Many Bloody Returns

I Was a Teenage Vampire Bill Crider

Bill Crider is the author of fifty published novels and numerous short stories. He won the Anthony Award for best first mystery novel in 1987 for Too Late to Die and was nominated for the Shamus Award for best first private-eye novel for Dead on the Island. He won the Golden Duck award for best juvenile science fiction novel for Mike Gonzo and the UFO Terror. He and his wife, Judy, won the best short story Anthony in 2002 for their story “Chocolate Moose.” His latest novel is Murder Among the OWLS. Check out his home page at www.billcrider.com.

If you really want to hear about it, which a lot of people do, being naturally curious, you probably want to know where I was born, and what I was like as a kid, and how I wound up living (in a manner of speaking) under a bridge, and all that Catcher in the Rye kind of crap, but I just don’t feel like talking about any of that right now, and anyway it’s not all that interesting, to tell you the truth.

I’ll tell you how I got to be a goddam vampire, though. That’s pretty interesting. It was all because of my sister, Kate, who you’d think would know better, for Crissake, because she was practically a high school graduate, but then there aren’t a lot of geniuses in my family, including me, although I did make a pretty good grade in a civics class one year.

Kate can’t take all the blame. If she’d never seen those movies, it might have been different. It wasn’t my fault, though. I was just an innocent bystander.

Anyway, being a vampire isn’t as much fun as you might think it is. I mean, you probably think it’s all about the cape and the gleaming white fangs and the ripping good times you could have after the goddam sun goes down. Or maybe you don’t think that, but that’s what I thought, which shows how much I knew because I was wrong. Dead wrong, just to throw in a little vampire humor there.

What happened is that my sister was planning this big party for her eighteenth birthday, which happened to be on Halloween, and she wanted it to be really special. My crummy parents said she could do whatever she pleased, which is what they always said when she asked for anything because they liked her best. You probably think that’s just sour grapes, but it’s not that. It’s just the way it was, and it never bothered me because I was used to it, after all.

What she wanted was a vampire.

“Like Christopher Lee,” Kate said. She has this way of brushing her hair back out of her eyes when she talks, which is frankly pretty irritating, but she thinks it’s cute and that the boys like it. I don’t know about other boys, but it just seems phony to me. “Like that movie we saw last year, Horror of Dracula.”

She went to a lot of movies like that. I Was a Teenage Werewolf. I Was a Teenage Frankenstein. But she liked stuff with vampires best. They’d never made one called I Was a Teenage Vampire or she would have been first in line.

“You know,” Kate said. “Remember what the ads said? ‘The chill of the tomb won’t leave your blood for hours.’”

She tried to say the last part in a deep, creepy voice but it wasn’t deep, and it wasn’t creepy. It was just phony.

“You don’t have to laugh,” she said, because I couldn’t help it. “It’s your stupid friend Binky who says he knows a real vampire.”

“Binky wouldn’t know a vampire if it bit him in the ass,” I said, which I knew was a pretty crude thing to say, even to my sister, but I was getting tired of the way she was brushing at her hair. Besides, I was wrong, as it turned out. “And he’s not my friend.”

“Well, he’s certainly not my friend,” she said. “And you don’t have to use that kind of language.”

Binky wasn’t really anybody’s friend. He was just this guy that was always coming around, wanting to be somebody’s friend and making cracks like he thought they were jokes, but nobody ever laughed at them. He had a pointy nose that was always dripping, and big sad eyes, and hair that he needed to wash a whole lot more often than he did. He hardly ever smiled because he had pretty dingy teeth and he didn’t use his tube of Ipana any too regularly, at least as far as I could tell.

He’d told me about this vampire that he’d met. It was supposed to be this big hairy secret just between me and him because we were such good friends. That’s what he thought, anyway. But Kate had wormed it out of me. She has a way of doing that. I never should have told her, but I did, and there was nothing I could do to change that.

“I guess if anybody knows a real vampire, it’s Binky,” Kate said. Her name’s really Katherine, but she thinks Kate is sophisticated or something. “Anyway, he says he does, and that’s what I need to make the party perfect.”

She should never have gone to see that movie, is what I think. Now she had the idea that a party with the girls dressed up in filmy nightgowns and guys looking like Igor or whatever his name was would be just the ticket. But she said it just wouldn’t work unless she had a vampire to liven things up.

