Jesse P. Hiltz - Not by Needs nor Nature

Today there are two new posts. I'm posting part III of Persistence, the hot new story recently rejected by Gaspereau Press. If you've been reading along and wondering about where all this supposed 'horror' is at, this section of the story will hopefully satisfy; it's where things really start picking up speed. You'll find Part III: Stories directly below this post.

But before I get to that, I also want to recommend something else for you to read. This is the work of my good friend Jesse P. Hiltz, which you can find at his writing blog, Not by Needs nor Nature.

Jesse is a man well-versed in the philosophical critical approach, and this knowledge finds its way into everything he writes (it is also the reason why my review of his work won't be nearly as far-reaching as his review of mine, which is an interesting little essay in its own right on the essence of horror). Never satisfied with a simple approach, Jesse evaluates all things from all sides, drawing out and often tearing down our inherent assumptions- assumptions about what it means to read, assumptions about what the real purpose of story-telling is, and (perhaps the greatest fiction of all) the assumption that there is an absolute and inviolable barrier between reader and thing-read.

His latest and (I think) most impressive fictional(?) work is now being posted in sections on his blog. This story, The Split, is a fascinating study of the idea of motivation and guilt, framed within the hazy bounds of a horror story that often seems more like a dream. As we read, we begin to realize that the story is not merely an isolated report of events but the actual product of those events and maybe even the motivator for future events not recorded in the story itself. This is the reason for the question mark above. In the story's process of drawing itself into itself, it also causes itself to go beyond its fictional barriers; as the real story is drawn into the fictional event, the fictional event becomes bound up against the real story and acquires a realness of its own. In the end we are left with the question of what exactly we mean when we say that a thing "has happened."

The Split was written at about the same time as my story, Persistence, and both are the result of hours and hours of frantic discussion between Jesse and I regarding the nature and purpose of horror. This includes the how-and-why of being 'horrified' by things, and the oft-overlooked distinction between 'horror' and 'fright'; ignorance of which leads certain writers (to name no names) to think that merely injecting a stock monster into an otherwise mundane situation is cause enough to label the resulting product a work of horror. In the end, I think that these two stories, the result of that discussion, are complimentary manifestations of a shared outlook; as the one argues that the reality of horror is essentially fear of one's own self, the other takes this one step further, adds the social element, and explains how this fear of self can be spread to or shared by others; although- crucially- the result is not fear of the other, but rather a sense of shared guilt, and an acknowledgment of the fact that all human motivations are essentially entwined.

Take a look at his stuff and I'm sure you'll be impressed. If you've been reading Persistence, I'd suggest you get caught up on The Split, and read the two side-by-side as we post them; they were written side-by-side and they are brothers.

Persistence - Part III: Stories

PERSISTENCE
Dominic E. Lacasse

Part I: Halifax (Link)
Part II: Triumph (Link)
Part IV: Ellen (Link)

Part III: Stories

   Cyrus helped me get settled into my new room. I noticed that he had his eye on the whiskey bottle, so when my meager luggage was moved, I suggested that we sit down and have a few drinks– a prospect he seemed to appreciate. He left the room and reappeared shortly with two glasses. I gestured for him to pull a chair up to the desk on which I had carefully positioned my notes about Triumph.

   “You said this morning you’d tell me some stories?” I asked. He grinned, poured himself a glass, drank it in one gulp, and poured another.

   “Well, if it’s stories you want, I’ve got them,” he said. “I probably know more about the comings and goings of this town than anybody else.”

   We talked for a long time about the town’s history, though I didn’t learn anything that I hadn’t known before. However, our historical discussion served its purpose, which was to get enough whiskey into Cyrus that I could begin to ask him about the darker side of Triumph’s past. At first I asked him about fires in general, the worst ones he’d seen or heard about, the fate of the first church (apparently it burned when a Sunday-school teacher forgot to open a flue, a tragedy for such a small mistake, but Cyrus assured me that no one was hurt.) Then, feeling that the time was right, I mentioned the lighthouse.

   “The lighthouse? That was a sad thing, alright. The whole town was broken up about it. My father would never even go back to see the place afterwards. Real tragedy.”

   “Your father?” I asked. “So then this was quite some time ago.”

   “It was in 1910, I think, ‘10 or ‘11.” came the reply. I watched Cyrus carefully, but he didn’t seem at all perturbed by my questions. He sipped his whiskey and leaned back in his chair with the same wistful look he’d had in his eye throughout our conversation.

   “I stopped by the church to look it up, it was in a bulletin from 1911.”

   Cyrus shrugged. “Well, there you go. I suppose you know the story. For a man to lose his wife and child like that, and he’s just down the road, but you can’t see anything through that forest, so nobody knew. He killed himself, I heard, a few years later. It wasn’t his fault, but you don’t get past that kind of guilt.”

   I nodded. “You know, it’s funny,” I said. “Your son told me it happened in ‘28.”

   Cyrus glanced at me. “Lad’s got his facts mixed up. The place burned twice.” I was surprised. I had imagined myself as some kind of detective. When I was preparing my questions for the event I had seen myself slowly wheedling out the facts from a tight-lipped Cyrus. But here he had beaten me to the chase. I felt obligated to show off at least a certain amount of journalistic expertise.

   “That’s what I thought,” I answered. “The picture in the bulletin from 1911 showed the lighthouse essentially unharmed.”

   “Yeah,” he replied. “The first time the fire didn’t get to the lighthouse. The rain put it out before it got through. Nobody ever used it again, though. When something like that happens in a town like this, people would rather forget it than try to rebuild, and the new lighthouses made it so there wasn’t really a point to reopening it.”

   “So what about the second fire? That was in ‘28?”

   “Yeah, I think so. It doesn’t surprise me that Jeb got the story wrong, he was just a boy when it happened. Some kids got in there, just fooling around, you know. They were smoking, and somehow they managed to set the place on fire from the inside out. They managed to get out okay, they ran and told the constable about it, but by then there was no point in trying to put it out, really. The fire department from Lunenberg came down and we pretty much just watched it burn, kept it from spreading into the woods. Nobody hurt. I think most of us were glad to see it go.”

   I was crushed. Once again, it appeared that I had gotten to the end of my search. Perhaps Triumph was, as my friend had suggested, simply not home to many good stories. I had learned a lot about the town’s woeful history, the decline of the fisheries, and the tragic burning of a lighthouse (as well as a not-so-tragic second burning) but beyond the face values of these stories there seemed to lurk no mysterious legend, no grand myth.

   I had been scheduled for Monday at my job in Halifax. Here it was Saturday night and I was no closer to my goal than I was when I had left. I had one more day. It would have made sense to return to Halifax and forget the entire event, but somehow I would not allow myself to consider it. It may have been a hunch, or perhaps simply a sense of competition, but I was resolved to stay here and find something where my friend had not. Cyrus and I stayed up for several more hours swapping tales, but when he left and I crawled into my new bed, thoroughly drunk, I was at a dead-end.

   Fear. I am running through the woods at dusk. My foot slips off a rock and I fall, hard, on my right shoulder. There is no impact but a sickening cushioning, a sweet-smelling rotten softness as my shoulder goes through a decaying tree-trunk. Potato bugs swarm out of the gash in their putrid home.

   I leap to my feet and keep running. Cobwebs and tangled branches swipe at me. It is getting darker. My feet slip and dig in foul-smelling mud and slick black moss. The further I run, the more rotten the world becomes. There is no life in these woods. I do not know what I am running from.

