His Vampyrrhic Bride

  He scanned the riverbank again. The forest appeared tranquil. There wouldn’t be a body to find. He’d murdered no one. No, he was the victim. A gang of rural muggers had made a fool of the city boy.

  Tom’s back hurt most from the blow. The force of the impact had painfully wrenched the muscles. He didn’t think he’d been punched or kicked. Even so, he decided to check his reflection in the river for black eyes and busted lips.

  He made his way down the bank where he crouched at the water’s edge. The melody of the river pouring over the stones had a calming effect. His usual sense of well-being returned. Once again he was the twenty-three-year-old easy-going guy with a plan to open a scuba-diving school in Greece – not a murderer facing prison.

  Tom Westonby examined his reflection in the water. His dark hair stuck up in tufts. What else can you expect from sleeping outdoors? His brown eyes were clear. There were no signs of being punched. What there was, in massive abundance, were red blotches. Midges had made a meal of his face. Just the sight of them triggered a tide of itchiness. A rash of insect bites covered his bare arms, too. He scooped up handfuls of water to drench his skin. Its coldness helped counteract that hot itch of the bites. The sooner he grabbed a shower the better. Then get to work with the antiseptic ointment.

  As he sluiced his face he noticed that the gold chain was still around his neck. He checked his watch. ‘Still there,’ he murmured in surprise.

  Quickly, he stood up to yell into the forest. ‘You muggers are crap! In fact, you’ve got to be the crappiest muggers ever! You forgot to take this!’ He pointed at the diver’s watch on his wrist. ‘You are absolutely crapping useless!’

  Even as images blazed inside his head of a gang of thugs comically blaming one another for not stealing the expensive watch, another explanation of last night’s events occurred to him. A more rational one.

  The jar of green spirit he’d smashed in the basement? He’d been working in those pungent fumes for more than an hour. When he’d finally cleaned up the glass, and the pool of green stuff that reeked so powerfully, it felt as if his tonsils had caught fire; he’d gone upstairs to grab some fresh air at the window. That’s when he’d seen the beautiful barefoot stranger.

  Or thought he’d seen her.

  By the time Tom Westonby headed home along the woodland path, he found himself grinning. I haven’t killed anyone. I haven’t been attacked. There never were any muggers. No . . . I was high on fumes. I was like a glue-junkie after a monster sniffing-binge.

  As he pushed open the back gate that lead to Mull-Rigg Hall he realized what had really happened last night. He’d been intoxicated by the spirit vapour – high as a solvent-junkie. All this about seeing the woman in the pond had been a bizarre vision generated by inhaling the chemical. After that, he’d gone on a crazy rampage through the forest – all the time, hallucinating like mad.

  I must have fallen over one of the boulders down by the river, he told himself, and the grin got even bigger. Then I passed out. Just wait until Chris hears about this. He’ll be laughing for a week.

  As Tom headed towards the house a stern, male voice rang out: ‘Mr Westonby? I have reason to believe that you have just returned from the scene of a crime.’

  THREE

  Tom Westonby’s heart nearly exploded when he heard those words: ‘. . . you have just returned from the scene of a crime.’

  He spun round on the path to catch sight of a broad face grinning at him from over the fence.

  ‘Chester! Are you trying to blow a heart valve or something?’

  Chester jerked an oily thumb back over his shoulder. ‘I brought the lawnmower that my dad said you’re renting. The van’s parked on the drive. When I couldn’t get you to answer the door I was just about to give up, then . . .’ He gave a knowing smile. ‘I saw you sneaking back from the scene of the crime.’

  ‘What scene of the crime?’ Spasms of guilt clenched up his muscles. For one disturbing moment he wondered if he really had killed the woman in white. ‘What the hell are you talking about, Chester?’

  Chester vaulted over the fence; he couldn’t keep that big smile off his face. ‘You know what crime I’m talking about.’

  ‘Oh?’ Tom finally guessed what Chester was hinting.

  ‘Coming home at nine in the morning? Looking like you’ve been mauled by a she-tiger? You’ve had a night on the tiles, haven’t you?’

