At last we slowed down and stopped. There was a solid metal gate blocking the way, but Nathalie pressed a remote control and it slid silently open. We swung around and up another steep path. There was just one building ahead of us. It was the house I was going to stay in.
It wasn’t at all what I had expected. The Duclarcs’ home was a low white building, very modern, with roofs that slanted at strange angles and windows the size of whole walls. These could slide back, opening the inside to the terrace, garden and the darkly inviting swimming pool. The house stood on the side of a hill, entirely surrounded by trees, with Nice no more than a scattering of bright lights far below. Madame Duclarc drove straight toward a double garage built into the hillside under the house. There must have been some sort of sensor. The doors rolled open to let her in.
Inside, the house was even more unusual, with walls of naked concrete, metal staircases and glass-bottomed corridors giving me the impression of a sort of fortress—though, again, a very modern one. The Duclarcs seemed to like neon tubes so one room would glow red, another green, while the main living area, with its open-plan kitchen, steel fireplace, spiral staircase and huge wooden table reminded me of a theater stage.
Adrien’s dad was named Patrick (pronounced Patreek), and he greeted me in French that was rather more difficult to understand, swallowing his words before they had time to come out of his mouth. But he was still friendly enough, a slim, athletic, curly-haired man—as pale as his wife and son. Adrien was their only child, but there was another member of the family at the table waiting to eat and, I have to say, I didn’t like him from the start.
The Duclarc family had once lived in Eastern Europe, and this was one of their distant relatives over on a visit. He was Patrick’s uncle or second cousin or something like that . . . although it was explained to me, I didn’t quite manage to follow the French. My first thought was that he was ill. His hair was long and silver and looked as if it had never been brushed, hanging down just past his collar. He wasn’t exactly thin. He had a sort of half-starved look, as if he hadn’t eaten for a week. The way he sat, hunched over the table, you could imagine all the interlocking bones holding him together under his strange, old-fashioned clothes. I’ve already said it was boiling hot. Even so, the uncle was dressed in black trousers, boots, a white shirt and a loose-fitting black jacket that almost hung off him like a cape.
His name, I was told, was Vladimir Duclarc. I would have guessed he was about fifty years old, but I could have been wrong. His gray skin, his gnarled fingers and his hunched shoulders could have suggested someone much older. And yet, he had a certain energy. When he turned and looked at me, I saw something come alive in his eyes. It was there just for an instant, a sort of flame. He nodded at me but didn’t speak. In fact, he spoke very little. French, I later learned, was his second language.
We sat down to dinner. I was feeling much more cheerful by now. For a start, the food was excellent. Smoked ham, fresh bread, three or four salads, a huge plate of cheese . . . all the food that the French do so well but which never quite tastes the same when you eat it at home. I noticed that Adrien drank wine, and although I was offered it, I stuck to Coke. The parents asked me a lot of questions about myself, my home in Burford, my family and all the rest of it. It would have been a nice evening.
Except there was something about Vladimir Duclarc that spoiled it. Every time I looked up, he seemed to be staring at me, as if he knew something I didn’t. As if he were sizing me up. He ate very little. In fact, he didn’t touch the salad, toying instead with a piece of raw ham that he chewed between small, sharp teeth, and even as he swallowed it with a little red wine, I could tell he would have much rather been eating something else. Me, perhaps. That was the impression he gave.
And there was one other thing that happened during that meal. Nathalie Duclarc had cooked some really delicious hot snacks. I’m not sure what you’d call them. They were slices of bread dipped in olive oil with tomato and mozzarella, baked in the oven. My mother made something very similar, and as I helped myself to a second portion, I managed to stretch my French vocabulary enough to say that she also used garlic in her recipe.
There was a sudden silence at the table. I wondered if I’d chosen the wrong word for garlic. But it was l’ail. I was sure of it.
“We never eat garlic in this family,” Patrick said.
“Oh?” I wasn’t sure what to say.
