In The Woods Somewhere - The Books Of Beginning AU

1. The Town That Terror Built

"Hey, Mr. Chu, my shift just ended, I'm headed home for the evening!" Kate called down the hallway to her jovial, but somewhat oblivious, especially to the time, boss. It was Friday afternoon, and she was eager to get going and start her weekend.

"Okay!" Mr. Chu yelled back. "Walk safe! Be careful of the woods!"

"I will!" She replied, even as her lips turned downwards into a grimace. Shouldering her bookbag, she strode out the back door of Cambridge Falls' sole outdoor supply store, Chu's Garden and Home Improvements. She'd been working there after school for a year now, and it was fine, for the most part, but she still couldn't wrap her head around certain oddities her boss possessed. 

Then again, Kate thought, as she was beginning to walk down the street, it wasn't like he was the only odd one, here in the town of Cambridge Falls. The residents radiated strangeness like the sun radiated heat, and though Kate had lived here for over ten years, she doubted she would ever wholly understand it. (Maybe, to do so, you had to be born here, rooted in the soil. Fed the bizarre from birth to death.)

On first glance, the town, sitting right on the New York and Vermont border, didn't seem that unusual. It was small and isolated, tucked against the untamed forest, trapped between the mountains and Lake Champlain. The Cambridge River ran past it, down said mountains and eventually into said lake, and created the titular falls. There were no more than two thousand people living there, the closest city was Westport, directly across the lake, and life was simple, not impoverished but far from wealthy. It definitely came across as a bit antiquated, but not unnatural, and certainly not disturbing. The eeriness only reared its head when you got closer, when you had already put down roots and it was too late to leave.

Kate knew that eeriness all too well. She'd been steeped in it for long enough to learn about the town's dark underbelly. A dozen or so mysterious disappearances over the past century. None of them solved, none of the people recovered, alive or dead. And, even more unnerving, no one seemed particularly interested in recovering them; no one seemed to be searching for answers. That was the part that made her uncomfortable. She could handle the ghost stories and superstitions, grating as they could get. She could handle the way almost every local blamed the entirety of the town's problems on a boogeyman. What she couldn't handle was the fact that everyone was resigned to it all, the disappearances, the legends, the mystery. How could the town just give up, over and over again, on its residents? Kate couldn't fathom it. After all, she never stopped searching for her missing loved ones, and she never ever would.

(She had been only four, when Richard and Clare Wibberly vanished. The couple had left their family home in Boston to attend a work function at the local college where Richard taught. According to the other guests, they never arrived, and they never made it home either. Ever since that fateful December night, Kate and little siblings, Michael and Emma, were stuck in a terrible void of not knowing. Still, they refused to lay down and accept it. They searched their parents' names in every online database. They emailed anyone they could think of who might have information. And every Thursday, without fail, Kate called the police officers assigned to the Wibberly case - from Agatha, the first one on the scene, who was bumbling but kind and who always took Kate's calls up 'till the day she died in a car fire, to the current Detective Crumley, who was rude and short tempered and loathe to talk - to ask for updates, even though everything had gone cold years ago. Even though the cops didn't seem to have any interest in doing something to change that.)

The wind whipped at her hair as she walked, chilling her even through her sturdy coat. Such was February in Cambridge Falls, though the month was on its way out. In a few days, it would be March, and on the 7th Kate would turn eighteen. She supposed that was a big milestone, but it didn't feel that way to her. How could it, when she lost her innocence so long ago? Official adulthood meant nothing to someone who'd been functioning like an adult for years now.