These childhood and adolescent memories and speculations shrink away, replaced by the blue-black of the night. If my direction has remained at least mostly true, I should be reaching the abandoned school before long. Already the buildings around me, sparse and almost camouflaged in the abundant green encroaching on them, are of the abandoned sort, derelict and time-whipped. The vegetation works tirelessly, if slowly, to reclaim the land that has always belonged to it, pressing in through floors, eating away at poorly treated wood, crumbling chimneys, and caving-in rooftops.
In one building nearby, an enormous tree has fallen right into a house and now occupies half of it. Wooden porches host tangles of weeds and shrubs, and here and there, a door is missing completely. I wonder whether nature confiscated these doors or humans have repurposed them. Some doors cling to their formal jambs by just one hinge, causing the brass to warp and bend.
Windows are covered in thick layers of dirt and grime, and even if they weren’t, I’d imagine I wouldn’t be able to see anything anyway, as little to no light could flourish in such dense forest. I speculate that the landscape was quite a lot clearer twenty, thirty, sixty years ago. Now, aside from the main road which led me out of the town, I can’t even discern any paths for walking, not even blazed trails where bored teenagers might have come through on nights of empowered rebellion. This comes at my dismay; I do my best to leave as few traces of my passage as possible, and stomping over this dense greenery will be a direct hindrance to that goal. I’ll probably have left some visible footprints on the main path too, but those are quite a lot subtler, nearly impossible to notice from a distance and more difficult still to discern from the other unevenness of the terrain. In contrast, a swath of trodden-on grass and weeds in the middle of an overgrown forest is noticeable from quite a distance away.
Still, my curiosity has a stronger grip on me than prudence, a dynamic that is a rarity indeed. Also a result of that is that I’m fully prepared to make some audible noises as collateral risk of my investigation. My normally methodical, silent movement is replaced by a clumsier counterpart, as though someone turned my volume up using a remote control that has been lost for a decade.
My feet fush fush fush through the grass, my feet and shins quickly becoming wet with dew and sending remaining droplets cascading to the ground. The first structure I approach, a cottage that looks like it was yanked from a fairy tale and planted in the pages of a much darker story, is missing its two front windows entirely; whatever force removed them left not so much as a jagged sliver of glass in the frame. I elect to use this as my entrance rather than the door, which is intact and almost certain to squeak loudly on its cold, rusty hinges.
Exploring places that have been abandoned, such as this, inspires in me an interesting cocktail of emotions. At the forefront, I feel a thrill—the same juvenile brand of it that accompanied me when I used to run away. Just beyond that sentiment lies a sense of curious wonder, and it seems that the only function of this feeling is to urge me to explore further and farther, to satisfy curiosity and to plunge myself deeper into the surreal. Underneath that, I taste the less-than-subtle undertones of melancholy; an empathy for the losses incurred here and a compassionate longing that echoes with phrases like what if or could have been.
Oddly, it’s a sensation I quite enjoy. Perhaps it appeals to the morbid curiosity of the soul, one rarely acknowledged and just as seldom satisfied. Even more than that, however, we outlived them. We survived to see the answers to questions that these people didn’t know they should have been asking. We get a rare, privileged glimpse into our past and their future simultaneously.
Plus, creepy shit is cool.
My feet descend upon a thick layer of dust and, from what I can see, no trespassers have intruded upon this cottage in recent years. When my shoes touch the ground, the familiar emotional clusterfuck runs through me like a current.
The living room looks as though it was inspired by Little House on the Prairie, but I suppose that when functionality takes up so much in the way of resources and materials, home décor and interior design take a back seat to livability and sole comfort. A wood-burning fireplace sits in the far wall, wide and sturdy, made of stones and built to accommodate huge pots of water for cooking or bathing. The structure still bears the chars from the last fire stoked in it.
A wooden bookshelf spans the entire length of the west wall, fitted with small nooks and shelves meant to display trinkets and photographs, though neither are present. I put on gloves and open the low cabinets, searching for nothing in particular, and finding just that. Cabinet after cabinet reveals nothing more than more thick dust, as undisturbed as the rest of the house, except for the very last one, which contains a picture frame that’s cracked and completely without a photograph to frame.
