls, that’s why. Those places are run like concentration camps. Everyone has to get up at the crack of dawn, make their beds, exercise, wash and work. I imagine they made their own beds when they got up, out of habit.’ He grinned at me like he’d just solved one of the great mysteries of the world. ‘Nice theory,’ I replied, ‘except for the crack of dawn bit. These girls don’t seem to get up until the sun goes down.’ ‘They’re on holidays.’ His easy acceptance of everything was beginning to get on my nerves. ‘Okay then, mastermind, why are they still wearing the same clothes they had on last night?’

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‘Maybe they have the same idea about clothes as Albert Einstein.’ ‘Excuse me?’ It wasn’t that I didn’t know who Einstein was, everyone knew that, but I didn’t know the first thing about his dress sense. ‘He wore the same clothes every day, three hundred and sixty-five days a year.’ ‘He must have smelt horrible. Talk about a mad scientist.’ Gino laughed happily. ‘Nah, he just didn’t like to waste time thinking about what to wear every day, so he had seven of the same outfit. Same shirt, pants, jacket, shoes and socks. That way he could work out theories about relativity and stuff instead of having to think about boring things.’ ‘Imagine that,’ I said, impressed. ‘Maybe I should try wearing the same clothes all the time, then I might do better at science. Let’s check out the wardrobes.’ ‘Good idea.’ He strode across and pulled open the doors to the ward robe like he was opening the curtains on a school play. It was empty. ‘ Well, they’re obviously not budding science geniuses,’ I said quietly.

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‘ Y OU KNOW, this place seems a lot bigger on the inside than it does from the outside,’ Gino said as we reached the end of the hall. In all, we’d looked in six bedrooms, each one as big as the lounge room in my parent’s house. The door we were now standing in front of was at the very end of the hall, opposite the one we’d entered by. It was large and made from some hard, dark wood. There were strange carvings all over it. If you put your face really close you could make out heads of people, which looked like they were screaming, and the figures of animals all mixed in together. I could see wolves and birds and fish. They were tiny, the detail astonishing. It looked almost as old as time itself, and it gave me the creeps being close to it. After I’d been staring it for a few seconds, the tiny figures starting to look like they were moving. I jerked back, blinking rapidly. ‘Optical illusion,’ I said. Everything seemed to be an illusion to me at that stage. ‘Yeah, that must be it,’ Gino agreed. It took me a couple of seconds to work out that he thought I’d been talking about the size of the house. ‘Shall we check out what’s behind door number seven?’ asked Gino in his best TV voice. ‘Will it be the Gold Coast holiday or a night on the tiles with Graham Kennedy?’

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‘Don’t be stupid, Gino, I’m not going down there.’ He looked at me strangely. ‘Who said anything about down?’ I shook my head as if to clear it. ‘I don’t know. But if you open that door I’ll bet you find stairs going down, and it’s going to be really, really dark.’ ‘Yeah, right,’ he said as he placed his hand on the doorknob, which was brass and moulded in the shape of a lion’s head. The door swung open, disappearing into blackness. I was about to say, ‘Told you so,’ when the smell hit me, choking off my words as effectively as a stranglehold. It was thick and horrible, seeming to coat your nasal passages and throat as you breathed it in. I’d never smelt anything like it in my life, but, oddly, I knew what it was. ‘Something’s dead down there,’ I gagged, recoiling from the stench. Gino had a look on his face like he’d just swallowed an entire pumpkin. ‘I think you’ve got a point there.’ He reached forward to try and find the doorhandle in the darkness, but as he did he stepped through the actual doorway itself, gave out a strangled yelp and halfturned back towards me, then disappeared himself. I heard a muffled thumping as he rolled down the stairs.

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‘You never listen to a thing I say, do you?’ I shouted after him.

DARKNESS. T h e re has to be something primitive about our reaction to it, something which goes all the way back to when we lived in caves and viewed fire as a treasure stolen from the Gods. If anyone stepped out from the safety of its flickering circle, they had a good chance of getting eaten by creatures a lot larger and stronger than they were, creatures naturally equipped with implements for ripping and tearing and devouring. This distaste for darkness — unless, of course, you’re safely tucked away in bed — has to be part of our genes. I know for certain it’s part of mine. I had absolutely no intention of following Gino down those stairs. ‘Gino!’ I called after him. ‘Hey, Gino, what are you doing?’ There was no reply. I gulped loudly and looked back over my shoulder, wondering if I should go for help. But then I remembered that we’d been instructed not to wander o ff, and to be caught at something we’d been specifically told not to do was even more terrifying than having to walk down stairs in pitch blackness into the overwhelming odour of death.

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(I’ve always been well-mannered, you see, and even though I didn’t always do what I’d been told, I never did so when there was any chance of my being caught out at it. The consequences just weren’t worth it. In those days, disobedience at school meant you’d be liberally beaten with a three foot cane, and if you mucked up at home you’d lose your pocket money and your general liberty as well as cop a thrashing. So, naturally, I was more than a little nervous about admitting to wandering off in the girls’ house against instructions, even if the people who gave those instructions were around my age and more than a little weird themselves. And I really didn’t want to get on the wrong side of Lavinia again.) ‘Stupid bastard,’ I hissed down into the darkness, ‘Arsehole!’ There was still no reply, and I’d pretty much used up my repertoire of insults, so there was only one thing for it. Gingerly, I lifted one foot and went to step into the darkness, then changed my mind. There was no reason I should risk the same fate as Gino, so I went back down the hall and took one of the candles from its holder. It didn’t provide a whole lot of light, and was in constant danger of flickering out as I walked, but it was better than nothing. The tiny amount of light thrown by the candle made the stairs seem to go on forever. Every time the light illuminated another step, there’d by another one underneath it, and so on and so on. Eventually I

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stopped and looked back at the door. It seemed to be miles away, a small rectangle of light standing out of total blackness. ‘Gino? Gino?’ I whispered his name every step I took, but there was no reply. Then, without me seeming to know exactly when it happened, I was standing on packed earth instead of wood. I’d reached the bottom, but there was still no sign of Gino. ‘Oh, this is just great, just great,’ I said to myself, and because I wasn’t expecting a reply I nearly jumped right back up to the hall doorway when a voice answered, ‘Isn’t it.’ ‘Gino?’ I squeaked. ‘Is that you?’ ‘Of course it’s me,’ he said, suddenly moving into the small circle of light thrown by my candle. ‘Who were you expecting, Boris Karloff?’ ‘I wouldn’t have been surprised,’ I muttered angrily. ‘Why the hell didn’t you answer me when I called?’ ‘Sorry. I was having a look around.’ ‘You can’t see a thing down here, how could you have a look around?’ ‘A feel around, then. It’s huge down here. I reckon this cellar’s at least as big as the house, probably bigger. Come over here, there’s some big boxes which I want to get a good look at. Thanks for bringing the light.’

