The Spaceship Next Door

⁵ IN THE LIBRARY, WITH THE CANDLESTICK

There was an enormous mural on the wall of the library. It greeted all persons upon entry, and was the subject of endless hours of scrutiny among the staff employees and volunteers, and many a patron. It was easily the most dramatic—and certainly largest—piece of art in town, if not the state.

The painting was called Sorrow Fell, and the most tragic thing about it—aside from what was depicted—was that nobody knew the name of the artist. The town commissioned the artwork to commemorate the foundation of the library, which was in itself odd, as there was nothing in the painting to imply that greater knowledge might be found through books. More curious, all of the historical records detailed the commissioning, installation, and aggrandizement of the mural’s creator, but in every last document the name of said creator was either omitted or excised. He or she was only ever referred to as The Artist.

What The Artist painted was the tragic, mundane, and borderline comic founding of Sorrow Falls, which aside from a particularly unusual interpretation of the Bible was an extremely non-literary event.

In the center of the piece was the heroic figure of Josiah Foster Sorrow, depicted not at all accurately. The Josiah of the painting was a strapping, powerful man with an open collar to reveal his impressive chest hair, traveling in a canoe in the most ridiculous way imaginable: standing, one knee up on the edge of the boat, hips squared and pelvic region unquestionably augmented for artistic reasons. It looked vaguely like the pose one might expect of a man on the cover of a paperback romance novel.

The real Josiah Foster Sorrow was a cult leader of sorts. Over three hundred years earlier, Josiah fled what he considered religious intolerance in the colonies, taking along his family and many like-minded religious zealots. It was an inconvenient detail that the intolerance the Sorrowers fled was in regards to his peculiarly unpleasant set of beliefs. Such beliefs involved worshipping a God who told them to ignore property rights, marriage banns, and the social and legal standards surrounding the minimum age of sexual consent.

Like an earlier band of Massachusetts settlers, Josiah had been fleeing religious persecution for a little while, having first self-exiled from the Massachusetts colony for what would later be New Hampshire, then for what would later be Vermont, before heading down-river on the Connecticut, into Western Massachusetts and Native American tribal territory.

The Connecticut River was never one of those rivers that could be traversed at length via canoe. This was a detail lost on Josiah and his people, and made for slow going, as they frequently had to stop, beach themselves, carry their boats downstream, and get back in. It was frustrating, and Josiah’s God was an impatient deity, so one night his God told Josiah to stop stalling and hurry on down to the Promised Land already.

According to at least half of the legends, what happened next was that Josiah and his Sorrowers came upon a large drop in the river, at dusk. When his followers began heading for the shore, as always, their leader excoriated them for their lack of faith and vowed the Lord would protect them from harm if they only stayed in their canoes.

There were doubts, as most of the Sorrowers—while being unswervingly dedicated to their leader—also had a passing familiarity with gravity and its consequences. So they recommended that Josiah go first.

He did, falling roughly twenty feet to his death upon a rock at the base of the falls—Sorrow’s Stone, it was now called—and putting an end to the wanderings of the Sorrowers. For as soon as Josiah perished, the rest of them looked around and concluded that this must surely be the Promised Land they had been told to expect.

They named the place Sorrow Falls, not for the waterfall that claimed Josiah’s life, but because this was the place where Sorrow fell.

That was not precisely what was depicted in the painting.

There was second version of the story, one that saw Josiah not as a determined fanatic who thought he could defy the laws of physics at a very bad moment, but as a peerless leader who was unaccountably distracted at exactly the wrong time.

In the painting, the strong, square chin, and determined blue eyes of Josiah Sorrow were pointed upward, at the sky rather than straight ahead. In his line of sight was a bright streak of light—a sign from the heavens.

Unfortunately, this sign arrived at exactly the wrong time. The river beneath Josiah’s canoe was disappearing over the falls, but as he was looking up he didn’t notice.

