“Well, what is it?” Charlotte snapped. “Tell me what's going on with him!” Then, even as dazed and exhausted as she was, Charlotte immediately realized how she had just sounded. “I'm sorry,” she said in reflex. “Please, I'm–”

Father Po’ke pulled her into an enormous hug. “Don't worry,” he said. “Everything will be fine now, Chala. You did the right thing coming here. Don't worry your little self about any of it.”

This took Charlotte completely by surprise. Po'ke sounded like he was trying to calm a terrified wild animal. Whenever Charlotte ran into trouble, she always tried to force herself to be calm and to approach things rationally. It was the way Grandfather had taught her, the way he said Memories kept control of their emotions, their greatest weapon against vampires.

Po'ke seemed to take the opposite approach. He rubbed a broad hand against her upper back as though he held a crying baby over his shoulder. He murmured and held her close as though it was the closeness and comfort that mattered, rather than the words themselves.

Then Charlotte could not help herself. She returned the embrace and began to wail, her face buried in Po’ke’s chest. She let out the whole story from the moment of her waking to her arrival again, talking in circles and repeating herself and, in other words, letting out all her pent-up fear and anguish.

This was nothing like her controlled sobbing from earlier when she had tried to hide from the destruction and the wretched persona that seemed to have overtaken Grandfather. That had been Charlotte trying to be the adult she needed to prove every day to Grandfather that she truly was, the one who could not submit or give into anything for fear of being crushed under the weight of the world.

For the first time in years, Charlotte felt like a child. It was the first time she had been allowed to be one in longer than she could remember, no matter that anyone else who looked at her would consider her an adult.

An immeasurable amount of time passed before Charlotte pulled away, feeling puffy and swollen, embarrassed to realize that snot and tears covered both her face and Father Po’ke’s chest.

Never one for ceremony, the man absently wiped away the mess with a bare hand and then rubbed it on his trousers. “Do you feel better now?” he asked.

Charlotte nodded, not trusting that she could speak without bursting into tears again. She felt shaken, but there was a sense of firmness and rightness in the core of her being now. It felt as though something that had remained fragile within her for a long time had shattered to reveal its true form underneath, one that didn't need to be tiptoed around for fear of breaking, something she could lean on in times as hard as these.

Mother Ke’a reappeared in the doorway, this time fully dressed for travel. She had a woven basket under one arm and a set of surgical tools hanging from her hip. She gave an impatient look to her husband.

“Go on, get ready!” she said, and then turned to Charlotte as Po'ke disappeared. “And he's always complaining that it takes me forever to get things done,” she said with what was clearly a forced laugh.

Charlotte noticed that the woman clenched one fist so tightly that it shook.

“Come on,” said Ke'a. She crunched over the thin, hard snow as she led the way to the next house over.

“I don't understand,” said Charlotte. “What are you–”

“We’ll need help,” said Ke’a. We'll need to subdue Mika while keeping him and ourselves as safe as possible. There is an old proverb of my people back home. A child can hunt a deer, but only strong, young men can take a horse alive. Well, we're here for the strong, young men.” Then Ke’a simply opened the door to her neighbor’s house.

Their tribe didn’t much believe in privacy. They found it amusing that Charlotte always knocked before entering a house, and told her it was perfectly all right to come in as she wanted. The idea had always embarrassed Charlotte far too much for her to accept their invitations.

Yet, tonight that lack of privacy seemed effective. Ke'a walked directly into the house while Charlotte stood in the doorway, hugging herself. She listened as Ke’a stomped about and yelled to the inhabitants of the house. “Copoco, Mi’goa, wake up and get dressed! You're needed to subdue a madman.”

She turned back to Charlotte. “They're probably the most sober boys we'll find tonight. I think that's for the best.”

Charlotte nodded as two boys in their late teens rose amid scattered sleeping rolls on the floor of the house. They conversed with Ke’a as the older inhabitants, their parents, disinterestedly covered their heads with pillows and tried to go back to sleep.

Shortly the boys had dressed and armed themselves with clubs, which terrified Charlotte, but when she tried to protest, Ke’a cut her off sharply and said, “This is beyond you, Challa. I'm so sorry, but it's only by the grace of the spirits that you made it out alive. If you would’ve thought better of giving him that second dose of medicine, he might have broken out of that rope before your eyes and killed you.”

