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Last year I participated in an “Ominous October” writing challenge, to write a ~5k story around a theme a week of October. I only got the first two weeks done (because I had other creative projects going on), but I enjoyed it. Here’s my story for the theme “Undead / Strange Town.”
Everything was better once the mill burned down, of course. For whatever one’s idea of better was, anyway. But the point was, when that final abandoned shell was alight, the flames reflecting on the surprisingly calm faces of the residents gathered around the unexpected autumnal bonfire, it felt like the last page of a book turned, cover snapped close with finality. Without a mill, they weren’t a mill town any more, were they? The path was wide open for a New Town Identity, something they’d been attempting for a decade with the grim determination of an ex-quarterback who’d switched college majors three times over six years and found himself at forty with two marriages behind him. Because really, what was a town without a gimmick?
Up the highway, quite a bit up, was a Dairy Town. Now there’s a great thing for a town to be. You’ve got cheese, ice cream, every shop on the three-block main street dressed up quaint effigies of holsteins for Halloween in thematic outfits, while scattered through the town itself were bronze bulls of a different sort, the kind painted by local artisans to add photo-op colour to historic points of interest. They had a great online presence and a nice bit of tourism from the folks travelling through who realised that they might as well stop to water and walk around in a place that also gave out free cheese samples.
Down the highway, that was a College Town. The place that used to be a mill town was bracketed by College Towns, actually, but it did just go to prove that whatever your Town Identity was, it didn’t have to be unique. As it was, each of those college towns was its own sort of college town. You had the hippies and farmers and people who were determined to talk to dolphins at one, and the kids who liked to play with their chemistry sets a bit too much, or who somehow found running fulfilling at the other. So the place that used to be the mill town really had their pick of possibilities. And with the mill gone, so conveniently, they could now freely choose what to become.
The problem was, of course, that even with the mill gone the place was still full of ghosts. Most anywhere is, to be honest, but in a town that had been focused on an industry quite well known for its rather intense selection of tools, not to mention the way the land to grow all those trees had been got in the first place, the ghosts were pretty thick on the ground. Or air. Ether. One couldn’t walk the charming main street (four blocks long, due to how the highway split the town, thank you very much) without slogging through the miasma of lives long past. It added a rather negative vibe to the annual harvest festival—which was in summer, and full of summer fruits and vegetables, none of that dark winter-welcoming nonsense, thank you. It’s hard enough to stuff oneself on strawberry shortcake and zucchini noodles in the blare of wet June sun as it is, but doing it under the soul-weighing stare of several unnamed spectres can turn the stomach.
Which, of course, is not particularly great for the tourism.
After the mill burned down and the town felt it could steadily start down the path of claiming a new identity, the first tack they attempted was “recreation.” There were trees! And paths! And something like a pond and river that hadn’t flooded its banks in decades at this point—only the old-timers really remembered the smug satisfaction of the torn-away floating docks and pleasure boats, the only reminder of frivolously spent money a waterline smudged evenly well above head-height on every half-million-dollar manse that had been built too close to the riverbank. So, there was plenty of nature to recreate in. Especially after the town itself re-created a goodly bit of it, which included a makeover of one of the more rural parks that had all the subtlety of a desperate trophy wife remortgaging her youth under the knife.
The benefit of recreation, the former mill town figured, was that one didn’t need to have the town explicitly as the goal, the end-point of whatever RV-charioted quest a person was going on. Straddling the highway as it was, something that had been to its benefit in the old log-hauling days but now served only to make it a righteous pain to get from one side of the town to the other, it made for a nice little stop on the way. Why not stop for an extra night under the now thinned-out shade of trees that had outlived the logging? While you’re here sample the local cuisine, which was not much to speak of yet but a stack of small business grants sat tidy on the desk of the Chamber of Commerce, ready to serve.
If you’re just pausing on the way, not making the town your destination, then the ghosts aren’t quite as noticeable. They haven’t time to sink in, catch in your hair like the bitter liquor smell of campfire smoke. Right as one is about to get the jeebies, if not the heebies, about the undeniable presence of the unsettled dead, it’s time to roll the awning up, dump the black tank, secure the loose items on bungee-corded shelves, and hop back onto the highway that so conveniently rolls right past your temporary turn-off. You won’t remember the ghosts, some miles down the road. You won’t remember much of the town itself either, which is fine. The money you left behind doesn’t need anybody remembering, as long as the checks clear.
