Sons of Darkness

by Gail Z. Martin

  She sighed. “Gotta say, I’m of two minds myself. Doesn’t hurt to see some good paying jobs here—although it’s mostly outsiders doing them—and they spend local in the shops and diner. But I hear what the protesters are saying about earthquakes and groundwater spills and…I just don’t know.”

  “Well, I’m not with either side,” Travis assured her. “Just digging into local history.”

  Thanks to Father Ryan, and Brent’s friend, Doug, Travis found himself with preferred access to the historical archive, which also seemed to double as the library rare book room and the newspaper morgue for the Cooper City Clarion. The room took up most of the second floor of the old courthouse, and it was obvious to Travis that whoever set up the archive knew what they were doing.

  He’d expected to find a dusty attic stacked with boxes of faded, moldering boxes. Instead, floor-to-ceiling shelves were filled with color-coded binders. A microfiche reader sat to one side, and while the technology might be outdated, Travis had spent plenty of hours hunched over similar machines in Duquesne’s secret libraries, accessing old documents.

  “Looks like this is someone’s labor of love,” Travis observed. He felt certain that neither the town nor the county could pay for someone to organize and curate the archive.

  Connie chuckled. “You’re right. Hazel Monteleone was the powerhouse behind creating the archive. What a lady! She was a force of nature. She started the archive fifty years ago, right after the ‘Bad Times,’ when her husband and son were killed. Said she needed something to keep her busy, and a cause to direct her energy.”

  Connie leaned forward conspiratorially. “No one ever said ‘no’ to Hazel. She cajoled and sweet-talked—and occasionally bullied—donors and politicians into creating the archive and giving her the grant money she needed to get it off the ground.”

  “What was her interest?” Travis was curious.

  “Hazel had been a journalist and a librarian, and she loved history. I think that’s how she finagled the politicians—made them all believe this would be the guardian of their legacies,” Connie explained.

  Travis looked around at the oil paintings that seemed incongruous in what looked like the “stacks” of a library. A glance at the dignified old men in the portraits suggested that these were the politicos who had been hornswoggled into giving Hazel what she wanted, and the paintings were all the “legacy” they received.

  “Where does the continued funding come from?” he asked, knowing enough about non-profits to follow the money.

  “One of Hazel’s best friends was the daughter of Wilfred Mackinaw, the president of one of the big coal mines in the area back then.” Connie’s eyes sparkled with the prospect of a good story.

  Travis knew how much librarians and academics loved to gossip, and he’d figured Connie would be as much a trove of information as the archive itself.

  “Anyhow, Isabella Mackinaw lost her father, husband, brother, and son in the Bad Times, and so when Hazel came up with the idea of preserving the history of the area, Isabella loved the notion and made sure she had start-up money and a big enough endowment to last from now until Kingdom-come.“

  “That’s the second time you’ve mentioned the ‘Bad Times,’” Travis said. “What do you mean?”

  Connie perched on the edge of one of the solid wooden work tables, warming to the subject. “Fifty years ago this area had a real run of bad luck. There was a mine collapse, and one of the coal seams caught fire. Not as bad as over in Centralia, thank heavens, but bad enough.”

  Travis knew about Centralia, a now-abandoned town where the coal fires beneath were expected to burn for at least a century.

  “Two big railroad trains collided and killed a lot of people—passengers, train employees, and station crew. Hazel’s husband was the engineer on one of the trains, and he died in the crash. Then there was a flu outbreak, and dozens of people died—including Hazel’s son and Isabella’s father. A bridge collapsed, and Isabella’s husband and son were in a car that was on it at the time. They died. Two whole blocks in downtown Cooper City caught fire and burned to the ground. Isabella’s brother was killed when he was in a nearby building, and the heat caused a natural gas explosion.” She shook her head. “It was awful. So…the Bad Times.”

