Nestled between the A1 and the River Welland, you'd be forgiven for thinking that Stamford was like any other rural idyll, sprung out of a few settlements when an enterprising businessman started up by the side of a main road. So that's what I was expecting when I moved there.

As the train raced through the countryside toward this small town, I thought of all the decisions that had led me to this dramatic upheaval in my life. I think it only fair that I should start at the beginning here…

***

My name's Pete Helsing and I'm sixteen. An important age to me, as it's the age that the friend I'm going to live with moved out as well. His name's Daniel, and he's twenty now. I know, I know, he should be called Dan, but he gets very shirty when you start on his name. Truth be told, I can understand why: it's one of the few things he has left.

When he was sixteen, he was head boy at our boarding school in Poland, and was all set to leave in a blaze of glory, top of his class in everything, and captain of half the sports teams. But then, one winter's night he left. Nobody saw him leave, nobody heard him leave. But we woke up the next morning and his seat at breakfast was empty. He didn't turn up for the rest of the day, and there was no answer when anyone knocked on his bedroom door, which had been locked from the inside. Eventually, the teachers had had enough and the door was knocked down. What greeted those of us who saw it was a scene of devastation. The grand, four poster bed had had its curtains torn down, the windows were smashed, and there were all his school things strewn across his floor. Only I, his closest friend, noticed one key absence that meant I knew he had left rather than being taken. His great-grandfather's tinder box wasn't anywhere to be found. Naturally, the police were summoned and a full and thorough investigation was launched. The evidence was almost conclusive. There had been three people in the room, two male, one female, and one of the males appeared to have been dragged off given the small amount of blood on the edge of a shattered pane of glass still in the window. No matches could be found on the other two people, and if it weren't for the fingerprints, nobody could be sure that they had been there. But it was Daniel's blood on the window pane. Only I saw the obvious. We were four floors up, and directly below was an empty moat. Exactly how did the 'attackers' drag Daniel off? They must have had wings, or some form of flight awaiting them.

Anyway, the rest of the year passed without incident, unless you counted the absence of the bird under whose wing I had been kept. I had been Daniel's protégé, and without him, I was lost. I travelled home in a state of worry, and nervous anticipation. I hadn't seen my parents in months, and they had been extremely in favour of my friendship with Daniel. They would surely have heard about his disappearance and would have some great words of wisdom to impart. Doubtless, my father, Claud, would tell me to stop being such a baby, to grow up, and to get on with life. My mother, Jane, meanwhile, would see my side of the story, and compel me to track Daniel down. Naturally, I would agree with both of them, and then do neither.

So it surprised me when my father claimed to know precisely where Daniel had gone and bade him a cheery "Good riddance" in his thick German accent. My mother, who had never learnt German, and had no intention of letting her youngest son learn 'that foreign tongue', spoke in a lilting Irish accent, muted slightly by the years spent in a different country. She told me, rather surprisingly, to "Let Daniel get on with his own life, he's made his decision, it's time for you to make yours".

So I went back to my final two years at school wondering exactly what decision it was that I had to make. I had heard all the local legends, of course, the stuff that keeps little kids awake at night, about an epic war between human and vampire, that was almost over, and that the human's had almost won. I had heard the mutterings about me, about why I hadn't joined the 'family business' like my brother, John, had done before me. I had no doubts about my decision in that regard. They didn't need me. They had John to carry on whatever business that was. I only went home once every two years, and therefore had no idea what this 'business', if it even was a business, was. Those last two years were plagued with phone calls, e-mails, even letters from my parents asking me when I was coming home to help my father. People looked at me in the corridors of the school like they were expecting something to happen, and the headmaster called me into his study once, telling me that if I ever needed to leave, could I just let him know first and he could make all the necessary arrangements. It felt like there was a great web being spun around me, trying to trap me in it, a big, juicy fly.

And then, one evening, in my last summer at school, only two months ago, I received a phone call from an unknown number. The reception was poor, and, judging by the time lag, it came from a long way away. A voice, crackly from the lack of reception, and with an accent I couldn't place, had sounded sinister.

"Join us, Master Helsing," whoever it was on the other end said. "Join us, and you need never worry about your parents and their ambitions for you ever again." My throat was dry as the voice had continued, "The world you live in is changing, the tide has turned. Leave now, join us, and you shall be on the winning side. We'll be watching."

The line went dead. It was that night that I fled. In a state of panic I rushed to the headmaster's office, and told him I was leaving. I hadn't forgotten his promise, and he didn't need to know where I was going. I had to get away from everyone who had ever put any pressure on me, and the voice was still ringing in my ears. He was obliging, and kindly agreed to drive me to the train station himself. I had a family credit card on me, a card I'd 'borrowed' from my father several years ago, and at the station I bought two tickets, just as the good old detective books I liked to read had taught me. Plant a false trail, make it convincing. And so there were two trains leaving that night, one to my parents' village, and one to Berlin.

I got on the train to Berlin at two in the morning, and at that precise moment I realised that I was doing exactly what Daniel had done all those years ago. I still had his phone number. It was at that point that I made my decision. Whatever he'd done had angered my parents, but he'd still spoken to me whenever he could. He wasn't involved in any of this. So I waited until the train got to Berlin and found the nearest payphone. Of course, I'd woken him up. But, even though I'd phoned at four in the morning his time, he'd been more than accommodating once I'd explained my plight to him. He told me to get across the Channel, he was in England, and then to phone him.

And so I began my journey. I slept through several stops, missed more trains than I deserved. At times I thought the gods were conspiring against me, especially when one of the trains was cancelled due to unexpected necessary repairs to the lines. So I walked over the Holland-Belgium border, carrying all my worldly belongings on my back. That took me several days, getting to Brussels before getting the train to Paris and then Calais, where I finally had a train I could sleep through. On the other side of the Channel lay a strange and distant set of islands, one that I had never seen, and had only ever heard mutterings of, and some of those mutterings were not overly polite, especially of its weather. Apparently, though, the rumours about the eternal drizzle were false, as I stepped onto a train in England sweltering with autumn evening sunshine, having phoned Daniel and been given directions to Stamford, 100 miles north of London.

And that's where you find me now, just four stops away from my last train before reaching Stamford, Daniel, and hopefully a warm bed.