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‘My pleasure.’ I thought I sounded especially sarcastic, but Gino didn’t pay any attention, so I followed him with the candle. He was right, it was the largest cellar I’d ever been in, not that I knew a lot of people with them. The floor was simply earth that had been packed hard by feet tramping on it through the decades, and it gave off that ghastly smell we’d encountered at the top of the stairs. It was as if the cellar had been used as an abattoir and the blood and offal had rotted and soaked into the ground, impregnating it with an odour that would never go away. I didn’t really have any idea of how far I’d come down the stairs, but I had the impression that the ceiling was a long way above us; fifteen or twenty feet at least. ‘This must be what it’s like being in a cave,’ Gino said as we crossed the floor. ‘Maybe it’s where your bats came from.’ ‘Oh, thanks,’ I said, lifting the candle as high as I could. Looking up, I expected to see furry bodies hanging from the ceiling, but the light was too weak to illuminate more than a few feet. We seemed to be encased in blackness, a small pod of light on the bottom of the sea floor. I could only just make out the doorway to the hall, now little more than a tiny rectangle of light in the distance. I have to admit to feeling a certain amount of respect for Gino at that moment. There was no way I’d have

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gone crawling about in the darkness like he’d done, let alone cover the distance he had to find the boxes. T h e re were five of them and they were leaning upright in a row against the wall of the cellar. I stood there looking at them for a very long time b e f o re I said anything, letting the glow from the candle light them in all their glory. ‘Those aren’t boxes, Gino,’ I finally said in a shaky voice. ‘They’re coffins.’ There was a further long period of silence. ‘You know,’ he finally said, ‘for once in your miserable life I think you might be right.’

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TWELVE

WE DECIDED TO leave. It seemed like a reasonable thing to do. There’s something about coffins which always makes me want to be somewhere else, not that I’d seen a lot of them face to face at that stage of my life. I can’t remember which one of us got to the stairs first, but it had to be close. Gino and I crossed the cellar floor in what would have had to be Olympic record time, the candle extinguishing in our flight. But as long as we could see the rectangle of light f rom the open doorway we didn’t panic completely.

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At the bottom of the stairs we both came to a jarring halt. ‘Why are we running?’ Gino panted. ‘Because we’re in a cellar full of coffins, you great screaming nitwit. That seems like a very good reason to get the hell out of here.’ ‘I think we’re being silly. They’re just wooden boxes.’ ‘That you bury dead people in! You ran just as fast as I did, so don’t try and tell me you’re not scared.’ ‘I only ran because you did.’ ‘I only ran because you did,’ I said in the silliest voice I could muster. (It was a voice I used with my younger brother when I really wanted to annoy him, but it seemed to have the opposite effect on Gino.) He laughed. ‘Come on, John, I’ve seen you pull that stunt with Darryl. It’s not going to work. I’m not eight years old, remember?’ ‘Then stop acting like you are. Your grandmother was right about this place, there’s something evil here. Can’t you feel it?’ ‘We don’t even know if this is the house she was talking about. And anyway, all I’ve seen are a few old coffins in a cellar. They’re creepy, I’ll admit that. But upstairs, on the other hand, we have five girls who are just finishing breakfast, and when that’s over who knows what we’ll all get up to. Relax, why

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don’t you? You’re all in a tizz over nothing.’ And right at that second, with a slow, protracted creaking which could have come from a library of h o r ror sound effects, the door at the head of the stairs swung closed. It snicked shut and then, with a ghastly, rolling sound, we heard the tumblers of a lock fall into place. The darkness which descended was awe-inspiring. ‘Satisfied?’ I enquired. Gino didn’t bother replying.

I KNEW THERE was going to be no point trying the door. We’d heard the lock, after all, and whoever had closed the door had been very deliberate about it. But that didn’t stop Gino, who had a stubborn streak which would have tried the patience of a mule. While I sat on the bottom step trying to get my head in some kind of working order, Gino inched his way through the darkness up to the door. I could hear him swearing softly as he struggled with the handle. After a couple of minutes he gave this up and tried banging on the door with both his fists, shouting at the top of his voice to try and attract some attention. I knew this wasn’t going to work either, but by that stage I’d decided there was no point trying to reason with Gino, whose mind was set on one track and wouldn’t be diverted by anything less than a nuclear explosion.

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‘They can’t hear us,’ he bellowed through the darkness. ‘Oh, they can hear us,’ I replied conversationally. ‘They’re just not going to open the door until they’re good and ready.’ ‘Well I don’t think it’s very funny.’ ‘I don’t think they’re too concerned about your sense of humour, either.’ ‘Okay then, genius,’ he said as he came back down, his feet clumsily negotiating the stairs, ‘you seem to have a theory about this. Come on then, out with it. Why aren’t they going to open the door?’ I felt him arrive next to me and sit on the step. It felt weird conversing with someone I couldn’t see at all, even though I could feel him there. Our voices were like disembodied souls floating around in space, lost and frail and homeless. ‘They’ll open the door eventually,’ I finally said. ‘But when they do I have the feeling we’d better not be here, otherwise we’ll be the main course for lunch.’ In the silence that followed I could almost hear Gino’s brain turning over. A couple of times he almost said something, then he’d sigh and the silence would be complete again. I was quite p re p a red to sit there until he’d worked it out for himself, just to see if he came to the same unpleasant conclusion that I had. The last thing I wanted to do

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was to try and influence his thinking. Eventually, he made up his mind. ‘You’re nuts,’ he said with feeling. ‘I know exactly what you’re thinking, and you’re so far off it’s ridiculous.’ ‘Okay then, what am I thinking?’ ‘I don’t want to say it. I’d feel silly.’ ‘ You’d better, otherwise we’ll still be sitting here when that door opens, and that’s not something I’m all that excited about.’ There was a pause, another long sigh, and then he whispered one word, spitting it from his lips like poison. ‘Vampires.’ ‘Got it in one,’ I said, relieved. At least we appeared to be on the same wavelength. ‘ Yo u ’ re spending too much time with my grandmother,’ he said disgustedly. ‘I thought you didn’t believe in them.’ ‘I didn’t,’ I said as I reached over and grabbed Gino by the arm, hauling him to his feet. ‘But I do now. There’s enough evidence here to convince a grand jury, and I certainly don’t want to be here pretending not to believe when that door opens and they come on down and turn us into rubber chickens!’ ‘What?’

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‘Something Lavinia said. Don’t worry about it. I don’t suppose you have any matches so I can light this candle?’ ‘Yeah, sure. I always carry them in my underwear.’

