The Reformed Vampire Support Group

  ‘No, no.’ Father Ramon shook his head. ‘These were all good cars. I wasn’t very close, but I could see they were mostly recent models. Some of them looked brand-new.’

  There was a long pause as Dave and I processed this information, trying to work out what it meant. A pile of maps. A congregation of cars. A conspiratorial wink. What did they all add up to?

  ‘Could there be a party tonight?’ I proposed at last. ‘I bet they have really enormous parties out here, which go on for days and days.’

  ‘Then why didn’t the receptionist warn me?’ Father Ramon objected. ‘Why didn’t she say, “Oh, I don’t know if it would be a good idea to drop in on Barry right now, what with the party and everything”? Why did she just wink like that?’

  Dave suggested that we might be visiting someone with a bit of a reputation. He speculated that Barry McKinnon’s parties might be notorious – full of drinking, drug-taking, and the kind of wild behaviour that you can only really get away with out in the country, where you don’t have nosy neighbours breathing down your neck. I wondered aloud if Barry McKinnon might even manufacture his own illegal drugs, and throw a party for his best customers once in a while. Then Father Ramon said that, as long as we weren’t about to crash the fifth anniversary of the Vampire Extermination Club, Barry’s houseful of guests would probably work to our advantage.

  ‘If he is our man, he won’t try anything nasty in front of his friends,’ the priest declared, sounding for all the world like someone from the army reserve.

  Dave agreed. I didn’t know what to think; I was beginning to feel very anxious. It had been years since I’d encountered a large and noisy crowd of people. I had a sudden vision of drunk teenagers cutting themselves on smashed glass – in fact I could clearly remember something of the sort happening at the last party I’d ever attended. It had been held in a big old house full of university students, none of whom I’d met before. But a friend of mine had known somebody who lived there, so I’d gone with her. (I had a reckless streak, in those days, though you wouldn’t think so now.)

  I’m pretty sure a boy stuck his fist through a window, that night. I seem to recall seeing a bloodstained tea-towel wrapped around his arm, before I staggered outside to throw up. After that, of course, I never went to another party. Because Casimir caught up with me in a murky back lane.

  ‘Maybe we ought to wait till tomorrow night,’ I said, troubled by my memory of the bloodstained tea-towel. But Father Ramon didn’t think much of this idea. He was keen to be back in Sydney for the Sunday-morning service, if possible. And Dave was convinced that there would be safety in numbers.

  ‘We might even be able to crash this thing without anyone knowing that we weren’t invited,’ he said, speaking with the thoughtful air of someone accustomed to gatecrashing. ‘Especially if we take some beer.’

  In the end, though, we decided that our motives would look questionable if we slunk into the house like spies, and were later discovered. Barry might believe that we had come for the sole purpose of attacking him.

  Besides which, Father Ramon wanted to wear his clerical collar.

  ‘Our whole aim is to appear completely honest,’ he said. ‘People tend to trust priests, but not when they sneak into parties disguised as laymen. Everything has to be aboveboard. We should go there and say that we’re making inquiries about a silver bullet.’

  ‘A silver bullet that we found at a friend’s house,’ I added, suddenly struck by an inspired notion. ‘A friend who’s disappeared.’

  ‘Yes.’ The priest gave a nod. ‘We’re just three honest people searching for some answers. That’s how we’ll approach this thing. As for how we proceed from there …’ He shrugged. ‘I suppose that will depend on what we find out.’

  It was as good a plan as any. I certainly couldn’t think of a better one. But before we left I decided to give my mother a ring, just to make sure that Fangseeker hadn’t been identified. (He hadn’t.) I also wanted to reassure her that I was fine, and to satisfy myself that she was fine, too.

  She was. According to Mum, no one had bothered her during the day. There had been no lurking strangers or wordless phone calls. At present, she told me, Horace was trawling the Internet for phrases like ‘I killed a vampire’, Bridget was knitting, Gladys was having a bath and George was feeding the guinea pigs.

  ‘It’s Sanford who’s driving me mad,’ Mum complained. ‘He can’t seem to settle.’ As if to prove her point, Sanford suddenly addressed her in the background; I heard a short, sharp exchange before Mum relinquished the phone. When Sanford’s voice exploded in my ear, I quickly surrendered my own receiver to Father Ramon.

