Peter And The Vampires (Volume One)

by Darren Pillsbury

  They didn’t see anyone.

  After a few minutes they stopped to catch their breath. Peter noticed that they had almost reached the place where Mom had rescued them from the plant dusting.

  And where he had seen the mannequin in the blue dress.

  Peter’s stomach knotted up even worse. He remembered looking over at her and seeing that she was facing a different direction…then looking back moments later and seeing her head had moved again —

  A loud CLANG echoed in the distance, followed by the rattling of a shopfront gate.

  In his mind’s eye, he could see the gate slowly rising…to reveal her shoe on the floor. A black shoe on a dead, plastic foot.

  He felt his knees go weak with fear.

  “H— ” Dill started to yell.

  Peter didn’t let him get further than that: he wrapped his hand around Dill’s mouth and tackled him to the ground.

  “Mrrrrmmmmph!”

  “Shut up!” Peter hissed.

  Dill slopped his tongue over Peter’s palm. Without thinking, Peter pulled his hand away in disgust.

  “EW! Gross!”

  “Why — ” Dill started.

  “What if it’s the mannequin?” Peter whispered.

  “Gimme a break,” Dill said sarcastically, but he was drowned out by a booming voice far down the aisle of shops.

  “Those stupid, snot–nose punks…I’ll have their heads on a platter if it’s the last thing I do!” echoed through the empty hall.

  Deputy Jenkins.

  Peter looked at Dill. Dill looked back at Peter.

  “It’s even worse!” Dill said under his breath.

  Peter didn’t know if he agreed with that, but it was a close second.

  They crept along the floor like soldiers under fire until they were hidden safely behind a thicket of plants.

  Through the leaves, Peter could see Deputy Jenkins swaggering out of a shoe store. A pretty woman the same age as Peter’s mother followed Jenkins out, then turned back to pull down the gate.

  “That twit of a ranger keeps protecting them. They’re bad apples, and he’s too dumb to see it. It wouldn’t surprise me if they’re behind the vandalism, too.”

  “It’s been getting worse,” the woman said. “Yesterday, Jennie Monroe told me the locks on the back of her shop were all torn up. And for some reason, the security cameras keep fritzing at night, like somebody’s messing with them, so we can never get any of it on video.”

  “Maybe I should stay behind and help that idiot security guard.”

  “I think somebody’s forgetting about our date,” the woman said.

  “Well, one day I’m gonna catch ‘em red–handed, and when I do…”

  SLAP! Jenkins whapped his heavy flashlight into the palm of his hand.

  The woman hooked her arm through the deputy’s and cooed, “I feel so safe and secure being around law enforcement.”

  “Best in the state,” Deputy Jenkins laughed. It was not a pleasant sound.

  The two adults walked down a side corridor towards an exit. Their voices grew fainter. A door opened and then closed, followed by the SHUNK of a deadbolt sliding into place…and then the voices were gone.

  Dill and Peter were totally alone in the mall.

  9

  “Try the ones at the end and work your way to the middle,” Peter ordered as he shoved the bars on the exit doors one by one.

  Nothing. On every one, the deadbolt was locked.

  “No go on mine,” Dill sighed.

  They had tried every exit door on the first floor. Every single one was locked.

  “We gotta try the theater,” Peter urged.

  “Dude, you heard Jenkins — if he catches us in here, we’re toast!”

  “Maybe they won’t call the cops if we explain.”

  “Yeah, right.” Dill shook his head. “Let’s try the phone again.”

  • • •

  They called Dill’s house but still got a busy signal.

  “Can’t you DO something?” Peter fretted.

  “Like what, wave my magic wand?”

  “How long are they going to be?”

  “Dude, if Charlene is IM’ing her friends, there ain’t no tellin’.”

  After arguing for several minutes, Dill agreed to try the movie theater.

