Cozy Fantasy Series, Story #6 - The quiet Arrival of Caelen

The Quiet Arrival of Caelan, and the Considerably Less Quiet Departure of Garrett Hole

This week in Millhaven -

A vampire arrives, a bad man leaves and the baker's daughter is found.

 

There are two kinds of people who come to a town and don't quite belong to it. 

The first kind doesn't belong yet. They're new and they do things differently from the way the locals do. Belonging is a matter of time and effort and showing up enough times so people stop noticing you're different. Most people are this kind. Most people, given enough Tuesdays, eventually belong. 

Garrett Hole was this sort of different. Or so everyone thought. He had come to town eleven years ago, bought a piece of land on the edge of town and settled down to become one with the small-town people around him. 

For the most part, he did. Even so, after eleven years most people still thought of him as a visitor. 

He was a merchant, trading in the things that move between farms and town and back again. Grain futures. Livestock agreements. The lending of equipment at rates that were not exactly unreasonable, but neither the farms nor the town felt they were getting the best of the deal. He was the kind of man who you didn’t dislike exactly, but there was something about the words and phrases he uses that just rubbed people the wrong way. Most people were relieved when he left wherever they were at the time, or they found an excuse to leave themselves.

 

The second kind of person doesn’t belong and never will. This is not because they want it that way, but because they are too different to ever be one with the people around them. 

Caelan was the second kind, or so he thought. He didn’t give people the chance to decide what kind of different he was. He had come to the realization an extraordinarily long time ago that he would never find people who would accept him for who he was and so he didn’t give them a chance to rebuff him. He was no longer lonely, or so he told himself. 

However, because of who and what Caelan was, magic attracted him. He came to Millhaven because, once the magic came back, he started to feel someone who was using a particular piece of magic. Using it badly. 

It turns out the nature of the problem in Millhaven was so great, Caelan would need a partner, but even he, with his long life of experiences, would never guess who that partner would turn out to be. 

 

Caelan arrived on a night in late summer. The sky was slowly turning the deep blue that happens just before true dark, and nobody saw him arrive because he was, by long habit and considerable preference, particularly good at going unseen. 

The innkeeper at the Crossed Stirrup didn’t ask why his new guest arrived so late, looking so fresh. Most people who arrived at that time of day had been riding for a full day and were dusty and tired. Caelan wasn’t either. The innkeeper didn’t ask why Caelan paid a month in advance. He opened his mouth to argue that Caelan didn’t need to pay in advance, and then he closed his mouth again. 

The innkeeper decided that some people were simply different and he was not going to argue about money. 

Caelan kept his curtains closed and his hours unusual and his manner, on the rare occasions when someone encountered him, formal but distant. He did not foster friendliness. He dressed well and simply. He had, the baker's wife noted to the baker, incredibly good posture, which she felt was increasingly rare and deserved acknowledgment. 

He had a face that was difficult to age. Old eyes in an unlined face, which was unsettling if you looked at him directly and easy to overlook if you didn't. Most people didn’t. Professor Mole was one of the few who did. There was something in the way Caelan held himself, refused to shake hands and went around with a book held between his hands that gave the professor his first hint. 

A look in his eyes gave the professor the full answer. 

Caelan did not eat at the inn, which the innkeeper noted, but refused to speculate on. He had decided on a new policy of not questioning his guests’ habits.

 Professor Mole, whose policy about asking questions was the precise opposite of the innkeeper's, noticed Caelan on his third day in town. He spent the following two weeks constructing, in a notebook purchased for that purpose, what he believed to be careful analysis of the facts. He concluded that was, for only the second time in his life, completely incorrect. 

Caelan was clearly not ordinary. Anyone could see that. After a few days of study, watching his movements, seeing that he only went out at night, he didn’t eat at the inn, Professor Mole knew beyond any doubt that Caelan was a vampire. 

The professor was correct in this deduction. 

Based on this knowledge, the professor came to another conclusion: that Caelan was responsible for the wrongness that had been spreading through the south end of town like a slow stain. Caelan arrived at the same time the professor became aware of the wrongness. Ipso facto, the two were related. 

Professor Mole underlined this conclusion three times. He added an exclamation mark. He sat back, sure of his knowledge, as he always was.

 In this he was magnificently and completely wrong. 

---

 The wrongness had been building for longer than Caelan had been in town, which was information the professor could have found if he had chosen to investigate. He didn’t. He heard the rumours, second hand and twisted, the way words become twisted in a game of telephone.

 It started small. Perwick's north field, which had always been his best, produced half the normal yield. He couldn’t quite account for why, but he told anyone who would listen that he was sure it had to do with ‘all the damn strangeness that’s been going on recently’. 

He was one of the few in town who didn’t see the wonder in a dragon and a mermaid and the return of magic. Perwick was a curmudgeon. 

Then the well on Cooper Street ran brackish for a week. The residents were muttering to themselves and threatening to go to the mayor to have it investigated when it just cleared up again. The baker’s wife was the one who mentioned it to the professor. She’d heard it from her sister’s neighbour’s babysitter.

 The baker’s wife got the dates wrong, which is where half of the professor’s guess went wrong. 

