Page 75 of Never Invite a Vampire to Dinner

“Never changed, though, the men who owned that house. Every one of them. My grandfather said it, my father said it, and I’ve said it, and there’s not one of you ever wanted to hear it.”

“Said what, exactly?”

“That they don’t change. You’d see one at forty and then you’d see the next one at forty. Different names, same face, generation on generation.” He gives me a sharp look. “My father used to say you could set the tide by them.”

Generation on generation. Except there were no generations.

Mabel puts a hymnal on top of the photograph.

“Thank you, Arthur,” she says. “Do you want tea or do you want to be difficult?”

“I’ve got the gutters.”

“You haven’t done a gutter since 2003.”

“I supervise,” says Arthur, and goes.

Mabel takes the hymnal off the snapshot and squares it on the table with two fingers.

“Mabel.”

“Mm.”

“How many of them were there? Up at that house.”

“Depends who’s counting, dear.”

“You’re counting. You’ve been counting since before I was born.”

She writes a number on a folder in her beautiful upright hand and does not look up.

“There was a Thorne,” she says. “There was a Volkov before him and there’s a Volkov now. There was a Voss in the middle of the eighteen hundreds, who put up the marine railway, and a Blackthorne before any of them, which is where the house gets its name. None of them much cared to have their names on anything.”

She caps the pen.

“It is all in the town book. It’s been in the town book my entire life, and in seventy-five years you are the second person to ask me about it.”

“Who was the first?”

Mabel finally looks at me. Then she pushes the box of mourning jewelry across the table.

“Do the hair, dear.”

I sit there for another hour. I do the hair. I number nineteen folders. I finish half the sandwich. I don’t ask Mabel another question, partly because she has clearly decided she is finished answering them and partly because underneath everything else I am doing arithmetic at a speed that would embarrass a calculator.

Eighteen ninety-two. Nineteen-oh-four. Nineteen thirty-eight. Volkov. Thorne. Volkov again. And a man who stood in my kitchen last night putting cans of tomatoes on the wrong shelf until I moved them, then kissed me against my refrigerator when I explained the system for the third time. That is a hundred and thirty-four years in one town of two thousand people, in a state where someone can still tell you what your grandmother paid for a car in 1979.

I’ve had four hundred years in my head since Monday night and done almost nothing with it except be tender about it. Four hundred years is a number. It’s seventeenth-century Eastern Europe and a birth date nobody wrote down properly. It’s abstract, and abstract is comfortable.

This isn’t abstract. This is here. He didn’t outlive the world somewhere far away and then arrive in Black Harbor. He stayed.

He stayed on that hill while generations of people were born and married and fought about church suppers and planted lilac bushes and died. Every few decades, one man disappeared and another arrived. A Volkov became a Thorne. A Thorne became someone else. A new owner came up the road to Blackthorn House carrying a different name and the same face.

Maybe there were funerals. Maybe there were letters from overseas announcing a death, followed years later by a nephew arriving to inherit. Maybe he simply went away long enough for memory to soften around the edges.

I don’t know. That’s the point. I know only what I asked.

But whatever the mechanics were, the result is sitting in three photographs. Julian has spent more than two centuries making a home he has to keep pretending he just walked into. And the whole time, he kept paying for the roof.