Storberry

by Dan Padavona

  As the seeds spun down around him, he sighed. More overgrowth to deal with. He would be battling the saplings all summer if this kept up.

  Three

  The ancient air conditioner came to life with a harsh rattle, which caused an older man reading the new copy of TIME to glance upward, half expecting the ceiling to collapse on him. The blowers shook momentarily in spasm, then they settled into a hum, as they spread dust and cool air over pocked oak tables that were largely devoid of readers.

  The after lunch crowd at the Storberry Public Library was slow, even for a Saturday. Solitary footfalls echoed off the walls. Pages rustled like autumn leaves in the wind.

  As the sounds of the library reverberated off the ceiling and faded, Jen Barrows wheeled a book cart between brown wooden cases which stretched toward the ceiling. Renee Tennant had returned an hour ago, but one person was more than enough to handle the meager workload.

  When the returns were put away, Jen opened the 1960-1969 steel cabinet microfiche drawer of STORBERRY HERALD archives. The films were contained in small cardboard boxes labeled by month. She followed the chronologically-ordered boxes until she found the spring of 1967. She removed four boxes from April through June and retreated to the microfiche viewer in a small cubicle near the back of the library.

  She fed the April microfiche film to the take-up reel and flipped on the light to reveal the April 1st 1967, edition of the HERALD. Scanning over the front-page stories, she cranked the reel. Pages of print flew across the screen like images of the world seen from a merry-go-round, making her dizzy.

  “Working on a school project?”

  Jen jumped out of her seat. She hadn’t heard Renee approach from behind.

  “Sorry,” Renee whispered, and they both laughed.

  “I’m checking on an old story about a boy who supposedly went missing in the spring of 1967.”

  Renee raised her eyebrows.

  “Sounds a little morbid. This wouldn’t have anything to do with the haunted forest, would it?”

  “Actually, it does. Why?”

  “It came up in a conversation yesterday. What happened in 1967?”

  Jen leaned forward, her eyes wide with excitement.

  “Everyone knows the stories about people who went missing over the years in the forest. About how some came back after they died.”

  “Ghost stories.”

  “Yeah. If you have been to a sleepover in Storberry, you have heard every story at least once.”

  “I’ll take your word for it.”

  “Well, most of them happened a long time ago, too long ago to look them up. But there is one. A boy who disappeared in the spring of 1967. Supposedly.”

  “And you are trying to find out if he was a real person?”

  “Something like that.”

  “Let me guess. The boy still haunts the forest.”

  “That’s the story.”

  “I’m intrigued. Would you mind if I looked with you?”

  “Have a seat.”

  As Renee carried a wooden chair from a nearby cubicle, Jen wound the microfiche forward. Scanning the front page stories, Jen did not expect to find anything. And for a long time, she didn’t. Stories about Vietnam, Martin Luther King, and violent protests. Ads for stores she had never heard of.

  Then halfway through the month, she found a headline—

  SEARCH FOR MISSING BOY

  By Sandra Rudlock

  Staff Reporter

  Emergency personnel and volunteers are searching for Brian Nedson, age ten, of Storberry. The boy has been missing for 24 hours according to the Storberry Police Department. He was last seen in the vicinity of the forest which begins at the southwest corner of town, and stretches approximately ten miles toward the North Carolina border…

  Renee gave Jen a surprised look.

  “So there really was a boy who disappeared in the spring of 1967. That doesn’t mean the forest is haunted, though.”

  “I suppose not.”

  Renee considered Jen her favorite student worker at the library. She knew the girl to be level headed; street smart as well as book smart. What had provoked her to research the origins of a Storberry campfire tale?

  The front door swung open, and the man who had been reading TIME exited the library. Only a few people remained. Someone cleared their throat near the back wall.

  Jen cranked the wheel again, and history moved across the screen. Continued scans of the April archive brought a pall over them. Daily headlines told the tale of continued searches, distraught parents, and searchers who could find no sign of the missing child.

  By the end of the following week, the boy was assumed dead. The stories moved from the headline to the back pages, until a funeral ceremony was performed in late April to lend the community a sense of closure.

  “Well, that was uplifting,” Renee said, sitting back in her chair.

  “If it was a happy ending, it would probably be a pretty crappy ghost story.”

  “Good point. So tell me what happened.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Something must have happened to get you researching legends.”

  Jen sighed.

  “This is going to sound really, really stupid.”

  “Try me.”

  “Okay.” Jen ran a hand through her hair and nervously twirled a curl with her fingers.

  “Yesterday I was fishing at Becks Pond with Tom Kingsley.”

  “Sounds good so far.”

  “We took a walk. I’m not sure we really knew where we going, you know? Just sort of walking and talking about stuff.”

  “Sure.”

  “And we wound up in front of the forest, right at the tree line. I admit that it creeps me out a little. But Tom…Tom really gets freaked out by the forest. So I thought I’d have a little fun with him.”

  “Uh-oh.”

  “It wasn’t a big deal. We dared each other to go to the edge of the darkness. It was about a one minute walk. That’s all.”

  “That doesn’t sound so bad.”

