Aunt Dimity: Vampire Hunter Page 6

  We were nearing the fringe of trees at the base of the hill behind the manor house when Kit wheeled around to face me.

  “Before we go any farther,” he said, “I’d like to get one thing straight. You’re not expecting to find a vampire in the woods, are you, Lori?”

  “Of course not,” I said, avoiding his eyes. “What kind of an idiot do you think I am, Kit? I don’t believe in vampires.”

  “Just checking,” said Kit. “You said you wanted to find Rendor, who, according to Rob and Will, is a soul-eating king of vampires, so I thought you might—”

  “I used the name for convenience’s sake,” I interrupted. “I don’t care what we call the creep who was spying on the boys. If it’ll make you more comfortable, we can call him Mr. X.”

  “I don’t mind calling him Rendor,” said Kit, smiling, “as long as you don’t expect me to string garlic around my neck and add a wooden stake to my emergency gear.”

  I chuckled appreciatively, though I shifted my pack uneasily on my shoulders and continued to look anywhere but at Kit.

  “Don’t be silly,” I said. “I’m looking for a real monster—a voyeur or a child molester—not a make-believe one. And I’d like to start in the exact spot where Rendor appeared to the boys on Sunday.”

  “The spot where Rendor allegedly appeared,” Kit corrected. “I knew you’d want to start there, so that’s where I’m taking you. It’s about three-quarters of the way up Emma’s Hill.”

  Emma’s Hill was one link in a continuous chain of hills that stretched north and south for twenty miles or so, rising like a knobbly spinal cord between two fertile river valleys and shielding Anscombe Manor, Aunt Dimity’s cottage, and the village of Finch, among many other places, from the harsh winter winds that blew in from the east. Since cartographers had never named the hill directly behind Anscombe Manor, Derek Harris had taken the liberty—time-honored by all great explorers—of naming it after his wife.

  I’d climbed Emma’s Hill more times than I could count. I knew the trails that led to my cottage, the ones that led to the humpbacked bridge in Finch, and the ones to avoid during rambling season, when tranquil byways became superhighways crammed with day hikers, bird-watchers, and long-distance backpackers. I knew the best picnic spots, the best overlooks, and the best places to ford the spring-fed stream that tumbled downhill on its way to join the river that ran through Finch. I thought I knew everything there was to know about Emma’s Hill.

  Kit, however, had grown up at Anscombe Manor—his family had once owned the estate—which gave him a slight advantage over me when it came to local knowledge. The path he selected for our assault on Emma’s Hill was entirely unfamiliar to me. It was, by the looks of it, known only to Kit and a host of small wild animals, and its entrance was concealed by encroaching hawthorn bushes that hadn’t yet shed their leaves.

  “We could follow the bridle path,” Kit informed me, pushing the hawthorns aside, “but I thought we’d take a shortcut. The sooner we reach the old tree, the sooner you’ll learn to ride.”

  “You’re awfully sure of yourself,” I observed, ducking to avoid a whipping, dripping branch.

  “Yes, I am,” he said, and left it at that.

  The shortcut was steep, rough, narrow, and so annoyingly slippery that I began to suspect that Kit had chosen it in order to discourage me from carrying out my search. I seemed to slide down one step for every two I took up, and I collected so much mud on the soles of my boots that I felt as if I were wearing ankle weights, but I was up to the challenge. Nothing brought out my stubborn streak like an attempt to discourage me.

  All the same, I was relieved when Kit ended the punishing climb by turning onto a long and fairly level shelf that ran parallel to the hill’s ridgeline. I clumped after him through the sopping underbrush, silently blessing the inventor of water-resistant hiking gear. Had I worn my customary blue jeans and sneakers, I would have been soaked to the skin within seconds of leaving the path.

  After ten minutes of steady walking, Kit stepped over a decaying log, entered a tiny clearing, and placed his right hand on the trunk of an ancient apple tree that had seeded itself a long way from the nearest orchard.

  “Here we are,” he announced. “The twins and I were down below, on the bridle path, when they saw Rendor. They told me that he was standing right here, looking down at us. When I came up later, to take a look around, I realized instantly that they’d mistaken my old friend here”—he patted the tree’s trunk affectionately—“for a man.”

