The fear of the sea and things that come from the sea is easily spoken. The other fear is different, hard to name, the fear of things at one’s back, the silent inland presence.
~Don DeLillo, The Names
Part One – Parousia
The most terrifying thing about the summer of 2089 is not the nature of the events that took place, but my inability to properly express them. Not only that, but I find myself rapidly losing any cognitive grasp on my very memory of that year. It is thus under such urgency that I relate my tale.
The exit for Burns Hollow off I-95A is fresh and clean, and nothing like the overgrown wilderness that creeps along the edges of the old I-95 (which, for the record, is still passable and occasionally passed through, although most often by government transports or the rare teamster looking to shave off a few hours on the way to New Brunswick). The exit ramp slopes downward and eastward, veering off as though into the dense forest that comprises the wilderness between the interstate and the town, and eventually connects with Gunner Highway—a wide road but with only one lane going in each direction, threading the wood as through a dark needle’s eye, pitching endlessly and windingly through the looming chorus of conifers. There is a single filling station along this road, at which I stopped to ensure my course.
As I parked my car in the small lot (empty but for a pickup truck on blocks around the side of the station), I noticed with some unease the true darkness of the forest surrounding me. The midafternoon sun was vaguely hidden behind clouds, but even this could not account for the thick, soupy lightlessness that seemed not just to occupy the forest, but to emanate from it. As I approached the station I imagined that I could feel the dreariness as a kind of soggy stickiness, a synesthetic confusion that momentarily robbed my senses of their otherwise sharp capacities. It was for this reason that I nearly leapt out of my skin when the attendant asked if he could assist me.
“Christ, you scared me,” I managed, bending forward and clutching my chest.
“Can I help you?”
“I just… I’m sorry… I just wanted to make sure this is the way to Burns Hollow?” I gave the stress as a question, perhaps betraying my naiveté more than I had wished.
The man nodded. There was nothing particularly odd about him except for the way he stared at me, as though he thought words might not be enough to communicate. Like I was a fish, or an insect even. “Just head east. Should be about twenty minutes or so, maybe a little longer.”
“Okay, great,” I said, finally catching my breath. “Thank you.”
I was about to climb back into my car when he asked, “What are you headed that way for?”
I hesitated, but decided that it would be best to take any information I could get. “I’m investigating the Cove Corpses.” I waited for a moment. When he did not reply, I continued: “The bodies of children they found about half a mile north of the harbor. It’s been all over –”
“I know what you mean,” he interrupted. “You a policeman?”
I found his choice of words strange, but recovered quickly. “No, I’m an investigative journalist. I work for an online newspaper.”
The man’s face was impenetrable. His lips quivered in an expression stranded somewhere between terror and sorrow. “Those children…” He swallowed audibly. “I don’t know that you’ll get so much out of anybody there now.”
“I see,” I proceeded cautiously. “Why do you say that?”
“Those children… those bodies… you know what happened to them?”
I shook my head, and did so in earnest. The news coverage that I had watched and read had offered brief descriptions – bloated, decomposition, unidentifiable – but nothing concerning the unspoken cause of death, that brutal, voyeuristic classification we all yearn so desperately to discover. “I’m not sure I do.”
He cocked his head. “Why are you interested in this?”
This was a moment to be careful, and I knew this even as he asked it. The old trope plays out more than you might think: journalists are almost always strangers in very strange lands, and local residents wear their suspicion on their sleeves. Can you blame them?
“People need to know. If even just one person hears the right information… who knows? It could crack the case.” This was a line I had used before. No need to explain the process, the network, the media, the investigation in full; information is key, and in our era of the internet information is no longer currency – it’s oxygen.
The man pursed his lips skeptically, but he nodded. “Well, I can’t say I’m hopeful. The local police have been all over that stretch o’ coast, and I’m not sure if you know this but the feds have been here too. Nobody knows much of anything.”
“Including who they are?” I offered the gossip as complementary. It was a tactic to possibly extort further information; but my plan seemed to backfire. The man scowled at me and started to back off. “I mean,” I instantly put in, struggling to regain my footing. “They were, weren’t they? Unidentified?”