“My cousin Vladimir dislikes it.”
“I hate garlic.” Vladimir Duclarc spoke the words as if I had deliberately offended him.
“I’m very sorry . . .”
Next to me, Adrien was fidgeting. Then Patrick reached out and poured some more wine and everyone began talking again. The incident was forgotten—although I would remember it again in the days to come.
And the next few days were great. Patrick drove Adrien and me over to Monaco and we looked at all the million-dollar cars and ten-million-dollar yachts scattered around. We explored Nice—the markets, the cafés, the beach and so on. I went paragliding for the first time. We went to a couple of museums and an aquarium. I was beginning to think that maybe my dad had been right after all. I could actually feel my French getting better. I still found it hard to say anything very sensible, but I understood most of what Adrien and Nathalie said to me.
The only problem was that I wasn’t sleeping very well. It was hard to say why not. It was hot and there was always a lone mosquito whining in my ear. Also, the bedroom was down a flight of stairs, underneath the main bulk of the house, and it never seemed to have enough air. But it was something more than that. I felt uneasy. I was having bad dreams. One night I was sure I heard wolves howling in the woods near the house. I mentioned this to Patrick and he smiled at me. Apparently, there were wolves in the area. The locals often heard them. There was absolutely nothing to worry about. But there was still something about them that kept me awake long into the night.
And then there was Vladimir Duclarc.
It must have been the third or fourth day of my visit that I realized something else that was rather strange about him. He never went out in the day. You’d think that with a huge swimming pool, local markets, the sea, there would be plenty of reasons for him to go outdoors, but in fact I never saw him until after eight o’clock, when the sun set. He spent long periods in his room and never talked about what he had been doing. Only when the darkness came would he walk out onto the terrace, craning his long neck and half closing his eyes as he took in the scented evening air.
One night he went out on his own. I actually saw him walking down the stairs, past the swimming pool and on toward the main gate, his footsteps so light that he almost seemed to be floating in the air. He didn’t have a car and as far as I knew he couldn’t drive. Nathalie was preparing the dinner and there was no sign of Adrien, so—on a whim—I followed him. I wasn’t really doing anything. I mean, I was just playing a game, really. But it just seemed so odd for him to be disappearing into the darkness that I couldn’t help wondering where he was going and what he would do when he got there.
I reached the gate. There it was in front of me, a solid wall of sheet metal that had been stained by rust or rain. It hadn’t opened, but suddenly there was no sign of Monsieur Duclarc. He had vanished. I knew it wasn’t possible. He would have had to open the gate electronically to get out onto the main road, even if he was walking. But it hadn’t moved. So where was he? I looked first one way, then another. Could he be hiding in the darkness? Was he watching me even now? No. That made no sense and, besides, I was certain he hadn’t seen me. Something caught my eye and I glanced upward. A bat, almost invisible against the night sky, fluttered over my head like a piece of charred paper caught in a gust of wind. It was there and then it was gone.
And so was Vladimir Duclarc.
I didn’t have much appetite that night. The empty chair on the opposite side of the table was somehow threatening. I could imagine an invisible man sitting there, his eyes fixed on me. For
the first time, I felt homesick. I was even tempted to call my parents and ask them to let me return.
Perhaps I should have mentioned that I actually had a problem with the phones. It turned out that there was no mobile signal at the Duclarcs’ home, and although they would have happily let me use their landline, it was right in the middle of the hallway where everyone would have heard, and I didn’t like to ask. I’d brought my laptop with me, though, and I swapped e-mails every evening. Isabelle, my sister, had written a couple of times (assuring me that she wasn’t missing me) and Mum and Dad had given me the latest news . . . a new tractor arriving, the wind turbine at the bottom of the garden breaking down, local gossip from the village. It all sounded so normal that once again I couldn’t help feeling very far away. Not just another country but another planet.
It was on the sixth day of my visit that it all really went wrong. That was when I saw the mirror without the reflection.
