r/TheCrypticCompendium

The Tourist Board asked us to stop calling them rules after the woman from Westport complained, which was how Sheriff Walter J. Doyle ended up standing at the Visitor Center desk on a gray October morning, reading three printed pages about “unwelcoming language,” “luxury heritage tourism,” and the emotional impact of municipal signage.

The woman’s point, as far as I understood it, was that the word rules made Mourner’s Crossing sound unsafe. This was apparently bad for the new restaurant week campaign, the Witchwood walking tours, and the twelve-dollar strawberry-rhubarb hand pies now being sold in waxed paper sleeves at every business with a counter.

Sheriff Doyle read the complaint twice. Walter J. Doyle is the kind of man tourists mistake for part of the local charm until he speaks. He has blond hair gone silver at the temples, bright green eyes people sometimes mistake for blue because of the way he squints, and a way of standing still that makes everybody else look like they’re wasting energy. That morning, he held his hat in one hand and the complaint in the other, looking like he would rather be anywhere else, including underwater.

He slid the pages back across the desk to me and said, “Call them whatever you want. If people keep taking selfies at Hollow Line Bridge after dark, the bridge is going to answer.”

I had been working at the Mourner’s Crossing Visitor Center for six weeks, which was long enough to know he was speaking plainly. That was the problem with tourism here. The food was excellent, the shops were charming, the cemetery tours sold out every weekend, and the safety literature kept acquiring teeth.

The first time I saw the laminated sheet behind the front desk, I laughed. The document had been formatted in cheerful teal and cream, with a little silhouette of Town Hall in the corner and a header that said:

WELCOME TO MOURNER’S CROSSING!
A Few Friendly Suggestions for a Safe and Memorable Visit

Underneath that, in the same bubbly font used on the pumpkin festival flyers, were ten items.

Please do not visit Hollow Line Bridge after sunset.
Please do not accept flowers from children you do not recognize.
Please do not photograph the third-floor window of Hawthorne House.
Please do not whistle in Witchwood State Park.
Please do not follow train sounds after midnight.
Please do not knock on the red door behind St. Brigid’s.
Please do not feed the cats unless they approach you first.
Please do not repeat any voice you hear from the well.
Please do not leave mirrors uncovered in guest rooms during storms.
If someone you came with insists they have “always lived here,” contact the Visitor Center immediately.

I thought it was a bit. A lot of towns have bits. Salem has witches. Sleepy Hollow has the Headless Horseman. Mystic has nautical ghosts, haunted inns, and fudge aggressive enough to feel like a minor felony. Mourner’s Crossing had old money, older houses, a famous cemetery, a forest no one agreed on the size of, and a civic commitment to understatement so intense it bordered on pathology.

The woman who trained me, Ruthanne from the Historical Society, said the sheet had been revised twelve times since 1998. Ruthanne was seventy-two, wore silver-framed glasses on a chain, and had a bun so neat it looked engineered rather than styled. She moved through the Visitor Center with the precision of someone who knew where every brochure lived and which floorboards complained. She also had the flattened patience of a person who had explained too many times why the town sold three different kinds of maple candy but no Ouija boards.

“Why twelve?” I asked.

She handed me a stack of restaurant week flyers and told me to put them in the acrylic holder by the door. “Because thirteen tested poorly.”

I laughed again, and Ruthanne looked at me over her glasses.

“Guideline Three used to say ‘Do not photograph Hawthorne House after dark,’” she said. “That was too broad. People need specifics. Give them something general and they assume the bad part applies to someone else.”

“So the third-floor window is the bad part?”

“The third-floor window is the part that photographs back.”

I waited for the wink. Ruthanne gave me a paperclip.

The Visitor Center sits on the green, between Mallory’s Fine Foods & Provisions and a store that sells candles shaped like local buildings. It is small, bright, aggressively tasteful, and always smells faintly of apple cider even in June. We have glossy brochures for vineyard tours, cemetery walks, Witchwood hiking routes, and seasonal events. We have a map with little icons for cafés, museums, public parking, and “areas of historical sensitivity,” which is what the map calls places where something has tried to eat somebody.

There is a glass display case full of local books by local authors, including six horror novels, two poetry collections, one cookbook, and a children’s picture book called Mr. Thimble Visits Town Hall, which I have been assured is “mostly accurate.” There is also a locked drawer under the desk. Inside are a flashlight, a first-aid kit, a rosary, three iron nails, a spool of red thread, a laminated card with Sheriff Doyle’s personal cell number, and a little silver bell I was not allowed to ring.

“Why?” I asked during training.

Ruthanne closed the drawer with her hip. “Because it works.”

My first week, I thought Ruthanne was hazing me. The Visitor Center gets a lot of seasonal help: college kids home for the summer, retired teachers who like giving directions, people between jobs who think handing out vineyard maps will be peaceful. The first thing Ruthanne taught me was not how to run the register, answer the phone, or refill the rack of restaurant week passports. It was how to tell the difference between a harmless tourist question and a question with a body count.

“Where is the cemetery?” was harmless. “Which grave is the pretty one with the little chair beside it?” required follow-up. “Can we walk to Witchwood from here?” was harmless, depending on shoes, weather, and time of day. “Can we still get to Witchwood if the path behind us moved?” required Sheriff Doyle. “Do you sell cat treats?” was usually fine. “Can we touch the tuxedo cat if he’s staring at my husband?” was complicated.

That was how I met Thimble. He came in during my second week while I was restocking maps, a huge tuxedo cat with a white marking around his left eye that made him look like he had been born wearing a monocle. A family from Rhode Island held the door open, and Thimble walked in as if summoned by poor judgment, hopped onto the desk, and sat directly on the rack cards for the cemetery lantern tour.

The youngest child squealed. The mother raised her phone. The father said, “Look, he wants attention,” and reached for him.

Ruthanne slapped a brochure against the counter so hard the entire family jumped. “Please wait until he approaches you.” Then she added, “He approached the desk.”

The father lowered his hand. Thimble stared at him with the full bureaucratic authority of an animal who had never once paid taxes and still outranked everyone in the room. Then the cat turned toward the map wall and made a low, irritated sound.

At first I saw nothing. Then one of the Rhode Island children, the older one, lifted his arm and pointed toward the map. His shadow stayed against the wall, small and dark and still, as if it had decided to wait and see whether leaving with the boy was worth the trouble.

Ruthanne took the spool of red thread from the locked drawer and tied a loose loop around the child’s wrist. “Did you accept anything today?”

The boy looked at his mother. His mother looked annoyed, then worried, then frightened in quick succession. “A flower,” he said.

“From whom?”

“A little girl by the cannon.”

“There is no cannon on the green,” Ruthanne said, and looked at me. “Call the Sheriff’s office. Ask for Deputy Bellamy if Sheriff Doyle is out.”

The boy’s shadow climbed back into place slowly, like it resented being corrected. The family did not buy cat treats.

By my third week, I had stopped laughing at most things. By my fourth, I had learned to smile without showing tourists I was checking whether their shadows matched their bodies. By my fifth, I could tell the difference between a normal out-of-towner asking where to find the best lobster roll and the kind who had already heard something in the covered bridge and wanted me to tell them it was fine.

People want towns like Mourner’s Crossing to be theatrical. They want fog with good lighting, graveyards with gift shops, haunted houses that stop being haunted when the tour ends. They want the thrill of danger with the paperwork of safety. That is why no one at the Visitor Center says “it’s fine.” We say, “Let’s take a look at your itinerary.” We say, “That area is best enjoyed before dusk.” We say, “The town recommends staying on marked paths.” We say, “Some guests find the cemetery tour more comfortable when they avoid speaking directly to anyone outside their group.” Branding matters.

The second time I saw a guideline save somebody, a man from Boston came in furious because his girlfriend had lost her voice on the Witchwood walking tour. He was thirtyish, red-faced, sunburned, and wearing one of those expensive waterproof jackets that make people look prepared until they open their mouths. The girlfriend stood beside him with both hands clenched around the strap of her purse. She was trying to speak, but nothing came out except a dry clicking sound, soft and rhythmic, like a fingernail tapping glass.

“She’s upset,” the man said.

Ruthanne looked up from the register. “I imagine she is.”

“You people need to warn guests better.”

“We do.”

