Author's Note: My flash drive, with a copy of my work on this story, seems to have died. Then a floppy disk with a backup on it almost died, but I was eventually able to retrieve the key data. Then my car battery died (this is relevant because I don't have net access at home). Oh, and the dog ate my homework. (Okay, okay, that last one was a joke—I don't even have a dog!—but the rest of it all happened recently, and it tended to set me behind schedule in my efforts to polish up the rest of this story. I won't be finishing it today, even though I had hoped to have it done on Halloween when I began it, but I'll give you some more to tide you over. I may even have another chapter ready tomorrow night; a good chunk of it has already been written.)

Chapter Four: The Game Is Afoot

Sergius advanced into the kitchen, twisted his head around to take it all in, and immediately realized he had an awkward problem. Sherlock Holmes would have taken it in stride with a British stiff upper lip, but Sergius was not the Great Detective, even if he'd intended to present himself that way at a party tonight. . . .

There were four unconscious bad guys in this kitchen, two men and two women, all stretched out on the linoleum floor after Batgirl had finished whaling them; and all four were all made up as vampires—pasty-white skin, blood-red lips, artificial fangs, kohl (or something dark) around the eyes, and at least two of them were wearing wigs. . . .

That wasn't the problem.

Batgirl evidently expected Sergius to live up to his Sherlock Holmes outfit by cleverly finding some clue here that would let the pair of them advance to the next stage of the game.

That wasn't the problem.

But the two women were both wearing diaphanous, slinky, low-cut gowns (if you could even dignify those gauzy things with the word "gowns"—maybe they were fashionable "nightgowns" from Paris for all he knew), and that was a problem! For him, at least, although he doubted Batgirl had any strong feelings on the subject.

Sergius was not equipped to look at such sights without getting flustered. His maternal grandmother would have euphemistically said these foolish girls were in dire peril of catching pneumonia. Even if it had been the hottest day of the year, she still would have phrased it that way. His other grandmother would have been more blunt about what else the young ladies were risking by parading around in such attire.

Sergius certainly was not immune to feminine pulchritude, but he really liked to think he wasn't the sort of guy who went around ogling women's chests. Even when, as in this case, it seemed virtually certain the women had wanted to inspire that reaction in male observers when they chose what to barely wear for All Hallows Eve. (Or perhaps they hadn't exactly chosen—but merely accepted the selections of their presumed employer, The Spook?) Looking at these women at all, under the circumstances, was going to amount to much the same thing as ogling. Or at least it would probably look to someone else as if he were ogling, even if he ordered himself to keep his gaze away from those low necklines as much as humanly possible. And there was at least one other conscious observer still in the room—Batgirl—and he'd really prefer to make a good impression on her.

It only took him a few seconds to take in the situation, re: the Vampire Chicks. Then Sergius determinedly examined the rest of the kitchen. Everything seemed clean and orderly, except for some broken glass and scattered cutlery—presumably the "vampires" had tried to use those things as weapons against Batgirl, and a fat lot of good it had done them.

From the way The Spook had described the game he intended to play, there ought to be a clue somewhere that required the skills of a professional mystery writer to untangle. In theory, it could be anywhere—taped to the bottom of a drawer, rolled up in a bottle inside the refrigerator, even written in tiny characters on the surface of a light bulb in the fixtures overhead—but Sergius strongly suspected he should start with the people Batgirl had subdued. The inanimate objects in the kitchen weren't going anywhere; an inch-by-inch search of them could be postponed for awhile.

Sergius figured he had a fifty-fifty chance of finding whatever he was supposed to find on one of the Vampire Guys. Both of them were wearing tuxedoes—lots of places for something to be hidden in a pocket, or inside a lining, or whatever. So it was a good place to start—for him, the prospect of frisking unconscious men did not fall into the "guilty pleasure" category.

Sergius had never searched another human being's clothes in his life, but he improvised. How hard could it be?

He started with a tall, broad-shouldered guy whose long dark hair proved to be a wig. Sergius checked pockets and shoes, pulled off the coat and ran his hands along it for lumps or bulges or whatever. He pulled off the wig to inspect the lining. Nothing.

He gave the same treatment to the other guy, a swarthy man, barely taller than Sergius but much huskier in his build. Nothing.

He patted them down more thoroughly, searching for anything hidden under an arm, or strapped to a leg beneath the trousers, or strung around the neck. More nothing. Not even wallets or cellphones; someone had "sanitized" these people to make them hard to trace if captured.

He could strip these guys naked if he just had to, to make sure he hadn't missed something tiny, but he sure wasn't looking forward to it and he had a hunch The Spook didn't expect him to take that much time; it would slow the game down too much. Maybe. But who could say how a villain got his jollies? Voyeuristic tendencies? The jerk was probably watching everything via concealed camera right this minute!

Still, looking at naked men's bodies to see if they had clues tattooed on their butts (or anything else that could only be detected by removing clothes) definitely qualified as "only as a last resort." It would make more sense to give the distaff members of the foursome the same treatment, before pushing things any further. Probably save time.