Vladimir Duclarc had a bedroom at the end of the same corridor as mine. The house had a sort of guest annex, a lower floor that was built onto the side—and that was where the two of us were staying, slightly apart from the rest of the family. Most of the time (and certainly during the day) he kept the door shut. But I had seen inside a couple of times on my way to bed.
The room was as modern as the rest of the house, with an abstract painting—splodges of black and red—on one wall opposite the bed. The walls were gray concrete and the floor some sort of Scandinavian wood. Only the bed was antique, a four-poster that looked particularly uncomfortable and out of keeping with everything else. The room had one interesting feature. There was a full-sized mirror on one wall that actually swung open to reveal a walk-in closet behind. This was full of clothes that I assumed must belong to Nathalie and Patrick.
I’d actually been shown the room by Adrien when he had first taken me around the house and I had noticed the mirror as I walked past. Or rather, I’d noticed myself—the fair hair, the freckles and all the rest of it. Well, on the sixth day, just as I was on my way to dinner, I glanced down the corridor and saw Vladimir Duclarc standing next to the bed, fiddling with the cuff of the shirt he was wearing. He didn’t notice me, which was just as well, because I stood there, wide-eyed, my whole body frozen as if a thousand volts of electricity had just been jammed through me.
Vladimir Duclarc had no reflection.
Now, I know what you’re thinking. You’re thinking that I’d gotten the angles wrong and that I simply couldn’t see the reflection from where I was standing. But it wasn’t like that. He was right in front of the mirror. Inches away from it. And there was no sign of him in the glass. Just vague shapes. He had no reflection!
And then the worst thing possible happened. I must have moved or made a sound because Vladimir glanced up and saw me staring at him. He was angry. I saw that strange fire in his eyes as his head turned toward me. He knew what I had seen. At once I muttered something that made no sense in French or English and hurried back to my room, closing the door behind me. But it was already too late. Why hadn’t I moved away immediately, before he’d spotted me?
I stood there with my heart thumping, every one of my fingers prickling with fear. Perhaps I hadn’t worked it out yet. Or perhaps I’d worked it out long before but had been trying to ignore it. All the evidence spread out in front of me, one piece after another. How could I have been so dumb?
Vladimir Duclarc never went out in the light.
He hated garlic.
He came from Eastern Europe.
He had somehow managed to vanish in front of the main gate seconds before I had seen a bat flickering away.
And he had no reflection.
And there was one last thing, one final piece of evidence that somehow entered my thoughts right then. Barely breathing, I went into the bathroom. I’d had a shower earlier that evening and the mirror was still steamed up. Slowly, I extended a finger and wrote a word in capital letters.
DUCLARC.
Then I began crossing out the letters. It wasn’t an anagram, but it was close enough. Take out a C and replace it with an A. Then jumble it around and what did you get?
DRACULA.
So here’s a question for you. Your starter for ten. Do you believe in vampires? I didn’t. Which is to say, I’d read books and I’d seen films and I’d always comforted myself with the thought that they were all made up. But that was then. That was before I found myself hundreds of miles from home in a house full of strangers in the middle of a wood with wolves howling in the night and a man in the next room with no reflection.
Now I remembered that vampires had been around for hundreds of years, that thousands of stories had been written about them. If vampires didn’t exist, why had so many writers taken an interest? And there was something else. Dracula, the king of the vampires, had certainly been a real person. We’d once talked about him at school, in history. What was his first name? Oh, God! It was Vlad. Vlad the Impaler, born in Transylvania (Eastern Europe) in the fifteenth century. Historical fact!
Even then, standing on my own, I tried to convince myself that I was wrong. There had to be a simple explanation. Lots of people don’t like garlic. It could just be a coincidence that Vladimir’s surname was so close to Vlad the Impaler’s. I told myself that he didn’t even look like a vampire. But then I remembered the long hair, the pale skin, the clothes that were at least fifty years out of date, and I knew it wasn’t true. If there had been a magazine devoted to vampires, he would have made the cover.