The depiction captured, almost comically, the moment just before his death: nearly half of the canoe was pointed over empty space, like something from a cartoon.

It was probably an apocryphal version of events, as the holders of the historical record—the founding Sorrowers—no doubt had cause to re-examine the suicidal last decision of Josiah Sorrow, and perhaps make it come off as less silly and more tragic. No, this version said, there was no talk of God protecting Josiah, it was only that he was leading and became distracted by a light in the sky.

The mural, then, paid respects to both versions. Yes, Josiah can be seen distracted by a light in the sky, but look at him. What an idiot. He doesn’t even have his paddle in the water. Who would go canoeing like that?

Unsurprisingly, after the spaceship landed outside of town, the light in the sky responsible for Josiah Foster Sorrow’s death became a lot more interesting to a lot more people, and the painting in particular ended up gracing the cover of enough magazines to convince the town council to put some money into getting it restored.

In a bit of irony, the restoration uncovered more of the fading tail of the meteor in the top left corner of the mural. The tail—surely nothing more than an accidental brush stroke by the artist—had a thirty-degree angle in it.

The Artist, according to some, had predicted the future.

That was probably Annie’s favorite part of the painting, or it was on that particular day. Other days she ended up transfixed by a background tree, or the symbolic renderings of wild men in the woods—horror show versions of Native Americans with dull eyes, reaching out toward the water like the Karloff edition of Frankenstein’s monster. Sometimes it was the chaos of the water, or the woman on a canoe way behind Josiah, barely given detail other than a bonnet and an open mouth, screaming to warn him.

Sometimes her favorite part was just that nobody knew who painted it or exactly how old it was.

“Stop staring at it.”

Annie was at the library’s front desk, directly beneath the enormous mural. When she sat on the middle stool her head was just below Josiah’s impressively bulgy crotch. That was never one of her favorite parts of the painting.

She turned to discover a slightly paler version of herself.

“I can’t help it,” she said to Violet. “There’s always something new to look at.”

Annie and Violet were the same age, had the same basic physical shape and the same dark brown hair. Anyone filling out a document listing their attendant vital statistics would conclude that they were therefore very similar, and in those simple terms, they were. Annie even thought of Violet that way—as a lost twin sister or lab-created doppelganger, depending on her mood. At the same time, nobody who saw them together could ever mistake them for one another.

To the extent that anyone knew of Violet’s existence, they would say she was a shy girl. Her body language said stay away under most circumstances, or perhaps easily frightened. She was reserved, did not express her opinions easily, assumed nobody was ever talking to her, and didn’t like introducing herself to people. Violet was the sort of person that had to be dragged into a social setting and coerced into interacting, but when she did so the people with whom she interacted usually wondered why the person who had coerced her to do so had bothered.

Vi was home-schooled. She moved into town six years ago, and as Annie liked to joke, if she hadn’t discovered Violet, nobody would know she existed other than her parents. It probably wasn’t true, but it wasn’t that far off either. Vi didn’t hang out with any kids her own age unless she was with Annie, and the only time she ever went into town was to hang out with Annie.

All of which made Annie feel as if she had a responsibility to get others to notice Violet. She appreciated that to a certain extent some people were just by nature unsociable and introverted, and as a highly sociable extrovert she would never entirely understand her friend’s issues. Telling her to just be friendly and all that was probably not helping.

Annie still did it more often than she probably should. Violet was the smartest person she knew, and Annie knew a lot of smart people. (Annie was, by her own estimation, extremely smart. Violet was smarter.) If Violet were in the public school system a lot more people would know this about her, and then maybe Annie wouldn’t have to spend as much time convincing other people how cool her friend was.

“It’s kind of amateurish, really,” Vi said. “The color composition is terrible, and the artistic style… I mean, what is he even doing with his…”

“The pelvic thrust for Jesus, right here?”

“Yes, the groin region. Someone rewrote a lot of history there.”

