“He was somewhat of a biologist, from what we can gather,” Amber said. “In his journal, he described what he thought might be new species that were maybe unique to this area.”
“From what I heard,” the woman said, “he was somewhat of a monster. Do you two have names?”
They introduced themselves. The woman regarded them almost like she didn’t believe that their names were Alan and Amber.
“Related?”
“No,” they said at the same time.
“I wouldn’t have figured,” she said.
“And you are…” Alan said.
“You came here without knowing who you were coming to see?” She laughed and Alan felt the room grow even warmer with the sound.
“Sorry,” he said. “We tracked down your house only by the age and approximate location.”
“Like it says on the mailbox, I’m Jan.”
“Nice to meet you,” Amber and Alan said at the same time. This made Jan laugh again.
“What were you saying about SE Prescott being a monster?” Amber asked.
Jan shook her head and let out a slow breath.
“Samuel Prescott. His extended family had to move away after he was departed. They all feared him, but once he was gone that fear turned into spite. His children received the full brunt of what everyone was afraid to do to Samuel. The sins of the father were visited two-fold to each of his sons.”
“Sins?” Alan asked.
“Cruelty, mostly,” Jan said. “Theft, if you want to think of it that way. He ran through his own animals, sacrificing them to what he called science, and then he started taking any animal he could get a rope around. Cats, dogs, horses, goats, and cattle—he would steal them in the night. People found tracks from their dooryards and barns that led right to what he called his laboratory. The last owners of this place turned his lab into a greenhouse. I use it only to store my lawnmower and bicycles.”
“What was he doing to the animals?” Amber asked.
Jan turned up her hands. “I guess nobody really knows why, but he was taking parts from them. People would track their animal to his lab, burst in, and they would find most of their animal still alive. The poor things would be wild-eyed with terror and they would have stitched up incisions and huge chunks of missing flesh. He was like a reverse Dr. Frankenstein, I guess.”
Amber looked at Alan. They had both read the journal and tried to understand everything there. No experiments on local animals were described. It seemed like the most he did, according to the journal, was capture some salamanders and expose them to sunlight.
“Where did you hear this?” Amber asked.
The woman’s expression turned sour.
“I don’t know where you’re from, but around here families talk with one another. We pass things down. If you cross one Libby, you’re going to have an issue with the next Libby you meet, I can guarantee you that much.”
Alan shot a look at Amber.
“I’m sorry. I didn’t mean any offense.”
Jan took a moment before she seemed to accept the apology.
# # #
“You were saying? About the animals?” Alan asked.
Jan jutted out her bottom jaw a bit and nodded.
“Yes. A whole group of local people came to Samuel Prescott to demand compensation for their loss and order him to stop his horrible experiments. It’s said that he denied, denied, denied, until some of the men forced their way into his back garden. The place was like the Devil’s own graveyard. Ringed in fruit trees, there were bones hanging from branches. In the center, a fully articulated skeleton of a deer was posed over a plot of fresh dirt. A couple of the men dug down and stopped when their shovel hit the hide of a mule, dissected into two pieces with each end sewn up as if it could live by itself. The group rallied back to take custody of Samuel Prescott and make him pay for his crimes against nature.”
Amber looked to Alan with wide eyes.
“But they found that he had escaped through the side door of his laboratory while everyone was distracted. This is where the accounts differ. It was just after sunset and they were organizing their search to hunt down Samuel so they could bring him to justice. There was a big commotion from the orchard. The Dunn boys were setting fire to the trees and claiming that the mule had wormed its way out of the grave and tried to bite them. I wish they hadn’t burned down those trees. I only have one apple tree left and it’s said that Samuel kept rows of a dozen each. If I trucked all the way down to the Puddledock Road and got some trees, it would take me five years to get half a bushel of apples. Those heirloom varieties lived forever and produced…”
Alan stopped her tangent by raising his hand, like he was asking permission to interrupt.
Jan kept talking but got back on the subject.
“They set fire to most of the orchard and more and more tales erupted of ferocious animals crawling out of their graves to come after people. When I saw that movie that came out in sixty-eight. What was the name of that? It was like I had seen that before. Those undead people crawled out of their graves and it was just like I had always imagined it from the stories. A group found Samuel and tried to bring him back. They said he went crazy and attacked. Several of the men were wounded trying to subdue him. Samuel died in the fight. That’s always the way that people put it when they told the story. Nobody ever said that Samuel was beaten to death, or Samuel