  Tom smiled. ‘Something like that.’

  ‘Who is she?’

  ‘’Ah . . . that’s just for me to know, Chester.’

  ‘Enough said, Tom. Your love secrets are safe with me.’

  Even though Chester’s talk about ‘scene of the crime’ was just a leg-pull, Tom still found himself changing the subject. ‘You say you brought the mower?’

  ‘Don’t worry, Tom. I won’t bug you about your girlfriend. But you could always bring her to the pub. Tomorrow’s quiz night.’

  ‘Cheers.’ Once more he changed the subject. ‘Did you bring the chainsaw as well?’

  Chester said that he had. They followed the path round the house to where Chester had parked the van.

  Tom had known Chester Kenyon for the past two months, ever since Tom had moved into Mull-Rigg Hall. Chester – or Cheery Chester as he was popularly known, on account of his happy nature – stood six foot six, had a mop of curly, blonde hair, and always wore a nigh-on impossibly broad smile. The man was clumsily playful, endearing, and nobody could ever actually bring themselves to be angry with him. He was in his early twenties, and he worked with his father at the village tool-hire store. Come to that, you could get anything repaired at the Kenyons’, from a computer to a combine harvester. The people in small, back-of-beyond communities like Danby-Mask tended to be versatile. Even to the point of being a little self-contained world all of their own.

  Tom almost told Chester about accidentally getting high on fumes in the cellar and then hallucinating like crazy as he chased some non-existent woman through the woods. After a moment’s thought, though, Tom decided against sharing the anecdote. Chester would tease him relentlessly for months to come. Chester was a great guy. Tom liked him. However, Chester believed his mission in life was to keep all his friends laughing. And sometimes that would mean endless micky-taking. Chester might be the warmest-hearted guy in the world, yet sometimes he had the sensitivity of a charging bull.

  Chester opened the back doors of the van. Tom helped the big man lift the mower on to the drive. After that, he hauled out the chainsaw while Chester unloaded a fuel can.

  The gentle giant chatted in that amiable way of his as he dealt with the paperwork. ‘It’s the first time I’ve been back to the house since your aunt died.’

  ‘I’d never been here before, either,’ Tom confessed. ‘It amazed me how big the place is. It’s a proper mansion.’

  ‘Dad said your aunt was a good customer . . . always paid her bills early.’ As Chester wrote on the clipboard he glanced round the garden. ‘So you landed the job of getting the house ready for your parents to move in?’

  ‘It’s a full-time job, too. For some reason the house is full of chairs. You know, the straight-backed kind? I think my aunt must have been a bit nutty about them.’

  ‘She was a nice lady, Tom. She’d set out the chairs on the back lawn and invite local people to cream teas.’ He held out the clipboard for Tom to sign. The rental agreement was covered with Chester’s big oily fingerprints. ‘I’m glad somebody will be living here again. I’d hate to see the place fall apart.’

  ‘Lately, I’ve been concentrating on moving all those chairs into the garage, so there’ll be space for the new furniture.’

  ‘And cutting the grass.’ Chester nodded at the mower.

  ‘My mother wanted the garden tidying so Owen will have somewhere to play.’

  ‘Owen?’ Chester’s eyebrows rose in surprise. ‘Owen Gibson? Your aunt’s son?’

  ‘Yeah, my parents inherited a chunk of my aunt’s money. They also inherited her kid.??
? Tom paused. ‘That sounds a bit brutal. I didn’t mean it to come out like that.’

  Chester shrugged. ‘I’m always saying stuff that comes out wrong. Last week I told Grace Harrap that she didn’t look a day over forty.’

  ‘Chester. She’s twenty-six.’

  ‘I know.’ He gave a pained sigh. ‘Grace took the ice out of her drink and rammed it down my shirt.’

  ‘Maybe she’s flirting?’

  ‘Flirting? I fell over a chair and nearly smashed my head on the pub’s fireplace trying to get that flipping ice out.’

  Tom handed the clipboard back. ‘Owen’s only ten. I’m not sure how to talk to him. Sometimes he doesn’t say a word for days.’