My footsteps within the cottage are muffled by the excessive dust, but still collide audibly with the floor, popping through the silence. They sound of a firm but hollow sturdiness. The other half of the main floor is dedicated to the kitchen. It has the same rustic, musty smell as the living room, but the melancholy is thicker somehow, as if the ghosts of those who cooked meals here reach through time to cast their longing onto me.
Whether taken by the former occupants when they vacated or by looters later on, the cabinets, cupboards, and pantry are barren of cooking instruments of any kind. The dust on the shelves is substantially thinner than that on the floor and counters, but it is still a thick layer indeed. The nickel in the metal knobs and handles of drawers and cabinets has come forth in a green filter, and rust plagues the iron alloys.
As I snoop through the cabinets, a small, white triangle catches my eye, pinned against the back of one such unit. I pull the shelf out slightly and it slips below, where I am able to retrieve it by opening the cabinet beneath it. I pull a small plastic bag out of my pack and deposit the paper. This isn’t a crime scene, certainly, but if I do decide, later on, that I want to find out more about this object, it’s only prudent to be as careful as possible, and prudence is one strategy I virtually always try to implement.
The item is the corner of a sheet of paper, mostly white but mildly yellowed over the years. It looks to have been torn from some sort of handwritten letter. In an elegant, cursive script, the portion displayed on my trinket reads “Dear Dean,” before cutting off so abruptly that the name could be Deanna or any number of things that begin with ‘Dean.’ Or even ‘Deam.’ But that strikes me as less likely. A gust of wind rattles the house. Or, what’s left of it.
I tuck the paper into the pages of the book in my pack (The Trespasser by Tana French) and continue looking around for any more forgotten relics, trinkets, documents, ghosts. But I find none. After one final visual sweep of the main area, I walk to the base of the stairs, set directly between the kitchen and living room, enclosed by a full wall rather than railings alone. Like the floor, the staircase is exposed wood, and I push outward, against the walls, stepping on the very edges to minimize the weight I put into the middles of the stairs. They seem sturdy enough, but you never know with these older buildings, and I’d much rather risk being overly cautious than risk falling through the stairs and getting impaled by a broken plank. Every step creaks loudly, calling out in pain after decades of disuse.
The upper floor is also wood, but a frayed runner covers the bulk of the surface in the hallway, an ugly crochet piece made out of the remains of old clothes, it seems. It sits perfectly centered in the hallway, which contains one door on the right and one at the end of the hall to the left, both facing me. As I step into the hallway, I notice yet another, on the south wall. I shiver even though the night isn’t excessively cold.
The door on the south wall, now on my right, opens to a full bathroom—or the bones of one. There is plumbing installed (though it’s quite outdated), but there is no tub, no sink. An old vanity decays in one corner. I imagine a beautiful claw-foot tub where the drain is, and a small, weak rectangle of moonlight illuminates a spot on the floor, giving its all to
push through the decades of grime on the skylight.
The wind has died down and the few sounds remaining are my own. They don’t permeate much of the darkness, being absorbed and muffled by the wealth of dust caked upon every available surface.
I listen to my heartbeat and my breathing, both cool, steady, calm. I used to have a fascination with ghosts, back when I was eight, maybe nine years old. Even then, I felt that their existence was unlikely, but it was nonetheless exhilarating to pretend, and once in a while, either Trina or I would dare the other to sneak out to the graveyard at night. Now, the skepticism of my youth has evolved and matured, but a faint echo of that thrill threatens to manifest if I keep this up. I welcome it.
