I’ve got to do it, he realized. Now is the only time.

  He’d be crazy to try and check out the passage during the day. I’d get caught! he thought.

  And if he got caught, what could he possibly say? His father would be so mad…

  So now is the time, he instructed himself.

  He glanced over to Jimmy’s bed. Jimmy lay fast asleep.

  Then Kevin, dressed in his flannel pajamas, climbed out of his own bed. He tiptoed across the bedroom, the rain beating against the french doors to the balcony behind him, and he crept out of the room, quietly clicking the door behind him.

  Then, determined to summon all of his courage and see this thing out, he began to walk down the hall, toward the wide, dark stairwell…

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  The second-floor hallway stretched silent before him. This late at night, and so dark, it seemed ten times longer than he knew it actually was. His first task was to find a flashlight. Without a flashlight, he wouldn’t be able to see anything, and he’d be wasting his time. There was no way he was going to sneak back down to the passageway without some kind of light. Downstairs, he thought. Aunt Carolyn must have some flashlights downstairs for power failures and stuff like that.

  The carpet felt warm against the bottoms of his bare feet. He walked cautiously down the hall—he didn’t want to make any noise and risk waking someone up—then turned at the landing and began to descend the twisting stairwell. Now, he found he was grateful for the occasional flashes of lightning, for they provided enough light for him to safely make his way down the stairs.

  On the bottom landing, he immediately felt the sudden gust of warmth from the huge fireplace. The fire had burned down now, to not much more than a pile of glowing-orange embers with a few short fingers of flame, but it was still putting out a lot of heat. And by the soft orange light, he was able to find his way to the kitchen without stumbling over anything. But once he was in the kitchen, he had no choice but to flick on the light; otherwise, he wouldn’t be able to see. Everybody’s upstairs asleep, he reasoned. No one will be able to see the light.

  Kevin used his time wisely. He searched all the kitchen cabinets and counter drawers quickly and efficiently. There were quite a few of them, and this took several minutes. But unfortunately—

  A, darn it!

  He didn’t find a single flashlight anywhere.

  Without a flashlight, there was no way he could expect to investigate Bill’s secret passageway. I’ll never find out what’s going on around here! he exclaimed to himself, frustrated. He looked through a few more drawers and cabinets, found nothing, but then—

  All right!

  It wasn’t a flashlight he’d found, but it was the next best thing. There, lying in the last drawer, was a box of long, white candles, and right next to the candles was a large box of blue-tip safety matches.

  He took up one candle and removed the box of matches. Then, very carefully, he struck one of the matches across the flint striker on the box, cautious to make sure the box was closed when he did so, and then he lit the candle.

  Now he was ready to get on with it!

  He walked to the end of the kitchen, past the long butcher-block counter, and stepped into the back hallway.

  It was like stepping from a world of light into a world of grim, silent, eerie darkness. Suddenly Kevin found himself standing in the middle of what seemed a corridor of faint, shifting shadows, the shadows of course being thrown by the single candle in his hand. Again, the darkness made the hallway seem a lot longer; it seemed to stretch on for a hundred yards, but he knew this was only his imagination working on him. Get on with it! he ordered himself. What are you? A chicken?

  And if there was one thing Kevin swore he would never be, it was a chicken. So he walked on down the dark hallway, with bizarre, ghostly shadows roving about him from the candle. The shadows, above him and on both sides, looked like weird butterflies flittering about…

  Butterflies—

  Or bats! he thought.

  But that was silly. He was just getting scared.

  Instead, he let his imagination get behind him, and he proceeded down the corridor. Each wooden panel on the wall had one of the dark paintings hanging on it, and Kevin inspected each one as he passed, holding the candle close to the canvas.

  His eyes widened, and a breath caught in his chest.

  Each painting showed a different depiction of The Count’s arrival to the shores of America. His coffin and crate of gold bricks being carried across the beach, through the woods, up hills and dales. Then another painting showed the lodge being built. And another painting showed the lodge fully erected, and it looked just like the lodge today.