   I stop at the edge of a carefully-constructed foundation. The ruins of some long-dead house. Ancient, finished. A piece of humanity left to crumble and rot as the world reclaims all things. It is dark now. I dive into the foundation and shove myself into a corner. Dry things and wet things. Things crawl down the neck of my shirt where my back is pressed against crumbling stone. I become as small as possible, hoping to be overlooked by whatever nameless, mute terror is chasing me. Fear rises inside me like a second self. I am no longer myself, I am made of fear, it conquers my being.

   I am standing. I have no control over myself. I know it is foolish to do so, but I walk into the center of the foundation. Whatever hunts me will find me. The fear is turning my mind to ash but I begin to move dead logs and brush from a heap in the center of the foundation. I uncover the blackened head of a rotting horse. An eyelid is open but the eye is gone. A smell of death washes over me.

   I hear nothing and see nothing but suddenly I am intent, mystified, staring at the edge of the foundation. A black thing is there. A human’s hand grasps the side of the foundation and the black thing heaves itself closer. The world is full of fire.

   I awoke in a cold sweat. It was still night, the lingering effects of the whiskey pounding dully in my head. I had never been so terrified. The dream played itself out over and over in my mind’s eye as I stared into the blackness. That rotting foundation in the dark woods, that feeling of decay all around me, like a terrible black hole in the world’s heart. That unspeakable black horror, dragging itself toward me, more terrifying for the unhallowed mask of humanity it wore. There was no humanity in it. It was a being of rot and plague. But the form it wore was undeniably its own, and the notion that what was once human was now that thing was nauseating.

   It was the most vivid dream that I had ever had, but it was a dream and nothing more. Deeply wishing it were morning, I closed my eyes and tried desperately to clear the vision from my mind. Behind it all was the lighthouse, a tortured building calling for me. I would go again tomorrow. I would go on my own and find that which was being hidden from me.

   It was raining again the next morning. Cyrus was kind enough to offer me breakfast, but he was obviously in no mood for conversation. He held a large meaty hand to his forehead and kept his gaze directed straight down at the table, eating small bites of scrambled egg and drinking cup after cup of steaming black coffee. Having been in his position before, I knew that his archival gift would be of no use to me until noon at the very earliest.

   I, on the other hand, was feeling surprisingly unaffected by the previous nights’ libations. My plan was to hike out to the lighthouse on foot with only a notebook, flashlight, and camera and find some way inside. Given how close the overgrown woods were to the lighthouse, I guessed that if the door would not avail me, I could try climbing a tree and getting in through a window. I couldn’t have explained why I felt that there was something that wasn’t being told about the lighthouse, but I had an odd sense of certainty about it. I felt sure that after only a few minutes of searching I would uncover some piece of this riddle that would either answer all my questions or send more and more swarming my way– either way, the story would grow from this search.

   It was raining again, a bleak kind of mist coming down from a bleak kind of sky. The lighthouse was about twenty minutes away on foot, the last five or ten of which wound through the ruts and puddles of the overgrown path leading up to the clearing by the sea. Before I had arrived at the lighthouse my clothes were soaked and my shoes covered in mud and grime. I was having second thoughts about the whole operation. Why was I suspicious of Cyrus’ explanation? Kids make stupid mistakes like that all the time, and it certainly wouldn’t have been the first time things got out of control and something like this had happened. What made this situation seem so out of the ordinary? There was the mixup with the bulletins, but Cyrus had corrected me on that.

   Just as I escaped the forest’s clutches and was again confronted by the mammoth structure towering over me, it hit. I was suspicious simply because I had still not found a record of the second burning. Peterson had told me his story and everything seemed to fit– his son’s confusion over the date, the first article’s picture with the lighthouse intact, everything seemed to make sense with the information that Cyrus had given me, but the box that should have logically contained a mention of even the relatively small news of the burning of an abandoned lighthouse by some careless kids had not mentioned the lighthouse at all. I had not gotten the full story, at least not in print.

   My inquisitiveness now renewed, I gazed upward at the enigmatic tower. Two small starlings zipped into the clearing and spiraled up through the broken glass at the lighthouse’s spire, making their home out of what man had forgotten. In a strange moment of poetic lunacy I suddenly saw the lighthouse as a grand prison tower, not a guardian to the wayfaring sailor so much as an asylum for those who embrace their own insanity. It towered over me, silent and inscrutable, daring me to challenge its blackened heart.

   I sloshed up to the door. It had taken some damage from the fire, the paint that appeared to have once been a lustrous red now a sickened brownish-black. The edges were charred and scorched. There was a heavy padlock hanging from the door, itself smoke-blackened although apparently not broken. I grabbed it and gave it a good shake and found, to my surprise, that it had rusted through. The entire latch snapped off, leaving me with the rusty lock itself, which I absently shoved into my bag beside the flashlight and the camera. I picked the latch off of the hinge which held the door closed and kicked the door in with one go. Strangely, it opened easily, and the excess force caused it to swing around and bang off the inside of the tower, a noisy clang that rang hauntingly through the darkened depths of the lighthouse. I saw a rusty chunk of an old deadbolt, previously mounted inside the door, fly off into the darkness.

   My heart fell as I shined the flashlight into the lighthouse, because the damage was even more substantial than I had thought. Broken rafters and pieces of the stairs lay all over the ground; it appeared that the fire had started near the bottom, for the stairs high above my head were still securely fastened to the wall, though they looked just as charred and demolished as those that now lay crumpled before me. I had a vision of those blackened things coming loose somehow, crashing to the ground, pinning me under them. I shuddered involuntarily but stepped inside.

   My feet sank into wet ashes. The rain must have come in through the broken windows and stagnated because a rancid smell immediately rose to sting my nostrils. I trod forward resolutely and even had the courage to lift and flip over a large piece of charred wood. A mass of tiny white insects of some kind or another fled this destruction of their decades-silent abode. I recoiled from their escape. There was nothing to be seen under the object I had moved, only more charred, soggy ashes.

   I looked around for another ten minutes or so, dodging all manner of entombed vermin who had decided to take up residence in the abandoned lighthouse, and found nothing. I had begun to accept that what little in this place had survived the maelstrom that engulfed it had surrendered to the elements long ago, working its way back into the earth in the bellies of worms, getting ready for another go-around.

   Suddenly a loud sound which I could not identify echoed through the inside of the lighthouse and a small black object crashed to the ground in front of me. I dove for the door, knowing for sure that the stairs hanging over my head had finally taken this moment to come crashing down. I was outside, frantically peering around with my flashlight, when I saw that the noise had been made by several large seagulls suddenly deciding to take off from the top of the lighthouse and out to sea. I spent several seconds analyzing the stairs, trying to read their minds. Eventually I decided that they would probably remain there long enough for me to quickly dart inside and see what had fallen when the seagulls had abandoned their shelter. If it was only another charred piece of wood then I would close the door behind me and head back to the hotel. This lighthouse was not the treasure-trove of clues I had hoped it would be.

   I stepped inside and trudged through the soggy ashes to the origin of my haphazard evacuation, passing my flashlight over the ground. At first I had a hard time recognizing it as anything other than a block of wood, but then I saw that the object on the ground in front of me was actually a small black book, what looked like a journal of some kind. I snatched it quickly, shoved it in my bag and stalked off back to the hotel. The rain was falling with a vengeance now, making the walk out even more miserable than the walk in, my shoes buried in mud, my lungs full of the sickeningly-sweet odor of a forest in a hot summer rain.

   When I had gotten back to the hotel, dried off, and changed my clothes, I sat down at the desk and pulled out the notebook. It seemed to have fared only slightly better than the rest of the lighthouse. It was damp and moldy, most of its pages blurred to unintelligibility. The cover was of a soft leather; I imagined it would have been a very nice journal when it was new, but now the cover and binding were bent and cracked, warped with moisture, giving off a noxious odor.