  Since the metal gate was three feet away from the theater doors, they couldn’t knock directly — so they banged on the gate instead. They called and hollered, but no one ever came. And the doors were blacked out, so there was no way someone could see them from inside.

  Peter slumped to the ground and checked his watch. It was almost 10:00. “My mom is going to call your house soon, and she’s going to FREAK when she finds out I’m not there.”

  “As long as somebody’s on the internet, she can’t get through. Just like us.”

  “Yeah, but she can walk over.”

  “Why don’t you call your mom and ask to sleep over at my place?”

  Peter hadn’t slept over at Dill’s house in the two months he’d been in Duskerville. When asked by his mother why not, he had gone on at great lengths about the smell of wet dog in Dill’s house (even though they didn’t own a dog), not to mention that Dill had to share his bedroom with his obnoxious brother Woody. There’s no way Mom would buy it. Of course, he didn’t want to tell Dill that and hurt his feelings.

  “We got a new phone with caller ID on it,” Peter lied. “She’ll see it’s not coming from your house.”

  “Oh.”

  Suddenly, there was a gurgling sound. Peter looked around in fear.

  Dill patted his stomach. “I’m hungry.”

  “That was you?! It sounded like a cat underwater!”

  “I’m really hungry.”

  “Well what do you want me to do about it?”

  Dill looked up towards the second story and broke into a smile. “Let’s go check out the food court.”

  “What?! No, we’ve gotta keep calling your house!”

  “It might take ‘em another hour to get off the phone. I’m hungry now.”

  “NO. We have to keep calling.”

  Dill’s stomach gurgled again, but much louder this time. “Fine. You keep calling. I’m going up to the food court.”

  Peter looked around the mall. It was still brightly lit, but he kept imagining the mannequin slowly turning her head…

  “Five minutes, Dill,” he warned.

  “Ten minutes and we’ll come right back, I promise.”

  Peter scowled. “What are we going to eat, anyway? Everything’s locked up!”

  Dill ran to a nearby escalator that had been shut down for the night.

  “We’ll see!” he shouted as he started up the steps.

  10

  All of the burger and Chinese places in the food court were not only locked up, there wasn’t even any food left in the display cases. The employees had cleaned up for the night without leaving a trace.

  “I told you,” Peter scolded.

  “Look!”

  Dill pointed to a cinnamon bun shop. Lo and behold, there were cinnamon buns still on display behind the glass cases. Dill grabbed the metal security gate like a monkey at the zoo and drooled at the food on the other side.

  “How are you going to get in there?” Peter scoffed.

  Dill lifted up on the gate. The padlock stopped it from going far, but there was probably six or seven inches between the bottom of the gate and the ground.

  “Hold it up.”

  “What?”

  “I’m goin’ in.”

  Peter held the gate up, which wasn’t too hard to do — it must have been specially weighted so that any shopkeeper could lift it easily. Meanwhile, Dill got on his back and scooted along the tile.

  “You can’t fit in there,” Peter said.

  “Watch me.”

  He bent his right shoe at an angle and slid it easily under the gate. Then he put his entire right leg under, which was easy, too. But when he got to his body, he had to
suck in his stomach and exhale all his breath.

  “Dill…” Peter cautioned.

  “Lift it!” Dill wheezed.

  It took a bit of scrunching, but Dill was able to finally wedge his entire body underneath. Then he placed his head flat against the floor with one ear against the ground and slid himself all the way under. For a second it looked like his ear was going to catch and rip off, but it finally flipped under the gate, too.

  “HA!” Dill exulted as he got up off the ground.

  “This is stealing,” Peter said gravely.

  Dill hoisted himself up onto the counter and clattered over behind the display case. “I got money. It’s not stealing if you leave money.”

  “We’ve got, like, a buck fifty. You’ve gotta save some coins so we can make a phone call, and the cheapest thing on the menu is a dollar. You’re telling me you’re only going to have one mini cinnamon bun?”

  “I’ll leave an IOU.”

