‘But why do we ha—’ began April, but Mrs Townley had already turned away.
‘You!’ she yelled at one of the Chinese girls. ‘Break the spine on one of my books and I’ll break yours!’
As April walked away, she heard Mrs Townley turn on her iPod again. Iron Maiden’s
Number of the Beast
.
Crazy
, April thought to herself as she walked out of the library.
Completely crazy.
Griffin’s looked like it had been abandoned, a curiosity from a bygone age left behind as the rest of the world modernised and moved onwards. It’s a miracle it’s avoided becoming a Starbucks, thought April. From its tiny windowpanes to its narrow entrance with its firmly closed door, it was the absolute opposite of the bright, welcoming, open-plan shops on either side. Griffin’s bowed shopfront may well have been painted an interesting colour once upon a time, but whatever it was, it was now buried under decades of grime from the High Street traffic. It was a wonder you could even read the dull gold lettering on the shop sign: R. J. Griffin, Purveyor of Fine Books.
There was a hand-written sign on the door - ‘Please ring bell’ - but it took half a dozen goes before a little old man shuffled up to let her in: Mr Gill, April presumed. He had ruddy apple cheeks and was bald but for the tufts of wild white hair sticking out horizontally from just above his ears. His half-moon glasses and moss-green cardigan added to the impression of a studious but forgetful Cambridge don. But he didn’t look particularly friendly.
‘Can I help you?’ he asked suspiciously, still holding on to the door. ‘We’re not sponsoring anything.’
‘No, no,’ said April, ‘I’m looking for a book.’
The man raised his eyebrows and looked April up and down. ‘Oh well.’ He sighed. ‘I suppose you’d better come in, then.’
He opened the door just enough to let April squeeze in. She had to duck under a clump of strange dried flowers hanging from the doorframe and step around an old full-length mirror. It was an incredibly cramped shop, every available surface covered with worn, dusty old books. She didn’t hold out much hope of finding anything here, let alone the book she needed.
‘Is there something specific you’d like?’ said the old man sceptically. Clearly they never had any customers under seventy in here. April fumbled out her reading list and showed him the book title Miss Holden had scribbled at the bottom.
‘I’m a pupil at Ravenwood,’ said April, almost apologetically. ‘Mrs Townley sent me.’
At the mention of the librarian, Mr Gill’s whole demeanour changed. ‘Mrs Townley?’ said the old man, straightening up. ‘Well, why didn’t you say so? How is Marjorie?’
Marjorie?
‘She seems, um, very well,’ said April dubiously.
‘Splendid times we had by the Serpentine,’ said Mr Gill, almost to himself.
April waited for a moment, but Mr Gill was lost in his memories.
‘The book?’ she asked.
‘Ah yes, the book,’ said the shopkeeper, returning to his previous hostility. ‘I dare say we have something like it in the local history section. You’ll find it through the reading room,’ he said, indicating a small door behind his counter.
Beyond the doorway, April found herself in a miniature version of an old-fashioned library, the kind you’d expect to find in a nineteen-twenties country house or an Agatha Christie novel, with wooden floor-to-ceiling bookshelves and two sloping reading tables in the middle of the room. Little hand-written signs were tacked to the front of the shelves: ‘Classical Rome’, ‘Natural History’, ‘Psychology’ and so on. Slowly she walked around, reading the spines of the books. She was no scholar, but even she recognised some of the titles: Origin of
Species
by Charles Darwin; George Stubbs’
The Anatomy of the Horse; Relativity: The Special and General Theory
by Albert Einstein.
‘Wow,’ said April. She wasn’t exactly sure how rare or valuable these books were, but she knew they were probably worth thousands each, if not more. The little corridors formed by the shelves had lots of twists and turns; it was quite a maze back there and it seemed much bigger than the shopfront had suggested.
Hidden around a corner she finally stumbled across the ‘Local History’ section. It was crammed with picture books, full of old maps and sepia photographs of the area a hundred years ago, and books with faded gilt titles like
Dr Crippen
,
the Holloway Poisoner, The Battle for Churchyard Bottom Wood and The Life and Death of Samuel Tizylor Coleridge
. It was all murder and death everywhere. She pulled out some books and checked their indexes, but there was no mention of vampires and no sign of the book Miss Holden had recommended. Still, April felt she was making progress of a sort, and she had the thrill of discovering a place she knew her father would absolutely love. Making a mental note to tell him about it, she walked into the section labelled ‘Medicine’. Her eye was drawn to one ancient-looking book bound in black leather with hinges on the outside. There was just one word on the outside:
Necronomicon.
‘Don’t touch that, please,’ said Mr Gill abruptly, making April jump. She hadn’t even been aware he was behind her. He pushed past her and draped a cloth over the book. ‘Some of these titles are very delicate,’ he said.
Okay, keep your hair on
, she thought,
I wasn’t going to set fire to it.
‘Is there anything I can help you with?’ he asked pointedly. April was reluctant to tell him, but she had the distinct feeling Mr Gill was about to throw her out if she didn’t say something intelligent.
‘Well, I’m looking for something on diseases and myths, something along those lines?’
The old man walked over to one of the bookshelves and pulled out a slim volume with a green cover. ‘This may be of some use,’ he said, indicating a reading table and stool.