   The first twenty pages or so were completely useless to me. There was a page beyond that, however, that was somewhat more legible. Taking up a pencil and my own black notebook, I carefully transcribed what I found on these pages:

   Nobody wants to talk about them. They call it dangerous. I think that’s foolish– as though simply learning about something causes you to become a part of it. There’s no harm in simply learning. Jameson and his mother were monsters, but that’s not to say there’s nothing that we can learn from their misdeeds. The work begun by Freud in this area could benefit greatly from such a dramatic case. For instance, the nature of their k-

   The text faded away here, although indentations in the page hinted at the sinister word that would have followed. The bottom half of this page was covered in scribbles, as though the author’s pen had malfunctioned and he or she was trying to coax it back into life. I eagerly turned the page, but the next several pages were blank, and when the writing resumed again it was in a section that had suffered much water damage and was essentially illegible.

I flipped further into the book. Past more obliterated text there was another dry spot. The handwriting here had changed considerably. Where before it had been a graceful, petite script, it changed to a somewhat cracked, spidery hand, as though written in haste or with pen in shaking fingers. It read:

   We say the insane are freaks of nature, we see them as half-animal. We do not understand them to be like us. They are mindless, we are rational. They are chaotic, we are predictable. They see a fragmented and nonsensical reality, we base our lives on fact.
What terrifies me is the idea that we characterize the insane this way because we are afraid of the obvious truth. The truth that confronts everyone and is silenced by such belief is that we are, really, all insane.
   This world is not meant for us. There are those among us who have passed beyond the curtain between what we call sanity and what we call madness, but in the eyes of the world, we are all madmen. We think and write, we build massive monuments to our own selves, we love beyond our lives, we destroy ourselves by the thousands with weapons of unearthly power.
   We have walked beyond the path of animal but here there is no road for us to travel, there is no guide for us because we are first, and so we simply act our desires, conforming our madness to the bonds set by our societies, driving down the one fact that we all know to be true, the fact of our own senselessness and chaotic lack of purpose.
   All madness is my madness. There is no escaping this truth.

   I put down my pencil and stared blankly at what I had written. I could not say what scared me more; the passage I had just transcribed, or the extent to which I could feel myself agreeing with it.

   That night, after dinner, I fetched my bottle of whiskey and sat with Peterson in the hotel’s office. We drank and he told me more about the town’s furthest reaches of history, its settlement by Basque sailors, their battles with the colonial French and English before their final defeat. Again, when his tongue was suitably loosened by the bitter whiskey, I began to steer our conversation toward the matters with which I was presently concerned. I had decided earlier not to mention my trespass in the lighthouse, nor the notebook I had found in there. I wanted to know about these Jamesons, and the apparently nefarious deeds they had committed, these crimes about which it was dangerous to speak.

   Again, as before, I led him into the discussion by asking about similar events. I asked if there had ever been a murder in the town, to which he replied that once, as a child, he had heard of a man in town who had killed his wife when he found she was being unfaithful to him. Here I decided to speak to the point:

   “Was that a Mr. Jameson?”

   Cyrus was silent for several seconds. Finally, slowly and deliberately, he put his glass down on the table and leveled his gaze at me across the small table. When he spoke, his voice was quiet, calm. “Where did you hear that name?”

   I had devised a somewhat suitable excuse before our conversation began. “I heard some of the kids talking about a Mr. Jameson, something about a murder.”

   “That’s a lie,” Cyrus said flatly. I remained silent. After a few seconds, he spoke again. “We don’t talk about them here. The kids have never even heard the name. So where did you?”

   I had no answer. If I told him the truth, then he would know I had broken into the lighthouse, and that was the last thing I needed. This town seemed like the kind of place where even someone like Cyrus would be enraged by the thought of an outsider snooping around, breaking into buildings.

   “You’re clever, you.” he said eventually. The rain pounded down outside the window. “You keep your mouth shut. You think before you talk. That’s good. Well, it’s none of my business where you heard about those lunatics, I suppose.”

   It seemed I may have gotten what I wanted. Cyrus took a long gulp of whiskey, which I had learned to identify as a signal of an oncoming story. But when he put his glass down, he kept a calculating stare on me, seldom breaking eye contact. His voice was quiet, barely audible over the torrent outside.

   “I don’t want you mentioning this again in town, do you understand?” the tone of his voice made clear how serious he was, and I nodded nervously. “It’s bad for us to be talking about them,” he said, “It’s a story people shouldn’t hear. But you’re the expert, not me, so I’ll tell you. But once we’re done here, we’re not going to be bringing it up again.” Again, I nodded. He grunted his approval and began.

   “A long time ago, I think it was sometime around 1850, there was a family here, named Jameson. A man and his wife, and two sons. They lived with his mother. She was feeble-minded and it was said she was demented somehow. She lived in their attic. None of this was out of the ordinary, you know, not for that time. It wasn’t like today, when people send their parents away when they get old and screws start coming loose. The idea of medicine for problems of the head barely even existed. So if granny cracked, you’d put her up somewhere in your house, and that’d be that.

   “Anyway, things went fine for them for a long time. Jameson was a butcher and he made a good living. His family seemed to be happy. But then his wife, she got sick, pneumonia or something. She held on for a long time, but eventually she passed, and it hit Jameson hard. He stopped showing up for work. He wouldn’t answer the door when people came to visit. His boys stopped going to school. Everybody in town was worried sick about the poor guy.

   “And then one day he locks the door on his shop, and he and his boys go off into the woods with saws and hammers. They come back a week or two later, and they’re packing up their stuff into a cart. None of them says anything to anybody. They take one cart-load of junk, bundle the old lady in, and off they go.

   “For a long time, nobody saw them except for when Jameson or one of his boys would come in to town for essentials. They hunted and cured their own meat out there in the woods, living off deer and bear, whatever they could get. After a while everybody just sort of forgot about them.

   “Then they got a real bad winter. Even the people in town were snowed in for a good part of it, not to mention the Jamesons, out in the middle of nowhere with nobody to help them out. Difference was people in town could stock up on food when the snow melted, get ready for the next snow-in. The way I heard it, the Jamesons didn’t have enough meat put away and couldn’t get out of their house until the spring.” Cyrus’ gaze was distant. He was looking down at his hands but there was no focus. He was quiet for a long time. He cleared his throat. I had the sudden, unbidden image of a rising tide. “Not to put too fine a point on it, his boys weren’t seen again after that winter.”

   I shuddered at the implication. I considered asking for clarification, just so I could be completely sure of what I was being told, but the look I was getting from Cyrus told me all I needed to know. A chill passed over me. Cyrus took another sip of whiskey and stared out the window for a long time. I thought the story was over, but then he suddenly began again.

   “Nobody asked questions,” he said. “Everybody knew, but nobody asked. The place became sort of a haunted house story around here. People avoided it like the plague. Kids dared each other to go out and sneak a look at it. On the rare occasion Jameson came to town, he looked dead inside, and people stayed out of his way. A thing like that happens to you, whether it’s guilt or something I don’t understand, it puts you off-kilter. And Jameson didn’t need any more of that, what with what he went through when his wife passed away, and being cooped up all the time with an old bat who had gone around the bend years before. Word spread that he was out of his head, but good. Them that lived closest to him said when the wind was right they could hear him screaming, just screaming and screaming.

   “And then the worst of it. Kids in town started to go missing. At first it was just one, and everybody figured she’d gone off into the woods and gotten lost, or else drowned in the ocean, something like that. Things like that happen sometimes, and you’ve got to get past it. But then there was another a couple months later, and then another. Eventually it got so parents kept their kids locked inside, too scared even to let them out for school.

