Once on a Sunday afternoon while taking a stroll down our street, I had wandered absent-mindedly into my father's church. Chesleigh was seated at the old upright in the choir, playing my favourite church hymn. Playing it by ear remarkably well for a child who had never had any sort of schooling. She was rather tiny and while seated on the piano stool, her feet dangled in the air a good foot above the floor. The afternoon sun was shining through the stained glass windows casting coloured light into the building. Chesleigh was dressed in the same dress she died in; the white sun dress with the blue trim, and the sunlight cast rainbows upon her. It was one of my favourite memories of her. I could tell the moment she knew I was watching her, her small shoulders stiffened then relaxed, but she did not stop her playing. When she was done, she turned around on the stool,
"Did you enjoy it Carlisle?" she'd asked.
"Very much so. When did you learn to play so well?"
She giggled once. Then turned and played the piece again, just for me, before dismounting from the stool and walking to me.
"I'm glad you enjoyed it," she said solemnly. Then, "Let's go home. I'm hungry."
We walked through the graveyard behind the church and jumped over the fence into the backyard of the vicarage where we lived. Our father was in the graveyard, communing with the souls he had buried in the course of his twenty years as vicar. We waved at him as we went by but he didn't notice us, so intent on chewing his pipe and meditating he was.
Chesleigh had been six, and since then, I had been saving my wages from my afternoon employment as a clerk in a merchant's shop in town in order to hire a governess to teach her at home. She would have become one of London's, nay, England's most accomplished ladies on her instrument. It was to be my present to her for her eighth birthday. I used the money to buy her coffin instead, and to hire the priest from St. Patrick's to perform the funeral. Our father had been too distraught to do the ceremony himself, and once word had got round of the manner of Chesleigh's death, it proved difficult to find a man of the cloth willing to risk being tainted by the evil that had killed her.
Aye, Chesleigh was dead as a nail, and my parents dead with her. Mother was physically gone and father was as good as dead for all the notice he took of us. I tried to raise my other sisters as best I could but desperate to escape the drear and gloom and melancholy that seemed to have taken permanent residence at the vicarage, they both married much too young and moved away from London, one to Guernsey and the other to Hereford. It was just me and Father then, and we barely spoke. I worked all day at the merchant's shop now and only saw him in the evening when I returned. He was usually preparing to leave for the hunt. Since Chesleigh's death, father had been organising his congregation every night to hunt the creatures that killed her. Whether or not they ever caught a real vampire, I do not know, I never went on their hunts, but I do not doubt, knowing all I know now about our kind, that they burned a lot of innocent people to death.
It was during one such hunt that Father lost his legs. They were chasing an unfortunate soul through the dark streets when father, not paying attention to the flow of traffic, ran right into the flow of carriages and a team of horses thundered right over him, snapping his spine and rendering him an invalid. That was how I became the new vicar of St. Andrew's Anglican Church. Father retired after his accident and I took over from him, inheriting both the vicarage and the living that went with it. Unfortunately, I also inherited the hunt for vampires, and it was a task at which my father made sure I directed all my efforts towards.