  And one more thing:

  All of these paintings bore the same artist’s signature in the lower right-hand corner:

  Count Volkov, Kevin read.

  The Count had painted all of these pictures. So Kevin was right:

  The Count is more than just a legend, he realized. He was a real person, who really came here over a hundred years ago, and he really had this lodge built, and it must have cost a lot of money, so maybe The Count really did have a crate full of gold bricks that he’d brought with him from Europe…

  And if all of that was true, then maybe the rest was also true.

  Maybe it was true what Aunt Carolyn said earlier, he considered. About how all legends are based in truth. Maybe Count Volkov really was a vampire too. And maybe his crate of gold bricks really is buried somewhere around here, and maybe his coffin is too. With The Count still in it, just like Aunt Carolyn said!

  Eventually Kevin came to the end of the hallway, to the wall-panel on which hung the painting entitled The Count Comes Ashore.

  This is it, Kevin thought to himself. He knew there was no way he could be mistaken. This was the exact same place he’d discovered earlier.

  He steeled himself. His hand, very slowly, raised up in the candle-lit dark, and then he pushed against the panel.

  And, just as he’d remembered, the panel moved, and—

  click!

  The panel nudged forward, then began to move inward, with a slow and steady creeeeeeak…

  A moment later, Kevin found himself standing before a pitch-black, open doorway.

  The secret passage, he thought.

  Here it was, right in front of him.

  The candle shadows seemed to move faster, like a flurry of birds. Kevin felt his heart suddenly begin to beat more quickly, like an impatient fist pounding on the inside of his chest. Total silence wrapped around him—he didn’t even hear the thunder and lightning anymore. All he could hear now were his own thoughts:

  Here’s the secret passage…

  And he knew there was only one thing left to do.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  When Kevin entered the great, black mouth of the passageway, he immediately felt the drop in temperature. Outside in the hallway, it was cozy and warm. In here, though, it was cold enough to make him shiver. And the floor of the passage wasn’t carpeted, it was flat, smooth cement which felt cold as ice against the bottom of his feet.

  Second thoughts began to occur to him:

  Maybe this is stupid, he thought. Maybe there’s nothing back here. Maybe I’m being an idiot and I shouldn’t be fooling around back here at all…

  But Kevin somehow knew that none of this was true. There was something very wrong about the things going on around his aunt’s lodge, and he was determined to find out what those things were. And he knew something else, too:

  This passageway is the perfect place to start.

  And with that thought, he continued down the chilly passageway. The air felt damp; when he coughed once, the sound echoed. After about ten more yards, he came to a large, wooden door.

  There must be another room behind it, he considered. The room that Bill Bitner was in…

  Kevin knew it wasn’t locked—he could see it standing open an inch. His teeth ground together when he pulled back on the rusted, iron handle; the door’s hinges suddenly sounded like a cat with its tail stepped on.

  What faced him now was a pitch-black chamber.

  Kevin cautiously moved into the room, holding the candle out in front of him. The walls were made of old, red bricks with yellowed cement oozing out from the gaps. What kind of a room is this? he asked himself, moving forward a few steps. He didn’t see any lamps or light fixtures, nor did he notice any electrical switches on the walls, and suddenly this made sense because then he remembered that when he and Jimmy had seen Bill Bitner coming out of the passage this morning, Bill had not only been holding a shovel, he’d also been holding a lantern. The darkness here seemed so thick it was like wading through a cold, black pond. The candle threw a fluttering shape of light before him, and eventually, he could see things. A rickety wooden table, several chairs, a dented coffee pot, and—

  Kevin stopped when he turned.

  Shovels, he realized.

