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 wrinkled 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 fi re-fl ecked 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 Aldercots. They kept themselves to themselves and were never seen in Aunt Dimity: Vampire Hunter
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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 goosefl esh 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
94 Nancy Atherton
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.