  I paused at the log to scrape the mud from my boots, then subjected the tree to a critical examination, circling it slowly in order to see it from all sides.

  “Are you sure you have the right tree?” I asked, coming to a halt in front of Kit. “I don’t think it looks like a man.”

  “You would if you saw it from the bridle path on a misty day,” said Kit.

  “I’d have to be hallucinating to mistake your old friend for a man,” I said flatly. “Look at it, Kit. The branches are bunched too closely together to be mistaken for arms, and I don’t see anything remotely resembling legs or a head. If you leave out the arms, legs, and head, there’s not much left to look manlike, is there?”

  “Your sons have very active imaginations,” Kit reminded me.

  “They also have very good eyesight,” I countered.

  “We can argue about the tree for as long as you like,” said Kit, sounding slightly offended, “but you can’t argue with the fact that I didn’t find any footprints up here.”

  “I most certainly can,” I retorted. “Watch this.”

  I walked deliberately across the thick carpet of dead leaves that covered the floor of the small clearing, then turned to peer intently at the ground. The indentations made by my hiking boots were barely visible.

  “So much for your tracking skills,” I said. “The leaves are so wet and spongy that a guy would have to weigh three hundred pounds before he’d make a lasting impression in them. In Will’s drawing, Rendor is as thin as a rail. He would have had to hop up and down to leave footprints here.”

  “Let me try,” said Kit, stepping forward.

  When his experiment produced the same results, I planted my hands on my hips and tut-tutted at him like a disapproving schoolmarm.

  “Shame on you, Kit,” I said. “You assumed that the twins were making up a story, so you didn’t bother to check it out properly. No wonder you didn’t find any clues.”

  “I may have overlooked one or two details,” Kit acknowledged grumpily.

  “Only one or two?” I said, raising an eyebrow. “I just hope the rain hasn’t already washed away the clues you must have missed.”

  Kit leaned against the apple tree, looking faintly bored, while I prowled the edge of the clearing, searching the surrounding undergrowth for a piece of hard evidence that would support the boys’ story. When I saw the crushed toadstool, my heart skipped a beat, and when I dropped to my knees for a closer look, a tingle of excitement mixed with dread curled up my spine. For there, in a small patch of mud just beyond the crushed toadstool, was a V-shaped mark that might have been left by the pointed toe of a grown man’s boot.

  “Kit?” I called unsteadily. “I think I found some clues.”

  I sat back on my heels while Kit bent low to examine my discoveries. When he straightened, I expected him to shout “Eureka!” and apologize profusely for ever doubting my sons, but he did nothing of the sort.

  “Interesting,” he said, with a noncommittal shrug. “But I wouldn’t call them clues. Toadstools collapse for any number of natural reasons, and the mark isn’t distinct enough to count as a footprint.”

  I stared at him in prickly silence, then got to my feet.

  “It’s distinct enough for me,” I said coldly. “And I’m going to see where it leads.”

  I brushed past him imperiously and followed the point of the V-shaped mark into the woods. I should have crept along at a snail’s pace, scanning the wet ground for more foot
prints, but I was too busy fuming to think clearly. How dare Kit cast aspersions on my splendid clues? Why couldn’t he just admit that he’d made a mistake? It wasn’t like him to be defensive, self-righteous, or grouchy, yet he’d been all three in quick succession under the apple tree. Perhaps, I thought, the sight of Nell’s many suitors was getting to him.

  Whatever the case, I wasn’t about to let his doubts deter me from discovering the truth. When I heard him coming after me, I didn’t slow down to wait for him but quickened my pace, crashing recklessly through the undergrowth until a wild rosebush caught me by the ankle and sent me tumbling headlong into another, much larger clearing.

  I landed with a damp splat on a small mound of earth covered with long, rain-speckled grasses. I lay there for a moment, feeling foolish as well as vexed, but when I finally lifted my head clear of the grasses, I felt nothing but skin-crawling horror. The tip of my nose was less than a foot away from the decaying face of a weathered tombstone. The small mound upon which I’d fallen was a grave.

