“Yeah, I guess. I mean, I don’t have a precise record of where each kill happened, but by the state of his house it was clear that something had gone on there. He lied to me and said something about the truck exploding. It looked like a war had taken place though. The whole house smelled of rot and the windows were blown in. The power was out. After I saw his letter, it seemed to me like they tried to assault his house. So, yes, I have to figure that he battled them there.”
“So, if that’s right, that house has to be, like, the last place in the world that any of them would go.”
George moved to the couch and found his shoes. He started to put them on.
“What are you doing?”
“I want to see the cellar,” George said.
“Are you crazy? It’s the middle of the night. What if it’s not true? What if they don’t care about the fact that some of them were killed there. You could be walking into a whole nest of vampires.”
“Amber, they’re after us and they somehow know how to track you down. If they don’t care about previous killing grounds, then they’re coming here anyway. This place is just as dangerous as your neighbor’s house.”
“Wait until sunrise at least.”
“We’re going to be busy,” George said. “I want to see his cellar. Maybe we’ll learn something important.”
“George, I was starting to think you were the sane one of the family.”
“Sanest, maybe, but none of us are really sane. Can I borrow that mirror?”
# # #
“I’ll be back in five minutes,” George said.
Amber’s headlights illuminated the side of the house. The broken windows looked like deep, black holes. They had been boarded up or at least covered in cardboard before. Amber wondered who had been there to knock them out again.
“You’re crazy,” Amber said. “Wait for me.”
They got out together and she made George wait while she went to the trunk of the rented vehicle. From there, she pulled out stakes, handed one to George, and a box of powder. She began to sprinkle a circle of it around the car.
“Grab that big bag of sunflower seeds and follow behind me,” she said.
He put down the borrowed mirror so he could follow her orders. Once that was done, she looked to the house again. The last time she had seen it, the place had been messed up but it still looked like a place that someone might live. Now, it was clearly abandoned and decaying quickly. Yellow police tape fluttered in the cold night air. It was as silent as a graveyard.
George stood there, holding the mirror and the stake in one hand and pointed the flashlight with his other. She thought that he had lost his nerve. Any second, she expected him to climb back into the car.
Instead, he took a single step forward. His next step came a moment later and after that he gained speed. He was heading towards the bulkhead doors to the right of the broken kitchen windows. The doors were open, leading down into the blackness under the house.
Amber followed.
She turned back towards the vehicle as they walked across the dooryard. Her rented car, in the circle of seeds and Borax, was an island of safety and they were swimming out into open water. Far in the distance, down the road, she thought she could see the glow of light from her great uncle’s house on the other side of the hill.
George whispered, “Take a look.”
He set down the mirror against the bulkhead door. His light was pointed down into the dark. What she saw didn’t make sense until he moved his light a little. The beam was split into shards down there. When George moved the flashlight, she understood that it was bouncing off of multiple mirrors placed down there. His light was bouncing through the space and reflecting off of the dust. As he descended, George put out an arm and brushed away the cobwebs in his way. Amber picked up his stake—he had left it by the mirror—and she pointed the two stakes down into the darkness as she descended.
“Yeah,” George said. “Part of it happened down here.”
“What makes you say that?”
He approached a spot on the floor and lit up a circle of dirt that was darker than floor surrounding it. Crouching in front of it, he pointed his light up and then stood slowly to trace his finger on scrapes on the beams overhead.
“One of them was hiding here, near the stairs. It probably waited to get him as he descended. Maybe that’s how he got bitten—like on his ankle or something.”
“No,” Amber said. “It got him on the hand or wrist. They amputated at the hospital in hopes to defeat the infection but it obviously didn’t work.”
“Amputated?” George whispered.
Amber nodded.
“So they knew about it. Thats’s really interesting. I wonder what they thought was the matter with him.”
Amber turned slowly, trying to find more evidence now that she knew what to look for. On the stones that made up the foundation, she found more scratches in one of the corners. It was hard to see if there was any discoloration of the rocks or floor. There was some moisture leaking through the foundation, so everything was discolored in one way or another.
“I think this is a tooth,” George said.
Amber turned and went to him. Her light flashed across the thing that he was poking around in the gravel.
“That’s a piece of china,” she said. “See the blue ink?”
“Oh.”
They continued to look around the dark cellar. Amber began to wonder why they were there. George had convinced her that they might find some sort of clue about the mirrors. His search was haphazard though, like he was just poking around because of some morbid curiosity.
“So after he changed, he came to find you,” George said. “You were going to be his first victim.”
“No,” Amber said. “He killed
