Aunt Dimity: Vampire Hunter

by Nancy Atherton

  She withdrew into the farmhouse, leaving the door open behind her. I took a bracing gulp of cold, damp air and followed her into a large, rectangular room with white-plastered walls, a raftered ceiling, and a well-worn flagstone floor. A blanket of warmth enfolded me as soon as I stepped into the cottage, redolent with the tantalizing aromas of fresh-baked bread, roasted meat, and fragrant herbs. The delicious scents made my stomach grumble longingly, but I was too absorbed in my surroundings to regret missing my dinner.

  The room was lit not by candles but by three old-fashioned kerosene lamps with bulbous reservoirs, etched bases, and fluted chimneys. Faded rag rugs covered the uneven limestone flags, and hams, bunches of herbs, strings of dried red berries, and skeins of yarn hung from the blackened rafters.

  The huge hearth that pierced the north wall had been fitted with a type of black-leaded range I’d seen only once before, in a museum of country life. It had an oven on one side, a boiler on the other, and an open fire burning in a grate in between. A teakettle hung on a pivoting pothook above the fire, and woven pot holders dangled from iron hooks set into the mantelshelf.

  A wooden rocking chair sat close to the hearth, opposite a three-legged stool and a full-size spinning wheel, and a towering pine dresser beside the hearth was crammed with books and piled with mismatched but beautiful old china.

  The south wall held a deep stone sink with a hand pump at one end and a wooden draining board at the other. The rest of the walls were hung with shelves that held too many objects to catalogue at a glance. The remains of a meal littered the oak table that occupied the center of the room—a brown teapot and a blue-and-white striped mug, a crust of bread, an apple core, a plate bearing telltale swirls of gravy.

  “I’m so sorry,” I said as I closed the door behind me. “I’ve interrupted your dinner.”

  “No matter,” said Lizzie. “I’d finished.” She cleared the table and took the plate to the sink. “Warm yourself by the fire. I’ll freshen the pot.”

  I took off my jacket and sat on the stool with it in my lap while Lizzie prepared tea in the traditional manner, rinsing the teapot with hot water from the kettle, adding three teaspoons of tea leaves from a caddy on the dresser, filling the pot with boiling water, stirring the mixture, then setting it aside to infuse for several minutes. When the tea was ready, she added milk and sugar to my cup without asking whether I wanted them or not and handed it to me. I accepted it gratefully, hoping to appease my growling stomach.

  Lizzie didn’t refill her own cup. Instead, she sat in the rocking chair, took a pair of knitting needles from a wicker basket filled with balls of yarn, and began to knit so rapidly that I forgot about my tea and watched her, mesmerized.

  “Wow,” I said, after she’d whizzed through the first five rows. “You’re fast.”

  “I have to be,” she said. “I earn my living with my knitting, among other things.”

  “Doesn’t it hurt your eyes to work at night?” I asked, glancing at the kerosene lamps.

  “I don’t need to look,” she said. “My hands know what to do.”

  “They certainly do,” I said respectfully, and because she’d shown no sign of resenting my first question, I asked another. “Where do you sell your knitting?”

  “In an exclusive little shop in Upper Deeping,” she replied. “The owner comes by once a month to fetch what I’ve finished.” A hint of amusement lit Lizzie’s eyes as she added, “She walks in. Doesn’t like to risk her motorcar.”

  “Smart woman,” I muttered.

  The needles kept clicking while Lizzie’s pale eyes traveled from the spinning wheel to the skeins of yarn hanging overhead. “I raise the sheep and shear them, spin the wool, and make the dyes from berries, onion skins, lichens. People feel closer to nature when they wear one of my jumpers, and these days people pay dearly to feel close to nature.”

  “It sounds like hard work,” I commented.

  “Hard work keeps me healthy,” she returned. “I’m seventy-five years old, and I’ve never had a day’s illness in my life.”

  “You’re seventy-five?” I said, impressed. “I thought you were younger.”

  “That’s because I live alone,” she said, nodding wisely. “Mark my words, Lori Shepherd, the less you have to do with people, the healthier you’ll be, in mind as well as body. People are good for nothing but germs and arguments.”

