by Vic Kerry
“Who’s there?” David asked.
A pudgy woman with her gray hair pulled back under a black scarf toddled up the steps to the podium platform. She wore a maid’s black uniform with a white apron. A wooden bucket hung from one hand, and the other clutched a scrub brush.
“Who are you?” she asked.
“I’m Reverend David Stanley.”
She smiled. It was unpleasant, showing far too many teeth and too much gum. When the skin on her face wrinkled, all her features disappeared. Her face looked like a piece of chewed gum.
“Very happy to meet you. I’m Hester. Mr. Fernwell sent me to clean the church for Sunday. It’s our big day. He wanted it spic-and-span.”
“Mr. Fernwell?” David searched his memory of the last few days. His brains still seemed a bit addled from the fall.
“Nahum Fernwell. He’s one of the elders,” Hester said.
“I remember. Please excuse me. I had a fall yesterday and have a slight concussion, according to the doctor.”
“Doctor?”
“Ebenezer Hollingsworth.”
Hester blew a raspberry. “I’m more of a doctor than he is.”
“You’re a little different from the other servants I’ve met,” David said.
“I ain’t a servant. Well, not anymore. My master’s family has been dead for years. I guess being without one that long makes my tongue a little looser.”
“Do they prevent you from talking?” David said. “The master’s family.”
“They discourage it,” Hester said.
David took a moment to consider things. Perhaps this cleaning lady could answer questions for him.
“Do you know anything about an eerie purple light that might float round in here?”
“Yep.”
“Can you tell me about it?”
Hester shook her head. “Nope.”
“Why not?”
“Ain’t proper to talk about things I’ve never seen.”
“But you know a legend or something about it. You can tell me that.”
She shrugged. “Ain’t anything to tell. I reckon it’s like the will–o’–the–wisp or foxfire. Preacher, unless you need me for anything else, I’m done here.”
“That’s fine.” He looked up at the candles. “How do I put those out?” He pointed.
“Let them burn out. Won’t cause any issues.”
Hester plodded past him and out of the church. As he stared at the candles flickering close to the ceiling, David decided he should give her a ride home. When he went to the door, she was gone. He walked to his car and looked both ways down the road. A light mist floated around but didn’t interfere with visibility much. The maid wasn’t anywhere to be seen.
“Will-o’-the-wisp,” he said aloud.
He’d heard about that but didn’t really know what it was. His grandfather called it foxfire and said it showed up out over the swamps where he grew up, but David had never seen it. It had never been described as purple that he could remember. Maybe his phone would get enough signal for him to consult Google.
His apartment felt like a tomb after coming through the clean-smelling sanctuary. The air smelled musty and stale. Even opening the window didn’t help. The damp outside air only brought in the heady smell of rot and wet pine needles. It didn’t sit well on his stomach, leaving him queasy.
David grabbed his phone and headed back to the sanctuary. As he crossed over into the church, he saw that his phone had no signal. He stepped on the podium platform, but the signal bar remained the same. Marsh had not been lying. The phone didn’t even give a hint that it would find signal. Maybe he needed to get higher, out of the small valley.
David left the church building. He walked across the cemetery to his car. Nothing came up or down the road, so pulling out was simple. He eased the car up the road toward the main highway. The shoulder on his side of the road was narrow, and a deep ditch dropped off from there. The other side plummeted to the hollows and valley below. David carefully watched both his phone and the road. The last thing he needed was to meet another tanker truck barreling down the mountain and end up turtled at the bottom of a hollow.
Driving higher up the mountain had no impact on the signal. The phone showed no signal bars. He shook the phone as if that would help, but still no change.
“Come on,” he shouted. “There is no way there is this big of a dead zone.”