“He did take several wives, maybe the man had the goods.”

“I think it’s more of a Methuselah touch.”

“Explain.”

“All the exceptionally wise men in the Old Testament ended up living extra-long lives. It was an artistic flourish to put a number behind exactly how wise they were.”

“Methuselah didn’t actually live nine hundred years?”

Annie began singing It Ain’t Necessarily So… in her head, which was a little curious only because while she knew the song was a show tune from Porgy and Bess, she didn’t know how she knew that or when she ever heard the song.

Probably something we watched together, she decided.

She and her mother were always catching up on something older than Annie, and sometimes older than either of them.

“It was nine hundred and sixty-nine years. And no. If he was lucky, he lived to sixty-nine.”

“I am shocked… shocked… that you would suggest a non-literal interpretation of the Bible. In front of Josiah no less. And his enormous member.”

“I’m pretty sure Josiah was sicklier than that too. He was seizure-prone and probably had syphilis.”

“Source, please.”

“Half of the Sorrowers were dead in a year from it and he had multiple wives. And it wasn’t like they picked it up from the Indians.”

“Native Americans, please.”

“Noted.”

“The court finds your argument in favor of Josiah Sorrow having syphilis unconvincing.”

“On what grounds?”

“Speculation!”

She banged a hardbound copy of Essentials of Gardening on the counter to gavel home her judgment.

“If it pleases the court, what time is the judge getting the heck out of this place?”

“I can leave whenever. Nobody’s here.”

This was a common fact of the library, especially in the summer, when the high school that stood behind it and up the hill about a quarter of a mile wasn’t in session. Annie went between deciding that was sad, and not worrying much about it. A lot of books could be found online nowadays, so what could have been interpreted as a lessening of interest in reading was maybe actually a change in the way information was obtained.

True, there were a lot of books that weren’t available in any form other than print. The Sorrow Falls library had plenty of such books, and if it did—it was not in any real sense a large collection—there had to be a ton of such books out there. At the same time, a whole bunch of those books were perfectly dreadful. They were as relevant as historical artifacts, perhaps, like Methuselah’s exaggerated age, but not as valuable resources in and of themselves. They had meta-historical value, at most.

“So what are my reasons for closing early?” Annie asked. “What do you have for me that could be better than this?”

She waved her hand at Josiah’s package.

“I have the car, and cash, and the sun is still out.”

“Oooh!”

“Does it please the court?”

“It pleases the court immensely.”

ANNIE HAD A DRIVER’S LICENSE. She got it as soon as it was legally possible to do so, even though she had almost no use for one, because there was only one car in the family. Annie only drove it once, on the occasion in which she got her license. Since then, she’d driven Violet’s family car twice and that was all. It was okay; she didn’t enjoy the experience—it looked much easier when other people did it—but thought that this was perhaps because she wasn’t a particularly good driver.

Violet, on the other hand, seemed to have access to the car whenever she wanted, and was clearly a better driver. Annie only sort-of knew Violet’s parents and certainly not well enough to ask them what they did for a living or why that existence didn’t require them use of the car, but that was clearly the case. Her mother—Susan—mostly stayed at home, and her father—Todd—seemed to have the kind of job that used a company car and had him leaving for extended periods, but beyond that it was an Adult Thing. Annie knew about plenty of Adult Things in the town, but this was one she never tried understanding.

Plus, the happy consequence was that Violet got the use of the car, which meant Annie got the use of the car. As long as that continued to be true, Annie wasn’t going to ask any hard questions.

It took Annie about ten minutes to close down the library for the afternoon. The building was theoretically large enough for someone to hide inside of one of the stacks without being detected, but they would have to want to do it. Otherwise, it was impossible for this to happen by accident, because the library carried sound incredibly well. It was something only a few people realized, for the obvious reason that most people were trying to be quiet while inside. Once Annie walked from end to end loudly declaring her intention to bolt the door for the remainder of the day, only the deaf would have failed to hear her.

