The School of the Undead

couple from Balfour Lane were suspected missing after disappearing following their renting of a boat while on holiday in America. Of course, it would be made very clear that the couple were elderly, meaning that the state of the house, as well as the true age of Mary and Peter, would not lead to any unwanted questions. Problems would only arise if anyone who had recently worked with Mary, who despite what she wore still looked as if she were in her 20s, somehow managed to connect her with the missing woman in the story. Mary had, she admitted, always used her real address with employers, so it was a possibility. They would not necessarily identify Mary as the missing woman, but they might start to ask questions about what had happened to the young woman they had worked with, as well as where and how this unidentified, youthful looking Mary - who also happened to share a name with the elderly lady who had been lost for some time in the United States – had lived in such an outdated house. When Amanda raised this matter with the deputy, he suggested that it was nothing to worry about. His experience with such matters, he assured her, suggested that such problems developed only very rarely as it was hardly ever the case that people really remembered old work acquaintances, let alone checked-up on them. From the tone of the conversation, it also became quite clear to Amanda that fabricating stories to cover up disappearances was something the school had attended to on more than the odd few occasions.

The first thing that Amanda dealt with was the easy job of clearing out Mary and Peter’s remaining supply of blood in the fridge. It came as a pleasant surprise to be told by the deputy that she would be permitted to keep whatever blood she found in the house. “A little perk of the job,” he had explained. However, as soon as Amanda opened the fridge, she found out why the school had not bothered to ask for the its return: there were only three bags, hidden away at the back of the otherwise empty plastic vegetable drawer in an old Tesco carrier bag. “Every little helps, I suppose,” she said to herself as she stashed the blood away in a cool box she had found beside the fridge: a necessity for any vampire.

Once she had carefully placed the cool box next to the front door, Amanda returned to the kitchen. Slowly, she eased open the door to the bathroom and revealed the undulating mess of floor covering that she and Mary had created during Amanda’s previous visit to the house. It took a little more effort than she expected, but she collected the mass of ruined linoleum together and stored the results of her work in the corner. Her intention was to deposit the remains of the floor covering in the basement, but first, it would be necessary to enter the space that had hidden Peter away for so many years and clear out everything that evidenced the man’s years of self-imprisonment.

As the trap door to the hidden basement below was still jammed open, Amanda was able to flip the thing open with her foot. The wooden boards of the hatch thwacked against the ugly green and brown tiles of the bathroom wall, but it managed not to break anything – fortunately, considered Amanda, who for a moment feared she had sent the surprisingly heavy trap door on a course to crash through a possibly plaster wall. These worries, though, were soon forgotten as her action of throwing open the hatch had the result of drawing up the foul air from below. The stench was such that without a second’s hesitation, Amanda retreated to the hall. Due to the excitement and tumult of her tussle with Mary, Amanda had failed to notice the extent of the smell on her previous visit, something which she now regretted as if she had - and if she had been aware of the petty amounts of blood in the house - she may have refused to take the job of clearing the house.

Armed with an ageing bottle of air freshener spray, and with a scarf tightly wrapped around her face, Amanda returned to the bathroom and descended the steep homemade stairs that led into the dark space below the house. When she reached the floor below, Amanda found that the air turned out to be not as noisome as she expected, though she was still glad she had brought the spray, which she proceeded to use liberally.

The space was a fairly cramped cube, with only just enough room for her to either lie down flat on the ground or stand up straight. The walls had been whitewashed and a single naked, low-watt light bulb illuminated the hidden room. Apart from the steep wooden staircase, the space in the room was occupied by a three-legged stool with an ancient television on top as well as the collection of restraints that Peter had put together over the years to prevent himself from escaping when he lost himself to his hunger. While trying to avoid thinking about what Peter must have gone through in the long lonely hours in front of his little TV, both when he was in the grip of his hunger and the many hours when he was just waiting for it to come, Amanda disconnected the set from a cable – which had been run through the house from the living room - and placed the sad little object in the bathroom above. For a moment, Amanda almost lost her grip on the set and feared that the thing would come tumbling down, crack her on the top of her head then smash on the floor. Fortunately for her, she just about managed to settle the thing on the bathroom floor above before anything happened.

After breathing out a