Anne Brontë Nightwalker

Chapter 39

Inside, I find Emily sitting at my desk, looking through my notebooks. A flare of anger ignites. We had always respected each other's privacy. Well, except Charlotte, the snoop. Emily's regard for propriety was tenuous before, but since the turning it seems to have been eradicated. There is a feral quality to her now that unnerves me. However, I say nothing.

I set my saber by the door and spin a dimmer switch so that the chandelier lights softly. Next, I turn on a Tiffany lamp and it wells up in rich shades of amber and blue. Ivanhoe is at my legs, slipping through them like liquid gold.

"How'd you get in?"

"The key beneath the pot on your porch. So obvious, Anne. How can you be so careless?"

I build a low, slow fire. In the kitchen, I heat water for tea, keeping an eye on Emily, afraid she might slip away again, leaving me for another century. Ivanhoe howls at me and I pour him dry food, then place a small bowl of cream beside it.

"I can't believe you have a cat," Emily says. "What do you do when you have to run from here?"

"Since I've had him, that hasn't happened, but I will take him with me when I leave," I say, inwardly vowing I will never panic and leave him behind again.

"I've missed our animals," says Emily "Keeper especially."

I smile at the thought of the big Mastiff mongrel. "Did you know he was at your funeral?"

She tilts her head in surprise.

"He walked beside your casket as it was carried to church, and during the ceremony he sat quietly with us in the pew." Her eyes glaze and she looks away.

"I didn't know," she said.

Then the scroungy mongrel refused to move from her bedroom door, waiting and waiting for her to come home. But I don't say this. I can see her pain is fresh enough. Even near death, wasted and starving, Emily had gone to Keeper on teetering legs, rebuffing all help while Charlotte and I watched from the shadows, ready to catch her if she fell as she fed him from her own hands. Emily showed more tenderness to Keeper and Flossie than she did her own sisters, refusing our care, armoring herself in steel stoicism until her very death.

She spurned our love, but it didn't matter. We gave it to her anyway.

Emily turns a page of my notebook and begins to read, "Noah lived 930 years. But we are more ephemeral, risen and walking, made of dust but filled with thirst. Dust that will not rest. And this is god's will, but his cruelty was to make the dust think, so that it would know its thirst as it walked." She looks at me, curiosity lighting her eyes.

"David Vann. He's an extraordinary writer."

"Is he writing of us?"

"No, only mere mortals."

"Do you think he could be one of us?"

"It seems unlikely. He's a professor at university."

"You are the only one of our kind I have ever known to work. Is that how you have afforded all this?" She glances around the room with an air of disdain.

"I've worked since the Crimean War. Over the years I spent little and put the rest in savings. It's grown considerably. In the 80s, I began to invest and to my surprise did extremely well."

I walk to my bookshelf and finding Goat Mountain, hand it to her. "Keep it," I say. "I've read it a dozen times. Although beware. It's a bit bleak."