The Reformed Vampire Support Group (21 page)

‘It doesn’t matter.’ Dave’s tone implied that I was fussing over inessentials. ‘What matters is that we get out of here. Fast.’

‘And the homeless guy?’ I was referring to the stranger in the spare bedroom. ‘What are we going to do about him?

‘We’ll take him with us.’

I blinked. ‘But we can’t!’ I exclaimed.

‘We have to.’ Dave was insistent. ‘If we leave him here, he might die.’

‘But we don’t
know
him, Dave!’

‘Father Ramon does.’

‘If that fat man wakes up in a strange house, he’ll freak! He might call the police, or something! He’ll certainly call them if he wants the McKinnons arrested for drugging him, and where’s that going to leave us?’

Dave sighed. ‘It’s a risk,’ he acknowledged. ‘Thing is, if he wants to call the police, he’ll do it no matter where he wakes up. Unless Father Ramon asks him not to. He might listen to Father Ramon.’ Seeing my tortured expression, Dave pleaded his case more urgently.
‘We can’t leave the poor guy here, Nina. He could choke on his own vomit or something – like Jimi Hendrix. And what if the McKinnons come back? They’ll kill him for sure.’

‘But he’d be in my
house
…’ I said feebly, frightened at the thought of a domestic invasion. Dave put his arm around my shoulders.

‘We’ll take this one step at a time,’ he recommended. ‘First we have to get Sanford on the case. He’s a doctor. After that, we can work out our next move.’ When I failed to respond, he added, ‘We’ve gotta be quick, though. Because I’m starting to feel a bit crook.’

The implication was clear. If we didn’t hurry, Dave wouldn’t be well enough to drive. And if that happened, we’d be stuck – since we couldn’t exactly load Father Ramon into the back seat of a taxi.

‘Okay,’ I said. ‘You fetch the car. I’ll call Sanford.’

‘Tell him—’

‘I know what to tell him. I’m not stupid.’ It was mean of me to snap at Dave when he was being so nice. I’m not sure why I did it – fear, perhaps? But before I could apologise, something occurred to me: something so dreadful that I actually reeled, and almost dropped my golf club. ‘You don’t think – I mean, whoever did this …’ I had to take a deep breath before continuing. ‘What if they know where Mum lives?’

‘They don’t.’ Dave hastened to reassure me. ‘Remember what your mum told us? The McKinnons asked for an address, and she wouldn’t give it to them.’

‘But what if it’s
here
somewhere? What if there’s an address book in the office with my name inside? What if they heard you call me Nina, back at Wolgaroo?’

Dave stiffened. Our gazes locked.

Then we turned, simultaneously, and bolted for the nearest phone.

I’m going to
cheat a bit now. I’m going to tell you something that wasn’t known to me until long after it actually happened.

You see, while Dave and I were out cold in Father Ramon’s garage, Nefley Irving was climbing through Dave’s kitchen window.

Let me introduce you to Nefley first. At the time of which I speak, he was a postal worker. Don’t imagine that he served behind a counter, exchanging gossip and counting out change; his job was in mail sorting, so he didn’t have to interact with many people at all. And this was just as well, because he’d never been very sociable. In public he was shy and timid, hovering on the fringes of every conversation – unless that conversation dealt with horror movies, psychics, or paranormal phenomena. Nefley always had a lot to say on
those
topics: so much, in fact, that he could become very boring to listen to. The world of the paranormal was his obsession. He spent most of his free time reading books about ley lines and alchemy and demonic possession, watching films about shape-shifters and witchcraft, and researching occult subjects on his computer.

Needless to say, he wasn’t married. Nor did he have a girlfriend. In fact he didn’t have any friends at all, except the ones he’d made over the Internet. To some of these Internet friends he’d expounded his theory about the role of evil on earth: how evil was a kind of spiritual waste product that had to be collected in certain ‘vessels’,
so that it wouldn’t spill out and contaminate everything. Some of these vessels were inanimate: rocks and weapons and houses. Some of them, however, were human beings.

There were also Hemihoms, who were supposed to be half-human, half-animal. According to Nefley, they were the most dangerous vessels of all, because they contained a concentrated mixture of conscious and unconscious evil. Vampires, he told his Internet friends, were Hemihoms. And they were a danger to the entire human race.