Charlotte remembered how weak Grandfather had been, how she'd been able to wrestle him to the ground and how he'd been unable to fight against it. She began to doubt that Ke’a and Po'ke knew what they were talking about, but she also knew that the situation had moved far outside of her control. All she could do now was witness the events she had set in motion and pray they did not get worse. If the Rook Tribe chemists were wrong, there would surely be no harm done.

They regrouped at the gate which led to the shore outside the clustered buildings of the tribe. Po'ke himself did not carry any weapons, but several coils of rope, one around his waist and around each shoulder. He also carried a wooden box awkwardly between his hands, like a child being told to hold some fragile or valuable thing without hurting it.

Charlotte instinctively moved toward her skiff, but Ke'a put a hand on her shoulder and guided her toward the longboat which her husband used for deep-sea fishing.

“You're in no state to row back,” said Ke’a. “You’ll go along with us in the longboat.”

The craft had six seats, each of which had an or attached. The two neighbours sat at the bow, while the chemists sat behind Charlotte at the stern. Po'ke bellowed out a rowing song which boomed eerily through the night air like a drunken ghost, and at the command of four strong pairs of shoulders, excluding Charlotte, the craft knifed through the sea toward Lighthouse Island.

Within a quarter hour, the lighthouse came into view. The Moon stood out behind the tip of its spire like a mantle of lights oh, and Charlotte shivered. She had never seen it like this in all her years living on the island, for she had only on very rare occasions taken the skiff onto the water after sunset. Certainly, she had never done so during the full Moon.

Charlotte remembered what Grandfather had told her about the original purpose of the lighthouse, how a fire was supposed to be lit at the very top at night so ships could find their way home. She wondered if this was what it might have looked like to sailors on the ocean, had it ever actually been used for that purpose. It could very well be that the longboat’s crew and their solitary passenger were the first people ever to see the lighthouse as it had been originally intended to by an ancient king aping the technology of his oppressors.

They ran aground, and at Po’ke’s command, the boys disembarked and retrieved their clubs. They stood awkwardly to the side until they were joined by Charlotte and the chemists. They seemed uncomfortable. To the best of Charlotte's knowledge, the two of them had never set foot on Lighthouse Island before. They look up at the looming stone structure, clearly awed.

“We'll have to climb all that?” the shorter boy asked. “Is that why we have all the rope?”

Ke’a snorted. Her whole family had visited the island on numerous occasions. “It has stairs up inside it,” she said, “like the mainlanders have in their buildings with two floors. It spirals up. But we have no need to go up to the top.”

The boys seem relieved.

“Well,” said Po'ke, “show us where you left him, Challa.” His voice was grim.

Charlotte led them to the wooden door, which, though in its usual state of disrepair, was as closed as when she had left it.

Ke’a held up her lantern and shed its twitching illumination upon the door, for they stood now in the shadow of the tower, seeing as how the Moon was almost directly opposite them. Within this flickering light, Charlotte creaked open the door and let out an involuntary murmur of shock at the sight which met her eyes.

Charlotte felt herself shoved to the side as Po'ke stepped urgently into the room, putting himself between Charlotte and whatever lay inside.

“All you spirits,” he muttered, “watch us, don't stop watching us, keep knives out of our backs and keep monsters out of the sky, don't stop watching us, all you spirits.”

It was a prayer. It was one always spoken reverently, or in a state of mortal fear.

In a moment, Po’ke nodded. “I don't think he’s right here. Come on in.”

Charlotte began to move, but Ke’a grabbed her arm. “Not you,” she murmured. “Not just yet.”

The boys filed in, clutching their clubs as a child might clutch a favorite blanket. They looked around in awe before disappearing around either side of the door frame.

Then Ke’a let go of Charlotte's arm and allowed her to step in, following directly behind her.

Charlotte fixed her gaze again on the unbelievable sight. Four of the flagstones which comprised the floor were revealed not in fact to be flagstones at all, but a composite carving which served as the face to a cube of stone four feet on every edge. This cube had been ripped out of the ground and slammed down onto the floor, seeming to have caused great cracks to spiderweb out from the point of impact.

A square hole in the floor, four on each side just as the stone plugging it had been, dropped into utter darkness below. Deep grooves like the scrapes of a pickaxe scored the ground around this whole, as though someone had used tremendous iron tongs to dig around the edges of the false flagstones and to rip them up.

Charlotte stepped away, bumping up against the door frame.

One of the boys looked up the spiral staircase that led to the upper floors. “I don't see any light up there,” he said.