Lastly, there was a general malaise among the livestock in the south yards. It wasn’t anything specific, but the animals didn’t come running at feed time, which they usually did. Tam, who often swung by the south yards on his way through town, noticed the animals were quieter than usual. He put it down to the heat of the summer. He, too, was wrong. 

Caelan had been watching Garrett Hole for two weeks before Professor Mole approached him. 

Caelan had seen a malaise of this sort before the sorcerers’ war sucked the magic out of the world, which you’ll remember was a thousand years ago. Plus, a few weeks. Even for a vampire that was a long time. He felt the wrongness in the air, but it took passing Garret Hole on the street and smelling the wrongness emanating from him before Caelan determined that Garret Hole was responsible.

 He came because the magic drew him. He stayed because someone needed to do something and he was that someone. 

Then, the baker’s daughter, Ginette, went missing. She was beautiful, but a trifle too trusting, having grown up in the tiny hamlet. In other towns, they might have attributed the young woman’s disappearance to a boy or some other distraction. Not in Millhaven. It wasn’t large enough to hide her. So, the outcry when she wasn’t in her bed one morning reached the Crossed Stirrup, Caelan, and the professor at the same time. 

Caelan didn’t know what exactly he was going to do about the situation, but he expected he was the only one who could do anything. 

He did not expect a short, bespeckled man to accost him.

 ---

 Professor Mole knocked on his door that afternoon, just hours after Ginette’s disappearance. It had taken him that long to pluck up the nerve. Caelan opened the door having heard the professor coming long before he arrived at the door. 

Caelan remembered the professor from the first time they met. The professor still had the same knowing glint in his eye, only now it had hardened into something slightly dangerous. He only carried one notebook, compared to the three he often had spread out around him at his table in the corner of the main room where Caelan had seen him each night when Caelan went out. The professors’ glasses had slid to the end of his nose, and he hadn’t pushed them back up. He pressed his lips into a hard line, which was not typical for him. 

He clearly had something on his mind. 

Caelan invited Professor Mole into his room. The professor hesitated. 

“I won’t bite,” Caelan promised. 

The professor blanched but then sidled past Caelan. He stood looking around the room and turning his notebook repeatedly in his hands.

 “Please sit,” Caelan said, gesturing to the chair.  

The professor sat. He opened his notebook. He scanned the pages. Then he jumped up, as if something had bitten him.

 “No,” he said. “I can’t. I won’t.” He stood still for a moment and then, with purpose, looked Caelan directly in the eyes. “What have you done with Ginette?” His eyes darted away, landing on the door to the closet and then on the bed, the only two places to hide something in the small room. 

Caelan was not exactly surprised at the professor’s deduction. People had accused of worse things than kidnapping young women. In fact, at one time Caelan had been responsible for worse things. However, it usually took people longer to determine what Caelan was and to concluded like this. 

Before Caelan could answer, the professor continued. “I have been documenting the incidents of magical interference. The problems in the south end began shortly after you arrived.” He looked Caelan in the eye again. “I know what you are.” 

Caelan was surprised at the backbone the small professor was displaying. He usually saw such displays from much larger and louder men.

 Caelan squared his shoulders. "The incidents began in April," Caelan said. "I arrived in August."

 A brief silence. 

“Well,” Professor Mole said, trying to come to terms with this latest information. “There was an intensification on the fifteenth, the day after you arrived –" 

“Which as unrelated to my arrival," Caelan interjected. "It was related to the new moon, which affects corrupted workings and corrupted people in the same way, which is to say it twists them. Now,” Caelan sat on the edge of the bed. “Please sit. We have much to discuss.”

 Professor Mole, sat, suddenly and without looking behind him. Caelan darted up, grabbed the chair, positioned it behind the professor so he wouldn’t land in a heap on the floor, and returned to the bed in a blur of motion the professor barely saw.

 "Tell me what you've found,” Caelan said.

 The professor gaped at him for a moment and then swallowed, blinked, and opened his notebook.

 Two hours later, Caelan and the professor had decided on a plan. It had taken some time for Caelan to convince Professor Mole that Garret Hole was the perpetrator. However, the professor had written about Hole without realizing it and so he was, eventually, convinced.

Then, they had to wait for dark.

 

“You know, this isn’t how these things are supposed to go. Strictly speaking,” Professor Mole said as they made their way toward Garrett Hole’s home on the edge of town. 

“Oh?” 

“No. We’re supposed to gather evidence and present it to the constable, who would normally take the appropriate action through the appropriate channels in the appropriate order. That is how civilized towns deal with civilized problems.” 

Caelan stopped and turned to the professor. “One, this is not a civilized problem. Two, you know full well Millhaven’s constable is an idiot. And three, if we wait for the appropriate channels, Ginette won’t be alive when we get there.” 

The professor blanched. “Noted,” he said. He closed his mouth on anything else he would add. He realized now was not the time. 

Caelan, too, kept his thoughts on the absurdity of joining forces with elderly, slightly overweight professor to himself.

