Uprising

Chapter Twenty-Four

Lavender Close, Wallingford

Joel’s grandfather had always told him that even though vampires could theoretically come out of their lairs any time after dark, they preferred to wait until later in the evening when the humans were quiet and restful. And when they didn’t kill their victims outright, they always returned for more.

‘You must have totally lost it, Solomon,’ Joel muttered to himself. For an instant it hit him how completely mad this was. Here he was, lurking behind the garden shed in the back of a nice middle-class suburban property at half past ten at night. Spaced out from lack of sleep, pins and needles crippling his legs after almost an hour of crouching there, and his nose beginning to run from the chill, damp air.

Thinking about vampires.

Suddenly, the whole thing seemed so absurd to him that he wanted to leave.

What if somebody caught him here? A Detective Inspector, hanging about like a pervert in the dark, peering up at a seventeen-year-old girl’s bedroom window. Not the best PR

for the Thames Valley force, and certainly not an ideal career prospect for him.

But still he lingered there, fighting back the doubts, willing himself to endure the cramps and the cold.

He wished his grandfather were here with him. Joel had been thinking about him a lot recently. And here he was, following in his footsteps after all these years. Or trying to. The old man might have known what to do. Joel wasn’t sure he had the first idea.

By quarter to eleven, the downstairs lights in the neighbouring houses were beginning to go off, and the upstairs lights were coming on. Curtains were being drawn, blurred figures were moving about behind the frosted glass of bathroom windows.

Showers showering, teeth being brushed, the respectable middle-class inhabitants of Lavender Close pulling on their cosy pyjamas and perfume-scented nighties and getting into their warm beds, blissfully unaware of the night creeper in their midst.

And perhaps unaware of other things too. Things too strange and terrible to contemplate in this nice, safe, cosseted middle-class world.

By five past eleven, Joel was feeling desperately uncomfortable. This was plain ridiculous.

No it’s not, said the voice in his mind. She has bites on her neck. She can’t stand the sunlight. She’s lying about the party. Something’s happened to her.

She’s theirs.

And they’ll be back for her.

The houses became dark. Joel had to blow into his hands and rub them together to keep them from going numb with cold. He settled into a position that was as close to comfortable as he could make it, sitting in the dirt with his legs wedged up against the shed wall and his back to the fence. More time passed. His mind wandered. His eyelids were heavy. He felt them close, jerked them open. Felt them falling inexorably shut again…and then he was drifting through the void of sleep.