   “Everybody got together to talk about it, try to figure out what the hell was going on, as you’d expect. Nobody could figure out where these kids were going to, one after another like that. And then somebody says when Jameson’s been in town, that’s when the kids go missing. It wasn’t so hard for them to notice that, because everybody was so scared of Jameson, they knew when he was in town and when he wasn’t, they stayed away. But of course they hadn’t told their kids about what he’d done and what they thought he’d become out there in the woods, and every time Jameson comes into town, one of the kids goes missing.

   “So a bunch of the men got together and headed out there. And I hear when they got to about fifty yards from the house, one of them trips, and they find this barbed wire, strung up about six inches off the ground. They follow it all the way around and it’s strung in a circle all around Jameson’s house.

   “So they go in and it’s like something out of a bad dream. Jameson’s mother, that crazy old demon, she’s in the living room, she’s laughing, and she’s got this kid, and she’s just breaking her fingers, one by one. Kid’s not even screaming, just sitting there crying, not resisting at all. So the men come in and knock the old bitch down, and this poor girl, she doesn’t even understand what’s happening. She just stares at these guys, doesn’t say a word. And they’re hugging her and telling her it’s alright, they’re here now, she’s not gonna get hurt anymore, and she’s just standing there, blank-faced, like she’s not even a person inside anymore. So somebody grabs her up and heads back to town with her. I heard she never said a word for the rest of her life.

   “They tie up the old lady where she fell down, and she’s hollering bloody murder and ranting and raving all kinds of nonsense. Next thing you know Jameson’s in the room and he’s screaming all kinds of madness and swinging at these guys with this butcher knife, catches one of them right in the arm. Somebody cracks him with the butt of a rifle and he goes down cold.

   “The rest of the house seems fine, they can’t find any of the other kids. So they go down into the basement, and it’s a fuckin’ nightmare. The blacksmith’s boy is strung up and skinned, just like a deer. What’s worse, there’s a pile of bloody bones and clothes in one corner, no flesh to be seen. The crazy bastard was kidnaping these kids, and when his demented old crow of a mother was done playing with them, he was... dressing them out just as neat as you please, for dinner.”

   Cyrus stopped talking, a haunted look on his face. I felt sick. I had come here for a story, and I had gotten it, and I wished that I had never even heard of Triumph. Cyrus poured us each a short-lived glass of bourbon. When we had taken a few seconds of silence, I asked in a shaky voice, “And Jameson? And his mother? What happened to them?”

   Peterson leveled his eyes at me. “We take care of our own around here.” he said at length.

   “You take care of your own?”

   “That house was burned to the ground before those boys even started back to town. They stayed and watched it go to make sure nobody got out. It was the right thing to do and nobody ever had a problem with it.

   “I said you were clever because you think before you speak. You keep your mouth shut when you think it’s the right move, which is the only reason I told you that story. If you’ve got any brains at all, you’d keep your mouth shut about this. That was the worst thing that ever happened in this town, but it’s finished. We don’t talk about it, and you shouldn’t either. Some stories are best left untold, for any number of reasons.”

   That night I had a hard time getting to sleep. It wasn’t only the gruesome story I’d heard that kept me awake, although that in itself has caused me many sleepless nights in the years that have followed. It was that I had two halves of what I was convinced was one story. The lighthouse, the house in the woods, the house whose foundation I was sure I’d seen in my terrible dream. Jameson and the author of my anonymous notebook. 1850. 1911. 1928. And now, 1958. A drama that played itself out over a century of mysterious events.

   Suddenly, I was struck by a memory of the notebook. It was a hunch, but at the same time, as I turned on my bedside light and leapt to the desk, I knew exactly what I would find. I frantically scanned the inside of the black diary’s cover with a magnifying glass. And then I found it: in a tiny script, a poem which I curiously remembered from an ancient McGuffey’s Reader I had somehow inherited, and the name that had been on my mind since my first night in Triumph:

   Don’t touch this book if you value your life,
   For the owner carries a leather knife.
   This diary is the property of
   Ellen Daress

Persistence - Part II: Triumph

PERSISTENCE
Dominic E. Lacasse

Part I: Halifax (Link)
Part III: Stories (Link)
Part IV: Ellen (Link)

Part II: Triumph

“Here he is!” I heard a boisterous call as I made my way down the stairs. Cyrus Peterson was leaning over the counter, a short blue pencil in his hand, preposterously small reading glasses perched delicately on his massive nose. Before him were business ledgers and other such papers. He appeared to be doing some accounting. Yawning, I asked him where to find breakfast in town.

“Won’t find much in the way of restaurants,” he explained. “Least not the kind of restaurant you want to be eating at. There’s a cafeteria, but its only customers are fish-plant workers, and after six hours dealing with old fish anything looks delicious. But I was just cooking some breakfast, and seeing’s how you’re the only one here, I’d be glad to offer you some.” I was more than happy to accept.

Over a breakfast of eggs and fried potatoes, I decided it would be a good time to ask Cyrus for some of his legendary wisdom regarding the town of Triumph. At first he lauded me with stories of the good old days, when Triumph was home to one of the province’s biggest fisheries. But the fish in the nearby seas had dwindled, folks were having to go further out, fishing was more expensive and less fish were coming in. Eventually the industry caved in. “People here today just don’t want to move,” he explained. “But Triumph is pretty much done in now. There’s some fishing to be done but we’re never going to be like that again. Those days are over for us.” He looked down at the table for a long moment, as if considering the idea for himself.
“You some kind of reporter?” he asked suddenly. There was a note of suspicion in his voice, and I did not know how to respond.

“Well,” I finally began, “Not for a newspaper, no. I’m a student, I study folklore, urban legends, ghost stories, things like that.”

“Just like your friend, then, I expect?”

“About the same, yes.” I confessed. Cyrus shook his head in resignation.

“What do you think you’ll find here?” he asked. “We’re not anything special. You kids read too many books, you think all the small towns are full of wackos.”

“I’m not here to make you out to be wackos, Mr. Peterson,” I tried to explain. “But every town has its stories, doesn’t it?” Cyrus pondered the question for a moment, and nodded after a few seconds.

“I suppose so,” he said at last. “Yes, I suppose that’s true. Triumph’s got its ghosts, or so some would say. But I doubt our stories are any more interesting than anyone else’s.”

The moment was right. “Could you tell me a few of those stories?” I asked. I reached for the notebook in my back pocket, but Cyrus was pushing his chair away from the table. “Not right now,” he said. “I’ve got to get these papers done. Come see me tonight and I’ll tell some stories. That’ll give me some time to remember them.”
“Your son, Mr. Peterson- David said he knew this town like the back of his hand, would he be able to show me around?”

Cyrus grinned. “Want the grand tour, eh? Well, Jeb’s got to be down at the plant in two or three hours, but a tour shouldn’t take you more than ten or fifteen minutes. I’ll call him down for you.”

Jebediah, a man I placed somewhere in his early thirties, graciously agreed to show me around town, to see what little there was to see. The fog of the previous night had all burned away and a nicer day could not have been asked for. The sun was shining brightly and there were only a few high wisps of cloud in the sky.

The town itself was not the most beautiful I’d seen, but it was not the run-down, half-rotten sprawl that Lovecraft had once convinced me was the paradigm of all small towns. His description of the town in ‘The Shadow over Innsmouth’, with its half-collapsed houses and clock-towers missing their faces, had given me a vision of a town diseased. Triumph was not like this. Most of the houses were in bad shape, it can be said, but they remained distinctly human places, and were obviously being maintained as well as meager budgets could allow. These houses were places of life, despite- or perhaps because of- the economic troubles of their occupants.

