Po’ke turned and roared at the terrified boys he had dragged along to this strange lighthouse in the dead of night. “Get those looks off your faces and help me with this thing!” He scrambled behind the block of stone which Grandfather had ripped out of the floor, putting his little wooden box carefully onto the ground and then putting his shoulder into the cubic slab.

The boys quickly understood what he intended, and rushed to add their weights to the block. The three of them heaved with all their might. Their eyes bulging and their hot breath steamed into the air as they strove to shift the stone back into its original position, plugging the secret hole in the lighthouse’s ground floor.

Yet, all their strength combined could not move the stone a single inch. Though Grandfather had heaved it up by himself with enough force to crack stone as he slammed it down again, the strongest man Charlotte had ever seen and two more young men besides could not move it in the slightest.

At that moment, Charlotte truly believed everything the chemists had told her about the mutant transformation.

She clutched her hands to her head, racking her brain in search of anything Grandfather might have told her about fighting ghouls and vampires throughout her childhood.

Charlotte had to dig deep into her memories. Grandfather had never liked to discuss the details of fighting monsters. He had always discouraged Charlotte from the idea that she might become a Memory someday herself, and always changed the subject if Charlotte prodded him to extrapolate on some story about her mother that went further than simply how she had saved some family from a fate worse than death.

Well, everyone knew vampires were weak to sunlight. That had to go for ghouls and mutants too, right? They were born from vampires, after all.

But now it was the middle of the night. It was the night of the full moon, no less. The night when vampires were supposed to be the strongest.

Fire. Ghouls hated fire. It was one of the harshest weapons against their regeneration. Grandfather had at least told her that much, once upon a time.

Even if the man himself was not exactly a ghoul, that was the only weakness Charlotte could latch onto.

“We need to throw fire down there,” she said. “I think fire will keep him away. For the moment. Maybe that can buy us time.”

Ke’a glanced at Charlotte and nodded. “You have firewood?”

“No, not firewood. Oil.” Charlotte raced to the pallet beside their fireplace, where blocks of processed seal oil lay in their cloth wrappings. She called for help, and Ke’a helped her drag the heavy pallet to the edge of the hole. Dozens of the greasy blocks lay on the pallet, enough to keep the lighthouse warm for a week. As it happened, the fireplace on the far wall was dead by now, though the coals had been far from dead when Charlotte had left to seek help. Grandfather must have scattered the coals after escaping from his bonds.

The men stopped shoving the stone and moved around to assist the women. The boys had looks of utter terror on their faces and had long since dropped their clubs. Charlotte snapped at them to be helpful and unwrap the oil blocks, so with trembling fingers they tore strips from the packaging and followed Charlotte in dropping the rancid, oily cloth into the hole between them.

Po’ke quickly caught on and, having much better control of himself than the boys, split the dense blocks between his fingers and crumbled the constituent fuel into tooth-sized chunks. The work smeared his hands with black-brown grease but aerated the fuel well as it fell down in trickles like soil shoveled into an empty grave.

No additional noise came from below this entire time. That scared Charlotte more than anything. It was like seeing a deadly spider in your room before it darted away into a corner and you lost track of it. You might be able to tolerate it if it sat right on the wall where you could see it, and even if it never bit you you would prefer to have never known it existed.

But once you knew it hid from you, that it had the upper hand and could kill you simply by sinking its tiny teeth into your heel, that was almost too much to bear.

If he were mutating into a creature anything like the ghouls he had described to her, Charlotte bet that Grandfather’s teeth were a bit larger than a spider’s by now. She looked again at the deep claw-marks on the stone block which lay, unmovable, beside them. They were nothing like the pathetic scrapes which Grandfather had visited upon her sleeves before she tied him up.

When the five of them had nearly broken down every one of the dozens of fuel blocks, Ke’a knotted up one of the remaining cloth wrappers, and set it on the edge of the hole. “Stand back or you’ll go up yourself,” she warned, then ignited her lighter, set it on the ground, and pushed it with her toe until its steady flame touched the cloth’s frayed edge.

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She flinched as the whole mass of fabric burst into flame at once and reflexively kicked both it and her lighter into the hole.

Less than two silent heartbeats passed before, following a heavy pulse of air pressure, roiling orange–white lights burst from far below, revealing a drop of at least 50 feet. Hellish, black smoke burped up from below, having no outlet except the ersatz chimney over which Charlotte and her allies stood.

Charlotte stumbled away, coughing and retching, as the vile cloud billowed around her. She heard the sounds of the others reacting similarly, and one of the boys was actually vomiting close by as he could not endure the rancid stench of processed blubber.

And then Charlotte heard the screaming. The screaming of a man blind with pain, choked with rage, burning with hatred as well as with fire. Even over the roar of the newborn flames, Grandfather’s screaming came to her loud and clear.

Then the screams were much louder, much closer!