David stared at his phone, willing it to get a signal. He looked back to the road and saw several boulders blocking his way. The excessive rain likely had caused the rockslide. He slammed on the brakes. The car fishtailed as the tires squealed on the pavement. David braced himself, ready to topple down the side of the mountain. Instead, the car spun and slammed into the rocks. The passenger side crumpled in toward him. The impact jarred his phone out of his hand. It clattered to the passenger-side floorboard. The car stopped. He looked out the windshield. Through spiderweb cracks, the great drop-off stared back at him.
With a clarity that only a near-death experience can bring, David looked around. Adrenaline amplified his senses. The car idled. Nothing knocked in the engine, which was a good thing. He shifted the gears to park and reached to the floorboard for his phone.
David eased the car into reverse. Metal ground as the car moved against the rocks. When he was sure he could turn without dropping a tire off the side of the road, he put the car in gear and started toward the church. Everything seemed okay. The tires didn’t blow out as he slowly descended the mountain. His brakes held out. The whole way back he kept staring at his phone, hoping for some signal. Now he wanted just enough signal to make a call to the outside world and let someone know where he was. For some reason, despite what God was telling him, the idea of being trapped in Innsboro scared him. No signal appeared.
As he neared the church, rain began to splatter the windshield. He looked up to turn on the wiper blades and hoped they’d work across the broken windshield. Glowing purple water hit the windshield instead of rain. The entire windshield became a flashing neon sign. David screamed and slammed the brakes. The car pulled to the passenger side, threatening to skid off the road.
The wipers swiped the water from the windshield. The glow turned into a fog. The engine shut off. The car sat dead on the side of the road. The violet fog began to sift into the cabin. David still depressed the brake. He shifted the gears to neutral and let off the brake. The car rolled downhill. Without power, the brakes wouldn’t be much good, but anything was better than being eaten by the purple light. The car rolled faster. He sailed past the church, taking the curve toward town so fast the tires squealed. The road flattened out, and the car coasted down Main Street and slowed as the slope of the street leveled off. He stood on the brakes. The car stopped. He looked at his phone, hoping that he might finally, just by luck, have signal so he could call 911. The phone was dead.
David tried to turn the engine over. It wouldn’t make a noise. He knew the cause. The battery was drained. The same thing must have happened to his cell phone. The purple light had absorbed the energy. Something strange was going on. He was going to find out what.
No cars moved down the street. The whole town looked as uninhabited as it had on the Sunday he found the place. David walked toward the hub of town. He saw the old gas station on the other side of the creek. No cars sat at the pumps, but the tanker he’d passed on Sunday sat beside the building. The wind began to blow. The air felt chilly and damp. Not surprising since a fine mist still floated in the air.
David turned to look back up the mountain road. He expected to see the light following him. Instead, the slick black ribbon disappeared around a curve. His broken-down car looked at him from the shoulder. Despair began to fill him up. Only his car gave him any real independence he could have in the town. Without it, David knew that he was at the will of Alistair Marsh and the other elders. He had been beginning to trust Marsh until he met Hester. She changed his mind. Her candor made him think things were being hidden from him.
The old woman must have been faster than he thought she could be. He hadn’t spotted her on the road as he barreled back down the mountain. Perhaps she’d fallen off into the ravine. Something more sinister came to David’s mind. Marsh might have eliminated her. For some reason, David felt Marsh and the elders were capable of such things.
His ponderings bounced around in his mind, sending his thoughts down one tangent after the other until he was lost in a tangle of speculation and conjecture as harrowing as the forested mountains that surrounded Innsboro. He was so lost in these thoughts that he didn’t notice walking through town and into the library. The dusty smell of old books snapped him back to the present. He looked around the room. His intent had been to find the town library, if it had one. It seemed that his feet brought him there on autopilot.
A small circulation desk took up the space in the middle of the floor. The walls were lined with bookshelves. The only space between the shelves was for the windows, which seemed to provide the ambient light in the room. A few tables with chairs littered the floor. Lamps with green glass shades sat on the tables to provide further light. David stepped deeper inside. No librarian greeted him. The whole place seemed as though no one had been there in a while. He ran his finger through a thin layer of dust on the circulation desk.