“Where to?” Annie asked, as she threw her bike into the back of Violet’s incredibly unsexy hatchback.

“Your choice. Where do the youths gather?”

“The youths gather at the mall.”

“Then we shall hie to the mall.”

“Verily.”

The engine kicked to life with tremendous reluctance, and they were off, pulling out of the library’s modest parking area onto Main and then left, past the protestors, over the river and out of town.

“Think something’s up with Shippie,” Annie said, as Vi took them toward the highway.

“Something’s always up with Shippie.”

Shippie was what the two of them called the spaceship, but only when they were alone. Annie tried using it on other people but nobody much cared for the nickname. The name was borrowed from Nessie, because there seemed to be a certain kinship between Sorrow Falls’s most famous visitor and Loch Ness’s most famous lake inhabitant. The ship was very real, while Nessie probably was not, but that didn’t seem like a huge distinction back when they were thirteen.

“Yeah, but this might be legit.”

“This isn’t from your friends on the roof, is it?”

“No. They had something too, but it wasn’t really something.”

“They’re still seeing canals on Mars, those people.”

Sometimes, Violet sounded uncomfortably like an adult, especially when she was judging the behavior of actual adults. In this case, she was referring to the erroneous sighting by various scientifically inclined persons in history of water-bearing canals on the surface of Mars. It was an optical illusion, which should have been obvious when the drawings of the canals were compared to one another.

Annie got the reference, because this was the sort of minutia one learned when hanging out with Violet, who was some kind of trivia savant.

“They’re enthusiastic is all. It’s good to be enthusiastic about something.”

Violet smiled.

“I guess. So what’s the thing?”

“I don’t know yet. A guy turned up this morning asking for Joanne. I went and talked to him.”

“You talked to him? Why’d you do that?”

“Dunno. He looked approachable. He didn’t have the kind of skeeve a lot of those guys have. Clean-cut, laptop, young.”

“Stop hitting on older men.”

“Oh my God.”

“I’m serious.”

“I wasn’t hitting on him, he’s like thirty or something. He just didn’t look skeevy is what I mean. He looked like a normalish guy with a normalish understanding of the modern world. He wasn’t… what did you call them?”

“Ink-stained wretches.”

“Yes, he wasn’t like that. Except now I’m pretty sure he’s not a reporter.”

“All right, now you’re confusing me.”

“He never said he was a reporter. I talked to him about the story he was writing, and he talked back as if he was in fact writing a story, but he didn’t say reporter. And when he gave me his name he didn’t say anything about who he was writing for. I’m pretty sure I’ve never met a reporter who didn’t give the name of his magazine or newspaper in the first thirty seconds. A lot of them say it before they even say their own names.”

“Maybe it’s a crummy paper and he’s embarrassed.”

“A writer for a crummy paper getting a tour of Shippie?”

“He’s getting a tour? Like, they’re letting him inside the fence?”

“That’s what my sources say.”

“Well, you’re right, that would indicate some prestige, if not his, then the company he’s attached to. He gave you his name?”

“Edgar Somerville. I looked him up, and either he gave me a fake name or the guy doesn’t have a byline in any major publication.”

Violet side-eyed her. “Uh-huh. What did you check?”

“The database in the library and the Internet.”

“Did you check the scientific journals?”

“Of course I did.”

“Government?”

“What, like position papers and bills?”

“Sure.”

“Those don’t really come with bylines.”

“Hmm. I guess you’ll have to go flirt with him some more.”

“I wasn’t flirting!”

Violet maneuvered the hatchback into highway traffic and stuck to the right-hand lane, both because the mall was only two exits down and because the car couldn’t hold at sixty-five MPH without screaming and rattling, and every car on the road was going faster than that.

“So if he’s not a reporter, what is he here for?” Vi asked.