I could understand now what my friend meant when he said that the people seemed like ghosts. To me they seemed like their houses. They did not seem happy, exactly, but neither were they miserable. These were people who simply made do, people who lived a life of monotony, and it would only stand to reason that they would be jaded, bored. The dull look in their eyes, the unenthusiastic way in which they greeted each other, all of this could, I thought, easily be attributed to their lot in life as fishermen and their wives in a small town on the coast. The modern exuberance, the lust for life that we are encouraged to foster, is entirely a creation of our own, a product of our age. Life was not so exciting and romantic for our ancestors, the ancestors who, in large part, lived lives similar to the lives of these townspeople.

Aside from the houses, the only memorable structures in the town were its large fishery (along with its cafeteria, whose appearance suggested that Cyrus was right to caution me), a small government office, and a great red ogre of a church. I asked Jebediah to wait a moment or two while I snapped some photographs of the church, for it was majesty in ruins; a large red-bricked cathedral with a tarp over part of the roof, missing bricks, and a cracked and broken set of stairs leading into its darkened interior. Jebediah explained that the church served many roles– it was a place of worship, an emergency shelter, town hall, and, through its weekly bulletins, the town newspaper. When I asked, Jebediah told me that the church had always kept an archive of its bulletins in order to hang on to the town’s history. This seemed to me the logical place to begin my search.

As our last stop before we returned to the hotel, Jebediah took me down a short dirt road to see the ruins of the old lighthouse. Trees hemmed in alongside and above us on the overgrown road, which had clearly not seen regular traffic for a very long time. At the end of the road was a clearing, and as the trees parted and gave way upon our entering this clearing, the lighthouse suddenly and shockingly dominated the sky. The clearing appeared to be little larger than the lighthouse itself and before I’d even noticed it we were suddenly mere feet from the stone behemoth. It loomed over us like some great mindless predator.

Now this was a sight that would have made my predecessor smile, for it seemed almost transposed directly from one of his stories. I was expecting a simple foundation, perhaps with some large stones and debris from the lighthouse’s storied past lying about, waiting to be overcome by the earth. But the lighthouse had apparently been abandoned comparatively recently, such that it was still standing in all its grotesque magnificence. There appeared to have been a fire, quite severe by the look of things. The door was scorched and burnt, held closed by a large and heavy padlock. All of the windows had broken out, their frames warped and twisted like the legs of dead spiders from the heat. Above these windows the exterior walls of the lighthouse were stained with massive black spikes of soot and burned paint. At the very top were the magnifying windows, shattered and broken, the railings around them snapped at insane angles. The roof was sagging noticeably in one place and looked ready to cave in.

To the side was the corpse of a small house, presumably for the lighthouse-keeper and his family. This was entirely destroyed, and were it not for the foundation, a half-standing chimney on the far side and a greater concentration of charred debris I could have overlooked it completely. I walked to the edge of the foundation and peered inside. My eyes fixed on a charred and warped spoon on the edge of an equally obliterated metal card table, still waiting for a meal to come. I felt a chill, though I did not know why.

“What happened here?” I asked.

“Well, a fire, of course.” Jebediah replied. “Back in twenty-eight. Nobody really knows how it started. We think it may have been lightning.”

“Was anyone hurt?”

Jebediah gave me a long look. He walked a few feet away and peered momentarily at the top of the lighthouse, where a large black crow had landed to survey our little expedition. “Two. Two dead,” he explained. “A mother and daughter.” he glanced quickly at me. “The keeper’s wife and his daughter, you know. He was in town, and nobody heard or saw anything, I guess, and when he went home, this is what he found.”
Something about the way he was talking seemed strange to me. It seemed he was somehow telling me more than the truth. “And nobody’s thought to rebuild the lighthouse?” I asked quietly. Jebediah smiled and headed back towards his truck.
“No point,” he said as we drove away. “They’ve been building lighthouses all up and down the shore, new ones with brighter lights. That thing was just a big oil lamp, it’s amazing it didn’t burn down sooner.”

“Still, you think somebody would do something with it, restore it, if just for the history.”

“Folks around here know history, we don’t need museums.” he laughed, but I thought I noticed a kind of nervousness in his laughter. The birds had stopped chirping in the forest around us. “That lighthouse, it was a bad business, but it’s over now.”

Jebediah drove us back to the hotel and, now that I had my bearings, I decided it was time to do some investigating on my own. Cyrus Peterson was busy out in front of his hotel, his torso buried under the hood of his son’s pickup truck. “Can’t be bothered to learn to do this himself,” he muttered to himself. “Little bastard leaves me to do everything.” I decided now was not the best time to press him for more stories. Given that the lighthouse was the only real story I had so far, I decided to go to the church and look through the archived bulletins for further clues.

I made my way up the hill to the massive church. I found myself even more enthralled than before with its beautiful desolation. Going up the steps and through the big doors I was suddenly met with ten or twenty people, just milling about and catching up with each other. The conversation dropped to a murmur as soon as I entered, and I received a great number of suspicious looks. For a moment I felt that I had made a huge mistake in coming here, that this church was a place for insiders only, that I had violated some unwritten code. I searched frantically for a friendly face. In one corner was the youth who had driven me in from Lunenberg. He was talking with a few friends his age. I approached him, with a mind to ask where the archives could be found, but as soon as he saw me heading his way, he and his friends quickly left the church. I felt a sudden sense of profound alienation.

“Who are you?” I heard a voice behind me inquire. I nearly jumped through the ceiling. Taking a moment to compose myself, I turned to face an elderly woman.

“I’m sorry?”

“I said who are you? Haven’t seen you before.” she was squinting at me suspiciously, her gnarled hand clasping and unclasping the top of a wooden cane.

“My name is Jason, I’m a student in Halifax. I’m here on a visit,” I replied, trying to avoid words like ‘reporter’ and ‘folklore’. My brief conversation with Cyrus that morning had shown me that it would probably behoove me to speak as little as possible about my true intentions here.

“A visit? Here? What’s to see here?”

“I’m just interested in your history, that’s all. I’m told there was once a big fishery here.” To my relief, the woman’s face softened.

“Oh, yes!” she said. “You should have seen this town when I was a girl. Not like today,” she shook her head. “I suppose you’re here to see the bulletins, then?”

Hardly believing my luck, I agreed. I appeared to have won her over, as she gladly led me down a set of dark stairs into a room filled nearly to the ceiling with old cardboard boxes, most of them stamped with the logo I’d seen outside the fish plant. She stayed and regaled me with more stories about the good old days until I finally mustered the courage to explain that I’d rather be alone while I went through this material. “Oh, shy, are we?” she cackled. “Well, alright then. But put everything back where you find it! I’m too old to go reorganizing this whole mess.” With my heartfelt promise that I’d be careful, she left me to my work.

The archives were truly a mess. While they were generally arranged more or less chronologically, many were torn or otherwise ruined, and some boxes were out of place, meaning that I had a hard time tracking down the right pile to begin my search. With no other events to investigate aside from the unsettling lighthouse fire, I rifled through the pile until I found the box labeled BULLETIN ARCHIVE - 1920-1930.

Locating ‘28 quickly enough, I began to search through the bulletins for any mention of the fire. The news in Triumph was of fish-hauls, houses being built, old houses being torn down, marriages, new babies, and obituaries. These were punctuated by the occasional disaster- a flood, a particularly bad snowstorm, a fire. Yet I could find no mention of the lighthouse. I shuffled back and forth through 1928 two or three times, and I was sure that the lighthouse was not mentioned.

