They waited until Saturday. There was no time to be found elsewhere. They did not even really know they were waiting. But when the time came they knew it had and were as ready as they would ever be.
Ginger and Ollie had shown Shannon, Jared, Dexter, and Caleb the papers Ollie had found the day after she'd found them. They'd gathered in the library, so far back they were in the hopelessly outdated references, and Ollie had gingerly—almost reverently—produced the old pages from her bag. It was a wonder they didn't disintegrate.
Caleb Vance's stomach had dropped all the way into his left shoe the moment he'd gotten his first glance at those papers, and he hadn't even seen what was on them yet. It was like he knew just looking at them, seeing how old and brittle and timeless they were, what would be on them. Ollie's eyes were shifting too frequently, Ginger's smile too bright and forceful. He'd turned to Shannon and found her gnawing on the inside of her cheek.
Four days later they met in front of Briargate underneath the trees. Puffy gray clouds blocked out the sun, but it was warm. As far as anyone knew—as far as anyone had said—they were just meeting up to hang out. They did most Saturdays anyway, especially now that the winter had passed. But Caleb supposed all of them felt the pull, the drag towards something they'd almost certainly regret.
Looking back, Caleb would never be able to explain why they did it. He could not explain why they did most of the things they did that year. Not in a way that anyone who hadn't experienced it would truly understand, anyway. Some would think it was heroics, but he didn't think that was it. Others may place votes on sheer stupidity, and he thought that that was a little bit closer but still not the complete mark. There was something more that was like idiocy and like disregard and like—
Desperation
—a thousand other things. That was it, Caleb would think. Whatever that was, that was it. That was the reason. It was shaky and a little bit broken, but so were a lot of things during that time. Perhaps it made perfect sense to not make any sense at all.
Ollie was wearing a pair of her overalls, the one with the giant pocket on the front. A pocket big enough to house a couple folded up sheets of paper. There were ribbons in her hair, thick green ones that matched her eyes. She looked skittish, more so than usual. That was all the confirmation needed to know that he wasn't the only thinking what he was. She kept biting at her fingernails, a nasty habit that he was sure would take her quite some time to be rid of. Granted, no one else seemed to be fairing much better.
"Might rain," Jared said when they'd all convened, like anyone cared.
"Yeah," Caleb agreed anyway. It wasn't thunderstorm weather, but a light rain maybe. Later.
There was a long silence between the six of them. So long it was almost ridiculous. There were other kids out and about, students of all ages. Caleb found himself absently looking for Allison. She wouldn't be there, he knew. She'd gone home for the weekend again. Even if she hadn't, he didn't really think she'd be outside. Not with the way she'd been acting lately. He'd talked to her on occasion after the night in March, but she'd made it clear that she wasn't really in the mood to be around...anyone. He supposed he could sympathize.
"So Jared and I were talking," Dexter said, just when Caleb felt a little like screaming just to make some noise. "We were thinking that maybe we should—"
"Yeah," Ginger said quietly. She looked expectantly at Ollie. "Did you bring...?"
Ollie bit at the side of her thumbnail and nodded, looking at the ground. They already knew that. Caleb did, anyway.
"Do you really think we should?" Shannon asked. She looked almost as nervous as Ollie, which was honestly quite a feat. It wasn't surprising, though. Caleb figured that, out of all of them, if anyone was going to be the voice of reason besides Ollie it would be Shannon. Shannon, the interloper, the girl who was toeing the line between two vastly different worlds. Her hands were at her sides, but they were grasping at the sides of the jeans she was wearing, too tight, too tight. Her knuckles were white.
"Dunno," Jared said softly.
"Maybe we shouldn't," Ollie said. "Maybe we—maybe we should just—show someone, one of the teachers maybe. Or—or we don't have to do anything. M-my parents probably already know about it, they're probably doing something about it right now."
Now that was true. About Ollie's parents knowing about the papers, at least. As for them doing something about it...well, the jury was still out. Ollie's parents were the whole reason she'd even found the papers (as near as anyone could figure). They'd actually been home the previous weekend—only for the weekend—and had spent most of the time locked up in the library. That was where Ollie had found the papers, shoved haphazardly into a book that had been left off the shelves. It had to have been left out by her parents, Ollie reasoned, probably by accident—Eugenia would never have allowed it, but Abraham...Abraham had a bad habit of leaving a mess in his wake.