  “What about Dimity?” I asked.

  “She was different,” Lizzie allowed. “She didn’t yammer on at me about finding a husband and having babies. As if I ever needed either.” She tossed her head disdainfully. “People think children will look after them in their old age. In truth, most children would as soon poison their old parents as look after them. As for husbands—I sleep much better without a man hogging the bed or raising the roof with his snoring or telling me to put out the light before I’ve finished reading.”

  It suddenly struck me that Lizzie was as different from the Pym sisters as it was possible to be. Where they were vague and gentle, Lizzie was as sharp as an axe and just as lethal.

  “Your animals depend on you, though,” I said. “What would happen to them if you fell ill?”

  “A young couple, Rhys and Kim, live over the hill,” she said complacently. “I gave them a place to park their caravan ten years ago, and in return they help me with the heavy work. They drop in from time to time, to make sure I’m still ticking, but otherwise we leave each other be. When I pop my clogs, they’ll get the animals, the land, everything.”

  She put down her knitting, picked up a poker, and stirred the fire vigorously. I sipped my tea and basked in the fire’s warmth.

  “Did Dimity tell you about my mother?” I asked after a moment’s silence.

  “She mentioned her best friend, Beth, from time to time,” said Lizzie, returning to her knitting. “I’d forgotten that Beth had a daughter.” She tilted her head toward me. “You’d be the one with the rabbit.”

  I grinned. “Yep. I’m the one with the rabbit. His name is Reginald, and he lives with me, my husband, and my sons in Dimity’s cottage.”

  “Husband and sons, eh?” Lizzie shrugged. “To each her own.”

  “I’ll drink to that,” I said, and took a sip of the sweet, milky tea.

  “Why did you come to see me, Lori Shepherd?” Lizzie eyed me shrewdly. “You’re not doing a piece on me for the Upper Deeping Despatch, are you?”

  “I’m not a journalist,” I assured her. “I came here on my own account, to ask you about Aldercot Hall.”

  The knitting needles stopped moving. “Why would you come to me with questions about Aldercot?”

  I phrased my answer carefully. “Dimity Westwood left her personal journal to me along with the cottage. In the journal she wrote that you knew about certain legends associated with Aldercot.” I skated delicately around the fact that the journal entry had been written posthumously and continued, “I’m interested in local history, but I haven’t been able to find out anything about the DuCaral family or their home. So I decided to come to you. Was Dimity right? Can you tell me about Aldercot?”

  “Oh, I can tell you about Aldercot,” Lizzie said darkly. “Whether you’ll believe me or not is another question.”

  “Try me,” I suggested.

  “Your sons,” she said, after a moment’s silence. “How old would they be?”

  “They’ll be six in March,” I told her. “They’re twins.”

  “Babies,” she murmured. After another pause she laid her knitting in her lap and nodded decisively. “All right, Lori Shepherd, I’ll tell you what I know. You can do with it what you will, but if you’re half as clever as I think you are, you’ll keep those sons of yours away from Aldercot Hall.”

  A shiver of anticipation passed through me, and I hunched forward on the stool so as not to miss a word that Lizzie said. She rested her arms on the chair’s, began to rock in a slow but steady rhythm, and turned her gaze to the fire. The flickering flames cast a reddish glow over her w
rinkled face and lit her pale eyes with golden sparks.

  “In 1899,” she began, “a great storm drove a ship ashore near the town of Whitby in North Yorkshire. The crew was dead and the ship’s sole passenger missing, so no one could explain the queer cargo the ship carried. Fifty crates filled with dirt seemed an odd thing to ship to England, but the crates were loaded onto a wagon and sent to London, in accordance with papers found in the captain’s cabin. The crates were the property of the ship’s missing passenger.” Her fire-flecked eyes swiveled toward me. “His name was Count Dracula.”

  “I’ve heard of him,” I said solemnly. It seemed impolite to point out that her story, so far, had been stolen directly from Bram Stoker’s famous novel, a copy of which might very well be sitting on one of the pine dresser’s crowded shelves.