Digging through the rest of the box, I scanned over every bulletin for the entire decade, and the lighthouse was not mentioned once. I assumed that maybe the bulletin for the week the lighthouse burned had simply gotten lost or destroyed, but the 1920-1930 box, being near the bottom of a pile, had appeared to have suffered much less than those that were more exposed. Furthermore, what struck me as strangest of all was that it wasn’t only the fire that wasn’t mentioned, there was simply no mention of the lighthouse at all, nor its keeper or his family. For one of the largest structures in town to go unmentioned in the town’s only newsletter for an entire decade seemed highly unlikely to me. It was almost as though the lighthouse had not existed during these ten years.

That lighthouse, it was a bad business, but it’s over now.
I had played a bum hunch. With no other leads to track down, I began rifling through the other boxes. They appeared to date from at least 1870, and I amused myself by reading some of the older ones. I could begin to understand the nostalgia with which the elderly people in town spoke of the old days; the black and white photos I saw in these old bulletins spoke of a much happier time. The church in which I stood was featured in one of the bulletins from 1890 as having been recently built. Far from the disrepair the place was in now, it seemed almost to sparkle in the sun. The townsfolk were gathered around outside it. Everyone seemed young and happy.

Then I followed along as the fishing trade began to decline in the early 1900's. The headlines were less encouraging:

Fish shortage may last, according to captains.
Eastern fisheries closes.
Mayor encourages young people to stay in Triumph.

I imagined the surprise, the disappointment of the town as they saw their way of life shrinking into next to nothing. This life that they had made for themselves was supposed to last. They expected their sons and daughters to lead the same life. It was a good life, and things seemed like they could go on, and nobody would ever be wanting as long as there was good hard work to be done. But where do we go from here? What do we do when our best-laid plans turn into nothing? I knew what they did- most left, and some stayed. And that was Triumph.

I was so engrossed in the local drama that I almost skipped right past the story I was looking for. On the bottom of the first page of the bulletin from the second week in April, 1911, there was a simple headline and a short story:

Lighthouse Fire

Constable Michael Burns reports that sometime in the early evening of April 9th, a fire started in the home of lighthouse-keeper Daniel Morgan. The fire spread quickly and gutted the small house.

Tragically, Morgan’s wife Aliza and daughter Hannah were both killed in the fire. Both bodies were found in the remains of little Hannah’s bedroom. Constable Burns reports that it is believed Aliza had gone to retrieve her daughter to make their escape, but had soon fainted from the smoke. Lighthouse-keeper Morgan was in town at the market at the time of the fire.

The cause of the fire is as yet unknown, although the afternoon’s thunderstorm suggests lightning as a possible cause. The lighthouse-keeper’s house appears to have been destroyed completely, but the lighthouse itself

The story ended abruptly. I turned the page and saw a large black and white photo of the scene I had witnessed earlier in the afternoon; the fire-demolished house with its standing chimney, its hollowed-out foundation. But there was something different about the scene, something I could not quite put my finger on. And then I realized what it was. The windows of the lighthouse were intact. The roof was in passable shape. The trails of soot and ash bursting from the windows were entirely absent. The door was solid, not charred. I felt a chill as I read on.

appears to have suffered no structural damage whatsoever. Nevertheless, Morgan explains that he has no intention of returning to his work. Deeply disturbed by this event and left without a home, he has resolved to move. We offer Morgan our deepest condolences and wish him the very best of luck.

The town will advertise the job, but town manager Davis explains that the cost of rebuilding the burned home likely means that the lighthouse will shine no longer. For years, the new lighthouses in Lunenberg and down the coast have made Triumph’s lighthouse little more than a curiosity and, Davis explains, the cost of running it no longer justifies its worth.

I was baffled. I was sure I had seen that lighthouse completely gutted, almost beyond repair, yet the fire reported in the bulletin had not touched it. Nor had any of the bulletins mentioned a second fire, at least before 1930. Why had Jebediah given me the wrong year in his recounting of the story? When, then, had the lighthouse burned, if it was still in decent shape when Morgan’s family met their end?

I resolved to ask Cyrus that evening. I felt that I was really on the trail of something now. If my friend had even gotten to the archives in the church basement, I could see how he could have easily missed the story about the lighthouse, seeing how we had the same guide to the area, a guide who was either misinformed about the correct date or was hiding the date on purpose. However, now that I knew that something strange was going on, I felt sure that I would uncover something worth reading.

That night I enjoyed a dinner with my host, a simple meal of baked fish and more potatoes. I didn’t pry him for any information at dinner, as I had a certain secret weapon in the form of a large bottle of whiskey I’d picked up in Lunenberg. I thought that after dinner I would sit down with Cyrus and the two of us would talk things over, aided by the strong spirits.

I returned to my room later that evening in order to sit down with my notes for a while and come up with some questions for Cyrus. Obviously, I intended to ask him about the second fire at the lighthouse. I also wanted to ask him about any other strange happenings around the town that could have been related to it, as well as some general history of this declining village. My room had a little desk and I poured myself a small glass of the whiskey, sitting down to do my writing. I quickly became engrossed in the story. Visions flitted through my mind of the lighthouse burning. It must have been quite a fire to leave such obvious stains on the outside of the building. I wondered if it would be possible to get inside.

Without warning I was suddenly shocked out of my writing. There was no sound or vision to startle me. Again, like in my dream, I was tense, on edge. My head snapped immediately toward the corner where I had dreamed of the figure, hiding herself behind her hands. There was nobody there. Still, I could not shake this sense of presence, could not deny that there was something in the room with me.

My heart lurched suddenly as I heard a tremendous shattering of glass behind me. Before I could even turn I saw shards of glass rocketing across the room. I spun around and saw that the large mirror across from my bed had completely shattered. Not a piece of it was left on the wall. It had exploded outward, covering the bed and floor with fragmented glass as though something had crashed into it suddenly from behind. Yet it was a wall-mounted mirror, and that would have been impossible.
I was standing and examining the glass, heart pumping, when the door slammed open. I nearly attacked Cyrus Peterson when he burst through the door.
“What the hell’s going on in here?” he bellowed.

“Mr. Peterson, I’m sorry, but this has nothing to do with me,” I explained, doubting seriously that he would believe me. He was scared himself, eyes darting around the room like a nervous cat. “I was at the desk over here, you see?” I gestured madly at my papers scattered everywhere.

Cyrus took a long look around the room and finally sighed. “This house, it’s old, it swells and shrinks. I guess the mirror just got pressed a way it didn’t like. Never seen something like this happen before.” We stood for a moment, both winded with surprise. Finally he glanced at the bed. “Aww, for fuck’s sake.” It was the first time I’d heard him swear. “There’s glass all over your bed, you can’t sleep in that. Pack up your things and I’ll move you to a different room.” I had no arguments.

Unfinished Horror Project

Writer's Note: An unfinished project, most written some time ago, though I've been getting back to it now and I expect to have more soon.

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Mr. Aaron Davis
Bethel, North Dakota
December 19, 1884

My dearest son, Samuel,

A terrible thing has happened these last months. I suspect that I will not see you again, nor will I be alive when the ice and snow thaws in the spring. I have had time to come to terms with this; time is all I have now. I am, I know, the only one left, and as you know, problems of my own leave me confined to this damnable wheel-chair, unable to provide for myself as man was meant. So I know I will not survive this winter– His will be done.

As I noted above, however, I am the last living citizen of the town of Bethel. As such it falls upon me to provide a record of the events, should providence one day sweep this place clean of the wickedness which has so recently brought it to ruin. Your family, my loving wife and your three beautiful sisters, are in the arms of our blessed Lord now, Samuel, and so I address my memoir to you. I will try to explain as much as I can in the time I have left, though I cannot give reason for this thing nor comprehend its work. I fear some great evil in us has called down His fury. Whatever has happened here, know that I have always been proud of you, and that I will be watching over you until we meet in the promised land.