  I let out a shriek that should have awakened the dead and scrambled to my feet, backpedaling so fast that I ran straight into a sycamore tree. I stood with my spine pressed to the tree’s mottled bark, breathing hard and looking wildly around the clearing. No one had ever told me that there was a graveyard on Emma’s Hill, but the clearing was dotted with headstones, all of them tilted at crazy angles, as if the ground had shifted beneath them—or as if someone had been pushing up on them from below. My heart nearly burst from my chest when I saw that one of the graves had been ripped open.

  “Lori!” Kit’s shout rang out as he burst into the clearing. He swung around, caught sight of me, and dashed over to peer down at me anxiously. “What happened? Why did you scream?”

  My knees were so weak that if the sycamore hadn’t been holding me up, I would have fallen into Kit’s arms.

  “The b-boys did see a v-vampire,” I sputtered. I grabbed his wrist and spun him around until he was facing the open grave. “He came from there.”

  Kit stood stock-still for a moment, then bowed his head and pressed a hand to his mouth. When he turned back to me, he looked as if he were trying hard not to laugh.

  “If he came from one of these graves,” he said tremulously, “he must be a very dainty vampire.”

  “What are you talking about?” I demanded.

  “Calm down,” he soothed, “and come with me.”

  He pulled me away from the sycamore, put an arm around my shoulders, and walked me to the nearest headstone. As the adrenaline rush subsided, I began to notice a number of odd things about the grave. The marker was considerably smaller than the ones in the churchyard in Finch, and the mound, too, seemed abnormally tiny. Stranger still was the name that had been inscribed upon the headstone—it wasn’t one usually bestowed upon a child.

  “Snuffy?” I read the inscription aloud, in some confusion.

  “A noble parakeet,” Kit said somberly. He then guided me from one headstone to the next, narrating as he went. “And here we have Pom-Pom the Pomeranian, Leslie the Labrador, Alex the Angora cat, Buckles the basset hound, Little Jim the turtle—”

  “Animals?” I broke in, blinking stupidly. “Is this a pet cemetery?”

  “I’m afraid so.” He turned to gaze at the grave that had been dug up, then sighed heavily. “A badger must have unearthed poor Diane.”

  “Dachshund?” I guessed.

  “Iguana,” he replied.

  “Oh, man,” I groaned, burying my face in my hands. “I am such an idiot.”

  Kit was too kind to agree with me out loud. When I risked glancing up at him, I could tell by the twitching corners of his lips that he was royally amused, but he gallantly refrained from hooting like a hyena as he strolled to the easternmost edge of the cemetery and pulled a tangle of shriveled blackberry branches from a hitherto-hidden stone bench. It was the size and shape of a small love seat, with a weatherworn pattern of intertwined grapevines carved on the arms and the back.

  “Sit down, Lori,” Kit called. “You’ve had a shock, and I have the perfect remedy.”

  I shuffled sheepishly to the stone bench and sat huddled in silent humiliation while Kit placed his day pack on the ground and withdrew an insulated flask from its main compartment. He opened the flask and filled its cuplike cap with a steaming brew.

  “Hot tea,” he said, handing the cup to me. “With lots of sugar.”

  “You brought hot tea with you?” I said, astounded.

  “Naturally.” He sat beside me and nodded toward his pack. “I brought everything we’d need for a daylong expedition—sandwiches, snacks, hot tea, and spare socks, as well as the usual supplies and equipment.” He eyed my day pack curiously. “What did you bring, Lori?”

  “Some…things,” I muttered, refusing to look at him.

  “What things?” Kit asked.

  I gave a forlorn little sigh, handed the cup of tea back to him, took off my day pack, opened it, and exposed its contents to his inquisitive gaze.

  “I see that you brought spare socks, too,” he said. “Along with two strings of garlic, a mallet, a wooden stake, a silver crucifix, a rosary, and let’s see…one, two, three glass bottles filled with”—he glanced up at me for confirmation—“holy water? Does the vicar know that you raided his church?”

  “The crucifix is mine,” I said quickly. “It was my mother’s. So was the rosary. The mallet’s mine, too, and I made the stake from an old broom handle.” I sighed dismally. “But the holy water is from St. George’s. I went there after Bill left this morning. I wanted to be prepared.”

  “For what?” Kit asked. “You don’t believe in vampires.”

