Vampire Lodge (5 page)

They tracked back through
the foyer toward the stairwell. Kevin was looking forward to
getting his kite together—it was a
vampire
bat
kite—but just as he approached the
bottom of the big stairwell, something made him come to a halt and
pause for a moment.

His head turned.

His eyes glided across the paneled
wall—

—
back to the creepy
painting.

The painting hung there right in front
of his face.

It seemed to stare back at him just as
much as he stared at it…

The rowboat, the box of gold bricks,
and—

The Count Arrives with his
Servants and Treasure.

—
and the coffin…

CHAPTER TEN

Jimmy had bought the “Wind-Box
Deluxe”, a box kite, which was a box-shape made out of thin wooden
poles with red plastic sheets wrapped around the box. Kevin’s was a
standard wing-type kite: “The Vampire Bat.” It had a simple
t-shaped wooden frame onto which a black plastic sheet was
attached. It took them both about a half hour to get the kites
fully assembled and ready to go. Kevin was proud of his finished
kite; once he had attached the plastic to the frame, the kite
looked just like a giant black bat, complete with big red eyes and
a mouth with fangs.

“
You ready?” Jimmy
asked.

“
Sure am,” Kevin said.
“Let’s go.”

They put on their fall coats and
headed downstairs. Kevin thought it best to let his Aunt Carolyn
know that they’d be on the bluffs for a few hours, but once they
got back downstairs, they still couldn’t find her
anywhere.

“
Where
is
she?” Kevin questioned aloud. “I
haven’t seen her since our dads left.”

“
Look,” Jimmy suggested,
“we don’t want to waste any more time trying to find her. Let’s
just go.”

“
Well,” Kevin hesitated.
“We really should let her know where we’re going first.”

“
She already knows where
we’re going, Kevin. She knows we brought our kites, and she knows
we’ll be flying them. It’s no big deal. We’re not babies. We’ll be
careful, we know what we’re doing.”

Kevin thought about it. “Yeah, I guess
it’s all right.” And, anyway, how could they tell Aunt Carolyn
where they were going? She wasn’t anywhere to be found.

By now it was mid-afternoon. Fallen
leaves blew in swirls out in front of the lodge. “This is going to
be great,” Kevin observed. “The wind’s really picking
up.”

“
So where are these
bluffs?” Jimmy asked.

“
Not far. Right through
this trail.”

Toting their new kites, then, Kevin
and Jimmy set out down the narrow, tree-lined trail. Autumn leaves
continued to fall as they made their way. Acorns and branches
crunched under their feet. “Look!” Jimmy shouted, pointing. “What’s
that?”

Kevin peered into the dense trees to
his left. Two eyes glittered at him, inside of a red
face.

“
It’s a fox,” Kevin said,
as the animal scampered away. “There’re lots of squirrels around
too, collecting acorns and nuts for the winter.”

They both glanced upward then, and
above them, racing back and forth over the high branches, were
dozens of squirrels, mostly brown, but several black ones, and they
even saw one rare white squirrel. Starlings and other birds also
roosted high in the trees, preparing to fly south for the
winter.

“
This place sure is a lot
different from the city,” Jimmy commented. “The woods and the
animals and the birds. It’s incredible.”

“
I know,” Kevin agreed.
“Why do you think I like coming here? The only thing I’m worried
about is what my dad was saying on the way up, about Aunt Carolyn
going ‘bust.’“

“
That means she might have
to close the lodge down, huh?”

“
Yeah, I think
so.”

“
Well, what happens
then?”

Kevin thought about this. It only made
sense. “I guess if she doesn’t have enough money to run the lodge
and the campgrounds, she’ll have to sell the place, something like
that.”

“
That’d be a
bummer.”

“
Yeah, but maybe it won’t
happen,” Kevin said. Then he wanted to change the subject because
he didn’t like to think about the idea that Aunt Carolyn might have
to close down the lodge or sell it to someone else. “Just wait till
we get out onto the bluffs,” he said. “This is absolutely the best
kite-flying weather I’ve ever seen. A whole lot of wind but not
too

hard. If it’s too hard, our strings
could snap, or we might not be able to control the kites, and we’ll
lose them in the trees or crash them.”

Eventually, the trail opened up into a
huge, flat grassy field. Suddenly Kevin and Jimmy were standing
right out in the open. There was a mild salty smell in the air,
from the ocean, and they could hear the waves breaking time and
time again just over the cliff.

“
Wow!” was all Jimmy could
say.

The view over the horizon was
spectacular. Clouds, some white, some dark-gray, churned above
them. And beyond that, they could see the deep-green ocean rising
and falling, every so often topped by swirling squiggles of white
foam that grew and then disappeared, only to be replaced by more of
the same white, foamy squiggles. The great, churning ocean seemed
like it went on forever. And a steady salt-scented wind rushed
against their faces.

“
And it’s a safe place,
too,” Kevin commented, pointing a finger across the
bluff.

Along the edge of the cliff, there was
a long, high fence which led all the way down the coast for well
over a mile, or maybe more. The fence was made of metal wire
attached to steel posts.

“
So there’s no way we can
accidentally fall off the cliff while we’re flying our kites,”
Kevin pointed out. “That fence would catch us.”

“
Did your aunt put the
fence up?” Jimmy asked, dropping his big spool of string and tying
one end to the tail end of his shiny-red box kite.

“
Yeah, a long time ago when
she first bought the lodge,” Kevin told him. “It probably cost a
lot of money to put up, but she wants to make sure no one has any
accidents while they’re staying here. Take a look.”

