by Hamill, Ike
“Albert loves people, he knows what vampires smell like, and I’m sure that he can tell the difference. I’m not saying your dog should stay away from strangers. I’m saying that he should go to his safe place whenever there is unexpected company. You never know what might happen.”
Albert went to Alan, inspected his shoes and then Alan pet his head for a minute before he went to Romeo’s side.
“Mr. Libby, can you tell us what happened to you? We’re trying to put more facts around what happened to us and figure out how to prevent it from happening again.”
“I’m afraid I’m beyond all that,” Romeo said.
“Pardon?” Ricky asked.
“I don’t have it in me. I went through those events in my head a million times and boiled down everything I knew into what I’ve already told you. I stay here and I stay safe. I train my dog to go to his spot, and he stays safe. That’s what I need to know. The rest is down in the well. I don’t let it up to the surface—too much pain and I don’t have anything left to learn.”
“But we have more we need to learn,” Ricky said. “We were at a hotel when they attacked. Living there is not an option, so we can’t just stay in a place where they’ve already been dispatched, as you put it. We have to live our lives in our homes, and we’re afraid that they’ll come back for us.”
Romeo nodded. “If that’s the case, you’re probably right.”
Ricky frowned and wrinkled his brow when it was clear that Romeo wasn’t going to continue.
Alan looked back and forth between them. With the current line of questioning, they were at a standoff.
“Mr. Libby…”
“Romeo,” the man corrected.
“Romeo, how did you guess that Ricky would bring me? How did you even know about me?”
Romeo smiled. When he did, the dog thumped his tail against the floor.
“Because I’ve heard of you. You’re the one who chased some sorcerers out of Kingston.”
Ricky looked at Alan with raised eyebrows.
“Honestly,” Alan said, “we were just trying to protect our son. I didn’t know what kind of ceremony they were trying to do and I just knew that I wasn’t going to let it involve Joe.”
“That’s smart,” Romeo said. “They would have used him up.”
Alan shook his head. “How do you know about that?”
Romeo smiled.
“I make it my business to know. When something like that is going on, it’s impossible for everyone to keep quiet about it. They like to think that they’re keeping it to themselves, but more people know than you would expect.”
“What are you two talking about?” Ricky asked.
Alan waved his hand. “It’s the other side to the story that I’ve already filled you in about.”
“It’s okay to talk about here,” Romeo said. “They won’t catch your scent here.”
“I’d rather not,” Alan said. “Maybe we should drop it.”
The old man just looked at Alan, not responding.
Ricky sounded frustrated and a little mad when he spoke again.
“This needs to stop,” Ricky said. “I know you said that you didn’t care about my family, but I do. My parents and my brother are going to get pulled into this and you both know things that you won’t tell me. I’m not going to let anything happen to them so both of you need to bring me up to speed.”
Alan thought back to their conversation in the car.
“Yeah,” Alan said. “Okay. I’ll give you the other side of what happened to my family. You’re sure it’s okay here?”
Romeo nodded.
“Ricky, I told you about the creatures that move through my property every October and how we used them to help Joe when he was sick, but I didn’t really tell you the other side. There were other people who were trying to use Joe’s sickness to entrap those creatures and use them for their own benefit. They were trying to do a kind of spiritual marriage between a child of their family and Joe. With his cancer as part of the bait, they wanted to turn their girl into a sorcerer, as Romeo put it, so she could carry on a tradition of harnessing the power of the creatures. I’m guessing that Romeo has firsthand knowledge of these people and that’s why he has heard of me.”
Romeo nodded.
“What happened to them?” Ricky asked.
“When I disrupted the marriage, it broke their system. I turned the bones of their ancestors over to the creatures and the family’s power was dissolved,” Alan said. “We chased the sorcerers out of Kingston.”
Ricky shifted in his chair.
“Some of them,” Romeo said. “Some of them are still stumbling into their power and others left before you ever came to town. Some of them were my friends.”
Alan’s eyes widened as he took in this information.
Romeo caught the look and said, “My friends weren’t part of the clan who tried to snare your son though. Don’t get that impression.”
“There were others?” Alan asked. “How many evil magicians does one town need?”
“Hold on,” Ricky said. “He didn’t say that his friends were evil.”
“They weren’t,” Romeo said. “They weren’t evil at all. Maybe they were misguided. That’s as far as I would go. More than anything, they were in the wrong place at the wrong time, maybe like you and your friends at the hotel you mentioned.”
Alan held his breath. It seemed like Romeo might be about to finally tell them what they came to hear. He was afraid that if he interrupted, the old man wouldn’t continue.
Nine: Ricky
“He was lying,” Ricky said as they pulled down the driveway, drove under the gate, and stopped at the road.
“What makes you say that?” Alan asked.
“The lights,” Ricky said. “If what he said was true, then why would he need those ultraviolet lights set up to shine whenever someone came through that door?”
“Could just be a belt and suspenders thing. Just because a thing has been true for forty years, you don’t have to believe that it will always be true. If he’s right that killing them leaves behind a repulsive scent they want to avoid, scents wear off over time.”
