Free Her Vampyrrhic Heart by Simon Clark

ragged clothes the creature wore ignited. Even his skin seemed to catch light. Yet still he crouched there. Not moving. Not making a sound. All he did was stare into her face.
    Then he moved. For a terrifying moment Tom thought he’d attack them. But with the speed of a cat, the vampire climbed back up the chimney, his hands and feet scratching and scraping the stonework as he went.
    Tom opened the window blind. The vampire hit the dirt outside the house with a thud. Sparks flew. The vampire burned brightly. Even so, he didn’t give any sign of being in pain. Instead, he raced away into the night. As he ran, he resembled a fiery comet that flew just above the ground. June stood beside Tom, watching the fireball race through the trees until it dwindled to a spark of light that grew smaller and smaller before vanishing completely.
    â€˜Was that my father?’ June’s eyes swam with tears. ‘Was it him?’ Trembling, she sat down on the sofa – there she spoke the words that shocked Tom to the core: ‘If it is him, how do I find him again?
And how can I take him back to my mother?
’

EIGHTEEN
    A t the same moment that Tom Westonby and June Valko watched the fireball dwindle as it raced away into the darkness, Owen Westonby had to remind himself why he sat there in Kit’s house. Kit had told Owen and Jez that the mysterious pod was an automatic camera. But waiting for the battery to be charged so they could find out what the device had filmed had become a kind of torture. As Jez neatly put it, ‘This waiting around is boring the bones out of my arse.’ For a while, they’d amused themselves by throwing to one another a dried-up orange that Owen had found on the floor behind the sofa. But that soon lost its entertainment value.
    â€˜That’s it.’ Jez headed for the door. ‘I’m not waiting for Kit any longer. I’m going home.’
    Before he reached the door, however, Kit appeared. ‘I need to be quick. The battery’s been damaged; keeps losing its juice.’
    â€˜It better be worth it,’ Jez grunted. ‘The last bus goes in twenty minutes.’
    â€˜This’ll only take two …’ Kit plugged the lead from the pod into the TV. ‘Trust me, what you’ll see is worth it.’ As he’d done before he used a chopstick to activate the mechanism inside the damaged cylinder. ‘Here goes.’ Kit sounded excited. ‘We have lift-off.’
    The TV screen flashed from black to blue. Following that, an image of trees appeared with the river flowing in the background. At the bottom of the screen a clock recorded the time and date.
    â€˜Why’s the picture weird?’ Jez wasn’t convinced that this would be worth his time.
    â€˜The camera had been set up to operate automatically at night when an animal triggered the sensor. The image looks odd, because the camera’s on a night setting. It’s using infrared as a light source, so it’s basically a flat, black and white image. If there’s any light at all, it’s exaggerated to the point where it becomes a brilliant glare.’ Kit talked like an enthusiastic teacher presenting a fascinating science experiment. ‘See the flashes on the river? That’s moonlight being reflected in the water.’
    Owen studied the TV screen. ‘So every time an animal comes in range it sets the camera running?’
    â€˜Yup.’ Kit pointed at the bottom right-hand corner of the screen. ‘You can just make out a fox there. Notice the high angle. Someone must have fixed the camera to a tree trunk at about head height.’
    The fox glanced in the direction of the camera. Infrared mode made it look as if electric lights had replaced its natural eyes. An effect of the moonlight being reflected from the animal’s eyes, of course. The fox paused to scratch its ear with a back leg then scuttled off. More shots followed. They captured