History, global and local, has long been a passion of mine. Not the condensed “names/dates/places” monotony, but rather the intricate social histories of the people, both good and bad. It is in that sort of history that I believe we can truly garner the importance of where we came from, and where we can go.
In particular, I found that local histories – those of the counties and townships – are at times more compelling than their global variety. When I moved from Texas back to the Midwest, I continued that trend of immersing myself in the historicity of the area.
That was how I came across the town of Arcadia.
I doubt I would have even heard about it if it weren’t for a slip of the tongue by my waitress. I had stopped in that Saturday morning at The Buckeye Diner to get my usual coffee and omelet and had offhandedly asked her about any interesting local spots to check out.
“Well, aren’t you just the scholar!” she laughed pouring my third cup in twenty minutes.
I lifted my hands just slightly in mock surrender, matching her airy tittering with my own more baritonal chuckles.
“Hardly miss, just a guy with jack to do on a weekend and an overactive mind,” I replied.
“Oh c’mon Carl, you know I’m Abbie to you by now,” she said with a grin.
“Still, there’s plenty to do around here even if you got more interests than just drinking and hunting,” Abbie continued, “and there is this one weird place I’d always heard about growing up, but…”
I noticed Abbie peeking her cobalt eyes at her mother and the matron of the diner. The indomitable Susan van Houten. She was a good woman by any account, but a bit overly protective of her late-twenties daughter by those same accounts.
Following her nervous gaze, I lowered my voice to as best a playful whisper as I could manage.
“I’m guessing that it isn’t a place mom would approve you talking of, eh?” I said.
“Oh hush now!” Abbie retorted. “I’m my own woman and you’d do well to remember that you silly man!”
“It’s not her I’m spooked by,” she continued more gently, “rather what she’s let slip over the years ‘bout that place. Arcadia. I think it’s where she grew up actually, but she’d only talk about it when she was drinking, and thank the good Lord she ain’t done that in half a decade now.”
“I’m glad to hear that at least. But,” I pressed, my curiosity piqued, “Arcadia. What’d you hear about it? What’s so spooky about it that your mom doesn’t even want you talking about it?”
Abbie bit her lip and shook her head, the sun-gold mane around her neck swirling in its curls.
“Don’t rightly know. All I’ve ever heard was her mutterin’ about the ‘evil seeped through that place’ and how it was ‘Lucifer’s own playground.’ I’ve been craving to figure out more ‘bout it for years now actually, but ain’t really tried since Mama caught me sneaking off to it one night in high school,” she said.
Hoo boy. If my interest was brimming before, now it was veritably boiling over.
“Well then,” I said with a conspiratorial smile, “when do you get off work tonight?”
Her eyebrows raised sharper than the Pyramids and I thought Abbie might even smack me for the perceived audacity. Just as quickly though that edge disappeared and was replaced by an equally as furtive, even excited look.
“Seven-thirty. Park a block or two down and I’ll find you,” she replied.
Abbie talked fast and low now that the senior Van Houten was moving over to see why I was holding up her daughter at breakfast rush.
“This ain’t a coincidence you coming in here talking history! I know where it is, how to access it,” she whispered. “Plus, I’ve been on weirder dates.”
***
Around half past eight, we were easing along the beige clay backroad in my dad’s old Cutlass. As we drove, Abbie filled me in on more of what she knew about the mysterious ghost town from her mother’s inebriated mutterances.
All she could recall was that its founder Edmund Haysom had rode in out of nowhere over thirty years ago with a crew of devoted followers in tow. He and the others had built the town of Arcadia, situated neatly on the Ohio River, in order to live “a life of communal, pastoral paradise free from the constraints of tyranny.”
Over the following decade, they constructed the entire town basically from scratch, grew vast fields of healthy crops, and raised countless livestock. All signs seemed to point towards Haysom’s promise of a new Eden coming to fruition.
Then, tragedy. It had been a relatively calm, even dry Spring that year. So, when the storms began to rage and the Ohio overflowed, it had taken the entire town off-guard. Abbie told me a tale of a Biblical flood sweeping through the land and catching nearly everyone in the middle of a town hall meeting. All those souls in one spot.
By all accounts, Abbie had said, there had been no survivors. Soon after folk from nearby towns, recovering from their own, far lesser flood damages came by to check on the hermitic citizens of Arcadia. After the initial shock, clearing, and burials, soon after it became the ghost town of today. Relegated to rumors and mystery.
As we parked just outside the ebony iron gates of the crumbling palisade surrounding the dead community, I could see it was much as Abbie had described. Although I could not shake the electric chills jolting down my back while taking the place in.
