Vampire Lodge (10 page)

When Kevin had first discovered it,
he’d planned to hunt for a flashlight and check out it late
tonight…

Yeah,
he recalled.

And it was late tonight…
now.

The idea of getting up and
investigating the passageway right now was pretty scary. Everyone
was asleep. And the big lodge was dark and vacant downstairs.
And—

Thunder boomed, more lightning
crackled in the window

—
and the raging storm
outside didn’t help.

But—

I’ve got to do it,
he realized.
Now is the
only time.

He’d be crazy to try and
check out the passage during the day.
I’d
get caught!
he thought.

And if he got caught, what could he
possibly say? His father would be so mad…

So now is the time,
he instructed himself.

He glanced over to Jimmy’s bed. Jimmy
lay fast asleep.

Then Kevin, dressed in his flannel
pajamas, climbed out of his own bed. He tiptoed across the bedroom,
the rain beating against the french doors to the balcony behind
him, and he crept out of the room, quietly clicking the door behind
him.

Then, determined to summon all of his
courage and see this thing out, he began to walk down the hall,
toward the wide, dark stairwell…

CHAPTER TWENTY

The second-floor hallway
stretched silent before him. This late at night, and so dark, it
seemed ten times longer than he knew it actually was. His first
task was to find a flashlight. Without a flashlight, he wouldn’t be
able to see anything, and he’d be wasting his time. There was no
way he was going to sneak back down to the passageway without some
kind of light.
Downstairs,
he thought.
Aunt Carolyn
must have some flashlights downstairs for power failures and stuff
like that.

The carpet felt warm against the
bottoms of his bare feet. He walked cautiously down the hall—he
didn’t want to make any noise and risk waking someone up—then
turned at the landing and began to descend the twisting stairwell.
Now, he found he was grateful for the occasional flashes of
lightning, for they provided enough light for him to safely make
his way down the stairs.

On the bottom landing, he
immediately felt the sudden gust of warmth from the huge fireplace.
The fire had burned down now, to not much more than a pile of
glowing-orange embers with a few short fingers of flame, but it was
still putting out a lot of heat. And by the soft orange light, he
was able to find his way to the kitchen without stumbling over
anything. But once he was in the kitchen, he had no choice but to
flick on the light; otherwise, he wouldn’t be able to see.
Everybody’s upstairs asleep,
he reasoned.
No one will be able to
see the light.

Kevin used his time wisely. He
searched all the kitchen cabinets and counter drawers quickly and
efficiently. There were quite a few of them, and this took several
minutes. But unfortunately—

A, darn it!

He didn’t find a single flashlight
anywhere.

Without a flashlight, there
was no way he could expect to investigate Bill’s secret
passageway.
I’ll never find out what’s
going on around here!
he exclaimed to
himself, frustrated. He looked through a few more drawers and
cabinets, found nothing, but then—

All right!

It wasn’t a flashlight he’d found, but
it was the next best thing. There, lying in the last drawer, was a
box of long, white candles, and right next to the candles was a
large box of blue-tip safety matches.

He took up one candle and removed the
box of matches. Then, very carefully, he struck one of the matches
across the flint striker on the box, cautious to make sure the box
was closed when he did so, and then he lit the candle.

Now he was ready to get on with
it!

He walked to the end of the kitchen,
past the long butcher-block counter, and stepped into the back
hallway.

It was like stepping from a
world of light into a world of grim, silent, eerie darkness.
Suddenly Kevin found himself standing in the middle of what seemed
a corridor of faint, shifting shadows, the shadows of course being
thrown by the single candle in his hand. Again, the darkness made
the hallway seem a lot longer; it seemed to stretch on for a
hundred yards, but he knew this was only his imagination working on
him.
Get on with it!
he ordered himself.
What are you? A
chicken?

And if there was one thing Kevin swore
he would never be, it was a chicken. So he walked on down the dark
hallway, with bizarre, ghostly shadows roving about him from the
candle. The shadows, above him and on both sides, looked like weird
butterflies flittering about…

Butterflies—

Or bats!
he thought.

But that was silly. He was just
getting scared.

Instead, he let his imagination get
behind him, and he proceeded down the corridor. Each wooden panel
on the wall had one of the dark paintings hanging on it, and Kevin
inspected each one as he passed, holding the candle close to the
canvas.

His eyes widened, and a breath caught
in his chest.

Each painting showed a different
depiction of The Count’s arrival to the shores of America. His
coffin and crate of gold bricks being carried across the beach,
through the woods, up hills and dales. Then another painting showed
the lodge being built. And another painting showed the lodge fully
erected, and it looked just like the lodge today.

And one more thing:

All of these paintings bore the same
artist’s signature in the lower right-hand corner:

Count Volkov,
Kevin read.

The Count had painted all of these
pictures. So Kevin was right:

The Count is more than
just a legend,
he realized.
He was a real person, who really came here over a
hundred years ago, and he really had this lodge built, and it must
have cost a lot of money, so maybe The Count really did have a
crate full of gold bricks that he’d brought with him from
Europe…

And if all of that was true, then
maybe the rest was also true.

Maybe it was true what
Aunt Carolyn said earlier,
he
considered.
About how all legends are
based in truth. Maybe Count Volkov really was a vampire too. And
maybe his crate of gold bricks really is buried somewhere around
here, and maybe his coffin is too. With The Count still in it, just
like Aunt Carolyn said!