Sergius finally looked back at the Vampire Chicks, as he now thought of them. They still looked gorgeous, and he supposed they could still have something hidden away in some unlikely spot . . . he grimaced as he felt the temptation to use that excuse mounting, and then he finally saw the obvious solution. He would have thought of it sooner if he hadn't been so painfully self-conscious about the entire situation.

"Batgirl," he said urgently, "please search the two ladies to see if anything unusual—pieces of paper, for instance—is hidden on their persons. I really don't—I mean—well, please, just search them!" (The Spook had implied she was no detective, but that didn't mean Sergius had to do all the searching, did it?)

Batgirl flashed a warm smile at him for no apparent reason—and Sergius had the sudden horrifying suspicion that she somehow knew exactly what had been going through his mind regarding those women. Was she silently congratulating him on his self-restraint in not seizing a reasonable excuse to run his hands over their defenseless bodies and call it "detective work"? He suddenly suspected his cheeks were flaming if they hadn't been already—one of the curses of being a shy white guy with a particularly pale complection and an awkward set of scruples.

He quickly turned his back while Batgirl ran her hands over the Vampire Chicks. As it turned out, she only needed about two minutes to find a white folded square stuffed into one woman's high-heeled slipper. He turned back when she snapped her fingers for his attention. Batgirl didn't even bother to open her prize for a quick look before handing it to Sergius, and it suddenly occurred to him as he accepted it from her gloved fingers that perhaps she couldn't read—not English, anyway?

"Right," she admitted suddenly, and he froze as he asked himself if he had absent-mindedly muttered that speculation of illiteracy aloud.

"No," she said, obviously not offended, and he suddenly feared she had short-range telepathy. Now that was scary—a guy would never have a moment of mental privacy when such a girl was around, digging into his most embarrassing memories!

"No," she said in a reassuring tone, shaking her head to emphasize the denial, but she was grinning now, suddenly looking very much like a precocious little girl who's somehow outsmarted an adult three times running and is naturally proud of herself. Now Sergius was afraid of even thinking anything about her, for fear—

The Spook saved him. Sergius had never expected to feel grateful to a notorious killer, but he was relieved when the deliberately creepy voice said conversationally from somewhere overheard, "I don't know what it's all about, but that's a very one-sided conversation. Are you trying to talk his ear off without letting the poor fellow get a word in edgewise, my little vespertilionid?"

Batgirl looked puzzled—probably thinking: I'm his little what?

"I'm fairly certain a 'vespertilionid' is a member of a large family of bats," Sergius said helpfully. He couldn't blame her for not knowing that; few people would. It wasn't a word you heard in normal conversation; not unless you happened to find yourself sitting near Kirk Langstrom at a dinner party. (As a side issue, it occurred to him that Batgirl's failure to comprehend the word tended to support the idea that she wasn't telepathically scanning Sergius's brain, or else she would have understood that epithet as quickly as he had . . . er, wouldn't she?)

The Spook didn't pursue the subject of the one-sided conversation he hadn't understood, so Sergius finally unfolded and studied the piece of paper. Torn out of a small spiral notebook, obviously. A single line of handwritten text:

Star of 1st Eng. Lit. novel about them

Sergius pondered. Under the circumstances, "them" almost had to be "vampires." So far, so good, but bloodsuckers weren't one of his specialties. Thrillers, mysteries, that sort of thing, but he'd never been wildly enthusiastic about reading or writing straight horror. Bram Stoker's Dracula had been acclaimed a century ago and was still famous now (Sergius had tried to read it once, and all he could say was that popular tastes must have changed drastically since Stoker's day), but it hadn't been the first vampire novel in English, had it? Nor had LeFanu's Carmilla, although Sergius had actually found that one much more readable when he ran across it in a library when he was about eleven. . . .

Then he thought he had it. Like a telephone, the keypad beside the door had letters in tiny type on squares 1 through 9. Therefore, 8-2-7-6-3-9 could spell VARNEY, as in Varney the Vampire. He punched that in, hit the ENTER key at the bottom of the pad, and heard something go click near the knob. He was partly proud and partly disappointed when it actually worked. This commonplace "Trivial Pursuit" approach had been easier than he expected.

Batgirl pulled Sergius away from the door and yanked it open, then charged in. Sergius grabbed the edge of the door before it could close again—it suddenly occurred to him that he didn't know if they'd be able to open it again with the same code if it swung shut. Then he poked his head around it to see what was happening. He had thought a dining room would be located in this corner of the house, and he'd been right—a table was set along one wall, with a punch bowl and several types of refreshments laid out along it, and there were Halloween-themed decorations on the walls; the first such decorations he'd seen in this household (if you didn't count people's costumes as having "decorative" functions).

Speaking of which, four stereotypical pirates had apparently been lurking near this door, all with cutlasses, all looking ready to go board a gold-laden galleon on the Spanish Main! At least four more pirates were clustered near a double door set in the wall over on the left, still turning to study the situation as their buddies began fighting the superhero in their midst.