Indeed, the only light among them was the lantern which Ke’a carried.

“Don't look for light as a sign,” Po'ke growled. “He doesn't need light anymore.”

All this time there had been another level beneath the lighthouse, one Grandfather had known about and had never spoken of. How many other things had he hidden from Charlotte? Was this just another way that he treated her like a stupid child?

She turned in rising fury to the Rook Tribe chemist. “You know what all this is! He told you, and he never told me! Well, I'm here now and it can't be hidden anymore. What exactly is going on?”

“No,” said Ke’a flatly. “I have no idea what’s going on. None of this should have happened.”

“What do you mean ‘should have?’”

Ke’a held Charlotte's gaze coolly. “The medicine was supposed to prevent this. Your grandfather isn't the first person to come to us with either of his conditions. The medicine we gave him has been successful at slowing cancer in other patients who overused the relics, and we added to it an agent which can reverse the onset of the effects of ghoul serum.”

Charlotte started. “Ghoul serum?” The substance vampires used to turn humans into ghouls. Grandfather had told her about this, along with the scenario which she now realized must be taking place. “He’s mutating,” she whispered. When someone with the relic cancer would be turned into a ghoul, they instead mutated in a different way. They become something else. Not human, not vampire, not ghoul.

“So we have been told,” said Po'ke. He stood at the edge of the hole, looking downward. He clutched the box in his hands with white knuckles. “What else did your grandfather tell you about mutants?”

“Nothing, except that they can gain their sanity again, unlike ghouls, and the ones that do live in a valley somewhere.”

Po'ke sighed. “They can regain their sanity? That's what he told you? He told us something a little different. It's more like brainwashing. It's more like breaking a horse. Only those with strong, young minds survive.”

The implication was clear. That would be impossible for Grandfather.

“Why didn't the medicine work?” Charlotte whispered.

“We don't know,” said Ke’a, stepping between Charlotte and her husband, glaring at him as though commanding him to stop filling Charlotte’s head with despair. “But it won't serve us to ask those questions now. What we need at this time is to contain him.”

“What, you're going to jump down there?” Charlotte asked.

The boys, who had been listening this whole time, looked nervously between each other at this.

Po’ke let out what sounded like a genuine laugh, one without nerves or forced levity. “No, I might be dog-tired and had a bit too much to drink yesterday, but I'm not that slow. If he's down there, he’ll have to come out at some point. We'll just wait here.”

That assumed there were no other ways out. Charlotte hadn't even known of this way in, so could it be that there were other ways he could escape and perhaps sneak up on them?

There was a long moment of silence before Ke’a glanced over to Charlotte again. “You really don't know what's down there?”

Charlotte shook her head.

“I see.” Ke’a surveyed the destruction all around. “I don't entirely understand all of this,” the woman said gently. “The mutation process in every other story I've heard has been nearly instantaneous. It always occurs when a Memory who is already suffering the effects of the early stages of cancer is bitten and injected with the ghoul serum. The transformation always completes within twenty-four hours.”

“So you're saying he was bitten yesterday, perhaps when I was visiting all of you?”

Ke’a shook her head. “Focus, Challa. We have been giving him both medicines since you were a little girl. He was bitten a long time ago. My older sister was a Memory. Still is, perhaps. I haven't heard from her in years, but have never been sent word of her death. In any event, she had been working on an experimental form of the compound which we gave to your grandfather.

“It was given to every Memory who, at that time, was suffering the effects of that generation of relic. Those ones caused cancer more aggressively than the ones which they use now, as I understand it. My sister and others were experimenting to see if early compound treatment could prevent the onset of the transformation.

“It seemed to work for your grandfather. He lost his leg not too long after that, and it was determined that replacing it with a functional relic would be too much even for our medicine to stem, so he retired. My sister sent him to us with the recommendation that he live on our island, but he's always been such a crotchety old man that he would have none of it.”

Charlotte nodded slowly. “I feel there has to be more to it,” she said. “This lighthouse was here already. It's been here since ancient times. And so this pit thing in the ground must have been here also. Whatever reason the medicine stopped working now, it drove him into… wherever that leads.”

All of a sudden, a triumphant cackle echoed up to them from below, and Charlotte's blood ran cold.

It was her Grandfather's voice, to be certain. Yet it was filled with such a vile array of emotions as she had never known to burn within his heart.

Whatever that thing was, if it still wore his warped and mutated body, it was Grandfather no longer.