“Hello,” David yelled.
His call echoed off the walls. Nothing moved in the place. He needed help to find exactly what he sought. A map or atlas might be the best place to start. If he could find another way out of town, he might be able to access the Internet.
David wandered around the main room until he found the card catalog. In most libraries he had been to lately, a computer database made this piece of furniture obsolete. He hadn’t seen a single computer in the place, not even an antiquated one. For that matter, the library appeared devoid of any modern machines. The place felt stuck in some other time.
That was it. The idea popped in his head like a lightbulb burning out. The whole town seemed trapped in a time warp. Marsh’s old Lincoln and the absence of modern necessities or the Internet or cell phones testified to this. Now that he gave his attention to the thought, even people’s clothes were outdated. They didn’t wear leisure suits or frilly cravats, but the clothes had a thrift-store quality to them.
He slid the “A” drawer out before remembering that an atlas would be in the reference section. Large signage was a convenient feature of the Innsboro Public Library. He easily found the reference section and a US atlas. David took the book back to one of the tables, opening it to Tennessee as he did.
The lettering on the map was small, but with the additional light from a lamp, David found the highway he’d traveled before turning off on the road to town. He traced the line up from Chattanooga, looking for the cutoff road to the town as he did. His finger crossed the border into North Carolina. The road to town never appeared. He flipped to the town index in the back. Tennessee listed no town named Innsboro. David looked at the date of the atlas. The year 2000 stared up at him in bold, square letters. The atlas was old, but the town was older.
“What are you doing here?” Marsh asked, pushing a cart loaded with books from another room.
David jumped up from the table, slamming the atlas closed. “I was looking up roads out of town.”
“Why would you do that?”
“I tried to get up to the main highway so that I could get a cell phone signal, but a rockslide blocked the road. I figured there has to be another way out of town.”
“There isn’t,” Marsh said.
“So we’re trapped?”
“We are all trapped in our own way,” Marsh said. “It is nothing to get excited about.”
“What if we have a medical emergency of some kind?”
“Ebenezer Hollingsworth can handle anything we need. He is a very good doctor.” Marsh pushed the cart past David.
He grabbed hold of the cart to stop it. “That’s not what I’ve heard. I was told he isn’t even a doctor.”
Marsh chuckled. “That’s crazy. Who told you that?”
“Hester, the lady who cleans the church.”
“Hester?” The other man thought for a long time. “We don’t have a Hester in this town.”
“You have to. I saw her with my own eyes. We talked. She said that Mr. Fernwell sent her to clean.”
“Do you mean the Gilmans’ servants?” Marsh asked.
“She said her master’s family was dead, so I don’t know.” David took a book from the cart.
“That’s her. The Gilmans have been gone a long time. I would have thought she’d moved on.” Marsh said the last part dreamily. “I can’t imagine why a servant would stay without a family.”
“So you have people leave Innsboro?”
“Eventually.”
“How can they do that? According to that atlas, the town doesn’t exist.” David poked the atlas with the book he had in his hand.
“Please be careful with that book. We only have so many children’s books. We must take good care of them.”
David turned the book over in his hands. A picture of the Br’er Rabbit and the Tar-Baby looked up at him from the glossy board cover. The book looked very old, but in remarkably good shape. He opened it to the copyright page. It read 1924.
“This book is in great shape for its age,” he said.
“We try to keep it that way. Books are hard to come by.” Marsh took it back. “Children’s books especially.”
“So you have children in the town?”
“Of course we do; what kind of town doesn’t have children?”
“I’ve not seen a school, a playground or any evidence of children,” David said. “I’ve never been to a town with children that didn’t have those things.”
Marsh put the book back on his cart. “I’m going to guess that until today you didn’t know that we had a library either. Reverend, there are many things about us that you don’t know. There are many things that you assume, and I am afraid that they are all bad or conspiratorial.”
“You keep a lot of mystery around yourself.”