  The last thing I needed was another one of Sanford’s lectures.

  ‘Yes? Who? Oh, Sanford. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Oh, yes.’ The priest’s patience astounded me. ‘No. Yes. No,’ he murmured. ‘Yes, of course. We were just about to leave. There seems to be some kind of party going on over there …’

  As Sanford was given a full report, I followed Dave out to the van. By now it was nearly nine o’clock. Across the dusty road that skirted the car park stood a line of small, shabby houses made of fibro and corrugated iron. Peppercorn trees rustled in the wind. A battered white ute drove past, bristling with antennae. The starry sky seemed so huge that it had a strange kind of weight to it, as if it were pressing down hard on the stunted landscape.

  The air was as sharp as an icepick.

  ‘Have you been to the outback before?’ I inquired of Dave, very softly.

  ‘Yeah,’ he answered. ‘Once. When I was touring.’ He lifted his chin, staring up at the Milky Way. ‘Amazing, isn’t it?’

  ‘Kind of … scary, too. Don’t you think?’

  Dave looked at me. Then he glanced back at the door to our room. Then he said, ‘We’ll be all right. I’ve got a deterrent.’ And he reached into the pocket of his jeans.

  I don’t know what I was expecting. A gun, perhaps? A flick-knife? Something fairly intimidating, at any rate.

  Imagine my disappointment when he produced a very small bottle of perfume.

  ‘You want us to smell so nice that they can’t bear to kill us?’ I demanded. That’s when he produced one of his rare, slightly down-cast smiles.

  ‘It’s Windex,’ he rejoined. ‘With pepper and chilli powder. It’s for squirting in people’s eyes.’

  ‘Oh.’

  ‘You can take it, if you like. I’ve got a Swiss army knife, as well.’ Dave passed me the elegant little atomiser. ‘It looks harmless, but it will come in handy if anything goes wrong.’

  I have to admit, I was impressed.

  ‘That’s really gas, Dave.’

  ‘Thanks.’

  ‘I should have thought of that myself.’ It annoyed me that I hadn’t; once again, I had demonstrated a woeful lack of initiative. ‘Does he know?’ I asked, jerking my chin at our room.

  Dave shook his head as he climbed up into the front of the van. I could understand his reluctance to inform the priest, though I doubted very much that Father Ramon would confiscate my innocent-looking perfume bottle. As for the Swiss army knife, you could hardly call it a weapon. It was more of a tool.

  I was trying to imagine holding off an armed psychopathic killer with a corkscrew and a squirt of spiked Windex when it occurred to me that these two items weren’t our only means of defence. But I could hardly bring myself to say so. In fact I’d been sitting inside the van for several minutes before I finally muttered, ‘Dave?’

  ‘Yeah?’

  ‘If anything does go wrong, would you … that is, if you had to protect yourself …’

  As I trailed off, he regarded me from behind a pair of opaque lenses.

  ‘Would I fang someone, you mean?’ he said. ‘Yes.’

  We gazed at each other wordlessly. Then he opened his mouth. Before he could reply, however, Father Ramon suddenly appeared – and you don’t discuss topics like that in front of a normal person. It isn’t polite. After all, poor Father Ramon would soon find
himself sitting right next to us, in a small enclosed space, speeding through the night across an empty wasteland. No one in this kind of situation wants to hear that the two vampires with him are prepared to use their fangs, if necessary.

  That’s why I never did learn how Dave felt about defensive fanging. It’s also why I had to make a certain moral decision all by myself, in private and without assistance, as we headed along a bumpy, unsealed road towards Wolgaroo Corner.

  You can discuss these subjects all you like in a group meeting, but it doesn’t prepare you for the moment when you actually have to make a choice.

  10

  The moon was full. That’s why it wasn’t as dark as it could have been. Even if our headlights hadn’t been pushing back the shadows, I would have spotted quite a few things, I feel sure. I would have seen the fences, and the saltbush, and the small, furry creature that skipped out of a dry creek bed as we passed. I might even have spied the bleached animal bones that lay scattered beneath a lone desert tree like fallen magnolia petals.

  Not that I was much interested in the scenery. Not for long, at any rate. We had barely cleared the outskirts of town, leaving behind the last telephone pole and dusty, unoccupied shopfront, when we caught sight of two glowing red dots in front of us.

