Vampire Lodge (12 page)

Which supported what he had suspected
all along.

Aunt Carolyn really is a
vampire. There’s no doubt…

But something else came to his mind
just then, something just as frightening:

If Aunt Carolyn isn’t
here,
he wondered, trembling,
then where is she?

The first impulse told him to scoot
back to his own bedroom right now, pretend he hadn’t seen anything.
He’d play dumb till Sunday morning when his father got back, and
then could just get in the car and go home, and Kevin could forget
all about this evil place.

But that wasn’t like him, was it?
Kevin’s curiosity was just too strong; it wouldn’t let go. Like
right now, for instance. He knew Aunt Carolyn was up and about
somewhere—as most vampires would be at this hour—and he knew that
the safest thing to do would be to go back to bed. But one thing
he’d noticed while peeking into his aunt’s bedroom, during that
last flash of lightning, were the two paintings on the wall, and
next thing he knew—

I really shouldn’t be
doing this,
he warned himself.

—
he was tiptoeing into the
room!

Because he
had
to see those two
paintings. He’d seen most of the others in the lodge, the scenes
painted by Count Volkov himself, and it only stood to reason that
the best of the paintings would be here, in his aunt’s
room.

But, again, the biggest problem was
light. The room was so dark that once he entered he found that he’d
have to wait for another flash of lightning to light his way. It
took him several minutes this way to get across the room to where
the paintings hung. The first thing he noticed was that one of the
paintings was larger than any of the other paintings he’d seen in
the lodge, maybe even twice as large, with a thick fancy-carved
frame. When the lightning cracked, Kevin’s eyes darted immediately
to the bottom of the painting, to see what the title
was:

Count Volkov,
it read.
A
Self-Portrait.

And painted in the corner, sure
enough, was The Count’s signature, proving that he was the
artist.

Then the lightning cracked again, and
Kevin’s eyes flicked quickly upward to look at the painting itself,
and—

His jaw dropped.

—
and in the brief flash of
lightning, the painting of The Count looked right back at
him…

It was the scariest painting he’d ever
seen in his life. In dark, creepy colors, there he was—The Count.
The painting looked so real, it almost seemed as though Count
Volkov were standing before him in the flesh.

The Count’s face was long
and thin—and so pale it was white. He was bald, and the collar of
his great black cape was turned up, connected by a big brass button
with a fancy V embossed on it.
V,
Kevin thought.
For
Volkov.
And hanging just under the button,
from a chain about The Count’s neck, was a pendant of gold, a
pendant of a hideous vampire bat with outstretched
wings…

Kevin’s stomach quivered as he
examined the painting more thoroughly, and when the lightning
flashed again, he took closer note of The Count’s face:

The whites of Count Volkov’s eyes were
bloodshot, with pupils so black they looked like holes. The mouth,
turned up into a sinister smile, was opened just enough that Kevin
could see the two long needlelike fangs…

Kevin turned away. Count
Volkov’s self-portrait was more frightening than any of the
vampires he’d seen in the movies. It was so chilling, in fact, that
he
forced
himself
to turn away, because he knew that if he looked at it any longer,
he’d have nightmares of The Count’s fangs and terrible white face
for a long time to come.

Get out of here,
he told himself, shivering.

But he couldn’t leave yet, could he?
There was still one more painting he needed to look at…

The second painting was smaller, more
like the others that hung in the lodge, and with a similarly
carved, antique frame. Kevin waited for another lightning flash,
and when it came, he read the second painting’s title:

The Count, Standing on the
Balcony of his Room.

And another lightning
flash—

All the breath seemed to seize in
Kevin’s chest once he got a full glimpse of the second painting. It
was a painting of the back of the lodge, at night, with a full,
yellow moon hanging just over the peak of the lodge’s roof, and
there, on a second-floor balcony, at the far corner of the lodge,
Count Volkov stood in his great black cape, looking out into the
night…

Suddenly, all Kevin could do was stare
at the picture. The depiction of The Count was frightening
enough—yes—but that wasn’t what scared Kevin the most—

In his mind, he recited the
painting’s chilling title:
The Count,
Standing on the Balcony of his Room.

And then he thought
further:
His room. The Count’s room. The
second-floor balcony at the far end of the lodge…

Then he realized:

Count Volkov’s room, and Kevin’s room,
were the same.

CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

The lightning, now, flashed
along with Kevin’s terror. Bug-eyed, and still staring at the
ghastly painting, he backed away. His heart raced, his breath grew
thin, and now his hands were shaking uncontrollably.
I’m staying in the same room that used to be
Count Volkov’s,
his thoughts pounded in
dread.
The very same room!

Kevin knew he had to get out of his
aunt’s bedroom now—he’d been here too long already, and staying
another minute would just be too risky. But in leaving, that left
him with a big problem:

Where do I go
now?

Eventually, he knew he’d have to go
back to bed, but now that he knew that his bedroom was once Count
Volkov’s room—he didn’t know if he could do it. How could he sleep,
knowing that he was sleeping in the same room that was once
inhabited by a vampire?

But he knew he had no
choice…

He finally backed out of Aunt
Carolyn’s room, the storm still pounding, the lightning still
flashing along with its crackling, thunderous sound. Back out in
the hallway then, he began to close the door but before he could
push it shut completely—

—
a hand landed on his
shoulder.

“
Kevin!” a voice caught him
from behind. “What on earth are you doing?”

Kevin’s heart suddenly felt like a
bomb that had just exploded in his chest. He turned, in newfound
terror, at the sharp, angry voice and the touch of the hand that
suddenly had landed on his shoulder—

To face Aunt Carolyn!