“Not a clue, but like I said, he got to see the ship. Hardly anybody does that any more. Dobbs and Mr. Shoeman will have to fill me in tomorrow about his visit. I’m assuming they recorded the whole thing.”

“Yes or your army boyfriend.”

“Sam? He won’t tell me anything. No, I take that back. If something happened, he won’t tell me anything. If nothing happened, he’ll say so.”

“How will you know the difference?”

“Oh, I’ll know.”

Vi laughed again.

Off the highway exit, she followed the generously large signs to the parking lot of the Oakdale Mall, which was surprisingly congested for a weekday afternoon.

SOMETIME IN THE past ten years, some intrepid marketer got the idea that the word ‘mall’ was a negative, so beginning with the shopping malls close to the downtown Boston area and radiating outward, the chain malls had been getting makeovers and new names.

In all fairness, the makeovers were sometimes quite impressive, in that they turned low-end strip malls into upscale centers with a higher quality of stores. The rebranding was a pretty effective way of signaling that change. Still, when it turned the Oakdale Mall into The Oakdale Experience, pretty much everyone laughed. Annie didn’t know one person who called it that without irony. Even tourists weren’t quite sure what to think.

Whoever was in charge of redesigning the mall did a fantastic job, though. What had been a large rectangular building surrounded by parking was turned into a rectangular parking area surrounded by shops, with a smaller rectangle of shops in the middle. From the air, it looked like an especially thick digital zero. This seemed like a catastrophic choice for a New England shopping center—who would shop at an outdoor plaza in the winter? —but it worked surprisingly well. The restaurants, movie theater and bowling alley made it the kind of place people went to spend the day rather than visit in order to shop, and that turned out to be an important distinction.

Annie didn’t have a lot of spending money at any given time, but she enjoyed going to the mall when circumstances conspired in her favor. A generation or two ago “the mall” might have been a place for someone of her age and/or economic level to go and “hang out”, and perhaps use a skateboard and harass angry white adults like in the music videos from the 90’s. (These videos looked as dated to her as the black-and-white films she watched with her mother. In fairness, everything pre-spaceship looked a little dated anyway, but these looked like especially quaint artifacts. Especially the clothing.) For her, hanging out at the mall, more often than not, meant figuring out who’d gotten a job where. It was basically the only place in the area that hired high-school-age kids on a consistent basis.

The Oakdale Mall (everyone still called it this) also benefited greatly from being the only shopping center of consequence within a twenty-mile radius of the spaceship. Sure, there were the authentic and semi-authentic shops on Main Street, but almost without exception those shops ended up being places to stop at briefly, and not to linger. Plus, one of the things that made Main so very authentic was a thorough lack of parking.

The typical activities arc of the Sorrow Falls tourist was, in order: see the spaceship; discover the ship was not all that interesting a thing to look at; visit Main; if lucky, find parking; shop for approximately forty minutes; hear something about ‘The Oakdale Experience’ and conclude incorrectly that it was perhaps—with a name like that—an amusement park; head to the mall; spend remainder of vacation there.

One would think the town of Sorrow Falls would be interested in encouraging people to stay, perhaps by building a mall of their own, but after three years the town’s attitude toward visitors was permanently affixed somewhere between blandly courteous and get the hell off my lawn. Just about any local, when asked, would tell a visitor, “You should really check out Oakdale!” and not think twice about it. They would even offer directions.

It was one of the only places Annie visited outside of Sorrow Falls on any kind of consistent basis. It was too far to bike, though, so she had to rely on people with cars. This was also one of the reasons she didn’t have a job there, although not the only one. She also didn’t want to be too far from the ship, for more or less the same reason Mr. Shoeman and the rest of the rooftop city people couldn’t bring themselves to leave. She didn’t want to be the one who gave up waiting on something to happen right before something happened.

She also didn’t want to be too far from her mom for too long at a time.

