Vampire Brat (2 page)

W
anda did not believe that I had seen a werewolf.

I found her in the boiler room eating a whole bag of gummy bears and warming her hands on the boiler. She was not looking very hard for Pusskins if you ask me. Anyway, I rushed in, covered with bat poo, and Wanda did not look at all pleased to see me.

“Ugh,” she said, jumping away. “Don't get
that stuff all over me. Or the boiler. Mom will be really annoyed.”

Wanda's mother, Brenda, takes care of the boiler. She does it extremely well and the boiler room is very nice now. The boiler is polished, the floor is swept, and there is a little line of coal buckets and an alarm clock. Every three hours the alarm clock rings and either Barry or Brenda feeds the boiler with a bucket of coal. Sometimes even Uncle Drac does it, but Aunt Tabby does not, which I think is a good thing because Aunt Tabby and boilers do not mix. But that day the boiler room was not so great, as Brenda had been looking for Pusskins, and the boiler was making funny gurgling noises—or maybe it was Wanda.

I made Wanda give me some gummy bears
and told her all about the growling and the werewolf eyes. But she did not believe me.

“But, Aram
in
ta,” she said in the voice she uses for telling me something that she thinks I don't know. “Everyone knows that werewolves are just normal people during the day, so it can't be a werewolf. And if there
is
a werewolf in Spookie House it is going to be someone who lives here. Like your aunt Tabitha—or
you
. In fact,” she said, looking at
me in a funny way, “all things considered, it probably
is
you.”

It is tough always having to explain things to Wanda but I've gotten used to it. “Look, Wanda,” I said very patiently, “obviously it is not me. I would
know
if I was a werewolf, wouldn't I? And actually, if I
was
a werewolf I do not think
you
would still be around. I think I would have eaten you for supper before now.”

Wanda did not answer. She stuffed another handful of gummy bears in her mouth and didn't offer me
any
. So I continued telling her about the werewolf. “It was
horrible
. You would have been really scared. It growled and it had big yellow fangs and lots of matted fur. And claws. And it drooled.
Tons
of drool. All over the floor.” Although I hadn't actually
seen
all that stuff, that is what the pictures in my
Werewolf Spotter's Handbook
showed, so it must have looked like that.

Wanda began to look a bit scared. “Really?” she asked, gulping down the last gummy bear.

I nodded.

“Supposing he creeps up on us here,” she whispered, glancing around.

I hadn't really thought of that. I had figured that Barry and his pile of bat poo would be enough to keep any werewolf at bay, but I was beginning to think it would be nice to get out of the basement just in case. And then something really spooky happened. There was a great big bang and all the lights flickered off and on, off and on. Wanda screamed and we both
ran
.

We bumped into Brenda, who was coming down the basement stairs.

“Wanda, Araminta,” she said, “there's the most awful thunderstorm. Come into the kitchen where it's safe.” Brenda grabbed hold of us both and took us into the third-kitchen-on-the-right-just-around-the-corner-past-the-boiler-room. Before we knew it we were sitting at the table eating Brenda's egg and lettuce sandwiches—except the lettuce in mine had mysteriously managed to escape and fall on the floor. Lettuce in Spookie House always tastes of bat poo, because that is what Aunt Tabby feeds her lettuces with. Yuck. And now that Brenda keeps a bunch of weird chickens in the backyard, all the sandwiches she makes have egg in them. Egg and banana, egg and jelly, egg and peanut butter, egg and frog—well, not yet, but it is only a matter of time. I only like egg sandwiches if I can have some
cheese and onion chips with them to take the eggy taste away, so I went to get a bag from my chip cupboard
but they were all gone
.

“Whararyoudoing?” said Wanda, spraying bits of egg all over the table.

“Don't spray egg all over the table, dear,” said Brenda.

“I am looking for my chips,” I said frostily.

“Oh, they're not there,” said Wanda, who often likes to tell me things that are what Uncle Drac calls totally obvious.

“You have been feeding them to Pusskins again, haven't you?” I said.

“Wanda, do you know where Pusskins is?” asked Brenda, looking a bit suspicious. She was getting as bad as Barry.

“No, I
don't
,” said Wanda. “Araminta is fibbing as usual.”

