James rushed into the bedroom, threw the duffle bag onto the bed, and checked to see that it was mostly packed as Sarah said she left it. Then he went through the closet, pulling the few items of clothing Sarah had hung up on the hangers and tossed them into the open bag. They needed to go. There was no time to waste. He would let Sarah sleep a little while longer, get their plane tickets over the Internet, find the next flight out of Bangor International Airport, and they’d be on their way. He zipped the bag closed and carried it into the living room where Olivia and Theresa stood huddled by the front door as though they wanted to block him.
“Are you leaving?” Theresa asked.
“We have to go,” James said.
Olivia took James’s hand. “Sarah can’t go, James. She’s still recovering.”
James shook his head. He couldn’t admit, even to himself, that Olivia was right. “She’ll be fine. I’ll take care of her.”
Then James heard it, the smug, self-satisfied footsteps shuffling toward the house. The knock startled Olivia and Theresa, but James knew. Theresa peeked through the peephole, worried about who it might be.
“You can let him in,” James said. Theresa opened the door, and Geoffrey walked inside. “This is Geoffrey, everyone.”
“You were at James’s wedding,” Olivia said. “I believe we met there.”
Geoffrey nodded. “That is correct. Very nice to see you again.” He looked past James to Sarah. “How is the little human person? She doesn’t look so very bad. And the littlest human person?”
“Sarah is getting better. Grace is fine.” James noticed Geoffrey’s haggard look, how tired and gaunt he seemed. James thought Geoffrey looked on the outside the way he felt on the inside. “How did you know we were here, Geoffrey? Who else knows we’re here?”
“Good God, James, everyone in Maine knows you’re here. You didn’t need to cause such a ruckus at the hospital.”
“I was…”
“I know, James, I know.” Geoffrey’s nodded, his voice soft, even comforting. “But Maine isn’t a big place, and everyone around here knows everyone else and some kayakers saw the ambulance bringing Sarah here. It didn’t take long to put the pieces together.” Geoffrey sighed. He walked to Sarah, still sleeping, and looked at the IV bags connected to her veins. “She’s very strong,” he said.
“I know,” answered James. “How do you know all this?”
Geoffrey shrugged. “I have ways of finding out, that’s all. Aren’t you going to ask why I’m here? You always ask me why I’m here.”
James sighed. “Why are you here, Geoffrey?”
“I’ve come as your own personal town crier.” Geoffrey stood tall, pushing his shoulders back and stretching his head toward the ceiling, lengthening his already long frame. He pretended to unroll a scroll and held his hands out as though he stretched the imaginary paper so he could read whatever was written on it. He cleared his throat. “Hear ye, hear ye. They’re sending soldiers out in force. The Vampire Dawn has officially ended and the round ups have begun. All vampires must be ready to report at their appointed time.”
“No!” James said. “I’m not reporting to anyone. I’m leaving with my wife and daughter and we’re going somewhere far away where we’ll be safe. We’re leaving now.”
Geoffrey grabbed James’s arm. “And go where? With her?” He pointed his elbow at Sarah, who was oblivious to them. “Do you see what your little human person looks like? She’s so pale right now she could be one of us. You can’t run anywhere with her. She’s too damaged.”
“He’s right,” Theresa said. “Her wounds are still healing, James. She can hardly sit up yet. She can’t sit in a car, let alone for hours in a train or an airplane, and what about the time you have to wait in the airport? I’m so sorry, but she just can’t leave on a journey like that right now.”
James sat on the sofa, his hands on his knees, his head down. He was gasping for air, odd since he hadn’t needed oxygen since 1692. He felt his preternatural body knotting up muscle by muscle from the inside out, and he couldn’t stand the crimping pain. He felt the way he did the night he sat awake while his human body died because now it was happening all over again. He was wasting away inside and he shuddered from the knowledge that he might never see his wife again. He felt Olivia’s hand on his but he wouldn’t look at her. He knew he’d see the truth he couldn’t bare to acknowledge in her motherly steel-gray eyes. She tugged on him, and finally he turned to her.
“Sarah can’t go,” she said, “but you can. If you need to run, James, then run. Sarah will understand.”
“No,” James said. He pulled away from Olivia and walked the room again, back to smoothing the tire-like grooves he was working into the wood floor with his frenetic pacing. “I can’t live without her. I’ve tried, and I can’t. We have to go together—all of us. I know it will be hard, but as long as we’re together everything will be all right. I’ll take care of her.”
Geoffrey knelt besides James, took his vampling’s hands in his, and brushed a few stray gold strands from his brow, a fatherly gesture that suddenly seemed natural between them. His voice was soft, concerned, such a contrast to his usual irreverence. “You can’t take Sarah,” he said. “Your little human person is so delicate, and she’s hurt right now.” He looked at Theresa. “All you human people are so delicate, I hardly know how most of you make it through the day without injuring yourselves somehow. How you live into your eighties with your soft skin and fragile bones is quite remarkable really.” He tugged on James’s hand and looked at him without a flicker of sarcasm anywhere in his features. “I can see it in your eyes you know what I say is true. Your little human person needs to stay here now, and you need to go where they tell you to go. It’s the best thing for you, and it’s the best thing for her too.”