“She whistled,” he said, and the anger began to drain out of him as Ruthanne took off her glasses.

“On the trail,” he said. “She whistled because we thought we heard someone whistle back. It was a joke.”

The girlfriend shook her head very slowly. Her eyes had filled with tears. From inside her purse, something whistled: two rising notes and one falling note, light and clear and almost cheerful. The woman made the clicking sound again and pressed the purse to her stomach.

Ruthanne told me to lock the front door. I did not ask why. The whistle came again from the purse, then from the map rack, then from the heating vent behind the desk. Each time, the girlfriend flinched. Each time, the man looked less angry and more like someone realizing anger was a flashlight with dying batteries.

Ruthanne opened the locked drawer and took out the three iron nails. “Did you answer it?”

The girlfriend tried to speak and couldn’t.

The man said, “She whistled back.”

Ruthanne placed one nail on the counter, one on the floor, and one on the windowsill. “That was unwise.”

He stared at her. “Can you help her?”

“I can keep what answered from learning the shape of her voice any better than it already has.”

That was the first time I heard the silver bell, though I did not see Ruthanne ring it. She took it into the back office wrapped in her scarf while the man and I waited in the front room and the whistle moved around us in the walls. When the bell sounded, it was quieter than I expected. The fluorescent lights flickered, the rack of vineyard brochures shivered, and the man from Boston sat down hard in one of the visitor chairs and began to cry without making any sound.

Afterward, his girlfriend could speak again, though her voice came out hoarse and strange, with a faint echo behind it. Ruthanne gave them bottled water, a printed list of aftercare instructions, and a coupon for ten percent off at Café Fleur.

“Why the coupon?” I asked after they left.

“People are calmer when they’re holding a coupon,” Ruthanne said.

The complaint from Melissa Harrow of Westport arrived three days before restaurant week. Her name was printed at the top in a font that looked expensive. She had attached screenshots of our website, circled the word “rules” in red six times, and written that the language created an “unwelcoming atmosphere inconsistent with luxury heritage tourism.” She had also included a photo of herself at Hollow Line Bridge, taken at 9:17 p.m.

In the picture, Melissa stood smiling in a cream wool coat, one hand lifted in a little wave. Behind her, the bridge arched black against the evening sky. The old iron railings were wet with mist, and the river below was a pale ribbon in the dark. There was someone standing behind her.

At first, I thought it was a man, tall and thin, with his head bent slightly to one side. Then I zoomed in and saw that he was on the wrong side of the railing. His feet hung over the river. His fingers hooked through the iron bars from underneath. His face had blurred where the camera should have caught it, smearing the features into a gray oval with a mouth too low and too wide.

Ruthanne saw me looking and sighed. “That’s why Sheriff Doyle’s coming by.”

“For the complaint?”

“For the woman.”

Sheriff Doyle came in twenty minutes later, read the complaint, said the bridge was going to answer, and left with the expression of a man who had already had this conversation with tourists, the Tourist Board, the bridge, and possibly God.

Melissa Harrow came into the Visitor Center after lunch with her husband, her sister, and the polished fury of someone who had paid for a beautiful weekend and found consequences waiting at check-in. She was in her late forties, stylish in that coastal Connecticut way where a camel coat can look both effortless and weaponized. Her hair was pinned loosely at the back of her neck. She had a small gold pendant at her throat, a wedding ring she kept turning with her thumb, and one of our town tote bags hooked over one arm. Her husband had the depleted calm of a man who had spent the morning apologizing to hotel staff. Her sister stood half a step behind them, pale and watchful, still wearing the Hawthorne House scarf given to overnight guests.

The tote bag looked damp.

“I’m the one who wrote in,” Melissa said, before I could welcome her. “About the rules.”

Ruthanne, who had been restocking the Hawthorne House brochures, made a small sound behind me. It was the sound of a person recognizing a familiar disaster in a new coat.

I gave Melissa my best Visitor Center smile. “Thank you for your feedback. We’re always reviewing our guest-facing language.”

Ruthanne coughed into her fist.

Melissa set her phone on the desk and tapped the screen. The bridge photo appeared again. She had zoomed in on the figure behind her and circled it in yellow. “This,” she said, “is exactly what I’m talking about.”

Her husband made a strangled noise, and the sister whispered Melissa’s name.

Melissa kept going. “You can’t market a town as charming and then have signage that makes guests feel threatened. We went to the bridge because the girl at the hotel said it was scenic. There was no gate. There was no guard. There was one little sign with a moon on it and some vague warning about dusk. Do you know how many places say things like that for atmosphere?”

Ruthanne stepped closer. “What girl at the hotel?”

Melissa blinked. “What?”

“You said a girl at the hotel told you the bridge was scenic.”

“Yes. At Hawthorne House.”

Ruthanne’s expression changed by less than an inch, but the air around the desk seemed to tighten. “What did she look like?”

Melissa glanced at her husband, irritated. “Young. Dark hair. Old-fashioned dress, I suppose, but half the staff there dress like they’re in some prestige drama about inherited silver.”

Her sister made a small, hurt sound.

Ruthanne looked at her. “You saw her too?”

The sister shook her head. Her name was Caroline, according to the reservation printout Melissa had slapped onto the counter with everything else. She had the anxious, careful posture of someone used to making herself useful in other people’s storms.

“I heard her,” Caroline said. “Last night. In the hall outside our room. She was laughing.”

Melissa rolled her eyes. “People laugh in hotels.”

Caroline kept looking at Ruthanne. “She said Melissa’s name.”

The Visitor Center seemed to grow quieter around us. Outside, a delivery truck hissed at the curb. Somewhere on the green, a child shrieked with ordinary delight.

Ruthanne reached beneath the desk, opened the locked drawer, and took out the laminated card with Sheriff Doyle’s number. Melissa stared at her.

“Is this really necessary?”

Ruthanne looked at the phone on the counter. The figure in the photo had changed. It no longer stood behind Melissa. It was leaning toward her photographed shoulder, one gray hand lifted beside hers in a perfect imitation of her wave. The mouth had opened wider, and the blur where its face should have been had begun to clear around the edges. Something pale shone inside it, either teeth or the beginning of a word.

Then the figure’s hand changed too. In the first photo, its fingers had been long and jointed wrong. Now it wore a ring: Melissa’s ring. Same gold. Same narrow band. Same small diamond chip set into the side, except the thing wore it on the wrong finger. Melissa stopped turning the ring on her real hand.

Her husband reached for the phone, but Ruthanne caught his wrist before he touched it. “Don’t,” she said.

“I want to delete it,” he whispered.

“You cannot delete something while it’s still arriving.”

The Visitor Center bell over the front door gave a small, nervous jingle, though no one had come in. Outside, tourists crossed the green with shopping bags and coffees, laughing under the clean gray sky. Someone had stopped to take a picture of the scarecrow display in front of Mallory’s. Across the street, the candles shaped like Town Hall glowed in the shop window. Mourner’s Crossing looked exactly like it did on the brochures: charming, historic, memorable.

Ruthanne called Sheriff Doyle. While she spoke, Caroline began to cry very quietly. Melissa stood motionless, staring at the phone as if anger could still carry her out of this. Her husband said, “Mel.” She didn’t answer. He said it again, and this time Ruthanne snapped her fingers once, hard. “Do not say her name.”

The husband’s mouth shut.

The sound came then: a train whistle, faint and far away, drifting through the Visitor Center in the middle of town, though the nearest active rail line had been torn up before I was born. It sounded lonely at first. That was the trick of it, I think. It sounded like distance, like rain, like something passing through and asking to be mourned.

Melissa lifted one hand to her ear. “What is that?”

Ruthanne ended the call and placed the laminated card on the counter. “Sheriff Doyle is on his way. Until he gets here, Mrs. Harrow, I need you to listen carefully. Do not look at the bridge photo again. Do not answer any voice that uses your mother’s name. Do not say your own name out loud. If you hear water, close your eyes.”

Melissa’s face had gone slack. “My mother’s been dead eight years.”

Ruthanne took a breath before answering, and in that pause I saw what her calm cost her. She was steady because someone had to be, not because the situation was small. “That’s why it’ll use her.”

A slow, wet drip fell from the tote bag hanging on Melissa’s arm and spread dark across the old wood boards. Ruthanne looked down, then looked at me.