SO THAT WE didn’t get separated, we linked arms and shuffled into the darkness like some drunken fourlegged beast, weaving this way and that as we tried to find one of the walls. The stairs, we’d worked out, came down in the middle of the cellar, so we figured that whatever direction we headed in would eventually lead us to something solid. I was counting on there being another door, or at least a window of some kind, which we could force to make our escape. We must have gone round in circles a couple of times, though, because it seemed to take ages before we smacked into the wall. We both gave out a loud ‘ooff’ of surprise as our noses slammed into rock and we care e re d backwards, falling to the floor. ‘I think I’ve found the wall,’ Gino said, quite unnecessarily. ‘And if I could find your face I’d punch it,’ I muttered as I edged back to the wall, moving a little slower this time so that I didn’t impact with it at quite the same rate of knots. The stone was icy cold

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to the touch and slightly damp, but at least it was solid and we now had something to work with. ‘Okay, we have ignition.’ ‘We’re in a cellar, idiot, not a sputnik.’ ‘Sorry, just trying to lighten our situation a little.’ ‘I’d prefer it if you could just light the candle.’ Once we got over our tantrums, Gino and I arranged ourselves at the wall and linked arms again. ‘Right or left?’ he enquired. ‘Does it matter?’ We chose left and gradually started to inch our way along, feeling about for gaps in the wall. The stone was uneven and I could feel myself losing skin whenever my knuckles or the side of my hand encountered any rough outcrops. We were a duo of aches and pains as we moved, yelping as we gouged our hands in our efforts to find an escape. Suddenly, Gino gave out a louder yelp than normal and there was a huge crashing sound, followed by another, then another, and so on. It sounded like he’d stumbled into a hardware store. ‘I think I’ve found the coffins,’ he said when silence finally descended again. ‘And I may have tipped a couple over.’ ‘Now we’ll know if they’re occupied or not,’ I

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snarled. ‘There could be vampires standing right in front of us and we wouldn’t know the difference.’ As soon as I said this I realised the implications, and I felt Gino freeze at the same time I did. We stood there in silence, our ears pricked for the slightest sound. After a couple of minutes, I felt Gino relax. ‘Panic merchant,’ he muttered. ‘Clumsy oaf,’ I replied. Then we both started giggling hysterically, the tension dissipating as quickly as it had arrived.

THEY WERE COFFINS all right, we could feel the silk linings as we carefully negotiated our way across them. They had fallen in a massive jumble, the lids coming off and creating an obstacle course through the darkness. At one stage I tripped and ended up half inside one, the smell of decay closing around me as I thrashed about trying to escape. ‘Oh God, this is a nightmare,’ I said after Gino had managed to find my hand and help me out. ‘I’ve been in a coffin!’ ‘It’ll be one amazing What I Did On My Holidays essay when we’re back at school,’ Gino said jovially. ‘No one would believe me.’ ‘I would.’ And just at that second I felt something. It wasn’t

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much, and for a few seconds I thought I must have imagined it, but then I felt it again. It was the hair on one side of my head, and it seemed to be moving slightly. ‘Gino?’ ‘What?’ ‘Can you feel that? I can feel air moving.’ ‘It was a nervous fart,’ he said sheepishly, ‘I couldn’t help it.’ ‘Stop being an idiot!’ I snapped. ‘Just stand still for a minute.’ ‘It’s a family problem,’ he said sulkily, but then fell silent. There was another gentle puff of air, coming from somewhere in front of us. ‘Did you feel it that time?’ I said. ‘Too right,’ he replied. ‘Let’s get moving.’ We carefully edged our way forward again, keeping close to the wall to retain our bearings, our arms still hooked together, until finally the air was blowing right in our faces. ‘I’ve found it,’ Gino said triumphantly. ‘It’s a passage.’

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THIRTEEN

IT

WA S D O O R L E S S ,

which immediately made me suspicious. Why would they lock the door to the cellar if they knew that there was a way out? Perhaps they didn’t think we’d find it in the dark, but I doubted that; and they must have known that we had the candle, even though I didn’t have any way of relighting it. The only thing I could think of was that they wanted us to find the passage, and that when we got to the end of it we’d discover the reason why. I can’t say that I was enthusiastic about the thought of making that discovery, but we didn’t have a lot of options. The only other thing we could do was sit in

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the stinking darkness with the empty coffins and wait for them to come and get us, which had about as much appeal as a setting my own head on fire. Gino went first, much to my relief. ‘It’s pretty narrow,’ he said, his voice echoing strangely. ‘There’s really only room for one person at a time.’ ‘Not a good place to get trapped in, I’d think.’ ‘No,’ he replied. ‘Not good at all. Let’s not have that happen, eh?’ ‘Well I’ll do my best, but I won’t be able to tell if someone’s coming up behind us. I can’t see a thing.’ ‘And I won’t be able to see anything coming from the front, either, so there’s not much we can do about it. I guess we’ll just have to handle it if it happens.’ ‘Handle what?’ ‘Whatever it is you’re worried about. Now shut up and start shuffling.’ We inched our way into the passage, our shoulders brushing the cold, slimy rock on either side. Every couple of steps my face would collide sharply with the back of Gino’s head, causing my eyes to water and him to curse loudly about my general clumsiness. As we progressed, I had the distinct feeling that the passage curved around to the right and that were also moving in a slightly upwards direction, but in the darkness it was hard to be certain of anything. I’m

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generally not a claustrophobic person, but the close p roximity of the rock walls was making me understand the phenomenon. Even though I was only wearing Y- f ronts and there was an intense chill coming from the surrounding rock, I could feel beads of sweat popping out all over my body, which would combine and trickle down my forehead or the back of my neck. To try and take my mind off what was happening, I imagined myself as one of those incredibly ugly deep sea creatures which never see the light of day, their entire lives, from birth to death, lived out in darkness. But then I remembered that most of those fish had luminous growths on their heads or along the sides of their bodies, so even they were better off than I was at that moment. The only sounds that accompanied us were our breathing and the shuffle and scrape of our feet on the earth floor; though every now and then we’d add a curse for good measure when one of us scraped off some more skin on the walls. One good thing about the passage, though. The further we walked along it, the fainter that horrible smell became, until it was no longer with us at all, just a memory of something unpleasant, the way a sudden burp will remind you of a meal that you’d rather forget. Finally, Gino stopped and I heard a sound which obviously wasn’t made by contact with a rock surface.

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‘What is it?’ I hissed. ‘A door,’ Gino replied. I could hear him tapping it gently with his knuckles and the furtive sound of his hand slithering over the surface in search of a handle. ‘Where do you reckon it leads?’ ‘How should I know? I’ve lost all sense of direction. We could be at your cousin’s place for all I know.’ ‘Wouldn’t that be a relief.’ In the darkness I heard Gino’s slithering hand become a lot less furtive as he continued to search for the door handle, until he started slapping the wood in frustration. ‘What are you doing?’ I whispered urgently. ‘You’re going to let them know we’re here.’ ‘ T h e re’s no handle,’ he replied, the exasperation clear in his voice. ‘We’re trapped.’ ‘Nonsense. If it’s a door, it has to have a handle.’ Then I thought for a minute. ‘Unless it’s a sliding door. Here, let me try.’ After some considerable jiggling about, Gino and I finally managed to change places. In front of me I could feel the smooth wood of the door, and Gino was quite correct, there was no handle. No amount of pushing, either forward or sideways, seemed to budge it in the least. In the end, I gave up as well. ‘We’re going to have to go back,’ I said, leaning

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against the wall of the passage. As I did, my back came in contact with an outcrop of stone — or at least it felt like that — and I was about to move forward again to ease the discomfort when it moved away from me with a low grinding noise. At the same time, there was a gentle ‘click’ from the direction of the door and a sudden sliver of light cut t h rough the darkness, highlighting one of Gino’s wide and terrified eyes. It immediately brought to mind images of the Poe story, The Tell Tale Heart. ‘What did you do?’ he asked quietly. ‘I don’t know,’ I whispered back. ‘But whatever it was, it worked.’ ‘Well open it then, you’re in front.’ ‘I’m not sure I want to,’ I said nervously. ‘Anything could be on the other side. Maybe if I take just a little peek, not push it all the way open.’ ‘Just do something,’ he hissed in my ear. ‘I don’t want to stand here all night, I’m freezing to death.’ ‘That might be preferable to what’s on the other side of the door.’

