Now he ran lightly up the carpeted incline and put his hand on her shoulder. He felt her body tense, knew she was going to scream, and said, “Don’t yell. It’s all right. It’s me.”

She didn’t scream. What escaped was a terrified exhalation of air. She turned around and looked at him, her face white. “W-Who’s me?”

He sat down beside her. “My name is Mark Petrie. I know you; you’re Sue Norton. My dad knows your dad.”

“Petrie…? Henry Petrie?”

“Yes, that’s my father.”

“What are you doing here?” Her eyes were moving continually over him, as if she hadn’t been able to take in his actuality yet.

“The same thing you are. Only that stake won’t work. It’s too…” He groped for a word that had checked into his vocabulary through sight and definition but not by use. “It’s too flimsy.”

She looked down at her piece of snow fence and actually blushed. “Oh, that. Well, I found that in the woods and…and thought someone might fall over it, so I just—”

He cut her adult temporizing short impatiently: “You came to kill the vampire, didn’t you?”

“Wherever did you get that idea? Vampires and things like that?”

He said somberly, “A vampire tried to get me last night. It almost did, too.”

“That’s absurd. A big boy like you should know better than to make up—”

“It was Danny Glick.”

She recoiled, her eyes wincing as if he had thrown a mock punch instead of words. She groped out, found his arm, and held it. Their eyes locked. “Are you making this up, Mark?”

“No,” he said, and told his story in a few simple sentences.

“And you came here alone?” she asked when he had finished. “You believed it and came up here alone?”

“Believed it?” He looked at her, honestly puzzled. “Sure I believed it. I saw it, didn’t I?”

There was no response to that, and suddenly she was ashamed of her instant doubt (no, doubt was too kind a word) of Matt’s story and of Ben’s tentative acceptance.

“How come you’re here?”

She hesitated a moment and then said, “There are some men in town who suspect that there is a man in that house whom no one has seen. That he might be a…a…” Still she could not say the word, but he nodded his understanding. Even on short acquaintance, he seemed quite an extraordinary little boy.

Abridging all that she might have added, she said simply, “So I came to look and find out.”

He nodded at the stake. “And brought that to pound through him?”

“I don’t know if I could do that.”

“I could,” he said calmly. “After what I saw last night. Danny was outside my window, holding on like a great big fly. And his teeth…” He shook his head, dismissing the nightmare as a businessman might dismiss a bankrupt client.

“Do your parents know you’re here?” she asked, knowing they must not.

“No,” he said matter-of-factly. “Sunday is their nature day. They go on bird walks in the mornings and do other things in the afternoon. Sometimes I go and sometimes I don’t. Today they went for a ride up the coast.”

“You’re quite a boy,” she said.

“No, I’m not,” he said, his composure unruffled by the praise. “But I’m going to get rid of him.” He looked up at the house.

“Are you sure—”

“Sure I am. So’re you. Can’t you feelhow bad he is? Doesn’t that house make you afraid, just looking at it?”

“Yes,” she said simply, giving in to him. His logic was the logic of nerve endings, and unlike Ben’s or Matt’s, it was resistless.

“How are we going to do it?” she asked, automatically giving over the leadership of the venture to him.

“Just go up there and break in,” he said. “Find him, pound the stake— mystake—through his heart, and get out again. He’s probably down cellar. They like dark places. Did you bring a flashlight?”

“No.”

“Damn it, neither did I.” He shuffled his sneakered feet aimlessly in the leaves for a moment. “Probably didn’t bring a cross either, did you?”

“Yes, I did,” Susan said. She pulled the link chain out of her blouse and showed him. He nodded and then pulled a chain out of his own shirt.

“I hope I can get this back before my folks come home,” he said gloomily. “I crooked it from my mother’s jewelry box. I’ll catch hell if she finds out.” He looked around. The shadows had lengthened even as they talked, and they both felt an impulse to delay and delay.

“When we find him, don’t look in his eyes,” Mark told her. “He can’t move out of his coffin, not until dark, but he can still hook you with his eyes. Do you know anything religious by heart?”

They had started through the bushes between the woods and the unkempt lawn of the Marsten House.

“Well, the Lord’s Prayer—”

“Sure, that’s good. I know that one, too. We’ll both say it while I pound the stake in.”

He saw her expression, revolted and half flagging, and he took her hand and squeezed it. His self-possession was disconcerting. “Listen, we have to. I bet he’s got half the town after last night. If we wait any longer, he’ll have it all. It will go fast, now.”

“After last night?”

“I dreamed it,” Mark said. His voice was still calm, but his eyes were dark. “I dreamed of them going to houses and calling on phones and begging to be let in. Some people knew, way down deep they knew, but they let them in just the same. Because it was easier to do that than to think something so bad might be real.”

“Just a dream,” she said uneasily.

“I bet there’s a lot of people lying around in bed today with the curtains closed or the shades drawn, wondering if they’ve got a cold or the flu or something. They feel all weak and fuzzy-headed. They don’t want to eat. The idea of eating makes them want to puke.”

“How do you know so much?”

“I read the monster magazines,” he said, “and go to see the movies when I can. Usually I have to tell my mom I’m going to see Walt Disney. And you can’t trust all of it. Sometimes they just make stuff up so the story will be bloodier.”

They were at the side of the house. Say, we’re quite a crew, we believers, Susan thought. An old teacher half-cracked with books, a writer obsessed with his childhood nightmares, a little boy who has taken a postgraduate course in vampire lore from the films and the modern penny-dreadfuls. And me? Do I really believe? Are paranoid fantasies catching?

She believed.

As Mark had said, this close to the house it was just not possible to scoff. All the thought processes, the act of conversation itself, were overshadowed by a more fundamental voice that was screaming danger! danger!in words that were not words at all. Her heartbeat and respiration were up, yet her skin was cold with the capillary-dilating effect of adrenaline, which keeps the blood hiding deep in the body’s wells during moments of stress. Her kidneys were tight and heavy. Her eyes seemed preternaturally sharp, taking in every splinter and paint flake on the side of the house. And all of this had been triggered by no external stimuli at all: no men with guns, no large and snarling dogs, no smell of fire. A deeper watchman than her five senses had been wakened after a long season of sleep. And there was no ignoring it.

She peered through a break in the lower shutters. “Why, they haven’t done a thing to it,” she said almost angrily. “It’s a mess.”

“Let me see. Boost me up.”

She laced her fingers together so he could look through the broken slats and into the crumbling living room of the Marsten House. He saw a deserted, boxy parlor with a thick patina of dust on the floor (many footprints had been tracked through it), peeling wallpaper, two or three old easy chairs, a scarred table. There were cobwebs festooned in the room’s upper corners, near the ceiling.

Before she could protest, he had rapped the hook-and-eye combination that held the shutter closed with the blunt end of his stake. The lock fell to the ground in two rusty pieces, and the shutters creaked outward an inch or two.