  Someone else was on the road to Wolgaroo Corner.

  ‘Do you think that’s Barry McKinnon?’ I asked, peering through the windscreen. I wasn’t really expecting a reply, and I didn’t get one; nobody said anything for about ten minutes after that, probably because we were all becoming increasingly nervous. It was Dave who finally spoke, after he’d glanced into the rear-view mirror.

  ‘Uh-oh,’ he mumbled. ‘Look.’

  I looked, and saw the reflection of two blazing lights.

  ‘There’s a car behind us,’ he continued, quite unnecessarily. Then he opened the passenger-side window and adjusted the wing mirror next to him. ‘I can’t figure out what make it is,’ he said.

  ‘Well …they can’t both be Barry McKinnon,’ Father Ramon observed. ‘And I doubt that he has many neighbours – not all the way out here.’

  ‘It’s a party. I told you,’ was my contribution.

  We fell silent again, dividing our attention between the vehicle up ahead and the one to our rear. At last a distant cluster of buildings became visible, bathed in electric radiance; within seconds, the tail-lights preceding us had veered off to the left.

  ‘There’s that gate I told you about,’ said Father Ramon. ‘Should I drive straight in, or should we park down the road a bit, and walk?’

  ‘Are you kidding?’ Dave sounded apprehensive. His hands shook as he rolled up the window. ‘We can’t go in on foot. Outback farms always have packs of vicious dogs. Not to mention snakes.’

  ‘Snakes don’t come out at night,’ I said scornfully. ‘They’re cold-blooded.’ I did, however, agree that we should drive straight in. ‘Otherwise people will think we have something to hide.’

  So when we reached the gate, Father Ramon turned left. We immediately clanged over a cattle grid, which stretched between two whitewashed gateposts. Dust still hung in the air, thrown up by the tyres of the car we were following. Somewhere a dog barked.

  ‘See? What did I tell you?’ Dave commented, under his breath.

  I couldn’t see any dogs, at first; just the glare of arc lights, an assemblage of concrete water tanks, and a long, low residence that seemed to be constructed almost entirely out of flyscreens. The vehicles parked near this building ranged from filthy old Land Rovers to gleaming luxury rental cars. There were more than fifteen of them, I noticed.

  Lots more.

  ‘This is a really big bash,’ I said, in sheer amazement. But despite the number of guests there wasn’t a hint of decoration. No streamers or balloons fluttered from the eaves of the house. No fairy-lights illumined the fences or outbuildings. All I could see were discarded tyres, rusty petrol drums, chewed bones – even a gutted lounge chair.

  If it was a party, I decided, it was a very strange one. Because the people who were climbing out of their cars and hurrying towards a gate at the rear of the house didn’t smile or greet each other. Nor were they carrying bottles of wine, or brightly wrapped presents. They all seemed to be men, and they were dressed in dull, dirty colours, with caps or hats pulled down low over their eyes.

  ‘You know what?’ Dave said uneasily. ‘I don’t like the look of this.’

  ‘No.’ The priest had braked. ‘It feels a bit … illicit.’

  ‘You’d better move,’ I suggested. ‘We’re blocking the road here.’

  Obediently Father Ramon steered us towards a vacant patch of gravel that lay between a parked campervan and a tin shed. The campervan’s driver had to step out of our way as we glided to a standstill; he kept his head low and his shoulders hunched. Watching his rapid retreat, I decided that my sunglasses might not be a problem after all.

  ‘Everyone seems so shifty,’ I remarked, then glanced at Dave. ‘You’re going to blend right in, with that two-day growth.’

  ‘Yeah – but he isn’t.’ Dave gestured at Father Ramon’s clerical collar. ‘I don’t know if they’re going to welcome a Catholic priest with open arms, do you? Unless someone keels over suddenly, and they need the last rites.’

  ‘I’ll put on my jumper,’ said Father Ramon.

  The jumper certainly helped, though it couldn’t conceal his patient, candid, kindly expression. Even without his cassock and dog-collar, Father Ramon retained a priestly air. But there was nothing we could do about that. He wouldn’t wear his sunglasses because it was too dark, and the only hat in his possession had a Latin motto embroidered on its crown, directly under a sacred heart of Jesus.

