Now Entering Silver Hollow

by Anne L. Hogue-Boucher

  People in town will talk, I’m sure. Let them. They do little else with their lives. As soon as we go home later today, I’m taking a shower, sleeping for twelve hours, and spending the rest of my time with my best friend.

  ***

  9 September

  Mercy stayed with me for the week, and she is quite a trooper. During her recovery, she asked me for a glass of Braxbury Cola. When I brought her a glass, she looked at me with a puzzled expression. “That’s not right, Lucy. I asked for a Braxbury.” It took me a few heart-skipping moments to reorient her.

  “I’m not Lucy. I’m Kit. Remember?”

  “Oh yes. Where’s Lucy?”

  My brows raised. “She’s at home in Grace City. You’re in Silver Hollow.”

  “Right. Oh! Right. I’m visiting Kit. You’re Kit.”

  “Yes, I’m Kit.” Looking into her eyes with my penlight, she roused to full consciousness and her pupils reacted. She looked at me, aware. I breathed a sigh that shook my lungs.

  I’ve scheduled a follow-up MRI to ensure no permanent damage. I’m sending her to a friend of mine in Grace City—a neurologist and lovely person. She’ll take excellent care of Mercy, I’m sure. Someday (I hope) we can look back on this week with some fondness, or at least a laugh or two.

  Now I’m alone again, though, the house seems ever more ominous and dark. Because that visit to Dubbs House may have affected my endocrine system, I ran some blood work and checked. All normal. My norepinephrine and serotonin levels? Normal for someone who’s experienced a fright. So, I’m blaming an ever-growing imagination and group-think along with a potential hallucinogen in the air. The town’s belief in the supernatural is leaking into my head.

  I am crossing off the days on my calendar, counting down to the day I get to leave this ridiculous town.

  ***

  15 September

  Things this week were getting a little better for me. Now I’ve around a month left in Silver Hollow. I miss home. I’ve been in touch with Mercy, and she is recovering, although shaken from her experience. She tells me she had nightmares about it, but that in her dreams, her children are the ones in danger. The dreams sound bizarre—telling me of her little brood of six laid out dead in a heptagram with her husband as the crown. Yet she says they’re dreams that will fade over time.

  She and Frank are planning to pick me up in October and bring me to Grace City so we can have a proper celebration, and they’re going to bring Bryce with them if they can get him to arrange his schedule. Frank loves road trips and has since he first got his license. Something to look forward to instead of dwelling on this empty house.

  I’d rather fly from Terrace Lake (I can fly my plane or charter one, for goodness sake), but this seems like it’s something special to Frank and Mercy, so I’ve given in and am letting them come get me. The drive will be full of leaves turning and the sights of animals by the roadside grazing to fatten up for the winter. Then it’s back in the city, away from all this—whatever it is.

  Once again, thoughts of home and my friends are keeping me sane. So is this journal. I need the anchors because I’ll spin off into my babbling madness without them. I’m not so sure that’s an exaggeration, either—not after the stress of playing paranormal investigator and putting my friend in danger.

  I’m writing this now because everything seemed to be at a nice lull until the end of the week, and then a slew of madness at the hospital started up again. Babbling insanity, injuries—ghastly injuries, and a death from hypovolemic shock. I checked with Langelier, and he said that the agency he hired to check for hazmat found nothing. Then he suggested that it may have cleaned itself up or that the heavy rainstorms did the cleaning.

  The bullshit wafting from his mouth—overpowering.

  Arguing with that pompous tit is futile. If Langelier tries to weasel more money out of me, forget it. I’ll report the incident to the CHA and let them take care of it (I have friends there). See how that git enjoys having a bunch of CHA agents in hazmat suits hanging around looking for the problem, fining him thousands for infractions along the way. Brushing me off is a mistake, he’ll soon learn.

  I’ve never been the nicest person in the world. Except for those who are close (there are four people I care enough about to check on with frequency), I’m a human glacier. I don’t change it—it protects me from users.

