When the Darkness Falls

by Gonzalez, J. F.

  “Nope. I’ll be home all day.” Richard operated a book-selling business off the Internet, which enabled him to work out of the house. Sometimes local clients came in to inspect his stock by appointment, which was housed in the basement. It had been easy to move the business from Maine to Pennsylvania, since he’d already been established in mail-order for over ten years. The only time he left his home was to pay a call on a client to appraise books they wanted to sell, attend an auction or estate sale, or to go to the post office to ship orders.

  “Will you go to the store then and stock up? If this thing is hitting tomorrow the stores are gonna be packed.”

  “Okay.”

  Carrie left with the kids; the routine was that they took turns taking the kids to school. Carrie worked in Manheim as an Administrator at a high school. She’d been able to get a job pretty easy when they moved here. After all, Lancaster County was her hometown; she’d grown up here. That was one of the reasons why they’d moved back.

  When the forecast came back to the local area, Richard sipped his coffee and paid attention. The storm was expected to arrive tomorrow morning, and it was going to be a doozy. It was being called an extreme Nor’Easter, the first blizzard the area had had in thirty years. There was the possibility that with the wind chill factor and the amount of precipitation, they could get up to over a foot of snow in the next week.

  Even by Maine standards that was significant snowfall. They used to get storms like that at least once a year.

  When Richard arrived at the grocery store on Lititz Pike, he found it pretty busy as was expected before a storm when people stocked up to ride it out. Older people pushed shopping carts, filling them with various sundries. He was rounding the corner to the canned goods isle when he ran into Walt Forest, the guy who ran an antique store around the block from where they lived. Walt nodded. “When you leavin’?”

  “Leaving?” Richard asked, confused.

  “Big storm coming,” Walt said. “That foot of snow is probably going to turn to eighteen inches or two feet by tomorrow. This is a big one. Best you’d leave.”

  “No sense in leaving,” Richard said. “We’re just gonna hunker down and –”

  “Oh,” Walt said, staring at Richard with a look of epiphany. “That’s right. You’re not from here.”

  “Well, yeah, but I am from Maine,” Richard said, now more puzzled than before. “I’ve been through storms like that and—”

  “Like I said. Best you leave. Trust me on this.” Then, without another word, Walt pushed his cart past him and down the aisle.

  Richard looked at Walt’s receding figure as he headed down the aisle. What was that all about? Walt looked...well, he looked pretty uneasy. Almost embarrassed.

  As he drove down 772 nearing Silver Spring he noticed two more of his neighbors, people he’d developed nodding acquaintances with, heading in the opposite direction. The Rutts, who were in their mini-van, had all the kids crammed into the backseats. They looked like they were embarking on a family trip. Likewise, the Beckers had both their teenage children in tow. Richard frowned, wondering why both sets of families had decided to allow their children the day off from school.

  When he pulled into the driveway of his home he saw his neighbor, Paul Ross, packing a suitcase into the back of his gray Chevy Suburban. Richard opened the trunk of his Saturn and began taking out bags of groceries.

  Paul turned to Richard. “You stock up?”

  “Yep.” Richard hauled a bag containing a jug of milk and reached inside for the eggs.

  “Where you staying?”

  Richard paused, looking at Paul curiously. “Here. Why would we go anywhere else?”

  Something passed through Paul’s face, as if he realized he’d said the wrong thing. His eyes were wide, nervous looking. “You might want to leave. This is supposed to be the biggest storm we’ve had in thirty years.”

  “Are we in a bad zone or something?” Richard asked, getting fed up now with the evasive nature in which the locals were refusing to address the situation. “I mean, we aren’t at the foothills or anything. I see no threat of Silver Spring being in the path of an avalanche.”

  “No, we aren’t,” Paul said, eyeing Richard. “Still, it’s better if you can leave for awhile.”

  Three cars drove down the street in quick succession. As they passed, Richard saw they were filled with families or couples. Across the street, a man and woman exited their home bearing suitcases. The man opened the trunk of his Subaru and loaded it up.