CAREFULLY, I PUT my eye up to the crack and eased the door forward until I could see into the room. It was empty. Well, almost.

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On the floor on the opposite side of the room were what looked like three half-empty bean bags. Apart from that, it was just an ordinary room with a couple of lighted candles in holders along the wall. ‘It looks safe,’ I whispered back over my shoulder. ‘It’s just an empty room.’ ‘Let’s get going then,’ Gino said eagerly. ‘I can’t wait to get out of here.’ I started to ease the door further open when the door on the opposite side of the room suddenly flew back. I hurriedly drew back inside, pulling the door almost closed after me. ‘What are you doing?’ Gino tried to shove his way past me in his eagerness to get out of the passage. ‘Don’t close that, we’ll never get it open again.’ I slapped a hand over his mouth and pulled his head close so that I could whisper. ‘Shut your trap. There’s someone there.’ His eyes swivelled about wildly and I gave his head a good shake to make sure he understood. Finally, he seemed to calm down and I took my hand away, indicating with a raised finger that he was to stay exactly where he was. He nodded and I turned back to the door again and peered into the room. Just coming through the other door was Lavinia. She

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seemed to be carrying another deflated bean bag, but what caught my attention was the fact that she didn’t seem to be walking. Instead, she seemed to glide into the room, her hair and clothes rippling about her as she moved. From what I could work out, her feet were a couple of inches above the floor. The other thing that bothered me was the blood. From her mouth down to her chest she seemed to be soaked in it. It was all over her chin and neck and it had drenched the top she was wearing. For a second I thought she might have injur e d herself, but from the look on her face I realised that wasn’t the case. She looked more alive than ever (which is a hard thing to do when you’re clinically dead, I thought) and her eyes seemed to blaze with energy and excitement. I watched as she floated across the floor and dropped her bundle down next to the others. It made a horrible squelching noise and wobbled about on the floor a bit before settling. There was something strangely familiar about it, but I couldn’t quite make it out.

SHE HOVERED THERE for a while, looking down at the bundle with a slight smile on her face, then her head suddenly jerked around in our direction. I froze as her eyes moved over the door I was hiding behind, my skin prickling with goosebumps. For a few

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seconds she was as still as myself, her eyes glaring i n t e n t l y, almost as if she could see me. Then she lifted her head and gave a loud, throaty chuckle. When she did this I almost fainted, because when she opened her mouth wide to laugh I caught a very good glimpse of her teeth, and they were far from normal. Gleaming blood-wet on either side of her mouth were two unnaturally long canine teeth, and I had a pretty good idea of what she used them for. I was right. Gino and I were in the presence of vampires. And just then a freezing cold hand settled on my s h o u l d e r, making me utter a loud shriek of pure terror and burst through the door into the room.

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FOURTEEN

THE FORCE WITH which I came through the door sent me sprawling full-length on the floor, where I stayed with my hands crossed over the back of my head waiting for the savage thrust and suck of vampire teeth in my neck. When, after what must have been a full minute of awful anticipation, I realised that I wasn’t being drained dry, I carefully lifted my face from the floor. There was a closed door in front of me and no sign of Lavinia. I looked wildly around the room.

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Apart from Gino standing rather sheepishly at the door to the passage and the four collapsed bean bags, the room was empty. ‘Where’d she go?’ I asked. ‘Who?’ ‘Lavinia, you idiot. She was floating in the air and t h e re was blood all down her chin and over her chest.’ ‘You must be seeing things,’ he said as he stepped into the room. ‘When you did your commando leap into the room it was empty. I mean, I could see everything, and there was no one except you lying on the floor with your hands on your head.’ I leapt angrily to my feet. ‘It was you, wasn’t it? You grabbed me on the shoulder, you great blithering pillock. I nearly had a heart attack.’ ‘I just wanted to have a look,’ he said in a surly voice. ‘I was only trying to see past your head.’ Now that I knew I wasn’t about to be sucked dry, my body was reacting to the shock with great shudders, starting at my neck and working their way down to my feet. I felt sick and strangely lethargic, followed by the overwhelming desire to lie right back down again and go to sleep. ‘What on earth are those things?’ Gino said as he moved towards the bean bags. ‘They look like

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they’re made of some sort of skin.’ ‘Don’t touch them,’ I warned. ‘Lavinia was carrying one when she came into the room.’ ‘I think you were imagining things,’ he said as he reached down and took hold of one of the bags. ‘I was right on your heels and I didn’t see anyone else.’ Then he suddenly leapt back. ‘Jesus Christ!’ he screamed. ‘It’s got a face!’

IT HAD A LOT more than that: arms, legs, everything. What’s more, I recognised him. ‘Oh God, Gino, it’s that guy from the games hall. The one you were gonna brain with a pool cue.’ Our altercation in the pool hall seemed like a lifetime ago. Gino made an awful moaning noise, followed closely by the sound of him tossing his lunch in the corner of the room. I wasn’t far behind him. When our stomachs finally settled down, we laid all four of the bodies out on the floor so that they resembled — as much as they could — human beings again. It wasn’t easy to do as their limbs were all loose, almost as if the bones had become disjointed, and it was difficult to grip the slippery skin. All of them had the same expression on their faces, a ghastly rictus of surprise and pain combined with a look of absolute terror, as if they’d seen the end of the world; it obviously wasn’t a pleasant one.

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‘Look at the bite marks,’ Gino said quietly, not that I needed them pointed out. ‘It looks like they’ve been attacked by my grandmother’s knitting club.’ Each of them had puncture wounds running from their wrists right up to their shoulders, clusters of them around their necks, and further marks on their legs and stomachs. ‘They look like … like … ’ I couldn’t find words to describe the strange, loose collection of skin and bones that had once been four healthy young men. ‘Rubber chickens?’ Gino suggested. ‘Lavinia really has a way with words. I was right, wasn’t I?’ ‘About vampires? You’ve got no argument from me anymore.’ ‘What are we going to do?’ I asked. ‘Get the hell out of here. Find something to protect ourselves. Fall in a heap and cry a lot. You choose.’ ‘How about if we protect ourselves first, then try and get out of here? If that doesn’t work, I’m prepared to accept your last option.’ ‘ T h e re’s something else I’ve just thought about,’ Gino said in a worried tone. ‘In all the vampire movies I’ve ever seen, anyone who gets sucked comes back as one of the undead.’ ‘Yeah, so?’

