I couldn't make myself stay the whole week in Chancel Road. It wasn't how cold and distant Dad was when we were alone or the way Mom would be so calm and reassuring, more so than she had ever been.

It was the terrible silence of Chancel Road, the way everything looked at sunrise, like arthritic soldiers leaning against their posts. It was the creaking of the floorboards at night and the sound that the house made as it settled; a rasping, hollow sound that it let out in the middle of the night that made me shoot up from the bed, panting. It's odd, how I hadn't noticed these things before. Perhaps I hadn't wanted to.

Mom had been waiting for me in the study, chest-deep in books like always, leaning over a length of parchment where she was drawing her outline of the Helfwir lineages. It was going to be a big redwood tree, with great gnarled roots. She had given me the outline, may years ago, as she scribbled the details with coal on the great white canvass:

“The roots will be the First Helfwir.” Mom would explain, as she struggled with placing the rows on rows of names, lineages, sons and daughters. “They were the ones that sowed the seeds that led up to all of them, after all. Then all the way up to the branches, the earliest recorded ancestors. The big, gnarled branches that started it all. Some of them go all the way back to the Indus civilization, wouldn’t you know? On those branches, the stalks that didn’t quite make it; the Souks, who chose to stay Valley or the Torghud, who got themselves lost somewhere along the way after Genghis Khan died. A little bit higher, the branches of the surviving families, reaching all the way up. The Don, that’s us” Mom said, smiling. She didn’t have a drop of Helfwir blood in her but it wouldn't let it stop her. “Will be here, somewhere in the middle. After all, Ludd was a relatively recent family. We’ve only been around for two thousand years, while the Lovedu have existed for fifty centuries. First, Bryn the Mountain with his Rainbow Sword. Then Culhwch the Deathless and your great to the fourth power grandmother, Owain-who-wrestled-dragons. A little curve here, where the Dons left Wales to help the Jottundottir fight the army of Balor with the Freezing eye-that’s when Owain fell in love with him- then an offshoot right here; that was…Carolyn’s line.”

Mom would always pause at the mention of her name. Carolyn had been Dad’s last wife. She had been a Helfwir, same as he was and a daughter of the Jottuns, who where an offshoot of the family. I didn’t know much about her, except that she had given me a half-brother and a half-sister, but they had been ‘bad apples’. They’d left Chancel Road along with the rest.

“There’s going to be a branch for Lorelei, your half-sister and one for Bradley. He’s your half-brother. And right here, in a little perch all her own, we’re going to have…you.” She said and drew a tiny bird’s nest where she would set my name on.

Ten years later and Mom was still halfway up the tree, nesting names across the tree branches, laying them across the leaf mesh, struggling with the overbearing presence of wizened grandfathers and battle-hardened grandmothers. I coughed to clear my throat, my eyes fixed on her head as she leaned down over the canvass. Time to pay the piper, I told myself.

“Mom, I…” I began.

“I know. Your father told me.” Mom said, not looking up from her work. I braced for a rant that wouldn’t come.

“And you’re okay with it?”

“No. I am mad as hell with your father and I think that you’re being crazy. If you had been just any old fourteen-year-old girl, I’d have called what you are doing stubborn and small-minded and I’d tell you that you are going through a silly little phase where you think you’re smarter than the whole wide world. I’d have chewed your father out, made him not do this stupid ceremony and then put your sorry behind to work until it was raw, just like my momma used to do when I was a know-it-all little girl that just wouldn’t see how foolish I was being.” Mom said and turned around. Her green eyes were glistening with tears that streamed down her coffee-colored cheeks. “But you’re my daughter and I know that you are smart enough and hard enough to do it and that your world shouldn’t be just a damn dirt road and a stuffy old house that you could get bored in between running around across the world trying to get yourself killed by something that’s clawed its way out from the grave.”

I struggled with the words, mumbled for a good minute, before finally muttering:

“Thanks, Mom.”

We didn’t hug and Mom didn’t ruffle my hair. She only gave me one of her I-love-you smiles and I left her to her work.

I spent the next three days in a haze; between packing and unpacking my suitcase-constantly second-guessing myself every step of the way- sleeping late at night only to shoot out of the bed early in the morning and pace around the house struggling with the idea that not only was I going to leave Chancel Road, I was doing it with Mom’s and (to some extent) Dad’s blessing. That I was going to be alone and responsible for every single thing that I did. That wherever I went, I would stay someplace where the view outside the window was always the same. Someplace that was boring and normal and so much bigger than a dozen haunted houses laid out across a single stretch of dirt road.

Some place where I wouldn’t know anyone and no one would know who I was.

This part had been the scariest. I couldn’t admit it, of course. After all, I had never really been alone up to now. Or met anyone who wasn’t a screaming hostage, imploring us to ‘just kill it, whatever it was’ because it was tearing up the town or turning people inside out or dragging their children into the dark places under their beds. I wouldn’t do that; Dad had had given me a year and a day to do what I had asked for: a normal life that I wouldn’t spend chasing creepy-crawlies for a living. I had learned that nowhere was truly safe, but there were places where the creepy-crawlies hadn’t reached yet.