“Get the bell.”

I opened the locked drawer. The little silver bell sat in the back corner, bright and cold and perfectly still. Behind me, Melissa began to hum. At first, it sounded like a nervous tune from someone trying not to cry. Then Caroline backed away from her, because the tune was not a tune. It was the train whistle, coming from behind Melissa’s teeth while her mouth barely moved.

I picked up the bell. It was heavier than it looked. The moment my fingers closed around the handle, every brochure in the Visitor Center lifted at the edges: the pumpkin festival flyers, the vineyard maps, the glossy Hawthorne House pamphlets, the restaurant week passports with their little boxes for stamps. For one second, all that paper stirred without wind, like a hundred small animals waking in their sleep.

Ruthanne held out her hand. “Not yet.”

The whistle deepened. Melissa’s husband pressed both hands to his ears. Caroline whispered a prayer under her breath, and I could tell from Ruthanne’s face that praying was fine, provided Caroline did not use any names the thing might find useful. The dark stain beneath the tote bag spread in a long line toward the desk. It smelled like river mud and hot iron.

Melissa’s phone buzzed on the counter. The screen lit with a contact photo of an older woman in a sunhat, smiling in bright summer light.

MOM

Melissa made a sound that seemed to tear itself out of her chest.

Ruthanne moved fast. For a woman in her seventies with orthopedic shoes and a cardigan with embroidered pears on the pockets, she moved like she had been waiting fifty years for this exact stupid moment. She snatched the phone off the counter, flipped it face down, and shoved it beneath the stack of restaurant week flyers.

“Mrs. Harrow,” she said, voice sharp now, stripped of customer service. “Look at me.”

Melissa turned her head. For a moment, her eyes were normal: terrified, wet, furious, human. Then the train whistle came from her throat again, and her pupils seemed to pull long, stretching sideways like something seen through running water.

The front door opened, and Sheriff Doyle stepped inside with his hat low in one hand and rain on the shoulders of his jacket, though the day outside was dry. Behind him came Deputy Kyle Bellamy, compact and watchful, with reddish-brown hair, bright eyes, and the careful expression of someone trying not to startle anything that might bolt in a direction physics couldn’t follow.

Sheriff Doyle took in the phone, the stain, the tote bag, Melissa, Caroline crying, the husband shaking, Ruthanne’s hand outstretched, and me holding the bell. “Well,” he said. “That’s inconvenient.”

Ruthanne said, “It has a ring now.”

Doyle’s gaze moved to the photo. His jaw tightened. “From her hand?”

“Yes.”

He looked at Melissa. “Ma’am, I’m Sheriff Doyle. I need you to stay exactly where you are.”

Melissa smiled, barely moving her mouth, which made it worse. From beneath the restaurant week flyers, the phone buzzed again.

MOM

The train whistle sounded from outside this time, close enough that the windows trembled. Tourists on the green stopped walking. A man carrying a paper bag from Mallory’s turned in a slow circle, searching for tracks that had not existed in decades. Deputy Bellamy moved to the door and locked it.

Sheriff Doyle looked at Ruthanne. “Bell.”

Ruthanne nodded. I handed it to her. Her fingers closed around mine for half a second before she took it, and her skin was cold.

“When I ring this,” she said to Melissa’s husband and sister, “do not speak. Do not look at the windows. Do not answer anything you hear, even if it sounds hurt.”

Caroline nodded at once. Melissa’s husband looked at his wife. “What’s going to happen to her?”

Ruthanne did not soften it. “We are going to make sure what’s coming through the picture does not finish arriving.”

“And Melissa?”

Sheriff Doyle answered. “We’ll do what we can.”

That was the first honest thing anyone had said to him, and it nearly broke him. Melissa opened her mouth, and this time her mother’s voice came out.

“Baby,” it said.

Her husband made a choking sound. Caroline shut her eyes and pressed both hands over her mouth. Ruthanne lifted the bell and rang it once, and the Visitor Center stopped pretending to be a gift shop with brochures.

The photo on the phone flashed white through the stack of flyers. The windows went black, as if night had pressed itself against the glass. The dark stain on the floor snapped backward toward Melissa’s tote bag and vanished into the waxed paper sleeve sticking out of the top, where I could see one of the strawberry-rhubarb hand pies from Mallory’s, its crimped edge bitten cleanly through.

Melissa screamed. The sound did not come from her mouth. It came from the phone, the walls, the floorboards, the locked drawer, the brochure rack, and the cheerful teal header on the laminated sheet. It came from Hollow Line Bridge, wherever the bridge was at that moment, because I was no longer entirely convinced it stayed in one place.

Ruthanne rang the bell again. The second note was higher, sharper. The phone cracked beneath the flyers. The old wood floor shuddered. Outside, the tourists on the green began moving again, but slowly, as if they were walking through deep water. Melissa dropped to her knees, and Sheriff Doyle caught her before her face hit the floor.

“Got her,” he said.

Deputy Bellamy crossed to the desk, grabbed the spool of red thread from the open drawer, and looped it around Melissa’s wrist with practiced hands. Ruthanne set the bell down carefully on the counter and took three iron nails from the drawer.

“She said her name?” Doyle asked.

“Her husband did,” Ruthanne said.

The husband looked ruined. “I’m sorry.”

Doyle did not look at him unkindly. “You didn’t know.”

“I’m sorry.”

“I heard you.”

Ruthanne placed one iron nail on Melissa’s phone, one on the tote bag, and one on the floor where the stain had been. The room smelled less like river mud now and more like hot dust on an old radiator. Melissa lay against Sheriff Doyle’s arm, shivering. Her eyes had gone back to normal. Her mouth moved, but no sound came out.

Ruthanne crouched beside her. “Do not try to speak yet.”

Melissa’s hand twitched. Her ring was still there. In the photo, the figure’s hand had gone bare.

Deputy Bellamy wrapped the cracked phone in Ruthanne’s scarf. Sheriff Doyle lifted Melissa carefully, and for a moment she looked smaller than she had when she walked in. The camel coat was still expensive. The gold pendant still shone at her throat. Her fury had gone wherever fury goes when it finally meets something older and hungrier than itself.

Caroline followed them to the door, then turned back. “What happens now?”

Ruthanne picked up the laminated sheet from the counter and smoothed one curled corner with her thumb. “Now,” she said, “we update the website.”

After they took Melissa away, Ruthanne made me sit in the back office with a paper cup of water until my hands stopped shaking. Neither of us mentioned that the bell had left a silver smell in the room.

The next morning, I arrived early and found Ruthanne already there with a bucket, a scrub brush, and a fresh stack of Visitor Center maps. The dark stain on the floor had faded to a faint shadow between the boards. It looked almost ordinary, which in Mourner’s Crossing meant nothing useful.

Melissa Harrow had been taken to St. Brigid’s first, then to the clinic, then to a room at Hawthorne House with the mirrors covered and the windows locked. Sheriff Doyle came by before eight and said she was alive. He also said she had not spoken yet, though she had written her mother’s name twelve times on hotel stationery before Ruthanne took the pen away.

The Tourist Board sent an email at 8:47 a.m. After careful consideration, they agreed that rules sounded too severe. By noon, the website had been revised.

WELCOME TO MOURNER’S CROSSING
Please Review Our Guidelines for a Safe and Memorable Visit

At 12:15, a couple from New Jersey came in holding coffees from Konditori Oxenstierna and asked whether Hollow Line Bridge was walkable from the green.

I smiled. “It is,” I said, reaching for a map. “But the town recommends visiting before sunset.”

The man laughed. “Why? Ghosts?”

His wife elbowed him lightly, embarrassed. I marked the safest route in blue pen and handed them the map with both hands. Outside, the green was bright with afternoon sun. The scarecrows in front of Mallory’s leaned cheerfully in the breeze. Somewhere nearby, a cat yowled with what sounded like civic disapproval.

“After sunset,” I said, “the bridge gets less scenic.”

The man looked like he wanted to make another joke, but his wife took the map from me before he could. She read my face. Then she read the first guideline on the sheet beside the register.

Her smile faded a little. “Thank you,” she said.

That was the right answer.

When they left, Ruthanne came out of the back office and stood beside me at the desk. She had the silver bell in one hand and a fresh label from the office printer in the other.

“What’s that for?” I asked.