At this point you must be thinking that Nefley was out of his mind. But he wasn’t. There are lots of perfectly sane people who create their own weird philosophies, and Nefley was no different. Nor was he particularly violent or cruel. On the contrary, he wanted to be a hero. He wanted to be a warrior fighting for good against evil.

His problem was that he didn’t have anyone sensible to talk to.

When he posed as Fangseeker on the Net, Nefley was still living in a kind of fantasy world. But Casimir’s response changed all that. For the first time Nefley realised that he was in actual, physical danger, and it scared him. He wondered what would happen if he refused to meet with Casimir after all. Suppose the vampire became angry and tried to track him down regardless? Suppose Casimir was a computer expert?

Faced with this awful possibility, Nefley devised a ‘honey-trap’. This he did after consulting one of his geeky Internet contacts, who probably took it for granted that they were both engaged in an online role-playing scenario. Upon discussing Casimir’s unexpected approach, they agreed that Nefley should arrange to meet the vampire at an all-night coffee-shop in the middle of town. But Nefley wasn’t to make contact with Casimir. He was to monitor Casimir from a distance until the vampire grew impatient and went back home. Then Nefley would pursue him, in the hope of discovering Casimir’s lair.

So when Casmir did show up, at the designated place and time, Nefley was waiting in his car. And when, after thirty minutes, Casimir finally left the coffee-shop, Nefley followed him home. As luck would have it, Casimir even checked his mailbox before disappearing inside – thus revealing his exact address.

The broken pane of glass in the building’s front door sealed Casimir’s fate. Once Nefley had spotted it, he realised that a break-in would be easy to carry out. He could offer no valid excuses for shirking his duty to protect the world from evil – especially since Casimir was such a small, hunched, withered, pasty, shuffling creature. Faced with a strapping great vampire in tip-top condition, Nefley might have had second thoughts about attacking him. Even Nefley, however, didn’t find Casimir intimidating.

On the contrary, Casimir conveyed the impression of being verminous, like a cockroach. And it isn’t hard to squash a cockroach.

At the time, Nefley worked on Saturdays. But he received every Tuesday off in lieu. So he broke into Casimir’s flat on a Tuesday, knowing that fewer neighbours would be around during the week. He took with him a pair of gloves, a stake, a crucifix, several cloves of garlic, a can of lighter fluid, a box of matches, and a pistol loaded with silver bullets.

As it turned out, Casimir’s corpselike appearance made killing him far easier than Nefley had anticipated. It was like spearing a wax dummy. There wasn’t even any mess to deal with; after his mission had been accomplished, Nefley simply closed the coffin and departed. But he picked up Casimir’s address book on his way out – and spent the rest of the week poring over it, whenever he had a minute to spare.

He knew that he would have to determine whether Casimir’s friends were vampires or not.

By Sunday he was ready to act. That afternoon, he approached Sanford’s house and knocked at the door. When no one answered, he
checked around the back. And when every window proved to be heavily fortified (because it was, after all, a former bank), he proceeded to the next house on his list – which happened to be Dave’s.

I’ve already mentioned that Dave lives in a skinny little duplex with a basement darkroom. This house is stuck into the side of a hill; you reach the front door by climbing a steep flight of stone stairs, and you reach the back door by turning into an alley that runs behind the house, then pushing through a rusty gate. Because Dave’s garden is massively overgrown with choking vines and unpruned bushes, Nefley was invisible to any neighbours who might have glanced outside at approximately two o’clock that Sunday afternoon.

In other words, no one raised the alarm.

Nefley soon located an unlocked window, which gave him access to Dave’s kitchen. From there he penetrated the rest of the house, including the basement darkroom. But the darkroom was empty. No one lay in Dave’s modified sun-bed, which is tucked between great piles of second-hand records in cardboard boxes. Nefley poked around for a while without any luck.

He was making his way back upstairs when the doorbell rang. It was a terrific shock. For perhaps five minutes he stood frozen on the third step from the bottom, holding his breath. Then he heard the sound of a window being pushed open. I’m not sure if he realised that someone was climbing through the same window that he’d used. All I know is that he bolted for the front entrance, trying to avoid whatever threat was looming out the back.

He wasn’t aware that there were two intruders, and that one of them – Barry McKinnon – had remained by the doorbell. Nefley suddenly found himself face to face with a man who appeared to be a legitimate visitor.

So Nefley lied to protect himself.

‘I’m – I’m a friend of Dave’s,’ he stammered, in an attempt to
account for his presence. ‘Is it Dave you’re looking for?’