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‘So we don’t just have the girls to worry about, do we?’ I looked at the four bodies on the floor in front of us. ‘I see your point. Mind you, these guys don’t look like they’re going anywhere fast.’ ‘You want to wait around and find out?’ ‘Not on your life!’ T h e re were only two ways out of the room; the passage we’d entered by and the door on the opposite side. The room had no windows. Except for the candles burning in holders on the wall, it was bare. ‘We’d better get going,’ I said finally. ‘Yeah, but let’s do something with these guys first,’ Gino said decisively. ‘I really don’t want them coming after us as well.’ I looked down at the still damp pair of Y-fronts I was wearing, then across at Gino. ‘I don’t know about you, but I’m all out of wooden stakes, holy water and garlic. What do you suggest we do with them?’ He looked thoughtful for a moment. ‘I do know w h e re there’s some garlic. I’ve got half of one of mum’s salamis in my bag. That’s so soaked in garlic it’d make Dracula choke. In the meantime, let’s shove these guys back in the passage and close the door. If nothing else, it’ll slow them down for a bit.’

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I glared at him. ‘These girls can fly, they’re stronger than us, they’ve got teeth like Rottweilers and there’s five of them. And you want to protect us with half a sausage!’ ‘Got any better ideas?’ I hadn’t, so I helped him drag the bodies into the passage and close the door on them. We crossed to the other door and paused. ‘Here goes nothing,’ Gino said, and he slowly turned the handle.

IT WAS ANOTHER hall with doors coming off it, though only on one side. The other had windows, but we could see that they were solidly boarded up on the other side, so there was little chance of us getting out that way. Originally, it must have been some sort of sleep-out that had been enclosed. ‘They must go through an awful lot of candles,’ Gino said as he peered out of the room. ‘This place is huge, and they’ve got them burning everywhere.’ ‘I’ll bring that up with them the next time we talk,’ I replied. ‘Now do you think we can do something about getting out of here instead of discussing their household problems?’ ‘ S o r r y,’ Gino muttered. ‘I was just wondering if vampires caught fire.’

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‘Doesn’t that happen after you’ve staked them in the heart?’ ‘Christ knows.’ ‘I suppose he would,’ I replied. ‘Let’s go.’ We eased our way along the wall until we reached the first door, which opened into the kitchen. Luckily for us it was empty. It was pretty much like every kitchen I’d ever seen, except for one fact. The table which dominated the centre of the room came complete with heavy leather straps attached to all four corners, plus a larg e r, thicker strap across the middle. Around the edges of the table and over the floor underneath were puddles of something dark. When I touched them they were sticky, and the smell when I lifted my fingers to my nose was horrid. ‘It’s blood,’ I whispered. ‘I think we’ve found where they like to have b reakfast,’ Gino replied. ‘See if you can find any weapons in the cupboards or drawers.’ We searched but, as the saying goes, the cupboards were bare, as were the drawers and everything else we looked in. ‘I guess they don’t do a lot of cooking,’ I said. ‘No, idiot!’ snarled Gino in frustration. ‘Everything they have is strictly takeaway.’ He looked wildly

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about himself. ‘That door over there must lead back to the lounge room. If they’re not in there we might be able to sneak out, or at least grab that salami from my bag.’ ‘Gee, that should really scare them.’ Just then we heard a noise from back the way we’d come, a sort of whispering sound in the hall behind us. Gino raised his finger to his lips for silence, not that I really needed the warning; my throat was frozen solid with fright. Quite clearly, we heard the sound of a door handle turning, followed by a sound that made my hair stand on end. It was a scream, but not of fright or surprise. It was rage, pure and unadulterated, full of the promise of revenge. The effect on Gino and I was instantaneous. Without having to consult each other, we both turned and bolted for the door through to the lounge room, all thought of secrecy and silence gone in a second of wild panic. Just as I was about to slam the door behind me I saw the kitchen door swing open and smash into the wall, a massive cloud of plaster erupting as it did, and the figure of Lavinia appeared framed in the opening. Her red hair was flying all about her head and she had a look on her face which would have frozen the Pacific Ocean.

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Briefly we looked each other in the eye, then she broke into a maniacal grin and bellowed so loudly I thought my eardrums would burst. ‘LUNCHTIME!’ she screamed. ‘AND I FA N C Y ITALIAN!’

GINO AND I slammed the door behind us. There was no lock, so we sat on the floor with our backs to the wood holding it closed. ‘Nice date you’ve got there,’ I said. ‘Glad she doesn’t fancy me.’ ‘Being sucked into something that resembles a rubber chicken wasn’t exactly what I had in mind when I said I liked her,’ he replied. Beads of sweat were popping out all over his brow and running in tiny rivulets down the side of his face. I imagined that I must have looked pretty much the same. I could feel Lavinia carefully trying the door handle, then, when that didn’t work, rattling it madly. ‘Come on guys,’ I heard her whisper (though I couldn’t really be sure I heard it at all, the words just seemed to enter my head), ‘it really doesn’t hurt at all. It just looks a little painful.’ ‘Try telling that to those four other guys,’ I said to the now-shuddering door. ‘They look like they’d been having the time of their lives.’

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The door was now rattling alarmingly on it hinges and I was pretty sure Gino and I wouldn’t be able to hold it much longer. I was about to suggest we make a break for the front door when Lavinia’s head suddenly smashed through the wood and appeared between Gino and myself. ‘SURPRISE!’ she bellowed, then her hands erupted through the door as well and caught us both by the neck. It felt like I had an anaconda wrapped around my throat, cutting off all my air, and I could feel my eyes beginning to bulge. My body started to thrash around all by itself, panic setting all my senses into overdrive. Quite calmly, Lavinia put her head up to my ear and whispered, ‘I never liked you,’ and then bit off my left ear lobe. Even her grip on my throat couldn’t cut off the scream which came belting out of me like a bull at a rodeo. I’d never felt pain like it in my life, and I hope never to again. She spat the lobe onto the floor at my feet and grinned at me through bloody lips. ‘First I’m going to bite your whole face off,’ she said sweetly, ‘then I’m going drain your friend while you watch. After that, Elizabeth and the girls can do what they like with you. Fair enough?’ I didn’t really have a reply. Behind her head I could see Gino going a peculiar shade of purple. At any

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second he was going to pass out completely. ‘You’re so cute’ she said, turning to Gino. Then she stuck out her tongue and licked him along the side of his face like he was an ice-cream. During my struggles, my foot seemed to have snagged something, and when I looked down I found that it was Gino’s bag. I carefully drew it closer, hoping Lavinia couldn’t see what I was doing. Lavinia had her head close to Gino — whose tongue was now poking out of his mouth and his eyes rolling back in his head — and was whispering something in his ear, confident that she had me under control. I slipped my hand inside the bag and searc h e d frantically until my fingers found something hard and greasy. This better be the salami, I thought. S u d d e n l y, Lavinia spun her head back in my direction. ‘Time to go,’ she said, her breath positively poisonous. ‘Face first.’ Then she opened her mouth and lunged at my face.