  “Everyone’s heard of Count Dracula,” Lizzie acknowledged, looking again into the fire. “And some have heard of the crates he shipped to London. But only a few—a scant few—know that the wagons carrying those crates interrupted their southward journey with a stop at Aldercot Hall.”

  “Ah,” I breathed. The Aldercot Hall connection was a new twist on the old tale, a subplot not derived from Stoker’s novel.

  “The Aldercot family had died out years before, and the hall was derelict,” Lizzie went on. “But a short time after the wagons made their unexpected stop, a new family—the DuCarals—took possession of the hall, claiming a distant kinship with the Alder-cots. They kept themselves to themselves and were never seen in the nearby villages. The DuCarals ordered everything they needed from London”—Lizzie gave me a meaningful sidelong glance—“including servants.”

  “Why did they bring servants up from London?” I asked. “There must have been plenty of people around here who needed jobs.”

  “Too many questions would be asked if a local girl went missing,” Lizzie replied.

  “Went missing?” I repeated, frowning.

  “The girls that entered Aldercot Hall were never seen again,” Lizzie intoned.

  “Didn’t their families—” I began, but Lizzie cut me off.

  “They had no families,” she declared. “They were orphans, all of them. When they disappeared, no one noticed or cared.”

  “What happened to them?” I asked, though I thought I knew the answer.

  “The DuCarals needed blood to live,” Lizzie said bluntly. “They used those girls to keep themselves alive, and when they’d drained them dry, they ordered new ones. There are more graves in the DuCaral family graveyard than there ever were DuCarals to bury. And most of them are unmarked.”

  The wind moaned in the chimney, and the twisted tree branches scratched at the windowpanes, like clawed fingers searching for a way in. I clutched my teacup in both hands and tried to ignore the gooseflesh that was creeping up my arms.

  “It couldn’t go on, of course,” Lizzie continued. “Times change, and the DuCarals changed with them. When disposable humans became more difficult to come by, they turned to animals. A herd of fallow deer roams their property, to make the place more picturesque—or so they would have you think.”

  “They drink the deer’s blood?” I said, grimacing.

  “The DuCarals came from a foreign land, but they’re English now,” said Lizzie. “They don’t like to draw attention to themselves. Missing deer draw far less attention than missing housemaids.” She stopped rocking and turned her pale blue eyes toward me. “You’ll know them by their sharp white teeth, their rancid breath, the strength in their cold hands. They live in shadows, and unless they’re killed the right way, they never die.”

  “The…the right way?” I faltered.

  Lizzie leaned forward and lowered her voice. “Ask them, if you dare, about the murder that took place there forty years ago. Ask them why it was never reported to the police. Ask them how a man could be dead one day and alive the next.”

  “A d-dead man came b-back to life?” I stammered, my eyes widening.

  “No,” Lizzie said softly. “He never died. The bullet missed his heart, you see. You have to hit the heart to kill a vampire.”

  She picked up the poker, heated it in the fire, and used the soot on its tip to write the name “DuCaral” in spiky capital letters on the hearthstone. Then she wrote the name a second time, but this time she rearranged the letters to spell…

  “Dracula,” I whispered, thunderstruck.

  “The count never came to Aldercot,” Lizzie said in what she must have thought was a reassuring tone. “But his cousins did. And they never left.”

  While I stared, dumbfounded, at the anagram Lizzie had scrawled upon the hearthstone, she sat back in the rocking chair and resumed knitting. The hissing fire and the clicking needles made me acutely aware of sounds that were missing from Lizzie’s house—the hum of a refrigerator, the rumble of a furnace, the ticking of a clock, the background noises I associated with normalcy. But I was so caught up in the abnormal by then that I found myself straining to hear a wolf’s howl rising from the valley or a bat’s claws scrabbling at the door. When Lizzie spoke, I jumped in fright and splashed tea across the spiky letters, making the soot run in rivulets, like black blood spilled upon the hearth.

  “Keep your sons away from Aldercot,” she warned. “You can see yourself out.”

  “Uh, yes,” I said, tearing my horrified gaze from the hearthstone and getting unsteadily to my feet. “Thank you for a…a fascinating evening. And for the tea.” I wiped my tea-streaked hand on my jeans, took my cup to the sink, put on my jacket, and headed for the door.

