The Hybrid Cycle: Volume 1

4: A Discovery

After her breakfast with the Early Riser's Club, Beatrice left in her Sentra and drove southeast.

 It struck her how little sky one could actually see from any point. The few commercial buildings in the town proper were either small junk and tackle shops or shells with boarded up windows.

The last real sign of civilization she saw was a painted advertisement on the roadward side of a barn.  "Drink Ale-8-1."  Galloping horses and a smiling crowd.  Bowler hats and taffeta Derby dresses.

Down Route 15 and onto twisting backroads.  The scenery grew more wild. Narrow dirty roads with no guard-rail snaked around cliffs.  More than once she imagined her car spilling over the edge and into the forest below.

Oak. Pine. Eastern Hemlock. 

A Lana Del Rey song played in the car.  She sang along.  The twanging guitar and smoky vocals were good for the nerves.

Blue jeans.  White shirt.  Walked into the room, ya know it made my eyes burn.

Finally, Beatrice pulled onto a grassy shoulder and parked.

From here, it would be a three-mile walk. Essentially, the road to Sherbert's Mill was a wagon path overgrown with poison ivy and jutting tree roots.

As she got her gear ready, Beatrice wondered how much of the town's past life still stood upright in the primordial quiet.

It was a century-old settlement that had been abandoned by a group of Primitive Baptist separatists when disease came through. Kentucky Fever.  Mountain Plague.  Informal names, all.  Truthfully, there wasn't enough documentation to really pinpoint any pharmacology.  It was an efficient, unknown killer. 

Eventually, Sherbert's Mill emptied out.

A little over a century later it was the least-known ghost-town in America.  A ruined place ignored by all but the truly dedicated.

***

Beatrice walked uphill over rough ground.  

Briars. Blackberry brambles and kudzu.

At times, she had no idea where she was placing her foot.  There could be snakes here.  Venomous ones.

She wore a green backpack with a netted sidepocket for her canteen. Slung across her left shoulder was a case that carried her Nikon.

Next to her car, the camera was the priciest thing she owned. As she often put it, the Nikon was her means of documenting her semi-frequent journeys into the Underworld.   Katabasis.  Immersion.  May I emerge, Lord, in one piece...with plenty of documented evidence, of course.

The first thing she spotted was a mostly intact square-framed house.

Her belly tightened. It was a feeling she'd encountered frequently in her travels, like a forgotten scent from a foreign land that edged its way back into consciousness.

She pulled the Nikon from her case and started snapping photos.

At some point, the rafters on one side of the roof had collapsed, opening up the once-upon-a-time home to invaders. Nesting birds. Insects. Still, the house had stubbornly remained upright.

Beatrice worked quickly, circling the house with her eye glued to the viewfinder. Nothing escaped her. Orphan foundation stones. Fallen planks. She ate all of it up with savage intensity.

Coming round the back, she positioned herself by a pineboard outhouse nearly covered by morning glory vines. She looked towards the second storey, her finger perched on the shutter button.

With near effortless and precise movements she ran the viewfinder left to right, as if reading a book. She stopped on a large casement window and zoomed in. The window blurred, then came back into focus.

There was light. The collapsed roof left part of the second storey open to the heavens. The window – begrimed by age - was just transparent enough to show the silhouette of something big move across the frame.

"Oh God", she exclaimed.

Her heel struck something in the high grass that sent her tumbling backwards. Luckily, the door of the outhouse broke her fall.

Saved by a shitter, she thought. The glamorous life of an adventurer.

She placed the viewfinder back on the window and adjusted the zoom. The silhouette was gone. She waited, intermittently sliding the viewfinder from window to window. Ten minutes passed before she gave up on her stakeout.

Beatrice knelt and parted the grass where she had tripped. The guilty object was a half-buried cast-iron skillet.

She dug it up and looked at it. Heavy. Rusted. The sort of thing you could find at almost any junk-peddler's shop with an Antiques sign hanging up front.

Finders-keepers, she thought.

According to the ghosty creed, taking something from a site was prohibited. It violated the spirit of the community. Principles like seeing things in their pristine state of abandonment. Leaving it whole for the next archeological sleuth.

She didn't intend on taking it home, however.

You really gonna do this?, she thought.

What if there's a mountain lion making himself cozy up there. Maybe he just fell asleep and is having sweet predatory dreams about sinking his teeth into the throat of a baby deer. What will a fucking kitchen implement do against one of nature's finest killers?

Then again, what if it was the shadow of a bird, enlarged by whatever physical principals my non-science mind never quite grasped in school.

Then came the Great Hypothetical that had followed her since childhood like a ghost rattling its chains. What would Mother say?

She already knew. She could see it as clearly in her imagination as the house in front of her. The look in her eyes that made Beatrice second-guess every decision. The Holy Matron of Fear, whose predictions nearly always screamed Disaster.

At length, she stood, the cast-iron in her hand making one of her shoulders dip lower than the other.

I love you Mom, but, fuck it.

I'm going in.