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FIFTEEN

‘EAT THIS!’ I snarled, and shoved the salami as far into her gaping mouth as I could. The effect was instantaneous. She bit down hard on the sausage, then her eyes suddenly started to bulge. For a split second I thought she was just going to spit the thing right back into my face, but her teeth were clamped solidly into the tightly packed meat. A sound like a siren going off issued from her throat, her hand dropped away from my neck, and then she simply exploded, the force throwing Gino and I in different directions halfway across the lounge room. I crashed into a settee and bounced straight back to

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my feet, my eyes swivelling madly about in search of Lavinia. But there was nothing except destruction to be seen. The door through to the kitchen was gone completely, tiny bits of planking scattered all about the room. Small tables and knick-knacks had been thr o w n everywhere, paintings knocked askew on the walls. ‘Jesus,’ said Gino, dragging himself from behind a fallen chair, ‘what was that?’ ‘Your girlfriend ate something that disagreed with

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her,’ I replied, picking up the fallen salami from the floor. Apart from the clear indentations of Lavinia’s teeth, it appeared unscathed, unlike the thing that had been chewing on it. ‘Where’s she gone?’ Gino enquired groggily. ‘Everywhere and nowhere, I would think.’ I wasn’t quite sure what had happened to her, I was just grateful to have most of my face in one piece. ‘What was she saying to you?’ Gino shook his head. ‘She said she wanted to keep me forever.’ ‘Nice way of showing her appreciation, sucking you dry first. Let’s get out of here while we still can.’ Gino lurched towards the front door, which suddenly swung open in front of him as if by magic. Floating in the doorway, backlit by the lightning that was still flashing outside, were three of the girls, their eyes red with hunger. ‘Here,’ I shouted, ‘catch!’ And tossed the salami to Gino. He snatched it out of the air, whirling back to face the three girls, thrusting the salami like a rapier in front of him. ‘You want a piece of what your friend got?’ he snarled at them. ‘Cause if you do, you’ll end up in pieces just like she did!’ They hovered in the air, their eyes surveying the damage to the room, searching for signs of Lavinia. There wasn’t a lot to see.

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‘Run!’ Gino shouted back over his shoulder, and that was all the encouragement I needed.

NOW, YOU MAY think it cowardly that I ran as I did, but to be completely honest, I really don’t give a s t u ff. You weren’t there, and if you were you probably would have done exactly the same thing. I no longer look back at my desertion as anything other than a natural reaction to extreme terror. After all, I was just a kid fresh from the country. The closest I’d come to real danger in my life had been the time I saved Gino from a beating and when he nearly got both our heads knocked off at the games hall. Somehow, close encounters with the undead seemed to exceed these dramatically, and I simply wasn’t equipped to cope, especially since I’d tossed our only means of protection across to Gino. I fled down the hallway Gino and I had first used and threw myself into the nearest bedr o o m , slamming the door behind me. Still gasping for breath, I looked wildly about the room, hoping to discover some form of weapon. It was highly unlikely I’d come across holy water in this particular house, and since Gino had the only garlic available and there was no such thing as bottled sunlight, the single option I had left was a wooden stake.

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Unfortunately, none were lying about ready for use. I’d have to smash up a chair or pull the legs from a side table. Quickly, I knelt down and listened at the door to check for sounds of pursuit, but all I could hear through the thick wood were far-off crashing and banging noises. I hoped Gino was the one starting the noises rather than being on the end of them. I grabbed the chair from beside the door, raised it above my head and was about to smash it to the floor when someone quietly said my name fro m behind me. Slowly, I turned around. The room seemed as empty as it had been when I’d arrived. I swallowed loudly and pressed back against the door, letting the chair fall with a thump beside me. ‘Up here,’ the voice continued. I slowly raised my eyes to the ceiling. Elizabeth was hanging there like some giant variety of fly, her head hanging back, looking at me upsidedown. ‘Oh, hi,’ I croaked, slowly sliding down to the floor to get as far from her as possible. ‘Has Lavinia been giving you boys a hard time?’ she enquired, smiling as she spoke. ‘She can get especially nasty when she’s hungry.’

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‘I think she might be a bit fed up with us,’ I replied weakly. My eyes were rapidly scanning the room in search of a something … anything … that could serve as a weapon, but I seemed to be right out of luck. It was unlikely that she’d just hang up there and wait while I smashed her furniture to pieces and tried to fashion a stake. ‘Don’t be nervous,’ she said, the smile still touching the corners of her mouth, ‘I’m not going to eat you.’ Then she let go of the ceiling, turned gently in mid air and floated down to land in a sitting position on the edge of the bed. ‘Funnily enough,’ I said in a whisper, ‘I don’t believe you.’ Elizabeth clucked her tongue like my mother sometimes did when she thought I’d said or done something especially silly. She patted the edge of the bed next to her. ‘Come and sit over here and I’ll explain everything.’ I shook my head. ‘Sorry. Not on your life … not that you have one.’ As I did this I felt drops of blood from my ear splatter about on my shoulder. In all the fuss, I’d forgotten about the wound. A look of concern swept over Elizabeth’s face. ‘Oh, what has that girl gone and done? You’ve been disfigured.’ Then she rose from the bed and floated across the room towards me, the smile never leaving her face.

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My face, on the other hand, must have registered extreme alarm, because she stopped halfway towards me and gently dropped to the ground. ‘I guess that must frighten you when we do that,’ she said as her feet silently hit the floor. I shivered in agreement. She strode across to me and knelt down, touching my face gently so that she could get a better look at my ear. ‘That’s a nasty little nip she’s given you.’ ‘You should have heard what she had in mind for the rest of my face.’ Elizabeth chuckled. ‘Not the old I’ll eat your face off routine. She’s always threatening that, and I’ve only ever seen her do it once. The guy deserved it, though. Thought he was just sooo handsome. Lav sorted him right out.’ She suddenly appeared thoughtful. ‘Where is she, by the way? Still playing with your friend?’ ‘Gino’s teaching her some of his mother’s recipes, I think.’ Elizabeth took her hand away from my face. There was blood on her fingers, and, almost absentmindedly, she licked it off, her eyes closing in delight. When they opened again there was a faraway look in them, something strangely dark and mysterious, as if the taste of blood made her aware of things far beyond the scope of mere mortals, but it disappeared the moment she saw me looking at her.

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‘Right,’ she said, leaning across and taking me in her arms, ‘we have a lot of talking to do.’ And with that, she lifted me off the ground and gently flew us across to the bed. Which is when I fainted.