“They are unidentified,” the man said. It was only at this point that I noticed an odd look about his face – not skeptical or inquisitive, but uncanny. As though if I could peel back the outer layer of skin I would find a different, and somehow more authentic layer underneath, and a more authentic layer underneath that, and a yet more authentic layer beneath that. I felt my animal instincts go on alert.
“You ever hear of Baby Hope?” the attendant asked.
For a moment I was in the dark, the gears in my brain doing somersaults. Then ancient history clicked into place, cartoonish images popping up like a dusty photographic flipbook. “Angelica Castillo? I’ve read about the case.”
“Took them over twenty years to figure out who she was. Twenty years and a fluke conversation, you know that? What’s here for you? These kids are fresh to the Other Kingdom. No hope in it. Especially considering what happened to ‘em.”
“What did happen to them?”
The attendant’s head fell, his eyes finding nothing toward the gravel at our feet but looking beyond at something else. When he raised his head again it was as though a weight hung off his chin, the unwillingness as palpable as gravity. “You’ll have to get the coroner to… to put ‘em back in shape for you. Otherwise you’ll have to look at ‘em...”
I was silent, although not entirely surprised. My silence was out of respect and etiquette rather than shock. “I understand,” I said slowly. “I’m sorry.”
He left me with a nod, and I climbed back into my vehicle puzzled at the phrase “other kingdom.”
The road narrowed the further east I went, and eventually it felt as though the trees arched overhead like the walls of an umbilical. I tried to tune the radio but could find only static. Interference, of course: ever since Lenore, meteorologists and physicists have tracked strange electrical anomalies in the Upper Northeast. I tapped my phone to sync it with the car’s Bluetooth; but there was nothing. No signal to be found. I scowled, wondering how on earth these people got any news of the outside beyond outdated printed materials. The sky darkened overhead. At first I thought it was an effect of the dense canopy, but then I noticed how distinctly the branches stood out against the sky beyond. Clouds were gathering. A feeling of constriction sank upon me as I drove. I could see no more than a thousand feet or so ahead, for the road curved as though insistent on evading my vision, a twisting cartilaginous serpent…
It is a pertinent question, for any storyteller, whether style should make an appearance, and to what degree. If I were a poet I would not only tell an aesthetically enhanced tale; I would tell a tale about aesthetics. Any poetic act must be as much about its form as about its content, if it can be said to have any content at all. My act is not one of poetry, but one of confession and exposition. I must express to you not my feelings of the experience, but the experience itself. I must refrain from conveying the horror of my time in Burns Hollow. I must keep to myself the involution of my insides, how every atom of bodily matter that could mean something was made to know its pure, pale deadness, a deadness that stunk out of my own eyes and creeped in through my rectum. I was my split shell to the children of a sickness that lived beneath the waves and whose eyes drew down the moon, my unlit wicks quenched in that sick density and floating past sunken wrecks, derelicts of an involuntary ritual beneath the stars, drifting regardless of ocean currents. I quivered under gravity, I could not help myself, I felt disgusted at my own corpse, which I felt to be responding to a curse despite my iron will. No one could stand against that before which I would fall, the whole bloated carnival of carcasses.
It could have been that certain offices of varying intelligences knew about Burns Hollow. It could have been that they knew all along. It could have been that they planted me there. It could have been that some ancient, evil god wrought a clayman of questionable propensities to wreak havoc down here on the threshing floor. It could have been any of these things. My shadow flees the sun no matter which way the wind blows. Light is so, so heavy. I am an unfixed thing. I could have been a fixed thing. My name is a name, but it is not always the same. It could have always been the same, but the best it could have been is a trick. My name is not a trick. If I tell it, I give away the ending. I cannot give away the ending. I could have given away the ending. But if you’re smart, you can guess the ending. If you’re smarter, you already have.
“Welcome to Wyrd’s Inn,” the elderly woman said, smiling pleasantly as I strode through the slender doorway trailing my single piece of luggage. A quick glance around the lobby confirmed my exterior suspicions – a small, quaint, quiet place. Perfect for working. “And welcome to Burns Hollow.”
“Thank you,” I said, approaching the counter. Behind the old woman hung a broad painting: a thick, black star hanging above farmland, dark silhouettes driving cattle across thin snow, tracks of blood in the white—
“How many nights will you be with us?”
I tore my eyes from the painting. “I’m not sure.”