She peeled the backing off the label and placed it neatly inside the locked drawer.

The label said:

FOR EMERGENCIES ONLY. IF UNSURE, YOU ARE SURE.

Ruthanne closed the drawer. The bell did not ring. Across the green, the couple from New Jersey stopped at the corner, looked toward the road that led down to Hollow Line Bridge, and chose the bakery instead. Ruthanne watched them go and said, “Good.”

I went through a pretty rough breakup recently with a girl who was really into crystals and what have you. Her whole room was decorated with dream catchers and things of that nature.

She was great, if I’m being honest. Nothing particularly wrong about her or anything. She just was so into spirituality and dark magic that it turned me off to the point of resentment.

That kinda thing is so childish in my opinion. You’re literally playing with rocks. Thinking that the world and stars are communicating with you. Dumbest thing I ever heard.

At the point of our breakup, though, we’d already been together for about seven months. Attachment had become a real thing. And I think it was more prominent in her than it was with me.

That being said, the breakup was not taken lightly. There were fights. Screaming matches. All manner of verbal assaults that ensued within the following weeks.

I stood firm in my decision.

Every time she tried to contact me from some fake social media account or number, she’d be blocked within minutes. Only for her to try again the next day. And the next day. And the next day.

Even after I got my new girlfriend, she’d just keep trying to fix things. Force things to work, even though I’m sure she knew deep down that they never would.

Day by day, I’d hear from her against my will. That is, until all of her communication stopped entirely. Not gradually, either. One day she just up and stopped trying.

I’d thought she had given up. Realized that we weren’t meant to be and started the process of moving on with her life. And for a few days, that seemed to be the case.

I was ecstatic, with the emotional weight finally being off my shoulders. However, that joy was pretty short lived.

I’d woken up in the middle of the night one night in absolute agony.

I couldn’t pinpoint the source of my pain because, frankly, it was everywhere. All over my body from head to toe. All I could do was stumble blindly into my bathroom, feeling around to guide myself through the dark.

I made it to the bathroom, found the light switch, and what I saw in the mirror when I flipped the switch was enough to make my heart stop in its chest.

Hundreds of tiny holes filled my body. Thousands, even. Too many to count, but I literally could feel the tiny streams of blood trickling out from each wound.

Obviously, I wanted to call the police, but as soon as I went to find my phone, it was like a force field encapsulated my entire body. I couldn’t move even an inch.

Suddenly, my arm began to bend against my will. Pulled behind my back by an unknown force with the strength of a gorilla. I felt the pressure build more and more until… *snap*

The pain was enough to make the world feel quiet. I couldn’t even hear myself scream because it was like every portion of my brain was too focused on the pain.

That’s when my leg began to bend against my knee. Further and further. I could hear my own bones creaking until, again… *snap*

All I could do was stare at the bone sticking out of my leg in utter shock and disbelief. I cried at the top of my lungs, screaming for God to help me.

I laid there for a moment. Breathing heavy and trying to make sense of everything. My concentration was interrupted, though, when I was lifted into the air and thrown violently against the wall. Again. And again.

Blood poured from my broken teeth, and I knew that my nose had been broken, but the pain in my arm and leg were still the center of my attention.

After one more toss against the wall, I was out cold. Knocked unconscious on the icy bathroom floor.

I awoke hours later from the pain, but instead of finding myself on the floor, I found myself in bed. Tucked in tightly underneath the covers, with a familiar woman standing over me and stroking my hair.

With a wink, a smirk, and a kiss on the forehead, she left me with one final sentence.

“Now you know not to ever leave me again.”

The thread was buried under four years of inactivity and two pages of spam about a cryptocurrency exchange that had been defunct since 2021. I almost missed it entirely because the original post had been flagged for low effort — no GPS coordinates, directions that assumed you already knew what you were looking for, and photos that had mostly broken into gray error boxes. Three thumbnails survived. One showed a street sign reading BARON in green reflective letters. One showed a pharmacy counter filmed through dusty glass, amber pill bottles still lined up on the shelf behind it. The third was a child's sneaker sitting in the center of a cracked two-lane road with no caption and no explanation.

The username who posted it had made exactly one other contribution to the forum — a question about whether it was legal to enter condemned property in a state they declined to name — and had not logged in since 2019.

I know how this sounds already. Guy goes alone into an abandoned town he found on an internet forum and somehow forgets every basic rule of being alive. I brought a Glock, a pry bar, two flashlights, and enough common sense to understand that common sense deteriorates the deeper you walk into a place where nobody is supposed to be.

The thread had eight replies, only three from people who claimed any firsthand knowledge of the place. One said the town had been cleared out after a wildlife incident in the early 2000s and the county had never formally reclassified the land. Another called that a cover story without elaborating. The third posted a single line and never came back: Don't go at night and don't make noise you can't take back.

I printed the satellite image on paper because my signal drops in that part of the state and I have spent enough time in concrete basements and metal-roofed warehouses to know that a phone map is useless the moment you actually need it.

I packed the bag the way I always do: Glock and two spare magazines in the hip holster, pry bar clipped to the outside of the bag, two flashlights with fresh batteries and a third set loose in the front pocket, cheap respirator in case of mold or animal waste, bottled water, granola bars, paper map, first aid kit. The first aid kit was a twelve-dollar drugstore kit with four bandages and a pair of plastic gloves. I want to note that specifically, because it mattered later, and I want to be clear that I was already aware of the inadequacy before I put it in the bag.

The drive took longer than the satellite image implied. Gravel roads, then a narrower gravel road, then something that had been paved once but was mostly broken aggregate now with scrub grass growing through the center stripe. My signal dropped to one bar around the third mile marker and disappeared entirely before I found the gate — a rusted cattle gate pulled open and leaning against a fence post, the latch bent back. Someone had been through recently enough that the hinge still moved.

I sat in the car with the engine off for a few minutes. Standard practice at every site. You listen for what is already moving before you add yourself to the noise. The utility poles along the road still had their wires, sagging between them in long arcs, some low enough that I had to duck slightly getting out. No hum from any of them. Whatever they had been connected to had stopped sending current a long time ago.

I parked outside the gate and walked in on foot. The road curved left past a stand of scrub pine, and then Baron was in front of me — small, flat, and absolutely still in the early afternoon light.

The town was smaller than the satellite image suggested because the image had included the surrounding lots and what turned out to be a collapsed barn on the edge of the property. Baron itself was maybe two blocks of commercial frontage on a two-lane road with residential streets branching off the back end, and none of it had been touched in a way that felt recent.

I have been in abandoned places since I was nineteen. Factories, flood-damaged motels, a decommissioned elementary school in the northern part of the state where every locker had been left standing open and the gymnasium floor had buckled into a slow wave from water damage over many winters. I know what abandonment looks like when it happens fast versus when it settles in over years. Baron looked fast.

The gas station near the entrance still had its pumps. The card readers were cracked, the price display frozen on digits that had not been accurate in decades, but the pumps were still there, connected to the tanks below, still oriented toward vehicles that never came. A Pepsi machine near the station door had been pushed onto its side at some point. The glass panel was unbroken. A Pepsi machine lies on its side for twenty years without breaking its glass front — that detail stayed with me, the way small wrong things do.

The diner across the street had a "Closed — Back at 2pm" sign flipped in the window. Chairs still at the tables inside, two cups still on the counter at the far end, a paper menu holder still standing between the napkin dispenser and the sugar caddy. The kind of arrangement that takes on a different quality when the people who set it up never walked back through the door.

A payphone near the diner entrance had its receiver missing, the cord frayed at the end where something had pulled it free. A "Now Hiring" sign in the laundromat window next door had faded until the letters were barely there, just an impression in yellowed paper. The VHS return slot of a rental store two doors down still had a tape halfway through it, the case too swollen from moisture to push in or pull out.

An old Ford Taurus sat in the parking area behind the gas station, all four tires flat, the hood rusted through above the engine block. Someone's jacket on the passenger seat, dark fabric, collar up.

Every door I checked was unlocked. The pharmacy, the hardware store, the laundromat, the diner. No forced entries, no broken glass, no signs of looting. Whatever cleared this town out did not involve people taking what they could carry.