I’M NOT SURE how long I was unconscious, but it can’t have been too long. When I came back to reality I was lying full-length on the bed and Elizabeth was sitting next to me holding my hand. ‘Welcome back,’ she said. ‘Am I still living?’ I asked nervously, my free hand searching about my neck for fresh holes. ‘For the time being. There’s a few things we have to discuss first.’ Instead of puncture wounds, my hand discovered a small bandage where my ear lobe used to be. ‘What would they be?’ I asked. ‘ Well …’ Now it seemed to be her turn to look nervous. ‘… your decision to become one of us. You see, I can’t bring you into the fold unless you are completely willing to do so. It won’t work otherwise. And I’m more concerned about that than I am about feeding. I can feed anytime.’ I carefully pulled my hand away from hers and sat up. I wondered what had happened to Gino, but then

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decided that my situation deserved my full attention. Unless I worked my way out of where I was, it seemed unlikely that I’d be seeing daylight for a very long time to come. ‘I’m sorry,’ I said, ‘but I don’t understand. You’re saying you want me to become a vampire?’ She nodded. ‘I thought that everyone who got … drained? … turned into vampires.’ I was trying to edge as far away from her as possible, but every time I moved she moved with me. She laughed. ‘That old folk tale. No, it doesn’t work like that. We choose our companions very carefully, and they have to be completely willing before the process has a hope of working. And even then it can be dangerous, especially if you change your mind halfway through.’ Elizabeth reached across and brushed the hair back from my forehead. ‘That’s why I’ve been watching you, I had to know you were right.’ ‘So it was you outside my bedroom window the other night.’ ‘Yes. You have a very cute younger brother, by the way. Darryl, isn’t it? We had a nice chat.’ Elizabeth lowered her head and looked slightly embarrassed. ‘I suppose you’re wondering why I was naked?’ ‘Me? No, girls do that outside my bedroom all the time.’

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Elizabeth didn’t seem to think that was the least bit f u n n y. She shook her head a little sadly and continued to explain. ‘It’s part of shape changing. A bat would look rather silly wearing these clothes, wouldn’t it? Or a dog. I find if I’m travelling long distances I prefer to do it as a bat, and I can’t exactly carry my clothes with me.’ All of a sudden I was interested, not that it stopped me being any less afraid. ‘You can change into those things? Can you do any other impersonations?’ ‘I’d hardly call them impersonations, but no, bats and dogs seem to be about all we can manage. But then there are the other advantages, like flight and being able to move faster than your eye can see.’ And with that she disappeared. ‘Like this,’ she said from the other side of the room, then she was back next to me on the bed again. ‘That would be very handy if I was playing football,’ I agreed. ‘I don’t think you’ll be playing a lot of sport, not during the day, anyway. You could call that the down side of our existence. Sunlight and vampires don’t really go together.’ ‘What about my family? I’m not sure I’m ready to leave home yet. I mean, I haven’t even finished high school.’ ‘Everyone leaves home at some time, John.’

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‘Not at my age they don’t.’ ‘I did,’ she said. ‘And that was at a time when people usually stayed with their parents until they were married, way back before the war.’ ‘ You saw the war?’ No wonder she’d seemed so grown up. God, she was ancient. At least as old as my parents. ‘Oh yes,’ she said, that faraway look coming back into her eyes. ‘It was a good time for me. At that time in Europe, no one noticed the activities of vampires, there were simply too many bodies around. I could wander through cities after battles, feasting on the wounded. Most of them were happy to see me because I brought an end to their suffering.’ ‘What about all your cousins? They don’t exactly look like wounded soldiers to me.’ ‘Everyone needs friends, John, you should know that. Companionship is as much a part of being a vampire as it is being human. And during the war, people took any way out they could. I had no trouble convincing them to join me.’ ‘So why me? What was wrong with the four other guys, the ones that Lavinia turned into r u b b e r chickens?’ ‘Oh, they weren’t very nice. And they refused to understand. But you understand, don’t you, John?’

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I sat very straight and nodded my head vigorously. I could see no point in disagreeing with what she was saying, especially since I didn’t fancy the other option. To me, it was a bit like having something a bit beyond your comprehension explained at school, when you didn’t want to appear like an idiot to the teacher. You just kept nodding and nodding until the problem went away, then hope to hell you could sort it all out afterwards. But Elizabeth was a bit smarter than most of the teachers I’d encountered, she wasn’t having a bar of it. ‘Good, I’m glad,’ she said, her face going suddenly serious. ‘Now explain it all back to me. It’s getting late, and if we want to do this properly we have to get started.’ ‘Ah, riiight. Uum, do you think we might be able to put it off for a bit? It’s a big decision, after all, and … you know … I’d like to think it over. Sleep on it for a while.’ She shook her head. ‘No, John, you have to decide now. The only way you and your swarthy friend are ever going to leave here is as vampires. Otherwise …’ Elizabeth shrugged and looked sad for a second. ‘We wouldn’t have gone to all the trouble of enticing you here if we were just going to let you go again. The next thing you know, there’ll be people here with wooden stakes and crosses and all that other weird paraphernalia they like to throw at us. It can really ruin a girl’s night. Not to mention her complexion.’

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Then a sudden change came over her, more dramatic than that first time in the alley. I was seeing the real creature underneath the dark haired, green eyed girl I’d been so taken with at the games hall. Her face seemed to suddenly wrinkle, her lips drawing back in a snarl which clearly showed the massive canines at the sides of her mouth. There was a reddish gleam to her eyes and I could see thousands of fine lines running away on either side of them, making her look much older and very seriously evil. She leant down so that her face was just inches from my own, her foul breath making my eyes water. In a voice several octaves deeper than the one she’d been using, she said, ‘Decide, boy, and be quick about it.’

‘O KAY,’ I

SQUEAKED ,

‘you win. Just don’t hurt me, okay? I’m not too good with pain.’

As far as I could see, I didn’t really have any other option. At least agreeing with her request might give me a bit more time in which I could work out a method of escape. What I didn’t count on, was her going to work immediately. All of a sudden, she was Elizabeth again, all sweetness and light. ‘I would never intentionally hurt you, John, but a small amount of pain is necessary with any great change in one’s life. Just relax and let it happen.’

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I was about as relaxed as a guy going to the electric chair, but when she put her hand to my face and gently stroked it a great calmness seemed to overwhelm me, something akin to the onset of sleep. My mind seemed to drift away, touching on thousands of images at the same time, and in a sudden flash of realisation I understood that it was my short life passing in front of me. As I felt my eyes close, her lips briefly touched mine

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and then continued down the side of my face and came to rest around where my neck joined my s h o u l d e r. I could feel her hot breath on my skin, which prickled as if it was in contact with static electricity. Then, with a crash which seemed to shake the entire house, the door of the bedroom flew open, and a voice bellowed, ‘CEASE AND DESIST!’ My eyes shot open and I looked wildly about. Elizabeth was crouched at the end of the bed like an animal about to pounce. And there in the doorway, backlit by a yellow flickering, stood Gino, mangled salami in hand. ‘If there’s anything I hate more than being interrupted,’ snarled Elizabeth, ‘it’s tautology!’