James dropped his head, shuddering in spasms, and Geoffrey, still kneeling, looked up into his vampling’s sad face. “You have to decide whether or not you’re going to run, James, but if you run it will have to be alone, and it will be hard. It’s not so easy to hide anymore. Are you going to drive? They’ll find the license plate of your car. There are security cameras everywhere. Are you going to fly? You need a passport to leave the country.”
“I know how to get new passports with different names,” James said.
“There’s no time!” Geoffrey shook James’s shoulder, trying to rattle some sense into him. “Didn’t you hear me? They’re coming to take you away. And me too. Every one of us. And if we don’t go willingly they’re going to hunt us down.” Geoffrey sighed with frustration. “I knew you’d do something rash like try to run. That’s why I’m here now—to stop you. We both need to go, James. We’ll be all right, and your nice little human people here will be all right as well. But there’s no running. If the government wants you gone they’ll make you go away. You know that all too well, don’t you? They’ll find you, and it frightens me to think what they’ll do to you once you’re found. Now as your…” Geoffrey closed his eyes, and he was silent a long moment. “As your friend, I’m begging you. Don’t run. Don’t risk all the happiness you have to come back to. Do you know how fortunate you have to have these nice human people who love you? Do you know how proud I am of you?” Again, Geoffrey stopped himself, and again he took James’s hands in his. “You have too much to risk, James, by being foolish now. I’ll be there to help you. I won’t leave you alone again. And these lovely human ladies will be here to help Sarah and Grace.”
“Of course that’s true, James,” Theresa said. “They can live here with me.”
“Or with me if they want to move back to Salem,” Olivia said. “We’ll take care of them.”
James pulled his hands free. He stood and towered over Geoffrey, who was still on his knees, his eyes still begging James to understand. James pointed at Geoffrey like he was calling the attention of the heavens onto that horrid vampire man.
“You’re telling me to go along with it?” James laughed a wicked laugh. “The way
you wanted me to go along with it when you said you could help me when I was sitting outside the jail where they held my wife? The way you wanted me to go along with it when you bit me and turned me into this? You’re the reason I’m in this hell in the first place.” James turned the entire force of his fury onto Geoffrey. “Damn you, Geoffrey! This is all your fault! If you just left me alone, if I wasn’t this unhuman, cursed atrocity! You cursed me, Geoffrey, and now my wife and daughter have to suffer for it and I will never forgive you. You’re not going to leave me alone again? What’s so special about this time? Why are you going to help me now when you abandoned me when I needed you most?”
Geoffrey sighed. He walked to the window, unlatched the lock, and slid it open. He looked toward the blackness of the bay, invisible in the night. He breathed in deeply though he didn’t need to.
“I deserve all your wrath, James, I know I do. You don’t know how I’ve suffered knowing what I know. I reproach myself nightly because of it. You and I are connected, James, and though I made mistakes in the past, I’m here now. I won’t abandon you again.”
James was stunned into silence. Geoffrey—loving and considerate? The world must be coming to an end. He would have laughed if he wasn’t so sad. Finally, he asked, “Is there no other way?”
Geoffrey shook his head. “I’m so very sorry, James.”
Olivia covered her eyes with her hands, and her shoulders shuddered with her sobs. She sobbed the way James wished he could have but he was numb suddenly, unable to feel anything. Someone might have staked him right then and he wouldn’t have known the difference and kept going as though nothing had happened until he disintegrated into a splat of blood on the floor. Finally, when her tremors slowed enough so she could gather her voice and speak, she said, “I think Geoffrey is right, James. It breaks my heart to say it, but I don’t see a way around it. You need to go.”
“But what’s going to happen to you after you’re rounded up?” Theresa asked.
Geoffrey shook his head. “I don’t know,” he said.
When Sarah awoke Geoffrey was gone and James sat with Olivia and Theresa around the dining room table. Olivia was weeping, keeping a white linen handkerchief to her cheek while she wrote whatever James told her into a spiral notebook. Theresa dropped her head onto her arms on the table. Sarah pushed herself onto her elbows, straining to hear what they were saying but they whispered closely to each other and their words were muffled. She watched her husband, his stillness, his blank stare at the red-checkered tablecloth under his clenched fists, his inability to look at either Olivia or Theresa, the way his mouth hardly moved while he spoke.
“What’s wrong?” she asked.
“Nothing,” James said. He left the table, sat on the bed beside her, and brushed a few stray curls from her eyes. “Everything is going to be all right, Sarah, I promise.”
When they heard the angry banging on the door they froze. Theresa peeked around the red gingham curtains and gasped when she saw the two grim-faced army officers outside her house. Her hand shook as she opened the door.
“We’re looking for James Wentworth,” said the dark-haired officer.
James stood from the bed, still gripping Sarah’s hand. “I’m here,” he said.