  ‘It’s going to be hard on him losing his mother at ten years old.’ Suddenly, the man that Tom thought of as being the giant toddler sounded so mature and wise. ‘Owen’s going to need a lot of love and patience. He found the body, didn’t he?’

  ‘The coroner said she’d died of a heart attack out here on the drive.’

  After a pause, Chester was the one to change the subject this time. ‘How you doing with your diving school? Any sign of going to live in Greece yet, you lucky sod?’

  ‘We’re getting there. Chris found some premises next to the beach.’ He didn’t mention the worrying conundrum of how they’d claw together seventeen thousand dollars by the end of the week.

  ‘Your own diving school? It’ll be a dream come true, won’t it?’

  ‘Believe it or not, we started planning this three years ago. It’s taken eighteen months to save up enough money to get the ball rolling.’ And we’re still seventeen thou short.

  ‘You’ll be taking her?’

  ‘Taking who?’

  ‘The new girlfriend. The one you were tangling with last night.’

  Tom decided he would keep that particular girl a secret. Especially as she was a product of hallucination. So he just shrugged, winked, and said, ‘Who knows?’

  ‘OK.’ Chester laughed. ‘I’ll keep my schnozz out of your biz. Right. I’ll show you how to use the chainsaw.’

  ‘I’m sure I can figure it out.’

  ‘No. I’ll give you a safety lesson. If you cut your legs off with that thing don’t come running to me, complaining that I didn’t teach you how to use it.’

  ‘If I cut my legs off, I won’t be running anywhere.’

  ‘Just my little joke, Tom, to put you at ease.’

  A low roar came from the direction of the forest.

  Chester nodded towards the trees. ‘Don’t worry about the sound. It’s only the local dragon clearing his throat.’

  ‘The local what?’

  ‘The dragon. Haven’t you heard of it? A dragon’s supposed to roam those woods.’

  ‘Sounded like a bus to me.’

  ‘When we were kids we were told a dragon lurked up here in the valley. A big, ugly monster that loves to suck out your blood.’

  The sound of the bus grew closer.

  ‘I haven’t seen any dragons.’ Tom played along with the joke.

  ‘Neither did us kids. I reckon they made up the dragon story to keep us away from the river.’ He picked up the chainsaw. ‘See the D-ring? That’s how you start the motor.’

  Tom wasn’t listening. He couldn’t take his eyes from the bus passing by.

  ‘Did you hear me, Tom? This starts the motor.’

  Tom didn’t hear. He wasn’t thinking about the chainsaw. Or about the appetites of the neighbourhood dragon. He was watching the bus. Or, rather, a specific individual on the bus.

  Because sitting in the middle of the vehicle was a woman dressed in a white blouse. The woman from the hallucination. The same woman he thought he’d chased through the forest last night.

  She turned her head. He thought he saw her nod in his direction. Then the bus accelerated away into the distance.

  FOUR

  Cheery Chester drove away from Mull-Rigg Hall. He waved a happy goodbye from the van window and left Tom Westonby alone with the rented lawnmower, the chainsaw, and his thoughts.

  Tom ate baked beans on toast for lunch. Nothing like beans, the boldly symphonic fruit, to inflate a wetsuit, or so the scuba fraternity insisted. The sense of humour shared by professional divers tended to be pretty unsophisticated at the best of times.

  After he’d eaten his meal Tom prowled the grounds of Mull-Rigg Hall. He’d lived here alone for the past two months, ever since he’d agreed to get the place ready for his mother and father, and what amounted to a new brother. His late aunt’s son, Owen, was likeable. Tom was sure he’d get on well with the ten-year-old once he got to know him better. In truth, though, they’d spent very little time together. Before Tom had accepted the role of janitor here, along with the post of general fixer-upper, he’d taken a whole string of jobs in different parts of the country in order to raise money for the new dive school.

  Today, Tom found himself preoccupied with how he’d find the seventeen thousand dollars for the premises in Greece. It didn’t help matters that he’d seemed to have a weird out-of-body experience last night after accidentally inhaling those fumes in the basement. By this morning he’d convinced himself he’d been in the grip of a bizarre hallucination: that he’d been chasing nothing more than a phantom of his own imagination through the forest.

