Haverton sat several miles west of Boston, a tiny town half forgotten by time and sometimes the locals themselves! Boston remained a good forty minute drive out, enough for only the most dedicated commuters to bother with. The rest of the town occupied themselves with... supporting the town. A small grocery store, a gas station, a few antique shops and boutiques that rarely saw outside business; the firehall, police station, the town court and clerk, and the council chambers all shared the one building. Not that there was much call for any of them. Among the chaos of the world, those who lived in Haverton existed in a quiet repose of peace and dreams. It served as a haven for lost artisans and painters, writers who wanted away from the distractions of life for a bit. The trick, however, was not just in the hearing of it. Finding it was difficult at best.

Buried among the trees of the Massachusetts forests, a wrong turn on any of the various back roads that passed nearby would leave you either in another town altogether or hopelessly lost. Haverton's one main street, lined with turn of the century buildings and with tiny lanes running off towards Victorian houses, ended in a cup-de-sac a mile outside of town. The remains of an asylum, with stone walls and burnt out windows, stood like an ancient and forgotten castle there. That single main road heading southeast out of Haverton was also the only way in. So small was the town that it did not even warrant stoplight any of the intersections. Robert found his home town to be relaxing. The people who lived there were much like his family had been: quiet, polite, and... slightly different from the rest of the world. And the only people who ever entered were those who knew how to find it to start with or those who were well and truly lost.

 Better than the town was his own home. The sprawling farmhouse with no farmlands around it was at the end of a country lane that led deeper into the woods and then stopped, as though the dirt road's only existence was to provide access to the house. And such a house it was! Originally, the builder had intended a small four room house. Somehow, under the care of the Chandler family, it had grown! Additions had been tacked onto the sides by amateur carpenters, spare rooms and closets sprouted at odd angles on the second floor, and few of the windows matched in either construction or size. Sections of the wooden house had even been painted with different colors unified only drabness! The only thing unifying the house was the carvings.

Over the generations, the Chandlers had left their marks upon the structure. Glyphs! Wardings! Runes! All manor of symbols had been carved into the wood around the doors and windows, and etched into the stone foundation as well! Amish hex signs fought for space with Nordic carvings, while a mezuzah hung in each door and window frame. Those wooden frames had been painted bright red and were kept well painted even as the rest of the house looked in need of some love and care. Robert tucked his iron knife into its sheath as he stepped back to examine his own latest addition: a [i]hamsa[/i] just above the outside knob to the front door. The purpose of all of this was the same now as when his great-grandfather had first started the tradition: to keep out any who would mean harm to those within. Robert didn't know if they had ever worked, of course. He did know that the house had never been broken into or invaded in anyway, although he was well aware that absence of evidence did not prove a thing. But he believed that such symbols might have had some effect and might continue to do so. He was not so shattered a man that he had stopped believing.

Besides, if vampires and werewolves and ghosts (oh, yes, there were ghosts, even if only in the mind!) were real, then why not the basis for this tradition as well?

Sighing, Robert looked up towards the late evening sky. The sun had almost slipped beneath the horizon, the last orange-pink rays of light causing shadows to stretch like fingers about the house. Sunrise and sunset. Dusk and twilight. These were the between times that he relished, when the world was at a silent, otherworldly peace that matched his own nature. It almost made him smile.

Almost.

Stepping back inside the house, he looked about numbly. He should have cleaned more he realized. Not as far as dirt and dust, as he did his own housekeeping on a weekly basis. No, the concern was the books. They were everywhere: piled in stacks along the walls, jammed into corners and crevices, lining the staircase up, filling the kitchen countertops... Robert knew where almost everything was that he needed. Or at least he had a good idea. The best ones, of course, he kept in a special barrister's case in his room. A few darker ones he had locked away in trunks in the dank basement to fight it out with the mold; there was no question in his mind that the fungus rot would be on the losing side of that battle. He debated with himself whether or not he should remove the books off of some of the furniture he thought might still be under the neatly stack heaps, wondering if people would want to stay in one place long enough to sit...

"Food," he muttered suddenly, "Probably should have gone shopping... or something..." 

Robert looked out the living room window to the old stone barn that sat at the back of the property. The roof was still sound, he thought. People could hide their vehicles there, maybe? Or turn it into something useful? It would have to be cleaned out, though, as to the best of his knowledge the barn had never actually been used in any farming capacity since his family had purchased the land some seventy years ago. The ancient steam powered traction engine that sat rusting within would probably be worth a fortune... if it could be repaired. Now that he thought about it, his uncle Renfew had stored two or three cars in there a couple of decades ago, hadn't he? Robert shrugged. His uncle had collected all manner of things and dumped them there: HAM radios, tools, scrap lumber and metal, oil lamps. There had always been the temptation to call one of those 'picker' companies and have them clean it out, only he never saw the point. It wasn't like he needed the barn for anything before. If the others wanted it or needed it, they could clean it out themselves.

"Speaking of which..." he muttered again. Robert pulled the pocket watch out from his jeans and checked it. He had little idea when any of them might arrive. If any of them did, he darkly added. The Society had promised to send some help but had encouraged him to do what he could as well on his own. Which was ridiculous. Robert was many things, but he was not a leader nor a recruiter. Still, even a token force showing up would be useful. Things in Boston were getting worse, and there had been little he could do about it by his lonesome. 

Tired of the wait, he picked up his violin from off the mantle by the fire and headed out towards the back porch. A quick tuning, and then bow was placed to string to let forth a low, long note like the wail of a banshee. Robert closed his eyes and played, only it was not any music that had ever been written or recorded, nothing found in any library. Instead, it was an improvised melody that came from his soul to ring out into the silent woodlands behind his house. What he lacked in training and skill, he made up for in passion as he played for a woman dead two years, along with the death of his heart.