When I turned off the highway, I caught sight of Darren in front of his caravan doing jumping jacks. He was wearing a pair of sunglasses and a brown dressing gown. The gown’s belt—and whatever was underneath the robe—flapped about as he jumped. When he saw me coming, he took a long drag on a cigarette and flopped into a lawn chair.

Darren was a vampire.

Last month, someone introduced Darren to calisthenics. He assured me, at his age, you needed to do something to stay supple.  I wasn’t entirely sure how old he was but once, when Burke and Wills came up in conversation, he shot me a predatory grin.

Darren was also a music connoisseur. He hosted the night shift at 3HFM, Holbrooke’s community radio station and premiere source of news and gossip. Like most community radio stations, it played an eclectic selection of rock, jazz, Christian folk, punk and—every second Thursday—thirty minutes of Tibetan singing bowls played by a well-meaning hippy who claimed she could read auras (lately, she’d started averting her eyes when we passed on the street).

“Better be something good!” he yelled.

I climbed out of the car and tossed a bottle in his direction.

He snatched it from the air, turned it over in his delicate fingers and appraised the label, before taking a swig.

Lowering the bottle, he smiled, teeth red with blood.

“Is that all?”

I revealed what I’d been concealing behind my back. It was a copy of Bob Dylan’s ‘Bringing it all Back Home’

Darren scoffed. “Got that one.”

Reluctantly, I turned the album around and he gave an approving whistle when he saw the signature scrawled on the back. It was a lifetime ago. Before Lucy, before Holbrooke, before all of this weird bullshit. I’d waited outside Festival Hall for hours to get it signed.

“What do you need?” he asked, taking the record and inspecting its slightly foxed corners with a look of disapproval.

I reeled off the details: big bastard with a red beard driving a Datson 1200.

His eyes narrowed in recognition.

“I’ve seen him around,” he said, taking another puff from the cigarette. “Not sure he’s someone you want to mess with.”

He ground the cigarette into an ashtray.

“What do you mean?”

“Not entirely sure what he is,” he said. “Just a bad feeling, a whiff of something…” Darren’s prodigious sense of smell had helped me out on more than one occasion. The fact that he didn’t know what we were dealing with was deeply troubling.

“I may need a little help too,” I said.

Darren studied the album for a moment and looked up.

“Sergeant Night,” he said, “it would be my absolute bloody pleasure.”