Something feels off, I thought. Something feels way off.
The stillness of the evening rivaled that of a midnight mass. Unlike at such a service, my gut and very soul had to them an anxious constipation which had long served as my own tangible intuition.
“You uhh, wanna check out anywhere in particular?” I asked her.
Abbie pursed her rosy lips. The air had taken on an unexpected chill, and we were both a bit underdressed for such a turn.
“I think…I don’t know, but I feel like I need to see where it happened,” she said, “Where they…if my mom really grew up here, I can’t figure out how she alone made it out.”
As we crept along the loose gravel up past the decrepit buildings and nearer to the steps of the eerie town hall, a thought struck me. I felt like a fool for not thinking it already.
“Abbie, what makes you think your mom even grew up here if no one else survived? Even you just told me that the folks who came on the scene later never saw or heard from anyone after,” I asked with quiet gentleness.
Before Abbie could answer, a third, unfamiliar voice boomed out from the sea of dark.
“Because, child, because I remember dear Abilene’s mother as my proud wife.”
Quicker than smoking bullets Abbie and I spun to face whoever had so adeptly snuck up on us.
The lanky, wiry man stood just half a meter back from where we had started to walk up the half-ruined steps. He wore a felt brown blazer on top of a mahogany button-down and on his bowed legs a pair of amber chinos, neatly cuffed over the tops of his equally pristine two-tone Wellington boots.
His face wore a slimy grin that was disgustingly accentuated by a jet-black petite handlebar mustache flanked by cropped chops. The man’s head was bare aside from a curiously modern “pretty boy” haircut, and out of his ears were barely noticeable cherry trails that seemed both long coagulated yet somehow eternally bleeding.
In all, he appeared as if he had read the first twenty pages of an old dime novel and modeled himself after the head villain.
I was still trying to wrap my head around who this macabre figure was and how he had snaked up on us when Abbie beat me to the punch.
“Who…what, what did you say about my mother?” Abbie stammered out. “The hell do you mean, your ‘wife’? My daddy died before I was born you sick sonofabitch!”
The man just smiled, that vile sneer widening to inhuman proportions and his arms hung like plyboards at his hips. The shiver that wracked my spine felt as if it would cause me to seize up and fall into the mud and debris if I interjected, so I kept quiet and tried to plan an escape.
“Ahh, child, it should be a sin to tell instead of show, so…” he said, pulling one of those rigid arms up to direct our attention to the entrance of the ravaged town hall.
Compelled to obey by some ethereal force, Abbie and I stepped through the building, carefully making our way toward the platform where the council once convened. The stranger calmly stayed on our heels the entire way.
As we reached the great oaken table that still sat unsullied, I felt a rapid sucking of air in my throat when I saw, sitting dead center on the table, a single framed photograph. It was black and white and Sol had just crested its meridian, but even in the fading light I could still see that within the brass frame stood a pair of individuals, both of whom I recognized. Yet one was a few decades younger than I knew them to be now.
Abbie had seen it as well. Before I could reach out to stop her, my friend had run up and grasped the old picture close to her chest and began to give out muffled sobs.
I turned back to face the inconceivable.
“Haysom…how in the hell–” I started.
The impossibly youthful Edumund Haysom was still smiling.
“Son, all you have to do to achieve the unthinkable is – what is the phrase? Reach out and touch faith,” he said.
As he spoke the final word, the roof of the building opened up. The rotted beams peeled backward as if they were a potato being stripped of its skin and in place of the starlight it should have revealed instead was swirling cosmic mass of something.
Within that whirling void which seemed to absorb all goodness left in the world flickered a singular catlike orb that gazed at all three of us with a cold, almost lazy apathy. There was no name I could put to it, though it was no God that I knew and certainly not one I would willingly give my faith to. Not that I seemed to have been given much of a choice in the matter right then.
The dread it filled me with was instant and relentless, driving me to my knees in forced suppliance as I craned my over to Abbie, who somehow stood upright in the faces of the master and its acolyte. I tried to call out to her but my gullet felt more barren than the Sonoran. Still, she looked frozen in similar terror, speaking innumerable questions with her expression alone.
Haysom remained outwardly calm, though I could see a glint akin to pleading in his face.
“Great One, I have brought to you the final sacrifice at long last! Her blood is that of the one you desired most, the Purest Offering! By your promise, I beg that you release me to be a king in your realm,” the lich said, his voice growing as thin as he.
He’s trapped here. He’s been bound here by this thing the entire time…
I nearly felt a little sorry for the poor bastard, until my himbo brain put the decisive pieces together.
“You damn fool,” I rasped out. I might have laughed if I could have mustered one.
