Vampire Lodge (4 page)

What is… this?
Kevin thought.

The painting showed what looked like a
large rowboat coming ashore. There were several men in the rowboat
but their faces all looked blank, as if they were in a trance. And
sitting right in the middle of the rowboat were two
things:

The first thing was a big open wooden
box piled high with gold bricks.

And the second thing was—

Kevin’s eyes
widened.
It’s a— It’s a—

It was a coffin.

A creepy, wood-plank
coffin.

Just like the one in the vampire movie
he’d been watching with Becky last night.

CHAPTER SEVEN

“
Well, it was great meeting
you, Becky,” that young guy, Wally, was saying just inside the
front door. Then he pushed the door open with a long creak. “If you
need anything, just let me know.”

“
Uh, uh,” Becky brilliantly
replied, her face all lit up with a big, dopey grin. “I, uh, I
will.”

“
See ya.”

Wally left the lodge, shutting the
door behind him.

Becky turned dreamily. “He’s just so,
just so—”

Kevin smirked. “Just
so
what?
”

“
He’s just so…
wonderful…”

“
Who?” Kevin said. “That
Wally guy? What’s so wonderful about him?”

“
Oh,” Becky gushed on,
“he’s just so handsome and strong and rugged and smart and nice
and—”

“
And
,” Kevin cut in, “he’s probably twenty years old! You’re only
fifteen, Becky! Mom and Dad would go crazy! What is wrong with you?
I can’t believe you have a crush on a twenty-year-old
guy!”

“
He’s not
twenty!
” Becky objected.
“He’s seventeen. He just seems older because he’s so
mature…”

So mature,
Kevin thought, rolling his eyes.
Yeah, right.
He decided
to let the topic drop—trying to convince Becky that older boys
weren’t for her was always a lost cause. “Come here a minute,” he
said instead, remembering what he wanted to show her. “Look at this
picture over here—”

“
I don’t have time to look
at some stupid picture,” Becky snapped back. “I’ve got important
things to do.”

“
Oh, yeah? Like
what?”

“
Like deciding what I’m
going to wear later on. Wally said he’d be back in this evening to
do some work. I want to look my best.”

Kevin frowned hard. “Okay, fine, but
just come here for one second and look at this picture on the wall.
It’s a painting of a boat—”

“
Big deal,” Becky
said.

“
It’s like a rowboat, with
a bunch of guys in it, only the guys have these really weird blank
looks on their faces, and right in the middle of the boat there’s a
big crate full of gold bricks—”

“
Big deal.”

“
But there’s also a coffin
in the boat!” Kevin excitedly went on. “And the coffin looks just
like the one in the vampire movie we saw last night!”

“
You have vampires on the
brain,” Becky sniped. “I’m going back upstairs. Oh, but you know
what?”

“
What?” Kevin said,
frowning.

“
Wally even drives. He even
has his
own car!
”

Great,
Kevin thought.
He can have his own
bus for all I care.

Becky stomped back up the steps,
leaving Kevin alone in the dark, dusty foyer. He looked at the
painting some more, squinting, and then he noticed that the
painting had a title, written in tiny cursive letters along the
bottom.

The Count Arrives with his
Servants and Treasure.

Kevin’s scalp tingled. He’d been
right…

“
The Count,” he whispered
to himself. “As in Count Dracula, the king of the
vampires…”

CHAPTER EIGHT

“
Drac–
who?
” Jimmy asked, peering at the
dark painting on the foyer wall. Kevin had made sure to point out
the strange picture the minute Jimmy had come back
downstairs.

“
Drac-u-la,” Kevin slowly
pronounced for his friend. “Like what I was telling you about on
our way down in the car. Count Dracula. He’s from some place called
Transylvania, and he’s, like, hundreds of years old.”

“
Aw,” Jimmy scoffed, “no
one lives that long. How can he be hundreds of years
old?”

“
Like I
told
you, Jimmy. He’s a
vampire.”

“
Oh, yeah, someone who
comes out of his coffin at night and drinks people’s blood so he
can live forever.”

“
They have
fangs,
” Kevin added. “And
they bite people on the neck, and they can never go in sunlight.
And if they want to, they can turn into bats, and sometimes they
can even change into wolves.”

“
You mean like werewolves,
the things people change into whenever there’s a full
moon?”

“
No,” Kevin said. “I don’t
think they can turn into werewolves, just the regular kind of
wolves.”

Jimmy seemed impressed at first, but
he hesitated a little. “That’s pretty cool but… vampires can’t be
for real. I mean, you don’t believe that this Count Dracula really
exists, do you?”

“
Well, no,” Kevin answered.
“Of course not. Vampires are just make-believe, and so are
werewolves and zombies and the Frankenstein monster and the Mummy,
all that kind of monster stuff. Somebody in Hollywood invented them
so they could make movies about ’em.”

Jimmy looked back at the painting. “I
wonder who painted this?”

“
I don’t know,” Kevin
said.

“
And why would your Aunt
want a painting of a vampire’s coffin in her lodge?”

Hmm,
Kevin thought.
That’s a good
question. As a matter of fact, that’s a
real
good question.
“You’re right. It seems like a pretty weird thing
for an adult to have hanging in a place like this.”

Jimmy nodded. “And
adults
can
be
pretty weird sometimes.”

“
You’re right about that,”
Kevin agreed. “We can ask her about it later.”

“
Good idea.”

