Simon Green: The Dark Side of the Road

‘Do you honestly think Sylvia would hide inside one of those things?’ said Jeeves.

‘She hid the Colonel inside a snowman,’ I said.

I checked between and behind every topiary shape, taking my time, refusing to be hurried. I really didn’t want Sylvia jumping out at me. I could sense a growing tension in Jeeves’ increasingly abrupt movements. I wondered if he thought I was putting off checking the cottages for Sylvia, and I wondered that too. I finally stopped, at one particular place, and looked at the ground.

Jeeves moved in beside me. ‘Is that where you found the snowman?’ he said quietly.

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘That’s where I found the Colonel. When I first smelled blood and didn’t know what it meant.’

‘I suppose the world still made sense to you, back then,’ said Jeeves.

‘No,’ I said. ‘I can’t say this world has ever made sense to me.’

‘Do you ever wonder … If you hadn’t found James’ body, would Sylvia have just bided her time here till the storm was over and then left?’ said Jeeves. ‘And then maybe no one else would have died?’

‘No,’ I said. ‘I never think things like that. Hindsight never helped anyone. You can only ever deal with what’s in front of you. Sylvia killed before she came here, and she would have killed again, afterwards. She’s a predator. That’s what she does. Stopping her is all that matters.’ I looked around me. The pale world looked back, pristine and gleaming, cold as death.

Jeeves was shivering hard now. ‘I think we’ve seen all there is to see here,’ he said. ‘Let’s go check the cottages.’

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Let’s do that. Maybe we can set a fire to warm ourselves up.’

We made our way back to the row of Victorian cottages, driving ourselves on through the hard-packed snow. I think we both felt more vulnerable, more at risk, out in the open. Where Sylvia could be anywhere. And we both wanted to find the vampire and get this over and done with. Find and stake the rotten thing, and put it behind us, so we could have our lives back again. We stopped before the old head gardener’s house, GravelStone Cottage, and looked it over carefully. No lights showed at any of the windows, and the front door was firmly closed. A pleasant scene, in a winter view.

But would an undead creature need light, or heat? Or anything other than a dark place to hide?

Jeeves strode up to the front door and tried the handle. The door didn’t budge. ‘Locked,’ said Jeeves. ‘Knew I should have brought my skeleton keys.’

I gestured for him to stand aside, and then charged the heavy wooden door. I hit it square with my shoulder and blasted the door right off its hinges without even slowing. The door slammed down on to the floor, and I strode right over it, slowing to a halt in the dark and gloomy hall. Jeeves hurried in after me, waving his gun around in a more or less professional way.

‘All right,’ he said, once he was sure we were alone. ‘That was … really something. I am officially impressed. Doesn’t doing that hurt your shoulder?’

‘Yes,’ I said.

We pressed slowly forward, into the gloom of the hallway. Jeeves found the light switch eventually, and the sudden glare was almost blinding. The narrow hall was disconcertingly cheerful and cosy, with pleasant old-fashioned wallpaper, charming furnishings, and a bare wooden floor. A perfect getaway home from home, to soothe the spirits of the troubled guest. Not the kind of place you’d expect to find a monster. But then, that was the point.

We searched all the downstairs rooms and found nothing. No sign anyone had been inside GravelStone Cottage in months. We went upstairs. Jeeves wanted to go first, because he had the gun, but I took the lead anyway, because I knew for a fact I was a lot harder to kill. I kept sniffing the air, but I couldn’t smell blood or decay. Just dust and damp.

We searched all the upper rooms, kicking in doors and checking every nook and cranny with malice aforethought. I even opened all the cupboards and overturned the beds, just in case there might be a monster hiding under them. By the time we’d checked all the rooms and gone back out on to the landing again, we were both so tense from unrelieved anticipation that we were exhausted. All my muscles ached, from not being allowed to relax.

‘There’s no one home,’ Jeeves said heavily. ‘Let’s get out of here.’

‘After you,’ I said.

I let him lead the way back down the noisy wooden stairs, mostly so he wouldn’t see me scowling as I struggled to think things through. I couldn’t help feeling I was missing something. Learn to think like the prey , the Colonel always said, So you can out-think them. But the prey I went after was usually alive, in some form or another. My cases usually tended more to the super-scientific than the supernatural. I knew such stuff existed; you couldn’t operate in my world and not know. But the Colonel had other agents for that. So why had he called for me, specifically, to come and help him? If he suspected Sylvia was a vampire, why not call on a more suitable agent? Could it be that he didn’t trust them like he trusted me? I would have liked to think so.

I felt a little easier once we were back in the entrance hall with the open door in front of us. All the way down the stairs, I’d had the horrible suspicion that when we got to the bottom we’d find Sylvia there, waiting for us. Smiling her awful smile. But she wasn’t. Jeeves and I hauled furniture out of the living rooms and into the hall, and piled it up. Then we took turns dousing it with bottles of wine we’d found, until the whole hall stank of alcohol. Jeeves and I slipped out the front door, while I left a careful trail of booze behind us, and then Jeeves got to do the business with his Zippo again. The furniture went up in a moment, and a great blast of heat shot out the open doorway. If we hadn’t been so thoroughly wrapped up, the intense heat might well have taken our eyebrows off. The entire frontage of GravelStone Cottage was soon wildly ablaze. Jeeves took his gloves off and happily warmed his bare hands against the fierce heat. He pulled down his scarf, so he could grin at me.

‘First time I’ve felt warm since we left the Manor! Look at the place go … And you’re not even sweating!’

‘I don’t,’ I said. ‘Mostly.’

We turned our attention to the long row of terraced cottages. Stretching away for as far as we could see, with the furthest end disappearing into the fog. Everywhere we looked, the doors all stood properly shut, with not a light showing anywhere. Sylvia could have been hiding behind any of the darkened windows, watching and waiting, and we would never have known.

‘It’s going to take far too long to search each cottage individually,’ I said. ‘And it’ll give Sylvia far too many chances to launch an ambush. I say … we don’t go inside at all. Just light them up. You set fire at the far end, I’ll take this one; we’ll let the fires spread from cottage to cottage till they meet in the middle.’

‘And then?’ said Jeeves.

‘And then we wait for the fires to drive Sylvia out, knock her down, stake her … and then cut her head off, just to be sure.’

‘You really think it’s going to be that easy?’ said Jeeves.

‘Well, no,’ I said. ‘I was just trying to sound positive.’

‘You haven’t even got a wooden stake!’

‘I will acquire one, before the need arises,’ I said.

‘You really don’t inspire confidence, you know that?’ said Jeeves. He looked down the long row of cottages. ‘You think it’s a good idea for us to split up and go off on our own?’

‘I don’t see that we have a choice,’ I said. ‘If we both start at the same end, she could just make a run for it. So … stay in sight as much as you can, and don’t let yourself get distracted. Set the fire, and get the hell back here. Call me if you even think you see anything.’