My first instinct was to run, to get away from the house and somehow find my way to a local police station. But I knew that was crazy. The police would never believe me. They’d think I was a stupid fifteen-year-old English boy and they would drive me straight back to the house, and if there was one sure way for me to end up with my throat torn out and my blood drained, that was it. Could I call my parents? The mobile wouldn’t work, but there was still my computer. Yes. That was what I would do. I glanced at my watch. It was five past eight. I was already late for dinner. But the family could wait.
I grabbed my laptop and wrenched it open. My hands were trembling so much that I had to jab down three times before I hit the start button. And then the computer seemed to take an hour to boot up. But at last the screen was glowing in front of me. The house had no Wi-Fi, but I’d be able to connect over the telephone line. I’d already done so half a dozen times.
But this time it didn’t work.
I double-clicked on the AOL icon and managed to get the home page on the screen. There was nothing wrong with the computer. But every time I tried to dial out, I got a busy signal. I must have tried twenty times before I suddenly heard Nathalie Duclarc’s voice, calling me from upstairs.
“Jack. Dinner is ready!”
Once again, I froze. The computer bleeped uselessly in front of me. What was I to do? Join them and try to pretend nothing had happened? Or make a break for it? There was only one answer to that. It was dark. The gate was locked and, unlike Vladimir Duclarc, I couldn’t turn myself into a bat and fly over the top. And even if I did manage to get out onto the lane, they’d catch up with me before I reached the main road. Right now it was night. The darkness was my enemy. If I could somehow hold myself together until sunrise, if I could survive, then I could take action. Maybe they’d take me into Nice. I could slip away and check in at the airport before they knew I’d gone. All I had to do was to pretend that nothing had happened. Vladimir Duclarc had seen me outside his room. But despite what I had thought earlier, there was always a chance that he believed his secret was safe. I just had to be very, very careful.
I left the room and climbed up the concrete stairs that led to the main living room, knowing exactly how a condemned man must feel on his way to the scaffold. The entire family was already around the table and nobody seemed to take much notice of me as I sat down. I noticed Vladimir Duclarc was eating more hungrily than usual. Dinner that night was steak. My own meat had already been served. It was sitting in th
e middle of the plate with blood all around. Patrick said something and passed me the vegetables. I didn’t understand his words. In fact, they echoed in my ears. I helped myself to a few pieces of broccoli and some potatoes. I had no idea how I would get through the next hour.
Fortunately, nobody seemed to notice that I was freaking out. Or maybe they were just pretending. Vladimir glanced at me a couple of times but said nothing. Nathalie asked me if I was feeling well and I told her that I might have had too much sun.
“You’ve hardly eaten anything, Jack,” she said.
“I’m sorry.” I’d barely had two mouthfuls of the steak. “I’m not very hungry.”
“You don’t like your meat sanglant?”
Sanglant. The French for “bloody.”
“It’s fine . . .”
But it wasn’t. I’ve always liked meat, but right then I could have become a vegetarian in the blink of an eye. When I sliced a piece of the steak off with my knife, I didn’t feel hungry. I felt like a surgeon in an operating room.
Patrick poured himself a glass of red wine. As I saw the liquid tumbling out of the bottle, I could only imagine something very similar pouring from my own neck. “You must get an early night, Jack,” he said. “We need to look after you.”
And this is what I was thinking. Were they all vampires or was it just cousin Vladimir? True, they were all very pale. They all had the same uncomfortable eyes. But surely they were normal? After all, Adrien and his parents had come out with me into the sunlight. Perhaps it was like this. Vladimir was the vampire and the rest of them were, as they had told me, distant relatives. They were similar to vampires but they weren’t actually vampires themselves. That would make sense. But even if they weren’t blood guzzlers, they still knew about their cousin. Their blood relative. They were protecting him. And that made them as bad as him, however you looked at it.