She raised her eyebrows. “Oh. Um, well…”
“I’m a reporter,” I said. “I’ll take a room for three nights, but I may end up staying longer. Will that be alright?”
“Oh!” she exclaimed, an expression of pure delight spilling across her face. “How exciting! Why yes, of course, we have several rooms this time of year. To be honest, not many people come by here anymore, especially to stay for a whole three days! We have our Yellow Room, that one looks out over the park, and the Bierce Suite, now that one…”
Her voice faded as my gaze drifted back to the painting. The blood trailed behind the cattle, speckled across the snow as though it was dripping, albeit in large quantities. The silhouetted humans drove the herd, two on either side of the group and another in a vehicle like a wagon, one arm raised and wielding a stick of some kind. The wide landscape spread between two forested clusters on either side of the image, and the herd rode away from the viewer’s perspective, toward the distant horizon. The black star cast an odd unlight within the frame, a darkness visible, a pale spectrum of plutonian illumination. All the bodies strode through a chthonian surface-world, a cavern beneath the cosmic dome, toward a monstrous accumulation clustered around the painting’s vanishing point. But the most puzzling aspect of the image was a single word, barely visible, inscribed above the portentous, dark mass—tentacular script, coiling serpentine against the grainy gray:
Septentrional
“Sir? Are you alright?”
Her voice brought me back gently into the calm lobby. “I’m sorry,” I said. “I was just admiring this painting.”
“Oh, yes,” she said, smiling modestly. “My son made it.”
“It’s astonishing. Does he sell locally?”
“He did,” she said. “He died.”
I wasn’t struck by the information, but by the tone in which she delivered it. She said it casually, as though it was the most normal thing in the world to share such intimate family history. It took me a moment to recover my speech. “I’m sorry. He was a wonderful painter.”
“He was, wasn’t he?” She smiled pleasantly. “So, you’d like the Bierce Suite?”
“Bierce?”
“Yes, it observes the orchard out back. A splendid view of the fountain and courtyard as well. I must say, I think it’s our nicest room.”
I nodded. “That sounds lovely.”
“Oh, I’m so glad. The Bierce Suite for three nights, and I’m sure it will be no problem to extend your stay if you’d like.”
“Fantastic. I’m sorry, but do you mind if I ask you a few questions?”
Oh my,” she stuttered, her smiling turning feverish. “Am I being interviewed? Oh, I used to dream about being interviewed! Did you know that I was an actress when I was younger? I even did a few shows in Boston back in the day. I was Stella Kowalski in college. They said that my performance was –”
“Oh, that is wonderful!” I exclaimed, trying my best to make my interruption sound organic rather than targeted. “I love Tennessee Williams.”
“Who?” she asked, her head cocked to one side.
I paused, struck dumb.
Change the subject. “I’m actually here to investigate the Cove Corpses.”
She recoiled at that, a somber veil descending over her countenance. I could see, in my periphery, her hand tremble as it hovered slightly above the counter, a large key grasped in its fingers. Her eyes were directed toward me, but she appeared to look past me, at something distant, far beyond the walls of the small lobby. I thought back to the gas station attendant’s far-off gaze that strove to peel back the layers of the earth.
“I’m sorry if this is troubling,” I said at last. “My editor sent me. Our website wants to run a full story about what’s happened here, the mystery of these bodies. But we also want to speak with members of the town, to see how everyone’s holding up. To talk about how it’s affected the locals.”
“Locals,” she repeated, softly. “You out-of-towners always make us sound so… so simple.”
“Oh, oh no,” I said. “I didn’t mean that at all. I’m sorry, all I meant –”
“It wasn’t your words, young one. It’s in your tone. You have to watch that tone.”
I had not anticipated being scolded by the first person I met in Burns Hollow. Something in her voice rendered me momentarily speechless. It seemed to me perfectly normal that people would be hesitant to talk when they heard about why I was here; I had expected some resistance, perhaps even stone cold silence. But here was someone circumventing the niceties of social manners to make explicit that which I was in danger of transgressing. I was doubly thrown—first by the audacity of the gesture, and second by its content.
“I apologize.” This was all I felt comfortable saying.
Her lips immediately recovered their smile. “Well then!” She raised her hand, no longer trembling. The large key sprouted ungainly from her delicate fingers. “Let me show you to your room.”
