Black Box: Book Three

34 ~ The Spire in the Woods part 1

Robert Edward Kennan killed himself in the Fall of 1999. I wasn't there but it's where my story begins. It begins with Rob, 17 years old, sitting in a burning car in the middle of a crowded parking lot one Monday night in October. He burned for nearly four hours before the police let the firemen near enough to put out the flames and pull out his body. I didn't know him. Not really. We lived in a small town. I knew him by sight, knew his name, but I doubt we'd ever exchanged more than a few perfunctory words. It makes me feel funny talking about him, like I'm not justified doing it, but if I'm going to tell you about the Spire, it's unavoidable. I have to tell you about Robert Edward Kennan and how the suicide notes he left behind tangled my life up with his.

Back then, we both lived in a sleepy town in New England, a little over an hour northwest of Boston, just across the New Hampshire border. It's the sort of place that's nice to live, if you're the sort of person that doesn't like doing very much. There's really only three reasons anyone ever steps foot in my hometown. The first is that they're on their way to Nashua, the shopping Mecca of the northeast. The second would be the ice cream. We have a dairy farm where they sell the world's best ice cream. All of it made right there on the premises. And the third is because they bought one of those "Haunted New England" books.

Usually, you can find our town listed in those books twice. The first entry will likely be the story of how our high school, which is one of the ten oldest in the country, came to have the Silver Specter as its mascot. I always loved the Spector. It reflected how steeped in folklore rural New England once was, and, as mascots go, it's much more interesting than the "Fighting (fill in the cat species here)" everyone else seems saddled with.

Way back in the 1890s there was a terrible blizzard. A proper nor'easter. It dumped several feet of snow across the whole region. There were many, many casualties, mostly the very young and very old stuck in their homes without heat. One of the exceptions, who was neither very young nor very old, was Jennifer Wilkins. She was a teacher, trapped in the school when the blizzard hit.

What little food there was in the school house couldn't have lasted more than two days, and folks say by the fifth, she had resorted to boiling her boots, to soften up the leather for eating. It was two weeks before anyone was able to reach her. They found her, body thin as a matchstick, wrapped up in a gray wool blanket. If only they'd had paste in those days, she might have made it.

That old school house is now our town rec center. Supposedly, old Jenny still haunts its halls, wrapped in that gray wool blanket, her hollow, emaciated visage searching in vain for something to eat.

Once, when I was eight or nine years old, long before I knew the origins of the Silver Specter, I went up into the rec center's attic alone. It was August, and I had snuck away from the rest of the summer reading program and my own interminable boredom. The dusty attic was filled with broken furniture and plastic bins containing the crafting supplies for all of the daycare programs. It would have been entirely forgettable if not for the drafts.

The summer had been hot and humid, but in the rec center's attic, if you stepped in the wrong spot it'd get so cold that you could practically see your breath. I told my mom about it, and she was the one who told me about Jenny. I never went back up there alone.

The second story you typically find in those books is about the Blood cemetery. It's real name is the Pine Hill Cemetery, but nobody calls it that. They call it the Blood Cemetery because it's supposedly haunted by Abel Blood and his family.

According to legend, Abel Blood lived in the center of what is now the cemetery back when it was farmland. He returned from the fields early one day to find his wife in bed with another man— a tall, dark-haired stranger. Abel was stunned. How could Mrs. Blood, a good Christian woman, do such a thing? Obviously this scoundrel was forcing himself on his wife!