VIOLET FOUND a spot at the top corner of the plaza; right in front a fiberglass model of the ship. It was an impressive replica, built to scale, with enough detail to pass as the real thing when one was squinting. It sat in the middle of an extra-large sidewalk in front of the movie theater, which was appropriate: it was one of the models used in the movie version of the Sorrow Falls story, donated to the town by the filmmakers as thanks for their hospitality. Naturally, the town thought the replica was tacky and immediately donated it to Oakdale.

The two things Annie thought particularly funny about the replica: first, everyone assumed it was not to scale because they thought the actual ship was much bigger; second, there was a glass case around the ship and a velvet rope around the case, to prevent anybody from touching it, meaning even when fake versions of the ship were put together, nobody could put a hand on it.

This was the most ostentatious of the dozen-or-so things in the mall that were meant to connect the Experience with the slow invasion happening up-road. That list didn’t even include the gigantic souvenir shop.

“Hello, Shippie,” Annie said to the model as they got out of the car.

“Don’t talk to it, people will stare,” Vi said.

“Ignore the olds, skatergirl, let’s go smoke some cigs.”

“…what?”

“Never mind. C’mon, I think Rachel’s working at VS now.”

“HEY, did you hear?”

Sometimes Annie liked to pretend she was a sociologist, and her job was to evaluate her own life. It was a kind of meta-distancing trick she pulled under certain circumstances, in which she saw herself interacting directly with the world while at the same time standing back and taking notes.

In the ninety-odd minutes it took to nearly complete a full circuit of the outer ring of shops—with one brief stopover at the ice cream shop at the inner building—Annie encountered over a dozen people she might call friends. Sociologist Annie’s notes listed them as fellow tribal members, with additional margin notes like potential mate and competition.

The standard greeting for this tribe would be Hey, did you hear? It was how they all said hello, and how they verified their tribal statuses. It was also the preamble to the transmission of vital social, political and legal issues concerning members of said tribe, which were of critical import to the entire unit.

None of it mattered, while at the same time all of it was terribly important. This was what Violet—who was a much more authentic sociologist, really—never entirely understood. It was true that in the proverbial Grand Scheme of Things, it wasn’t terribly important that Rachel broke up with Luke after hearing he made out with Lucy at Marko’s party—which she wasn’t even invited to! —and then got, like, sick drunk and passed out on the floor of Marko’s pool house, especially since that wasn’t half as Earth-shattering as the news that Tina was completely gay for Nona, except Nona was only pretending to be a lesbian to piss off her parents while Tina was pretending to be straight so as not to piss off her parents, which was amazing news except for the much more amazing story about Dougie shaving his entire head for no reason at all except Dougie is a dork who thinks he’s going to join the army, which is stupid because the army doesn’t let in dorks, besides which, the army wasn’t even all that cool, and oh, did you hear Rick thought he saw a vampire? No joke!

“I have an important question,” Violet said, over two burgers and a shared milkshake. They were sitting in the dining area of the bowling alley, which was not at all like a typical New England bowling alley, for a number of reasons. First, the food was actually excellent. They had the best burger at the mall, only nobody knew it because when people wanted a burger they went to one of the two places that specialized in burgers. Second, it was 100% ten-pin bowling. Most of New England bowled a version called candlestick, which used narrow pins and shot-put sized balls. It was about a thousand times more frustrating than ten-pin, which meant it served an important regional purpose of teaching local children how to swear effectively.

“Hit me.”

“Do you like any of those people?”

Annie laughed.

“How long have you wanted to ask me that?”

“About as long as I’ve known you. Or since you started trying to indoctrinate me.”

“Ooh, indoctrination. That’s definitely what I’m doing. No, come on, I’m just trying to, I don’t know, insert you into the world a little.”

“I’m perfectly happy with my degree of insertion.”

In the ninety-odd minutes of their whirlwind shopping circuit (in which there was virtually no shopping) Violet had said approximately five words, and all five of them were hi. The people of Annie’s tribe knew her exactly well enough to understand that Vi was meant to be ignored, and that she preferred it that way.