"It's an idea," Shannon said weakly. Caleb nodded slowly, thoughtfully. Closer to the front of the school, a young first year shrieked with piercing laughter.
"Maybe we should show a teacher, just in case," Jared said. "We wouldn't really get in trouble, would we?"
"No, guess not," Dexter said.
"Yeah," Jared agreed. "It's not like we went looking for those papers, or anything. Right, Ollie? You just found them."
"Yeah," Ollie said, voice small and very nearly sad.
"Maybe they'll even appreciate it," Shannon said. "The teachers, I mean."
"Yeah, maybe," Ginger said. "Maybe you're right. What can we do about this, anyway? We should just show someone. Professor Nadig, maybe."
"Right," Shannon said, nodding.
That was what they should have done. They knew it, Caleb knew it. But Caleb could hear their voices; they spoke with no conviction. He was sure he wouldn't have either if he had spoken. Their minds were already made up. Even Ollie's, even Shannon's, even if it scared them. Even if it scared all of them.
The last time Caleb had seen his father was at Christmas time, and he'd sat Caleb down and talked to him about all the things that had been happening in Clearwater. His father had assured him he'd be fine. He'd said, "You don't be stupid, boy, and you'll be just fine. You just don't be stupid, all right?" Caleb had hung onto the words a little at the time; he could see no reason his father would be wrong. The words hadn't comforted him exactly—Caleb did not find himself comforted by his father often—but perhaps they made him feel a bit more in control. But more and more as of late Caleb had been feeling that it didn't matter if his father was right or wrong; Caleb was, of his own volition, doing a lot of stupid things.
"Someone's probably dealing with it already," Dexter said.
"Uh-huh," Ginger said, nodding firmly.
Caleb looked around at the group of them and found a smirk forming on his face in spite of himself. He didn't think a single one of them was convinced.
The thing was that Ollie's parents had left again.
The thing was that no one had breathed a word about monsters of any kind since the day Headmistress Lea had addressed the entire school to tell them that Lester Ames was missing.
The thing was that rumors had spread that Howard Nesbitt, the President of the Administration, had been seen in Briargate on Monday after classes had ended.
The thing was that someone had nailed a cow head to the wall on Allison's birthday and had wrung the neck of Pip the canary.
The thing was that they had seen something and something had seen them on a night in the middle of March under the cover of darkness.
"If we're gonna do this we should probably get going," Caleb said, knowing they were all in agreement. He looked at the sky. He didn't think the sun was planning on moseying back out any time soon, and he wasn't really hoping to wait around to see if it would rain. They had time, he thought, but maybe not tons of it.
"Right," Dexter said, barely a whisper. He was suddenly very interested in the grass by Jared's feet. Ollie gulped audibly. Caleb waited another moment, then jerked his head in the direction of the road out past the trees.
Tucked away on the other side of the road, well hidden by the swell of the hill upon which it stood, was Cole Cemetery. Much like it was easy not to realize that Briargate was nestled in amongst the trees, it was easy not to see the cemetery, guarded as it was by the landscape and vegetation. The sole visible hint to its existence was the iron archway that bore its name. It was the only cemetery Clearwater had, and much of this concealment was done on purpose dozens of years ago when the cemetery was first organized. It was a superstitious thing, bad luck asserted by many of the first inhabitants of the town. It was also no coincidence that its placement was so close to Briargate and The Forest beyond.
All of this history was long past the day Caleb, Shannon, Ollie, Ginger, Dexter, and Jared ventured to the Cole Cemetery together. The cemetery was impressively large for such a small town, and surprisingly full. Small pathways curved throughout the ground, dividing the cemetery into about a dozen large squares of gravestones. The oldest of the markers were in the southeast corner and they steadily became more recent as they moved outward. Towards the back, near the oldest stones, was a white shed with a single grimy window.
The cemetery was deserted when the six of them came to it, which was no surprise. The place was eerie under cloud cover and silence. The wind was stronger up on the hill. When Caleb turned around he could just make out the top of the North Tower of Briargate over the trees. At the top of the hill, where the cemetery truly began, the road could no longer be seen.