  However, just an hour ago there’d been another twist to that particular story. He’d actually seen the woman riding by on a bus. So who was she? The beautiful stranger with fair hair.

  What really troubled Tom was that the woman must have been in the garden at midnight. Therefore, she really had been dipping her bare feet into the pond. So that meant he must have pursued her. Dear God, he’d been chasing her like he was going to attack her or something!

  I don’t stalk women. It’s out of character for me to grab hold of a stranger like that. He kept telling himself this to avoid the guilty notion that he might have frightened someone who’d been innocently taking a midnight stroll. Though that’s a dangerous thing for a woman to do, even in the countryside. He decided the intoxicating effect of the spirit had briefly sent him . . . what? Crazy? Psychotic? Murderous?

  Shivers ran down his back. His imagination conjured up big, bright pictures of what he might have done after the woman made him angry by revealing that she’d been spying on him. As he paced about the lawn he found himself, to his horror, picturing how he might have grabbed hold of the stranger before strangling the life out of her. Then what? Frantically returning to the house for a spade so he could dig a grave out in the woods? Or dumping the corpse in the river?

  Those gruesome scenarios unsettled him so much that he couldn’t concentrate on any one job. He’d a long list of chores – rooms to be emptied of the army of chairs that his aunt had accumulated, walls to be painted, new curtain tracks to be fitted, fences to be repaired, lawns to be cut, dead wood to be lopped (the orchard was a spectacular jungle). Yet he couldn’t settle on any one task.

  He mooched from one of the mansion’s ten bedrooms to the other. Started to remove plastic light-switch covers to replace them with the beautiful antique brass ones bought at auction, then found himself remembering – or was that obsessing? – about the woman in white. Eventually, he returned to the basement.

  The fumes still caught at the back of his throat. Even after one lungful of vapour coming off the spirit that had soaked into the brick floor he felt light-headed. His lips started to tingle. Brick walls began to ripple strangely. It was a wonder he hadn’t choked to death last night. Tom quickly opened the hatch that once allowed delivery men to pour coal down into the cellar. With the hatch open, the air should start to circulate and dispel the evaporated spirit. He decided not to return to the basement until the fumes had gone.

  In order to get some fresh air himself, he strolled around the garden. It wasn’t long before he found himself by the pond where she had walked barefoot.

  Ponds tend to be slimy. At the bottom, there’s usually a disgustingly noxious black layer of mud a
nd rotting leaves, which would be vile to actually walk on.

  However, this pond, fed by a natural spring, contained beautifully clear water. In bright sunlight, the liquid looked deliciously sweet. A sparkling Perrier effect. There was no foul, black mulch at the bottom. On the contrary, the pond-bed was covered with light grey sand, speckled with tiny blue pebbles. He found himself thinking that on a warm, summer’s night, the pond would be pleasant to bathe hot, tired feet. Even a skinny-dip seemed a temptingly refreshing way to escape the heat.

  Outdoors was definitely more attractive than cooping himself up inside and drilling holes in dusty plasterwork so he could install light switches. Now the chainsaw had arrived he could make a start on taming the orchard.

  He headed back round the house towards the garage. At first sight, the mansion had seemed intimidating. Its size, its age, the imposing pillars at the front. The edifice had resembled a Victorian courthouse. The kind of place where hungry kids arrested for stealing bread would be sentenced to go to rat-infested jails.

  However, he’d grown to like the building. The roof tiles were as red as sun-ripened tomatoes. The stonework had mellowed down to a soft, buttery yellow. A slate tablet over the front door boasted that Mull-Rigg Hall had been Raised From Ruin In The Year Of Our Lord 1866. That’s when the pillars and imposingly posh frontage had been added.

  Tom collected the chainsaw from the garage. When you’re twenty-three, chopping down dead trees with a powerful, motor-driven saw is immensely appealing. Even Chester’s jokey warning of ‘if you cut your legs off with that thing, don’t come running to me’ did nothing to lessen his enthusiasm to start blasting tree trunks with the ferocious blade.