"You don't want to hear his offer?" I asked. I think that I already knew the answer to that one.
"Let me guess. Let me go. I promise to be good. No more demon summoning. Blah, blah, blah. I'll tell you what you need to know." She let the tape measure snap closed in her hand and dropped it into a pocket.
"Pretty much. But he did say that the Cursed One is going to strike on the full moon. That gives us just three days."
"Not much time. Figures. Bad stuff always goes down on the full moon. How did this get here?" She bent down to pick up a belt sander that was lying on the floor. Grunting in sudden pain, she paused, and slowly stood back up. "Forgot. Big hole in my shoulder. Would you grab that for me? I need to put it away."
I picked up the sander. "You should take it easy."
She shook her head. "I can't. I'm a little tense. My insane dad is upstairs, in the home that I grew up in. It's just a bit awkward is all… I like working on the house. It keeps my mind off of things, you know?" I nodded. "It helps me to keep busy. I feel better when I'm improving something."
The whole mansion was torn apart. Every room that I had been in so far had some project begun in it, but very few had been finished. Apparently Julie had a lot of things that she did not want to dwell on.
"You seem to be pretty good at it," I said. That was true enough. The work that was finished appeared to be meticulous and professional. Which was not really a surprise considering what I knew about Julie Shackleford's nature.
"Thanks." She paused uncomfortably. "Enough about my dingbat father. I'm just glad he didn't stab you with his plastic fork."
"I did check the bathroom for guns before I let him go."
"Beat you to it." She reached into her back pocket and pulled out a.38 Detective Special. "Bathroom number three gun. I've got them stashed all over."
"You really are my kind of girl."
She smiled. "Thanks. Most regular people think I'm insane."
"Screw regular people. They suck." It was good to hear her laugh again. "Since you're too injured to lay floor, how about a tour of the Heart of Dixie Historical Preservation Society headquarters?"
"That I can do. And by the way, I never said thanks for saving my life from that gargoyle. That was a little too close." She absently touched the bandage on the side of her head.
"No big deal. That was some pretty good driving."
"If that jackass in the truck would have just let us pass, I could have lost them."
"Jerk," I agreed.
"Tour?" she asked.
"Gladly."
Chapter 18
The Shackleford ancestral home was an imposing structure. Once one of the finest of the great antebellum homes of the Old South, it was the crown jewel of a once-massive plantation. Ages ago it had been the center of thousands of acres of timber and farming cut out of the woods of Alabama. The original builder's heirs had sold the home and the property to the first Raymond Shackleford nearly a hundred years before.
"You can see out this window where the slave quarters used to be, the kind of empty spot right there. You can still make out the foundations. They were pretty rickety and busted up by the time I was a kid." Julie pointed out the back windows off of the main corridor. "I burned them down when I was twelve."
"Why? Some sort of protest against the injustice? A young girl trying to right the wrongs of the past?" I asked.
"Nothing so noble. Me and my brothers were learning how to make homemade napalm. Styrofoam packing peanuts dissolved into a bottle of gasoline. They make the best Molotov cocktails. I let one of mine get away from me. I'm just lucky that it didn't spread and burn the house down… Those were the days."
"I can understand. I did something similar once when I was a kid. My brother and I built a pipe bomb. Big thing. We smuggled powder out of my father's reloading room for almost a year so he wouldn't notice. Mixed it with a whole bunch of other ingredients. Detonated it in the backyard when my folks weren't home. It was a little bit bigger boom than expected though, dug a four-foot trench in the yard, cut the gas main and forced the neighborhood to evacuate."
"No wonder the ATF has your name on file," she said. "I wonder if all future Monster Hunters blow stuff up as kids?"
"Probably. The ones that live that long at least." I shrugged. "Hey, I was an upstanding citizen until I met you guys."
"I bet… Anyway, I was sad when the old slave quarters burned down. I was just a little girl. I hadn't really understood what they stood for. I mean, I knew what they were, but not why they were important."
"Lot of history in the South," I stated.
"Don't go getting high and mighty because of slavery. You grew up out West, you have no clue about the South. My family might own this house, but that doesn't mean that we approve of the kinds of things that happened here. I had ancestors who fought for the Confederacy, but I would be real surprised if any of them had two nickels to rub together, let alone owned a slave. People think that the South is racist, and it was, and some parts still are, but for the most part, we've dealt with our history. The biggest racists I've ever met aren't here, they're in politics, and they are smug bastards. They're the ones that are quick to play the race card, the ones that pimp poverty. Those are the real bigots."
"Touchy subject."
"I guess. But Bubba Shackleford employed black Hunters in his very first group of Professional Monster Killers. Remember 'Flexible Minds.' He made that little credo up. That's not just about the unnatural, it's about how you look at the world. He only cared if they could fight, and that they kept it together when strange stuff started. They were some pretty tough Hunters too. You don't want to know what happened to the Klan boys that messed with them."
"I can guess." I could only imagine that after dealing with werewolves and vampires, yokels hiding under white sheets were not that big of a deal.
"Rumor has it that a bunch of night riders ended up buried in the back forty. Great-great-grandpa never had much trouble from those folks after that." She changed the subject. "Let me show you the ballroom. This is probably my favorite room in the whole house." She pushed open some double doors and led the way into a huge space. The floor was vast and open, ornate antique chairs lined the walls, and an opulent crystal chandelier hung from the ceiling. Most of the walls were mirrored, with old-fashioned and slightly distorted glass. A large stage filled the back corner of the room, complete with carved pillars capped in brass. Staircases spiraled around and upward to the second floor, perfect for the Southern belles of old to descend for their grand entrances.
I walked into the room. My boots echoed on the worn smooth wood, stirring up small clouds of dust. I could imagine the parties of bejeweled women and men in Confederate gray, royalty of a forgotten time and kingdom. "Impressive."
"I haven't done any work in here. I don't really want to. I'm just going to leave this one alone. We never used this room growing up. If this old place has a soul, it would be in this room. So I leave it closed." I watched her reflection in one of the many mirrors. She awkwardly placed her hands into the pockets of her jeans. "I know it sounds silly, but that's how it is."
"I understand," I said, not really, but it seemed like the correct answer. Even though there had not been any music played in this room for generations, I had to resist the urge to ask her to dance.
"Um… Through here is the formal living room. Now this one, we used a little, for guests and that kind of thing." I followed her through another set of double doors into a much less lavish room. This one was under drastic construction. Tarps had been thrown over the furniture, and sawdust covered almost everything. Only one wall was not in the process of being stripped and repainted. It was covered in painted portraits of Julie's ancestors.