It breaks my heart to recall it, especially to you, my son. My sweet wife was the first to fall victim to whatever happened here. There is some perverse irony at work here– my wife the first, and I the last. Would that our roles could be reversed! Your mother was strong, but not strong enough to resist this. I witnessed her death and it gives me pain every moment of every day. I want nothing more than to be together with her again, but here I remain– the only man alive, left to wile away the hours and days as the last of them all, surrounded by the dead, listening to the howling wind, waiting to die. An awful death like that of your mother, the drawn-out wasting away of your father– that these were the only possibilities speaks to the terror of these times; that all received the former, and only I the latter, speaks to the inscrutability of God’s will.

I was there when the Cerberus germ (as it came to be called) got its start. I was walking with my wife in mid-autumn, she pushing my chair down one of the paths where the river forms the border of my farm. These were paths that I had cut in my younger days, before my affliction, and you helped me, Samuel, before you left Bethel. I was thinking of this when your mother suddenly gave a loud cry– an animal had bitten her ankle. It was like nothing I’d seen before. It was very small, about the size of a mouse, with similar fur, but with no legs or appendages of any kind. It had a large head, but it seemed to be all mouth. I could detect only tiny black pinpricks for eyes. Your mother was kicking desperately, trying to rid herself of the creature, but it had locked onto her tightly. I saw it seem to swell slightly and then tighten its body as it clung to her ankle. It gave a single ecstatic shake and stopped moving, curled up on itself. When she saw this she stopped kicking and I was able to reach for the creature. When I pulled on it, it dislodged easily in my hand and lay motionless in my palm. It was quite dead.

Your mother said she could go on and we went back to the house. I kept the animal with me, balled up inside my hat so as to keep it out of sight. Your mother said she had some soreness in her ankle, but I thought that this was to be expected. As to the nature of the creature itself, I tried not to speculate until I could get a better look at it, although my first assumption was that it was some kind of rodent, deformed somehow, likely mad and near death when we crossed its path.

As soon as we returned to the house I sent your sister Deborah to fetch Dr. Stuart. He examined the wound and declared that it was only a small bite, and that as long as it remained clean, it would heal on its own. He made a bandage for your mother’s ankle and then the doctor and I examined the animal in more detail.

As I mentioned before, it seemed to have no arms or legs, though its matted, grey hair could have been hiding vestigial stumps of the kind sometimes found in other animals when the young are born with such defects. If it was a mouse, then its face was also unnaturally flattened and its mouth extraordinarily large in size. It had no tail. The doctor and I both agreed that we’d not seen the likes of such an animal before, but what of it? Strange monsters are born all the time in the wild. We thus passed the incident off as a curiosity which could not be fully explained but which was not, in the grand scheme of things, so absurd. I burned the creature’s body in the stove and thought no more of the situation until your mother’s condition worsened.

Two or three days later, the wound did not show signs of healing. Your mother’s ankle was swollen and ached constantly. I feared what I thought then was the worst; that the creature that had bitten her had been rabid or otherwise diseased, and that she was having a reaction. Again I sent for Dr. Stuart, who examined the wound and did not seem pleased with what he saw. He gave your mother a pill of some sort or another and replaced the bandage after cleaning the wound. Leaving her with the girls, he gestured for me to follow him outside where he told me, in hushed tones, that if the swelling did not go down in a few days, he would have to consider an amputation. The wound could be serious, could develop into gangrene. My heart sank in my chest at the thought of her having to go through with such a terrible thing. I felt helpless and for a time could not speak. The doctor reassured me that in all likelihood the swelling would go down, before reminding me to fetch him again if it did not. There was nothing else I could do.

We kept her off her feet as much as possible over the next few days. The girls were always helpful and did all the chores. They were smart girls, and I do not expect that they did not, on their own, reach the same conclusion that had been grimly proposed to me by the good doctor regarding your mother’s convalescence. They remained bright and cheerful, though they must have worried for themselves as well, forever bound to serve their invalid father and amputated mother. They said nothing about it and seemed delighted to help. At night we all prayed, together, that everything would turn out well. They were good girls.

The ankle did not get well. The next day it was swollen larger and was giving constant pain. It was black and blue. We changed the bandage and cared for her but she was feverish. The girls and I exchanged furtive, ominous glances over her. Nothing was said. I decided to give it one more day, in blind hope that perhaps this was the peak of a troubling condition, that it would from here on begin to heal. But the next morning, it was worse than before. Your mother was sweating unnaturally and was deeply feverish. I sent one of the girls for cold water and another to fetch the doctor; if this thing had to be done, to save her life, then it would have to be done.

As we waited for the doctor, I got out of my chair and cradled your mother’s head, wiping it with a cloth and the cold water fetched from the well. I tried to calm her, but she was delirious and speaking gibberish. I held her and waited.
When the doctor arrived, he took one look at your mother and his face sank. His eyes met mine and I knew what was going to happen, there was no doubt in the doctor’s eyes. I nodded, feeling ready to collapse. The doctor quietly herded the girls out into the kitchen and told them they needed to leave the house, to go visit a friend. They obediently did as they were told, though there is no doubt in my mind that they knew what would happen. When they were out of the house I began to cry, holding your mother’s head in my lap.

The doctor slowly walked back into the room. He said nothing. I covered your mother’s eyes as he opened a black leather case and retrieved the saw. I sat mortified, holding your mother’s arms, and the doctor did the deed. Two hundred have died since this happened, all of my friends and family except you; I live as the last man in Gomorrah now as the snows begin to fall outside my house, but never in my life have I experienced such horror.

Over the next few weeks we all tried to make do as best we could. Your mother was withdrawn, as one would expect, but her fever had gone down and she seemed to be regaining her strength. We spoke rarely, merely did what we could to get by. She used my chair when she wanted to move around; we had intended for her to get a crutch when she was fully recovered, but the doctor warned us that it would be a long process. We were all simply satisfied that she still lived. There had been a terrible thing that had happened, and it had hurt us all, but we felt as if we could overcome and move on. That is what we thought.

However, the Lord was not done testing us, was only beginning with Bethel. Your mother’s condition, though it looked hopeful at first, soon began to decline. Her breath became labored and ragged. She could barely keep her eyes open most of the time. She stopped talking altogether after a time and would not even answer questions. Each time a new development in her sickness appeared, Deborah would run for the doctor, who would come and examine the situation and look at the wound where the amputation had taken place. He said that such behavior could be the result of an infection, but that the amputation did not appear to be infected. He was perplexed. Every time he came he would come up with some new hypothesis, only to find that it was not borne out by any of his tests. I fear the man almost lost his mind worrying about the poor woman.

She began to waste away before our eyes, and there was nothing to be done for it. Your sisters and I cared for her as best we could, but still she rarely opened her eyes and never spoke. She was still capable of moving her limbs, but did so in no directed manner, her arms and legs simply flopping occasionally like cold fish.
Eventually the doctor decided that it would be best if we took her in to Bismarck. I eagerly agreed, feeling that at last there was something to be done about the poor woman. The voyage would have to be done immediately; it was drawing on winter and the doctor feared she might not make the voyage in the cold air. The girls made a stretcher for her and we set out for the wagon, the doctor and two of the girls carrying your poor mother, the other girl attending to my wheel-chair. I felt like a hopeless child.