“I am not.”

“Yes, you are.”

“No, I am
not
.”

“Girls, girls,” said Brenda, “
please
stop fighting. Oh my
goodness
!”

A huge crash of thunder shook the house, all the lights went off, and a ghostly phone bell started to ring…and ring…and ring.

Brenda and Wanda dived under the table, but I do not dive under tables.

“I am going upstairs,” I told them, “to watch the lightning.”

Halfway up the big stairs from the hall I met Sir Horace. He was on the landing. Sir Horace is my most favorite ghost ever. We do have another one, but he is not much fun in my opinion, although Wanda likes him. His name is Edmund and he lives in the secret
passage behind the boiler. But Sir Horace is wonderful. He lives in an old suit of armor and he just hangs around the house. He is not good at climbing stairs and he forgets that it takes him days to get all the way up—although sometimes, by mistake, he goes down really fast.

I stopped beside Sir Horace, tapped very quietly on his armor, and said, “Are you awake?” Sir Horace spends a lot of time dozing and it is a good idea not to surprise him when he is asleep. He often wakes up with a jump and then parts of his armor fall off. You do not want parts of Sir Horace to fall off halfway up the stairs. Last week, when he was only two steps from the top, the spring holding his left knee together pinged out, his leg dropped off, and he fell all the way down to
the bottom. It was not my fault at all, I just happened to be walking past at the time, but no one believed me. I spent the rest of the day putting Sir Horace back together again.

“Good morning, Miss Spookie.”
Sir Horace's booming voice came out from his helmet.

“It's not morning anymore, Sir Horace. It's nearly dinner time now,” I said.

“Is it really? How time flies when you're going upstairs.”

“Sir Horace,” I said, very quickly, as Sir Horace does go on a bit and it is best to get your question in early. “Have you seen a werewolf around here?”

There was another crash of thunder and the lights came back on, flickered, and then went off again.

“A what wolf?”
asked Sir Horace.

“A
were
wolf.”

“Where? Ah, indeed, that is the question, Miss Spookie. Where does one find wolves nowadays? In my time we used to have them howling at the castle gates on a cold winter's night. Terrible noise it was. Quite froze the blood…”

“Wow. Did it really, Sir Horace?”

“Yes, it most certainly did, Miss Spookie. Ah, those were the days. You know I once found an abandoned wolf cub?”

“Did you really?” Now that was interesting.

“Indeed I did, Miss Spookie. It had injured its leg and been deserted by the wolf pack. I took it home and raised it myself. A wonderful companion….”
Sir Horace sighed like he always does when he remembers the old days, which in his case are extremely old days.
“Ah
well,”
he said,
“I must be getting along.”
He suddenly stuck one foot out and put it on the next step. He looked very wobbly.

“Would you like some help, Sir Horace?” I asked.

“That would be most welcome, Miss Spookie,”
said Sir Horace in a smiley kind of voice. So I took his right arm—very carefully—and we got to the top of the stairs in no time at all.
“Along here, if you please, Miss Spookie,”
said Sir Horace, so I walked along with him to the little secret door under the attic stairs.

Now I knew where Sir Horace was heading—he was going to his secret room. I helped him open the door and watched as he squeezed through, then I closed the door behind him. I listened to his footsteps fading
away down the secret passage that runs behind the wooden paneling on the wall, and then a loud crash of thunder reminded me that I had an urgent appointment with some lightning.

I ran down the corridor, through two moldy curtains, and past the monster bathroom. I zoomed along the zigzag passage, jumped over the trapdoor to nowhere, climbed up the old apple ladder and scrambled onto the ledge. And there I was, outside the old door to the haunted turret. I turned the key and went inside.

T
here are lots of turrets in Spookie House, but the best one to watch thunderstorms from is the haunted turret. The haunted turret is not really haunted. Well,
I've
never seen a ghost there and I have spent many hours looking. But it is the tallest turret and is so high in the sky that you feel as though you are right in the middle of the storm. It is very exciting.