"Look, Ollie, it's your parents," Jared said, pointing a finger towards one of the large, dark stones. O'BRIEN was carved clearly and plainly on the front of it, with ABRAHAM and EUGENIA underneath. Birthdates were underneath both names. In the middle, the name ALFRED was printed, followed by the dates NOV. 15, 1941-DEC.16, 1953.
"Yeah," Ollie said.
"Think my parents are in here somewhere too," Jared said, looking around, but it was mostly perfunctory.
"My grandpa's over there," Dexter said, pointing vaguely. "My grandmother insisted on her own stone. She'd made my grandpa look into having them done when she got pneumonia 'cause she was sure she was gonna die."
"Oh?" Jared asked.
"Yeah. That was twenty-seven years ago. I think. She tells the story enough, I should know."
Jared snorted. "Your grandma does strike me as the type who's too stubborn to die."
Dexter grinned. "Yeah, that sounds like her."
The group of six strolled in farther, sticking close to one another. None of them would have said it, but they were all nervous; Caleb could feel the anxious energy thrumming between them. They moved towards the southeast corner—the oldest corner—as a unit silently, solemnly. The crunch of gravel under their feet seemed unbearably loud. Somewhere to the side a number of birds were chirping.
The stones became less legible the farther back they went. Names and dates were blocked off by moss and erosion. Some looked as if they had never had any markings at all. Fresh cut flowers—which were rather plentiful near the stones closer to the front of the cemetery—were nowhere to be seen. Another trend that Caleb noticed, but could not give reason to, was that the older stones were more likely to be taller than they were wide, though the opposite could be said of the newer ones. Many were thin and obelisk-like, looking rather like tiny Washington Monuments.
They settled almost at where the cemetery ended and a thin line of trees and bushes began. They could see a harsh downhill drop-off on the other side of the vegetation. A small 'No Dumping' sign was stuck in the ground like another gravestone.
"Is this it?" Shannon asked. She didn't sound like herself.
"Somewhere back here," Ollie said, finally pulling out the papers they all knew she had with her.
Ollie O'Brien's great-great-grandfather had been something of an amateur historian, in the loosest terms. Most of what he'd recorded had been inconsequential, day-to-day things that wouldn't have been useful to anyone outside the family, but he had one distinction: he had been around at Clearwater's very beginning, and he had seen things that few had seen. It was his book of notes that had been left out in the library in McKenzie House, and it was his notes—among other things—that Ollie had found.
The Night of Blood and Fire was what Ollie's great-great-grandfather had called it. Caleb had no idea if that was the colloquial term—he didn't know if there was a colloquial term—but it seemed as good a name as any. The Night of Blood and Fire seemed more accurate and to-the-point than anything else could be.
Caleb would've sworn he'd seen the whole thing play out as Ginger read what Ollie's great-great-grandfather had written (Ollie had refused to even look at the pages as Ginger spoke). He could see it even clearer now, standing in the cemetery, the epicenter of the whole thing. He'd never been here before. Everything seemed a little more real. Caleb suddenly felt cold and a little bit queasy.
If there were vampires in Clearwater now, it was not the first time they had been there. Ollie's great-great-grandfather's notes outlined that perfectly.
"Which ones...?" Jared asked, craning his neck to see as many gravestones as possible.
Ollie's great-great-grandfather had not been a gifted man, but he had not been a stupid man, either.
"Don't know," Dexter replied. "Look around."
It was suddenly very apparent to Caleb that they were only here looking for confirmation they already had.
"Over here," Shannon said softly.
The Night of Blood and Fire was one of the nastier of Clearwater stories that were stamped out over time. There were still some who knew it—or knew bits and pieces of it, at least—but most had chosen to forget it had ever happened. It was simpler that way: forgetting, rationalizing, revising. The citizens of Clearwater had become experts at that without even realizing it. And perhaps not just the citizens of Clearwater.
Ollie's great-great-grandfather had not been privy to all the details. I don't know if there is anyone around anymore who knows the full story. I certainly don't, but what I know is enough. I know what Ollie O'Brien read to herself in her house one afternoon, what Ginger Beaumont read aloud to her friends in the library of Briargate School. I know what Ollie O'Brien's great-great-grandfather knew, and so you will know too.