In an instant the flames rose above the level of the floor—

No. No, no. Charlotte had fallen to her back in confusion and was now trying to reorient herself. She was not prepared to see the looming, humanoid form engulfed in flames which clambered its way up the edge of the hole. She scrambled backward, scraping her bare hands on shattered pottery and debris, not stopping until her head collided with the wall.

The mutant did not seem to be looking directly at her. Its flesh pulsed underneath the sheet of flame, seeming to grow and shrink in mass with breath-like regularity. Bulbs of tumorous flesh burst open in the flames and then dissolved, and the creature twitched and convulsed as it moved its limbs in a jerky, staggering march toward the lighthouse’s open door. Now and again the bones of its ribs, skull, and limbs became visible, exposed by the licking fire, before muscles reformed and allowed the mutant to keep walking.

Charlotte wasn’t the only one to notice. She heard Ke’a yell at her husband to stop, and then a moment later Po’ke himself tore past Charlotte, a club in one hand and the small wooden box in the other.

Just as the mutant who had been Grandfather passed through the door, Po’ke barreled into him. Their screaming and the thumping, scraping noise of a scuffle clashed with the still-heavy thunder of fire from down below, but the two men were hidden from Charlotte’s sight through the doorway, and she couldn’t make out a single detail of the fight.

Charlotte scrambled to her feet and staggered after the pair as best as she could. This was insanity. This was a nightmare. Smoke and noise and heat assaulted Charlotte from every angle. Her brain fogged and her lungs burned. She pulled the fabric of her nightshirt up from under her coat and over her nose in an attempt to filter out some of the smoke, and though it still stung her eyes, she could finally move without retching.

Charlotte moved toward the door with unsteady but decisive steps. She had to see what was happening. She had come this far and needed to see it all through.

She emerged. To her horror she realized that, as Po’ke and Grandfather thrashed in a pile on the sand, the flames on the mutant’s flesh were quickly extinguishing. Thankfully, they likewise suppressed the flames catching in Po’ke’s furs, but as the fire died out from Grandfather’s body, so did their greatest weapon and perhaps their only chance at survival.

Little muscle remained on the mutant’s bones, but considering the evidence of his previous, monstrous strength, and the rate at which his muscle was regenerating, it was clear that in a very short time Grandfather would be strong enough again to move a stone block so tremendous that three men could not budge it together.

He would be strong enough to rip even the mighty Father Po’ke in half.

“The relic!” Po’ke roared. “Challa!”

His words turned to anguished screaming as Grandfather put a bony claw like an eagle’s beak into Po’ke eye socket and tore through it into the flesh of his cheek.

The wooden box! There must be a relic in it! The box lay on the ground mere steps away, between the doorway and the brawl which turned every moment more away from Po’ke’s favor, but Charlotte was frozen by fear. She could not get close. Yes, relics killed vampires. This one could save Po’ke. But if she got close, Grandfather would kill her just as he was killing…

Po’ke screamed again. Grandfather pulled back his arm, flecks of blood hurtling from the red–drenched forelimb.

“You’ve always thought you’re better than me!” He said in a wet, gristly wail. “The man without a leg! He can’t take care of himself, can’t be of value to anyone, can he? ‘I’ll take care of you, old man, and take care of your granddaughter, because you sure as hell can’t!’”

His arm came down again and Po’ke, somehow retaining focus despite his ghastly injuries, caught it in both his mighty hands.

Though it seemed that the muscles of Po’ke’s bulging forearms were far more powerful than Grandfather’s thin, stringy claws, Grandfather grinned with a mouth full of teeth so long and inhuman they stabbed through his own cheeks in places, as though someone had stuck an angler fish’s jaw into a human skull. He drooled as he pressed his arm inexorably downward, seeming to move so slowly not because Po’ke offered any real resistance, but because he enjoyed the fear and anguish he must be reading in Po’ke’s face.

Ke’a yelled something from within the lighthouse, but Charlotte could not make it out. She was only focused on the scene before her. In a moment, Po’ke would die.

He still had a family. Charlotte had none left at all.

Earlier had been the time for crying. That had been the time for mourning.

But now she would honor Grandfather’s memory by following what he had taught her. To be a Memory was to remember those who came before, to remember that others would come after, to choose to be human in a world full of monsters.

Catching her breath, steeling her quaking heart, Charlotte dashed for the wooden box on the ground.

Grandfather did not look up.

Charlotte gripped the box and ripped its top off to find a ring of silver wire with a delicate barb protruding from the outside.

Hoping that she did not make a mistake, Charlotte slipped on the ring, took the single step which separated her from Grandfather, and swung toward him.

Effortlessly, as if by animal reflex, Grandfather’s other arm, the one he was not using to torment Po’ke, came up to ward away Charlotte’s feeble attack. He clutched her wrist and snapped the bones of her forearm as a child might break a blade of grass.

The needle of the ring pierced his flesh, and a feeling like ice filled Charlotte’s body as both she and Grandfather began to scream.