---

 Garrett Hole's operation was in the cellar of his property on the Alderton Road, which explained the soil damage on the farms nearby and the quality of the water in the wells within half a mile. It was not large. It was not sophisticated. It was the working of a man who had found fragments of something old and powerful and had constructed from those fragments something that almost worked, in the way that a collection of door parts almost makes a door. 

The almost was the problem. The almost was what was bleeding into the ground and the water and making the animals slow and quiet.

 When Caelan and the professor arrived in sight of Garret Hole’s operation, there was a brief argument. Both men wanted to be the one to confront Garret. 

“You should go around to the back. He will have her hidden in the back room. You can sneak in while I keep him busy at the front.” 

“I am not the sneaking sort,” Professor Mole replied. “You should be the one to go in the back. He will have the door locked. You are strong enough to break in if necessary.” 

Caelan produced a key. “I swiped it off him.” 

Professor Mole stuttered.

 Caelan didn’t let him speak. “Will you be able to catch him if he runs? Will you be able to fight him off if he attacks you?” He stared at the professor. “No, you will not. Go around back. Wait for my signal.”

 “What’s your signal?” Mole asked with a sigh.

 “I’ll yell at you,” Caelan replied.

 Hole, surprisingly, answered the door on the first knock. He looked at Caelan and went pale, which was understandable. Caelan had put on his game face, and it wasn’t something Garret had seen before.

 “You and I need to talk,” Caelan said.

 Garret didn’t try to run. Instead, he pushed his fingers through his hair, which stood up in all directions. He dragged his hands down his cheeks, stretching the bags under his eyes.

 "I'm not finished," Hole said. There was a plaintive note to his voice. "I just need more time.”

 Caelan grabbed Hole by the back of the neck. “Take me to her.”

 Hole’s shoulders slumped. He led the way to the cellar stairs. Holding firmly to Hole, Caelan opened the back door, revealing the professor who was looking towards the front of the building and who jumped when the door opened, raising his book as if to ward off an attacker.

 “Come in,” Caelan said.

 

I won’t describe what the men found in Hole’s cellar. It was not simply wrong, but evil. I will say that they got there before anything too terrible happened to Ginette, although the experience would take some time to get over and she would never be as trusting as she had been before Garret Hole.

 For once, the professor and Caelan were on the same page when it came to deciding what to do with Hole. Caelan stayed with Hole while the professor returned Ginette to her family. He then returned with the constable.

 The Constable blanched at the sight of Hole’s cellar. For once, the constable wasn’t a complete idiot. He strongarmed Hole to the tiny police station, stuffed him in the town’s one and only cell and didn’t let anyone near him until the deputies arrived to cart him off to the city. The professor had thoroughly documented the contents of the cellar. His books went with the deputies.

 No one ever heard of Hole after that.

---

Caelan prepared to leave town on the Saturday after they carted Hole off. It took that long to verify the soil and the water, and the animals were all on the mend now that Hole was gone.

 The townsfolk felt like they had a bad taste in their mouths. They would be more careful of the people they allowed to stay in the future.

 Starting with Caelan.

 He was heading out of town when he passed by Sorrel’s plant stand. The sun had set, but night had not yet fully settled on the land. Sorrel saw Caelan’s eyes shine in the dark as he caught sight of the plant she had set out specifically for him.

 “I’ve been waiting for you to come,” she said.

 Caelan approached the stand. The leaves were the black of the midnight hours of a moonless night, and the flower was the deep red of old blood. Caelan had seen much in his long, long life, but this was something new. Something that called to him on a level that he couldn’t explain.

 Before he could pick up the plant, there was a sound behind him. He turned to find a sizable portion of the town gathered behind the constable, who stood with his feet apart and his hands on his hips.

 “Where do you think you’re going?” he asked, in his loud voice.

 Caelan was fast and strong, but he wasn’t up for fighting off a crowd. “I’m leaving,” he replied quietly.

 “Oh, no you’re not,” the constable replied.

 Sorrel came around the table and handed the plant to Caelan. “Please stay,” she said.

 Caelan looked from Sorrel to the Constable to the crowd. They were all smiling.

 It turns out, Caelan was the first kind of different after all.

 ---

 Professor Mole sat in the corner of the Crossed Stirrup that evening with his notebooks and his flat beer, trying in his way to come to terms with the experience with Hole. The professor had volunteered to document the cellar so no one else would need to and it would take some time for the images from that place to stop popping into his mind at random moments. It had been hard to give up the notebooks to the deputies until Caelan had asked what else he thought he was going to do with them.

 Finally, Professor Mole turned to the page with Caelan's name on it. As he sipped his flat beer, he read the entries. He crossed out three lines. Added two. Sat for a long time looking at what remained.

 He smiled. He knew Caelan would be happy in Millhaven.

 He turned to the page with Tam's name on it, which had more on it now than when he'd started it, and read it through from the beginning, and added a line at the bottom that he underlined once and then, after a moment, underlined again.

 He closed the notebook.

 Outside, in the stable yard, a boy with hay on his boots was finishing the evening feed, and the horses were quiet, and the magic moved through the night in the channels that were meant for it, and everything was, for now, more or less as it should be.

 More or less.