In a sense, I am a vaguely composed individual. Sometimes I cannot even properly focus on myself as I stand in the world in front of me. It’s a kind of invisible-man effect, as though I’m an ectoplasmic form subtracted from its surroundings, but those surroundings have now begun to bleed into the space left behind, to fill the vacancy like rainwater spilling over an open manhole. My real constitution—if I can call it real—grumbles annoyingly below the surface of things, a dull Brownian motion swimming in eccentric circles, spiraling further into an exponentially rendered cosmic chaos. It is unsettling to acknowledge the senselessness that underscores me, but it is also affirming. To know that I am of the stars, hurtling toward collision and collapse.
The Bierce Suite was a large room: a king-size bed and enormous armoire in which sleeps a wide television that slides forward as you open the doors. The bathroom had two sinks and an elegant tub over which hung the showerhead, and next to the bathroom was a deep closet. A kitchenette lingered opposite these, and on the far side, beyond the bed, a grand window looked out over the labyrinthine garden. The floor was covered in soft carpeting and the walls decorated in a design that looked somewhat dated, but simultaneously pleasant and comforting. A ceiling fan provided the room’s central light, but lamps sat on nightstands to either side of the bed, as well as on a desk, tucked into the corner of the room beyond the armoire and next to the massive window.
Somewhat perplexing, the only mirror in the room hung, frustratingly, above the bed’s headboard, providing me only a glimpse of my shoulders and head. I shrugged this off, reminding myself that I had never been desperately concerned with my appearance. Half the time I didn’t even show up in mirrors. I turned and smiled at my host. “It’s wonderful.”
My interest in the occult can be traced back to my undergraduate years at Amherst PRU12 (formerly UMass Amherst). The anthropology professor that taught the course on the relation between cult rituals and conspiracy theories wasn’t the greatest teacher. He rambled a lot, often forgetting why he had started to say something and ending on an entirely different point. On top of that, I’m fairly certain he would have eagerly acted upon any vaguely promiscuous advance. None of this is to suggest that my interest in the material was diminished. I took copious notes, and even went so far as to conduct my own research beyond the scope of the class.
In the fall semester of 2081, I came across the following reference in an out-of-print study in the stacks at Du Bois:
During their research into the persisting practice of cage fishing off the coast of Old Maine, Emmanuel Ricardo and Jason Richter discovered evidence of occult practices along the rocky shores near what used to be Bald Head. While tracking the placement and retrieval of traps, Ricardo and Richter noticed odd rock formations along the very edge of the shore, partly submerged by the tide. Upon closer inspection, they noted that these formations were comprised of much smaller pieces of stone arranged in what they described as “an unnaturally intentional pattern.” Inspecting the area further, they located more patterns further inland, as well as two comprised of much larger rocks. When asked about these formations, the locals referred to a “cult of numbers,” and occasionally to a “cult of the number.” They refused to provide any further explanation.
John L. Pressman, of Harvard’s Viral University, has hypothesized the existence of a “Cult of the Unique Number,” which he describes as a set of practices structured around the central belief in a number, or theorem, that establishes a “necropolitical relation”—that which we might define as a socio-communicational bond between the living and the dead. (Hammond 176)
I brought this passage to the attention of my professor, who read it with less than mild interest and dismissed it with a brief comment: “Pressman is an armchair hack, he spends no time in the field.” I don’t recall my instructor’s answer when I asked if he had ever spent time in the field.
I pursued journalism, but anthropological mysteries and obscurities have always tickled my fancy, and I’ve made it a point to try and pursue leads that I think may have some connection to various occult practices or groups. Naturally, when I read about the Cove Corpses, I thought that the story had a particular scent, an occult bouquet. I began looking into the case, reading every article, op-ed, and transcript that I could get my hands on. I met with freelance investigators to get their opinions, I sent emails to the local police (I never received a response), and I even was able to meet with a federal agent who was assigned to the case. I wanted to hear all the details that could be recalled, to learn everything that I was permitted to know. “Not much to tell,” the FBI agent told me. “Well, not much that I’m allowed to tell.” He’d grinned, spinning the salt shaker on the small table in the café where we met. I remember he swept the palm of his hand across his forehead and kept glancing out the window. “Sometimes you can feel when you shouldn’t be somewhere. That’s how I felt in Burns Hollow.”