“Maybe Dad could be the vampire,” I said. “He likes to dress up and stuff. He even has a tuxedo.”

“That’s so passé,” she said, brushing back her hair. I thought what she ought to do was cut off her bangs, but nobody ever asked me about stuff like that. “And Dad would make a terrible vampire.”

She was right about that. He was more the Mr. Peepers type, and he seemed to be getting more that way all the time, which might have been because our mother was a lot like Rip Van Winkle’s wife in that story we had to read at school.

“So that’s why you have to talk to Binky,” Kate said. This time she flipped her hair out of her eyes by tossing her head, which was even more irritating than if she’d used her hand. “If there’s a real vampire around, it would make the party just perfect. Will you do it?”

“A real vampire would be pretty dangerous,” I said. I didn’t even believe in vampires, and I thought Binky was full of crap. I was just trying to get her to shut up. I should have known better. Nobody could get Kate to shut up.

“We’ll have garlic and crosses and holy water,” she said. “It won’t be dangerous.”

“That stuff never works in the movies.”

“You don’t know anything. You don’t really like those movies. You think they’re not intellectual.”

“I never said that,” I told her, and it was the truth, even if she was right about what I thought.

“You didn’t have to say it. You sit around and observe everybody, like you think you’re better than us. But you’re not. You just like to think so.”

I couldn’t remember ever winning an argument with Kate, and I knew she’d never let up (she was a lot like our mother that way) so I finally said I’d talk to Binky if she’d do my geometry problems for a week. Not that I couldn’t do them myself, which I could, but I had to get something from her or she’d think she had the upper hand on me, which she didn’t, not really.

She thought she was a whiz at geometry, so she said she’d do the problems, and of course that meant I had to talk to Binky whether I wanted to or not.

Our high school was a big redbrick two-story building, and it smelled like that red stuff the janitors throw on the wooden floors before they sweep them. I’ve never figured out how that stuff is supposed to clean the floors, but I kind of liked the smell of it. I actually even liked the school. It’s just most of the students and faculty that I couldn’t stand.

When I went to school the next morning, not long before the first bell, the girls were all talking about how they’d seen Frankie Avalon sing “Venus” on American Bandstand the day before. That was their intellectual level, for Crissake, watching American Bandstand and liking Frankie Avalon. The guys were mostly farting and picking their noses, which was about their intellectual level. They didn’t like Frankie Avalon any more than I did, though; I’ll say that for them.

I couldn’t find Binky until Fred Burley told me that he was shut in his locker. Binky was small and weak, so some wit was always doing that to him.

“Who did it this time?” I asked. “Harry Larrimore?”

Harry was usually the one who did it. He’d done a few things to me, too, including giving me a terrific wedgie just before geometry class one day. Harry was a lot bigger than I was, so there was nothing I could do to him. I just went on into the class. I had trouble walking into the room, and everybody got a big laugh out of it, even Mrs. Delaney, the teacher, though she tried to hide it.

“I don’t think anybody put Binky in his locker,” Fred told me. “I think he just likes it in there.”

I didn’t see how that was possible. Who could like being closed up in a little dark space like that? There was no use in trying to explain that to Fred, though. If it didn’t have something to do with a ball, Fred had trouble figuring it out.

I eluded the teachers and sneaked up to the second floor where the sophomore lockers were lined up along the wall across from the study hall. The lockers were about four feet tall and painted gunmetal gray. They had little louvers at the top. I think the louvers were put there as a safety measure in case somebody left his stinky gym shoes inside but those vents were a lifesaver for some of the kids who got locked inside.

Nobody else was in the hall because we weren’t supposed to go up on the second floor before the bell. We might get into all kinds of unsupervised trouble. Anyway, it was very quiet in the hall, but I heard a noise coming from locker number 146, which was Binky’s. It wasn’t loud. It sounded as if someone might be reading a book in there and flipping the pages. That couldn’t be it, though. Binky was weird, but not weird enough to try to read in the dark.

I stood in front of the locker for a few seconds and listened. “Binky?” I said.

“Carleton?”

That’s my crummy name, Carleton, and I try to get people to call me Carl, which isn’t so bad, but nobody will do it, the bastards. They’ll call my sister Kate, but they won’t even give me the time of day.