I kept my phone out, camera running, audio on. I wanted documentation and I wanted the ambient audio track, because a recording picks up things you miss in the moment. I had learned that from a factory visit where I had been certain something was moving on an upper level, and the playback showed it had been HVAC venting the whole time.

Main Street held still. Weeds through the asphalt. Old newspapers flat against the storefront walls, the ink long gone from every page. The municipal building at the far end of the block — brick, three stories, windows intact, functional-looking in the specific way that government buildings sustain themselves when everything around them has gone soft.

I photographed all of it and kept moving.

I stopped at the RadioShack because the door was already cracked open and the interior was dark enough that I wanted a look before I walked past it. The bell above the door gave a weak clack when I pushed in, the mechanism dry and slow. Inside, the pegboard walls still had their hooks — most empty, a few holding old packaging, battery packs in plastic shells with the cardboard browning at the edges, a coaxial cable still in its wrap, a set of cordless phone handsets in a box with the display window cut out so customers could see the color. Cream-colored plastic.

Late nineties design.

Display cases along the counter, glass on top, sliding locks that no longer slid. Dust on every surface, thick enough to hold footprints, and no footprints already there except mine going in. A price tag gun beside the register. The register drawer open and empty. An employee name tag behind the counter: Steven, in red letters on white.

The back wall had posters. Tobey Maguire crouched above a city that had gone blue from sun damage, the Spider-Man release date strip still legible along the bottom edge. May 3, 2002.

Someone had taped it crooked beside a display rack of portable CD players, and I stood there with my flashlight on it for longer than I needed to, thinking about how strange it was that a town could stop on a date and still keep standing. The red in the poster had gone pink. The blue had shifted to something close to gray. But the date strip was still sharp. May 3, 2002. First weekend of summer. The movie had been everywhere that year.

Demo radios sat on a shelf behind the register, handheld units lined up, one of them sitting slightly forward from the others — the way something gets repositioned when someone has handled it and set it back without paying attention to the line. I picked it up. The battery compartment had corrosion at the contacts, the green bloom of alkaline leakage, and two AA batteries partially fused to the housing. I pulled them loose, and the unit crackled once.

A single burst of static. Short, dense, with a slight rhythmic quality that lasted about two seconds before the unit went dead. I stood there holding it. The rhythmic quality could have been interference from old circuitry cycling through a partial discharge. I put the batteries in my bag anyway. Old alkalines sometimes hold a partial charge even after corrosion, and I wanted the radio working if I could get it to.

I set the unit on the counter and turned to leave.

The crying started.

Faint. Outside. Somewhere down the street to the east. I stood at the door of the RadioShack and listened to it. The cry had the right pitch and the right cadence — short inhale, longer exhale, the hitching quality of a child who has been at it for a while and is running low. I ran through the options. Foxes can cry in a way that maps uncomfortably close to an infant. Wind through structural damage produces sounds the brain immediately assigns meaning to. Another explorer somewhere in the town pulling something deliberate. The sound could be many things.

Then it came again, clearer, and the list of options got harder to hold.

I stepped out with the Glock up and tight against my chest. I want to address the people already objecting to that: I know there are individuals who wander into abandoned hospitals with a vape pen and a phone at nine percent battery because they believe that being scared is the same as being prepared. I am not one of them. If you were already watching through the screen thinking get your weapon, then we were briefly on the same page.

The crying was coming from somewhere past the diner. I moved along the storefront wall, keeping my back near the brick, checking the angles. I called out once at the intersection — just "Hello?" — and immediately regretted it, because that is precisely the kind of noise that tells anything listening where you are without giving you anything in return.

The crying paused.

Then it started again, and it was coming from a different place.

That was the first clearly wrong detail. It had been at the intersection of Main and what the satellite map had labeled Garfield Street. Now it was behind a detached garage set back from a blue house on the residential block to the north. There was no time for a child to cover that distance quietly. The ground between those two points was gravel and dry weeds, and I had heard nothing move.

I covered the intersection and angled toward the garage with my back along the fence line. I used the window glass of the blue house as a partial mirror to check the approach before I moved up along the garage wall.

The signs started at the corner. Claw marks in the vinyl siding, low and grouped, four parallel lines dragged downward through the material and into the foam underneath. The trash cans at the back of the property had been pressed flat from outside, bent inward rather than toppled. Black smears along the porch railing, thick and dry. Deer bones under the collapsed section of the carport, picked clean and concentrated in one place, the way they accumulate when something has time to be unhurried.

Tufts of pale hide on the fence nails. Hairless at the attachment point and rough at the edges, torn rather than cut. I did not touch them.

I moved around to the back of the house. The crying was coming from inside. The back door was open, and through the screen I could see into the kitchen — linoleum, old appliances, a chair on its side — and beyond the kitchen, the entrance to the living room, and in the living room, something large.

My first thought was bear. The shape was right for it: broad across the back, heavy in the shoulders, the posture of something that carries its weight forward. It was crouched over something on the floor with its back to me, and the pale skin across its spine moved with each breath in a way that registered wrong a full second before I could name why.

It was hairless.

Entirely hairless across the back, pale in the flat, waxy way that plastic goes after years in direct sun. Patches along the shoulder blades and lower spine had gone raw-looking, friction damage or something that had been scraped repeatedly against a rough surface. The forelimbs were long — longer than the body proportions called for — and the claws were curved, black, thick at the base where they grew from the paw. The paw was splayed wide against the floorboards. The ribs tracked under the skin when it inhaled, each one a slow ridge moving and settling.

The crying came from it.

Its mouth was barely open. The sound came out structurally correct — the short inhale, the longer exhale, the hitching — but the structure was the whole of it. The crying was shaped right and hollowed at the center, the meaning stripped out, leaving only the form. The creature had learned the architecture of crying without the thing that makes crying matter.

I started backing away. Slow, weight distributed across each step so the floor didn't register it all at once.

I stepped on glass.

The creature stopped crying.

A full second of nothing. Then its head turned — past where a head is engineered to turn on that kind of neck — until the small wet eye on the left side of its face was oriented toward the back door. The black nose was split with old scarring. The gums were visible beneath the upper lip because the lip had been damaged at some point and healed badly, pulling back from the teeth.

"Hello?"

My voice. The exact pitch, the exact small uncertainty I had put into it at the intersection. Replayed through a mouth that did not move the way a mouth moves when a person forms words.

I fired once when it came through the doorframe. The round hit the shoulder — I saw the flinch — and the creature kept moving.

I ran toward Main Street because I knew the layout and because the creature was faster in open ground. I had covered the residential block on the way in and I knew the angles: the alley behind the diner, the gap between the hardware store and the pharmacy, the side entrance to the laundromat. The creature hit the Taurus hard enough to shift it on its flat tires. I heard the scrape of the wheel wells on asphalt and then the impact against the driver's door, and I did not look back because looking back costs you the step you need.

I fired again at the corner of Main and Garfield. Moving shot at a moving target, and the round hit the telephone pole behind where it had been. The wood splintered — the pole was rotten through — and I kept going.

The diner door was unlocked. I went through it at speed and got behind the counter in three steps, and the creature hit the front door hard enough to bow the frame inward. The plate glass flexed without breaking — it was old and thick — but the frame separated from the brick casing on the right side and opened a gap. I could hear it working at the door. Steady pressure, evenly applied. Unhurried.

I went through the kitchen. Old commercial equipment, stainless steel surfaces worn through at the high-traffic areas, a walk-in cooler with the door wedged open and the smell coming out of it concentrated and dark. A rack of old fryer baskets came down loud when I caught it going past, aluminum on tile, and the creature at the front door paused and then hit it again.

The rear exit opened into an alley. I came out moving left, toward the back of the pharmacy, and the creature came over the roofline of the diner. I heard the landing before I saw it — the impact of something heavy, claws on asphalt — and then it was in the alley behind me.

It was imitating the RadioShack bell.

That was what I heard for the first several seconds — the dry, slow clack of the entrance bell repeated on a two-second interval while it closed the distance. Then the clack became the child crying, and the crying shifted to my own "Hello?" in my own voice, and I understood then what the forum post had meant. Don't make noise you can't take back. Every sound I had made since entering Baron was now in its inventory.

I cut my hand going through the gap in the pharmacy's side fence, a rusted nail catching the heel of my palm and dragging. I registered it as pressure and kept moving. My keys were beating against my thigh with every step and the creature repeated that sound too, the small metallic rhythm of them, in between the child crying and my voice saying Hello and the RadioShack bell cycling through again.