In 1855, back when Clearwater was still the town of Cole and Wisconsin was a fresh-faced young seven-year-old, Ollie O'Brien's great-great-grandfather, Joseph McKenzie, was forty-two years old. An Irish immigrant, McKenzie had been driven to the unlikely town of Cole in the early 1840s by volatile attitudes towards the Catholic Irish in big towns further east. Cole was new, just beginning to blossom, and the people there...well, they kept a lot to themselves. McKenzie settled well there; he built a home, the famed McKenzie House, married, and had one child, a daughter. All the while, he took note of things around him. And in regards to the night of July 21, 1855, he took note of a great deal.
Back in those days, life wound down by about ten at night, even in the summertime. Shops had long since closed up, workers had returned home for the night, families had retired indoors. Most of the town was asleep. Most. But here, in Cole Cemetery, on the very same ground Caleb Vance, Shannon Malone, Ginger Beaumont, Jared Wilkins, Ollie O'Brien, and Dexter Bradbury would stand over a hundred years later, things were very much awake.
The only way anyone had it figured was that it started in the cemetery. There was a sexton, a man who, particularly in the summertime, ventured to the cemetery at night for one last check to make sure that everything was in order, usually sometime shortly after nine. He was found the morning of the 22nd lying behind one of the gravestones. He was missing a leg and three of his fingers. It looked as if the back of his head had caved in; his skull had been bashed repeatedly against the side of one of the stones. Apart from the deep red stain on the marker in question, there was a troubling lack of blood around the scene. There was little doubt that he'd been killed when he went for his last check of the night.
From there, things get murky. As I've said, there is perhaps no one who knows everything that happened. Too much did happen. Whatever had gotten the sexton in the cemetery had taken to town. That was for sure. All the windows in the market had been broken. The only schoolhouse in town had been ransacked. The barber's shop had been trashed. Families in houses all across the town had been woken up to the noises of destruction outside. And before the night was over, the tavern at the top of Main, the only business still open after ten at night, went up in flames. Perhaps mercifully, everyone who had been inside at the time had already been dead.
Joseph McKenzie and his wife and daughter were a few of the many awakened that night. At that time, McKenzie House was rather detached from the town; only Boulder Hill—which was only just being constructed—was nearby. The Kraus farm and the houses that would become the Wilkinses', the Bradburys', the Beaumonts', and the Graces' had not been built yet. Minerva Boulevard seemed a much longer road when only McKenzie House and the beginnings of Boulder Hill occupied it. That had mattered little on The Night of Blood and Fire. All the chaos had made its way to McKenzie House just fine. Nellie McKenzie, the woman of the house, was the first to awaken, dragged from a relatively deep sleep into a vague, misty haze of slumber by a number of muffled but very obvious shrieks. She twisted restlessly in her sleep, lumbering lazily towards consciousness. A particularly loud and piercing scream brought her rocketing into the land of the living.
The master bedroom faced away from town, where Nellie McKenzie could tell the screams were coming from. She frantically shook her husband awake, immediately fearful of what might be happening. The noises were far away, but the emotion behind them was unmistakable, and the message was clear: there was real danger. These were the sounds of people fearing for their lives. Joseph McKenzie was just pulling himself out of sleep when his daughter rushed into their room. Her bedroom was at the front of the house, facing east towards the town, and she'd heard the screaming even louder than her parents had.
Joseph McKenzie dressed in a rush that sent all three of them reeling. He did not say a word, and Nellie only questioned once what he was doing. It did not matter that she did not get a response. She already knew.
Joseph McKenzie wrote that when he headed into town on that muggy July night he had never been more afraid in his life. Anyone who knew what would happen that night would be inclined to believe him. He was alone and unarmed and quite aware that he was most likely making a catastrophic mistake. After the fact, he asserted that it was only by chance that he had not been killed.
As soon as he got close enough to Main Street to see what was going on, he nearly turned back. That was the smart solution, the solution for anyone who had any sense of self-preservation. Something drew him on further, though, something that later he could not name, much like, over one hundred years later, six young students would not be able to name what it was that drew them to the cemetery. The town, usually dormant by this time of night, was alive; people of all ages had spilled out onto the streets. They stood in a cloud of rubble and destruction. The businesses all up and down Main Street had been trashed. Windows had been broken, doors had been pulled off hinges, furniture had been smashed into pieces. Joseph McKenzie would never know it, of course, but the state of the Clearwater Public Library on the night Sarah Benadine's body was found was vaguely reminiscent of all the damage done on the night of July 21, 1855. But the material devastation was hardly the worst of it. As Joseph McKenzie walked onto the bottom of Main, he saw the first of the injured. Like a man in a dream, he realized that the whole of Main Street appeared to be painted in blood.