“Yeah,” I said. “It’s me.” I know I should have said, “It is I,” because old Mrs. Shanklin, our English teacher, keeps telling us how we should use correct grammar at all times if we want people to respect us, but I think it sounds phony as hell to tell you the truth, so I never do it. “Were you expecting somebody else?”

He couldn’t have been because nobody else ever came by to let him out of his locker. I didn’t come by because he was my friend, though, because he wasn’t. It’s just that I couldn’t treat anybody like the rest of the morons did him.

“What do you want?” he said.

“I need to ask you a favor.”

“I’m busy right now, Carleton. I have a test in first period.”

“You’re studying in the locker?”

“That’s right. Go away and leave me alone.”

That’s the thanks I got for being the one who tried to look out for him. I started to tell him what an ungrateful bastard he was, but I thought better of it.

“It’s about the vampire,” I said. I figured that would get his attention.

There was a dull thud, like a book being slammed shut. “You know I can’t talk about him, Carleton. I told you that. Now go away. I need to study, and I can’t be late for class. If I get another tardy, Old Man Harkness will give me detention for a month.”

Binky got a lot of tardies, mainly because he was shut up in his locker so much. I did my best to help, but I couldn’t remember to go by and let him out every single day.

“I’m going to open the door, Binky. Just don’t run off.”

“I wish you’d just go away.”

“Well, I’m not going anywhere. And you better not, either.”

I’d let Binky out so many times that he didn’t even have to tell me the combination to his lock. I’d memorized it long ago. But this time, I didn’t need the combination because the lock was missing. All anybody needed to do was lift up on the handle and the door would come open. Binky could have jiggled it from inside easily enough. He must have been dumber than I thought.

I opened the door and Binky stepped out into the hall. He was so short and so skinny that he hadn’t even been very cramped. For a change his nose wasn’t dripping, which I have to admit was an improvement. He was holding his civics book in one hand with his finger in it like he was marking his place.

He ran the other scrawny hand, the one without the book, through his lank blondish hair and said, “I have to go to class, Carleton.”

“You’re welcome,” I said.

He looked at me like I was nuts. “Very funny. I didn’t ask you to let me out.”

He tried to edge to the side and slip around me, but I moved in front of him.

“The vampire,” I said.

“What about the vampire?”

“I need to talk to him.”

The first bell rang, and people started coming up the stairs and milling around. I could tell that Binky was going to make a run for it, so I grabbed the front of his shirt. He looked up at me with his sad black eyes and said, “I don’t think that would be a good idea, Carleton.”

“I know it’s not a good idea,” I told him. “It’s my sister’s idea, so it’s obviously pretty stupid.”

I explained the situation in a low voice so nobody could hear me talking about a vampire in the hall. They’d think I was as crazy as Binky if they did.

I told Binky about the party. While I was talking, I held on to Binky’s shirt. He might make a break at any second, even though there was plenty of time for him to get to class before the second bell.

“That’s really dumb, Carleton,” he said when I was finished telling him Kate’s plan. “Even for your sister, it’s dumb. You shouldn’t mess with a vampire. It’s dangerous.”

“Yeah, but she’s going to do my geometry problems for a week, so we have to talk to the vampire.”

“That wasn’t the deal you made with Kate.”

I asked him what he meant by that. I was the one who made the deal, after all, so I should know what it was.

“She said she’d do the problems if you talked to me. Well, you talked to me. Case closed.”

I thought about it, and he was right, technically speaking. Except that Kate’s mind didn’t work that way. She didn’t go in for loopholes and technicalities. She’d never do the geometry problems if I didn’t try to get the vampire for the party. Not that I needed her help. I can do geometry. It was just the principle of the thing.

I was still trying to explain that to Binky when he noticed that the hall had just about cleared out. He gave a sudden jerk and pulled away from me. I guess he wasn’t as weak as I thought, and he was quicker than I’d have guessed. Before I could do anything about it, he was gone, escaping into Mr. Harkness’s classroom. The ungrateful little bastard would be lucky if I ever let him out of his locker again.