  The timing was right for the hell gate cycle, and from what Connie shared, the energy or entity behind the calamity had created plenty of misery for its feast. “Would the documents about everything that happened during the Bad Times be here, in the Archive?” Travis asked, and found himself holding his breath. This was why he had made the trip back to Cooper City, hoping he could piece together clues from old newspapers. Hazel’s involvement, together with Isabella’s backing, made him hopeful that he might find even more than he’d expected.

  “Oh, yes,” Connie replied. “As well as Hazel’s diaries.”

  “Diaries?” Intuition told Travis to pay attention.

  Connie nodded. “Hazel said in later years that she took up keeping a diary—we’d call it ‘journaling’ today—to help her through her grief. She wrote some articles for the newspaper, although she wasn’t officially on staff—times being what they were and all—but she certainly had a journalist’s eye for news. When she died, the City Council declared her the ‘official historian’ of Cooper City. There’s a plaque to her memory over by the courthouse. Too bad they didn’t make that fuss over her while she was alive.”

  “I’d like to dive into the reference material, but if I have questions later, can I ask you?” As sure as Travis was that Connie would be a good resource, he knew he could ask better questions once he had more facts, and he was itching to get a look at Hazel’s diaries.

  “Of course! There’s no gossip as good as fifty-year-old gossip,” she said with a laugh. “Kind of like wine—it gets better when it ages!”

  Connie showed Travis where Hazel’s diaries were kept, warned him to wear cotton gloves to protect the fragile paper, and pointed him toward the section of the archive that held all the materials from the period of the “Bad Times.” Then she left him alone, and Travis eyed the shelves like a hungry man with a cheeseburger.

  Travis found the diaries for 1968 and settled into a chair. Soon, he was sucked into the narrative. Hazel had an engaging voice and a unique writing style that read like a novel. From her descriptions of the town and its inhabitants, it was clear that she also had a sharp mind, an eye for detail, and a historian’s insight into human nature.

  More than once Travis sensed another presence nearby, but when he tried to hone in with his Sight, the impression slipped away. He didn’t feel threatened, merely watched, as if the spirit might be trying to figure out his motives.

  “Hazel?” he said quietly. “If you’re here, I’m on your side. I think there’s something going on now that happened before, and I want to stop it. So I’d appreciate any help you can give me.”

  He felt his throat tighten as Hazel’s journal reported on the disasters that claimed her loved ones, made all the more heartbreaking because of the clear-eyed, unemotional way she recounted the details. Hazel’s diary went on to document the epidemic and the accidents, and other smaller, but deadly, disasters. It all seemed to come to a head in the catastrophic downtown fire that leveled much of the city, killed dozens, and left hundreds of businesses ruined and apartment-dwellers homeless.

  Travis frowned as he read, and then re-read, Hazel’s paragraphs after her account of the fire.

  “After the fire that caused so many deaths and ruined so many lives, the calamity ended, as if someone had flipped a switch. There were many other stories confided to me by people who would never tell such things to a newspaper, for fear of becoming a laughingstock, or thought insane. I have documented those stories in my research. They are too strange for many to accept, but my fear comes from the fact that I do believe them to be true.

  I do not think our misfortune was accidental, nor do I charge human malfeasance. I am not an overly religious woman, but I am convinced th
at an infernal power visited destruction upon our city for its own purposes, as it has done in the past. It is my intent to gather every scrap of information to document those Bad Times so that some future champion might save our descendants from the fiery trials that I believe are sure to come once more.”

  Travis mused over what he’d read. Hazel was a journalist, historian, and librarian. But she was also a woman, and fifty years ago, if she suspected something might be behind the Bad Times, no one was likely to listen, doubly so if the suspected cause was supernatural.

  “So she did the next best thing,” he speculated aloud. “She left a trail of breadcrumbs, in case it happened again, so someone else could pick up where she left off.”

  The longer he spent in the archive, the stronger the sense of another presence became. When it got to the point where he felt as if an invisible someone was looking over his shoulder, he set down the journal he had been reading and closed his eyes.

