The Vanishing Vampire Read Free Page A

Ratatattat were locked in mortal combat with the evil supervillain Ludovico Mouse-Kara. I wasn’t watching where I was walking. If I had been, I would never have stumbled right into Lud Mellon.
    It was like running into the side of a cow. I looked up at his face, hoping to see something other than anger. He looked down at me as if slowly digesting the incident. Then he reached out, grabbed the comic book, pulled it from my grip, and said, “Thanks.”
    He walked on, leaving me standing there with my mouth open, my hands empty, and a feeling that was way beyond mad. I would have loved, for that instant, to have the power to become something horrible and get revenge. I imagined what it would be like to turn into a werewolf and rip off his arms. Yeah, and I’d do it without even wrinkling the comic.
    â€œHe probably can’t even read,” Norman said when Lud was out of earshot. “He just likes the drawings.”
    â€œYeah, but I’ll bet he moves his lips when he reads the pictures.”
    We laughed and tore him apart with our words as we walked to my house.
    Norman let Rory read his comic first. Then he let me read it. He kept himself busy by adjusting something on my computer. I don’t know what he did, but he told me it would run better now that he had optimized my hard drive.
    I kept thinking about how wonderful it would be to live in a world without bullies, mean people, and human monsters. At least with Dracula and Frankenstein’s monster, you knew what you were dealing with. It was people like Lud Mellon who were the real monsters as far as I was concerned.
    But by that evening, I had pretty much forgotten about it. And that night, beneath the posters of my favorite monsters, the change that had begun the night before took full hold of me. While I slept and dreamed of dark, rich earth and moonless nights, while I wandered through a mist-filled land of graves and crumbling castles, I became a monster.

 
    Five
    I RISE
    And then, suddenly, I was totally awake. One instant, I was deep asleep. The next, I was sitting straight up in my bed, drowning in a billion sensations. Waves of sound crashed over me. I heard a million conversations: every voice in the house washed over me, along with a flood of voices from up and down the street. The sounds …
    A car, half a mile away—I knew exactly how far it was—rushed down the road. Two jets passed overhead—one heading east, the other going southwest. A fly walked across the ceiling of the living room downstairs, all six of its tiny legs hitting the plaster with the boom of giant drums.
    That’s when the smell kicked in.
    I smelled an entire world around me. People. Animals. My family. Browser. Cats, squirrels, the fly. I could smell two quarters and three pennies in the pocket of the jeans that I’d dropped on the floor last night.
    I could feel more than just the sheet against my hand. I could feel the weave of the threads, and the touch of the man who ran the machine that made the sheet, and the hand of the woman who sold the sheet, and beyond and beyond.
    Then I opened my eyes. And nearly screamed. I slammed my eyes shut against the flood of light. It was barely dawn, the sun just beginning to rise, but the light hit me like a thousand jagged rocks. I pulled the sheet and blankets over me, and jammed the pillow hard against my head to protect my ears from the surge and crash of sounds.
    And slowly, in a world where time suddenly had no meaning, I started to hold back the sensations, filter them, and sort through the waves. It was like focusing a magnifying glass. But I was juggling five overloaded senses and kept losing my hold on one or another. When I lost control of one, they would all slip and crash back into me.
    Loud noises came from nearby. Roaring sounds. Words. Mom’s voice. “Hey, sleepyhead.” The sound was loud and slow and forceful, each word striking like a slap in the face.