  The end of this week has been trying for me, and I am ready for a fight.

  Well, perhaps tomorrow I’ll fight. I need to rest.

  -K. C.

  ***

  Didn’t sleep very much. Napped for about an hour. I have a patient who’s been weighing on my mind.

  I’ve recorded our interactions with her permission, and will call her ‘Wendy’ to ensure confidentiality. She came in with a severe scalp laceration (forty-three centimeters long from forehead to occiput), claiming that something had scratched her, and speaking gibberish. It sounded familiar as if some other patient was fluent in this made up language. After sedation she became coherent again, unlike the others. This one was a fighter.

  I stitched her up but if that was an animal scratch, it must have had knives for claws. The ‘scratch’ looked like an attempt at an old-fashioned scalping. It took around seventy-six stitches to get it sewn up (I have the exact number in her records I’ll pull later), and we had to shave her entire head. Pity, because she had long blonde hair that didn’t come from a bottle.

  “How are you now?” I came in to see her while on my rounds. She gave me a wan smile.

  “Well, at least it’ll grow back,” Wendy said with a hand pressed to the side of her head. “Been trying not to play with it.”

  “Yes, not touching it is a solid idea,” I said.

  “After everything that’s happened, I don’t want an infection.” Wendy adjusted how she was sitting and I reached out to arrange her pillows.

  “Would you be willing to do an interview with me, recording you?” I waved the small recorder at her.

  “Is this for a psych evaluation?” she asked, picking at her cuticles and biting her bottom lip.

  I nodded. I wasn’t about to lie to her. “It’s part of it—I prefer to keep a verbal record for my transcriptionist—and I find it helps me stay on top of my interviewing skills. As part of the evaluation, if I determine you’re a harm to yourself of others, I’ll keep you here for a mandatory hold. Why don’t we chat for a while and see what happens?”

  The patient shrugged. “I’ll wind up here for a few days, I’m sure.”

  I said nothing to that and turned on the recorder, then asked her for her consent. She agreed.

  Her story began at the old bed-and-breakfast—as many of them did.

  “I’m working on my PhD at Grace City University,” she said. Her voice was shaky at first, but gained strength as she continued. “My specialty is ancient languages and translations. It’s a hybrid degree, though, because of the narrow scope I chose. I cross over into the history department, so I get the pleasure—or displeasure, of having to defend my dissertation to professors of both departments. On the bright side, I work with some of the brightest people and learn from them, and they from me.

  “Part of my studies led me to Dubbs House to help them with some translations of an old book they’d uncovered in the basement. They found it in between the underpart of the stairs and the storage area.” She fell silent for a moment and shrugged. “It’s a little tough to describe but there’s a crevice between the staircase and the little cubby.”

  “That’s clear enough to me,” I said, familiar with the basement but not about to admit it. “Go on, please.”

  I poured her a cup of water and handed it to her. She took a drink before continuing.

  “When I drove up to Silver Hollow, Doctor Langelier was all too glad to see me. He was just happy for the free work.”

  I repressed a laugh. “I know who he is, and perhaps you’re correct.”

  Damn right she was c
orrect. That man was a leech.

  Wendy gave a faint smile and nodded. “Oh, then you understand. He was eager to show me the exact spot where they discovered it, and then took me back to the Historical Society where they kept it.

  “It was old. The pages were thick, likely vellum, and the words were a dark red but legible. When I examined it further, I discovered it wasn’t vellum. It was human skin, and the ink was blood.”

  Years of practice listening to bizarre things patients say helped me keep a straight face when she told me this. Also being from Albion helps as we’re supposed to be famous for our deadpan expressions (I fit the stereotype). But I dismissed what she said.

  The experience traumatized her and building things up in her mind, she may have fantasized about was her way of coping with it. People have strange, fleeting thoughts and when coupled with a traumatic event, she was likely exaggerating things in her mind.