  Peter watched through the glass as Dill opened the back of the display case.

  “How’re you going to pay them back? Are you going to say, ‘Oh, hey, there was this time I broke into your shop, so here’s ten bucks?’”

  “I’ll throw the money behind the counter and run away.” Suddenly Dill looked up in excitement. “OR we could take some money from the fountain and leave it here, and then I could just pay the fountain back!”

  “You’re going to steal from sick kids so you can eat cinnamon buns?”

  “It’s not stealing, it’s borrowing. You want anything, Mr. Sunday School Preacher?”

  Peter’s stomach felt a little hollow, but he couldn’t give in to Dill and take any of the cinnamon buns.

  …could he?

  “Just one…or two,” he relented.

  “Yeah!” Dill passed several handfuls of treats under the metal gate to Peter. After Dill squeezed back to the other side, they sat on the ground eating the pastries in all their sticky goodness.

  “Tell me this isn’t cool,” Dill said happily.

  “It’s pretty cool,” Peter confessed. “If we weren’t going to totally get busted.”

  Dill licked sugar frosting off all of his fingers. “You only live once.”

  At that exact moment, the lights went out.

  Except for the moon filtering in through the skylights and a few isolated spots of yellow streaming out of shop windows, the mall was plunged into darkness.

  “Oh crap,” Dill whispered.

  11

  They literally had to feel their way down the escalator to get back to the first floor. Peter wondered if, once they reached the phones, there would even be enough light to see the keypad and dial the number.

  “This is so not cool,” Peter muttered as he traced his fingers along the escalator’s rubber handrails.

  “It’s not my fault! Did I shut the lights off? NO.”

  “We’ve got to get back to the phone and call your mom, now!”

  “What, am I stopping you?”

  They reached the first floor and walked along the shopfronts, letting the glow from the glass windows light their way.

  “My mom is going to kill me,” Peter moaned.

  “Quit complaining and let’s just get back to the phone,” Dill snapped.

  “Fine.”

  “FINE.”

  Somewhere deep in the mall, a metal gate groaned and rattled open. The sound echoed over and over again in the vast darkness.

  Peter and Dill both paused to listen.

  The echoes died away. Only silence remained.

  “…did you hear that?” Peter asked fearfully.

  “Yeah,” Dill murmured. “Do you think we oughta go find it?”

  Images of a friendly security guard flashed through Peter’s mind, only to be replaced by other possibilities: Deputy Jenkins. Vampires. Swamp Monsters.

  Or something else.

  What the ‘something else’ could be, he didn’t exactly know, but he wasn’t eager to find out.

  “I think we should keep going and make the phone call,” Peter whispered.

  “Okay,” Dill agreed quickly.

  They kept to the glow of the shop windows, but sped up a little faster than before. As he walked, Peter tried to keep his mind off of where that sound had come from — but failed.

  Was it from one of the large department stores?

  Or…somewhere else?

  Peter stopped.

  Off to his right, he could have sworn he heard bushes moving. He looked over at the island of landscaping in the center of the dark first floor, but couldn’t see anything.

  “Dill,” he whispered.

  Dill paused and turned around. Without the sound of footsteps, the quiet whshh and scrape of branches was a tiny bit more noticeable —

  And then the sounds stopped, as though the person making them realized he had been found out.

  “Did you hear that?” Peter breathed.

  “Hear what?” Dill asked worriedly.

  “I…I thought I heard something in the bushes over there…”

  They stood there for half a minute, straining to hear anything else.

  Silence.

  “Are you trying to freak me out even more?” Dill asked through gritted teeth.

  “No, sorry…I guess I imagined it.”

  Despite that explanation, Dill didn’t suggest checking out the shrubbery.

  Peter certainly wasn’t going to offer. “Let’s go,” he whispered.

  They began fumbling through the shadows again — until he heard the sound of whispers from somewhere up above.

