Page 101 of Never Invite a Vampire to Dinner

“The Veil is coming here.”

She slaps her phone down on the counter and spins it towards me.

I know a lot more about The Veil than I ever wanted to because Lucy has been listening to it while she works ever since the harvest supper, and she has insisted on sharing. She usually listens to it in the darkroom, which I have told her is how people end up convinced they heard breathing behind them. The Veil is all about hauntings and cryptids and is your neighbor secretly a selkie. It’s the kind of show that treats the supernatural world like one enormous mystery even though such creatures exist and everybody knows such creatures exist, even if they choose to ignore them.

“They’re doing a whole season,” Lucy says. “Six episodes. On Black Harbor.”

I scroll through the announcement. Fog. Lighthouse. The Cordelia. A ghost ship. A sea witch. Some sort of curse involving a bell that I’ve never heard of and Mabel is going to have opinions about.

Honestly, my first reaction is delight.

“Oh, this could be fun.”

Lucy stares at me.

“What? It could. Tourists. I could do a haunted harbor menu. I’ve been looking for an excuse to use squid ink.”

“Penny. Two million people listen to this show every week.”

“Two million people could eat squid ink.”

By seven that night, apparently every person in Black Harbor has heard. The Widow’s Lantern is packed. Nobody in Black Harbor listens to podcasts. Everybody in Black Harbor now has an opinion about podcasts. Theo has printed the announcement at the library and brought it to work with him, which is how I know he is more interested than he is pretending to be.

“It’s ridiculous,” he says, sliding a bowl of chowder in front of me that I did not order and will not be allowed to pay for.

“You printed it out.”

He shrugs. “It’s ridiculous and I printed it out. Both things can be true.”

At the far end of the bar, Doris and Hollis Baker are already arguing over which of them has the better story about the storm of '78. Wendell wants to know whether the podcast people will need a boat. Someone near the window says tourism in the reverent voice you’d use for a saint.

Then Mabel arrives. She is wearing a small enamel raven on her coat and carrying a folder approximately thick enough to stun a burglar.

“I have prepared corrections.”

“Of course you have.”

“It is indexed, Penelope.”

“What are you correcting? They haven’t said anything yet.”

“They will get the Cordelia wrong. They always get the Cordelia wrong. They’ll say eleven hands when it was nine and they’ll say the lantern was lit for a brother when it was a husband, and I have been correcting that since the Nixon administration.”

Harriet Coyne leans across the nearest table towards me. “Will they interview people?”

“No one knows, Harriet.”

“Because I should have notice if that’s what they intend.”

I give her a confused look. “Of what?”

“The interview.”

“You just asked whether there was an interview.”

“I should have notice either way.”

Theo looks at me. “Two million people are going to listen to this.”