April nodded her thanks and sat down. The book was called
The Healing Word: Folk, Myths and Medicine
. April turned to the index and was almost overjoyed to see the entry under ‘V’: vampires, p. 124. She quickly turned to the page:
Vampirism has always been linked to disease. It is often dismissed as allegorical tales about the Black Death—undead strangers coming to remote villages and killing everyone
—
creating a story people can understand to make sense of the inexplicable. To simple peasants the idea of strange zombie creatures drinking blood makes more sense than the idea of some invisible bacteria carried in the air. But all the traits of the vampire - marks on the neck and wrists, lust for blood, hypersexuality, enlarged teeth, sensitivity to sunlight and even garlic - can all be explained in other ways. They are the symptoms of rabies and porphyria, to name but two of the diseases common at the time that could have added proof’ to the rumours and speculation about vampirism.
Feeling disappointed, April carefully replaced the book and returned to the front desk.
‘Not what you wanted?’
‘Not really.’
‘You were looking for something about the Highgate Vampire, I take it?’
April almost gasped and Mr Gill gave her a slight smile. ‘One needn’t be Sherlock Holmes,’ he said. ‘You were looking for information on the cemetery and on old myths. Fairly easy to see the link.’
‘Oh,’ said April, a little embarrassed. ‘I thought I might find a book on it here.’
Mr Gill scoffed. ‘Cobblers, the lot of it, I won’t have them in the shop.’
‘I’m sorry?’
‘Books about the Highgate Vampire, they’re not worth the paper they’re printed on,’ he said. ‘But if you really want to know, it’s all up here.’ He tapped a finger against his forehead.
April’s eyes widened. ‘Really?’
‘When something that exciting happens on one’s doorstep, it would be churlish to pass up the opportunity to get your feet wet, as it were. All happened in the early seventies, you see. I’m sure Marjorie - Mrs Townley - will remember it as well as I do.’
‘Can you tell me what happened?’
Mr Gill indicated a tall stool facing his counter and April sat down.
‘I’m only telling you this because of our, uh, mutual friend, you understand?’ he said, pouring her a cup of tea from a tartan flask.
April nodded.
‘As long as that’s clear. Well, back in the nineteen-sixties, Highgate Cemetery was in rather a sorry state. I suppose many of the relatives of the ... ah ... inhabitants had died off themselves and the graves had become overgrown and somewhat neglected. It became a gathering place for some rather unsavoury characters, hippies and so on, and there were quite a few incidents of graves being desecrated, even bodies removed. Anyway, one night, a chap claimed he saw a “spectral presence” and wrote to the local paper asking if anyone else had ever had a similar experience in the area. Well, that was a red rag to a bull, of course, and they were inundated with reports, although none of them seemed to match: ghosts, blood trails, dead foxes—’
‘Dead foxes?’ interrupted April.
‘Yes, there was a story that they were being found dead, with their throats torn open. But, of course, it was probably just one animal killed by a dog and the numbers got steadily increased in the telling. Interesting though.’
‘Interesting? Why?’
‘Oh, interesting that they should have chosen foxes rather than cats or rats or birds. Foxes are quite important in folklore, you see. They’re a symbol of cunning and deception and also of hunting, for obvious reasons. The pagan Welsh believed witches could transform themselves into foxes.’
April stared down at her cup, her brow furrowed. ‘I saw one,’ she said very quietly. ‘A dead fox, I mean.’
Mr Gill frowned. ‘When was this?’
‘Last week. Just inside the north gate of the cemetery.’
The old man couldn’t hide his concern. ‘Well, it was probably hit by a car, poor thing. People do drive up there like demons. Probably just crawled off somewhere quiet to die.’
April nodded noncommittally. ‘I suppose.’
‘Don’t look so worried, dear child. After all, remember that none of this vampire hoopla has ever been substantiated and the people who claim to see them are the sort who call in to radio shows claiming to have seen Lord Lucan in their local supermarket. There are a lot of people who think it was all a hoax.’
‘And are you one of them?’
‘When it comes to vampires, you do find most of it is ... well, not to put too fine a point on it, it’s rubbish. Personally I think “vampire lore” is often a case of people seeking out Eastern European folklore and making it fit their story, rather than the other way around.’
‘But how did they get from ghosts and folklore to vampires? ’
‘Now that’s the interesting part of the Highgate story. The week after the original letter, someone else wrote in to the paper claiming that the original spectre had been a vampire, brought over from Eastern Europe in a coffin. The claim was completely unsubstantiated, but the media picked up on it, it made the six o’clock news and the story grew and grew. There were tales of a woman being beheaded and even a vampire being staked in a tomb and a nest of them being cleared out of the cemetery. All very unlikely, but that never stops journalists in search of a good story.’
‘So you think it was all nonsense?’
‘Oh no, quite the contrary.’
April looked at him, feeling cold all of a sudden. ‘You think there were vampires in the cemetery?’
‘I don’t think there
were
. There
are
. Present tense. And not only in the graveyard.’
‘I’m sorry?’
‘Oh yes, my dear. It’s my belief that vampires are real and that they are living among us.’
Chapter Thirteen
By morning break on Tuesday, it was all around school. By lunchtime, a buzz of rumour had mutated into the gospel truth and the original story had been embellished beyond all recognition. In fact, Simon’s plan had worked so brilliantly, even April was beginning to wonder if there was some truth behind it. They had hatched the plot in Americano the previous evening. April had still been reeling from her conversation with Mr Gill, but as Caro had brought Simon along, she hadn’t been able to discuss it. She had been so troubled by Mr Gill’s revelation - she wanted to dismiss him as a mad old eccentric, but he was so sincere it was hard to doubt him - she couldn’t concentrate on the job in hand.