  “Dill,” Peter murmured.

  They both stopped. Peter tried to hear over the pounding of his heart, but the whispers had ceased, just like the noise in the bushes.

  “What?” Dill whispered in both fear and anger.

  “You didn’t hear it? Up on the second floor?”

  “This isn’t funny, man,” Dill hissed.

  “I swear, I’m not trying to — ”

  “Hey,” Dill interrupted, pointing. “Look over there!”

  12

  Peter looked to the center of the mall. In the glow of the moon through the skylights sat a woman on a bench.

  She was tall, with long brown hair cascading down her neck. She sat with her back to Dill and Peter so they couldn’t see her face. The bench was surrounded by a brick island full of plants and ferns, so it was hard to see much more than the back of her head.

  Peter’s chest flooded with relief. At this point he didn’t care if she turned them in to the cops. As far as he was concerned, she was their ticket out of there.

  “Ma’am?” he called.

  Even though he spoke normally, his voice sounded like a shout in the silence.

  The woman didn’t move, not even a millimeter.

  “Uh, lady?” Peter said.

  Again, no reaction.

  Relief slowly drained away, and fear began to creep back in.

  “You think she’s deaf?” Dill asked.

  “I don’t know.”

  Peter crept out into the center of the mall floor. Dill was right behind him, a hand on his shoulder.

  The woman sat still and quiet only fifteen feet away.

  “Lady,” Peter whispered harshly.

  The woman kept staring off into the darkness.

  Part of him feared she would suddenly whip around, her eyes black like a shark’s, her lips drawn back over fangs. But even more than that, he was afraid because he had no idea why she wouldn’t answer.

  “Miss…?”

  Peter circled around the ferns and the bench so that he could see everything about her — and immediately his fear became panic.

  It was the woman.

  The mannequin.

  The one who had turned her head in the shop.

  Peter gasped — but nothing happened.

  She sat there on the bench, staring out into space. Lifeless.

  Dill exhaled in relief.

  “It’s a dummy…dummy,” he
said to Peter.

  Peter stepped closer. She wore the same blue evening dress, had the same painted–on blue eyes.

  “It’s the same one I saw earlier,” Peter managed to say. He still kept waiting for her to move, for her head to slowly swivel around…

  “What?”

  “The one I told you about,” Peter explained, his voice quivering. “The mannequin I saw in the shop, the one that turned her head.”

  But she seemed harmless now. She only sat there, quiet and serene in the darkness.

  Finally he understood: this was all a joke. Somebody was playing an elaborate prank on them, locking them up in the mall, placing this dummy here to scare them. None of it was real. Someone — Eric, maybe? Deputy Jenkins? — knew exactly how to scare him, and had done everything in their power to make him pee his pants.

  But it wasn’t going to work. Not today.

  He stepped closer to the dummy, close enough to touch her.

  She was actually very beautiful. Her hair looked almost real, and her face was flawless. She could have been a supermodel or a movie star if she were real.

  Peter stared at her and wondered who would have been twisted enough to drag a dummy out into the middle of the mall and put her here on the bench.

  Without warning, her hand lashed out and grabbed his wrist.

  He was too surprised to scream. He tried to pull his arm away and found that he could not. Her grip was cold and hard, like carved ice against his skin.

  Behind him, Dill gasped.

  The mannequin’s head slowly rotated so that her unseeing eyes stared into Peter’s. From somewhere inside her body came a voice. It did not emerge from the mouth; instead, it seemed to reverberate somewhere within her chest, hollow and empty. Her lips never moved.

  “You must leave.”

  Finally Peter found his own voice: he screamed. Dill joined in, twice as loud.

  The mannequin’s hand let go of his wrist.

  “You MUST LEAVE,” the voice repeated, as dry and inhuman as a drumbeat.

  Peter pulled away and ran. Dill followed close behind.

  Read the rest in PETER AND THE WEREWOLVES!