At once a softly glowing light was on
his face. Aunt Carolyn was holding up a lantern—the same kind of
lantern, Kevin noted, that Bill Bitner had been holding in the back
hallway this morning—and what Kevin immediately noticed was that
Aunt Carolyn wasn’t dressed in a nightgown but was wearing one of
the same long, tight black dresses that she always wore. She looked
scoldingly at him, her dark eyes narrowed, and the look on her face
was clearly one of irritation.

“
Young man,” she said.
“It’s not nice to go into people’s bedrooms without their
permission. I’m surprised that you would do such a thing. Now I
want to know what you were doing in there, and I want to know right
now.”

Kevin, all trembles now, could only
stutter in reply, “I, I, I, uh, was looking for you.”

“
Looking for me? What
for?”

“
I, I—” and suddenly Kevin
could think of nothing to say in the way of an answer.

Aunt Carolyn’s angry face
glared down in the lantern light—
a long,
thin, pale face,
Kevin noticed.
Like Count Volkov’s face, like a
vampire’s
face!
But then, just as suddenly, that same anger
drifted off, and at once, Aunt Carolyn’s voice softened. “Oh, I’m
sorry,” she said consolingly. “You poor thing. Of course, you
must’ve been frightened by the storm, is that it?”

“
Uh, yes,” Kevin stammered
back. “The storm, it woke me up and, uh, I got scared.”

“
Well, you needn’t worry,
because I was just downstairs listening to the weather report on
the radio, and they said the storm will be over soon. So there’s
nothing to worry about, see?”

“
Uh, yes,” Kevin
bumbled.

“
It’s very late,” Aunt
Carolyn went on. “You get back to bed now. Hopefully, the weather
will be good enough tomorrow for you and Jimmy to fly your
kites.”

“
Uh, yeah, Aunt Carolyn,
that would be great,” Kevin managed to say. “Well, I’m going back
to bed now. Goodnight.”

“
Goodnight,
Kevin.”

Boy, did I luck out
there,
Kevin thought, walking down the
darkened hall toward his bedroom.
She
thought I was scared of the storm.
What a
joke! After all the things he’d seen tonight, and all the things
he’d discovered, a lightning storm was the last thing he’d be
scared of!

When he got back to his bedroom, Jimmy
was still fast sleep. Kevin got into his own bed and lay back under
the heavy covers, his mind still spinning with thoughts…

Yes, Aunt Carolyn was definitely a
vampire, she had to be. Up at this hour, still in her long black
dress. Never eating anything and never going out into the sun. And
no bed in her bedroom. There could be no doubt—

She’s a vampire, all
right,
he realized.
But what am I going to do about it?

What
could
he do?

Well… nothing,
he concluded, at least not until their fathers got
back from fishing. And what had her excuse been, for being up so
late herself?

Listening to the weather
report on the radio, he remembered. What a bunch of
malarkey!

Kevin felt exhausted and he
tried to fall asleep but again the fact returned to his mind, and
so did his fearful recollection of the second painting he’d seen in
his aunt’s room.
Count Volkov used to live
in this same room
, he thought.
This used to be a
vampire’s
room. How can I expect to
fall asleep, knowing that Count Volkov himself used to think and
walk and breathe in this same room?

He lay there in bed,
staring at the ceiling. But then he noticed something.
I guess Aunt Carolyn was right after all. The
lightning and thunder has stopped.
Sure
enough, it had, and it seemed like the rain was letting up
too.

And this sudden absence of the storm’s
steady sounds left the bedroom suddenly, and eerily,
silent—

clink!
he heard.

Then—

crunch, crunch, crunch,
crunch…

Kevin leaned up in bed. What were
those sounds? The clink had sounded somehow like metal, and the
steady crunching noise sounded just like—

People walking,
he realized.

And something else: The sounds seemed
to be coming from the french doors which led to the balcony, which
could only mean:

The sounds are coming
from… outside,
he thought.

But who on earth would be walking
around outside this late at night?

He listened some
more.
Maybe it was just my
imagination,
he considered when the sounds
disappeared. But just when he was about to forget about
them—

clink!

crunch, crunch, crunch,
crunch…

—
he heard them
again!

Quietly, he climbed out of bed and
approached the two closed french doors. Then he quickly opened them
and slipped out onto the wet balcony. The rain was only trickling
now, and the wind had vanished. He glanced down at the grassy area
between the forest and the back of the lodge, and was astounded at
the heavy silence. And, once more, that creepy feeling returned to
his belly, the idea that he was now standing on the same balcony
that Count Volkov had once stood upon.

Count Volkov… the vampire…

clink!

There it was again! And then,
again—

crunch, crunch, crunch,
crunch…

Kevin leaned out over the balcony’s
heavy wooden railing, and then looked down.

And he… saw something, didn’t
he?

Yes, indeed he did. There, at the edge
of the woods behind the lodge, he noticed two faintly glowing
lights…

Lanterns!
he recognized.
Lantern
lights!

And once his eyes had adjusted, he
recognized something else too.

Two figures!

He was sure of it. So late
at night, and in the trickling rain, two men were walking along the
edge of the woods behind the lodge, their lanterns pitching slowly
back and forth as their feet—
crunch,
crunch, crunch, crunch—
crunched on over
fallen leaves and branches, and every so often—
clink!
—that same metallic sound could
be heard. Each man seemed to be carrying something long and thin,
which Kevin, in the dim lantern light, was then able to
identify.