  “When we got there,” Jen said, pausing to find the right words, “I felt like someone was watching me, like they were right there with us. Tom felt it, too.”

  “Go on.”

  “We heard something coming through the trees, so we ran. It was coming after us, but by the time we made it to the pond, it was gone.”

  “The forest is full of animals.”

  “It wasn’t an animal. I’m sure of it. I swear I heard footsteps behind us. I’ve never been that scared.”

  “It sounds like it was scary. You really shouldn’t be in the woods by yourselves.”

  “Believe me, I’m not going to try anything like that again.”

  “That’s good to know.”

  “When I got home I started thinking about all the stories we used to tell each other about the people who disappeared in the hill forest. I don’t know anymore. Maybe there is something to it.”

  “That reminds me of something a friend of mine said. Maybe I should get the two of you together. Let me know if you find anything else.”

  Renee patted Jen on the shoulder, and as she left the girl to the archives and made her way to the front desk, she could hear the fading whir of the reel, and her own footfalls echoing through the stacks.

  The afternoon heat built, pressing against the brick façade. The air conditioner convulsed to life, and the ceiling shook.

  Four

  The afternoon sun was relentless, creating shimmering waves of heat over the blacktop like a mirage. As foliage blossomed like time lapse, giggling children sprayed one another with garden hoses and leaped over sprinklers.

  The central school ball fields hosted a youth league baseball game, where parents and grandparents cheered as young children smacked baseballs off a tee. They laughed and shouted instructions as the neophyte players ran the wrong way around the bases.

  Lawnmowers roared to life across Storberry, and those pushing them celebrated the activit
y that they would be cursing by late May.

  At Becks Pond, a small group of boys leaped off the wooden pier into the water and skimmed rocks across its surface. Summer served notice of its unseasonably imminent arrival.

  Liberty Cemetery was quiet. Rory Dickson had abandoned his battle with the samara in favor of a cold beer on the west side of town on his newly-finished deck.

  A young couple knelt next to a grey headstone. They paid their respects to the woman’s grandfather—a man named Beaufort, whose inscription read “Dat’s All Folks!”

  The woman puzzled over the three saplings, which stuck out of Beaufort’s plot like arrows from a felled prey. Didn’t someone maintain the grave sites? Growing rapidly but with diseased leaves and ugly black splotches, the saplings were the strangest looking she had ever seen. They were sprouting everywhere but were most numerous in recently-dug plots.

  The couple finished their business and departed quickly, neither certain why they felt a growing sense of uneasiness on a pristine afternoon.

  As the sun warmed the soil across Storberry, roots spread in response. Renee Tennant’s tulips bloomed in splashes of magenta, pink, and deep red. The newly-sown seed of the Moran farm awoke with the small beginnings that would yield a summer harvest. The death of winter was supplanted by the promise of growth and hope.

  Beneath the sod of Liberty Cemetery, the invading growth extended sinuous black tendrils. They choked out grass and weed and left barren gray spots around their stems. The tendrils dug through the loosened soil like worms through rotted apple flesh. The roots reached the wooden boxes and licked at the surface, searching crevices for a way in. The ones which penetrated sought out flesh and bone. They transmitted their path to the remaining roots and enclosed the decayed remains in depraved cocoons.

  The tendrils pulsed with life. Diseased growth sprouted across the cemetery. Energy, neither seen nor heard, was emitted. The forest watched and waited for nightfall.

  Jeff Branyan sat upright in his hospital bed. His ribs screamed whenever he moved too fast, as though someone was sticking knives into him. He was groggy and medicated, and his head felt like a vise was being tightened against it.

  He didn't have a mirror, and he didn't want one. He knew what he must look like. The pained expressions on the faces of his parents told him as much. They had gone to dinner and left him alone with his thoughts.

  His doctor had declared he was stable. It was amazing, really. How his body had sustained so many injuries and fought back this quickly seemed a minor miracle. There was no point to his staying in intensive care, and the doctor planned to move him to a standard room by sunset.

  He stared at the steady rhythm of the heart monitor and recalled his interview with Officer Madsen. Madsen had known who had done this to him. He just wanted some proof. Jeff had known too. He hadn't seen a face, but he had known just the same.

  As a doctor and two nurses raced past his door toward someone who was far worse off than he was, the heart monitor beeped with incessant monotony. His hands curled into fists, and the machine pulsed a little faster.

  He would heal faster than the doctor expected and would be out of this place before anyone believed possible. He just needed to bide his time.

  When he got out, he would kill Dell Lawrence.

  Five

  The books hit the main desk like a gun blast. The explosion bounced off the walls of the Storberry Public Library, echoing through its corridors. Heads shot up from desks within the cavernous main room like meerkats hearing the first rumble of thunder. Having had her back to the desk as she filed returned novels onto a rolling cart, Renee Tennant jumped out of her chair.

  Janet Barrister leaned over the desk and cleared her throat, as though doing so was necessary to get Renee's attention.

  “Good afternoon, Mrs. Barrister. Looking to check these out?”

  “I would think not.” Her voice hissed like a cornered snake. “I wish to speak with you about these...books, Miss Tennant.”