“So does fear,” Ricky said. “You don’t maintain the same level of vigilance for forty years unless something is frightening you into maintaining that vigilance. People are lazier than that. They get careless over the course of a year or two, let alone decades.”
“Slow down,” Alan said. Something along the side of the road had caught his eye. “Turn around, will you?”
“I don’t have all that much time,” Ricky said. “I promised my mom I would go to the store for her and…”
“It will just take a second.”
Alan asked Ricky to stop when they were across the road from a path that had been cut through the snow bank. Alan got out. After Ricky told Tucker to stay put, he jumped out and followed Alan across the road. There was no sound of any other cars. He hadn’t seen anyone on Romeo’s road at all and there were no tracks. From the records Ricky had looked up, it seemed that Romeo lived on a pretty big parcel of land. It was likely that the nearest neighbor was some distance away.
Alan knelt down and studied the beginning of the path.
“Someone brought a little snowblower out here to make this path. Why?” Alan asked.
Ricky put his hand up to shield his eyes from the glare. It didn’t help much. The sun was bright on the snow and made it difficult to see into the depth of the woods.
Ricky looked down towards his feet. There were tracks in the melting dirt at the side of the road. A vehicle with big, knobby tires had pulled over. He guessed that the tracks belonged to a big truck.
“You said this area used to be more developed?” Alan asked.
“Yeah, a bit. In fact, the first local electric grid in Maine was started right near here when there was a mill. When the mill closed, the town dried up.”
Alan followed the path up the hill and between the trees. As Ricky followed him, he was a
ble to see that the path led under an iron arch, beyond which a clearing opened. The path didn’t go far into the clearing. It took a sharp left and ended at a cluster of headstones that poked up just above the depth of snow.
“Evil magicians,” Alan said.
Ricky leaned in closer to see one of the carved names. He only saw a first name and part of the last. It was enough.
“Sadie Dunn,” Ricky said. The last name was the same as his own, but that didn’t mean much. There were a million branches of the Dunn family around. He remembered the name from one of the old newspaper articles he had read. She had been part of Romeo’s community.
“Why would he bother to keep a path after all this time?” Alan asked.
“Lots of people maintain memorials to deceased loved ones,” Ricky said.
“People are lazier than that,” Alan said, quoting Ricky’s earlier statement. “Romeo would have had to hook up a trailer to haul his snowblower down here. You only put yourself through that level of effort if you’re feeling guilty.”
“Or maybe checking to be sure that the dead stay dead,” Ricky said.
“It doesn’t take a path like this to check. And I thought that we all agreed that the things hibernate. Look at these footprints. Someone comes here frequently.”
“You’re jumping to conclusions. Can we head back now? I have to get to the store for…”
“For your mom,” Alan said. “Yes, I remember.”
Ricky led the way, walking under the iron arch and back towards the road. When he stopped suddenly, Alan nearly ran into him.
“What?” Alan asked.
Ricky blinked at the bright snow through the trees for a moment and then ran. When he got to the road, a hand jerked him by his coat and he nearly fell. A truck blasted by, feet away from him. Alan had stopped him just in time. When the truck passed, Ricky sprinted across the road. The rear door of his vehicle was up. That was the sound he had heard from the woods—the sound the latch made when it was opened.
Tucker was still inside and Ricky let out a relieved breath.
Alan arrived at his side.
“What happened?” Alan asked.
“I heard someone open the hatch, but Tucker is safe.”
“Someone?” Alan asked. “Who?”
“Maybe the person in that truck,” Ricky said. He reached out and pet Tucker, who wagged his tail. Ricky shut the hatch carefully while he watched Tucker to be sure the dog stayed put.
“No,” Alan said. “It was going full speed over the hill. You said that you heard the hatch. You would have heard the truck if it had been closer.”
“I don’t know then. I guess it wasn’t closed properly.”
“Maybe you were right before. Maybe this is a place where the dead don’t stay dead,” Alan said.
# # #
“Dad, did you ever know a Romeo Libby around here?” Ricky asked.
His dad looked the to ceiling while he rolled the name around in his mouth, saying it a few times to himself.
“Did he have a sister named Sadie?” his mother asked.
“Could be,” Ricky said. “Did she marry a Dunn?”
“Not that I know of, but it wouldn’t surprise me to find out. They all moved away a million years ago. I didn’t know any of them personally. They were before my time, but I’ve heard the names,” she said.
“I didn’t know him,” his father said. “I only ever knew one Romeo—Teague was his last name—and he never lived around here.”
“Why do you ask?” his mother asked.
“He’s the guy I met with today. He said that he lived around here a long time ago. It would have been before seventy-two, I guess. He lied about other things though. I’m trying to figure out how much of what he told me was true.”
“Talk to Debbie and Jack,” his father said. “They know everything about everything that happened here back then and they love to talk about it.”
Ricky sighed.
“What?” his mother asked.
“You know—when they get to talking, it’s impossible to get away.”
“It’s not impossible. You just have to go over there late enough that your visit has a cap on it. Call them up and go over tonight. I told Jack I would drop off his bean pot this weekend. Just say you’ll be passing by and see if you can drop it off.”