  “Wait,” said Lizzie. She placed her knitting atop the balls of yarn in the wicker basket, stood, and pulled a string of shriveled red berries down from a hook on one of the rafters. She tied the string into a loop and hung it around my neck. “Rowanberries. The undead can’t abide rowans. I plant them around my fields to protect my flocks.”

  I looked at the room’s tiny windows. “The trees arched around your windows, your door…?”

  “Rowans,” Lizzie confirmed. Without warning she seized my shoulders and drew me to her, until her cheek was nearly touching mine. “If you go there, go by day,” she whispered hoarsely. “That’s when they’re weakest.” She released me, turned toward her rocking chair, and said over her shoulder, “Good night, Lori Shepherd.”

  “Good night,” I said.

  I opened the door, hesitated, then stepped outside. I would never admit it to Bill or to Kit or to the incurably sensible Emma Harris, but without the rowanberries I might not have had the courage to face the darkness.

  Eleven

  Few drives have tried my patience more severely than the one I took that night down Lizzie’s lane. Each dead leaf streaking past my windshield made me squeak like a frightened mouse, and the headlights picked out grotesque shapes in the hedgerows—leering faces, staring eyes, twisted hands with grasping fingers.

  I wanted to fly home at the speed of light, but I was forced instead to inch along at the speed of sludge, dodging potholes and bumping gingerly in and out of the yawning craters I couldn’t dodge. The only thing that kept me from panicking completely—and destroying what was left of Annelise’s car—was the wholly irrational but nonetheless comforting thought that the trees lining the lane might be rowans.

  I floored the accelerator the moment I hit the paved road, and I didn’t lift my foot until I reached the safety of my driveway and saw the beautiful pools of bright, electric light spilling from the cottage’s many windows. Since I didn’t want Annelise, Will, or Rob to know how spooked I was, I took a moment to collect myself, then pasted a winning smile on my face and strode jauntily up the flagstone path to the front door.

  My hand was on the latch when I realized with a jolt that I was still wearing the rowanberry necklace. I removed it hastily, to avoid unwanted questions, stuffed it into my jacket pocket, hitched my smile back into place, and walked into the cottage.

  “Mummy!”

  The twins’ shouts and the familiar sound of their slippered f
eet pounding down the staircase turned my fake smile into a real one. I swept each of them into a hug and felt my tightly wound nerves unwind as I breathed in the tranquilizing scent of freshly bathed little boys.

  Rob and Will helped me out of my jacket and my wellies, then came with me to the kitchen, where Annelise was dishing up a plate of rewarmed ham and scalloped potatoes for me. The boys chattered like magpies while I ate, telling me about the clay ponies they’d made at school, the flock of sheep that had blocked the road on their way home, and the new toy they’d brought home for Stanley, which turned out to be a ball of raw wool they’d retrieved from a hedgerow while waiting for the sheep to pass. Annelise assured me that she’d washed and dried the wool before presenting it to Stanley, who’d chased it all over the cottage before depositing it on Bill’s armchair.

  I was still eating—and the twins were still chattering—when Bill called, so I handed the telephone to them. They kept their father occupied until I’d finished, then passed the telephone back to me and repaired to the living room to play with their knights and dinosaurs. Annelise went with them, to make sure that none of the pterodactyls “accidentally” flew into the fire.

  “How’s life in cat land?” I asked Bill after they’d gone.

  “Littered with complications,” he replied dryly. “Did I mention the educational scholarships Mrs. Shuttleworth endowed?”

  “Is Miss Muffin going to college?” I asked, laughing.

  “Thankfully, no,” said Bill. “The Shuttleworth scholarships will be awarded to humans, but only if they promise to dedicate their lives to curing cats. Not dogs. Not hamsters. Not parrots. Just cats.”

  “A laudable aim,” I said. “Stanley approves.”

  “Wait until I tell him about the cat spa,” Bill said. “What’s up with you?”

  I reminded myself of my own laudable aim—to protect my husband from unnecessary distractions—and said, “Nothing much. I’m pretty beat from all the walking Kit and I did today, so I’ll probably turn in early.”