Binky tried to make things right during lunch period by offering me his pudding, as if anybody would want pudding that he’d been sniffling over for ten minutes, not that he was sniffling today. Nobody would have wanted it anyway because there were lumps in it. I knew that for sure because there were always lumps in the pudding they served in the cafeteria. There were plenty of rumors that explained what the lumps were, and all of them were unpleasant, to say the least.

“I’ve been thinking things over,” he said. “I’m sorry I ran off this morning.”

He put a couple of thin cafeteria napkins on top of his chili to soak up the grease. He’s probably the only one who does that. For that matter, he’s probably the only one who actually eats the chili. He kills me; he really does.

I wished he hadn’t come to sit at my table, but I couldn’t do anything about it, and the fact was that there was plenty of room there, and he knew nobody else was likely to be joining me. To tell you the truth, I wasn’t a whole lot more popular than Binky was, but at least I was too big to be stuffed into a locker.

“That’s okay,” I said, hoping he wouldn’t say anything else. “I know you had to get to class.” But I was pretty cheesed off at him if you want to know the truth.

“I should never have told you about the vampire,” he said. “That was a mistake.”

“Too late,” I said.

“Yeah. So I guess I’ll take you to him.”

I stopped stirring my chili. That’s what I do: I stir it. But I never eat more than a couple of bites. If I do, I’ll have gas all during fourth period. I don’t eat much of the pudding, either. I just stick the spoon in it and stir that around, too, checking for lumps.

“So now you’ll take me to him?”

Binky nodded.

“What do you want from me, Binky?”

“Who says I want anything?”

I didn’t bother to answer that. Everybody wants something, and Binky was no different. After a couple of seconds he said, “I want to come to the party.”

Well, there it was. He was just a goddam sophomore, and he wanted to go to a party thrown by a senior.

“Binky,” I said, “even I might not be invited to the party.”

“No party, no vampire.”

“Okay, I’ll ask my sister. But no guarantees.”

He thought it over. “I guess that’ll have to do.”

“So we’ll go invite the vampire?”

“Yeah.”

“You better not be kidding me, Binky,” I said.

He gave me a hurt look. “Meet me outside the north door after sixth period.”

“I’ll be there,” I said.

“You want my chili?” he said. “I soaked the grease off.”

First it was the pudding, and now the chili.

“What’s the matter with you?” I said.

“I guess I’m not hungry.”

I looked down at my own chili, and I couldn’t really blame him.

See, the fact of the matter is that like I said, I didn’t really believe in vampires. Now, it’s a different story. Boy, do I believe in vampires now. But this was then.

Anyway, I need to tell you about the house where the vampire lived. Back in the nineteenth century sometime, a guy who had more dollars than sense, as my father liked to say, had an old manor house dismantled over in England. The workers numbered the pieces and rebuilt the place outside our little town.

I wasn’t around in those days, of course, and neither was my father, but he knew about stuff like that, local history and all. He said they put the house together like some kind of 3-D jigsaw puzzle. The guy even had the plans for the grounds, and he had gardens and all that kind of thing fixed just the way they’d been over in England.

That’s the way the story went, anyway. I never saw any of that myself because after a while, the guy died. He didn’t have any kin that anybody knew about except some cousins in New York. They inherited the house and property, and they kept right on paying the taxes year after year, but they never even came to visit. The house was abandoned, and vines grew up all over the walls. The gardens and the shrubbery overgrew the grounds, and then the trees closed in.

Eventually the place got a kind of a reputation. You probably know the kind of thing I’m talking about: funny lights, strange noises, ghosts. I didn’t believe in any of that kind of crap myself, but I didn’t ever go out there to see if any of it was true. It wasn’t that I was scared. I just didn’t want to go. Hardly anybody else ever went out that way, either.

Except for Binky, who was, as I think I’ve said already, weird. He liked hanging around places like that. That’s how he found the vampire.

I met Binky after school, and we rode our bikes out of town for about two miles and turned down a little dirt road for another half mile. It’s hard going on dirt, and I was hot and sweaty. Binky didn’t seem bothered. He was wearing a long-sleeved shirt and a cap pulled down low. I could hardly even see his eyes.

“I hope this guy’s not a real vampire,” I said when we stopped to rest. “I think it would be a big mistake to invite some guy to a party and have him rip open our throats and drink the blood of virgins and stuff. I don’t think it’s what Kate has in mind. That wouldn’t be any fun at all.”