If you live in the town, there is no denying the ghosts, is the thing. They remain quite undeniable.
The place that used to be a mill town did try its best to deny them, focused as they were on re-sculpting their selves into a semblance of a Nice Town To Stop In For A Night. There were towns that were Ghost Towns, the kind that have a nicely sized, rosy-cheeked population happy to strut around in cowboy couture for the tourist, play-acting an era that more or less existed before a boom went bust. And, of course, there were the actual ghost towns, the ones that really are quite empty, buildings shuttered, windows soaped, the mail delivered begrudgingly to the single municipal building housing an employee only because the retirement age keeps rising. Having come a bit too close to the actuality of a ghost town between the mill closing down and its convenient collapse into ash thirty years later, the whole concept was just too close for comfort for the Chamber of Commerce.
The populace of the town wasn’t quite as strident in their denial, being as they were rather more preoccupied with the day-to-day and less so with Five Year Plans and Tourism Initiatives. You couldn’t harvest a grass field without the combine cutting down a score of wafting, wandering spirits, though the process seemed to affect them as much as if one took a pair of scissors to a blob of mercury. They’d coalesce, seemingly no worse for the wear, whatever sticky gobbets of soul-stuff that had been caught up in blades lazing its way back to reform with the rest that had scattered among the seeds. The filberts weren’t free of ghosts either, they’d fall from the trees right along with the nuts as the shakers throttled the sturdy trunks. Others would get swept up and sifted out with the leaf litter. Very few ever made it as far as the nutcrackers, thanks to the local orchards modifying their sorting machines to strain out spirits.
It was disconcerting for the harvesters, but as a town that relied less on seasonal workers and more on a centuries-stratified system of social caste, it was a discomfort easily overridden through practise. Nobody in the far-flung states that planted grass seed to staunch erosion (often caused by logging, in a lovely sort of karmic loop) found foreign phantoms popping up with the shoots, nor did any ghosts gum up distant candy machines, or get enrobed in chocolate on their way to joining a discount Valentine assortment. As none of it seemed to affect any of the harvests themselves, the whole thing was easy enough to shrug off. It was like sparrows in seed barns, you did what you could to keep them out and dealt with what ones got in.
The ghosts were so undeniable that people causally built their life around them like a squeaky stair, but like the self-same stair, they were so ingrained into the daily life that what a stranger would do when confronted with this invisible issue never occurred to them. The Chamber could deny the ghosts, the recreators in their rented RVs could forget, but any outsider spending a sizeable chunk of time in the town would step right on the stair, sending it squealing. Maybe it’s apocryphal but the concept of the stranger stepping into the saloon, their dusty boots sounding a creak on the dry and tired floorboards that causes everyone to turn in worry—that’s because squeaky stairs and creaking boards were purposefully built-in. How better to know an outsider than having the house itself tattle on the trespasser?
It makes one wonder about the kinds of house rennos that silence all squeaks, shore up and square up all sloping walls that were set in place by a handful of folks piecing together a home from a Sears catalogue in an outsized premonition of the future’s flat pack furniture. It gives all the energy of a thriller heroine trying to alert the daring protagonist that “it’s a trap!” her words muffled by duct tape that one hopes is from a special theatre company that doesn’t hurt when ripped free.
When the town decided to branch out beyond recreation and began courting the addition of a new employer in the hospital industry, things started to get strange. Living in the town, staying within it for a couple of seasons, exposed outsiders not only to the breadth of the ghosts but the spaces the local population made around the ghosts as a matter of habit. Which wasn’t quite the fit one would hope for when trying to incite a college board to build a lovely brick satellite campus on the outskirts, next to the town hospital.