  There, propped up in the corner, were two long-handled shovels with large blades, almost like—

  Almost like gravedigging shovels, he pondered, like the ones he’d seen in so many vampire movies…

  He and Jimmy had seen Bill Bitner with a shovel just out in the hall, hadn’t they? And they’d also seen Wally digging in the wood earlier. With a big shovel like one of these, Kevin recalled.

  And, again, he wondered about something else:

  What were they digging for?

  In another corner, he noticed a bunch of old rolled up tents, sleeping bags, and lanterns, and on the wall opposite, hanging on a large piece of pegboard, was an assortment of regular tools, like the kind his dad had int their garage. None of this was any big deal.

  Kevin, next, approached the wooden table in the middle. There was a coffee cup on it, and a newspaper. But then he noticed something else.

  Kevin stopped again when he turned to face the last corner of the room. His eyes bloomed in the dim light. On the floor, shoved all the way into the corner, lay an old, oil-stained cardboard box full of…

  Kevin leaned over, peering down. He wanted to make sure he wasn’t mistaken, and when he realized that he wasn’t mistaken, a nervous sweat broke out on his brow in spite of the room’s damp chill.

  The box was full of wooden stakes.

  Kevin picked one up, examining it in the candlelight. It was crudely made, a two-inch by two-inch stick with a sharpened point. Just like—

  Just like the wooden stakes in the vampire movies, Kevin thought, and with that thought came a wave of scary images in his head, all the movie scenes he’d seen: the good guys, at the very last minute before sundown, finding the vampire’s coffin, forcing it open, and hammering a wooden stake into the vampire’s heart. And Aunt Carolyn, when she’d been telling her story, had verified it herself: a wooden stake hammered through the heart was about the only way to kill a vampire.

  And there was something else he noticed then:

  Two hammers lying next to the box of wooden stakes.

  This is just getting too wild, Kevin thought, and too scary. All this stuff—it all points to one thing…

  Vampires.

  But he needed to get out of here; he’d been down here too long, and if he didn’t get back upstairs to his room soon, someone might find out that he wasn’t where he was supposed to be—in bed. He knew he had a lot of thinking to do, and a lot of things to figure out.

  There were some other things in the room, too. More cardboard boxes, a file cabinet, an antique rolltop desk. Kevin wanted to examine all of these things but he knew there wasn’t time now, and the candle was burning down. He turned away from the box of stakes, was about to step out of the hidden room, but before he could actually leave and go back upstairs, he—

  Wait a minute…

  There was something else, lying under the table that the coffee cup and newspaper were on. Something small, shapeless, and white. But what was it?

  Kevin got down on one knee, lowered the candle, and stared under the table.

  There, in the flickering light, he finally realized what the thing was:

  A white rag with blood all over it…

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  Terror and dread made Kevin feel light-headed as he stumbled out of the secret room, closed the door behind him, and raced back down the dark corridor. All at once he felt more confused—and more scared—than he probably ever had in his whole life. Nothing made sense now. According to Aunt Carolyn, and according to everything else he understood, vampires didn’t exist. They were just part of a myth.

  But…

  If vampires don’t exist, he thought, moving down the hall, then what else can explain all the things I’ve found so far?

  It was a terrifying question.

  Secret panels, secret rooms. Creepy paintings all over the place, paintings of a vampire. Strange people digging in the woods. Shovels and hammers and—

  And a box of wooden stakes, he added in thought, and a rag with blood on it…

  And on top of all those things, there was always Aunt Carolyn’s story itself, about Count Volkov, a vampire story.

  Could it all be just a strange coincidence? No, he felt sure. No way. There are just too many things that all add up to vampires. A coincidence would be impossible.

  And all the things he’d discovered so far? They all pointed to one person, didn’t they?

  Aunt Carolyn, Kevin realized.

  He got to the end of the hidden corridor, rushed out, then carefully pushed the panel closed. He didn’t want to leave any evidence that he’d been down here. What would he do then? What would he say? How could he possibly explain it without being forced to reveal what he’d found?

