‘I’ll cast a light spell.’ My character, Nicodemus, studied the arcane; a trainee wizard, if you like.

Another hidden roll. ‘You cast it and the trail lights up, but it’s not like it should be, not like daylight, but as if you had a ten-watt bulb instead of a hundred. And it flickers at the edges. You can feel the darkness pushing on your spell like a physical pressure. It’s slowly closing you down.’

‘So, I grit my teeth and concentrate on keeping the spell going.’

‘Okaaaaay . . . you can keep it at ten watts, but you’re hurting, man. It’s like a twisting in your guts. Pains shooting along your arms and legs.’ Elton rolled another die. ‘So you walk on. And on. It’s only about five miles, but the tracks keep petering out and the wood’s too thick to press through. You keep doubling back and trying new ways. It takes the whole night. Nicodemus is hurting bad by the time the trees start to thin, but you make it. The trail leads down to a brook. It’s still inky, but dawn isn’t far off.’

‘Any bridge?’ Simon asked.

‘A brook. A few yards wide. You could jump it. Not in armour, but your thief could jump it from a standing start.’ Elton rolled another die. ‘Wandering monster!’ Another roll and he gave a low whistle, eyes widening.

‘Shit.’ Wandering monsters are an unscripted part of the game – people, creatures, or even events that have a small chance of showing up each day and are selected at random from a big chart. I guess Ian Rust had been mine for the day. We never had any luck with them.

‘Nicodemus sees it first. Back on the trail among the trees. A dark figure. A human, or human shaped. Just the starlight gleaming on a bald skull.’

‘Wait . . .’ I held my hand up, looking at John and Mia. ‘You guys told him, right?’

‘Told me what?’ Elton looked up from his list of monsters. He seemed innocent enough, but then every game master has to be a bit of an actor.

‘A dark forest. I’m sick. A brook. Not a river, but a brook. And then this shit with the bald guy.’ I gave John a hard stare.

‘Hey!’ The realisation dawned on his face. ‘We did this!’

I turned to Mia. ‘You told him then.’ Not a question.

‘It was a secret? Nobody said it was.’ She shrugged and examined her character sheet. ‘But no, actually. I didn’t.’

‘What the hell you all talking about?’ Elton’s brow furrowed in one of his famous frowns. I swear you could wedge pennies in those furrows and they’d stick.

‘This is like what happened to us last night,’ John said.

‘You met a damn vampire last night?’

‘Wait! What? This is a vampire? You’re shitting me.’ John sat up.

‘We’re dead.’ Simon sighed and turned his character sheet over.

‘You got a bad roll.’ Elton lifted his books to show the dice. Double zero. A one-in-a-hundred chance. ‘A very bad roll.’

‘Still,’ Mia said, ‘at least you accidentally gave away what it is.’

Elton sniffed. ‘You’re a cleric. Priests can sense that sort of thing. It’s undead. Can’t hide that from a woman of the cloth.’ He looked around the table. ‘What do you do?’

‘Run, of course!’ I moved my wizard figure to the front of our group. ‘It can eat the guys in armour!’

We all reached the same conclusion in short order and our brave band was soon pounding along the riverbank in terror.

‘You’re all strung out: Nicodemus in the lead, Fineous the thief just behind, the other two panting along some way back.’ Elton arranged the figures. ‘In the bend of the brook ahead of you—’

‘Meander,’ Simon interrupted.

‘What?’

‘When a river wriggles about like you’ve drawn . . . that’s a meander.’

‘OK, private school. In the meander ahead of you . . . the vampire is waiting. These guys can fly, you know.’

‘Damn. I . . . Uh.’ I looked down at my useless spells. ‘I prepare to die.’ Even if the vampire didn’t kill us, just its touch could suck away experience, taking memories from a person, leaving them reduced, a shadow of what they were.

‘Can’t I drive it off?’ Mia asked. ‘Priests can do that, right?’

‘Show him your cross!’ John urged.

‘I’m furious, but I don’t see how that will help.’ Mia grinned.

‘No, he means—’

‘She knows what he means, Simon.’ Sometimes Simon could be slow with jokes.

Elton looked at the table in his rulebook. ‘Clerics can turn undead away, but at your level . . . with a vampire . . .’ He set two dice before her. ‘Roll. It’s going to take something extraordinary, though.’

