IV
I love Stansbury. I love Vermont. Heck, I love the United States of America. Great places, one and all. The people of the town, the state and the country all know that these are places that you can do just about anything you want. I know that I can do what I want even though I haven’t always done what I wanted to do. There are times when I go down and sit by my bridge - and it’s only my bridge in the way that it is my lake or my town or my state or my country… my ego isn’t so large as to think that I am the owner of all these things, I possess them in the way that we all claim ownership of those things around us - and admire the craftsmanship of it.
It’s not a normal bridge. Not that anything is normal, but there are standards of things that people come to think of as normal. Yes, it is a covered bridge in Vermont and these are not entirely uncommon. But Lord Stansbury’s bridge is different. For one, it spans a small lake. A beautiful lake that glows with the seasons, green in spring and summer, gold, orange and red in fall - our season to be sure - and white in winter. The bridge crosses it. That’s all it does. It doesn’t join a broken road over a creek or span a river valley. It would seem to be there to get you from one side of the lake to the other a few minutes quicker than you would if you just walked around. It doesn’t seem to make any sense at all. Of course, those of us that have been around it for some time know just exactly why it was built and it wasn’t to bridge the beautiful little lake just outside of Stansbury. If you know the right things to say and do, it can take you other places. Places you might not want to go. And then, of course, there is its construction. Every plank was laid with care in endlessly complex designs. It can unsettle you a little to ponder just how long it took to place each board and peg. Some of the planks seem to bend at impossible angles and some of the corners inside do not seem to be corners at all, but seem to bend in dark curves. If you stand on the bridge too long, it can unsettle you some, like that choking feeling you get when you wander through a graveyard. And then, of course, there’s the color. It’s red. It’s always red and doesn’t ever seem to fade no matter the season. It’s an unnatural red that tints the moonlit lake bloody. Gil, a local seller of all things Vermont and keeper of Stansbury lore, once told me there was no way anyone could be painting it. He would know. I’m sure he also knows that the bridge was made to keep itself. It’s part of the design of the thing. If you’re ever in Stansbury, I’m sure you’ll go down and pay it a visit. You should. It is a beautiful thing to look at.
Have you ever really looked at the way things, like bridges, are put together? Every piece cut just so and sanded down and put into its perfect place to create a whole, perfect thing? Some people just don’t get it. They look at the constructs of man and see…things. They see the whole thing and they look for flaws and sure, there are flaws. I see them, sure. But I try to look beyond them to see the whole of a thing. Even Lord Stansbury’s bridge has flaws - that it was ever made, well, that could be considered a flaw of a kind. But those flaws are in the people looking at the things ever so much more than in the people who made the things. Everything they see is filtered through their prisms of imperfect thought and their negative worldview. They don’t love their towns or states or countries. They don’t love their mothers and sisters and neighbors. They don’t really much love themselves. They can’t see the love that the craftsmen and craftswomen - I’ve been trying to do better at recognizing the great works of women. I’ve even been reading great books by women recently because I read an article about the great works of women, how they were often neglected by a society that mostly promoted the great works of men. To tell you the truth, the great works of women are no better or worse than the great works of men. Some are greater than others and some are lesser than others. Ultimately what I think is great may be different than what you think is great. You know what? That’s just fine for the both of us so long as we don’t think less of one another for our opinions on great works. If you like something I don’t, that’s just fine, just so long as you like something and want to talk to me about it. If you don’t like anything, then there’s no use talking to you because you’ll never understand why I like what I like. If you don’t like anything, you might as well not exist. They can’t see the love that the craftspeople put into their works because they have never made anything. All they can do is complain.