He saw faces he recognized—he knew many of the people in town—but it was hard to pick out anyone in particular. The confusion was too strong. Many that passed him were little more than indistinct blurs. It seemed that everyone was screaming. But for all the carnage, McKenzie could not yet identify what was causing it all. There were people on the run, but he could not tell from what. The terror around him was palpable, but he could not see what there was to be afraid of.
Someone caught his arm, and he was dragged out of the open. It was a woman he recognized; her name escaped him. She pushed him against the cold stone wall of the tailor's shop—long gone by the 1950s—and placed one hand over his mouth. Frantically, she spoke to him, words that he would mark down verbatim later.
"Haven't you got a care? The devils are out tonight."
She spoke with a hint of an Irish accent. She was dressed in barely more than rags. And Joseph McKenzie still could not give her a name.
She pushed him deeper into the rather tight alley between the tailor's and the market, moving him with confidence and ease. She stuck her head out into the street, looking both ways carefully. Softly—so softly he had to strain to hear—she announced that she could not see any of them but she knew they were still out there. It was then that McKenzie first noticed that she was holding something in her hand: a crooked wooden stake. She looked back at him and appraised him long and hard before shaking her head and saying he ought not to be there.
She turned back out to face the street, and if she'd done it a second later she might have been dead. Seemingly from nowhere, a person sprang to her side and pulled her closer by the arm. Or something like a person. Perhaps the most vague in all of his descriptions of that night, Joseph McKenzie would write, "He was something like a man, but not a man at all. I have never seen anything like it, and I shall be glad to never see anything like it again. It was the eyes that gave it away; the eyes and the teeth. The teeth were like razors, and the eyes...the eyes were long dead. That was plain to see."
The split second of warning the woman in the alley with him had had was enough. Without flinching, without hesitation, she drove the wooden stake down firmly into the man's—the thing's—chest. Right where the heart would be. McKenzie heard a sickening snap of bone and the squelch of flesh and muscle and he knew she had used tremendous strength; he was a little amazed. His amazement doubled when, with a high-pitched screech, the thing dissolved into a cloud of dust.
The woman looked back at him and said decisively that he had to go. Without waiting for a response—McKenzie was not certain what he would have said anyway—she pulled him back out of the alley, into the chaos and confusion of the night. There were sparks lighting the sky that he could not explain. About ten feet away from him, a man lay folded over upon himself. McKenzie knew he was dead. The woman pulled him towards the bottom of the road. And there, just where Main Street crossed Minerva Boulevard, Joseph McKenzie saw what he would consider to have been the greatest horror of the night. A little girl, no more than ten, was crouched over a woman who was not moving. The girl's mouth was at the woman's throat. Rivulets of blood ran down the girl's chin and stained the top of the woman's dress. The girl was feeding.
The woman who had pulled him into the alley wasted one moment looking at him before raising her hand and flicking her wrist. To McKenzie's shock, the girl jerked backwards perhaps five feet away from the woman, as if an invisible rope had been tied around her waist and tugged. The girl looked round in furious anger, baring sharp teeth and showing eyes no living thing could possess.
With one arm, the woman from the alley with the Irish accent grabbed the front of McKenzie's shirt and all but threw him in the direction of his house, away from where the girl had landed. She screamed something at him; in his still abating shock and surprise, he barely registered it as a demand for him to leave. He stumbled and tripped in a half-hearted attempt to get away. His eyes were still glued on the woman and the girl, the latter of which had sprung forward with impossible speed, unadulterated loathing on her pale face. The girl was small. In fact, she looked almost frail. But her movements conveyed strength, like a powerful and graceful but untamed animal. She reached a hand like a claw towards the woman from the alley's face. The woman only just had enough time to avoid the child's grasp.
But that is no child.
For the second time, the woman raised her arm, and this time she swept viciously at a diagonal angle, as if she were trying to tear a hole in the air before her. The girl flung like a ragdoll to the side. The woman from the alley raised her crooked wooden stake high into the air with both hands. McKenzie turned and ran.