Jimmy followed Kevin out to the edge
of the bluff. They put their hands on the sturdy metal fence rail,
leaned over, and looked down.

“
Gosh,” Jimmy said. “That
makes me really dizzy just looking down.”

“
I know,” Kevin said. “It’s
pretty scary. But it’s a good thing my aunt had this fence put
up.”

They looked down. The rocky cliff
descended over huge, chunky rocks and led straight down to the sea.
Waves crashed against the stone cliff, shooting giant puffs of
white foamy water.

“
You know,” Jimmy said. “If
a person fell all the way down there—”

“
They’d get killed,” Kevin
finished.

“
Wow.”

They went back to where they’d left
their kites in the clearing. Kevin looked up at the sky, which was
growing darker by the second. “Guess what?,” he said. “Maybe this
wasn’t such a great idea. Look at the sky. It looks like it’s going
to start raining any second.”

“
I think you’re right,”
Jimmy said, also glancing upward. The wind jerked his box kite in
his hand.

And sure enough—

“
Run!” Kevin
yelled.

The darkening sky opened up, thunder
rumbling overhead, and a second later, it started raining harder
than either of them had ever seen.

They dashed back toward the woodline
with their kites. The rain made the air look like it was full of
tiny, moving slits. More thunder rumbled, the sky got even darker,
and then several whip-like streaks of lightning cracked overhead.
Kevin and Jimmy made it back to the woods just in time, otherwise
they would’ve been drenched right through their clothes.

“
What a storm!” Jimmy
exclaimed.

““
Yeah, and look at the
lightning!”

More whips of lightning cracked across
the sky, and then the rain was falling so hard they could hear it
beating against the ground. “We better get back to the lodge,”
Kevin suggested, “and fast.”

They both ran back down the trail in
the teeming rain. At least the heavily branched trees overhead
blocked out a lot of the rainfall. They trotted on for several
minutes, over a carpet of wet leaves, without really paying
attention to where they were going. Then Kevin stopped.

“
What’s wrong?” Jimmy
asked.

Kevin looked around, unsure of
himself. “This doesn’t look right,” he said.

“
What do you
mean?”

Kevin looked around some more, rubbed
his chin. Then his eyes went wide with apprehension, and he said,
“I think we’re on the wrong trail.”

“
What!” Jimmy
exclaimed.

“
Yeah,” Kevin said. “I
think we’re lost.”

CHAPTER ELEVEN

Lost,
Kevin thought. The word sounded dreadful in his head. And he
was sure now: this wasn’t the right trail—it was straighter and
wider and took fewer turns, and Kevin could easily tell that it led
in a direction that was opposite from the way they’d come. They
could hear the rain pelting the trees limbs overhead, and still
more thunder and lightning. Even this deep in the woods, they were
getting drenched.

“
What are we going to do?”
Jimmy asked fretfully.

“
I don’t know,” Kevin said.
“But we’ve definitely got to get back to the lodge. I guess we
better just start walking, and hope we get back going the right
direction.”

“
But what if we
can’t?
” Now there was a
hint of panic in Jimmy’s voice. “What if this path just leads
deeper into the woods? We could wind up walking for miles
and
never
find our
way back to the lodge.”

“
Don’t worry about it,”
Kevin tried to assure him, but he wasn’t even certain himself.
Sometimes he’d hear stories on the news about kids who’d get lost
in the woods, and the police would have to send out search parties,
and sometimes it would take days or even weeks before they could
find the kids. But Kevin decided not to mention this to Jimmy, who
was close to panicking already. Why make things worse?
If we got lost,
Kevin
very grimly realized,
and they had to send
out search parties, Dad would be so mad I’d get grounded for a
month!
And that wasn’t even the worst
fear.

What if we got
lost,
he thought next…
and
never
got
found?

Now Kevin was beginning to feel a
little bit of panic himself. “We’ll just keep walking,” he said.
“Don’t worry. We’ll find our way back.”

“
I hope so,” Jimmy
muttered

They followed the path.
Instead of crunching over the leaves, their feet now
squished
over them. The
rain poured down. At least their kites were made of plastic and not
paper—otherwise, they’d be ruined by now. It was hard to
concentrate: the rain was pouring down so hard, Kevin couldn’t hear
himself think from the steady, driving noise of it, and the rain
clouds had darkened the sky very quickly, which made the woods even
darker, almost like nighttime.

More thunder, then.

And more lightning…

Kevin flinched. He was trying real
hard not to show it, but it seemed that with each additional step
he took along the soggy path, the more afraid he got. Each crack of
lightning was so loud and abrupt, it sounded like the sky was
exploding and falling apart into giant, jagged pieces that he could
almost visualize falling down on them.

Kevin had been through
these woods many times in the past, but never during a thunder
storm. Nothing about this path looked familiar, and they just
seemed to be getting more and more lost as they trudged on through
the puddles, the dripping branches and wet leaves, and the
rain.
What if we don’t find our way back
before dark?
Kevin wondered.
What if we wind up having to sleep out here all
night?

It was just one more thing Kevin
didn’t want to think about. Sleeping in the cold woods all night,
in the rain. And—

He remembered the animal heads he’d
seen hanging on the wall back at the lodge. One of the heads was a
bear…

Bears,
he thought, his fear swelling up more and more till he could
feel his heart racing in his chest. The path curved around, and
then—

Wait a minute,
Kevin thought. He stopped, the rain pelting his
shoulders and the top of his head.

“
What is it?” Jimmy asked,
shivering.

Kevin squinted forward. Then he
suddenly shouted with glee when he realized what he was seeing.
“Look! A sign!”