After you push open the little door with the weird creak that goes “Eeh-aaaah…
ooooh
,” you climb up some rickety, cobwebby stairs, but you must not step on the third stair or the seventh because they are rotten because of some very big woodworms who live there. The stairs go around two corners and are really dark and steep. At the top is a dusty old velvet curtain, which is inhabited by some fierce moths that do not like being disturbed and dive-bomb your head, so it is best to squeeze through the curtain very slowly and carefully. Once you are in the turret you have to walk around the edge because there is a big hole in the middle of the floor where a bathtub fell through. Aunt Tabby used to keep lots of old bathtubs in the turret, but she made Barry help her take them all out after that.

Anyway, as I carefully walked around the edge of the turret I was really happy to see a bright flash of lightning. I stopped and counted the seconds until the loud crash of thunder came. It was not even two seconds, more like one and a half. That meant that the middle of the storm—the exciting part where the lightning is right overhead—was really close. Great, I thought, I'm here just in time. I climbed onto an old box by the window so that I could see out, as the window is very high up. It is also very dirty, as Aunt Tabby does not clean windows because it lets the light in and Aunt Tabby thinks that houses should be nice and gloomy, which is why she paints everything brown. I think she would even paint
me
brown if I stood still for long enough.

I rubbed a clean patch on the glass and peered out. Even though it was not yet dinnertime it was almost dark outside. There were
heavy gray clouds filling up the sky and a few fat spots of rain were falling. It was perfect—and really spooky.

In the distance, all misty through the rain and the grubby window, I saw a car's headlights. I watched the lights, expecting them to keep going along the big road, but to my surprise the car turned off onto the lane that
goes by Spookie House. I wondered where it was going—since Aunt Tabby put up a sign that says
DANGER, UNEXPLODED MINES
not many cars drive past. As it drew nearer I could see that it was going really slowly, as if it was looking for somewhere, and then it stopped—right outside our front gate.

At the very moment that it drew up outside Spookie House there was the most enormous
Craaaack.
A brilliant white streak of lightning shot down and hit the car. It was amazing. A blue flame whizzed around the outside of the car and I held my breath, waiting for it to explode.

It was very disappointing—nothing happened. The car did not explode at all. Instead the rain started to pour from the sky in buckets and the car didn't even
sizzle
. It was a
weird car. It was very long and I knew I had seen cars like that before but I could not think where. The window was misting up with my breath, so I rubbed it again and then I could see more clearly. The car outside Spookie House was a hearse!
With a coffin in it
.

I wished I had Wanda's telescope. I could just about see three people sitting in the back of the hearse with the coffin—a girl who looked almost grown up, a little kid, and an old lady. The driver was sitting on his own in the front; he wore a top hat and had a very white face that almost shone through the window.

All the time I was watching the hearse, thunder was rolling around the sky, and in the distance every now and then lightning streaked down from the clouds. The rain was
falling harder now, it was splashing in through the rotten window frame and dripping onto my socks. I rubbed the window clear with the end of my sleeve, and when I looked again the white-faced driver had gotten out. He opened an enormous black umbrella, and was holding the door open for the old lady. She stepped out of the hearse very carefully and was followed by the little kid and the almost grown-up girl.

Even though I did not want to be a detective anymore because now I had decided that I was going to be a werewolf hunter, I still practiced my detecting skills when I got the chance. I thought the people in the hearse were on their way to a funeral. That was pretty obvious because if they had been on their way back from the funeral, the coffin
would not have been there. And it was obvious that they were going to a funeral and not just taking the coffin out for a ride in a thunderstorm because they were dressed in black and were wearing hats. The old lady had a veil covering her face and the little kid had a funny black cap on. I watched the almost grown-up girl get out of the hearse. She wore a neat black hat perched on the back of her head and a black dress almost down to the ground, the kind that I would not mind wearing when I grow up. She lifted the hem of the dress out of the way of the huge puddle that always lurks outside our gate when it rains and she tiptoed up the path underneath the umbrella along with the old lady, while the little kid hung back in the rain and looked like he didn't want to be here.

A flash of lightning lit up the purple sky, and there was a sudden crash as the thunder rolled back over the house. Far away downstairs, I heard the doorbell ring.

Yes! We had a hearse with a coffin and spooky visitors in the middle of a thunderstorm. What could be better?