“I know you are, but it’s not healthy!”

“I’m perfectly healthy as well.”

“But I can’t be your only lifeline to the world, what if something happens to me?”

“What’s going to happen to you?”

“I don’t know, but something could! And if it did and I wasn’t around any more, your meager social skills would just wither away. A decade from now you’ll be like Nell, grunting in a cabin in the woods.”

“I already live in a cabin in the woods.”

“That’s my point.”

Violet sighed grandly.

“All right, I will try. But seriously, the banality is difficult to stomach.”

“You are so full of it.”

“Me? How so?”

“Nobody is actually this pretentious. People have to work at it.”

“I think I’m offended.”

“See, that’s what I mean, you can’t actually even be offended, you have to announce that it’s a possibility you may at some point develop a feeling, and that feeling if, when felt, might develop into a sensation akin to a quality reminiscent of offense.”

“Well I would never say that, but that was impressive. You should write it down.”

Annie threw a balled-up straw wrapper at Vi, and then Rodney sat down.

“Hey, did you hear?” he said.

Rodney Delindo was either nineteen or twenty, which put him squarely outside of the tribal demographic of Annie’s sociology study. He still had a spot inside her circle of friends, though, perhaps an even more important spot than most everyone aside from Vi. Rodney was, for a short while not too terribly long ago, quite possibly Annie’s very best friend.

They hardly spoke any more, because they both got older and things changed. Rodney’s graduation from high school was one of those things. He was a manager at the bowling alley now, while he considered his higher education options. This meant, in less polite terms, his grades were not fantastic and his ability to pay college tuition suspect. At the same time, the job still had to be considered temporary because nobody goes through life planning to be a shift manager at a bowling alley. Especially not one without a candlestick lane.

He was Annie’s first crush. She never said so, but he probably knew it.

When he sat down, he flipped the chair over so the back was facing the table, and then straddled it cowboy-style. It was a modestly stud-worthy maneuver.

“Hey, Rod. What were we supposed to have heard?”

“Yes, there’s so much,” Violet said. Annie shot her a look, and got back a, you wanted me to engage, so… shrug.

Rodney more or less pretended Vi wasn’t there. It wasn’t even impolite; it was just what one did.

“About Rick.”

“I heard he saw a vampire. But this is Rick we’re talking about.”

Rodney laughed.

“No, no, it wasn’t a vampire.”

“Of course it wasn’t. That’s my point. Rick is Rick.”

Rick Horton was a year above Annie, which made him seventeen and still four years away from the legal drinking age, when he could officially fulfill the role he’d been training for his entire life, that of the town drunk.

Wildly insensitive, Annie the sociologist wrote in her notebook.

Rick was the first local kid roughly Annie’s age that had a self-evident drinking problem. It didn’t seem possible for someone so young to exhibit alcoholic tendencies, but by most accounts, Rick had his first beer when he was twelve and hadn’t stopped drinking since.

The last two or three times Annie spoke to Rick, it became clear he was also auditioning for town crackpot. He was working on a number of fascinatingly disturbing theories about the spaceship and the army that was a complicated synthesis of everything the trailer people had to say combined with the wild theories from the protestors. Just add alcohol and stir.

Literally anything could follow did you hear about Rick? She expected one day it would be he died, but not yet.

Vampires were right in his wheelhouse.

“No, I mean it wasn’t a vampire, it was something else.”

“Go on,” Violet said. Rodney looked her way, confused momentarily; wearing an expression along the lines of I did not know it spoke.

“So you remember Mr. Granger?”

“From seventh grade? Sure.”

“And do you know…” he looked a little uncomfortable, because the next part of the sentence was…that he died, and it just occurred to him if she did not know this, the way he was breaking the news was probably a tiny bit insensitive.

“Yeah, so sad,” Annie said. “He was young, too.” To Violet, she said, “He taught English in middle school. He was really cool.”

