Amber prepared to jab her stake into the creature as it came through the doorway.
She froze when the lights came on.
George jumped and spun. His feet tangled and he went down to his knees.
Tucker ran to him, thinking he was playing a game. The dog licked George’s face.
Ricky stood in the doorway. “You guys think you’re being quiet, but you’re not.”
His eyes went wide when he saw Amber standing there, wielding her stake.
“I almost stabbed you,” she said, lowering the stake.
“What are you two doing, anyway?” Ricky asked.
“Get the lights,” George said.
Twenty-Five: Ricky
Amber drifted off at some point when George was talking about vampires and silver. According to George, some legends described vampires being allergic to silver—suffering burns or paralysis from it. Other sources claimed that it had no effect on the creatures.
Ricky put a finger to his lips and pointed at Amber. She was stretched out on the daybed, on top of the blankets.
Ricky and George stood up quietly and moved out of the room. Ricky flipped off the lights and waited for Tucker before he closed the door.
They went to the living room.
“I’m going back to bed,” Ricky said.
George nodded. “I’m just going to read a little longer.”
“Don’t stay up too late. We’re leaving just after sunrise.”
“Don’t worry about me. As long as we get some coffee, I’ll be fine.”
Ricky put a leash on Tucker and took him out, not letting the dog stray too far from the house. Back inside, he did a quick tour of the first floor, checking the doors and windows. He yawned and felt his eyelids growing heavy as he climbed the stairs, but once he was in the bed he felt wide awake. Ricky looked through the window across the field. The grass was tall and brittle with the snow almost all melted away. The wind sent ripples through it. They weren’t that far from the house where Ricky had grown up, but it seemed like a completely different landscape.
He had the window open just a tiny bit. The heat was barely on, but it was still hot upstairs. His father had examined the system and declared that there was no way to fix it. The thermostat was in a drafty part of the house, and the pipes all went to the upstairs first.
“Someone plumbed the thing backwards when the furnace was replaced,” Vernon had said. He had no real training in furnaces, but still managed to form unshakeable opinions every time he encountered one.
On the night air, Ricky heard the distant sound of the train. He knew just where the sound was coming from. The place where the tracks crossed the Barlett Road wasn’t too far away and they sounded the horn every time they rolled through there. As a kid, Ricky had put coins on the tracks at that crossing. Even when they watched carefully, they never figured out where the coins went after they were smashed. His friend Sarah was the only one who had ever found one of the smashed coins. Everyone else just hunted around in the gravel until they gave up.
Ricky forced himself to take several deep breaths in a row. Tucker was pressed against his side, already snoring. Ricky closed his eyes. He couldn’t stop thinking about his brother and all the research that George was doing into vampire lore. George was very careful to talk about which sources he trusted and why. If he could find an assertion that was made in two independent places, he would give it the benefit of the doubt and dive farther in. Then, if he could find some source that attributed a reason to a claim, he would search farther to see if anyone had tried to test the theory and repeat it.
But in all that folklore, George hadn’t found anything that really talked about stopping the problem completely. It always boiled down to how to ward them off, or how to nurse someone back to health from a minor infection.
That’s not what they wanted to do. They wanted to completely eradicate the infestation.
“Why would they write that down?” George had asked.
“Are you kidding?” Ricky asked. “Why wouldn’t they?”
“Well, if they thought that they cured the problem forever, would they need to document precisely how it was done? You want to pass along knowledge if you think it will have use in the future. If you’re convinced that you’ve just solved the problem forever, then aside from bragging what’s the point in documentation?”
Ricky flipped over, tugging at the sheets to free himself. The cold air that blew in felt good, but it brought another distant train whistle. The end of the sound trailed off and almost sounded like a dying, tortured moan.
Ricky put a hand on Tucker’s head, stroking the dog lightly even though he knew it would wake Tucker up. He wanted the dog to watch over him while he went to sleep. He seemed to know what was expected of him. Tucker climbed over Ricky and put his head on the windowsill and Ricky closed his eyes again.
# # #
Both of his parents were already down in the kitchen when Ricky woke up.
“How’d you sleep?” his father asked.
“Occasional,” Ricky said. “You?”
“I like this house,” Vernon said. “I like the way the sun comes in as soon as it comes up.”
“I like our house,” Mary said.
“Of course, but there’s something charming about this old place. It has seen things, but it doesn’t judge.”
“You’re crazy, Vernon,” Mary said with a laugh.
Ricky found the bread on the counter and fished out two slices to put in the ancient
