“A hundred years! But-but that's impossible. Impossible, crazy, but the deeds don't lie. The house is mine. The house was his and his father's. And Delokgate! I grew up here in Delokgate This place is more home to me than Mom and Dad's house. It was here almost before they'd finished killing the Indians. It says here Von Braun bought the land in 1886 from a farmer, and on this page, in Van Helsing's handwriting, that he was most of the way through drinking himself to death. The man's family was slaughtered by things. And then his wife and daughters kept coming back! Vampires. They came back to him as vampires every night. Then the park opened in '89. I knew that, though.
He was there. He was there, watching the old roller coaster rise, breaking open the crates that held the horses on the carousel. Maybe he accepted the delivery of the first costumes. Maybe he hammered a nail here, kept the books there, sharpened swords. How old would he have been? In '97, he was twenty-two. Thirteen. He was thirteen. He did no worse to me than his own father did to him. Child labor-well, I guess things were different then. Childhood isn't something a man of that time would understand. Could it be true? He did appreciate black humor. Did he play some outlandish prank?
No, that's not like him. Not now. He was just too thoughtful. Seven years ago, when he finally woke up, his first thought was to comfort me even though he was three quarters dead himself. He hung on long enough to tell me to bury his brother. He wouldn't leave a mess, a trick. Besides, the lawyer says it all checks out. He did some quick mental math and turned white as a sheet! This paper has his writing on it, and it's old.
How many nights did he do this? How many times? How many of them did he kill during his long life? There's no way to know. How many years will I be here doing the same thing? A hundred? Two? And does it rub off on the people around me? You've been here a long time, Mrs. Tran, and you haven't visibly aged. Not the whole hundred years, right? But you've been here a while. You said this champagne was set aside for my twenty-first birthday. It looks expensive, but I guess money's not something I have to worry about anymore. Here, have a glass. We'll drink to long life. Here's to our health and to all dead ghost riders. Here's to death, as hard a worker as any that ever rode his-my train. Here's to a good man, finally at rest, and the hope that we'll see him again someday.