That was Joseph McKenzie's first encounter with a gifted person. It would not be his last.
Upon his return home, McKenzie immediately found everything he could use to barricade every door into his home. He sent his wife and daughter into the cellar. When he was satisfied with the doors, he went to retrieve one of the few trinkets that connected him to his younger days: a pistol he had acquired long before he had ever come to Cole. Having it in his hands offered him no comfort.
In the end, all of it was unnecessary. The Night of Blood and Fire never quite made it to McKenzie House. Dawn came, and all the horror of the night had ended. It seemed more like a dream than anything else. If not for the plain evidence, some might have tried to insist that it was.
Many houses and businesses were left in hopeless disrepair. The tavern at the top of Main Street was completely destroyed. And the corpses...better than thirty people had died during the night. Men, women, and children. Most were laid out in the street, frozen in puddles of their own blood. The charred remains of those who had been in the tavern had had to be identified. A dozen or so more had just disappeared completely.
Joseph McKenzie found it quite hard to get any details of what happened that night past what he had seen himself. Much of him did not want any details anyway. But a morbidly curious part of him...but most did not want to talk. They did not want to think of it. Already, many of the townspeople were beginning the process of forgetting. The dead were not yet buried and many were trying to lock away all memories of all that had happened to them. Officially, the whole thing was eventually dismissed as a bar fight that had gotten far out of hand. Unofficially...well, it sometimes seemed that the whole thing was dismissed altogether.
Joseph McKenzie did get one person to speak on the events of that night. Without intending to, he found the single person who had made it out of the tavern alive before it had burned. Theophilus Clements (whose family line would eventually produce the likes of Steve Bellfrey, infamous town drunk) had been on his fourth or fifth drink when everything had gone straight to hell.
Some would insist in the coming years that that was when the booze really got hold of him. He'd be dead some five years later, face down in a ditch, frozen to death in the middle of January, enough alcohol in his system that he would have been seeing in triplicate. In the weeks before that, various townspeople had reported seeing him wandering around town, talking to himself. His wife had kicked him out of the house in September.
That was all still to come for Theophilus Clements when Joseph McKenzie spoke to him three days after the night of the 21st. He still was a rather well-respected man at that time. Theophilus Clements had found McKenzie, had called on him in his house. Had said, pathetically quietly, that he'd heard that the man who lived out on Minerva Boulevard had been asking around about just what had happened on the 21st. That was true. McKenzie had been trying to get to the bottom of things since the dawn had come on the 22nd. Most of what he had gotten was vague half-answers and blatant untruths. The shtick about an out of control bar fight. Hot, muggy night. Pent-up anger. Alcohol. Do the math. But the problem, to Joseph McKenzie, was that he had worked the equation, but no matter what he did he couldn't come up with over thirty corpses lying in the streets. There was no place in the problem for what he had seen, either. And the math never lies. But here stood this quiet, nervous man at his door, and Joseph McKenzie thought that he might finally be getting the missing variables. Without hesitation, he'd invited the man in.
Theophilus Clements's recollection was hazy, clouded by alcohol and trauma. Some of his details got jumbled together, and he couldn't always remember the exact order things took place. Joseph McKenzie did not get all of his answers by speaking to him that day, but he got enough to convince him of his suspicions.
Creatures like humans thirsty for blood had run the town that night. And they'd been beaten back by creatures like humans who could do impossible things.
Theophilus Clements gave McKenzie other little tidbits to chew on, too, like the people who had come into the tavern and started to tear the place apart before lighting it up; with something like awe in his eyes, Clements had muttered, "So many children." And not just children, children Clements had seen before, children Clements knew. Had known. Clements said he hadn't seen hide nor hair of them after that night, not that he'd wanted to. McKenzie thought of the little girl he had seen. And there had been other people Clements had known, most notably a friend he hadn't seen in a while. Clements said he'd been sick. He told Joseph McKenzie that that very man, that friend that he hadn't seen for quite some time, had shown up in the tavern looking "like the Devil himself." Clements had watched as that friend put a finger through a tavern customer's eye.
In fact, the only person the whole night that Theophilus Clements hadn't recognized was a young blonde woman who stood under five feet tall but had done things in that tavern that Clements refused to even speak about.