Why such a small town would even have a hospital is a surprise, actually. Other towns of comparative size relied on the helicopter closeness of nearby cities. It wasn’t as if the closest town was that far by highway (which, remember, split the town neatly in two and was quite easy to access). Once one is rural enough, thirty minutes is nothing, that’s about the standard just to get overpriced milk from a shop that doesn’t specialise in smokes and lotto. But thirty minutes, when you’ve got people working with saws and threshers and all the sharp implements that chew up nature and spit out building blocks, that’s enough time for things to go rather wrong. So, of course the town had a hospital. And a rather decent one as well! Decent enough it made sense for a medical college to break ground on a new campus, what a lovely thing, a win for all. The college could claim the prestige of expanding, the town could add a rotating drip of residents with a bit more money to spend, and the students and staff itself could practise medicine then spend their precious off-hours in the second growth forest so carefully tailored for recreation. A particularly nice option for those who weren’t quite cut out for the city. Except, again, for the ghosts.
Doctors aren’t baseball players, they haven’t room in their lives for casual superstition. Particularly superstition that seemed to have little predictable pattern, as one did need to breathe the full year of the seasons to start to see the shape of it. Only dipping into the freshly painted bars rebranded as pubs and added overly complicated burgers on weekends, they’d be confused by things like like open pockets in an otherwise thick weekend crowd, jukeboxes loaded with playlists nobody breathing had selected, or bar rags kept in briny buckets that rimmed the tables with like a margarita glass thanks to regular wipe-downs between customers (a favourite trick of all eateries in town for ensuring the only souls occupying a four-top had butts to warm the seat). If they bothered to ask, if a local bothered to answer, if the blossoming medical professional bothered to listen to the consonant-dropping drawl, the answer still wouldn’t have offered them a satisfactory explanation.
It wasn’t as if the town had taken the traditional path of creating a divide of tourists and townies. The presence of tourist season is a heady mix of end of the school year exam rush, harvest season but the harvest is other people’s dollars, an injection of new blood that stays long enough to observe like a migration of exotic butterflies, something that would be annoying to deal with on the daily but are fun enough for the short time they stay. These baby doctors, they were staying for months and months at a go. The caste stratification of the town, as previously mentioned, was as worn in as an old mattress that caved in at the centre—not comfortable, but familiar and difficult to get out of. What happened with this sparkling satellite campus was that it stacked a new class smack on top of the old.
It turned out that not only did this new class of people, with money to spend and little time for the near-monthly holiday parades of the (four block long!) main street, did not mesh well with the already extant populace, but they also did not mesh well with the ghosts. You’d think, working at the hospital as they did, that the whole lot would be familiar enough with ghosts, that they’d be used to running their rounds while wading through a spiritual swamp, thick and steamy with (un)life. They were, it turned out, rather not. And, as students who had invested quite a bit of money in being students and who had the horrifically packed schedules that higher learning deems the correct way to run people through the laundry press of education (because what better way to create a class of caring medical professionals than churning them through the kind of days that could be considered a type of psychological retrofitting designed to strip compassion and empathy for others until a body was honed to only survive and prescribe?), it really came down to one simple thing. They hadn’t any time for ghosts. They didn’t have the time, nor want to make the room in their schedules or lives, for the ghosts that haunted the streets and shops, parks and populace.
It had been so long since anyone had acted as though the ghosts weren’t even there that the town’s residents, both ethereal and physical, were quite taken by surprise. It took the first full semester after the ribbon cutting at the shiny new satellite school, with its fresh baby trees and under-grown local flower bushes barely visible against the clean white concrete and classic red brick, before anyone quite realised what was happening. The ghosts were agitated. Meanwhile, the Chamber of Commerce was satiated. The dual-pronged approach of Recreation and College Town put their piggy bank to a place where they could order new banners (at cost from the local sign shop) for the summer harvest festival. Actual twenty-footers, that could stretch nearly across the two lanes of main street, printed nice and bright. There were other nice things they threw into their shopping basket, most of which were signage-related, though they did also buy a new copier-printer. Fat and happy as a pig before slaughter, the Chamber waved away the inquiries that had begun trickling in from local businesspeople regarding the ghosts.
What ghosts, they said, despite their lives being as shaped around the spirits as anyone else in town. What problems with the new residents, they asked, concerned that the little thing about the quality of some of the outlying area’s well water had reached the delicate shell ears of the medically-inclined new members of town. Everyone had known the Chamber wouldn’t be a helpful place to turn but they’d all felt it was best to try the official channels first. Due diligence, after all, is sometimes worth the effort. Like a person calling to see what is wrong with their router box and being told to turn the device off and back on again, it was worth trying even though one knew the result would be the same as if they’d been asked to spin in a circle three times widdershins.