  Hazel? Is that you? Travis asked silently. I’m a medium. I can hear you if you have anything you want to tell me.

  The temperature in the archive plummeted, and Travis’s breath misted in the cold. When he opened his eyes, he saw a transparent form slowly taking shape a few feet away from where he sat. The ghost of a woman in her late seventies grew more distinct. With her short-cropped gray hair and tailored pantsuit, Hazel looked much like the framed photograph near the room’s entrance.

  “You knew that something strange was behind the Bad Times, didn’t you?” Travis asked out loud after realizing he was alone with the ghost.

  Hazel nodded.

  It didn’t surprise Travis that Hazel had remained to stand watch over her precious archive, safeguarding it so that the information she compiled might prevent another cataclysm.

  “Do you know where the power is the strongest?”

  Near the mines. Hazel’s voice sounded far away. Go to the mines.

  Travis knew there had been mining near Cooper City, but those had been shut down long ago, perhaps even before Hazel’s time. Locating old maps rose to the top of his to-do list. “I think there’s a cycle that repeats every fifty years or so, and it’s started again. My friends and I want to stop it—or at least, contain the damage.”

  It always ends in fire.

  “Did you realize there was a cycle?”

  Again, the ghost nodded. Always, mines and fire.

  “Did you find a way to stop it?” The more Travis learned, the greater his desperation to find a way to prevent a catastrophe—and the stronger his fear grew that he might not be able to do so.

  Can’t stop it, but can starve the fuel. Hazel’s appearance had grown less solid-looking, and her voice weakened. Travis knew that even a spirit with Hazel’s will and purpose could only maintain contact for a short period.

  “Thank you, for what you put together,” Travis told the ghost. “We’ll do our best not to let you down.”

  Hazel looked pleased as her image faded and she vanished.

  “Shit,” Travis muttered, turning his attention back to the stack of books in front of him. “How do you unplug the apocalypse?”

  As he read Hazel’s journals, Travis made notes of dates and key events, as well as the names of local people at the forefront of the disaster response efforts. Checking the binders and microfiche gave him additional information, although the most helpful resources were the first-hand accounts Hazel documented on recordings that were later transcribed. By the time Connie came to collect him because the archive was about to close, he had read enough of the transcripts to confirm that the current chaos was history repeating itself.

  “You’ve skipped lunch, and you’re late for dinner,” Connie chided. “I hope you found what you were looking for.”

  “Hazel really was a spitfire,” Travis replied admiringly. “She must have been a very special lady.”

  “She’s always been my hero,” Connie confided. “I mean, there she was, widowed and losing her son, at a time when women were just starting to get a chance to do real jobs, and she set out to do something and did it. I wish I could have met her.”

  “Did her interest in local history go back farther than the Bad Times?” If Helen had figured out that something supernatural lay behind the catastrophes and feared it would happen again, perhaps she had documented the previous cycle.

  “Now that you mention it, she did,” Connie replied. “There were tales about another period like the Bad Times that happened a long time ago, and Hazel reached out to the old-timers around here to get their stories and try to find diaries and newspapers from those years. She was working on that project when she died, so I’m not sure she ever finished her research, but what exists is in the archive.”

  “I have a favor to ask,” Travis said, mentally crossing his fingers for luck. “The research Hazel compiled—might I be able to borrow it overnight? I’d even leave you my driver’s license as collateral if you want. And I promise to have it back first thing in the morning.”

  Connie cleared her throat. “If you were just some yahoo who walked in off the street, the answer would be ‘no.’ But seeing how both Father Ryan and Doug Conroy speak so highly of you—and you went to Duquesne, like my cousin Vincent—I can let you sign it out. And I don’t even need to keep your license, because Doug will track you down like a dog if you make off with it.” She said that last bit with a laugh, but Travis didn’t doubt her protectiveness over Hazel’s legacy.