I leave the bathroom and enter a bedroom, once more to the right. This room feels, if possible, even emptier than the living room. Really, there’s nothing to suggest that much living had occurred here at all. The walls and floor are bare, sure, but there are no worn-down grooves or dents in the grain of the wooden floor, no tan lines on the walls indicating where a painting or a portrait may have hung. There’s no wallpaper and, as I inspect it, no paint, either. These walls are simply exposed plaster. Interesting. Perhaps not so much in itself, but it does encourage me to keep exploring, sending me on another quest, and I am not one to leave such a task incomplete. My curiosity mounting, I inspect the rest of the room with a lesser degree of scrutiny than I’ve had up to this point. The closet is equally bare, equally boring, and only contains a couple of built-in shelves. There isn’t even a rack for hanging clothing. The upper shelves contain only the uniform coating of dust.
I turn and head back the other way, toward what is most likely the master bedroom. As I reach the ugly rug’s midpoint, I hear a low but distinct thud. I freeze and hold my breath to listen as closely as possible, but the only thing I can hear is my heartbeat. Damn thing won’t shut up.
I wait for a minute or so, then continue, taking extra caution to minimize my decibel output. The rug and abundant dust assist me in that endeavor. There’s a crack of moonlight underneath the door. My heart arrests for just a moment when I see shadows break that luminous stripe and eddy about, until I determine that the sole caster of those shadows is a dense tree outside, but I suppose I’ll have to open the door to be sure. Just to lend to my certainty, I wait in a pregnant silence just outside the door, my gloved hand still hovering over the door handle, a plastic and brass atrocity. I half-expect it to stick or catch, but it slides open, and I’m met with more than just moonlight on the other side.
Three
Rather than the easy, crude nakedness of the rest of the house, this room has been…overtaken. More confusing yet, there’s almost no dust on the floor, and that which remains is only in small, accumulated piles in the room’s corners. My mind kicks into overdrive to assess everything around me, if only, at first, to determine that no threats lurk in the shadows. The bedroom is clear, and I check the attached washroom before returning my attention to that which demands it: the mess of the master bedroom.
The walls are the same exposed plaster of the other bedroom, but they’ve been covered over much of their area by pinned-up newspaper clippings. The dates on them are missing, but their time frame quickly becomes apparent based on the subject matter: the suicide that closed down the school in the end. Her name was Willa Frye, and the photos of her, though worn, show a young girl who had a subtle, unique brand of beauty to her, the same way that the most arid stretches of desert can themselves be beautiful in an unidentifiable, desolate way. On the surface, she had been fairly plain, but her smile concealed a charm that only served to enhance her physical beauty. Such was confirmed to be the case by her peers, according to the articles.
I hone in on one article. “You’d never think it of her, she was always laughin’ and makin’ jokes,” reported Nina Hesterly, a classmate of Willa.
“…doted upon from birth to become the loved and loving young lady we knew until the pain she hid became too much to bear. God rest her soul, and may she find peace in the afterlife,” says what remains of her obituary.
Other articles are posted too, but I can’t mentally connect them to this trend. I read on, in hopes that their relevance becomes clear. Closer to the window, I find a batch of articles about Thad Eboncore, the man convicted of raping Willa and ultimately initiating the emotional chain reaction leading to her suicide. These articles are complete, and seem to focus more on the investigation and trial process than the preceding events. I wonder where those articles are.
Thad Eboncore, only twenty-eight at the time of his conviction, was a typical entry-level staff at the school. The accusation of the rape was made just after Willa died. Willa was sixteen years old at the time, and would have turned seventeen had she lived two more months. She hung herself on the night of Halloween, and upon being found, her classmates first thought it was an elaborately executed prank on her part.
At Thad’s arraignment, to everybody’s surprise, he pleaded not guilty. Most were certain of his guilt, and those with any doubt only had shreds of it remaining, the last stand of the benefit of the doubt. A photograph accompanies this article, depicting what seems to have been the entirety of the town’s population, bearing signs reading ‘Thad is Bad!’ or pointing out that ‘Eboncore’ means ‘Blackheart,’ and the biblical implications that that has regarding his soul. A couple of the signs, from what I can see, proclaim that an innocent verdict would mark the beginning of the apocalypse.