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SIXTEEN

‘SORRY,’ GINO GASPED from the doorway, ‘I thought I was speaking English.’ With a savage scream, Elizabeth launched herself from the end of the bed directly at Gino, who drew back his arm and hurled the remaining salami with all the force he could muster. ‘CHEW THIS OVER, BITCH!’ he shouted. The salami caught her in the centre of her forehead, but instead of bouncing off it seemed to penetrate, the force of it causing her to roll backwards in mid-air, her hands scrabbling at her face, and crash to the floor at

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the end of the bed. The noise she started making was horrendous. At the same time, a massive gust of flame shot down the hall behind Gino, forcing him into the bedroom. He slammed the door behind him, leaning back against it panting for breath. I could hear a roaring as the flames took hold on the wood-panelled walls. ‘Time to go,’ Gino said with a grin, ‘the atmosphere’s getting a little hot in here.’ Then he sagged to the floor with a groan. I leapt off the bed and ran to his side. As I passed Elizabeth I saw that she was whirling about on the f l o o r, almost too fast for the eye to compre h e n d , though every now and then I’d catch a glimpse of her contorted face, made even more hideous by the stub of salami which seemed to have burnt its way into her forehead. Smoke poured out around the wound, and she appeared to be trying to literally claw the flesh away from its edges so that she could get a grip on it to stop it from sinking in even further. The sight stopped me in my tracks, but then Gino called out, ‘Help me, John, we’ve got to get out of here now.’ I ran to his side, grabbed him under the arms and hauled him to his feet. ‘I guess this about evens up my debt,’ he said. ‘Consider it done,’ I replied as I looked wildly

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around for some way out. I could now feel the heat from the fire through the door and I didn’t think it would be long before the bedroom went up in flames itself. ‘What happened out there?’ I asked. ‘You were wrong about fire, they don’t like it at all. I managed to back one into a candle by threatening her with the salami, and when it caught onto her dress she took off in a panic through the house. There are fires everywhere now. For a while there I didn’t think I’d find you.’ ‘Thank God you arrived when you did, I was about to go through a fairly major change of life.’ ‘Worse than puberty?’ ‘Probably. What are we going to do, Gino? We can’t go back through the hall, and there’s no other way out of here.’ Smoke was now pouring under the door and the timber itself was starting to blister and crack. On the floor, Elizabeth continued to thrash about, but her movements were slowing now and the only noises she was making were low, pitiful groans. At one stage I thought she called out my name, but it was hard to tell over the sound of the fire racing through the house. ‘The window,’ Gino gasped, ‘it’s our only chance.’

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‘But it’s boarded up. We’ll never get through it.’ And at that second the door erupted into flames and Gino grabbed my arm and ran full-pelt towards the window. I caught a brief glimpse of Elizabeth holding one claw-like hand out towards me, and then it was gone. We both screamed at the tops of our voices, covered our faces with our arms and leapt into the air.

THE BOARDS MUST have been rotten, because Gino and I went through them like they weren’t even there. There was the brief shattering of glass, then a ‘thump’ as we hit the boards, and the next second we were rolling through wet leaves, the air around us crackling with lightning-inspired electricity. Combined with the noise of the fire in the house, it sounded like we’d arrived on the outskirts of a major battle, which, I guess, we had. T h e re wasn’t a whole lot of time for r e f l e c t i o n , though, hell-bent as we both were on escape. Any second I expected Elizabeth to come flying out after us, and I didn’t think she’d be anywhere near as friendly as she’d been before. A salami-sized hole in her forehead, I imagined, wouldn’t do a lot for her temper. ‘The bikes,’ Gino said, and we ran around the side of the house towards the front verandah.

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We grabbed the bikes from the smoking verandah and rode down the hill and onto the road like the very Devil was after us. Twice as we were riding away we saw balls of flame shoot through the roof of the house and rise into the sky, exploding in a display which equalled anything I’d ever seen on Guy Fawkes night. ‘That’s four,’ Gino said. ‘Counting Lavinia and the one I got with the candle.’ ‘And Elizabeth,’ I added. ‘I’m not so sure about that,’ he replied. ‘There was something a bit different about her. I think it will take more than a salami and a fire to stop her.’

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It was only when the first fire truck caught us in its lights as it came hurtling towards the blazing house that we realised we were still in our underwear.

T HE

us a lot of very awkward questions, but we swore blind we’d been riding past the house and seen some other boys lighting the fire. We’d tried to put it out, and in doing so got caught inside the place, losing our clothes, my earlobe and almost our lives in our frantic attempts to douse the flames. We decided between us that the truth would have been too much for anyone to believe unless they’d been there. POLICE ASKED

I’m not sure they really believed us, but since there was no one who could contradict our story they had to let us go. They sifted carefully through the remains of the house, though, but there was nothing to be found. It was old and abandoned, they said, so probably no great loss to anyone. According to the records, it was owned by someone in Europe, but no one had ever come forward to claim the place after the war, so they presumed that everyone connected to it was dead. I couldn’t have agreed with them more. We both caught a hell of a bollicking from our parents, but it was more because they were frightened by our

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n e a r-death experience than anything else. They grounded us until school started, though. In those days you never got to stay out all night without some form of punishment. For a couple of years after that, Gino and I would sometimes talk about that night, but each time we did it seemed more and more like a dream, until eventually we stopped mentioning it altogether. And then my parents had a house built out near the beach and, since twenty-five miles is a long way to ride in anyone’s book, we simply lost touch. Nothing even remotely similar has ever happened to me since.

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POSTSCRIPT

SO THAT IS MY story. Make of it what you will. I, for one, intend to let it disappear now, as I feel myself becoming too old to really understand it anymore. Mind you, ever since that time, garlic has been a fairly major part of my diet, as, I guess, it is with most people in this country now. It’s amazing how something we once considered so alien has become as normal as the Sunday roast or a quick meat pie down at the corner shop. Time has a way of evening out most cultural differences, taking the best from each and making it better all round. Though there is one more thing worth mentioning,

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and it’s the reason I decided to put this down on disk and confine it to my safety deposit box. About a week ago, I took my children to the zoo. We’d seen most of the exhibits and eaten as much ice-cream and junk food as we could manage, and on the way out stopped briefly at the Nocturnal Display. The children were bored and restless and I’d just about decided to head for the car, when something caught my eye. I was standing next to a glass cage containing some bats, which were, at that time of day, fast asleep and upsidedown on their perches, when something made me look around. It was as if someone had quietly called my name, but almost too faintly for me to hear. At first I thought it had been my wife, but she was too far away and not even looking in my direction. As I looked into the cage, a large bat which was hanging at the back of the group suddenly opened its eyes and stared straight at me. It had an especially ugly face and what almost looked like a third eye in the centre of its forehead. A shudder ran all the way from my head to my toes. I’ve never seen a bat with bright green eyes before.

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