Before we got to the wagon, we passed a certain tree in the yard. I’m sure you know the one of which I speak, directly in the center of the field between the house and the barn. As we passed under this tree your mother suddenly gave a moaning cry, like nothing I’d ever heard before. We had not heard her voice for days and this sound shook us all to the core. We stopped in sudden surprise, staring at her. Her eyes slowly slid open. They were cloudy and dim. They seemed to seek out the branches of the tree under which we passed, but they did not focus. There was a brief moment of silence, the most ominous heavy silence I have ever encountered. And again she gave a ragged, unearthly moan. Her limbs began to twitch and her back arched violently. She began to shake and the doctor and the girls were unable to keep her on the stretcher. She collapsed to the ground, shuddering and kicking. She rose for one moment on her knees and stretched her face up to the heavens, and then, dear God, the sight I have had burned into my memory ever since, her mouth dropped open and with a guttural, violent groan a massive cloud of black particles erupted from her mouth and issued like a plume of smoke into the sky.

She collapsed on the ground. She gave a last spastic shudder and we heard her final breath escape her lungs. A trickle of blood, thick with the black spores, dripped from her lips. There was sudden uproar among us– the girls wailing loudly, crowding around their mother, holding her head, her hands– the doctor, his face a mask of shock and terror, huddling over her body and bellowing at the girls to step back so that he could test for signs of life– I, stunned, left helpless and alone, staring in dismal mute despair, tears pouring silently down my face as I watched this grim spectacle and tried to believe it was a nightmare and nothing more.

The doctor and the girls were peppered with the black seeds. I could see it clinging to their arms and faces. They seemed not to notice. I saw with abject sorrowful apathy that my clothes and skin also bore the seeds. They even clung to the branches of the tree under which your mother had died. On that day under the tree next to our house, the Cerberus germ started its life. The thing, the godforsaken disease that killed this town, it used her body to carry itself. I comfort myself by thinking that she was truly dead before this happened. Remember, my son, that the primal breath given by God to man is that of language and thus human wisdom. When that accursed blackness took her speech, she was dead in mind, waiting in paradise while the germ played with her mortal shell like a puppet. She was innocent and pure, and was not tainted by the foulness that claimed her life. Always remember that.

It was much later when we learned of the full effects of the Cerberus germ. We attended to all the proper procedures for your mother. We buried her in the town cemetery, of course, and grieved over her. It was as though I had lost the sun. I turned to drink, and was myself an ogre to my children and to my friends. I feel deeply sorry for it but it is the truth.

The doctor consulted all of his books and found absolutely no record of a sickness like the one that had afflicted your mother. At one point several days later, he had saddled his horse and resolved to ride to Bismarck to consult some professional acquaintances, and I encouraged him in this task, but the Lord in His mercy sent a sudden violent blizzard such that the doctor had to turn back after only a few miles. It is often I have given thanks that the doctor was not allowed to reach Bismarck, for if the germ should spread beyond Bethel, there is no saying what could happen.

It was shortly after this that the children and the doctor began to experience symptoms. We had not, until this point, known that the thing was contagious. Much like your mother had recovered for a time after the amputation, the girls and the doctor showed no symptoms for almost a week after the terrible event under the tree. The spores had washed off easily. I am no man of science but it seems to me that they were only a means of delivery, much like the dandelion’s seed, and that whatever germ the form took was dependent on the black plumes only to get them to a host.

As I say, the girls and the doctor all came down almost at the same time with symptoms with which I was already familiar. There was a fever, their breath grew slow and labored. They spoke less and less, seemed exhausted all the time. I attended to them as best I could. My soul had turned to ice. My wife was gone and now my children were ill with what seemed the same condition. I went to visit the doctor as often as possible but had less and less time. I spent my days shut inside my house with my daughters, telling them stories from their brief childhood even when they seemed not to be listening, and waited for what I feared was inevitable.
Soon enough, they stopped talking altogether. I continued to wait, with chilling certainty, trying to feed them, all the while feeling like a man trapped in the most morbid and dismal dream, as if I were the new and permanent guest of despair incarnate.

In time, the same gruesome expectoration that took place in your mother claimed each of your sisters, one by one. I sat with their bodies for a day, the black spores milling about like dust before breaking apart and vanishing. I wanted to die. I wanted whatever had happened to my family to happen to me, for I knew it was only a matter of time, and I had nothing left to live for. On one terrible day I carried the bodies of your poor sisters outside one at a time, nestled in my lap like when they were babies, slowly wheeling my chair and sobbing. I laid them next to one another with hands together and burned their bodies, for I am an invalid, and cannot on my own dig graves. I knew it was only a matter of time for the rest of the town but felt no need to hasten the downfall of any particular citizen by asking for his help giving my daughters their final rest. I never went back to see the doctor. I heard he died the next day.



I have been dreaming much since the death of the townspeople. I do not know if it is idleness which prompts this, the lack of human contact which draws the mind toward its own illusory creations, or whether the tragedy which struck the town and my family is causing me to refuse rest in the face of the enormity of this diseased reality. Whatever the cause, where I once slept soundly, I now rest but fitfully, waking often to the impossible silence and darkness of the town, feeling stripped not only of my ambulatory functions but of all sense and feeling aside from that of my clammy skin on the bedclothes. Often in my dreams there is a figure I do not recognize, always just out of sight. I feel as though it is watching me, but when I focus my attention on it, the image blurs, or my gaze is drawn elsewhere, and when I look back, the figure has departed again, slipped behind an empty house, or lost in the darkness of the forest.

Tonight I dreamed of a story my mother told me when I was young. She read to me from the fairy tales of the brothers Grimm, from a volume I remember well; the binding was broken and mended several times over, the once-rich green covers lightened to near-grey from age. I knew every story in that book practically by rote, but the one which truly held me was not a fantasy, but had its basis in truth. The story I dreamed of last night was that of the Pied Piper of Hameln. How I chilled as a child to the thought of that man who many say was the devil himself, all prancing in his multihued finery and lilting on his pagan pipe. A sickly-sweet nightmare, the memory of joy, rotten inside. Last night I witnessed the day when he returned for his due, dancing up and down the streets on that feast day of Saints John and Paul, the children wrenching themselves from the arms of their pleading parents and dancing glassy-eyed after the man into a cave across the valley. To kidnap, to steal people away in the night or to capture them as prisoner, is enough to shock the spirit; to lead them willingly away, by some wicked means to sway their own volition, is an entirely more obscene thing. It is an evil that spreads, like the curse which has lately stricken this town, and taken for its own not only the body, but the very words and breath of life, and had the sacrilege and the blasphemous daring to make participants of its victims.

Of the children of Hameln: Their subsequent history is a question not resolved, left open still to the story's varied tellers. Most say that they were led away through a passage in the mountain, brought out to the other side a new nation, perhaps in corrupt pagan imitation of the Jews and their holy guide Moses. There are tales of peoples in Moravia and Transylvania whose customary attire is of bright and varied colors and whose language is a joining of the local tongue and an elder German. Others say the children were led to slaughter in the Crusades, or that they were simply murdered and left for their parents to find in the fields and forests. It is said that only two children were spared from whatever fate the Piper laid on Hameln that day; one blind, unable to see the children to follow them out of town, the other lame, without the ability to dance along to doom or rebirth with the others. Am I that lame child? It is said that both spent the rest of their days bemoaning that their weaknesses kept them from following the others, so powerful was the sorcery of the Piper. This I do not doubt. I too spend my days now agonizing over the fact that only I remain, wishing to be with my loved ones, pleading with God to remove me to them, though I know it cannot be long now. Beyond it all is the question that never leaves me, the question which causes me to stir at night and invent apparitions in multicolored silken finery- why was I chosen to be the only witness to this event? And what does God want of me that he leaves me amid all this death, to see it all as my food grows short, to listen in utter isolation as the poisoned wolves open graves by night?