“Speak for yourself,” Binky said. “All that sounds pretty good to me.”

He sounded almost wistful, like he really believed it. He was weird, all right, but I didn’t think he meant it. He’d nearly passed out in biology class when we were dissecting the frogs.

“It sounds messy,” I said, trying to make a joke of it. I did that sometimes when things made me nervous. “My parents would have a snit fit if the house got all messed up.”

Binky took me seriously, though. “It wouldn’t be like that. Vampires are pretty fastidious.”

I wasn’t surprised that Binky knew a word like fastidious. He read a lot, and besides being weird he had what you might call a well-developed imagination. He read magazines with titles like Amazing and Astounding and Fantastic, the kind that had stuff like flying saucers and giant bugs on the covers. Sometimes on the same cover. Vampires, too, probably.

“How well do you know this vampire?” I asked.

Binky ducked his head. “I didn’t say I knew him.”

I’d figured as much.

“I just said I thought he was a vampire. You’re the one who wanted to come out here.”

I looked up the road. The trees grew right up to both sides, and their branches hung over it and joined in the middle, so it looked like a green and gold and orange tunnel. It was so shady that it was almost dark under there. The house was at the end of the road, and it looked kind of spooky, to tell you the truth, like one of those houses you see in the posters for my sister’s favorite movies. Maybe it even looked like the house in the Dracula movie she liked so much. I wasn’t at all sure going to the house was a good idea now that I’d had a better look at it, but we’d come this far. I pushed my bike on down the dirt road. Binky followed along.

When we got closer to the house, something flew out of an upstairs window. It looked a little like a bat, but I didn’t really know what it was. It was too early for bats to be flying around, I thought, not that it mattered. I got this kind of a chill on the back of my neck like somebody had touched me there with a cold hand. I looked at my watch. It was only four-thirty, but it got dark kind of early at that time of year. The dirt road was covered with fallen leaves, and a little breeze came up from somewhere and blew them along in front of us.

“Probably nobody’s home,” I said. “Maybe we should just go on back.”

“We’re already here,” Binky said. “You might as well see if anybody’s home.”

That sounded like a bad idea to me, but I didn’t want to chicken out. My crummy sister would never let up if she found out. Neither would Binky, probably, and he was just the type to spread it all around school. If that happened, I’d get crammed into a locker more often than even Binky did. So I kept on going.

The house didn’t look any better when we got to what had once been the front yard. It looked worse, to tell you the truth. There was no glass in any of the windows that I could see, and I think there were holes in the roof. I for sure saw a couple of holes in the stone walls where they weren’t covered by the vines and bushes. Trees grew all over the place, but they weren’t very tall.

The front door of the house didn’t look too bad. It was made of heavy wood, and it didn’t look as old as the rest of the house, which looked older than a hundred years. It even smelled old and moldy. If there was ever a place a vampire might pick to hide out, this would be it, all right.

The breeze had brought some clouds from somewhere, not storm clouds, but big puffy ones with black bottoms, and they blocked out most of the late afternoon sun. We might as well have been standing out on some old English moor somewhere.

Neither one of us made a move to get any closer to the house. I thought Binky should go knock on the door. He didn’t agree.

“You’re the one with the invitation,” he said.

“He wouldn’t answer, anyway,” I said. “Not if he’s a vampire. It’s not nighttime yet.”

Binky gave me a disgusted look. “You don’t know much about vampires, do you?”

“I saw Horror of Dracula,” I said, which was a lie, but Binky didn’t know that.

“Big deal. So did I. Have you ever read Dracula? The book, I mean.”

“I’ve read a lot of stuff,” I said.

“But not Dracula. If you had, you’d know the difference between the movies and real life.”

“You’re going to tell me that some made-up book is real life?”

“Bram Stoker knew what he was talking about,” Binky said, as positive as if he had a clue, which I was pretty sure he didn’t. “Anyway, his Dracula could come out in the daylight.” He pointed at the house. “I saw this guy in the daylight. So are you going to knock?”

“Why don’t you do it?”

“You have to give him the invitation. It’s your party, and it’s your house you’re inviting him to.”