  “Certainly. If you would follow me back to my office, I—”

  “No!”

  Janet Barrister's reply carried enough vehemence that two guests gathered their supplies from a nearby table and crept from the main room, hoping to avoid the woman's attention.

  “We will discuss this here and now, so that everyone may hear. This is business which concerns all who wish the best for Storberry and its children.”

  “I don't understand—”

  “These...books, if you dare call such drivel literature, have no place in my library or in my town.”

  The books were fanned out across the desk, like overturned hands at the poker table. There were two romance novels, both popular with the teenagers. Renee also noticed a horror novel she didn't recognize, which depicted a scantily clad woman being chased through a dark forest by a man with a knife. At the top of the heap was Cujo by Stephen King.

  “What I want to know is what you were thinking, depositing such trash into my community.”

  “I'm sorry Mrs. Barrister, but three of these four books are on the New York Time's best sellers list. I would venture to guess that those three are in every library in America—”

  “What may be acceptable for a godless country is not acceptable for Storberry, Miss Tennant. What do I care for what people in New York, or Boston, or Los Angeles consider acceptable? Places where students murder their teachers and each other, where there are more places to obtain narcotics than there are places of worship. Does the light of God not shine down on them, so that He does not see what crimes they commit? Do they escape His judgment because a school board cares not for morality? Is that what you wish to bring us, Miss Tennant, from the big city college you attended? Filth?”

  “Ma'am, I—”

  “This is where it begins,” she said, pointing a bony finger at the splayed novels. “If we feed our children poison, do they not become ill? It is people such as you, Miss Tennant, who are destroying what little good there is left in small towns. It is you who choose to bring these corrupting influences to us. Well, I for one will not stand for it any longer. I will not sit idly by, while the children of Storberry are forced to read stories of families being torn apart by rabid dogs—”

  “Nobody is forced to read—”

  “Nor was Eve forced to bite the apple, Miss Tennant.

  “I will remind you that I have a great many friends in this community. A public library requires public funding. Remember that. If you wish to keep your precious funding, I suggest you remove this trash. Send it back to your big cities. Keep my town clean.”

  A balding man with thick glasses slipped silently from the room, his footfalls whispers of prayer for Janet Barrister not to turn on him next. Her words, spoken several seconds ago, still reverberated through the stacks like the shrill cry of a tea kettle.

  Straining to compose herself, Renee stood taller, her hands trembling at her sides hidden behind the wooden desk. She breathed deeply and lowered her tone. Her eyes met Janet Barrister's, reflecting the woman's contempt as though mirrors.

  “There is such a thing in this country as the right to free speech. And a separation of church and state. You don't have the right to choose for others what they can and cannot read.”

  “Don’t you tell me—”

  “I, too, have gained a great many friends in Storberry, Mrs. Barrister. The expansion of the library is a reflection of the town's support for what I do here. And that includes allowing our readers to choose what literature they wish to engage themselves with.”

  Janet Barrister's eyes narrowed. She leaned forward, her face just inches from Renee's. She grinned through clenched teeth.

  “Hide behind your rights for as long as you wish, Miss Tennant. You cannot hide for eternity. Those who are corrupted may be forgiven in His eyes. But those who willingly corrupt others must answer for their actions and pay a steep price. Remember that, when you are cowering behind your precious rights.”

  Janet Barrister wheeled abou
t and exited the library. Renee stood silently, mouth agape, with a reply stuck at the back of her throat.

  The roiling anger morphed, rising out of the pit of her stomach to where it became stuck at the top of her chest. Her throat tightened, and suddenly she was a teenager again trying to get a word in edgewise with her parents.

  Everyone in the library had heard the argument, and now they all looked at her. She breathed deeply again and tried to fight back the tears which pushed against the backs of her eyes.

  “The show's over,” she rasped, glaring back at the onlookers.

  Heads quickly lowered toward open books and magazines. She sighed. She didn't mean to take her anger out on them.

  After a moment she said, “I'm sorry,” though it wasn't clear that anyone had heard.

  After she gathered up the offending books and placed them on the return cart, she proceeded toward her office at the back of the building. She could feel their eyes following her, burning like lasers into her back.

  The tiny windowless office was neatly organized. Her desk and chair sat to the side, with a small filing cabinet underneath. A framed bachelor's degree from West Virginia University hung on a bare side wall to the right of the entry door.

  Regarding the degree for a moment, she wondered if she should be doing more with her life than charging five cents per day for overdue returns. Why was she wasting time in another small town? Escape was but a short drive down route 16. There were other prospects, other opportunities.

  A second chair faced her desk, for the odd occasion on which someone brought a concern to her, or more commonly, for when she interviewed prospective student help.

  There came a soft knock upon the door. Jen Barrows waited in the doorway.

  “Yes, Jen?”

  “Are you okay?”

  “I'm fine,” she said, exhaling loudly. “Come on in and have a seat.”

  Jen slid the wooden chair forward a few inches and sat down.

  “I didn't mean to eavesdrop.”

  “You weren't eavesdropping. The entire library heard what she had to say. Heck, I bet Twain, Hawthorne, and Storberry proper heard too.”