I was in a restaurant in Boston recently. It wasn’t the greatest restaurant I had ever been to - that one burned down a few years back…I promise you I had nothing to do with that - but I was enjoying my meal just the same. I saw what the chef was trying to do with his flavor profiles. He was trying to be original in the way that chefs take a standard dish and put a twist on it. The way a chef might take macaroni and cheese and, instead of macaroni, use rigatoni. Then they put in a combination of cheeses, I really like it when they put in some Roquefort with a little bit of chevre, it’s just a nice mix of that sharp blue taste and the creaminess of the goat. I love that. That is the kind of alteration of a classic that makes sense to me. They like to add little bits of meat like pancetta or venison sausage and then cook it in an individual crock-pot with a layer of Parmesan crust on top. It can be delicious. At this restaurant in Boston, it wasn’t quite delicious and I didn’t quite love it, but I loved the chef for trying it all out because he really wanted to make something sublime and had just missed the mark. I’m sure that, given time, he would realize the dish would be better served without the white truffles. Chefs have this weird attraction to truffles or truffle oil…these things go well in some dishes, but not all dishes… and they keep sticking them into everything.
So I was there enjoying my meal, because even though it wasn’t perfect, I found things about it to enjoy. I always do this. It is the best way to live. I urge you to try it rather than finding things to complain about. You will live longer, I promise you. So I was there enjoying my meal and there was a gentleman at the next table over who was not. I was there, at that restaurant in Boston, when I heard this gentleman at the table next to mine ask the server if she could get the manager. The server very politely asked if there was something she could do. Her name was Felicity. She introduced herself to me as Felicity when she told me about the specials, including the chef’s special macaroni and cheese which she said was the best she had ever eaten and, even though I disagreed with her, I told her I understood why she thought it was the best she ever had and that her passion for the dish was to be commended. She gave me the genuine smile of someone who knows how to love things. Felicity wasn’t smiling as she walked away from the customer who had insulted her by telling her she was not qualified to do anything for him. He could have rephrased his remark. He could have been polite. You can ask to speak to a superior and be nice about it. You should always be nice. You never know who might take offense.
With his unfortunate dismissal of Felicity, I had to downgrade him from gentleman at that point to customer. A gentleman can resolve things without cruelty. This customer was the cruel sort who believed that he would be better served through belligerence and bullying. The manager was Mark, who had come by earlier and introduced himself to me when he checked in to see how I was enjoying my meal. Mark, who I learned a lot about over a glass or two of single malt scotch at a local tavern, the best drink in the best kind of establishment, had a degree in Hotel and Restaurant Management because all he ever wanted was to provide people with the best possible service. When he was young he had always seen people behind desks at hotels or behind podiums at restaurants or bringing him food or drinks or whatever he ordered and they were always smiling and seemed so glad to see him and so happy to be serving him. He told me he thought that it must be the greatest thing on earth to serve people what they wanted because that made the people being served happy. Mark wanted nothing more than to make people happy.
Mark, who made me happy with his rare ability to find pleasure in serving others, put on his best smile when he went to deal with the customer at the next table. He put on that smile even tho
ugh Felicity came to him in tears because the customer made her feel that she couldn’t be of service. Mark still wanted to make the customer happy. The customer did not want to be happy, though. The customer wanted a free meal and the customer wanted to make Mark miserable. The customer wouldn’t even get any perverse pleasure out of this. He didn’t even know what he was doing except that he could never be happy. He couldn’t stand it when others were happy. He really couldn’t stand it when others tried to make him happy. Mark could not help the customer. Mark was well trained in his craft and knew he could not satisfy this man, no matter what he offered him because Mark refused to be made miserable about his work. Mark refused to provide free meals when there was not a real reason for it. Mark wouldn’t even offer a free dessert to customers like this one because Mark knew that it was a perverse game they were playing and Mark refused to play it. Mark loved his work and he loved making people happy through his service. He also knew that some people were simply incapable of being happy and he refused to play along with their attempts at dragging everyone around them into their miserable excuse for a life. As I watched the events, I knew I wanted to know more about Mark, of course. He was worth knowing. But I really wanted to know more about the customer.