  “I told Langelier I would need to bring it back with me to Grace City, but he was immovable on that point,” she said. “But he offered me first publishing rights if I stayed and translated it, so I rented a house on Maple Street just outside of the town limits. A fair compromise.”

  I nodded, and she coughed, so I offered her more water. She sipped several times and then reclined again. I waited as the lighting grew dim from the sun hiding behind a cloud. For a while, the only sound was the ticking of my watch, the beeping and tones of monitors, and the distant busy murmurs of nurses as they went about their business.

  “The first thing I did when I was home—well, at the rental home—was try to put a date on the find. This is where my undergraduate dual degree in history and archaeology comes in handy.” Wendy chucked, then turned serious. “Dating the document was foremost in my mind because that would help me with the linguistics. This piqued my curiosity. The pages, as I’ve said, were thick, like vellum, but not as elegant. The color and variations of each page told me I wasn’t looking at hide, either, but in fact human skin.”

  Though she did have the air of authority I recognize in experts, I balked internally with disbelief. There have been such gruesome tomes in history, yes, but for it to be here in this place was a surreal idea I pushed away for the moment. That being said, I have kid leather gloves and leather-bound books, so perhaps I’m just being stubborn. Humans are animals, too (I have no illusions we’re any better than the so-called lower primates, and likely we’re something worse).

  Wendy kept going, some color returning to her cheeks as she spoke. “The ink resembled dried blood—a dark reddish brown, but mixed with something else. I don’t know what, but it was vibrant and easy to read. It wasn’t fresh, that much was obvious. I decided to get it to GCU for proper dating as soon as possible.

  “Anyway, I had luck while looking at the pages. Some of it was in Albionian. By the style of Albionian and the use of calligraphy and artistic style of the drawings, I narrowed the age of the book to be from somewhere between 1050 and 1080.”

  What Wendy was saying was akin to her speaking a foreign language—I was never a fantastic history student, as my friend Mercy would attest. I switch dates and forget details about wars and politics. I can retain information about diseases all day long, and even quote history of the diseases, but for other items like that, I lose interest. Her education and area of expertise was enough to convince me it was fact. At least the date part of it.

  Wendy was a master linguist even before she went to graduate school. She didn’t state that outright. I speak some languages other than Albionian—Francian, Alsatian, and Nipponese (enough so that I can get around Nippon without a translator), but this woman claimed to be fluent in ten different languages. It wasn’t possible to verify it at that moment, but I’d seen it before.

  I didn’t hide my shock—my jaw dropped and my eyebrows shot up my forehead. “Ten languages, fluently?”

  Wendy laughed and raised a weak hand to wave it at me, dismissive. “It’s not that impressive. My father was from Thule, and my mother’s from Rus Soyuz, and they spoke several languages themselves. I enjoyed speaking three languages before age six—Albionian, Rusyan, and Thulish—and children’s brains are sponges. I picked up languages with relative ease and loved speaking and reading them. Now I’ve incorporated Universal Sign Language into my languages—speaking with my hands.”

  I nodded. “USL is a good language. Useful,” I said. “I’ve been meaning to pick it up when I get the chance.”

  My upbringing was similar to Wendy’s. Father spoke Albionian and Alsatian, and mother spoke Francian and Albionian. Those languages learned early in life made it easier to learn more as I got older though Nipponese has been a challenge.

  Wendy rested a moment, though physically tired, her eyes were glinting with excitement. She took a sip of water, seemed to gather herself, then continued. “By the time I got to college, I spoke six languages, and by graduation, ten. I’m just glad I put my talent to work in linguistics.” She shrugged and gave me a soft smile.

  I would say the woman was a genius.