  No, he couldn’t do that—he knew it. He couldn’t tell anybody about any of this. At least not yet, he thought. At least not till Dad gets back from his fishing trip.

  And the reason for this was simple.

  Kevin was scared.

  Very scared.

  He double-checked to make sure the secret panel was properly closed, then he headed back to the kitchen. The candle, by now, had burned down most of the way. Kevin blew it out and turned on the kitchen faucet. Then he ran the candle’s wick thoroughly under the water, to be absolutely sure that it was out. The task finished, he hid the stub of the candle in the garbage can beneath the sink.

  But for the entire time that he was doing this, his thoughts kept running away with his fears, and then he noticed that his hands were shaking. Yes, Kevin was scared, all right. And he knew why.

  Suddenly the pieces started to fit together. They fit together so well, in fact, that Kevin was surprised he hadn’t figured it out sooner.

  He turned off the overhead kitchen light, then wandered out to the hearth room. By now, the fire had all but died; only a tiny pile of glowing embers remained, and traces of heat. Outside, the storm still raged, the rain splashing against the windows, and the lightning crackling. But it wasn’t the storm that made Kevin so nervous…

  He sat down in the dark, on one of the couches surrounding the fireplace. This whole creepy lodge is just like something out of a vampire movie, he realized, and everything else fits, too.

  Bill Bitner’s secret room, the wooden stakes, and all that were bad enough. Not to mention the bloody rag, the shovels, and the weird paintings. It was Aunt Carolyn herself that bothered Kevin the most.

  He formed a list in his mind, of all the things that suddenly bothered him about his aunt.

  She’s kind of creepy looking to begin with, he thought. Her pale skin, her long black hair, and those long black dresses she always wears. She knows all about the Count Volkov legend, every detail, plus she bought the very same lodge that The Count had built and used to live in, and she has all of The Count’s paintings hanging all over the place…

  But there was more, wasn’t there?

  She never eats anything. She didn’t eat a thing at dinner, even though she set herself a place at the table, and she didn’t eat any of the popcorn she’d made when she was telling her story about The Count…

  And if there was one thing Kevin knew full well:

  Vampires don’t eat.

  And one more thing, too, the most important hint of all.

  She never goes outside, he realized. She never goes out in the daylight. In fact, I’ve never seen her outside, ever in my life. She’s always inside, in the dark. Sure, this morning she stood out on the porch when we pulled up in the station wagon, but the porch is covered, and the sky was so cloudy, there wasn’t much sunlight anywhere. And for most of the day she was…

  Kevin’s hands began shaking again.

  All day long, we didn’t see her anywhere, he recalled. She disappeared, and that’s when vampires sleep in their coffins—during the day, so they can be awake at night.

  Kevin’s eyes went wide with dread as the lightning crackled in the window.

  And it was then that he finally admitted to himself what had to be true…

  Aunt Carolyn, he realized, is… a vampire…

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  He couldn’t believe it, but he knew there could be no other explanation. Aunt Carolyn is a vampire, living here in Count Volkov’s lodge, he thought. Where else would a vampire live, but in another vampire’s house?

  And everything else made sense, too.

  Like Bill Bitner and Wally. In all the vampire movies Kevin had seen, the vampires always had helpers, people who weren’t vampires themselves, so that they could follow the vampire’s orders during the day. Servants, Kevin thought. Like those blank-faced men in the paintings. Those men were Count Volkov’s servants.

  So what did that make Bill Bitner and Wally?

  They’re… Aunt Carolyn’s servants, Kevin figured. No wonder they work for her so cheap. They’re probably under her spell. They protect her during the day when she’s asleep in her coffin, and they do her work for her. But—

  But what work?

  Digging, he answered himself at once. He’d found the shovels in the secret room, and not only had he seen Bill holding a shovel in the hallway, he’d also seen Wally out in the woods today, during the rainstorm. And what had Wally been doing?