‘I’m all about extraordinary.’ Mia tossed the dice with none of the puffing and agonising we always made over important rolls.

‘Ninety-nine!’

‘Holy crap.’

‘OK, so you arrive just as the vamp’s about to get a taste of Nicodemus here, and hold your cross up. It seems the Man Jesus is watching, and the crucifix starts to glow. Our bald friend staggers back before you, but . . . and this is the kicker, because you were never in any danger . . . the sucker can’t pass over running water, so he’s trapped. Of course, you guys could have waded over to safety at any time.’

‘I knew that,’ said Simon.

‘I know you did,’ said Elton. ‘But knowing a thing and employing that knowledge when it’s useful. Those aren’t the same things.’

‘He’s trapped?’ Mia asked.

‘For as long as you can hold that cross up.’

‘I think I can hold it until the sun rises.’ Mia grinned.

‘Damn, she’s right.’ John leaned back from the table. ‘You, Mia, just killed yourself a vampire!’

‘Well, sheeeiit . . .’ Elton shook his head. ‘He don’t plead or nothing. He just watches you all like you’re bits of tasty meat.’

‘Don’t look at his eyes,’ Simon said. ‘They can hypnotise.’

Elton huffed. ‘At least you remembered that. So, you wait until the sun’s rays touch him and he screams and turns to dust, all in a moment; just his clothes falling down where he stood.’ He shook his head again. ‘Now tell me that happened last night! I dare you.’

‘Well, the running did.’ John grinned. ‘And he could have been a vampire . . .’

‘I check the remains. He’s got to have treasure. Right?’ Simon played a greedy thief pretty well when it came down to it.

Elton returned to his charts. ‘I gotta roll that up. Take five.’

I stood and stretched sore legs. I went to the window. It was only open half an inch, but the cold air had been playing on my neck, making my bones ache. I was reaching to close it when I saw him. ‘No. He wasn’t a vampire.’ None of them heard me. I knew that the bald man from the park wasn’t a vampire, though. He was standing there in the sunshine. Admittedly, weak January sunshine, but enough to dust a vampire. He looked up at me over the fence at the back of Simon’s garden, watching from the street.

CHAPTER 4

‘You good for Saturday?’ Simon stopped me in the hall between maths and French. He always talked about our D&D sessions with the intensity the first team rugby coach reserved for grudge matches. As if missing one would be a matter of life and death.

‘Yeah, I’ll be there.’

‘Will Elton be bringing . . . you know?’

‘Mia? You can say her name, Si. You won’t summon her.’

Simon gave a nervous grin and glanced over his shoulder as if she might be there. ‘Yes. Her.’

‘She’s alright. Saved our bacon with the vamp.’ I wanted her to be there.

‘She’s with Elton? Right?’

‘Nah.’ I grinned. ‘They’re just mates. Fancy your chances, Si?’ Elton seemed to have a dozen girls who were friends, but girlfriends were never mentioned. Odd, because in school we talked about girls all the time. At least imaginary ones. Maybe it was only a boys’ school habit. Perhaps that went away when you had enough of the real thing around you. ‘Mia is cute, though. But I think John might just have the upper hand in that game, Simon, old boy.’

Simon coloured. ‘How about your stalker? He going to show, too?’

My sighting of the ‘stalker’ had ended our last session somewhat abruptly. He’d been walking away by the time I got the others to the window, and a hurried mass exit into the street hadn’t been hurried enough to catch him. Much of that was down to me having come over kind of spacey at the window, like I was drowning in déjà vu. Going down the stairs I got this weird vision of me coming up them that morning, and in the confusion managed to fall down the last dozen steps. So our prey made a clean escape. Not that I knew what we would have done if we had caught him.

John had laughed after and said that he couldn’t have picked the park guy from a line-up at the gates while he was still sweating from running after Mia and me. So how I could be so sure it was the same man, he didn’t know. ‘It’s not like there aren’t a lot of bald guys around . . .’

But Mia had been more pensive. She’d been first to join me at the window. She only saw him walking away, but even so . . . ‘There was something about him, though.’

The hall was clearing as each classroom sucked in its allotted students. ‘We gotta go.’

Simon and I joined the end of the queue shuffling into the French lesson. Not one of my strong subjects.