It was Theophilus Clements who first brought up the name 'The Night of Blood and Fire,' at least to McKenzie. The term was exchanged in hushed tones between certain townspeople; it's impossible to know who actually thought it up.
When Clements left his house that day, it is possible Joseph McKenzie saw a glimpse of how he would end up: desolate and alcohol-ridden and alone. He left with one warning: to leave it lie. It was better that way. Knowing the details he now did, McKenzie wondered if he might not be right. He wrote it all down though. For posterity. Or something like that.
Two weeks later, he found the picture his daughter had drawn. The events of The Night of Blood and Fire had not made it all the way to McKenzie House but they must have come pretty close, because his daughter, in a crude, childlike way, had made a drawing of what could only have been a corpse. There was a person standing over it, lips to the corpse's neck.
Joseph McKenzie saved the picture, hid it away with his notes. Ollie O'Brien would find it a century later.
"July 21st, 1855," Shannon Malone said quietly on an overcast spring day in 1956. A delicate finger pointed to one of the gravestones. Andrew Hetty died on the 21st at the age of twenty-seven. On either side of his stone two more displayed the same death date. All around, more stones showed the same. As Caleb surveyed the area, he thought he could see perhaps more than a dozen with the same date. That was not counting all the nearby stones that only displayed 1855; Caleb had a sneaking suspicion that many of them could be attributed to The Night of Blood and Fire as well.
"Look," Jared said. His voice was only a whisper. He was not looking where the rest of them were; he was turned slightly away, looking at the gravestones that were even older. Caleb followed his gaze to a particularly tall stone. Most of the engraving was faded and hard to read. That was not what Jared was paying attention to, however. About halfway down the stone there was a faded russet stain. Exactly what Caleb would expect an aged bloodstain to look like. He was sure attempts had been made to get rid of it, but it still lingered. Not very strong, but still there.
"Is that—?" Ginger asked.
"Yeah," Jared said.
The temperature seemed to be rapidly plummeting. Caleb felt inexplicably like he was trespassing on sacred ground. He could imagine what it must have been like on that night; he could almost see the body of the sexton lying in the grass.
Without warning, Ollie gasped and sprang backwards. Ginger jumped a little bit as well, taken by surprise by Ollie's sudden movement. Caleb's eyes snapped warily in Ollie's direction. He did not really know what he was expecting to see but he did know that just about nothing would have surprised him. In fact, he was almost expecting something awful, and found it somewhat anticlimactic when all he saw was a fat black rat scuttling across the grass in front of one of the gravestones.
"Ew," Shannon said, wrinkling her nose.
"Ugh, you scared me, Ollie," Ginger said. She ran a hand over the side of her face.
"Sorry," Ollie said sheepishly. Her eyes stayed glued to the rat as it scurried past the gravestones. "I just saw something moving..."
"Aren't rats nocturnal?" Jared asked.
The group of them shot glances at each other. The rat cut across the gravel pathway to the side of them.
"It's...looking for food?" Shannon said uncertainly, watching it go. It scuttled down the pathway towards the supply shed. It was then that Caleb noticed that the door to the little white shed was slightly ajar; it was not a very large gap, but it was enough for the rat to slip through with ease.
"Hey, look at that," Caleb said with some fascination. He started off in the direction of the shed, following the path the rat had just crossed. He heard the crunch of gravel as his friends began to follow him.
It was quite obvious as Caleb got closer to the shed. The lock had been broken. The actual padlock that had been used was unharmed, but the latch it went through had been ripped off completely on one side. Little splinters of wood from the shed had come off with it. It seemed the result of one enormous shove...from the inside.
"That's strange," Dexter said as he tried to get a better look. "Why would—"
"What are you kids doin'?" A barking voice came from behind them. With embarrassing synchronicity, all six of them whipped around, looking, Caleb was sure, as if they'd been caught red-handed.
Jed Wahlert, retired janitor of Clearwater High School and the man who sometimes came to help keep the cemetery in presentable condition, was closing in upon them. He did not move very fast; scoliosis had twisted his back into a shape resembling a question mark, making quick movement still possible but usually quite painful.
"What are you up to here?" he continued as he came closer, looking intensely at each one of them. "I don't want no trouble up here."