Ricky rolled his eyes.
His father pointed at him. “You want to know? They’re the ones to ask.”
# # #
Ricky looked at his phone. It was exactly eight o’clock. Debbie and Jack always went to bed at nine, even though they were both retired and didn’t have any reason to get up as early as they did. Ricky smiled when Jack opened the door. He held up the bean pot.
“Awesome, thanks. How did the beans turn out?” Jack asked. Instead of taking the pot from Ricky, he turned and swept his hand to the side, inviting Ricky in.
“Actually, I haven’t had any yet. I’ll get some tomorrow, I’m sure.”
“Brace yourself, they’re going to be a little spicier than you remember. My pot has decades of extra flavor baked in.”
“Oh yeah?”
Jack closed the door behind him. Ricky led the way towards the kitchen.
“How did your mom’s break again?”
“I don’t know. She said she came down in the morning and it had split in two. She had to toss all the beans she had soaked and Dad had to live with canned beans on Saturday. He says the canned beans made him extra gassy on Sunday, but I find that hard to believe,” Ricky said.
“Tell her I have a line on one down in Sanford. I should be able to get it next week if she can hold out that long.”
Ricky nodded.
“Have a sit,” Jack said.
“Just for a minute. I know it’s late.”
“Nonsense,” Jack said. “It’s been ages since we talked. How’s that job going?”
“Good,” Ricky said. He crossed to the far chair. Debbie and Jack always sat in the same chairs and Ricky didn’t want to displace them. “Actually, I do have something to ask you. Did you ever know a Romeo Libby? He said that he lived…”
“Of course,” Jack said. He raised his voice. “Hey, Deb? Get in here.”
He didn’t wait for her to come in before he was already spilling everything he knew. Jack and Debbie both liked to talk more than anyone else Ricky had ever met. It seemed like they were desperate to fill every moment with all the news that they had. Both of them had impeccable memories so they never ran out of information to impart.
“They weren’t part of the old Libbys who lived up in New Sharon and who migrated down to the lakes. They were an offshoot of the Libbys from down near Mechanic Falls, who came up through the Dirty Lew. They got a place over on the border with Mount Vermin. The parcel was fifty-fifty so they were paying taxes to both sides. They tried to get it re-zoned to Kingston proper so they could get the lower rate, but that line runs straight from…”
Ricky put up his hand.
“Romeo?”
“Oh, right, Romeo. He was a bit older than me and Debbie. He had a younger sister, Sadie. She was always hanging around a Dunn—not one of your Dunns, but one of those New Hampshire transplants.”
“Soucy-Dunns they call them,” Debbie said, picking up the narrative as she entered from the other room. “Lee changed his name to his mother’s maiden name when he came down from Canada because the town they moved to was very anti-Canuck. Can we still say Canuck or is that racist now?”
“Probably best to say French-Canadian,” Jack said.
Debbie nodded and then opened her mouth to continue on with what she knew about the family that Sadie Libby had married into.
Ricky raised his hand again.
“Romeo Libby? Do you guys know if he was mixed up with the Prescotts?”
“Mixed up?” Debbie asked. “No. They hated each other. In fact, it may have been their feud with the Prescotts that drove those Libbys out of Kingston.”
“What was the feud about?�
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“Usually, that kind of thing comes down to someone dating the wrong person, or not dating the right person,” Jack said.
“I don’t think so,” Debbie said. “Not in this case. There was something about land and hunting, remember?”
“Back by the stream,” Jack said. “Not hunting, but poaching.”
“That’s right,” Debbie said. “The Prescotts had that big plot where they used to trap and they found some of the Libbys out there poaching. They tried to get law enforcement involved—the Prescotts had some family who worked law enforcement…”
“But so did the Libbys,” Jack said, finishing the thought.
“Still do,” Debbie agreed. “So the Prescotts couldn’t get any satisfaction and they took matters into their own hands. That’s when things got ugly and the Libbys began accusing the Prescotts of all kinds of strange things.”
“Like what?” Ricky asked, shifting forward in his chair.
“You name it,” Debbie said. “The Libbys said that the Prescotts were cheating the town out of property tax and embezzling from the Mother’s Club. They said that the Prescotts were abducting people and sacrificing them out in one of their cabins. They tried anything they could to get the Prescotts in trouble so they would be fighting on two fronts.”
“It didn’t work though,” Jack said.
“Well, it did and it didn’t.”
“Because every time they managed to burn the Prescotts, it also blew back on them. For instance, they did manage to get a couple of Prescott women kicked out of the Mother’s Club, but the Libby women were booted at the same time.”
Debbie nodded. “Nobody wanted to take sides, so even if they proved something against the other, the punishment was handed out equally.”
Ricky leaned on the table.
“Do you think they still hold a grudge?” Ricky asked.
“Seems unlikely,” Jack said. “Most of the Libbys dispersed forty years ago.”
“And the rest of the Prescotts fled a few years back. That kind of feud requires motivation and proximity. Without the friction of being close neighbors, there’s not enough heat for anything to combust,” Debbie said.