  He turned back to Paul. “Is everybody in town leaving?”

  Paul nodded.

  “Where are they going?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Where are you going?”

  “I’m going to my mother’s in Akron.”

  Now Richard was puzzled. “You’re staying with your mother in Akron? Akron’s, what? Ten miles from here? What’s the difference in staying here or—”

  “Listen,” Paul said, and now he appeared more animated. He glanced around furtively, as if afraid he was being overheard. “I can’t speak for everybody in town, but I’m guessing everybody else is staying with friends or family in Lancaster County. Most of ‘em are probably driving out of the county and stayin’ in a motel or something. Reason I’m staying with my mom is because...” He shrugged. “Well, she knows.”

  “Knows what?”

  Paul sighed. “Okay, you’re gonna think I’m crazy but here it is. You don’t want to be in Silver Spring when the storm hits. Last time a big storm like this hit was thirty years ago. I was only eight and we was fine. Everybody left. But before that? It was back in the fifties. Guy moved to Silver Spring from Philly with his family. Had three kids. He didn’t leave.” Paul swallowed and Richard could see his Adam’s Apple bob in his throat. “During the storm he killed his whole family. Chopped ‘em up with an axe.”

  “No kidding?” Richard still didn’t understand what an almost fifty-year old murder case had to do with the weather.

  “He was warned,” Paul continued, his eyes darting to the front door of his house. “My dad said everybody warned him and he wouldn’t go.”

  “He was warned to leave town before the storm hit and...what? He went storm-crazy and butchered his family?”

  “You don’t understand,” Paul leaned forward, his voice a hissing whisper. “They don’t just go stir-crazy. It’s the weather conditions. When we get a Nor-Easter like this, at these conditions, it awakens them. They take over and look for a suitable host. If you’re here—”

  “They? Who’s they?” Paul sounded like a bona-fide nut.

  Paul gripped Richard’s upper arm. “I don’t have time to give you a history lesson, so listen carefully. About a hundred and eighty years ago, this town was founded by a closely-knit religious group. They weren’t like normal Christians. They worshipped something else. It wasn’t the devil exactly, but it wasn’t entirely of this earth. They flourished in Silver Spring because Pennsylvania was a Quaker state and they were largely tolerant of other religions. But people started settling in the surrounding areas...Lititz, Manheim, places like that...and they didn’t take to this group’s ways. They got driven out.”

  “What does this have to do with—”

  “Listen!” Paul’s eyes were wide, all pupils. “They all got run out except one guy. He refused to leave. A posse came for him during the height of a great blizzard and they killed him in a little stone house that’s no longer standing. And according to legend, before he died he swore he’d come back. That was in 1845.”

  The tale was insignificant to Richard. An old wives’ tale. “So what happens? The town gets possessed or something whenever we get a storm like this? Does this guy’s ghost come back? What?”

  “I don’t know,” Paul said, getting back to the task at stowing his baggage in the vehicle. “All I know is that every time Lancaster County gets a huge storm like this, it acts like some sort of catalyst or something. It’s like when the weather gets to a
certain wind chill factor and we get enough snow it triggers something. It triggers some kind of madness to anybody who lives in Silver Spring.”

  “And whoever is left here when it happens is affected,” Robert said.

  Paul nodded. “Yeah.”

  “And you believe that?”

  Paul’s wife, Susie, joined him with their son, Ben. Susie had an overnight bag and Ben was clutching a backpack. “You see us leavin’ don’t you?”

  “Did you tell him?” Susie asked Paul.

  “Yeah, I told them,” Paul said. He put Susie and Ben’s luggage in the vehicle, then turned to Robert. “I know it sounds crazy, but it happens. The locals will tell you. We got old timers in town who’ve been through two or three of these things. Besides that family in the fifties, there was a family in 1932 that got wiped out, and before that, in 1917, another family was massacred. We get these storms once every fifteen, twenty years or so. Last one was in ’72. We was lucky that year. Everybody left. I’d advise you take your family and leave until it blows over.”