The municipal building was at the end of the block. Brick, three stories, windows intact on the upper floors and smaller than the ones on the ground level. I ran for it.

The front doors opened. I got inside and put my back to the wall beside the entrance and listened.

The lobby was government-functional — drop ceilings, linoleum, a reception desk with a low partition, a corkboard still pinned with notices I could not read in the low light. Stairwell at the back left. A hallway going right toward what the layout implied was a records room.

I dragged a filing cabinet from behind the reception desk across the floor and wedged it against the front doors. The cabinet was heavy and the dragging was loud and the whole time I was doing it I was listening for claws on brick. The doors held.

I went for the stairs.

My hands were shaking by the time I reached the first landing. I fumbled the reload, and one round bounced off the stair railing and fell through the gap between the stairs and the wall. I heard it hit the basement concrete a long time after it left my hand. I crouched on the landing and tried to pick up the round I had dropped on the step, and the blood from my palm was getting onto everything, and my fingers were not closing the way they should, and I could hear the front doors taking pressure from outside — slow, patient pressure, the frame ticking in small increments — and I was down there on one knee trying to get a single cartridge off a step with two fingers that weren't working correctly while everything below me moved closer.

I left the round and kept going.

The second floor was a long hallway with office doors on both sides, most of them open. A council chamber at the far end with its door wedged shut. I went for the stairwell to the third floor and made it halfway up when the filing cabinet in the lobby went over. I heard the front doors open and the creature move through the space below — claws on linoleum, steady and deliberate, and then the child crying, softly, the way a child cries when it has gone past the loud part and into something exhausted and continuous.

It found the stairwell.

I was at the third-floor landing when it caught me. A claw through the gap between the banister posts, into my calf, and the pain arrived as heat first and then as something more specific, and I went down hard with my knee on the edge of a step and the Glock skidded down two steps and stopped.

I kicked at its face with my free boot. The creature's jaw opened wide — past the natural hinge point, working in a direction that did not match the joint — and the child crying came out of it directly against my leg, and then its gums pressed against my boot and the sound shifted and it bit down.

I put the Glock against its cheek at close range and fired.

The grip released. The creature went back down the stairs producing a sound I have no category for, and I pulled myself up the remaining steps on my elbows and got onto the third floor.

The office at the end of the third-floor hall had a window facing Main Street and a door that opened inward. I got a desk across the door, then a filing cabinet on top of the desk — old, half-empty, lighter than it looked — then a laser printer braced against the base of the desk for friction.

I sat down against the wall beneath the window and looked at my calf.

The claw had caught the back of the muscle through the denim — three parallel lines, clean-edged, bleeding steadily without spurting. The twelve-dollar first aid kit had four bandages and a pair of gloves. I folded two bandages together and held pressure, and I used the gloves as a secondary wrap around the outside of the denim to hold them in place. It was the kind of fix that works for about an hour before it stops working.

The office had held most of its contents. A dead Dell monitor on the desk. A corkboard with town meeting notices still pinned to it. A paper calendar open to March 2002 and left there. A mug of pens on the desk, every pen fused in the residue of evaporated coffee, solid in place. A dead ficus in the corner, soil pulled away from the pot wall and cracked through. Ceiling tiles stained brown above the window, an old leak pattern spreading out from the seam.

I tried 911 first. The call connected for four seconds and dropped. The second attempt gave me silence. I sent my location to Steven — his number, my coordinates from the satellite map, a photo of the municipal building exterior, a photo of the RadioShack front so he had a landmark. The texts showed delivered. Then the signal dropped and the confirmation disappeared from the screen.

The hallway outside the office went quiet.

I shifted my weight to check the bandage on my leg and the hallway responded. A sound, low and close to the floor, moving from the direction of the stairwell. It stopped when I stopped moving.

Every time I shifted my weight, the sound adjusted. Every time I held still, it held still. It was not searching randomly. It was tracking by sound, building a map from every movement I made, and I had given it an enormous amount of material to work with.

I stayed as still as I could manage.

The creature moved down the hallway and began testing the doors — one at a time, a slow turn of the handle and a release, working from the stairwell end toward my office. The handle on my door turned. The pressure held against the desk for a moment. Then it released, and the creature moved to the next door.

I pulled out my phone and started typing.

My cough, from earlier in the stairwell — it repeated that. The slide of the Glock being pulled back to check the chamber, which I had done once at the bottom of the stairs — it produced that sound exactly, the specific metal movement of it. My own voice from the yard, "Help," coming from somewhere near the stairwell landing.

Then, directly outside the door, the child crying again. Softer than any version I had heard. The shape of it close enough to the real thing that the error in it almost didn't register on first pass.

My phone was at seven percent battery and the signal was gone and I was on the third floor of a building in a town that a county had cleared out in 2002 and never formally named the reason.

I kept typing.

The battery is at four percent. I am going to be concise.

Baron is off a gravel road that branches from County Road 14. The turnoff is unmarked. There is a broken cattle gate pulled open on the left side of the road and a green mile marker with 14 on it approximately a quarter mile before the turn. My car is a gray Honda CR-V parked just inside the gate. The keys are in my jacket pocket. The jacket is on the floor of this office because I used it to supplement the pressure bandage before I found the first aid kit.

I am on the third floor of the municipal building at the end of Main Street. West-facing office. The building is brick, three stories. There is a RadioShack on Main with Spider-Man posters still inside, a name tag behind the counter that reads Steven, and a handheld radio on the counter that I left sitting there.

The thing in this town uses sound as a tool. The child crying is bait — it moves to pull you toward it. It repeats sounds it has catalogued. It listens with a patience that does not seem to have a limit. If you are reading this on the road and you are approaching because Steven sent you — stay in your car. Windows up. Do not call out. Do not play audio from your phone with the volume on. Do not respond to crying, regardless of how close it sounds.

Steven has not replied, which likely means the outgoing message failed on poor signal. He will call someone when I do not return by tomorrow morning. That is the reasonable expectation and I am keeping it.

The thing outside this door is currently using Steven's voice.

I want to be precise about the mechanism: earlier, when I was at the stairwell trying to get signal, I played Steven's last voicemail on speaker to check the connection quality. I played it twice. The voicemail is twelve seconds long and Steven talks through all of it. The creature was below me on the stairwell when I did that, and it is now outside this office door, and it has his voice. The timing is not coincidental.

The printer at the base of the door just moved.

I do not know how many of these things are in Baron. I encountered one. I hit it twice and it kept moving both times. One round left in the Glock.

The desk just shifted.

If you hear a child crying near an abandoned place, stay in your car. Keep driving. Do not stop to confirm what you are hearing.

The door is flexing against the frame in slow pulses now, and Steven is on the other side of it saying my name with the cadence right and everything else wrong, and I typed this with one hand because the other is holding the Glock.

The printer is on the floor.

It knows exactly where I put the desk.

“The democratic revolution grows over directly into the socialist revolution and thereby becomes a permanent revolution.”

“Old age is the most unexpected of all things that can happen to a man.”

— Leon Trotsky

---

“You are known among us as a protector of the arts so you must remember that, of all the arts, for us the cinema is the most important.”

— Vladimir Ilyich Lenin

---

Far downtown, tucked away inconspicuously between, ironically, a Roman Catholic church, and a bookstore, which used to be Marxist too, then foreign-language, briefly devotional, on account of the proximity of the church, and finally became just another Towers Books (store no. 34 nationwide) there is a small, single-level rentable space, a little musty, a mite dusty, and proverbially past perfect, in which, every Thursday evening, and often late into the night, especially in the warm summer months, gather the indefatigable remnants of the Well Red Historical Society, known, at least locally, colloquially, as the Old Marxists.

Although once boisterous and bustling, filled with middle-aged men and women, lawyers, doctors, single mothers and workingmen, all at the zeniths of their intellectual curiosities and vigours, these 21st-century meetings are comparatively quiet and argumentatively sparse, which is not to say the discussions are always agreeable, because even the mostly old men who attend these days have still got some spark, but it no longer ignites, and the professionals and middle-aged participants are gone, either aged out, moved away, dead, changed convictions or lost faith altogether, leaving the meetings to the seniors and the odd young radical, of which I, myself, was one.