‘Yeah,’ said Barry, before shoving him inside.

As soon as Barry closed the front door behind them, it occurred to Nefley that if Dave
were
a vampire, he wouldn’t be receiving visitors in the middle of the day. At almost the same instant, Barry asked if Dave was about.

‘No,’ Nefley replied, in his squeaky voice. By this time he understood that he was in trouble. Barry’s tone was menacing, and his hard, pale eyes were empty of emotion. What’s more, he had Dermid backing him up; when Nefley looked around, he glimpsed Dermid’s hulking silhouette, framed in the kitchen doorway.

‘He wouldn’t be with that priest, would he?’ Barry continued, as Dermid stood blocking the light. ‘Big bloke. Grey hair. Ramon something.’

‘Ramon Alvarez?’ said Nefley, who was familiar with the name. He had found it in Casimir’s address book.

Barry and Dermid exchanged a quick glance.

‘That’s him,’ the older McKinnon confirmed. ‘Where does he live, do you know?’

Nefley promptly recited Father Ramon’s address, hoping to ingratiate himself with the two McKinnons, and perhaps secure a safe passage out of the house. But they weren’t finished with him. Not by a long shot.

‘And Reuben?’ Barry asked. ‘Where’s Reuben?’

Nefley wasn’t acquainted with anyone called Reuben. He said as much to Barry, who didn’t believe it for one moment. The McKinnons seized Nefley’s gym-bag, which contained a stake, a crucifix, a pistol and a box of silver bullets.

When Barry laid eyes on those silver bullets, he immediately jumped to the wrong conclusion.

‘I think you might know who Reuben is,’ he sneered, as Dermid
put a knife to Nefley’s throat. The two McKinnons then searched Nefley’s pockets, consulted his driver’s licence, and forced him into their ute – which was parked in the street outside. Despite his strenuous denials, they were convinced that Nefley had been hiding behind a bush somewhere, watching and waiting, as they drove the orange removalist’s van away from Wolgaroo Corner. They decided that he must have been the one who’d rescued Father Ramon. It was therefore obvious to them that he must also be hiding their runaway werewolf. And they wouldn’t believe anything he said to the contrary.

Not even after they’d searched his flat, and found no one there.

By this time they must have realised that they were dealing with a rather strange sort of person. For one thing, Nefley kept babbling on about the undead. For another, his entire flat was full of garlic and pentagrams and crucifixes and posters of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. If they hadn’t been so intent on their need to locate Reuben, they might have stopped to wonder what the hell was going on.

But they didn’t. Instead, having drawn a blank at Nefley’s apartment, they dragged him off to the presbytery. Their plan was to use him as a kind of Trojan horse, gaining access to Father Ramon’s house by making Nefley knock on the door for them. They assumed, you see, that he had been working in league with Father Ramon. They wouldn’t believe that Nefley and the priest had never met.

The McKinnons’ ruse only worked because Father Ramon is accustomed to having lost souls turn up on his threshold at all hours. If he had checked through his peephole and spotted the McKinnons, he would never have let them in. But he didn’t know the man who was hovering on his front veranda. And he saw enough of Nefley’s shaking hands, damp brow and tortured expression to conclude that he was looking at a desperate case: an addict seeking
counsel, perhaps, or a sinner wishing to unburden himself of some terrible secret.

So Father Ramon opened his door, just as he’s opened his door to a hundred other forlorn supplicants. At which point the McKinnons (who had been waiting out of sight) hurled themselves at him like a couple of attack dogs.

I should tell you, at this point, that they had come to Sydney fully prepared for a showdown. Their ute was stocked with a .22 rifle, several sets of handcuffs, a syringe full of anaesthetic, a bottle of tranquillisers, and lots of nylon rope – enough to sedate and secure at least ten people. What’s more, they had also taken Nefley’s handgun, and his stack of silver bullets. So poor Father Ramon didn’t stand a chance; the McKinnons had him hogtied on the floor before he could say ‘boo’.

And then, of course, they went looking for Reuben.

It was unfortunate that Reuben happened to be asleep upstairs at the time. If he’d been awake and alert, they might not have been able to subdue him. Knowing Reuben, the very sight of Barry and Dermid would have enraged him to the point of apoplexy; he would have tried to tear them apart. But when the McKinnons finally tracked him down, Reuben was snoring in one of the spare bedrooms. They had the barrel of the .22 shoved into his ear before he’d even opened his eyes.