The soldier held an envelope in James’s direction, which James took. Theresa gave the soldiers a glaring stare which made little impression on them. James turned the envelope over in his hands, stared at his neatly typed name, then ripped the top, pulled out the letter, and scanned the contents inside. Sarah saw his jaw tighten and his eyes narrow, and she could see in his straining muscles how he struggled to keep his expression still. But she didn’t need him to speak in words to understand that something was wrong. She knew him so well. She struggled into a sitting position to try to see what the letter said, but she felt dizzy suddenly, caught up in the tornado, the house and everyone in it spiraling through the wind-swept sky, higher and higher, then lower and lower until they crash landed somewhere through the rainbow and over the woods, from to the full life of color to the limited shadows of black and white on the other side.
“James Wentworth, as a resident of the state of Massachusetts you’re ordered to report to the Boston South Station at 10 p.m. on Friday, May the fourth. You can pack one bag to take with you. Anyone not following the directive will be subject to immediate arrest.”
“But I’m already being arrested,” James said. “Isn’t that what this is?”
“You’re not being arrested, sir,” the second officer said. “You’ll be detained awhile.”
“And the difference is?”
“Make sure you’re on time. That’s all.”
The soldiers turned away, and Sarah heard the marching cadence to their heavy steps as they disappeared through the front yard. They had handed James his notice, given him his directions, and now they were gone, their work done. James stood by the door, his head to the side, listening. Even Sarah from where she sat on the bed could hear loud crunching of the jeep’s accelerator as they drove away. James turned to the anxious faces watching him.
“Well, there it is,” he said.
Suddenly, without reading the letter, Sarah understood. Her breath came in short, strained bursts and she struggled to breathe.
“Are they taking you away?” she asked.
James took her into his arms. “Yes,” he said, “but don’t worry. Everything is going to be all right. I promise you, Sarah. We’ll be all right.”
“Friday the fourth,” Sarah said. She had been sleeping so much she realized she had no idea what day it was. “What is today?” she asked.
“It’s Wednesday the second,” Olivia said.
Sarah looked at James. “Two days? You’re leaving in two days?”
Her hands went to her cheeks, first squeezing, then slapping, trying to awaken herself from this nightmare. James took her hands from her face and held them to his chest.
“Sarah, please…”
Please what, she wondered? Please go? Please stay? She wanted to scream, cry, run, anything other than stare helplessly in the direction the army officers had gone. Suddenly, she felt herself chained to the walls, the pock-faced monster—that ghoul who had haunted her night after night, year after year as he stood tall in the shadows—triumphant after all. I have caught you again, my pretty, she heard him say, and I will catch you again and again until you understand you will never truly get away. I will hold you in my night-dark dungeon forever.
Bang! Bang! Bang!
Sarah started. What was that? Knocking on the door? A gun going off? She couldn’t tell. Her shaking shoulders betrayed her terror at the living nightmare she saw acted out everywhere around her. But she couldn’t move her hands to hide her eyes from the horror, weighted down by the chains as she was.
“What is it?” she cried. “James, what is it?”
James looked at the door. He listened, intent, his head tilted, his extra senses alert, but he shook his head. “I don’t hear anything, Sarah,” he said. He looked at Olivia and Theresa, and they both shrugged.
“I didn’t hear anything, either,” said Olivia.
Theresa peeked around the curtains. “There’s no one there, Sarah,” she said. “The soldiers are gone.”
Knock! Knock! Knock!
“No, he’s there.” Sarah cringed in terror, trying to hide behind James, trying to disappear. If you can’t see me, I’m not here, she thought, like a two-year-old playing peek-a-boo.
“He’s here!”
“Who’s here?” Theresa asked. She opened the front door, afraid she missed the intruder through the window, but all was still outside, the bay flat, the trees bent in the breeze, bowing in reverence at the sad scene before them. “Sarah, I promise you, there’s no one here.”
“Oh my God,” James said. He knelt beside his wife and kissed the top of her hair, her forehead, her cheeks, her hands. “Sarah, he’s not here. That was a very, very long time ago, honey, and he’s not here now. He won’t be here for yo
u ever again. They were here for me, Sarah, for me. You’re safe. No one is going to take you away.”
Bang! Bang! Bang!
Knock! Knock! Knock!
Sarah shook her head and waved her hands faster with each sound, trying to brush the pock-faced man away. “He’s here, James. He followed me here. He’s coming with his chains. He’s going to drag me away. We’re going to die again. Grace! We’re going to die again.”
“Oh, Sarah…”
“Ssh. Listen.” Sarah strained her head toward the window, and she cringed when she heard the wagon stop, the horses bay, the thud as the constable jumped to the ground, the rattle of the chains. “He’s here. He’s coming. Hide me, James. You have to hide me!”
And then it all began again. Bang! Bang! Bang! Knock! Knock! Knock! The door opens and he’s there, the pock-faced constable, talking nonsense about witches and confessions and warrants of arrest. But I’m innocent, Sarah screamed in the silence of her mind. How can you take me away? Her hands went to her stomach where she knew her baby waited, the baby she knew was a girl, the baby she named Grace, and she wept because they would die all over again.
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