It was there, at one such meeting, that I met Vytautas Banys, a Lithuanian-born eighty-one year old professor emeritus of history, and the history of economics, and the history of nationalism, and much else historical besides. I had objected to a point of doctrine, and he turned his head, which was perfectly, aesthetically pleasingly, round, but not entirely bald for it was covered partly by short, thin grey hairs resembling an accumulation of uniformly fuzzy dust, which gave him the appearance of being still for long periods, of becoming lost in thought and of moving only when the situation required it, as it did in response to my objection, which he politely but thoroughly rebutted, ending with the question, “And who, young man, are you?” “I—I—I am a revolutionary, sir,” I said. “Good,” he said. “We need more revolutionaries and fewer pillow heads.” “What’s a pillow head?” “A man who's gone soft in the mind.” 

We went for coffee afterwards. He had invited me, and how could I have said no, even if I’d wanted to, which I didn't, at the only place that sold coffee at such a late hour, the local 24/7 chain. The tired woman serving us probably got the wrong impression, but as Vytautas was fond of declaring, Who cares what anybody else thinks. What's key is that they think. He winked at her when he caught her staring, and, when she came over, interrogated her about her working conditions. When we returned to the same coffee place a few weeks later she was no longer working there, so perhaps Vytautas’ words had revealed to her her own exploitation, or, perhaps, that's just what I want to believe. Either way, Vytautas left a generous tip, to which I duly contributed, and we said good night.

The next time we met was at his apartment, which was old, a single cavernous room that used to be some kind of workshop, before the workshops became concentrated in factories, and altogether wonderful, smelling, as it did, and as I remember it doing to this day, of leather, shaving cream and old books, the last of which filled the apartment the same way a man who's recently gained weight fills his old Oxford shirt, bursting at the buttons. Another characteristic of his apartment, one which surprised me, was the abundance of Lithuanian national symbols, such as flags, maps and various insignias, banners and crests. I didn't dare comment on them, but when I asked about them later, citing my understanding of communism as being international, and my own convictions as an internationalist, thereby opposed to nationalisms of any kind, he smiled, asked me if I had ever tasted cognac, making it a point to insist he meant cognac specifically, not any old brandy, and when I said I had not, that I was hardly a drinker at all, that I preferred my mind sharp rather than dulled, he poured me a snifter, himself a snifter, sat in one of his several leather armchairs, invited me to sit in another, and as we both sipped the cognac, graced me with an impromptu lecture on the history of Lithuania and the history of Lithuanian history, which, he emphasized, were two separate things, and I learned that, in Lithuania, and in Vilnius, the capital city, especially, communism and nationalism were intertwined, for it was the Soviet Union which had allowed the Lithuanians to Lithuanize their homeland and create their much awaited nation state. 

When he finished, I sat in silence for a while, feeling as if a previously unknown country had suddenly come alive for me, until he asked, “And what do you think of that?” “I think,” I said, “that someone cannot be both a nationalist and internationalist at the same time.” “A persuasive observation,” he replied, “yet here I am—an apparent  contradiction—and there you are, still young and uncontradicted, and fully entitled to your opinion, which may be the correct one.” “Time,” he added, after a brief pause, “does not so much flow through, as complicate, existence.” “Who said that?” I asked. “Me,” he said with a chuckle, “Perhaps I should record it, lest time, in her complications, forgets it from me.”

As I attended more meetings of the Well Red Historical Society, I met more old Marxists, such as the doctrinaire Russian, Sokolov, and the gentle Italian, Pietro, but with none was I as close as with Vytautas. Once, when we were discussing Hobsbawm, he asked me about my parents, my family. I answered briefly, perhaps tersely, that we did not see eye to eye, using that very cliche, eye to eye, to prevent myself from having to think too much about something painful to me, the raw, emotional wound, to gloss over the material fact that the very people who created me, who nurtured and loved me, now wanted nothing to do with me, all because of my politics and my choices in life. They felt, I did not say but Vytautas did intuit, because he was a master of intuition, that they had worked hard and sacrificed to give me a comfortable life, and I had rejected that life, rejected their offer, their sacrifices, rejected them. In response, Vytautas asked me but a single question, whether I had a place to sleep, and when I said I did, which was the truth, he let the matter rest, both that day and forever, but he let it rest in a way I understood to mean he was not disinterested, nor was he silent by virtue of having nothing to say, which, by the way, is no virtue at all, for speech is the music of life, but was exhibiting great tact and would be willing to talk about it when I was willing, if ever I became so, and I felt that, one day, I would, although, as it turned out, that day never came, and now it is unfortunately too late.

At around this same time I fell hopelessly in love with a girl I met at a workers demonstration, although it took me many years of hindsight to see that hopelessness. Her name was Claudia, and for a while I loved every Claudia who had ever existed. Vytautas sensed the new emotion in me and urged me to open myself to the experience of love, regardless of its outcome, regardless even of its object, and told me of his own loves, including his last and greatest, his love for his wife, to whose grave he invited me one Sunday afternoon to lay flowers. While we were both standing before the tombstone, he crossed himself and said a prayer. My atheist heart raced at the sight. My dialectical mind raged. “Do you believe in God?” I demanded of him on the subway back to his apartment. I have no doubt he had been expecting the question, and, “No,” he said calmly, “but she did, and I loved her very much.” I asked him if he didn't consider it a betrayal. “One may betray people,” he said. “Ideas, however, are indifferent to our fidelity.” On my way home I wondered if I, too, would ever love so much. I wondered if I wanted to.

As my romance with Claudia blossomed, I expanded my repertoire of other Claudias, which is what led me to discover the Italian actress Claudia Cardinale, and what inspired me to give her name when Vytautas, one evening after a meeting, asked me if I liked the movies, and, when I answered yes, for it was the most modern of art forms, I said, he asked me who my favourite actress was. “She's an old—” I started to add, before Vytautas cut short my explanation with, “She may be old to you, but, to me, she was my youth. Once Upon a Time in the West.” As it turned out, Vytautas had a passion for the cinema and introduced me to many old directors, especially from Europe and the Soviet Union, including from the 1910s, ‘20s and ‘30s, and convinced several of his old Marxist comrades to allow me to come with them to a screening of Sergei Eisenstein's classic 1928 film about the Russian Revolution, October, at a small, smoky room, hidden well below an old abandoned bar, called, after another Soviet filmmaker, Vsevolod Pudovkin, the Pudovkino. Although I didn't understand why at the time, I overheard Vytautas discussing my participation with several others, who were opposed to my presence. “Vytautas, he cannot—he is not—he cannot know. This is for us. For us only, Vytautas,” I heard one of them say, and Vytautas respond, “He doesn't. He won't. He will just be there seeing a film.” “But, Pietro. It is Pietro's leave-taking.” “Don't worry,” Vytautas said. “Pietro will go like we always go, but, for once, not entirely in the company of—forgive the term—decrepit old men like ourselves.” “I don't know…” “No one knows. Lenin didn't know. Trotsky didn't know. They did, and we'll do too. Vitality. Change. Stagnation is death. Isn't that what we've always said?” “Yes, but…” “Then let God say, Let there be change, and there will be. Even if there is no God.”

At that, I stepped from the wall behind which I could hear the conversation, not because I was afraid of being caught eavesdropping but because the conversation wasn't meant for me, and people deserve their privacy, as life deserves her mysteries.

When, two weeks later, I arrived with Vytautas at the Pudovkino, the narrow steps down which we walked to reach the entrance seeming to lead us several stories underground, the atmosphere was sombre, like before a classical concert or a performance of Hamlet, or so I imagined, for I had never been to the symphony or theatre. My parents had never taken me. All the old men from the Well Red Historical Society were there, but I was the only representative of the young, which I attributed to the fact that I attended the meetings regularly and because Vytautas had vouched for me. “You have never seen October?” he asked as we entered the main room, with its yellow, peeling paint, exposing here and here the brickwork underneath, where a screen and projector had been set up, and one of the old Marxists was preparing the projection of the film reel. “No,” I said. “It is a great film,” he assured me, placing a hand on my arm, and for the first time I realized that, despite the magnificence of his mind, he was, physically, a weakened, elderly man. “Take a seat and wait,” he said to me and went off to greet the others, who had gathered around Pietro.

