The Traveling Vampire Show

We glanced at each other. Rusty looked like a school kid ordered to the principal’s office.

“Oh, man,” he murmured.

I ran to the stairs and raced up them two at a time, Rusty pounding along behind me. At the top of the stairs, I knew I would see Slim down the hallway, standing in front of her mother’s bedroom.

She wasn’t there.

The hallway was empty.

“Slim?”

“Over here.” Her voice had come from the left—the direction of both the bedrooms.

Heart thumping hard and fast, I hurried down the hallway, certain to find Slim inside her mother’s bedroom.

The two doors were on opposite sides of the hallway.

As I neared them, I smelled the sweetness of the spilled perfume. Maybe the scent had dissipated, but it certainly hadn’t vanished.

I turned toward the mother’s door.

“Dwight?”

I spun around. Slim was in her own room. I hurried to her door and got there just before Rusty. We both stopped and gazed in.

Slim was standing beside her bed, a nervous look on her face. She was barefoot. She still wore Lee’s red shorts, but she’d taken off the shirts and put on her own bikini top. The powder-blue one, a favorite of mine. The matching bottoms looked as if they been tossed onto her bed along with the two shirts she’d taken off.

“What’s wrong?” I asked.

In a small voice as if she feared being overheard, she said, “Somebody’s been in my room.”

I shriveled inside. Before I could say anything, Rusty asked, “What do you mean?”

She turned sideways, raised a long, tanned arm and pointed a finger at her pillow.

On top of it lay a paperback book, wet and chewed and torn. Though the book looked as if it had been mauled by a vicious dog, its cover was intact enough for me to read the title.

Dracula.

My breath knocked out, I looked at Rusty. He looked at me. Then we both shook our heads.

Slim still had her eyes on the wreckage of Dracula, so I took a fast look at the paperbacks on her headboard. They were lined up neatly, just the same as when I’d seen them earlier. Then, however, Dracula had been among them.

“How the hell did that happen?” Rusty asked.

I almost blurted out, “I didn’t do it,” but I caught myself in time.

I’d looked at the books, but I hadn’t touched them and certainly hadn’t chewed on any of them.

Neither had Rusty. The books had been fine when I went looking for him and found him in the mother’s room. After that, neither of us had been alone in the house.

Slim kept staring at the book.

“Did you do it?” Rusty asked.

“No!” I blurted.

“Not you. Slim.”

“Huh? Me?” She looked at him. “Are you nuts?”

He shrugged. “I don’t know. Did you?”

“No!”

“You had time to do it.”

“I was changing my clothes.”

“Didn’t you see it?”

Slowly, she shook her head. “Not right away. It must’ve been like that, but… I got undressed over there.” She nodded toward her dresser. “Then I came over here and tossed the stuff on the bed and that’s when I noticed.”

“That’s when you yelled?” I asked.

She shook her head some more. “I put my top on first.”

An image filled my mind of Slim standing there in just the red shorts, breathing hard as she stared down at the decimated book, her breasts rising and falling.

“This is crazy,” Rusty muttered. He looked worried.

Apparently, he didn’t suspect me. Maybe he’d glanced into the room on our way out and seen that nothing was out of place.

To Slim, he said, “Are you sure you didn’t do this, like to freak us out or something?”

One glance gave him all the answer he needed—and more.

“Slim wouldn’t do that to a book,” I said. “For any reason.” ,

“That’s right,” she said.

“So if she didn’t, who did?” Half grimacing, half smiling, he added, “Or what?”

Slim bent over slightly, reached down and picked up the book. “It’s still wet.” She lifted it close to her face and sniffed. “Smells like saliva.”

“Human or dog?” I asked.

“Or vampire?” asked Rusty.

Slim scowled at him. “It’s broad daylight.”

“We’d better look around,” I said. “Whoever did this might still be in the house.”

“Or whatever,” Rusty threw in.

Slim looked around as if confused about what to do with the book. Then she carried it across her room and dropped it into a wastebasket next to her desk. It hit the bottom with a ringing thump.

She pulled open a desk drawer and took out two knives. One was a hunting knife in a leather sheath. The other was a Boy Scout pocket knife. Not speaking a word, she brought the knives to us. She handed the hunting knife to me, the pocket knife to Rusty. Then she went to her closet, silently opened its door and stepped inside.

In the closet, most of Slim was out of sight.

She stepped backward with her straight, fiberglass bow in one hand and a quiver of arrows in the other.

Turning toward us, she slung the quiver over her back so the feathered ends of a dozen or more arrows jutted up behind her right shoulder. The strap angled downward from her shoulder to her left hip, passing between her breasts.