It was my sister’s crummy party, and it was my parents’ house, but I had a feeling Binky wasn’t interested in fine distinctions like that. I laid my bike down on the ground and went up to the door. I didn’t exactly rush. I wasn’t feeling too good about things if you really want to know the truth about it. I mean, if the guy was really a goddam vampire, I could be in big trouble.

The wood of the door was dark and old, but solid. There was no bell, not even a knocker. Maybe whoever lived there wasn’t expecting any guests. Or maybe nobody lived there. Binky might not have even seen anybody. He could have just made it all up to get attention.

While I stood there trying to bring myself to knock, I heard something shriek up above me. It was the bat, or whatever it was, and it flew back into the house through one of the windows on the second story.

I got that chill again, and I almost turned around and went back. I didn’t, though. I wish I had, but I didn’t. I knocked on the door. Nobody came, so I knocked again. Nobody came that time, either. Maybe the vampire was shut up in his coffin and couldn’t hear me. Or maybe he was flying around the attic like a bat. I looked over my shoulder at Binky, who shrugged. I was about to leave, and I’d turned halfway around when I heard something. I turned back. The door started to open.

It didn’t open very much, just a crack, but there was somebody there, all right. Or I thought there was. I couldn’t hear anybody breathing, and I couldn’t see into the dark interior of the house.

I didn’t know what to say. I mean, I couldn’t just say, “Are you the vampire?” So I just stood there, feeling like an idiot.

Finally whoever was behind the door got tired of waiting for me to say something and decided he’d go first. He said, “Yes?” Except he didn’t say it quite like that. It was more like “Yessssss?”

I didn’t jump when he said it, but that was just because I was kind of paralyzed and could hardly move at all. I tried to talk, but my mouth was too dry. I swallowed a couple of times and said, “I wanted to invite you to a party.”

There was no answer for a while. Then, “You are quite sssure?” Like he couldn’t believe anybody would actually invite him somewhere.

I couldn’t believe it, either. I wished I was at home, even if it meant watching Frankie Avalon pantomiming to a song on American Bandstand or something just as lame. But I stayed right where I was and got the invitation out of my pocket. I’d written it out in study hall while old Mr. Garber sat at his desk in the front of the room and pulled on the hairs growing out of his ears while he pretended to read something in his history text. The invitation said, “You are invited to a Birthday Party!”, and it had the date and time and address and everything on it.

I held it out, and a hand reached out from behind the door and took it. It wasn’t a hand like any I’d ever seen before. It was pale white, and the nails were thick and long and yellow and sharp. That was what bothered me, how sharp they were.

The hand disappeared with the invitation in it, and after a second or two the voice said, “Thisss isss very nissse. I will be there. Will you be at the door to invite me in?”

He already had the invitation, so I didn’t see why I had to do any more inviting, but I said, “If I’m not, my sister will be.”

“That isss sssatisssfactory.”

And then the door closed. I stood there a minute, blinking like I’d just come out of a dream, and then I walked back to where Binky stood waiting.

“What about my invitation?” he said.

“I’ll ask my sister.”

“She’d better invite me.”

“We’ll see,” I said, because knowing my sister, I was sure she wouldn’t want Binky hanging around the way he did. She only liked the popular kids, who were all a bunch of phonies. Binky was weird, but at least he wasn’t phony, which was about all I could say for him.

A funny thing happened at school the next day. Somebody stuffed Harry Larrimore into a locker. I wasn’t the one who let him out, but I heard about it from Fred Burley, who did. He said he asked Harry who put him in there, but Harry didn’t want to talk about it, like he was scared or something. I didn’t think that was right since Harry wasn’t scared of anybody, not even the teachers.

Harry and Fred both got tardy slips because it took awhile to get Harry out of the locker. He was a lot bigger than Binky, and nobody would have believed you could get him into a locker if Fred hadn’t seen it himself and described it.

I told Binky about it at lunch, but he didn’t seem to think it was funny. All he said was, “Sometimes things come back on you.”

I had a feeling he wasn’t talking about the cafeteria food. We had fish that day because it was Friday, but Binky wouldn’t eat any. He looked interested when I poured ketchup all over mine, and I thought for a minute he’d give it a try, but he said he just wasn’t hungry.

My sister surprised me when I told her that Binky had demanded an invitation to the party. She didn’t even argue. She pushed her hair back and said, “All right, Binky can come, as long as he stays out of the way.”