  Ben and Susie got in the car. Paul slammed the door to the rear of the Suburban, then climbed behind the wheel. Before he closed the door he looked at Richard. “Don’t say I didn’t warn you.” Then he slammed the door, started the engine, and backed out of the driveway.

  Richard watched them leave. He felt a sense of nervousness as four more vehicles headed down the street, all of them filled with people from the neighborhood. It was a mass exodus to leave Silver Spring, Richard realized; one based on fear and superstition.

  He carried the rest of the groceries in the house and put them away, thinking about what he’d just witnessed and heard. It was crazy, like something out of one of those B-movies he used to love watching as a kid. When all the groceries were put away, he went to the window and looked out. The sky was gray, definitely snow-material, but it didn’t appear the storm was going to be hitting anytime soon. A few more cars drove by, stopping at the end of their street and turning south on 772, heading out of town. Richard found it weird that all two hundred and thirty seven residents of the little village of Silver Spring would be held together by the same superstition. Still, it piqued his interest. He checked his watch; it was ten-thirty. A trip to the library was in order.

  The closest one was in Lititz, about ten miles away. He locked up the house and drove over, mulling everything he’d witnessed and been told in his mind. Something wasn’t right about the story. He found it hard to believe this legend was only confined to Silver Spring and the few Lancaster County residents who lived in the outlying areas.

  When he arrived at the Lititz Public Library, he asked the clerk behind the counter if they had microfilm of the Lancaster Intelligencer going back the past hundred years. The clerk, a young man with a crew cut sitting in a wheel-chair, nodded. He pointed to his right. “Micro-film machines are over there. The cabinets in the back contain back issues of the Intelligencer going all the way back to 1875.”

  Richard thanked him and headed over to begin his research.

  The first year he researched was 1972, the year of the last storm. As he scrolled through the issues, he decided to focus on the months between December and March, typical Nor’Easter months. He struck paydirt five minutes later.

  The storm that hit in 1972 had occurred on February 12. It had lasted for five days, bringing four feet of snow. The entire week of the paper was filled with stories about the storm and local reaction to it. The February 15 edition eluded to the last time a storm of this magnitude had hit—January 4, 1958.

  Richard took out the micro-film and went over to the cabinets to get the film for 1958.

  The January 4 edition ran a banner headline: MONSTER STORM EXPECTED TO DUMP TWENTY INCHES OF SNOW IN TWENTY-FOUR HOUR PERIOD. The next few days’ reporting was similar to the 1972 storm with one exception.

  On January 9, Karl Eschbach of Silver Spring killed his entire family—his wife and two small children—with an axe.

  The story made the front page. The bodies were discovered by neighbors who paid the Eschbach’s a visit after the storm lifted. The Eschbach’s had moved to the region from Philadelphia. Karl was arrested for first-degree murder.

  Intrigued, Richard scrolled through the rest of the year, looking for more stories of the Eschbach case. The week following the murder, the paper ran daily updates. He learned that in the days following the murders, Karl Eschbach had been examined by a psychiatrist and found legally insane. He also learned that, according to medical examiners, Karl had killed his family the day before they were found, on January 8, four days after the storm hit.

  Richard sat back in his chair, thinking about that. Snowbound for four days and Karl Eschbach goes crazy and kills his whole family. He leaned forward and perused the paper some more.

  A follow-up article contained the brief mention that, prior to the killings, Karl had been heard arguing with his wife. There were suggestions of family troubles. It was speculated that while they were closed up in their home for the four days their troubles accelerated until Karl blew a fuse, resulting in him losing his sanity and murdering his family.

  A plausible explanation, Richard thought. But not believable enough to support the theory that he’d become possessed by some spirit.

  During his perusal of the 1958 storm and the subsequent murder case, the articles mentioned that the last time Lancaster County had suffered such a heavy storm was in 1940.

