my life and I have never regretted it.’
Calamity looked downcast. ‘I’m sure it’s OK now, Transylvania has changed a lot.’
‘Quite possibly,’ said Sospan.
Ffanci Llangollen put her hand on my arm. ‘Mr Knight, won’t you tell me about the case you are investigating?’
I wondered what to tell her.
‘I know you will deny you are on one, the policeman told me you wouldn’t say. He said you wouldn’t tell him but you might tell me. Won’t you tell me?’
‘It’s not easy,’ I said.
‘No,’ she said distantly, ‘it isn’t.’
‘I meant—’
‘I know what you meant.’
‘Let me talk to someone first, there’s someone I have to ask . . . Where can I find you?’
‘Either in the public shelter or on one of the benches near the bandstand. I sit there usually. I won’t go far, don’t worry.’ She turned to leave and, remembering something, took out a letter and gave it to me. ‘I found this on your mat downstairs. Hand-delivered.’
We watched her amble slowly away into the fog. I opened the letter. It was from Meici Jones, an invitation to his birthday party the next day.
Chapter 10
Calamity sucked the dregs from her cornet, threw it in the bin, and then sucked the sweetness from her fingers. ‘Once upon a time in Abercuawg,’ she said, ‘there lived a balloon-folder called Alfred. He fancied two girls and because he couldn’t decide which one he liked best he courted them both. The girls were Ffanci Llangollen and her sister Mrs Mochdre. Then one day Ffanci Llangollen got pregnant and this helped the balloon-folder make up his mind. He proposed to Ffanci. Some time later, Gethsemane was born. When she reached the age of eight she went out one morning with her auntie, Mrs Mochdre, to buy a birthday present for her mum. After lunch they returned to Abercuawg and she went out to play and disappeared. Someone saw a local hoodlum called Goldilocks burying something in his garden that night and it turned out to be one of Gethsemane’s shoes. He was arrested and charged with murder. A week later Mrs Mochdre married the Witchfinder, a man she hated. On the same day that Gethsemane disappeared they found Gomer Barnaby, the heir to the Barnaby & Merlin rock fortune, wandering around in distress with all his teeth broken and behaving sort of cuckoo. He remained cuckoo for the rest of his life. A year later, someone sent a tape made at a seance in which Gethsemane allegedly turned up to wish her mum a happy birthday. Not long after that the spirit of Gethsemane turned up in Hughesovka. I guess I don’t need to go into the troll bride stuff?’
‘Not at the moment.’
‘Thirty years later the town reappeared during a drought and two private detectives investigating a strange case of an imaginary friend in Hughesovka stumbled upon a girl who ran away leaving behind a hat with the name of Gethsemane Walters inside. There were some students painting nearby. Not long after that two of the students were found dead with all their teeth broken. The third is missing. Have I forgotten anything?’
‘I think that covers everything. What’s our next move?’
‘We’ve got a busy day ahead of us tomorrow. In the morning we go to see the spiritualist and after that we do a tour of the rock foundry, see if we can talk to the typographer; they say he used to be in the Slaughterhouse Mob. Oh yeah, and we will need to pick up a present, maybe an Airfix model or something.’
‘What for?’
‘Meici Jones’s birthday,’ said Calamity.
‘I don’t think I’ll be going to that . . .’
‘Why not?’
‘I don’t like him.’
‘That’s not the point, this is business. I thought you could do some digging, you know, about the games teachers in his family.’
‘Yes, but—’
‘We’re supposed to be superseding the paradigm, remember? It would be unprofessional not to go.’
I knew there must be a good answer to that but before I could think of it my father, Eeyore, appeared with the night mail. There was just one donkey for the last ride. The last traverse was the one that symbolically closed the shutters of the town: a gentle clip-clop of hooves that signalled the time had come to put empty milk bottles on the step, release cats for their night’s mischief, and double-bolt the door against the hobgoblins of the coming dark.
‘We’re going to see Vlad the Impaler,’ said Calamity. ‘We’ll probably come back with a couple of tooth marks in our necks.’
‘Dad doesn’t believe in nonsense like that.’
‘I wish I didn’t, son, I wish I didn’t.’
‘Oh, Dad!’
Eeyore looked sombre. ‘Vlad the Impaler is no friend of those who ply the ancient trade of the seaside donkey.’ His gaze became distant, but focussed as if remembering an ancient wrong done to the men of the donkeys by the old Romanian prince.
‘What did he do?’ asked Calamity.
‘It’s just make-believe, isn’t it?’ I said.
Eeyore shook his head sadly. ‘There is nothing make-believe about the evil he did to poor Brother Hans.’ He stopped and pursed his brow as if even over the distance of five centuries the wound was still tender. We paused.
Sospan was so gripped that he was leaning as far out of his box as he could without actually falling. He bored his gaze into the silent Eeyore. ‘What did he do?’ he spluttered.
Eeyore adopted the attitude of a story-teller who had been waiting for the prompt. ‘Despite what some people will tell you, Vlad the Impaler was a real historical figure. A tyrannical prince who ruled in Walachia in the fifteenth century. Dracula was one of his nicknames, it means devil or dragon. The stuff about vampires is nonsense, of course . . .’
Sospan looked disappointed.
‘Probably an embroidered folk memory of his bloodthirsty exploits. He used to dip his bread in his victim’s blood which may account for the blood-drinking stories. And there are lots of bats in that region of Walachia and Transylvania, and they carry rabies. It’s not unknown for someone bitten and infected with rabies to run mad and even try to bite someone else, so you can see how easily the idea could have originated.’
‘And sticking stakes in the heart could have come from the impaling,’ added Calamity knowledgeably.
‘I thought you said they stuck them up the “you know what”,’ I said.
Calamity turned expectantly to Eeyore.
‘Oh, they stuck them in all sorts of places,’ he said. ‘Regions of the body that it really wouldn’t do for me to mention. In fact, given the lateness of the hour . . .’ He raised an arm in a theatrical gesture towards the foggy coast in which the setting sun appeared diffused and vague, more as a bloodstain than a disk. ‘I really shouldn’t even be telling it now.’
‘Go on,’ said Sospan, ‘tell us about Brother Hans. I’ll give you a free ice cream.’ I expected Eeyore to dismiss the offer, but surprisingly he didn’t. Sospan prepared a ninety-nine and handed it to Eeyore. It looked a bit smaller than the normal ones. ‘Don’t tell anyone, mind,’ he said.
Eeyore took a lick and resumed his tale. ‘This Vlad the Impaler, you see, was an astonishingly bloodthirsty prince. He was crazy about impaling. He did it by the thousands. One time he impaled twenty thousand peasants and soldiers and sat down among the forest of pales to eat his dinner. On another occasion an invading Turkish sultan marched his army into a narrow gorge filled with thousands of rotting corpses impaled there. They had been there for months and blackbirds were nesting in the ribcages. The sultan was so appalled and dismayed that he took his army straight back to Constantinople. Vlad was truly wicked. He impaled everybody: mothers nursing infants, old men and children, he even impaled sucklings on to their mothers’ breasts. Others he boiled alive, or
