Free The Little Vampire by Angela Sommer-Bodenburg

“Aunt Dorothy’s the worst,” she said. “She once had a go at me, even though I’m a vampire too!”
    “Ugh!” Tony could not stop himself. Hefelt his throat gingerly as he remembered Aunt Dorothy’s strident voice echoing around the vault.
    “But she’s nearly always out the longest,” said Anna soothingly. “She’s the greediest, you see. So – when are we off?”
    Tony seemed to have lost his earlier enthusiasm. “Do you really think we should?”
    “Yeah. Come on! You said yourself that we ought to be looking after Rudolph.”
    “O.K. If you’resure.”
    “Come on,” she urged. “You’ve got the other cloak.” She jumped up and down on the window-sill with impatience. “Rudolph will be surprised,” she chuckled.
    “I just hope it’s all right,” said Tony, joining her on the sill with the cloak. And away they flew.

First Aid
    T HE WALL OF THE cemetery was already in sight. The sky was clear, the moon shining brightly, and consequently the cemetery looked much less spooky and mysterious to Tony than it had the Sunday before. Perhaps it was just that this was his third visit, he thought, as he followed Anna over the wall and landed in the grass on the other side.
    “The entrance is just over there,” Anna whispered,“but we must wait to make sure everything’s quiet.”
    Tony nodded. “I know,” he said. “The Nightwatchman.”
    “Ssh,” she hissed.
    Tony looked around at the tilted gravestones, almost overgrown by the long grass, the rusty old crosses sticking up out of the undergrowth, and the shadowy mass of the yew tree, under which lay the entrance to the vault.
    Anna was straining her ears to catch the slightestsound. After a while she stood up. “O.K.,” she said. “We can go.”
    “Why don’t you, er, go first?” suggested Tony, who suddenly felt rather sick, like you do when you have not eaten for a whole day.
    Anna looked surprised. “Why? I promise there won’t be anyone else in the vault apart from Rudolph.”
    “But you could just make quite sure,” insisted Tony. What if Aunt Dorothy had had another faintingfit? Or if one of the others had stayed behind to look after Rudolph? Tony shuddered at the thought of coming face to face with Thelma the Thirsty!
    “Oh, all right,” said Anna. “I’ll have a look. But you must keep hidden.” She vanished down into the hole, and Tony crept deeper into the shadows.
    At that very moment, he heard soft footsteps. They sounded quite a way off, but in the stillness thatenveloped the graveyard, there could be no doubt of their reality. An icy shudder ran through him. It couldn’t be Nigel, could it? But he would never have been able to follow them from the ground. No, there was only one explanation: the Nightwatchman!

    By now Tony could make out the figure of a man. He was quite small, and he was moving swiftly but carefully, his head turning questingly from this side to that. As he came nearer, Tony could make out a grey, wrinkled face with a pointed nose and bright restless little eyes, all of which made him look rather like a rat. Then Tony’s gaze was riveted to something else: out of the pocket of his overallspoked an enormous hammer and some sharp wooden stakes!
    Tony hardly dared to breathe. The deep shadow of the yew tree hid him perfectly, so he felt he was fairly safe, but Anna ... at any moment, she would pop her head up to call him, and the Nightwatchman was only a metre away! He had already turned those piercing eyes onto the darkness under the yew tree!
    Tony saw the stone at the entranceto the vault begin to move, and suddenly he had an idea. He picked up a largish stone from the ground, and lobbed it as far as he could away from the yew tree. The stone landed heavily some way away, and like a hound on the scent, the Nightwatchman hurried off in the direction of the noise, baying: “Now I’ve got you!” Tony watched him start rummaging around in the bushes, brandishing the hammer andone of the wooden