There was, prior to the viewing of the film, a lengthy, and almost ritualistic, introduction, a taking of attendance, a reading of announcements and two well received speeches, the first of which was given by Sokolov, who, I couldn't help but notice, would, from time to time, pause mid-sentence and eye me with a profound and icy suspicion, and the second by Pietro, who reminisced about his personal and political life, his contributions to various Italian, American and Italian-American socialist causes and his few but cherished published essays about nineteenth-century Italian history, none of which I had read but of which he was visibly, movingly proud. Applause followed, and a reverent silence. The lights were cut. The projector, with the projectionist beside it, whirred to life, and across the darkness it shot its violent light, and from the light were images, captured long ago by men and women long dead, of a distant time and a distant place, and we sat and watched and, for a time, we were everywhere and nowhere, having surrendered our corporeal presence, its three brilliant dimensions, to a reality of only two, a world of intertitles and dynamism, a reality of phantoms.

Watching October I watched the old Marxists watching October. How they came alive! Their bodies, though worn down by living, were animated with such a vital spirit. They were like children. They spoke the words on screen, and stomped their feet in rhythm with the montage, and hissed the appearance of Kerensky, and cheered the appearance of Trotsky—and the revolution unfolded, frame by frame, heroically.

Halfway through the screening, Pietro and another man got up and walked together to a door beside the screen. The man opened this door, and he and Pietro went through. The door closed. The film went on. Then the door opened again and only the other man came out, his eyes squinting, glassy and red. Pietro did not come out, not even after the screening was finished and we had all sat together in a hush before, slowly, the chairs scratched against the floor and a few of the old Marxists rose to their feet. Although I was curious, even dreadfully so, about what had become of Pietro, I did not ask, for the sole reason it felt right not to ask, and, in not asking, I became one of the old Marxists too.

Summer started early that year and lasted long into September. The days felt exceedingly long, but I filled them with reading, romance and great expectations, both for myself and for the world. Even Vyautas was unusually cheerful. Then two tragedies befell me in quick succession, two fundamental blows from which I have never fully recovered. First, my relationship with Claudia imploded spectacularly when she announced, one night, that she had moved on from Marxism, which she called a skeleton religion, to post-humanism, which, to her, was the future. Even worse, she had met a post-humanist and fallen madly in love with him. He was on the verge of leaving his wife, she explained to me. Then he would marry her and together they would approach the inevitable, oncoming singularity. When she left, she left behind several books by Ray Kurzweil, along with a handwritten note urging me to read them and prepare myself for the melding of man with machine. If I refused to “upgrade,” the note said, “I would become a member of the new exploited class: the human.” She wrote this as if she were doing me a great kindness, and I immediately began writing a counter-note, a raw, emotional response, demanding to know how many microchips I needed embedded in my brain to fix a broken heart, but I didn't finish, and I burned the unfinished response, watching, through tears, my pain and embarrassment turn to common ash.

The second tragedy was quieter, more prolonged and more devastating. Vytautas had failed to appear at a meeting, and when I called on him in his apartment, he served me biscuits, black tea and told me he had terminal cancer. I don't remember hearing him say it. All I remember is how the world suddenly felt like it was cotton balls converging on me, their numbing, dampening softness a heaviness which prevented me from speaking, from breathing. He looked at me and I was suffocating on reality.

Vytautas spent most of his time at home after that. He would listen to music and read, but often he would simply fall asleep, and many times I woke him with my knocking, increasingly frantic as, in my head, I imagined his lifeless body sprawled out on the floor. Then the door would open and I would see him standing there, smaller than before, and hunched over, and I would allow myself the illusion that everything was all right. I collected his parcels and bought his groceries, doing my best to buy them at the few remaining independent grocers. He preferred rereading books he'd already read to reading new ones, and, as the weeks accumulated to months, and his abilities degenerated, his interests shifted, from rigorous economic studies of English agricultural records, to histories of medieval Lithuania, and of Lithuanian myths and legends…

He asked me one February morning to do him a favour. He was still in bed. “At the next meeting, tell Sokolov I want to arrange a screening of October.” “Of course. At the Pudovkino?” I asked. He nodded, and I brought him his toothbrush and toothpaste, and a cup to spit into, and watched him brush his teeth with a trembling, unsteady hand. When he'd finished, I went to the bathroom to rinse and put back the toothbrush and cup. When I returned, he was asleep, snoring gently with an unopened hardcover book on his chest. Sokolov planned the screening for early March.

Vytautas and I arrived at the Pudovkino by taxi. I had helped him dress, and now helped him from the taxi to the stairs, and down the stairs, one by one, into the screening room. Everything was as before, down to the position of the film projector. The only difference was Pietro's absence, and the other old men gathered around Vytautas instead. There was attendance taken, announcements and two speeches, but Vytautas’ was short. He was too ill to speak for long. His fuzzy grey hair had all fallen out, his eyes were weighed down with a swollen grey, and the exposed skin on his head was matte. When he finished speaking, he sat in the front row. I sat beside him. As the lights were cut and the projector whirred, he grabbed my hand and I held it like that. “When the film's half done,” he whispered, “I'm going to get up.” He coughed. “I want you to get up with me. I want you to help me to the door beside the screen and—” He took a deep breath. “Like Pietro?” I asked. “Like Pietro,” he said. “You're going to go with me… into the room behind the screen.” On screen, the Tsarist army fired on protestors in Nevsky Square. Briefly, I caught a glimpse of a face in the crowd that looked uncannily like Pietro's but younger. “What then?” I asked. “Then,” Vytautas said, “I take my leave.”

The minutes passed.

The revolution progressed.

Vytautas’ hand slipped from mine, and with great effort he rose. I rose too. I helped him walk towards the door beside the screen. He didn't look back. The old Marxists cheered the film and stomped their youthful feet. I opened the door and peered in, expecting something grand, but it was nothing like that. The room was small, with bare walls. Its only distinguished feature was a red curtain hanging from a rod like it would above a window, but there was no window. “Close the door,” Vytautas said. I was afraid to. “Close the door.” “No, I—” “Close the door,” he said, and he said it in a way and in a voice that was a lion's and, for the first time, I could imagine him as he was half a century ago, not calmly reading books but thundering at his opponents, leading, fighting and protecting, being captured, taking blows and refusing to betray his  comrades. I closed the door. The October sounds dimmed. “Let me rest a minute,” he said. “Then I'll go.” “Go where?” “Behind the curtain.” “What's behind the curtain?” “October.” “What? Maybe I should take you to the hospital.” “So that I can die slowly in a sterile bed?” “They can help you.” “You're helping me.” “You're helping me,” I said. He coughed. “At least you haven't brought me a dead bird.” “What?” “Farewell, my friend,” Vytautas said, embracing me, and I embraced him. Then he moved away toward the red curtain, which he pulled aside with his hand, and a light shined from the wall which was not a wall but a view, a view of a city and soldiers and smoke, and Vytautas passed into it, his body youthenizing as he did. He was a young man, about my age, and I could hear other people shouting in Russian and gunshots and singing. I could smell blood and wet stones. I saw—

The curtain dropped to its natural position, covering the wall. The room was dark and empty. I was alone in it. From the other side, I could hear the old Marxists watching October. I lingered for a few minutes before opening the door and taking my seat among them and watching the film until the end. Nobody talked to me after. Nobody asked me about Vytautas. I could hardly believe what I had seen, but the fact was inescapable. Vytautas was gone.

When I went back to his apartment, somehow hoping he would be there as always, I found instead an envelope addressed to me. A letter was inside, written in Vytautas’ shaky handwriting, instructing me to declare him missing, and apply, in time, to have him declared deceased. “I have prepared a will,” the letter said, “leaving everything  to you.” The envelope contained also a photograph of him as a young man, on the back of which he'd scrawled, “Please look for me,” and the single existing key to his apartment.

---

P.S. I am older now. The world has changed. I don't know if I'm a Marxist, or a revolutionary, or whether those terms are even meaningful today. On every anniversary of Vytautas’ leave-taking, I place flowers on his wife's grave and say a prayer. Then I go home and watch October, and always somewhere in its phantom images of events, to me, long passed, I see his face, his strong arms and unbreakable spirit, forever young and fighting forever in a permanent revolution.