  ‘You’ll just have to stand behind Dave,’ I advised him, in a low voice. Then we jumped down from the van and joined a straggling queue, which had formed in front of a young but grim-faced man posted beside the back gate. He seemed to be collecting tickets, or tokens, and he was large and sunburned, with a vicious scar on his cheek. His oily blond hair had been combed straight back.

  Something about him made my stomach churn.

  ‘Do you think that’s him?’ I breathed, plucking at Father Ramon’s jumper. ‘Do you think that’s Barry McKinnon?’

  The priest shrugged, just as Dave jabbed me with his elbow. Being so small, I had to peer around the enormous gut of the man in front of me before I could see what was happening at the head of the queue – where the scar-faced man was retrieving a silver bullet from almost everyone who passed him by.

  I gasped.

  ‘Follow the track … just follow the track,’ Scarface droned, as the bullets dropped into his open palm, one by one. There was a contemptuous edge to his voice. ‘Thanks, mate … yeah. Just follow the track.’

  ‘What are we going to do?’ I whispered. ‘Are we going to speak up, or what?’

  ‘Shh,’ said Dave.

  Now the fat man ahead of us was surrendering his silver bullet. ‘Hullo, Dermid,’ he said, and Scarface gave a cool little nod.

  ‘G’day, Russell.’

  ‘Where’s your dad? Up at the pit?’

  ‘He’s busy,’ Dermid replied. ‘You’ll see ’im soon enough.’

  ‘Good turnout, eh?’

  ‘Yeah.’ Dermid was getting impatient. His pale eyes flickered in my direction. ‘Not bad.’

  ‘Hope there’s enough room for us all,’ Russell added. ‘I wouldn’t want to miss anything.’

  ‘You won’t,’ Dermid said shortly. ‘Just follow the track.’

  A sudden low growl alerted me to the wide-bodied, musclebound dog sitting beside him. I couldn’t tell you what breed of dog it was – only that it had big teeth and a broad, ugly head. But one glimpse of those teeth was enough to get rid of Russell. He sauntered through the gate and waddled off down a narrow dirt track, towards another collection of arc lights in the distance.

  Dermid fixed his gaze on me again. I sensed that I was an unexpected (and possibly unwelcome) si
ght. But before he could say anything, Father Ramon spoke up.

  ‘Good evening,’ the priest declared. ‘My friends and I were hoping for a word with Mr Barry McKinnon. About this.’ And he displayed our silver bullet, holding it between his thumb and forefinger.

  Dermid blinked. Confusion replaced the hostility in his eyes; he frowned as he glanced from the priest’s face to mine, and back again. Something clearly didn’t make sense to Dermid. Our silver bullet had thrown him.

  I braced myself, convinced that he was about to interrogate us. Luckily, however, I was wrong. Footsteps crunched on the gravel behind me; the line was lengthening, and time was running out. After a brief pause, Dermid shrugged.

  ‘Yeah. Right. Whatever,’ he growled, reaching for the bullet in Father Ramon’s hand. ‘Dad’ll be along any minute. He’ll talk to you then.’

  ‘But—’

  ‘You gotta gimme that. You can’t just keep it.’ Dermid yanked the bullet from Father Ramon’s slackening grip. ‘Just follow the track. It’s a five-minute walk – you need to stay between the green lights.’

  ‘Yes, of course,’ said Father Ramon. If I hadn’t poked him in the ribs, he probably would have stood there asking questions for another ten minutes. As it was, I had to nudge him forward to escape the swelling crowd at our heels.

  Something about my presence still baffled Dermid, who leered and winked when he caught my eye.

  ‘Enjoy yourself, love,’ he drawled, in mocking tones. ‘Just follow the track.’

  So I did – as quickly as possible.

  ‘You know what? I shouldn’t be here.’ This was painfully obvious to me by now. ‘We’ve crashed a stag party, I reckon. Maybe he thinks I’m the stripper.’

  ‘Shh!’ Dave took my arm. Ahead of us lay two long strings of green lights; placed about a metre apart, like a pair of emerald necklaces, they marked the edges of our designated route. Beyond them, on slightly elevated ground, a brightly illuminated crowd of people had gathered around a wire fence. I could hear the murmur of massed voices, swelling occasionally in response to another noise – a kind of clanging thud.