“He died?”

“Couple weeks ago. It was really sudden. Heart attack?”

“I think so,” Rodney said.

“I think he was only maybe fifty. Used to jog, too.”

“Yeah, we’d pass him in the morning, remember?”

“I do.”

Rodney’s family lived up the road from Annie. She used to hitch rides in the winter.

“So what about Mr. Granger?” Annie asked.

“Rick said he saw him.”

Annie laughed.

“Was Mr. Granger the vampire??”

“Not a vampire. What Rick said was, he saw the undead. People filled that in.”

“So, wait, okay, Mr. Granger is a zombie?”

“Where did he see him?” Violet asked.

“Uhm…” Rodney was still perplexed regarding the existence of Violet.

“He was drinking in the cemetery, wasn’t he?” Annie asked. She thought this was hysterical, and couldn’t really understand why nobody else did. “That’s priceless.”

“No, no it was… well, he didn’t say exactly.”

“You got this from him?”

“Yes, he told me himself. He was really spooked.”

“So where?” Violet repeated.

“Okay, so the whole story, Rick said he was hanging with Ellard. You know Ellard?”

“I know him by sight. I don’t think I’ve ever talked to him.”

“He and Rick… they hang out.”

“Ellard can buy alcohol.”

Ellard Baron was twenty-two, and the kind of person young girls were told to steer clear of.

“Yeah, I’m sure that’s a factor. So he and Ellard were going tipping…”

“Oh, good Lord.”

“What’s tipping?” Violet asked.

“Cow-tipping,” Annie said. “Could they be more stereotypical? Did they also have moonshine in jugs? Jesus. I’m embarrassed on their behalf right now.”

“So Rick and Ellard headed up Cedar in Ellard’s pickup, looking for a cow. But you know how the farms are up there, not much to see from the road, especially at night. I guess they pulled off at some point and started wandering on foot.”

Annie sighed. “I can see where this is going.”

“I can’t,” Vi said.

“Once you leave Cedar, you’re pretty much just hopping stone fences one after the other. It’s really easy to get lost up there, isn’t it, Rod?”

“It is. Story is, they settled down, edge of one pasture or another, and started drinking. Never found a cow. Then Ellard passed out. Sometime around who knows when, Rick heard somebody walking around in the trees. He was thinking farmer, shotgun, that sort of thing, so he ducked down behind the fence. That’s when he swears Mr. Granger walked on past.”

“In the dark, in the woods. Was there even a moon that night?”

“I don’t know what night it happened. I guess I can catch up to him and check.”

Violet had pulled out her phone and opened a maps application.

“Cedar Road. This here?”

She pointed to a small road surrounded on both sides by no roads at all. Cedar was one of those poorly paved barely-two-lane roads that were commonplace in Sorrow Falls and large portions of the entire valley. It was the kind of tributary Spaceship Road used to be, before it was Spaceship Road.

“Yeah, that’s it. By the way, I’m Rodney.” He extended his hand. Conservatively, he had met Violet on six prior occasions.

“Violet,” she said, shaking his hand. “How far up Cedar do you suppose they were?”

“Seriously, no idea.”

She zoomed in on the map, pulled it left and right.

“Where was Mr. Granger buried?”

“Violet, seriously.”

“I’m showing interest.”

“You’re creeping me out.”

She turned to Rodney. “So you don’t know.”

“No, but I get what you’re saying.”

“What’s she saying?” Annie asked.

“Peacock Cemetery’s just over that hill.”

“You are seriously both just messing with me on this, aren’t you?”

“Yes,” Violet said. “That’s all.” She swiped the maps image to one side and put it down in front of Annie without saying anything about it.

“I’m sure this Rick was just drunk,” Vi said to Rodney.

Annie looked at where her friend stopped the map. Cedar Road ran more or less precisely between the cemetery and the field where Shippie rested.

This meant nothing, of course.