  He checked the paper for the winter of 1940. No murders occurred that year, but the storm had been a whopper—three feet of snow in two days, wind chill factor of 25 below freezing with winds of eighty miles per hour.

  The articles from that period referenced the last storm of similar magnitude in the area, from 1932.

  That year, the storm had hit with a ferociousness not seen since 1917. Five feet of snow was dumped in as many days between January 23 and January 28. On January 27, Eric Heister used a hatchet to dispatch his wife and two teenage children.

  Richard read the article with rapt interest. The articles on both the Heister and Eschbach cases were eerily similar; both families had been recent arrivals from out-of-state. The Heister’s had come from Indiana. There was trouble at home —Eric Heister had been laid off from a plant job in November of 1930 and was unable to work since then. They’d bought their home in Silver Spring from an inheritance on Mabel Heister’s side of the family, and Eric worked odd jobs in the area to pay the mortgage. In the articles published in the weeks after the storm and the discovery of the bodies (again, made by a neighbor after the storm passed, and again Eric Heister was committed to a mental hospital), it was suggested by neighbors that Eric was a violent man who often beat his wife. Relatives in Indiana confirmed this, adding that Eric had a problem with alcohol.

  There were no murders during the 1917 or 1901 storms, but in 1888, a farmer who’d moved from Berks County slaughtered his family of seven at the height of a week long blizzard. When his neighbors came to check on them after the storm, the farmer, Randolph Walker, attacked them with an axe. He was shot in self-defense.

  1888 was the last storm Richard was able to locate that was within the perimeters he was looking for. The 1888 articles noted that the last time the region was hit with this big a storm was in 1867.

  Robert wondered if anybody living in Silver Spring was caught up in the madness even then.

  He drove home slowly, pondering everything he’d read. Surely they were just weird coincidences. It had taken him three hours to do his research, and he wondered if, given enough time, he would have been able to find reports of similar violent acts in other parts of the state. Surely Silver Spring was not the only part of the country immune to violent acts while snowbound during heavy winter storms. Plus, according to all the articles he’d read, all the men involved had one thing in common: past histories of violent behavior and alcohol abuse. They’d been powder kegs waiting to explode. Cabin fever during extreme weather conditions keeping them inbound was what set them off.
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br />   As he drove through Silver Spring he saw that the town was deserted. Normally he wouldn’t have noticed. He drove slowly, checking everything out as he cruised. Sutter’s Market was closed on Main Street, as was the antique shop and the sandwich store. The four square blocks that made up Silver Spring was deserted. There were no cars parked in the driveways or along the streets. The casual passerby driving through town wouldn’t even notice the abnormality because Silver Spring was so small. You could literally drive from one end of town to the other in twenty seconds.

  As Richard parked in the driveway, three cars headed down the street and turned down Main Street, heading toward 772 out of town. Richard watched them leave, noting they were packed with families.

  Leaving in fear of the storm.

  Once in the house, he checked the orders he’d printed out on his computer the night before. Sales had been slow at the beginning of the year, and he’d shipped all his orders yesterday. He booted up his computer, accessed his Internet connection and checked his order queue. Nothing had come in since yesterday. If any orders came in during the storm, he could always e-mail the customer and explain that their order would be shipped as soon as the incoming storm lifted.

  He tried to turn his attention to other tasks: bookkeeping, browsing through publisher’s catalogues, updating his own print and on-line catalogue, but he couldn’t concentrate. He realized his mind was wandering when he realized the wind was blowing and he looked up from the mint copy of Ray Bradbury’s Dark Carnival he’d found at an estate sale for dirt cheap and looked out the window. The sky was dark. And he saw the snow swirling and blowing sideways in the field across the road from them before it hit.

  By the time the storm hit he’d shut his computer down and strolled to the living room window to watch. The snow was flying; it looked like thousands of little white pebbles zinging like bullets. A pair of headlights cut through the swirling white and a moment later Carrie’s car pulled into the driveway. Richard reached for his coat hanging on the rack by the door and went out to help her bring the kids inside.