With their due diligence done, the town was now free to find their own solution. Not the whole town, of course, even at the cosy population of a cool dozen times one thousand they were too big to truly do a thing en masse. As it was, quite a lot of that census included the people who didn’t live in the town proper and had quite enough of their own problems going on. So, the folks who had the time and the gumption got themselves together, at one of those places that is sort of a meeting club, sort of a bar, the type of place with the tinsel backdrop on a stage that’s a bare eight inches higher than the rest of the floor. You see a lot of old man bands on that kind of stage, folks who don’t have it in them to be bar bands but do like to get together and sing rock standards. That kind of place. Always named after some sort of animal, or with an animal for a mascot, their signs a mishmash of letters making an unmemorizable acronym. They’re good places to meet, especially if you want to be sure no outsiders will wander in. Because who goes to places like that except for the club members and folks who’ve rented the space for an event?
And they schemed. Well, they got close to scheming. The first time the invested members of the town got together they didn’t even plan, they sort of just hashed out what was going on, comparing notes like students a week before exams. Well, you’ve got that answer but my notes say this, they can’t both be right? Comparing observations and just getting the lay of the land. The land lay as thus: they did quite like the infusion of money so expertly inserted into the town from the baby doctors, that was a fact. It wasn’t just the Chamber that had made a good time of it. They couldn’t treat this new, ghost-ignorant class like the unwanted beaux of a single mother in a children’s cable romantic comedy and scare them off. All that said, it didn’t feel right for the ghosts to be so ignored. Or more, it didn’t feel right for how the town felt about the ghosts to be ignored. A person not in it could say that the town itself ignored the ghosts and they’d be right but also quite wrong, as one doesn’t make that level of effort to work within the bounds of a thing that one is ignoring. It’s the squeaky floorboard situation again, a purposeful shape made around a thing that acknowledges its existence while also choosing not to interact with it.
The second time the group got together—something that was easier than expected, because it was a large enough crowd of folks that one would expect schedules to misalign like a bad bite—the second time they started to sketch a plan. It wasn’t a very good plan, because no first plan holds up in the light of day, withering to dust like a movie vampire staked through the heart by logic. But they kept getting together and planning and finally scheming and eventually, the shape of a Good Plan started to form. Much like the ghosts themselves, who seemed to have changed their schedules to include these get-togethers and were showing up in larger and larger numbers each time but seemed satisfied enough with being gently herded onto the stage and out of the way of everyone else, the shape wasn’t incredibly solid but it was there and undeniable.
The primary problem that every previous plan had was: even if they got this batch of burgeoning medical professionals to acknowledge that the town had ghosts and there were accepted ways to deal with them, the school year would end, or residencies would change and then there’d be a whole new crop of well-educated idiots who’d need to be trained all over again. Any solution had to have a perpetuality to it, something that could keep puffing along on its own momentum eventually. As the town had well-proved, once a system had enough momentum, it slotted into life like a good pair of glasses, something you could forget existed but couldn’t live without.
The town historian had died the previous year. Nobody had spotted his ghost among the floating masses, but also nobody was particularly sure what the process was, as some townsfolk you saw again and some you didn’t. But of all people to join the haunting host, the man who’d run the tiny town museum would be highly likely to find his way back. And, if folklore (not the town’s folklore, just the general sort of thing one picks up out of the air like a radio signal), was correct, unfinished business had a large part in tying a spirit to a place. The town historian had left behind an estimated thirty linear feet of unsorted archives, which was a very rough estimation because the file boxes were scattered around his modest one bedroom, with more piled on various empty flat surfaces across dining room, living room, bedroom and, unfortunately, bathroom.
Some celebratory town birthday was coming up, one of those round numbers that end in a zero or a five. The tiny historical museum had spent the last year putting the more upsetting old taxidermies into heavily mothballed storage, replacing them with photographable dioramas and those informative mini-games that are the keystone of any all-ages educational facility. Due to the historian’s death, they’d also found themselves having to process all those linear feet, a task that had been particularly onerous due to them having only just finished processing what they thought were all the backlogs of previous historians and donors. They’d asked him, the dead historian (when he wasn’t yet dead) if there was anything at his house maybe, it seemed like there were gaps maybe, in the boxes they were going through. The dead historian had waved a hand at them, neither confirming nor denying and mostly implying that he’d get to it. Which, of course, he did not because Death got to him first.