Marsh moved to the table. He opened the atlas to Tennessee. After studying the map for a moment, he poked his finger at an empty stretch of land north of Chattanooga and east of the North Carolina border.
“That’s us,” he said.
David looked. Not a single road led off the main highway to his finger. Only the blue line of a creek scarred the green picture. He got closer so he could read the name of the creek. There wasn’t one.
“Why isn’t the town on the map?” he asked.
“Because we aren’t welcomed anywhere, even though we settled the area before anyone else. I told you about our ancestors leaving Massachusetts because of Cotton Mather. Tennessee tried to move us, but because we defeated the Union in a battle, they didn’t feel they could, so they marked us off the map. Plain and simple.”
“Do you still pay taxes?” David didn’t know why he asked this. It just came out.
“Yes. We do everything any citizen would. We are just not acknowledged. As far as Hester is concerned, don’t listen to her. A servant without a family is given to strange delusions.”
“Okay, but what about the rockslide?”
“I’ll let the others know when my duties as librarian end. We take it time about, you see. I think you should go back to the church and study,” Marsh said.
“I can’t. My car is shot.”
“What happened?”
“I skidded on the wet road and hit the rocks at the landslide. Then when I turned around to come into town to let someone know, I passed through a purple fog like I’ve been dreaming about. It fried all the electronics in the car, including my cell phone.”
Marsh looked worried. “That cannot be. You’ve only dreamed about that light. Surely it was your concussion causing you to see things.”
“My car is on the side of the road just outside of town, banged up and dead as a doornail.”
“I c
an give you a ride back to the church. You can study here in the meantime. The Bibles are over there.” He pointed to a shelf on the opposite wall.
“I think I’ll look up will-o’-the-wisp,” David said.
“Whatever for?”
“Hester said the purple light was like that.”
“The will-o’-the-wisp is caused by swamp gas,” Marsh said. “I don’t think swamp gas is causing your nightmares.”
David nodded and agreed that swamp gas wasn’t doing that. However, the light he’d just experienced wasn’t a dream or a hallucination. Something strange lived in Innsboro, and it wasn’t just the citizens.
Thursday
David ate breakfast at the small table in his apartment. It was leftover dinner. Marsh had taken him home for dinner and packed up some for him to eat at breakfast, with the promise of sending Thomas out to take him to the market so he could fix his own meals and not have to depend on Marsh’s hospitality.
Ham made a good breakfast food, but the instant mashed potatoes, which had been dry and lacking any hint of butter at dinner, were hard to swallow that morning. Water to wash everything down didn’t help either. He was certain by the almost artificial flavor of the meat that the ham was canned.
After eating all the ham and only a small bit of the potatoes, David pushed the plate away. Last night had passed without a single dream or any sleepwalking. For some reason, he’d decided to try an experiment. A box in the corner of his apartment contained religious gifts that congregation members had given him through the years. Most of them took a Catholic bend. A few statues of the Virgin Mary in sacred blue, Jesus holding the thorn-latticed heart, and a gaudy crucifix made up part of the collection. David had never gotten rid of them because in some ways he liked iconography. He took a few of the items and placed them around the apartment. A gold cross on a chain still hung from his neck as he decided to get dressed and wait for Thomas in the cemetery. The icons must have kept the nightmares and the light away.
David had never thought of dreams as supernatural. He’d read Freud’s treatise on them just like Marsh claimed to have done. His introductory psychology professor had given him an excellent grade on an essay about dreams many years ago. Everything he believed about the nature of them had changed when he woke up in Marsh’s third-floor hall after looking through a dream keyhole. He kept the cross hanging around his neck as he buttoned a French blue shirt. The symbol would remain hidden. Marsh and the other elders might not like him openly wearing a cross. Exploration of the church had come up empty on any Christian imagery except that strange star. He wanted to check the headstones in the graveyard to see if they bore any such imagery. He decided to do it while waiting for his ride. It gave him just enough time to look at a few markers.