'Lot of history in the South,' I stated.
'Don't go getting high and mighty because of slavery. You grew up out West, you have no clue about the South. My family might own this house, but that doesn't mean that we approve of the kinds of things that happened here. I had ancestors who fought for the Confederacy, but I would be real surprised if any of them had two nickels to rub together, let alone owned a slave. People think that the South is racist, and it was, and some parts still are, but for the most part, we've dealt with our history. The biggest racists I've ever met aren't here, they're in politics, and they are smug bastards. They're the ones that are quick to play the race card, the ones that pimp poverty. Those are the real bigots.'
'Touchy subject.'
'I guess. But Bubba Shackleford employed black Hunters in his very first group of Professional Monster Killers. Remember 'Flexible Minds.' He made that little credo up. That's not just about the unnatural, it's about how you look at the world. He only cared if they could fight, and that they kept it together when strange stuff started. They were some pretty tough Hunters too. You don't want to know what happened to the Klan boys that messed with them.'
'I can guess.' I could only imagine that after dealing with werewolves and vampires, yokels hiding under white sheets were not that big of a deal.
'Rumor has it that a bunch of night riders ended up buried in the back forty. Great-great-grandpa never had much trouble from those folks after that.' She changed the subject. 'Let me show you the ballroom. This is probably my favorite room in the whole house.' She pushed open some double doors and led the way into a huge space. The floor was vast and open, ornate antique chairs lined the walls, and an opulent crystal chandelier hung from the ceiling. Most of the walls were mirrored, with old-fashioned and slightly distorted glass. A large stage filled the back corner of the room, complete with carved pillars capped in brass. Staircases spiraled around and upward to the second floor, perfect for the Southern belles of old to descend for their grand entrances.
I walked into the room. My boots echoed on the worn smooth wood, stirring up small clouds of dust. I could imagine the parties of bejeweled women and men in Confederate gray, royalty of a forgotten time and kingdom. 'Impressive.'
'I haven't done any work in here. I don't really want to. I'm just going to leave this one alone. We never used this room growing up. If this old place has a soul, it would be in this room. So I leave it closed.' I watched her reflection in one of the many mirrors. She awkwardly placed her hands into the pockets of her jeans. 'I know it sounds silly, but that's how it is.'
'I understand,' I said, not really, but it seemed like the correct answer. Even though there had not been any music played in this room for generations, I had to resist the urge to ask her to dance.
'Um… Through here is the formal living room. Now this one, we used a little, for guests and that kind of thing.' I followed her through another set of double doors into a much less lavish room. This one was under drastic construction. Tarps had been thrown over the furniture, and sawdust covered almost everything. Only one wall was not in the process of being stripped and repainted. It was covered in painted portraits of Julie's ancestors.
'Five generations of Monster Hunters,' she proclaimed, 'and a few who decided to stay out of the family business, but we still love them too. Even if they are strange.' There were dozens of paintings. Most done in a classically formal style, kind of stuffy, and not really befitting the homespun, slightly insane, good nature of the family as I knew them. The first painting was of Raymond 'Bubba' Shackleford, followed by a picture of his wife and children, and then each of the succeeding generations after that. There was a single blank spot on the wall where Raymond II was missing, but other than that there were a lot of pictures up there. In totality it created a beast of a family tree. The last of the pictures were of people I recognized. The Ray Shackleford IV that I knew as a wild-eyed lunatic was captured on canvas as a handsome, square-jawed man. His wife, Susan, had looked almost exactly like Julie did today. My tour guide's portrait must have been taken when she was younger. I did not feel that the painting had done her justice. She looked slightly artificial. I felt for the painter, capturing something like Julie's beauty had to be difficult. You could get the technical details correct, but how did you convey the spirit?
'Lot of Raymonds. Must be kind of hard to keep track of them.'
'It's a bit of a tradition. Oldest son got the name. I'm the oldest in my family, so it went to my younger brother.' She pointed at one of the last of the portraits. He resembled his father.
'Where's he now?'
'Dead,' she said sadly. 'It's been a few years.'
'I'm sorry.'
'No. He died well. You can't be sorry for somebody that brave. You can be sad, but not sorry. He earned his plaque at the compound. Even the best of us get it eventually.'
'What happened?' I don't know why I asked her, but I did. She hesitated only briefly before speaking.
'1995. At the Christmas party, Monster Hunter International's one-hundredth anniversary. He was one of the ninety-seven Hunters killed that night. He was just a Newbie, but he fought like a champion. You should have seen him. He sure was something.'
'I've never heard the whole story.'
She gestured at one of the tarp-covered couches. I sat, and she sat next to me, under the watchful painted eyes of her ancestors. We sunk into the deep cushions with a rustle of plastic. I could taste the sawdust in the air.
'It was a great party. Hunters know how to throw a great party-you know, live fast, party hard, die young. That kind of philosophy tends to grow amongst people with such a dangerous job. Everybody who wasn't in the middle of a case was there, so most of us at least. Well anyway, it was at a resort near Gulf Shores, right on the beach. Beautiful spot, Dad had picked it out, reserved it for us. At the time I was just glad that he seemed to be coming out of his mourning, coming out of the archives, and participating with the living again. I had been worried about him for so long. Little did I know that he had picked that spot because it was the right place and the right time for his damned summoning.' She brushed aside some dust. 'I should have seen it coming.'
'You couldn't have known. Nobody could have.'
'I know, but that doesn't change the fact that it was my job to know. I'm the historian. I'm the researcher. I'm supposed to be the one with the answers. That's my job, and this one was right under my nose. I knew Dad was sad about Mom's death, but I never expected him to do something like this. The resort was his Place of Power. We didn't know until later that it was built on top of what used to be some tribe's sacred ground. It was his chance to bring her back. While the rest of us were gathering down at the resort, he planted a bomb in the archives. None of us ever learned the real logic behind that. He had the information he needed stored in his head, so he probably wanted to destroy the books that had the information on how to stop him, just in case. That's my guess anyway. Burned a big chunk of it down.'
She sighed, apparently studying her father's portrait, trying to discern reason behind the painted mask. She continued, 'Every Hunter that could be there, was there. Even the retired ones. Lots of wives, husbands, girlfriends, boyfriends, dates, it was a great big party. Even the caterers and the bartenders had been picked from people who knew what was up. People who knew about monsters and who and what we were. We could let our hair down. There weren't any secrets being kept in that room. I don't know why Dad wanted such an audience, but he had it.
'At midnight, Dad went to the center of the dance floor, splashed some blood in a circle, and said a few words. I think most of the folks near him thought that he was just drunk or something. I saw him doing it, I didn't understand, but I knew that it was wrong. I knew that something bad was about to happen. His voice became louder, almost like he was talking with a megaphone. I've heard about every language there is, but not this one. Whatever it was, it wasn't meant to be pronounced with a human tongue. The blood caught on fire and the floor under him disappeared, it just kind of opened right up. I was far enough away that I didn't get to see where it opened to, but some of the others did. They died first.'
'What was it?' I asked.
Julie appeared shaken as she recalled the memory. 'A rift. To someplace else, we don't really know where. We say hell, but that isn't really right, that's just our way of explaining something that we don't understand, but it was not on Earth, that's for sure. Things came out of that rift, bad things. I can't even begin to describe them. They tore through the party like the Hunters were made out of tissue paper. Dad's plan had gone wrong. Bad wrong.'
She unconsciously clenched her fists, the muscles in her jaw contracted, and her eyes narrowed angrily at the