I invited Mark and Felicity out for drinks afterwards and ended up treating the entire staff of the restaurant. It was my pleasure. I was fortunate in my birth as far as money is concerned. It has never been something I have worked for or worried about. I spend it as freely as it was given to me. I listened to the staff as they opened up to me about their lives. I was the friendly patron buying drinks and people open up with a scotch or two they don’t have to pay for. As interested in them as I was, and I am always interested in good people, what I really wanted to know was how they dealt with the customer, who I decided was incapable of enjoying this life or loving anything. After Mark refused to give the customer a single concession, the man loudly announced that he would never eat at the restaurant again and that he would not be tipping Felicity. Mark smiled at the customer and said that was his right. As Mark passed by my table, I pulled a hundred dollar bill from my billfold and told him to give it to Felicity. Mark did not seem surprised by my generosity. He recognized that I was someone who was happy to be served and happy to serve others and I could see that my act had restored Mark’s positive spirit somewhat.
It didn’t take too much work to discover the customer’s name and address. Dr. Dennis Covington was an economist who taught at Boston College. He wasn’t a tenured faculty member. He was a lecturer who bounced from college to university to college and never really found his way into a tenured position. I was fairly certain it was because once people got to know him, and people in academia, while cloistered and self-aggrandizing, still had some insight into others, especially those whose jobs were to discover potential professors… once they got to know him, they recognized that he was not a very effective educator because he hated his subject in as much as he hated everything and the only reason he had drifted into teaching economics was because after years of studying the economy in the hopes that he could attain some measure of wealth, he discovered that he had no talent for acquiring wealth. In fact, he discovered that he had no talent for anything, which was probably a reason that he hated everyone else, especially those who were talented in whatever it was that they did. People like Mark, who were talented at serving others, for instance. Dr. Covington spent his nights hating everything he watched religiously on television and then going on the Internet to blog about just how much he hated the latest reality show or hour-long drama.
I took some time away from Stansbury to audit one of his courses that he hated teaching. I never felt one way or the other about the study of economics. I’m sure it was important in some way for the functioning of the world and that without experts in it, the world as we know it would end and people would go back to trading chickens for walls. After a few classes with Dr. Covington, however, I felt that the world just might be a much better place without Dr. Covington studying economics. I talked with the other students in the class, which was the primer on economics that all non-majors enrolled in when they decided to use economics as a means of satisfying some requirement in their degree program. To a person, they all felt that a world without Dr. Covington teaching economics would be a better one. They at least felt that their Boston College experience would be vastly improved if he were not their professor so early on - or, in the case of a few, so late in - their academic careers. He made people wish for anarchy. I found Internet chat groups and web pages solely devoted to the mutual hate of Dr. Dennis Covington. I forwarded them to my friends Mark and Felicity and they told me that they would circulate his picture to other restaurants in the area in the hopes that no one else would have to suffer him as a customer. I quietly encouraged students to start a petition to have him fired from his post at the college. I quietly encouraged his neighbors in his Back Bay apartment building to start a petition to have him evicted from the building.
Janie Danielson, a sophomore at BC, offered to go to the administration and claim that he sexually harassed her. I could not be responsible for adding any sins to Dr. Covington’s resume. It was not allowed. He had to be the maker of his own despicable life. And, to be honest, I detest liars. Janie said that she didn’t need my permission and she was right. She didn’t. But I was doing a service in removing Dr. Covington from the lives of others. For him to serve the greater good of Stansbury, it was required for him to ultimately understand that it was entirely his own fault for what was happening to him. If he could point a finger at Janie Danielson and say that her lies were his undoing, it would give him a righteousness that he did not deserve and the spell would not work. The Dennis Covingtons are too rare and valuable to allow to spoil. When I cut Janie’s throat, I wasn’t especially gentle about it nor did I spend any real amount of time planning it. I didn’t give her any explanations. She was a filthy liar and didn’t deserve anything more than a cow at a slaughterhouse would get. Gil, who before selling stuffed moose and maple syrup to tourists had knocked around the country and worked for a time at a slaughterhouse, told me that they only cut the throats of the cows after they knocked them in the head with a hydraulic bolt… unless it was a Kosher place and then they cut their throats to kill them. I didn’t even stick around to watch her bleed out, and normally I felt it my duty to watch the life leave a person. Her death would never be useful to me. I couldn’t have her ruining my plans with Dr. Covington.