  “Thank you,” Travis said. “You really do have a marvelous collection.” Hazel’s single-minded focus—obsession—with preserving the region’s history was one more reason he felt certain that her real reason aligned with his interest and the desire to save Cooper City from the fifty-year cycle of horrors.

  “Out of curiosity,” he asked as he stood in the hallway while Connie locked up, “where is Hazel buried?”

  “Rolling Meadows Cemetery,” Connie replied. “Over on the Milesburg side of town. But she really just has a headstone there. Her will demanded that she be cremated, even though that wasn’t real common around here back then. So her ashes are in an urn in the archive, and we have her wedding ring and her favorite necklace in a display case with them.”

  That explained how Hazel was able to manifest so strongly, Travis thought and found his admiration rising for what she had accomplished. And since she believed in the appearance of supernatural creatures, she might have also wanted to guard her remains from ghouls. If she suspected a supernatural cause for the Bad Times, was putting her ashes and sentimental jewelry in the archive a way to add her ghost to the resources available to a future champion? At this point, Travis wasn’t going to rule out that possibility.

  He drove back to the small motel on the outskirts of town where he and Brent had taken rooms. It was the old “motor inn” style, a one-floor stretch of rooms with doors opening to the outside and parking spaces right in front. The owners had embraced the retro vibe in their vintage neon sign and the nostalgic metal chairs that sat beneath each window.

  Travis juggled the take-out containers as he knocked on the door to Brent’s room. Part of their deal had been that Travis would pick up dinner on his way back, while Brent researched online.

  “Finally! I thought I was going to gnaw off an arm.” Brent rose to help carry in the containers from the diner. He cleared away an empty pizza box from the end table. “Lunch feels like it was forever ago. I’m starving.”

  Travis set out their food while Brent moved his computer onto the bed while they ate. Turkey, stuffing, and mashed potatoes for him, lasagna and garlic bread for Brent, and large soft drinks for both of them. The food was as good as it smelled, and the two men dug in, leaving conversation until they had finished.

  When they both pushed back from the table, Brent took a final slurp of his soda. “I spent the day going through mythology, bestiaries, and lore sites, looking for a match for creatures that abduct their prey. And I think the Silverado killer might be a spriggan.”

  “Cornish fey
?” Travis asked, frowning.

  Brent nodded. “A lot of the people who settled in this area were from Cornwall and many of the rest from Wales. Both areas have tales about that sort of creature.”

  “Can’t say that I’ve heard of one that could drive a truck.”

  “I think the spriggan might be capable of some kind of projection to hide its true form, and that the creature was able to influence someone it used to do its dirty work—like drive,” Brent said.

  “I’m betting on the latter,” Travis said, thinking as he spoke. “The truck is real. It showed up on video. Although if the spriggan could create hallucinations, that would explain why no one could recall the license plate or got a look at the driver.”

  Brent nodded. “The driver was probably its first victim. But if it’s fey, then we know iron and salt will hurt it. We just have to find the damn thing.”

  “Hazel said to look to the mines.”

  “Who’s Hazel?”

  Travis told Brent about the archive and Hazel’s ghost. “I was planning to spend the evening reading her research—we might find out more about the kinds of creatures the genius loci juices up.” He paused. “Oh—if you can find a map of where all the old mines are, that could be a big help.”

  “Sounds good. I was going to see what else I could dig up about fighting the fey, and make a list of supplies,” Brent said. “And I picked up a couple of cartons of Yuengling. Help yourself.”

  Since his room was next door and Travis didn’t plan to drive anywhere, he went to grab them each a bottle, then helped clean up the dinner trash. He settled into the worn armchair in the corner, while Brent returned his laptop to the table and hunkered down. The longer Travis was in the old motel, the more aware he became of the vestiges of spirits who had breathed their last in the area. He went to the window and drew back the black-out drapes to look out at the parking lot.