She meant, “as long as he stays out of sight of my phony friends,” which also meant that he’d be hanging out in my room, since that’s where I’d be staying. I didn’t like Binky any better than she did. I just put up with him because I felt sorry for him, but I didn’t want him in my room during the party. There wasn’t anything I could do about it, though.

“Did you see the vampire?” Kate said. “Is he the real thing?”

Like I would know a vampire if I saw one, and I hadn’t really seen this one, mostly just his hand, which I have to admit looked real enough to satisfy me, so I said, “He’s the real thing, all right, and if I were you, I wouldn’t want him coming to the party.”

She just laughed. “You don’t have to worry about a thing. We’ll take plenty of precautions, and there aren’t any real vampires, anyway, no matter what you think.”

“If you say so.”

She could believe it was all a big joke if she wanted to, but it so happened that I didn’t agree with her, not that it made any difference.

“I do say so, and I want you and your pal Binky to stay out of the way.”

I didn’t bother to remind her that Binky wasn’t my pal. I asked if she’d told our parents about the vampire, and she gave me this condescending look.

“I don’t tell them a lot of things,” she said, as if she had these big secrets to keep, but I knew she didn’t because I’d sneaked into her room and read her diary one day. “And you’d better not tell them, either, if you know what’s good for you, buster.”

I told her I wouldn’t cause any trouble and handed her my geometry book.

“Oh, no, you don’t,” she said. “I’m not doing any problems until after the party and after the vampire shows up.”

I wished I’d never said anything to her about the vampire. Binky had warned me not to, but I had. There was nothing I could do about it. I took my geometry book upstairs and got to work.

Halloween was pretty dreary. It rained most of the day, and the thick clouds stayed dark and low all afternoon. By the time of the party, it was inky black outside, with no sign of the moon or stars.

Kate’s friends started to arrive, and our parents went next door to play canasta with our neighbors. Our parents were very liberal that way, not pushing in where they weren’t wanted. My mother said to be sure to call if there were any problems, and Kate told her not to worry about a thing. I wasn’t so sure, myself, but I kept my mouth shut. I knew what was good for me, buster.

When Binky got there, Kate invited him in. He had on a black plastic rain jacket with the hood pulled over his head, like it might’ve still been raining, and he didn’t seem to like the wreath of garlic hanging around Kate’s neck. I couldn’t blame him. It smelled pretty bad, but Kate thought it was just the right touch. She had a crucifix, too, not just a cross but the real thing with an image of Jesus on it, which was pretty funny considering nobody in our family had been to church in the last ten or fifteen years as far as I knew.

After Binky got inside, he wanted to hang around the way he always does, but I told him we had to go up to my room.

“I want to be here when he comes,” Binky said, and I didn’t have to ask who he meant. I told him we could slip back down later, and he said he guessed that would have to do.

“That crucifix won’t do any good,” Binky said when we got to the top of the stairs. “You have to believe in it.”

“I don’t guess it matters,” I said. “There’s all that garlic.”

“Yeah. That might help.”

I didn’t like it that he said might, but I didn’t believe in the vampire anyway, or that’s what I kept telling myself.

The doorbell rang exactly at eight-thirty, which is when the invitation I gave the vampire had said for him to come. Kate wanted all her friends to be there first.

Binky and I slipped to the head of the stairs and looked down. Binky still had that dumb hood over his head, but I guess he could see all right. Kate went to the front door and opened it. She said something, and then the vampire stepped inside.

He was tall and pale, and his hair was slicked back. From where I was standing, it looked as if he had pointed ears and red eyes. A bunch of Kate’s friends came into the room and stared.

The vampire looked them over like they were buffet items at the smorgasbord restaurant downtown. They all took a step back, even Kate, who usually didn’t back away from anything.

I looked at Binky. He pushed the hood of the rain jacket off his head, and I saw the tips of his ears.

“Binky,” I said.

He smiled. I wished he hadn’t. His teeth weren’t bad anymore. They were white and shiny, and his incisors were pointed and sharp.

“Binky,” I said.

His eyes looked as if they were lit from the inside with red lanterns.

“Binky,” I said.

I thought of a lot of things all at once: Binky studying in the dark locker, wearing long sleeves when it was so warm, Harry Larrimore. I remembered a lot of other things, too, things that I should have thought about before.

