"Well," Jay interjected, "in Love Bites it had to be the head vampire. Like, he’s the top of the family tree. Killing the gang leader vampire wasn’t good enough — Cody had to kill the antique store owner who made the whole gang."
"That’s just a movie, though."
"Yeah. It doesn’t really make sense, anyway. Like, how do you know who’s the head vampire? Wouldn’t the vampire that made the head vampire be the real head? Or the one who made him? How far back do you go?"
Doug thought about this.
"Anyway," said Jay. "The list. So. I know you usually cut through that Presbyterian parking lot on the way to school."
"Yeah."
"Do you still? Because then we’d know you can walk on hallowed ground."
"Well, I can definitely bike on hallowed ground. If the hallowed ground really extends to the parking lot," said Doug. "Is this really an issue? Cemeteries are hallowed ground. Old-school vampires lived in cemeteries."
"Hmm, yeah. Never mind." Jay consulted the binder again. "We know already that you have no trouble with mirrors, of course. Right?"
"Right," said Doug. What he didn’t say was that in the weeks since the change he had avoided seeing his reflection whenever he could. It was superficially the same, but he felt no connection to the boy in the mirror. Victor had taken that, too. There was only an empty stranger; a funeral mask; a pair of weird, dead eyes. He didn’t see himself reflected at all.
He’d taken to keeping his bedroom mirror covered with a sheet, as if someone had died. Someone had, actually.
"Right," said Doug again.
"And you’ve probably had garlic."
"Oh, yeah. My mom puts it in everything. There was extra garlic in those Manwiches. Do you remember," said Doug, "in fifth or sixth grade, when she read that it was good for your heart or something? She used to have my dad and me take garlic pills, eat garlic at every meal…"
Jay was looking more and more uncomfortable. He nodded gravely as if recollecting some great tragedy, until Doug finally said, "What?"
"That’s why…" said Jay, "people call you Meatball."
"What? No, it’s not."
Jay stared at the ground.
Doug was incredulous. "They call me Meatball because I’m short and…husky."
"And smell like Italian food."
"Shut up!"
"You don’t anymore!" Jay rushed to add. "But you did back then. Especially during PE. It was like you sweated garlic."
"Why didn’t you tell me? Shit!"
A fresh breeze ruffled the trees. A dead leaf caught in the hair of Jay’s heavy head.
"I don’t think anybody means anything by it anymore," he said. "It’s just something to call you. Cat isn’t being mean. She’s nice. Stuart calls you Meatball, but you guys are still friends, right? And Adam? He wasn’t even in sixth grade with us. He’s a senior."
"Adam," Doug snarled. "That guy is completely full of shit. I saw him in Planet Comix over the summer. Twice. You were with me one of the times, for the McFadden signing."
"Yeah. I guess he doesn’t like admitting he reads comics."
"I guess he doesn’t like admitting a lot of things. You ever notice how he’s nicer to us when we’re away from school? But even then he’s still looking over his shoulder like the girls’ volleyball team is gonna jump out from behind a tree."
Jay shrugged.
"Look, never mind," said Doug. "Just…what’s next."
Jay looked at his list. "Holy water. But I couldn’t get any."
"And after that?"
"Um…here. Eat this mustard."
AT FIVE TO MIDNIGHT the boys approached the gate of the Hawthorne for the second time.
"I’m going to get in trouble for staying out this late," said Jay.
"I know."
"I’m sorry about the garlic thing."
"I know."
They unloaded Doug’s bike from the trunk and tucked it behind a hedge.
"I have my phone. I’ll call you if…something happens." Doug thought this sounded stupid as soon as he said it. Of course "something" was going to happen — he was going to walk into a house full of vampires. The thought that this alone was not necessarily going to be the lead story of the evening made him suddenly cold. He marched quickly from the car before Jay could offer any words of encouragement. His feet were damp.
The gravel driveway looped like a racetrack around spare ornamental shrubbery and an expanse of lawn so large and plain that it seemed designed to testify to how much land this woman could waste. Doug had rarely seen so much grass in one place without a soccer net at each end.
The home of Signora Polidori was huge, redbrick, and brightly shuttered, more blandly Colonial than Doug would have expected. No gargoyles. No severe, Gothic arches. No bat-shaped door knocker. He supposed that last one would have been a little on the nose, actually.
He rang a perfectly ordinary doorbell, and a few moments later the door opened onto the crepe paper face of the man from the drainpipe.
"You honor this house with your presence, dark master," he said, stepping aside to admit Doug. "Truly it has stood patiently these lonely centuries only that it could one day receive such an exalted visitant into its homely blah, blah, etcetera."
Doug blinked as he walked into the hall. He had no idea how to talk to this person.
The interior of the house was more like it. The foyer was aglow with candlelight and clad in marble and bronze. There was a grand curving staircase of the sort that promised majestic introductions. In the movies a staircase like this could only exist to provide a beautiful woman with a decent way to enter a room. This was no movie, however, and the banister was rubbed dull and dry. The center of each velvet step was bald like an old dog. But the beautiful woman was a beautiful woman.
She looked like a college girl but carried herself down the stairs with the air of a woman three times her age. For all he knew, Doug realized, she was a woman three times her age. Thirty, even. It didn’t hurt that she was dressed like she’d stepped out of a school movie about the cotton gin.
Was this the vampire who had made Victor? She wasn’t French, not with that name, but what did Victor know? He’d probably think Sejal was French.
"I am Signora Polidori. You may call me Cassiopeia," she added, with a faintly raised eyebrow like a footnote, a little legal disclaimer to explain that she wouldn’t normally permit someone like him to call her anything at all. Her voice was the sound of crisp new bills — a little British, not really Italian like Doug expected. More than anything, it had that sound of the East Coast rich that you heard so much in old movies.