That was what got me to tiptoe my way into the library at 3 in the morning on the fourth day, with the house illuminated by the Singapore dawn. Chancel Road had stopped for a breather in a tiny island set between Semakau and Bukom in the South China Sea. The light seeping in through the windows was so crisp and clear that I didn’t even have to squint to look at the library’s extensive map, the one that Dad and the other Helfwir had filled with their own patterns and designs, showing monster activity all over the world. It was divided like a time-zone map, except each column had been color-coded and then broken down into boxes. The columns showed the general distribution of creepy-crawlies across the world. Red stood for high concentration. These were places like Russia and Africa or Australia and certain parts of China and Japan. Blue was for circumstantial population, places where the creepy-crawlies had mostly ended up after following human migratory patterns or where they had been hunted down into manageable numbers. England, some of the northernmost populated countries, most of India and America were blue. Yellow striped with black stood for unstable population, where the creepy-crawlies could increase or decrease at random. That was Germany, most of Southern Europe, Turkey and South America. Pink boxes meant constantly low population, places where the creepy-crawlies never really had a hold on or didn’t bother humans, choosing to stay well away from them. Most of the South Pacific and South America were like that. Except that it wouldn’t do at all. No place in the world was ever really monster-free, but if you really looked at the map and took the time to search every inch of it, soon enough you would find some tiny box or another that was just speckled with tiny black dots. Those stood for very small, almost negligible instances of creepy-crawlies having ever occurred, maybe once or twice every decade. Most of them were small fishing villages or mountain towns. But there was one place where-strangely enough-had absolutely no dots and was not included in any colored box.

It was a little town in America, set between a craggy mountain range and a big lake, just three days’ drive from the ocean. It was called Orsonville and according to the Helfwir world map, it was the safest place on Earth.

Orsonville it is, I thought. A place where I could hang my silver-edged hatchets and forget about checking if I’d packed mandrake root extract in the morning. Where I wouldn’t have to walk around with armor under my clothes and where I could be…normal? No, that wasn’t the word I was looking for. Relaxed wasn’t it either. Myself seemed to fit best. I decided to think about it later, as I went back to my room and made sure to leave my assortment of bladed instruments, multi-purpose mallets and my set of alchemical concoctions behind.

***

Dad only spoke to me once, on the day before I left. Mom was in her study and I had climber up to the chapel’s belltower, to look at the slideshow of landscapes that was the world beyond Chancel Road. It had been especially frisky that day, seemed as if it had taken us around the globe already. I was looking out at a stretch of Vietnamese jungle, when I caught the faintest sound of Dad stopping a few paces behind me.

“Hey, Dad.”

“Your mother told me you’d decided on a place to go?” Dad said, feigning indifference.

“Yeah.” I said, turning to look at him just as we began shifting again. “Took me a few days, but I found it. Nice little town, nothing too big for my first time out alone.”

“That’s good.” Dad said and he was silent for a while. “But if it turns out to be too much, you can…”

“Dad, no.”

“…always come back to Chancel Road. Your Mother…”

“Dad. Stop it.”

“I just want you to know that I spoke with your Mother and we decided that if you ever want to come back…”

“I’m not coming back, Dad. Not for a while.”

“That doesn’t mean that I can't care for my daughter.” Dad said in a tone I hadn’t heard before, one that I couldn’t put down. It wasn’t sad and it lacked the dramatic tenor he’d usually use when he would blurt out something like that. He sounded…proud.

“I know, Dad.” I couldn't help but smile.

“Your Mother and I discussed that we will give you some money, to help you start your life when you leave here. I also have the armory key with me. We can go now and you can take whatever hunting gear you think you’ll need from there.”

“I won’t need those, Dad. Not where I’m going. But thanks, anyway. I know it means a lot to you, letting me into the armory. You’ve never done this before.”

“I was going to let you in on your 18th birthday. Just in time for your anointment.” Dad said and I put my arms around him and I squeezed against the muscle and the criss-cross of scars under his clothes. Dad tensed up at first, but he reached down and stroked my hair after a couple of moments. “I guess I haven’t been a very good father.”

“Don’t be so hard on yourself Dad. Maybe you just didn’t have any Helfwir material to work with.” I said and then blurted out, without really thinking “I guess Lorelei and Brad were better at…”

“Don’t you say that.” Dad told me, looking me in the eye. “Don’t you ever dare think that they were better than you.”

We stayed like that for a while, watching the world spin around Chancel Road until the sun set over Ayres Rock before finally heading home.

***

Dad kept up the act of being distant until the very last minute. Mom was the only one who escorted me as I made my way to the northernmost edge of Chancel Road, my suitcase in hand.

“Now you remembered to pack your toothbrush?”

“Uh-huh.”

“The money’s in your jacket pocket just under…”

“I know, Mom.”

“If there’s anything you need, you know how to reach us? All you have to do is find an old unused telephone and...”

“Mom, it’s okay. I know.”

“I know you know, I am just saying that...oh, come here!” Mom said and she held me tighter than she ever had before there at the edge of the world. “You’ll be safe. You’ll be okay.” Mom reassured herself.

“I will. Promise.” I said.

Stomping my foot twice on the ground, I told Chancel Road “Orsonville, America.” And the world around us spun faster, became a blur that shifted from day to night to day again, before finally settling into the blurred image of a mountain range that came into view, with a lake to the East. Roads sprang out from the haze and houses along the length of them, sporting lawns and elm trees and backyard see-saws. A sign sprang into existence, its lettering faded:

ORSONVILLE

Population: 70,000

I stepped outside the edges of Chancel Road, without really thinking. Mom bit her lip and forced a smile.

“I love you, sweetheart.” She said, just as Chancel Road was swallowed up in a haze, spun like a top and then was finally gone.

“I love you too.” I said, just as she faded away. I hope it reached her. Checking the road around me, I noticed the sign that had been nailed a ways down the sloping curve that led into Orsonville. It read: ELLISSON ROAD.

It was early morning and the sun was just peeking over the peak of the Edgarhorn, dispelling the dew. Just over the ridge, the rows of tiny houses beckoned.

I set out into Orsonville, about to start my new life as anything other than a monster-hunter, in a place I’d thought was free of any and all sorts of creepy-crawlies and where nothing would ever go bump in the night.

I couldn’t have been more wrong.