A long-planned part of the birthday extravaganza was that all the old buildings, the ones that had been around notable amounts of time, would be getting tidy little plaques about their historical value. The more interesting ones would also have informative displays installed, in some sort of hope that the town populace would absorb the museum’s enthusiasm about history through proximity to educational signage. A nicely-designed pamphlet was due to be sent to the printers with a list of all these buildings of note, the kind of thing made with medium-grade paper and astringent smelling ink that could be purchased for a little bit more than you’d like to spend from the counter at the museum. During the week-long celebration, photocopies of the relevant individual pages would be available at each of these historic locations, the kind of thing somebody picks up and folds to put in their pocket or purse before they forget about it entirely.
It had been, until the problem with the medical students, a bit of a battle as to whether the hospital was old enough to be counted among the historic buildings. Maybe, some had argued, in five years it and other buildings of borderline eminence could be inducted. After gatherings in the dimly lit meeting club—where the slowly growing crowd of ghosts on stage were generating enough glow that they lit up the tinsel backdrop as though it were sparkling seaweed in the ocean’s depths, sending disco droplets of light over the concerned faces of townsfolk—it was decided that the hospital was old enough. It was quite special, after all, for a town so relatively small to have such a large hospital. Especially a large enough hospital to attract something as important as a satellite medical campus.
With everything decided, the nicely-designed pamphlets had small adjustments made and were sent off to the printer. The sign shop owner, who would have been having a banner (ha, ha) year if it hadn’t been for the Chamber and Rotary Club’s constant discounts, pulled out substrates that nobody in town had ever ordered, due to their expense and possible lack of taste or dignity. They were, actually, a very good sign maker, despite the clip art logos from clients they found themselves working with. Parade plans were solidified and announcements about street closures were published in the weekly paper nobody ever read. The secretary of the hospital director had practised his signature over the years due to really being more of an administrative assistant (despite that title rarely being in use in the modern age as it encouraged higher pay and prevented coffee from being made), so securing last-minute permission for new instalments in the lobby and other key places around the campus was as quick as the click of a pen.
In the week leading up to the town’s big birthday bash, even the most aloof baby doctors couldn’t ignore the preparations. Signs warning of roads being closed and parking abbreviated for the parade popped up around all their favourite spots to lunch, flyers were stuck under the windscreen wipers of the kind of cars that didn’t have a dealer around for a hundred miles. All the hip little pubs had placards about the upcoming specials to tempt the palate, with enigmatic titles like “Miller’s Mighty Meal,” “Strawberry Summer Surprise” and “Log Cabin Lumpia.” Every old building around town bloomed with badges, hidden until the day of the event beneath little squares of white, as though the streets had suddenly filled with fourth-grade teachers who’d found a good deal on novelty ghost brooches and decided the uneasy undead were the safest celebratory accessories.
The hospital itself seemed to be the central source of imminent revelations, the lobby now the proud owner of a large something that sat under a heavy painter’s drop, bracketed by empty easels that would presumably display information about whatever it was that sat beneath the sheet. The building itself not only had a yet-to-be-revealed badge at the front, but another at the back, right at eye height to the door most of the medical students used when passing between the fresh new campus and the place they practised their learning. There was even a plinth on the path between the buildings, newly installed with mud squeezing up through the grass around it, though it sat uncovered and empty.
The townsfolk were nervous, both the good kind one always is before a big event finally exhales and releases all the plans one has made into the air to come together as fate and planning have made it and the more uneasy kind when one has made a bet but is not certain of the odds. The ghosts, for their part, seemed mostly unaffected by all the preparations, though they did appear in such a volume they could barely be contained to the club stage during the last meeting of the conspirators.
When the day came, it came rather drizzly, which was standard for the season (or any season, really), but the kind that promised a solid 70% chance of sunshine once the morning got over itself. This was no bother to the residents, who were used to that sort of thing, and who appreciated the time to themselves to go about finishing their preparations. The building badges were revealed, the little museum unloaded a box of freshly printed pamphlets into the wooden rack at their information counter, every participating business pulled out the stack of Interesting History Flyers for their building, the restaurant openers swapped out the menu cards for happy hour specials for those themed to the event, and anyone involved in the parade hissed around on their walkies, getting floats in line.
