Page 102 of Never Invite a Vampire to Dinner

“To Harriet and Wendell? They’d be lucky.”

“They’d be bored, is what they’d be, and then they’d go home.”

I laugh and eat my chowder.

Because there is nothing to find. That’s what I think that night, sitting in a warm loud room full of people I have known my whole life. Supernatural creatures are not a secret. If somebody with a microphone eventually works out that the man on the hill doesn’t eat anything, the worst thing that happens is that a certain kind of tourist drives up Point Road to stare at his gate until Arthur Finch yells at them about parking.

Arthur is sitting at the end of the bar with a beer he has been nursing since five.

“I don’t like it,” he says.

The room doesn’t hear him. Arthur speaks at the volume of a man addressing a dog.

I lean towards him. “Why not?”

“They’ll want the house.”

“Why would they want the house?”

“Because it’s the one place in this town nobody’s ever been inside.”

“I’ve been inside.”

Arthur looks at me for rather a long time.

“I know,” he says.

Then he puts on his coat and goes home. I think about that for maybe four seconds before Bess arrives with an opinion about where a podcast van will park, and then Harriet has another question about interviews, and I go back to my chowder.

It’s another three days before I look at the actual website. I’m in bed, it’s six thirty in the morning, and Julian has already gone up the hill. I have a hundred and forty covers on the twenty-eighth and I’m the kind of person who checks her phone before she puts one foot on the floor.

The site is not what I expect. No dripping letters. No cartoon ghosts. It’s calm and grey and beautifully made, with more than two hundred episodes, a research section, source lists, transcripts, and listener submissions. It looks like something a museum would make if a museum had money.

Season Nine. A Harbor Full of Ghosts. Host: Rowan Pierce. And across the top is a photograph of Blackthorn House from the water. I sit up.

The photograph was taken at dusk from somewhere near the Sisters, and Blackthorn House rises out of the bluff with the last light behind it. Not one lamp shows in the windows. It looks exactly the way that house looked to me my entire life before October.

Then I scroll down.

THE OWNERS OF BLACKTHORN HOUSE

There are four images.

The first is the painting from the Maritime Museum. Gentleman with a Chart, c. 1816. Julian.

The second is an engraving from an 1851 shipping registry. Mr. E. Voss, financier of the Black Harbor marine railway. Julian.

The third is a newspaper photograph from Bangor in 1938. Mr. J. Thorne at the customs house handover. Julian.

The fourth was taken this year. It’s a slightly soft long-lens photograph of Julian coming out of Harbor Books on a cloudy day with a paper bag in one hand. He’s wearing his good coat on a perfectly ordinary morning.

Underneath the four images is a single line.

Four owners. One face.

And below that:

The Volkov family have held Blackthorn House for more than two hundred years, and their remarkable resemblance across generations has been noted locally for just as long. We think it’s more interesting than that.