They wandered around downstairs for a
little while, looking at all the other paintings. But most of them
were just landscapes and beaches and paintings of bowls of fruit,
stuff like that. They didn’t see any more vampire
paintings.

And they didn’t see Aunt
Carolyn anywhere.
I wonder where she
went,
Kevin thought. It wasn’t like she
could be busy with other guests because there
weren’t
any guests. And she wasn’t
fixing lunch either—the big country kitchen was empty.

“
This place sure is big,”
Jimmy observed.

“
Yeah, I know.”

“
And dark.”

This too was true. All of
the windows in the lodge seemed to be oddly narrow, and they were
all covered over by heavy curtains.
It’s
almost as if Aunt Carolyn likes it to be dark in here,
Kevin considered.
Like
she’s keeping all the curtains closed on purpose.

“
I think your sister’s got
a crush on that Wally guy,” Jimmy remarked as they wandered down
another hall off from the kitchen.

“
You can say that again,”
Kevin said, and smirked. “She’s got a crush on a new guy every
week.”

“
But what do you think of
this Wally guy?”

“
I don’t know. He’s nicer
than Bill Bitner, that’s for sure,” Kevin commented.

“
Anybody’s
nicer than Bill Bitner.”

“
Yeah, but Wally… I don’t
know. I don’t trust him,” Kevin remarked. “He looks like bad news
to me, like a hood or something.”

“
Then you better tell your
sister to stay away from him.”

Kevin laughed sharply. “Becky? Are you
kidding? She never listens to me. You know Becky—she knows more
about anything than anybody, and everybody else is
stupid.”

Then—

click!

Both stopped and turned.
They’d definitely heard a sound—a loud and sharp
click!
Like a—

Like a door
opening,
Kevin realized.

But… where was the door?

They peered down the dark
corridor that came off the pantry from the kitchen. The low,
wood-paneled walls made the corridor look even darker, but Kevin
couldn’t see any doors.
It’s just a
hallway with a bunch of shelves,
he saw.
The only door was at the very end, and that couldn’t have been the
one that opened because if it had, Kevin and Jimmy would have seen
it.

And then—

Light,
Kevin saw. An eerie, wavering swell of light was slowly moving
into the hall. And then—

A figure appeared.

Both Kevin and Jimmy stiffened up in a
quick fear. Kevin recognized the figure at once at once.

Bill,
he thought.
Bill Bitner, the
handyman…

And what was scariest of all was
this:

It didn’t look like Bill had come out
of any door—

A chill traced up Kevin’s
back.

This is impossible,
he thought.

It looked instead like Bill Bitner had
walked right out of a solid wall…

CHAPTER NINE

“
Hey, you boys!”

Bill Bitner’s shout made Kevin and
Jimmy’s feet jump an inch off the floor. Bill looked at them with
an angry glare. He raised an old, glowing lantern—the light they’d
seen—up higher so he could see them. “You got no business back
here! What’re you two up to?”

“
We’re, uh, we’re just
looking around, Mr. Bitner,” Kevin said with a hitch in his
voice.

“
Well go look around
somewhere else,” Bill shot back. And it was then that Kevin noticed
something else.

Bill had something long and thin in
his hand, and he was sort of holding it behind him, almost as if he
didn’t want the boys to see what it was.

But the glimpse Kevin had caught was
enough.

It’s a shovel,
Kevin realized.
He’s
holding a shovel…

“
Now go on and get out of
here, the both of you,” Bill ordered them. “Neither of you got any
business snooping around back here.”

“
We weren’t snooping, Mr.
Bitner,” Jimmy said. “We—”

“
Just go on and get out
here!” Bill Bitner repeated. Then he went to the door at the very
end of the hall, opened it, went in, then—

Slam!

—
slammed the door shut
behind him.

“
Did you see that?” Kevin
asked, his eyes wide as coins.

“
Yeah, before he went into
that room, it looked like he walked right out of the
wall.”

“
Let’s go check it
out.”

“
No way!” Jimmy objected.
“You heard him. He told us to get out of here.”

“
So what? He’s gone; he
went into that other room.”

“
Yeah, and he’s probably
standing on the other side of the door listening, figuring we’ll
snoop around some more. Let’s get out of here.”

“
What? I can’t believe
this.” Kevin challenged. “You’re chicken?”

“
I’m not chicken,” Jimmy
came right back, “and I’m not stupid either. That guy gives me the
creeps. And what if he tells our dads that we were snooping
around?”

Kevin opened his mouth to say
something more, but then he thought about it and decided not
to.

Jimmy had a good point.

Dad’s a cool guy,
he reminded himself.
But
he wouldn’t be too happy if he got back from his fishing trip and
heard that Jimmy and I were causing trouble.

“
Look,” Jimmy said. “You
can do what you want, but I’m getting out of here.”

“
Me too,” Kevin
agreed.

They walked back out the way they
came, down the dark hallway, through the kitchen, then back out
into the foyer. And in their journey, they again didn’t catch a
glimpse of Aunt Carolyn anywhere.

“
I know what we can do,”
Jimmy suggested.

“
What’s that?”

“
We can put together our
kites!”

“
Good idea,” Kevin agreed.
“Let’s do it.” He had to admit, there was nothing better to do, and
things were getting pretty boring around here real fast. Aunt
Carolyn didn’t even have a television in the lodge. No shows, no
movies, no nothing.
The pits,
Kevin thought. At least if they assembled their
kites now, they might be able to get out onto the bluffs
today.