Haysom and the Eye snapped to look at me, one with surprise, the other with nothing at all save a dash of curiosity.
“Quiet yourself, profligate!” Haysom screamed, his former fine composure crumbling like his eternal home was around him. “You know not of what you speak of nor speak to.”
“It won’t ever let you free…” Abbie finished.
“Shut up, shut up you insolent child!” Haysom cried. Breathing deep, he turned his back on us to once more face his dark uncaring master and began to converse – beg – with the entity in a tongue alien to this earth.
Looking over at Abbie, I tried to convey how so incredibly sorry I was that I’d led us to this grim fate born of my foolish curiosity. The clever young woman picked up on it, and with a pained smile shook her head.
“I’d have…come here at a point with or without you, Karl…I’m just glad it’s here with you—mama??” Abbie said, her eyes going wide midsentence looking behind where I lay kneeling.
Turning my head to follow hers, I saw marching through the hall’s yawning entrance a sinewy silver-haired woman who wore on her face the embodiment of a mother’s devotion. That same devotion had likely compelled her to follow us here in the first place.
“She ain’t your child, Edmund. No more than I was ever your wife,” Susan van Houten declared. “No more than your pathetic devil cares for you.”
Haysom twisted his waist to face his former unwilling partner. Doing so gave the lich an even more freakish appearance as he tried to address both his fetid god and the resolute woman.
“Susan, my Susan,” he said, “We were meant to rule as gods in the Beyond together, you and I with our daughter! All of those lesser souls who I had to gift to It were nothing compared to such a promise!”
Susan slowly shook her head.
“My daughter, and even this well-meaning fool with her are more clever than you or I will ever be,” she retorted. “They saw right away that this fiend is no true god, and you’re no more than the wretched grub you always were but I was too blind to see.”
The silver-haired diner matron moved forward, between her daughter and me, still facing her former partner. With a glance first at me then resting on Abbie, Susan nodded towards the door.
“Ride away, darling, Godspeed and ride fast as you can from this abomination. And don’t you dare look back!” she said with a finality that had both myself and Helen tearing up.
“Mama, I–I’m sorry…” Abbie started.
The senior van Houten woman cracked a rare smile she reserved for a select few.
“Abilene, you’re more precious to me than my fool tongue can ever express,” she said warmly. “I shoulda finished this long ago, ain’t no fault of either of yours…might even be the second best thing I ever done, ‘sides from keeping you and the years we’ve spent together.”
“I–I love you mom…”
“And I love you, always. Now git for the love of God while this thing’s still focused on me!”
Right as our will flowed back into our bodies Haysom launched himself with a desperate wail at the younger van Houten. With the strength of a woman half her age and twice as powerful, Susan clotheslined the frail bastard and pinned him to the dank floorboards. I moved to help her but she waved me off with her free hand.
“Just get Abilene outta here and look after her! There’s others like them out there,” Susan said as the voidal creature above began madly blinking its cyclopean eye and swirling faster till it was as a hurricane.
“Yes ma’am, I will, I–thank you,” I stammered and she nodded her head, turning her attention back to Haysom.
“Time to see which of our Lords is the more mighty, husband,” I heard her growl at the panicking Haysom before moving to honor her command.
I grasped Abbie by her trembling hand, urging her to not let her mother’s actions be in vain. With a final gaze at the mother who had saved her once before her birth and here again now, Abbie ran with me out of the maw-like entrance. We tore back across the gravel path through the looming gate and into my Cutlass, not daring to look behind us although I could feel the eye of a starving god glued to me the entire way.
A roar not born of this earth reverberated across the pastoral land as we peeled back down the clay road and onto the main county line. Then, eternal silence.
We spoke no words, hardly daring to breathe till we reached the lights of our town.
***
A few months have passed since that waking nightmare. Abbie seems to have recuperated quicker than I would have imagined, though I occasionally hear her light sobs when she thinks I’m not near. Still, we’re picking up the pieces as best as we can. Her with the diner, me with my writing. But both of us were together in our confusion and hurt.
I cannot imagine the rest of the townsfolk – our townsfolk – did not have some conception of what was out there all this time. Though to be fair, I don’t have much of an idea of what happened after Abbie and I took off like white lightning. All I know for sure is that she and I are in it together, whatever “it” looks like from here on out.
I say this because I often think about that night, and in the darkest hours of each evening I also find myself pondering Mrs. van Houten’s final words to me.
“There’s others like them out there.”
I’m not quite sure if she meant other power-mad cretins like Haysom, or netherworldly beings similar to his master.
I am starting to fear that she meant both.