Eventually Kevin came to
the end of the hallway, to the wall-panel on which hung the
painting entitled
The Count Comes
Ashore.

This is it,
Kevin thought to himself. He knew there was no way
he could be mistaken. This was the exact same place he’d discovered
earlier.

He steeled himself. His hand, very
slowly, raised up in the candle-lit dark, and then he pushed
against the panel.

And, just as he’d remembered, the
panel moved, and—

click!

The panel nudged forward,
then began to move inward, with a slow and steady
creeeeeeak…

A moment later, Kevin found himself
standing before a pitch-black, open doorway.

The secret passage,
he thought.

Here it was, right in front of
him.

The candle shadows seemed to move
faster, like a flurry of birds. Kevin felt his heart suddenly begin
to beat more quickly, like an impatient fist pounding on the inside
of his chest. Total silence wrapped around him—he didn’t even hear
the thunder and lightning anymore. All he could hear now were his
own thoughts:

Here’s the secret
passage…

And he knew there was only one thing
left to do.

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

When Kevin entered the great, black
mouth of the passageway, he immediately felt the drop in
temperature. Outside in the hallway, it was cozy and warm. In here,
though, it was cold enough to make him shiver. And the floor of the
passage wasn’t carpeted, it was flat, smooth cement which felt cold
as ice against the bottom of his feet.

Second thoughts began to occur to
him:

Maybe this is
stupid,
he thought.
Maybe there’s nothing back here. Maybe I’m being an idiot and
I shouldn’t be fooling around back here at all…

But Kevin somehow knew that none of
this was true. There was something very wrong about the things
going on around his aunt’s lodge, and he was determined to find out
what those things were. And he knew something else, too:

This passageway is the
perfect place to start.

And with that thought, he continued
down the chilly passageway. The air felt damp; when he coughed
once, the sound echoed. After about ten more yards, he came to a
large, wooden door.

There must be another room
behind it,
he considered.
The room that Bill Bitner was in…

Kevin knew it wasn’t locked—he could
see it standing open an inch. His teeth ground together when he
pulled back on the rusted, iron handle; the door’s hinges suddenly
sounded like a cat with its tail stepped on.

What faced him now was a pitch-black
chamber.

Kevin cautiously moved into
the room, holding the candle out in front of him. The walls were
made of old, red bricks with yellowed cement oozing out from the
gaps.
What kind of a room
is
this?
he asked himself, moving forward a few steps. He
didn’t see any lamps or light fixtures, nor did he notice any
electrical switches on the walls, and suddenly this made sense
because then he remembered that when he and Jimmy had seen Bill
Bitner coming out of the passage this morning, Bill had not only
been holding a shovel, he’d also been holding a lantern. The
darkness here seemed so thick it was like wading through a cold,
black pond. The candle threw a fluttering shape of light before
him, and eventually, he could see things. A rickety wooden table,
several chairs, a dented coffee pot, and—

Kevin stopped when he
turned.

Shovels
, he realized.

There, propped up in the corner, were
two long-handled shovels with large blades, almost like—

Almost like gravedigging
shovels,
he pondered, like the ones he’d
seen in so many vampire movies…

He and Jimmy had seen Bill
Bitner with a shovel just out in the hall, hadn’t they? And they’d
also seen Wally digging in the wood earlier.
With a big shovel like one of these,
Kevin recalled.

And, again, he wondered about
something else:

What were they digging
for?

In another corner, he noticed a bunch
of old rolled up tents, sleeping bags, and lanterns, and on the
wall opposite, hanging on a large piece of pegboard, was an
assortment of regular tools, like the kind his dad had int their
garage. None of this was any big deal.

Kevin, next, approached the wooden
table in the middle. There was a coffee cup on it, and a newspaper.
But then he noticed something else.

Kevin stopped again when he turned to
face the last corner of the room. His eyes bloomed in the dim
light. On the floor, shoved all the way into the corner, lay an
old, oil-stained cardboard box full of…

Kevin leaned over, peering
down. He wanted to make sure he wasn’t mistaken, and when he
realized that he
wasn’t
mistaken, a nervous sweat broke out on his brow in
spite of the room’s damp chill.

The box was full of wooden
stakes.

Kevin picked one up, examining it in
the candlelight. It was crudely made, a two-inch by two-inch stick
with a sharpened point. Just like—

Just like the wooden
stakes in the vampire movies,
Kevin
thought, and with that thought came a wave of scary images in his
head, all the movie scenes he’d seen: the good guys, at the very
last minute before sundown, finding the vampire’s coffin, forcing
it open, and hammering a wooden stake into the vampire’s heart. And
Aunt Carolyn, when she’d been telling her story, had verified it
herself: a wooden stake hammered through the heart was about the
only way to kill a vampire.

And there was something else he
noticed then:

Two hammers lying next to the box of
wooden stakes.

This is just getting too
wild,
 Kevin thought,
and too scary. All this stuff—it all points to
one thing…

Vampires.

But he needed to get out of here; he’d
been down here too long, and if he didn’t get back upstairs to his
room soon, someone might find out that he wasn’t where he was
supposed to be—in bed. He knew he had a lot of thinking to do, and
a lot of things to figure out.