My bloody French exchange.
I had just finished my second year at St Edward’s, a private school not far from Stratford-Upon-Avon. As the teachers kept on telling me, the third year was going to be tough because, of course, it finished with that delightful experience known as my GCSE exams. My end-of-term report was pretty upbeat. Everyone agreed that I was going to have no trouble in maths, history, geography, English and all the rest of it, but it was true that I was a little dodgy when it came to French. This was probably the result of having an extremely dodgy teacher. If you ask me, Mr O’Reilly must have been the only language teacher in the entire private-school system who spoke with a stammer. Not his fault, but it did make learning vocabulary tricky. We all assumed that every word was eighteen letters long.
My dad wasn’t taking any chances. The holidays were nine weeks long and before they’d even started, he’d decided I’d devote two weeks of them to a stay in France. On my own.
“You’ve got to be kidding!” That was what I said when he told me. Or words like that, anyway.
“No, Jack. You’ll have a great time. And it’ll give you a real head start next term.”
“But Dad…!”
“Let’s not argue about it, old chap. I did a French exchange when I was your age and it did me a world of good. And you know perfectly well that the holidays are far too long. You usually end up being bored stiff.”
This was true. But I didn’t see why it would be any better being bored stiff in French. Not that it mattered. As usual, my arguments went nowhere. Or rather, they went to the Côte d’Azur, the south coast of France where some friends of friends knew a family who would love to have an English boy to stay with them for two weeks – after which their own son, Adrien, could perhaps spend two weeks in England? Just what I needed! By the time Adrien was out of my life, almost half the holiday would have gone.
Normally, I liked going abroad. But I felt gloomy as I packed my case, sneaking in a couple of paperbacks and my Nintendo DS so at least I would have something English in the days ahead. The Duclarcs lived just outside Nice. I had seen photographs of them, an ordinary-looking family sitting by the pool, and I had exchanged a couple of emails with Adrien. “I look much forward to meet with you.” It seemed his English wasn’t a lot better than my French. My dad drove me to the airport. It would be only the second time that I had flown alone; at least this time I wasn’t going to be made to wear a “junior traveller” label round my neck.
Nice was only about an hour and a half away, but it felt a lot longer. As I watched the grey ribbon of the English Channel slide behind me, it was almost as if I had fallen off the edge of the world. Nothing was going to be the same on the other side. I had to remind myself that it was only two weeks, that I’d be able to FaceTime and email every day, that hundreds of other kids did French exchanges and managed to survive. If the worst came to the worst, I’d just sit there and count the days. Lundi. Mardi. Mercredi. And whatever it was that came next…
Nathalie Duclarc was waiting for me at the airport with Adrien. She was holding a sign with my name – Jack Metcalfe – written in bold letters. Not that she needed it as I was surely the only fifteen-year-old coming out of customs on his own. My first impression was of a small woman with very dark hair, rather pale skin and strange-coloured eyes – somewhere between grey and green. It was easy to tell that Adrien was her son. He was the spitting image of her with the addition of a moustache, or at least the very beginnings of one. He was only fourteen, a few months younger than me, but it’s something I’ve noticed about French kids. They like their facial hair and they try to grow it as early as they can, even if all they can manage is a vague shadow along their upper lip.
“Hello, Jack, I hope you had a good flight,” she said, folding the sign away. She spoke French. From now on everything would be in French. But to be fair to her, she spoke slowly and clearly, and with a sense of relief I realized that I could understand.
“I am Adrien. Welcome to my country.” Her son nodded at me and smiled, and it occurred to me that he had probably been looking forward to meeting me as little as I had been looking forward to coming. Maybe this was going to be all right.
“Please, come this way. The car is not far.”
Wheeling my suitcase behind me, I followed Nathalie to a car park on the other side of the airport and of course we all had a good laugh when I tried to get into the driver’s seat. It would take me a day or two before I remembered that the French drove on the right. It was eight o’clock in the evening and the sun had just set but it was still baking hot, with no breeze in the night air. We drove for about twenty minutes, skirting the city and passing through a desolate industrial zone before finally turning off and climbing up a steep, narrow lane full of ruts and pot-holes, hemmed in on both sides by thick woodland. I was quite surprised. After all, we weren’t far from the centre of a major French city. And yet from the moment we left the main road, we could have been miles away, lost in the middle of the countryside. Somehow it felt darker than it had any right to be, though when I looked up, I was amazed to see the sky absolutely crammed with stars.
At last we slowed down and stopped. A solid metal gate blocked the way but Nathalie pressed a remote control and it slid silently open. We swung round 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, the 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 towards 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 theatre stage.
Adrien’s dad was called Patrick (pronounced Pat-reek) 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 … it was explained to me, but I didn’t quite manage to follow the French. My first thought was that he was ill. His hair was long and silver, hanging down just past his collar, looking as if it had never been brushed. He wasn’t exactly thin, but 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, this uncle was dressed in black trousers, boots, a white shirt and a loose-fitting black jacket that hung off him almost 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 grey 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 din
ner. 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 in England. 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 weighing me up. He ate very little. In fact he didn’t touch the salad, toying instead with a piece of raw ham, which he chewed between small, sharp teeth, and even as he swallowed it with a little red wine, I could tell he would much rather have been eating something else. Me, perhaps. That was the impression he gave.
Another thing 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 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-pound cars and ten-million-pound 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 actually 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. 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 when I realized something else that was rather strange about him. He never went outside in the day. You’d think that with a huge swimming pool, local markets and 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 towards the main gate, his footsteps so light that he seemed to be almost floating in the air. He didn’t have a car and as far as I knew he couldn’t drive. Nathalie was preparing 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 upwards. 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 calling home. It turned out that there was no mobile signal at the Duclarc’s 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 been able to hear, and anyway I didn’t like to ask. I’d brought my laptop with me, but the internet was pretty unreliable too, so I couldn’t FaceTime. In the end, it was as much as I could do to send emails, which I did most evenings. Isabelle, my sister, had emailed 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.
Vladmir Duclarc had a bedroom at the end of the same corridor as mine. The house had a sort of guest annexe, 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 his 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 grey concrete and the floor some sort of Scandanavian 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-size mirror on one wall which actually swung open to reveal a walk-in closet behind. This was full of clothes which I assumed must belong to Nathalie and Patrick.
I’d originally been shown the room by Adrien when he had first taken me round 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, 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 stopped, 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 got 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 possible thing 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 towards 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.
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.
Scared to Death--Ten Sinister Stories by the Master of the Macabre Page 8