I feel my eyes growing tired, straining to read the faded print by the weak light of the moon, but I’m too wary of being seen from the window to use my flashlight, and the stuff is too intriguing not to continue reading.
The trial was short but brutal, according to reports. The evidence, while not much in quality, was tantamount in quantity, including witness testimonies ranging from classmates swearing they caught him trying to get an upskirt peek as she climbed the stairs ahead of him, to administration relaying their growing suspicion that Thad had made a habit of sneaking off to masturbate during work hours. Rumors flew that Thad had built, and possessed sole access to, a series of tunnels and secret passages within the walls and underneath the building, from which he could spy on the students without detection. The story goes that, eventually, he became dissatisfied with the fantasy and moved to bring his perverted daydreams to reality.
That’s the extent of detail offered by the pieces here, but as a detective, I’m not satisfied. Certainly, a large part of my job is detecting the subtle connections that elude most people’s gazes, but at the same time, my job is one that, aside from biologists and engineers, values completeness and accuracy of information over any other career.
The story seems pretty straightforward, and much as I’d like to believe in the infallibility of our justice system, I have seen, firsthand, overwhelming evidence of the contrary. Thus, I’m seldom satisfied with the accuracy of a verdict unless I work the case myself or am otherwise convinced—which takes a lot. But where can I find the rest? There has to be more information somewhere, accessible and waiting for me. But how? I can’t exactly use my badge to gain all of the access I would normally have as a detective.
An old voice bubbles to life within me—the one that started this whole thing. Before I’ve even committed to this project, it has chained me to it and thrown out the key, because it knows that this is more than a project. This is what my life has become. My identity. And if I can’t reasonably join up with the local police force, I can at least try to right the wrongs of the past with what few tools I have.
I’m called to this—commanded by it.
For now, I content myself with taking photographs of these articles on my phone. I’d prefer to avoid using the flash, but it’s a necessary risk and it will allow me to revisit the information on my own time without having to revisit the abandoned house with the not-so-abandoned room. One thing that piques my interest, though, is the dust. On virtually every surface in the house, a heavy layer of dust rests, and has for s
ome time. But in this room alone, the dust has been wiped nearly clean, in all but a couple of spots. Maybe I missed something, but as I mentally retrace my steps, I’m certain that the dust in other parts of the house was consistent and undisturbed. The window is shut, but not locked, on a simple metal joint. The dust on it is splotchy, but it seems that the activity has been exclusively on the frame. Careful not to touch the remaining, still intact film of dust, I push outward and the window submits, admitting a cool breeze that flutters the papers on the wall. I cringe in anticipation of the window’s creak, but it doesn’t come.
Feeling exposed, I pull the window shut. With the information here on my phone, I’m overcome with a sense of urgency, mandating evacuation. I do one more visual sweep of the room to ensure that I’ve gotten everything, then head back out the way I came. On my way out, I confirm that my own footprints are indeed the only ones to have blemished the otherwise serenely complete dust. How, then, has this mysterious other visitor managed to enter and exit without leaving a trace? My mind goes in two directions: either he goes through the second-story window (not impossible, but not likely either, I think) or there’s some other way in and out. My imagination goes to the eccentric Victorian mansions with webs of secret tunnels, trap doors, one-way mirrors, inner passages, panic rooms, and doorways leading to nowhere. Certainly, the size of the cottage doesn’t allow for most of that, but my curiosity is engaged anyway, and I spend a moment imagining an Indiana Jones-esque journey through the centuries-lost catacombs beneath Ghost Fork.
Perhaps there’s a door or something in the closet of that main room. I’ll have to check it out later.
To the best of my ability (and as much as is reasonable), I step within the footprints I have already made, so as to minimize the amount of disturbance I leave behind. It has the added benefit of disturbing each footprint, making it harder to identify. I exit through the same low windows through which I entered, careful not to kick the old rotting frame as I swing one foot over, then the other. The wooden porch isn’t creaky like I expect it to be, but this is probably because the excessive moisture in the air cushions the cracks and softens the wood, muffling out any would-be creaks.
Thunder Falls Page 3