“Binky,” I said.

There was some screaming from downstairs now, but I didn’t look to see what was happening. I couldn’t take my eyes off those red eyes, Binky’s eyes. I wanted to look away, but I couldn’t.

“Binky,” I said.

The screaming was louder, and I wondered if anybody had called next door, but I was pretty sure they hadn’t been able to get to a phone.

“Binky,” I said. “For Crissakes, Binky.”

And then he was on me.

I never went back to school after that. Somehow I couldn’t see trying to fit in with a bunch of people whose blood I wanted to suck. After what must have happened downstairs at my house, they probably wouldn’t have been real glad to see me, anyway.

Binky didn’t go back, either, now that he had a “friend” to keep him company. That just goes to show what can happen if you let somebody sit with you at lunch. They start thinking you like them, and then they turn you into a vampire.

Binky says he and the other vampire never did get friendly. Binky had found him out at the old house, where he’d moved after having a close call with some Van Helsing type in the Boston area. He’d told Binky that he was trying to kick the bloodsucking habit, but Binky had pleaded to be turned into a vampire. I blame all those nutty magazines that Binky read. Anyway the guy finally gave in.

“Nobody liked me anyway,” Binky said. “I’m still not with the in-crowd, but at least this way I get to live forever, or at least until somebody stakes me. So do you.”

If you could call it living. It wasn’t anything I wanted to thank him for.

“Too bad the Master had to leave town,” Binky said. “You would have liked him.”

As if I could ever like anybody called “the Master.” If there was ever a phony name, that was it. I’d rather be called Carleton than “the Master.” I’d have liked him about as much as I liked living in that broken-down old house, which is where Binky and I had gone after we left the party by the back door. I never knew much about what happened in my own house that night, and never tried to find out. I guess I didn’t want to know. You probably think that’s hard-hearted of me, since my sister was there and all, but she wasn’t my sister anymore, not now that I’d been changed.

“I don’t think he made any of them into vampires,” Binky said. “He thinks it would be a bad idea to have too many of us around, and he prefers just to drink the blood.”

I said I thought he was trying to break the goddam habit.

“He was,” Binky said. “But living on mice and rabbits and stuff like that got pretty boring after a while, I guess.”

Come to think of it, it was getting pretty boring to me, too. I mean, they were all right if you couldn’t get anything else, but before long I was going to have to go for something bigger and more substantial. More nourishing.

“Even blood from a mouse beats that cafeteria chili, though, right?” Binky said.

“Yeah,” I said, “I guess it does, at that.”

All that was a long time ago. For the last few years Binky and I have been hanging out (a little more vampire humor there) under a bridge in Austin, Texas. When you’re surrounded by thousands of Mexican free-tailed bats, nobody’s going to notice you, not if you’re a bat, too, even if you’re a lot bigger than they are. Being bigger works out fine, since they don’t try to push us around.

It’s a pretty boring way to have to spend your time, though, to tell you the truth. Like I said at the beginning, being a vampire’s not all capes and fangs and ripping times. When the highlight of your day is flying out from under a bridge and seeing how many tourists’ mouths you can crap into before they get wise and shut their mouths, you can be pretty sure you’re not living the high life.

It’s actually even worse than that. Bats have parasites. Maybe you didn’t know that. Fleas, mites, ticks. They can be pretty irritating sometimes. I don’t know how living on me affects them. I don’t even care. All I know is that they make me itch.

I think about the old days now and then, and sometimes around her birthday I wonder if Kate survived her party, and if she did, whether she got married to one of her phony friends and had a bunch of kids who were just as phony as their parents. And I wonder if she ever thought about any of those crummy movies she used to like so much. They were pretty much to blame for the whole thing, after all.

“It’s nearly sundown,” Binky squeaked.

The children of the night, such music they make. You probably couldn’t understand Binky even if you heard him, but I could.

“Time to give the tourists a thrill,” he said. “I’ll bet I can hit more open mouths this evening than you can!”

“Sure, Binky,” I said.

“Some fun!” he said.

“Sure, Binky,” I said. “Some fun.”

There’s nothing like being a teenage vampire. I should know. I’ve been one for forty-five years now, so I figured it was time to let the world know.

Maybe somebody will make a movie.