It only took me a few months to have Dr. Covington removed from the life he haphazardly built in Boston. The college chose not to renew his contract. His apartment manager, having found out about his termination by the college, used that as an excuse to terminate his lease. None of the restaurants in the area would serve him and he was banned from all the television Internet sites where he frequently posted his noxious opinions. Now here was the part I hoped for. Dr. Covington, for his many faults, wasn’t an entirely stupid man. Regardless of what some government workers who are kept from promotion due to the lack of a Ph.D. think, most people with a doctorate to their credit have a modicum of intelligence. Dr. Covington figured out that he was the target of a campaign against him and became somewhat focused on finding his tormentor. I wasn’t especially worried about any violent acts from him. It didn’t fit his character. At the most, he might write some nasty things about me on his blog and then there would be things written about me on the Internet. I work very hard to make sure nothing is ever written about me on the Internet because then it will be there forever. Once it is on the Internet, it is there forever. I did, however, want Dr. Covington to find me.
You see, I need someone filled with a good, strong hatred of everything. These people aren’t easy to find. Most of the time, they are in prison because they beat or killed someone. Or they just go and kill themselves. Most of the time, they find something that they like, even amongst all the hate. Maybe they do drugs and they like the high enough to realize that the
high is better than the hate. Maybe they read a book and it finally speaks to something inside of them and they are able to stop hating for the briefest moment that it takes to discover that there is so much about the world to like and then love and they learn to love. But there are those, like Dr. Covington, who are somehow able to go through their lives building up their hatred over time and, not being violent, are able to exist in that perfect state. I need someone like that because I love Stansbury.
Stansbury is a different kind of town. It really has no right to exist with everything that has happened there over the years. Oh, sure, I could accept a lot of the blame for the things that have happened, but I’ll only take the blame if you give me credit for all the good that I have done. There have been so many times that the town could have slipped from the map, given the number of tragic events that have befallen it. For instance, when that busload of young army recruits drafted from the town to fight in Vietnam went to their doom, it could have killed the town. For years, it looked like it was going that way too because people just wouldn’t forget about it in any meaningful way. You see, in order for people to move on and get back to their lives, they have to forget about all those bad things that happen. If the people who lived in Stansbury remembered that bus crash in any meaningful way, that kind of darkness would have grown like a cancer and eaten the very heart away from the community. You can’t live with that kind of darkness. You just can’t and you’ll either slowly let it kill you or you’ll leave. I knew after that bus crash, much like I’ve known after many of the other tragedies that have brought the town to the brink of destruction, that I needed to cut out the cancer of those memories.
There always has to be a sacrifice, though. It is something my father taught me. He said for as long as Stansbury had been around, our family was there as well. We were the caretakers who made sure the town survived the blackness that Lord Stansbury cursed it with. The bridge, so beautiful and foul, is an abomination that holds the worst of Lord Stansbury’s magic in it and it will eat the town and then other towns beyond it if left unchecked. Stansbury needs to survive if only to protect the world from the bridge. My family, we know the secret of forgetting. It’s a powerful spell that keeps the town from thinking on things too much. We are the keepers of it and we are responsible for making sure it is used judiciously. My father told me that we couldn’t make them forget every bad thing that happened. Bad things happen and they always will. In Stansbury, however, bad things happen a whole lot because there is so much bad luck and there is so much bad luck because of the bridge that Lord Stansbury built. My father and his fathers before him tried to destroy the bridge for as long as they had been keeping the town alive. No one knew how to do it, the magic that made the thing being as strong as it was. Sometimes it took unspeakable acts to combat it.
After the bus took all those young men from the town, I was sick with what I knew it would take to make it right and I almost didn’t do it. I was very close to letting the town of Stansbury go its merry way because if we all just left it, if we stopped feeding it, then maybe it would die and maybe that would be a good thing. I could go and live and love life without having to be responsible for a battle that, at the time, I didn’t have the heart to fight.