It wasn’t until I came across an online source of questionable veracity that I decided to ask my editor about Burns Hollow. It wasn’t a news report, but someone’s personal account – a conspiracy nut, buried somewhere in the deep web, with photos from the sites that apparently weren’t supposed to be released. My editor actually took me seriously for a few minutes, but eventually sent an email expressing skepticism. “How can we even come close to knowing these are authentic? I mean, they could be from the site, but someone could have set them up and then took the photos. There’s no way you can verify these.” At that point, I tracked down the photographer. It wasn’t easy. I had to call in more than a couple favors from friends on the tech-side of things. There had been no crime scene photos, to my disappointment, no pictures of the corpses; but there were numerous shots of agents and other figures scouring the shore, people in hazmat suits, divers in scuba gear, and others, black-suited men and women who looked to be pacing across the stones, all their eyes trained downward. And interspersed throughout the collection of photographs, grainy and taken in dim light, probably either at dawn or dusk in order to avoid detection (I couldn’t rightly tell, shadows didn’t seem to fall properly in any photo), there were six shots of the
mise-en-scène, ambient shots of the stony shore. And my breath caught when I saw them. Because I had seen them before.
They looked just like the photos that Ricardo and Richter had taken at Bald Head.
Small stones, arranged in strange patterns, sometimes piled upon each other. I tried to make sense of these patterns, to extract something recognizable from them, but they were as confounding as the ones in the study I’d read. There was meaning there, that I was sure of; but I couldn’t crack it, I needed more, I needed to know more, I needed to go there.
That last bit, of course, obeyed no observable logic that I would expect you to follow. It was simply what I needed to do. So, I contacted the photographer and asked if I could email him a few questions. Tactfully worded stuff, things that wouldn’t seem too interrogative but that would establish him as the one who took the photos, and that he had visited Burns Hollow. I don’t remember what those questions were, now. But they must have worked, because when I emailed my editor again she gave the go-ahead. And there it was. My next assignment.
Burns Hollow.
She caught me staring at the painting when she reentered the room. “I’m so pleased you like it,” she said, smiling.
I started at the sound of her voice, but quickly laughed and put my hand to my chest. “Well, it’s a fascinating painting.”
I had come back down to the lobby to ask some questions about the town, and about potentially useful places to focus on. Finding the lobby vacant, I had once again felt my eyes attracted to the image hung upon the wall behind the front desk. There was something strange about the poetic vision, something oddly evasive. Had it changed since I’d last seen it? There was what appeared to be the silhouette of a new body, someone doubled over on the snow – wounded? – left behind by the trail of cattle, perhaps… but there was a strange attention paid to this figure by the passersby (and were there more of them now, too?), an attention that drew my attention now but hadn’t earlier. I found myself trying to recall my first impression of the painting, to a somewhat desperate degree.
It was then that her voice broke my concentration.
“Is the room to your liking?” she asked, moving behind the desk.
“Yes, absolutely. I was actually thinking about making my way around town and wanted to ask you a few questions.”
“Around town?” she said, perplexed. “At this time of night?”
I turned and glanced out the screen door to the small inn, losing my gaze momentarily in the surprisingly deep blackness beyond the front porch. I had forgotten the time, and hadn’t even realized how deep the night…
“Get yourself lost, going out this late.”
I turned back to her. “I suppose… could you maybe give me some direction? I feel like walking a bit, getting in the right head space. And I would like to see the town at night.”
She raised an eyebrow. “Why?”
I shrugged, smiling. “Just part of the journalistic experience, I guess. I won’t be long. I could just walk around the block, perhaps…?”
“I’ll tell you what,” she said, leaning forward. “Why don’t you head down to the rocks. Great view of the water, and you can see the lights of the fishing boats. It’s a peaceful spot. You just go outside and take a right, walk for maybe a half-mile. You’ll see some restaurants and bars along to your left, eventually. They’ll still be open for a bit yet. Keep going until you see one called The Yarmouth Girl. Just past it you’ll find a path going down through the weeds, it empties out onto the rocks.” She spread her arms in a hallelujah pose. “And you’re there.”
I nodded. “Okay. Maybe I’ll do that. Thank you.”
She winked. “Watch your step. Those rocks have a mind of their own.”