  “But this language was odd. There were no base similarities to any language I knew from which I might extrapolate.” Wendy frowned as if the memory was aggravating her. “Nothing close to Shenzhouan, Rusyan, Thulish, Alsatian, Albionian, Mashriqic, nor any other one I spoke. The Albionian wasn’t helpful, either, as it contained just random words such as ‘wheel,’ or ‘reach.’ Just enough to give me a clue to the dates due to the spelling. Some of the longer sentences were Albionian translations of events that came before and sometimes while the book was being written.”

  “That must have been frustrating,” I said, unsure if she wanted me to react or was just taking a break. When I spoke, she nodded and relaxed. She was checking to see if I was still listening. I sat forward.

  “I was getting frustrated with it and wrote it off as nonsense,” Wendy said. “Just a hoax or something that a historical joker wrote.”

  She sighed and shook her head. “Tired, and feeling as if I might have been the butt of a thousand-year-old joke, I took a break from it for a while and contacted fellow linguistic gymnasts for a consultation. I gave three of them different pieces—copies—of the work so that none would claim it as their own discovery. Many people would say that’s just paranoid, but I’ve seen it happen before. I was being cautious. You know how it is.”

  I nodded. “The more competitive the school, the more they would steal from each other and claim as their own. Healthy paranoia, in that case—you won’t have to stay for that.”

  She chuckled.

  So she separated out the scraps. Now when I say they’re scraps of a journal, that’s my Albion tongue and gift of understatement. I’ve lived in The Union for many years now, so I’ve changed the way I use grammar and spelling. I still retain some of Albion’s quirks, though, and my accent remains unaffected. That won’t change. I have to hang onto something of the place that once was.

  These scraps were, according to Wendy, quite a tome with over two hundred pages.

  “Although several were missing and looked as though they’d been cut out of the book,” she said. “But rather than take that as a setback, I took it in stride and was even more determined to translate the pages. That would help me figure out what the missing pages might have said.”

  I sat back again and rested my chin in my hand, chewing on my lower lip. As she was talking, I decided to take down some notes while the recorder caught what Wendy was saying.

  This isn’t a fanciful woman. Now that she’s coherent, I can observe just how intelligent, driven, and well-grounded she is, in spite of her excitement. She is a tenacious spirit, unfettered by even this harrowing setback that landed her in hospital. She seemed to suffer from some mania when she first came in, with flight of ideas and pressured speech, but she is unlike the other manic patients I’ve seen in my career in the emergency room. She became grounded faster and doesn’t seem to have difficulties keeping to one subject after sedation. Many I
’ve seen still have those problems even after sedation.

  I looked back up at her and put my tablet away. She kept talking.

  “I set to work deciphering the language once I did a little background research and found comparison words to Aramaic. My colleagues found comparisons to Sanskrit and Thracian. When they returned their findings, I could translate quicker. As I worked, it appeared to be that these were spells, chants, and recipes of some sort. Dark and cruel, by far some of the worst things I’d ever read that weren’t fiction.”

  Wendy leaned forward to take another sip of water. For a moment, her hands shook, but she took a deep breath and seemed to steady herself.

  “One was a spell to raise the dead,” she said. “That was one of the tamer ones. It reminded me of the horror movie about the Necronomicon.”

  I must have made a face at that because she sighed, slumping her shoulders. “You don’t believe me.”

  I shook my head. “I do, but it’s foreign to me. The book—I know it exists—it was at the Grace City Museum before someone stole it, but what it claims is outrageous.”

  Wendy’s face went from pinched to relaxed, more confident I didn’t dismiss her belief in it, rather it was my personal reaction to the book’s concept. I am a scientist and have seen many dead people. They don’t just come back. Sometimes they sit up during rigor mortis, but they’re not going anywhere.

  Nothing brings back the dead. Perhaps I’ve brought people back with CPR, but they weren’t far gone, and there was still something to resuscitate. This spell, however, brought people back from underground, their half-rotten, embalmed corpses sloshing their way through six feet of dirt and soil, somehow without breaking their rotted fingers off. I could laugh at it but only because it’s impossible.