  “I don’t,” I said, “but some people do, crazy people who dress up in capes and have their teeth sharpened and sleep in coffins. Some of them do it because they think it’s cool, but some are true believers.” I took my lower lip between my teeth and chewed it worriedly. “What if Will and Rob saw someone who thinks he’s a vampire? If a man acted like a vampire, wouldn’t the end results be just as…infernal?”

  “Yes,” Kit said thoughtfully. “I suppose they would.”

  “And if we run into someone like that,” I went on, gaining confidence, “we might have to play along with his delusion, right? We might need the crucifix, the holy water, and the garlic to…to subdue him.”

  “What about the mallet and the stake?” Kit asked quietly.

  “I don’t know about you, but if someone waved a hammer and a sharpened stick at me, I’d back down in a hurry,” I replied. “They’re just props to you and me, Kit, but they’ll mean something to Rendor. They may be our only hope of persuading him to come along peacefully.”

  Kit gave me a piercing look, as though he knew that the stake was more to me than a mere prop. Then he turned his face to the overcast sky and leaned back on the bench.

  “Let’s say you’re right,” he proposed. “Let’s say that Rendor exists and that he’s some sort of pseudovampire. Why would he appear to the boys during the day? If you know that vampires are allergic to sunlight, I think it’s safe to assume that he would. Wouldn’t he spend the hours from dawn to dusk safely tucked up in a pseudocoffin?”

  “He might believe that his cloak protects him from the sun,” I said, recalling Aunt Dimity’s comment.

  “What cloak?” Kit asked.

  “The cloak he was wearing when the boys saw him,” I explained. “Didn’t they tell you? Rendor swooped.”

  I flung out an arm to imitate Rob’s impersonation of Rendor and flinched as the blackberry’s prickly branches raked the back of my hand. I yelped in pain, turned to take stock of my scratches, and saw, impaled on the blackberry’s thorns, a ragged strip of crimson fabric.

  I stared at the fluttering wisp, transfixed, then reached out to disentangle it from the thorns. Fascinated, I rubbed the red scrap between my fingers, draped it across my palm, and turned to show it to Kit.

  “Look,” I whispered. “It’s silk.”

&n
bsp; “So it is,” he said, stroking the cloth with a fingertip.

  “It was stuck on the blackberry bush,” I said. “But the rain hasn’t rotted it and the sun hasn’t bleached it, so it can’t have been hanging there for very long.”

  “It looks like a fresh tear as well.” Kit ran his finger along the scrap’s frayed edge, frowning pensively. “It’s not the sort of thing I’d expect hikers or horseback riders to wear.”

  “No, it’s not,” I agreed, my voice quivering with the thrill of discovery. “But in Will’s drawing, Rendor’s cloak has a crimson lining. He must have caught it on the thorns when he passed this way.” I looked up at Kit. “And I’ll bet you anything that he passed this way a short time after he stood beneath your old friend, the apple tree, watching you, Rob, and Will on the bridle path.” I shivered at the thought and turned to look at the decaying headstones. “He must have felt right at home here.”

  Kit, too, turned to look at the headstones. Then he took the wisp of crimson silk from my hand and held it dangling at eye level.

  “Lori,” he declared. “I do believe you’ve finally found a clue.”

  Seven

  Kit tucked the ragged scrap of silk into his breast pocket and passed the cup of tea back to me.

  “I don’t suppose there’s the slightest chance of persuading you to call in the police,” he said resignedly.

  “Not the slightest,” I assured him. “I’ve had a hard enough time getting you to believe me. Can you imagine what a desk sergeant would say if I told him that a pseudovampire was stalking my sons?”

  “You’re wasting police time, madam,” Kit intoned in a ponderous rumble.

  “Something like that,” I said. “Then he’d remember the newspaper stories about Abaddon shooting me in Scotland, and he’d treat me like a crazy woman who sees stalkers hiding around every corner. He’d probably send me off to see a shrink.” I shook my head. “Sorry, Kit, but it’s up to us to find Rendor—if you’re still willing to help me, that is.”

  “Do you really think I’d back out now?” Kit asked, reverting to his natural voice. “It’s my fault he’s still at large, Lori. I was careless on Sunday. I should have been more thorough when I checked out the boys’ story, but I’ve been…distracted lately.”