The sun came out as the clock ticked over for the parade to begin, which also happened to be lunch hour for baby doctors, enjoying their pint on sidewalk patios while deciding whether or not the new specials were worth a go. They found themselves far more integrated into the populace than they tended to allow, as anyone who hadn’t claimed a space at the edges of the main road were crowded onto the sidewalk, though they did so in a way that left easy gaps for anyone in outdoor seating to see through. The soon-to-be medical professionals appreciated this. Although much of the town’s displays could be considered provincial, they were notably good at parades. First, announced in the semaphore of the colour guard, came the high school band, their brass honking in that way that makes one almost appreciate Sousa. They were followed by the nervous clopping of the equestrian team, who were doing an admirable job reassuring their steeds when the flutes hit a note flat.
Then, after the swift machinations of people with brooms and dustpans clearing the road, some charming old cars with banners stuck on to celebrate various clubs, tossing candy to the packed crowds. The booming sirens of emergency vehicles on their day off could be heard echoing off the two-story facades of the side streets as they lined up to trundle down the four-block main street, surrounded by the swarms of worker bees in their ambulance blues and firehouse reds. Then, the high pony tails and sparkling suits of the high school dance team as a choreographed sea buoying a small float blasting something indecipherable while a separate drama played out on its tiny mobile stage—something that had the girls covered in winding sheets that contrasted strangely with on-the-beat hip pops. This was the harbinger of the business floats, which didn’t pass out anything more than penny candy and slightly off-cut coupons. They rolled along like a mobile Bayeux tapestry, telling a heroic version of the town’s birth and growth. The theme first spotted on the dance team’s float continued through the business floats, floating white spectres slipping around the smiling, waving, bastions of Business. Several of the baby doctors checked their phones that the date was, in fact, some time in late spring, and not anywhere close to a more appropriate autumn.
Everyone expected the children’s floats next, themed costumes and decorated bikes, determined parents pushing prams done up to look like combines, but in their place rolled an indefinable mass of somethings. There were heads and hollow eyes and a certain basement dampness, the lot of them weaving patterns like a jacquard loom as they made their way down the four-block main street. They were, in such a mass, heralded as they had been by the previous floats, undeniably ghosts. As with the horses, a group of people followed, spreading salt as they went in the same easy patterns they spread seed. Crunching the crystals behind them came the children, none of whom seemed to care a whit that close ahead lay the unmistakable and familiar spectres of death.
Of course, not all the baby doctors were lunching during parade time, as some had drawn the short straws when it came to rotation. For them, and for all the doctors who would come after, there was the new diorama in the hospital lobby, a tidy little miniature of the hospital itself, like a homunculus awaiting its own birth. As one walked around the display, different eras of the hospital revealed themselves, a time lapse controlled by one’s feet. It was a fascinating and charming jewel of a sculpture, created thanks to the singular talent of the bartender at the meeting club, who had turned skills gained through his passion for miniature trains to the cause. What was most notable, beside the realness of each brick and bush, were the semi-transparent figures floating millimetres above the tiny turf. A scrolling brass plate at the front of the diorama read “In celebration of our residents, living and dead” which was the kind of sentiment one was used to enough in hospital memorial sculpture, though it most notably came minus actual imagery of ghosts.
It was a classy and subtle bit of work, but the plinth along the path out back, where nobody but the medical students went, was not. Empty until the day, it was now the stage for a ghost, who seemed quite satisfied to simply stand there, staring at all who passed.
After the celebration week ended and the Birthday Bash specials had been mercifully retired, tinsel and banners removed from lamp poles, the ghost still stood on the plinth between the sparkling new Satellite Campus and the hospital. It perhaps wasn’t the same ghost, as none of the baby doctors quite had the eye to tell them apart yet. But there was always a ghost, no matter the time of day. And one couldn’t cut across the grass to take the long way, as the lawn that had been put in after the new construction hadn’t much of a root mat and a step off the path meant mud up to the ankle, if the weather had been wet enough.
In the end, the ghosts were undeniable. For everyone.