Caleb froze, stuttering for words. He desperately looked for an explanation, feeling as if they'd been caught doing something far worse than looking at a busted padlock latch. He moved on to wondering vaguely what Jed Wahlert would actually do if he didn't get an explanation when Ollie said, quite calmly, "We were just up here visiting my brother's gravesite. I guess we got carried away looking at all the different gravestones. We don't mean to cause any trouble, sir."
Jed's expression lightened. There was hardly a person in town who didn't know what had happened to Alfie O'Brien, and Ollie's mention of him seemed to have softened the man up considerably.
"Aye, that's all right, then," he said gently. "I didn't mean t' sound so harsh, but ya can't be too careful round here these days."
"Yes, sir," Ollie said meekly. "But, uh, we happened to notice that the lock"—she pointed to the shed door—"is broken."
"Oh, that?" Jed said with a huffy laugh. "That's been like that for months now. Really should get around t' fixin' it but it keeps slippin' my mind. Don't you worry none about that, now, there ain't nothin' in there worth stealin' anyway."
"Yes, sir," Ollie said again.
"You kids can keep on lookin' around if you want," Jed said, stepping laboriously around them towards the shed. "That don't bother me none. S'longs you behave yourselves. My pa always used t' say that cemeteries are the best source o' history there is. And we got some history round here, ain't that the truth."
Caleb had a feeling that none of them were very keen on sticking around for much longer, but they all smiled and nodded amiably, feeling a silly kind of relief. As a group, they started to move towards the entrance to the cemetery, perhaps to stop at Ollie's brother's grave once more to keep up the ruse, but they'd only made it a few steps before Jed Wahlert pulled open the shed door and they were bombarded with what seemed to be a solid wall of revolting smells.
"Mary, Joseph, and baby Jesus!" Jed cried. "What a stench!"
Caleb made a noise of disgust and immediately put a hand to his nose. The whole group had stopped in their tracks and, perhaps against better judgment, had turned back to look at the shed. Varying degrees of revulsion were painted on their faces; Jared even looked like he might be turning green. The stench was pungent, like rotten meat.
The smell was so overpowering that Caleb at first did not even register the sounds. They hit him eventually, after the shock of such a strong, nauseating smell had faded. A number of squeaky hissing sounds were coming from inside the shed.
"Christ almighty!" Jed Wahlert exclaimed, jumping backwards faster than Caleb had ever seen him move. He was not a second too soon; the moment he was out of the way, a giant mass of black rats came rushing out of the shed. There seemed to be hundreds of them. Caleb and his friends scrambled out of the way of them as they rushed out of the shed towards the street. Caleb watched them go in amazement as well as repulsion; many of them were ragged, their fur coming off in clumps, the rest matted down in dirty knots. They ran as one cohesive unit, quickly vanishing from sight down the hill.
Caleb looked back at the shadowy inside of the shed, half-expecting something worse than a bunch of rats to emerge. Mercifully, nothing did.
"Oh, Lordy," Jed moaned, one hand grasping the side of the shed door. He seemed to have all but forgotten the kids were there. "I don't need no damn rat infestation. I was just up here last week and I didn't see no rats then. Lord, that smell!"
With faltering steps, he hobbled into the shed. The swarm of rats seemed to have taken a sudden and tremendous toll on his mobility. Slowly, as if it pained him greatly, he reached an arm above his head to pull the chain on the single light bulb that hung from the center of the ceiling. The light bulb swung ominously, sending beams of light back and forth across the front and back of the shed. Something caught Caleb's eye at the very back of the shed, and he suddenly understood where the terrible smell was coming from.
"Not all the rats made it out," he said softly. He doubted Jed Wahlert heard him, but his friends did. Their eyes zeroed in on the back of the shed, right where Caleb had been looking. Jared looked positively ill.
"Oh, Lord," Jed said, and Caleb knew he'd seen what they all had. In the back of the shed, behind and around a group of rusty shovels, were the remains of about a dozen more rats. Many of them were missing patches of skin; at least three were displaying bright white bones. Caleb did not need more than one guess to know what had gotten to those animals.
The devils are out tonight.
***Well, if y'all wanted a chapter that goes on for twenty-three years, you got it. I won't lie though, I actually really like this chapter. Shocking, I know. Maybe just because I'm always down for needless backstory. Anyway, thanks to everyone who voted and commented, it's greatly appreciated :)***