Years before that, I asked my father if he knew what had been done to make the bridge, to set the curse. He told me that it was the darkest evil. He looked through the bridge once, saw where it really went, not just to the other side of the lake but to the other side of reality, and knew that only the foulest of creatures could have imagined it into being. There were horrors on the other side that were beyond anything rational men had nightmares to awake screaming from… he couldn’t speak of them without turning pale and breaking into a sweat. He told me he knew that if they could ever fully open the passage back across the bridge, they would spread their horror across the world. He was always afraid to try to destroy it because he said the bridge or whatever it was that made it had a way of tricking you. He told me his great-grandfather had been tricked and it drove him mad. Father decided that to be a caretaker was enough. He would keep them all forgetting until I could take over and then he would forget too. He told me that he prayed for the day he would forget.
On that day, the day he forgot, that day he was happy as I had never seen him. He told me that he loved Stansbury and he went out for a walk. That day the bridge took him. Sheriff Jim told me that it was one of those freak accidents that were all too common in Stansbury. My father stopped in at Osno’s to pick up some unguent for an infection that had been lingering for a time. On his way out of the pharmacy, he slipped on some ice on the step and cracked his head against the corner of the curb. It happened that quickly. I could only nod at the sheriff as he offered his sympathies. Whatever it was that my father had worked to keep from destroying the town for all those years finally seized upon its opportunity and took him. I expect no less from it when I choose to forget it all. If I choose to forget it all. I am not sure if I deserve to forget all those things I have done in the name of this town. When that bus went down, I knew I would have to do something drastic to keep it all together. But I thought I’d be clever and see if I could take the curse off the town while I was at it. I was still young about this business then and thought I could somehow do more then all those who came before me. Father warned me. But the hubris of youth… I thought with all my studies into the occult and with the accumulated knowledge of the centuries of caretakers that I could somehow break the town of the curse. I knew it would cost us all. But you have to pay, don’t you?
Sometimes in life you have to pay dearly. You give up one set of friends for another if there can be some kind of greater happiness in the giving. You give up one lover for another if you think the love will be stronger. I knew the town would have to pay to be rid of the curse of damned Lord Stansbury. And I was sure I knew how to do it. I had read the darkest books of the kind that old sorcerer used. I knew how to do it. I found the counter spells to close his gate that my father and his fathers before knew could never be closed. I would set fire to it all, but I would have to sacrifice the most beautiful of all things to do it.
I had been watching them for years, the same as everyone else. Jenny and John were perfect little children in love, just the kind the spell called for. Innocent only in the way that children who are in love but know nothing of love can be. If I killed just one of them and said the words of forgetting, it would erase the pain of the memory of the awful bus crash from the minds of the town. They lived with it for a few years and I could see it was just starting to eat away at the fabric of the place, but I waited because I knew I could make it all go away if I just waited for Jenny and John to mature almost enough to lose their innocence. They had to be ripe but not rotten. That’s what the book said. I thought I was so clever with that damned book. Ripe but not rotten. I was rotten. I could have taken someone else and made the town forget the bus, but I wanted to be more than a caretaker. I wanted to be a hero even though nobody but me would ever know I was the hero. I wanted to be able to leave the town I loved and see the rest of the world knowing the town I loved was safe because I did something heroic and made this horrible sacrifice to save the town. I know that whatever it is that keeps the bridge’s power in tact led me to that awful book with that spell. Ripe but not rotten. I had to do it. I was so sure when I took those perfect kids and did those…things. Sacrifice is an awful thing. It is not just the cutting of a throat and a word. Ritual sacrifice is complex and horrible. There are long chants that you have to learn by heart. Chants in forgotten languages that you must remember with deadly precision. Then there’s the victims. And the knife. Ripe but not rotten. Oh yes, they were my victims. I cried the whole time as I chanted. I could not just cut John’s throat and let his blood do the work. No. That’s not how it works. It works because it is a horrible thing to do and it asks for a horrible service. I had to cut John as Jenny watched in horror. I could not stop to explain how they were dying for the greate
r good. I had to chant and cut. Strips of living flesh. I had to cut Jenny as John cried in agony and horror. I could not tell him that he and his purest love were the real heroes and their death would keep everyone they knew safe from the horror of the bridge. I had to chant and cut and tie. Strips of living flesh extending from one to the other, tied in knots seeming random and insane in design, but perfect to their purpose. Each knot was salted with my tears. As I completed the spell, a spell not intended to destroy this thing but to take the life from these two young… Ripe but not rotten. I could see their very lives sucked from them as the bridge absorbed their essence. I could feel it mocking me for infusing it with power once more. I knew what I had done and I knew I would have to spend the rest of my life paying for it.
