“I’m going to open the door, Binky. Just don’t run off.”

“I wish you’d just go away.”

“Well, I’m not going anywhere. And you better not, either.”

I’d let Binky out so many times that he didn’t even have to tell me the combination to his lock. I’d memorized it long ago. But this time, I didn’t need the combination because the lock was missing. All anybody needed to do was lift up on the handle and the door would come open. Binky could have jiggled it from inside easily enough. He must have been dumber than I thought.

I opened the door and Binky stepped out into the hall. He was so short and so skinny that he hadn’t even been very cramped. For a change his nose wasn’t dripping, which I have to admit was an improvement. He was holding his civics book in one hand with his finger in it like he was marking his place.

He ran the other scrawny hand, the one without the book, through his lank blondish hair and said, “I have to go to class, Carleton.”

“You’re welcome,” I said.

He looked at me like I was nuts. “Very funny. I didn’t ask you to let me out.”

He tried to edge to the side and slip around me, but I moved in front of him.

“The vampire,” I said.

“What about the vampire?”

“I need to talk to him.”

The first bell rang, and people started coming up the stairs and milling around. I could tell that Binky was going to make a run for it, so I grabbed the front of his shirt. He looked up at me with his sad black eyes and said, “I don’t think that would be a good idea, Carleton.”

“I know it’s not a good idea,” I told him. “It’s my sister’s idea, so it’s obviously pretty stupid.”

I explained the situation in a low voice so nobody could hear me talking about a vampire in the hall. They’d think I was as crazy as Binky if they did.

I told Binky about the party. While I was talking, I held on to Binky’s shirt. He might make a break at any second, even though there was plenty of time for him to get to class before the second bell.

“That’s really dumb, Carleton,” he said when I was finished telling him Kate’s plan. “Even for your sister, it’s dumb. You shouldn’t mess with a vampire. It’s dangerous.”

“Yeah, but she’s going to do my geometry problems for a week, so we have to talk to the vampire.”

“That wasn’t the deal you made with Kate.”

I asked him what he meant by that. I was the one who made the deal, after all, so I should know what it was.

“She said she’d do the problems if you talked to me. Well, you talked to me. Case closed.”

I thought about it, and he was right, technically speaking. Except that Kate’s mind didn’t work that way. She didn’t go in for loopholes and technicalities. She’d never do the geometry problems if I didn’t try to get the vampire for the party. Not that I needed her help. I can do geometry. It was just the principle of the thing.

I was still trying to explain that to Binky when he noticed that the hall had just about cleared out. He gave a sudden jerk and pulled away from me. I guess he wasn’t as weak as I thought, and he was quicker than I’d have guessed. Before I could do anything about it, he was gone, escaping into Mr. Harkness’s classroom. The ungrateful little bastard would be lucky if I ever let him out of his locker again.

Binky tried to make things right during lunch period by offering me his pudding, as if anybody would want pudding that he’d been sniffling over for ten minutes, not that he was sniffling today. Nobody would have wanted it anyway because there were lumps in it. I knew that for sure because there were always lumps in the pudding they served in the cafeteria. There were plenty of rumors that explained what the lumps were, and all of them were unpleasant, to say the least.

“I’ve been thinking things over,” he said. “I’m sorry I ran off this morning.”

He put a couple of thin cafeteria napkins on top of his chili to soak up the grease. He’s probably the only one who does that. For that matter, he’s probably the only one who actually eats the chili. He kills me; he really does.

I wished he hadn’t come to sit at my table, but I couldn’t do anything about it, and the fact was that there was plenty of room there, and he knew nobody else was likely to be joining me. To tell you the truth, I wasn’t a whole lot more popular than Binky was, but at least I was too big to be stuffed into a locker.

“That’s okay,” I said, hoping he wouldn’t say anything else. “I know you had to get to class.” But I was pretty cheesed off at him if you want to know the truth.

“I should never have told you about the vampire,” he said. “That was a mistake.”

“Too late,” I said.

“Yeah. So I guess I’ll take you to him.”

I stopped stirring my chili. That’s what I do: I stir it. But I never eat more than a couple of bites. If I do, I’ll have gas all during fourth period. I don’t eat much of the pudding, either. I just stick the spoon in it and stir that around, too, checking for lumps.

“So now you’ll take me to him?”

Binky nodded.

“What do you want from me, Binky?”

“Who says I want anything?”

I didn’t bother to answer that. Everybody wants something, and Binky was no different. After a couple of seconds he said, “I want to come to the party.”

Well, there it was. He was just a goddam sophomore, and he wanted to go to a party thrown by a senior.

“Binky,” I said, “even I might not be invited to the party.”

“No party, no vampire.”

“Okay, I’ll ask my sister. But no guarantees.”

He thought it over. “I guess that’ll have to do.”

“So we’ll go invite the vampire?”

“Yeah.”

“You better not be kidding me, Binky,” I said.

He gave me a hurt look. “Meet me outside the north door after sixth period.”

“I’ll be there,” I said.

“You want my chili?” he said. “I soaked the grease off.”

First it was the pudding, and now the chili.

“What’s the matter with you?” I said.

“I guess I’m not hungry.”

I looked down at my own chili, and I couldn’t really blame him.

See, the fact of the matter is that like I said, I didn’t really believe in vampires. Now, it’s a different story. Boy, do I believe in vampires now. But this was then.

Anyway, I need to tell you about the house where the vampire lived. Back in the nineteenth century sometime, a guy who had more dollars than sense, as my father liked to say, had an old manor house dismantled over in England. The workers numbered the pieces and rebuilt the place outside our little town.

I wasn’t around in those days, of course, and neither was my father, but he knew about stuff like that, local history and all. He said they put the house together like some kind of 3-D jigsaw puzzle. The guy even had the plans for the grounds, and he had gardens and all that kind of thing fixed just the way they’d been over in England.

That’s the way the story went, anyway. I never saw any of that myself because after a while, the guy died. He didn’t have any kin that anybody knew about except some cousins in New York. They inherited the house and property, and they kept right on paying the taxes year after year, but they never even came to visit. The house was abandoned, and vines grew up all over the walls. The gardens and the shrubbery overgrew the grounds, and then the trees closed in.

Eventually the place got a kind of a reputation. You probably know the kind of thing I’m talking about: funny lights, strange noises, ghosts. I didn’t believe in any of that kind of crap myself, but I didn’t ever go out there to see if any of it was true. It wasn’t that I was scared. I just didn’t want to go. Hardly anybody else ever went out that way, either.

Except for Binky, who was, as I think I’ve said already, weird. He liked hanging around places like that. That’s how he found the vampire.