Yes, the town forgot about the bus. Hardly anyone gave a thought to it and, when they did, their thoughts were as light as helium and floated away without a care. Most of the town quickly forgot about Jenny and John. Some even denied they existed at all because to remember what I had done to them would have been like a stake through the town’s heart. Sheriff Ben remembers, but only because he really wants to remember and if he knew it was me… Well, I think he would kill me as I stand with no regrets. I have toyed with telling him just so he’d do it and I would be done. But I have a responsibility. Gil remembers because Gil never forgets a thing about this town.
And I remember.
I remember cutting Jenny to make the symbol right as the book said I had to. I remember her tears and how she and John never stopped looking at one another as I committed horror upon horror to their flesh. I couldn’t tell her how sorry I was and how this was for the town and how I was being a hero because I had to keep chanting. I finished the chant and I finished the spell and then I heard him laughing at me. That laughter echoed through the bridge along with something else. There was a terrible noise, like some unearthly music that nobody was ever meant to hear and it played and when I stand in silence I can still hear it because nobody was ever meant to hear it and the music knows that and it wants to find me. I looked at what I had done to that boy and that girl who were oh so ripe and who would never be rotten and I saw whatever energy it was that kept that bridge from rotting seep back into it from the horror that hides beyond this beautiful place and I knew I had been made to renew that thing I had come to destroy.
I didn’t throw in the towel then - and boy, did I spend a few nights with a shotgun in my mouth - because I still had to take care of the town. I still loved Stansbury.
I love Stansbury more than myself, really. My life is no longer about me. I’m not a hero and I don’t get to travel around the world knowing I have made it all better. I haven’t. I have to keep this place together for the rest of my life. That is my penance. Sometimes, that requires me to do some dark deeds. I am no saint and I am no hero. But I keep it all together.
So I look for the worst people, and there are some pretty bad people out there. There are people like Dr. Dennis Covington who seethe with hatred and who can be counted on to spread their disease to as many people as they can find in order to create a world that hates itself as much as they hate themselves. I try to find those people because I can use them to erase some of the pain the good people of this town feel for a time. That’s how this spell works. It’s so much simpler. It’s just a few words and a twist of a knife and they go and take the most recent cancer with them. Easy. Right now, there’s nothing for the town to forget, but I can feel it coming. I’ve felt it coming for a good long time.
Dr. Covington will find me. I left him an easy trail and he is not a stupid man. He’ll come and he’ll seek answers and he’ll get none. If he comes too soon, he’ll wait with me. He may pity himself a bit, but he’ll wait with me for the bad thing to happen. If he comes after whatever it is that I need to protect the town from, well… It’s just a few words and a twist of the knife and he’ll hear the music and he’ll understand that the universe has horrors in it. He’ll know why he has to join them. He’ll see that his death is necessary. He won’t care because he doesn’t know how. The bad thing is coming soon. When it does, Dr. Covington’s life will finally have some value.
I love Stansbury. I love Vermont. I love the United States of America. I even love this world.
I think I’ll go for a walk and sit by my bridge. I’ll sit by it and admire the skill that made it. I’ll sit by it and remember what I did to keep it there. I’ll sit by it and listen to that ghastly music that never stops playing. I’ll sit by it and suffer for my sins and wait.
Lakebridge: Spring (Supernatural Horror Literary Fiction) Page 19