By Al Bruno III
March 28th: Just to bring you up to speed, Sara’s parents have stayed away from the pawn shop but continue to blow up her phone. Meanwhile I continue to plan our little Delaware caper. Caper might be a little dramatic but trust me, if I was going to do what I had to do, it was going to be a full-on Ocean's Eleven situation. Just with a lot fewer beautiful people.
And I'd be robbing a trailer park instead of a casino. Specifically, a trailer park where a guy calling himself Rhett Vane—which is about as fake a name as Nathaniel Blades on my fake ID—was keeping a mystical tome that occasionally regrew its own pages.
I'd already tasked Cousin Roy with performing a little reconnaissance of Bayard Estates in Bridgeville, Delaware. It should be noted that Manufactured Home Parks get a bad rap; many are carefully curated and managed and serve the many Americans aging into or out of home ownership.
Bayard Estates, unfortunately, was not one of those places. It had a bad reputation of being a nest of criminals and crazies which means that by tomorrow the residents will probably have made Cousin Roy their king.
As for Sara and me, things had gotten pretty intense. There had been, as Robert Plant once put it, "A Whole Lotta Love." We even took a day trip to Lake George, a place I hadn't visited since that awful day in 2009 with Osrick Langhorne and The House That Dripped Clichés.
But we're not going to talk about that.
We're going to talk about Sara and me playing classic arcade games (where we kissed), wandering through a wonderfully creepy wax museum built inside an actual old house (where we smooched), taking a horse-and-buggy ride (where we canoodled), and finishing the day aboard a steamboat cruise (where we were politely—but firmly—asked to knock it off).
And now? Right now? I'm doing some classic Night Blogger-style Internet research while Sara happily mans the cash register and takes calls. She told me she'd never been happier with a job. She loved the normalcy of it. The biggest emergency she'd handled all week was a customer trying to convince her that a chipped Elvis cookie jar was an antique.
Oh, and speaking of antiques... Mrs. Vincenzo.
No, I'm not saying she's an antique, so don't email her and tell her I said that. Anyway, Mrs. Vincenzo's off on another antiquing excursion. That's the deal: she gets a few days to go to Vermont, then I get a few days to go to Delaware.
And with any luck, we're both going to come home with something old and valuable.
But one thing happened today that I did not expect. An email from Bunny Joe.
Let me tell you about Bunny Joe. He used to be a member of the FEAR AND TRUTH message board, but he eventually got kicked out because no matter what conversation he joined, he always dragged it hopelessly off topic. We'd be discussing UFO sightings in the Hudson Valley and he'd suddenly start explaining how kaiju were race memories. We'd be talking about the Salem Witch Trials and before long he had everyone arguing that the popularity of the erotic thriller genre could be used to map the American recession. Then came the day he somehow managed to bring Holocaust denial into a discussion about Bigfoot skepticism.
And he was out.
When I got the email—with its attached WAV file—I deleted it on general principle. Then I immediately felt guilty and recovered it. Bunny Joe explained that he'd been researching a correlation between numbers stations and serial killers when he stumbled across the following transmission. He insisted it was imperative that I give it a listen.
The file was called ‘MLDWCH040210’.
So once again, he'd managed to drag me off topic.
The voice on the recording belonged to a woman. Smoky and deep, like a jazz singer coming into her prime, but flattened by the narrow bandwidth of an old AM radio. Static kept washing over her words until it sounded less like she was speaking into a microphone than trying to talk through a thunderstorm…
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Transcript of audio file MLDWCH040210
...this is Sweet Jane and I will be talking to you from nightrise to dayfall, because this is Muldwych After Dark.
Tonight we will forgo our standard, never-ending, and slightly compulsive discussion of our little town's lost dreams and found nightmares. Tomorrow, I promise, we shall return to the notebook discovered in the scrapyard, and to the many possible reasons why our late Police Chief Clarence Marlow donated his entire body—save for his skull—to medical science. Those matters remain important. They will still be waiting for us in the morning.
But tonight we have a story.
A story about Him.
He does not live in our fair, five-sided town of Muldwych Corners, but I consider him both a kindred spirit and a lost soul. He is a stalker of mysteries, a martyr for the ordinary world, and a blogger of the night. The tales of His tragedies, His triumphs, and His complete misunderstanding of the linked cosmos-atoms that comprise the immediate super-cosmos of curves, angles, material organization, semi-material organization, and those electronic arrangements that politely decline to become either, make for good reading.
And this is, as I promised, a story about Him.
His story begins in New York's Hudson Valley, in the forests bordering the Croton Falls Reservoir. Strange lights are often reported there. In popular parlance they are called Unidentified Flying Objects. But if you cannot identify them, how can you be certain they are truly flying? Or that they are objects at all? Reality, and indeed spatial organization, are—as you already know—subjective.
It is a regular occurrence for UFO enthusiasts to prowl the forests around the Croton Falls Reservoir, but He is the only person there on this particular night. He has heard disturbing stories, far more disturbing than usual. There were reports of a loud yet curiously muffled whup-whup-whup sound, of a wind pressing down from above that pressed the trees earthward and sent the hitherto unseen local wildlife scattering. They say that even the Lesser Zoogs are left unsettled.
A lucky few left the forest with a handful of blurry photographs or a few minutes of jittery video. One particularly desperate soul emerged clutching a deeply unnerving keychain. Most, however, left with nothing more than the certainty that their most deeply held beliefs were true—and ran screaming because of it.
One UFO enthusiast never left the forest at all. At least not entirely. What they recovered of him fit into a fairly small bucket.
That is precisely the sort of mystery He could not resist. Such is the burden of being a self-appointed seeker of truth in a straw fedora.
But now let us pause in our story and go to the weather.
Tomorrow's forecast calls for a high of sixty degrees, possible rainfall, and probable spiders. Dress accordingly.
Now then... where were we?
Ah yes. Him.
The UFOs have been glimpsed at every hour of the day, but He enters the treeline at dusk. He has long been a creature of the sunset. He seeks them out because He carries one in His heart.
This is His fifth visit to the forest at the edge of the Croton Falls Reservoir. He wanders more than He searches, as we all do in our own way. He taps notes into His iPhone, describing the cool air and the glittering stars. He struggles to find something poetic to say and fails. Instead, He writes something wry and cynical. That always comes easily to Him.
He does not think aliens are the cause of all this. He does not believe in aliens at all. It remains uncertain whether the aliens believe in Him.
His suspicion is that things wished for with sufficient fervor become real. Some people call them tulpas. Others call them hallucinations. The wise avoid naming them altogether.
Somewhere nearby an owl hoots and a rodent squeals - another battle in the unending war. The sound makes His skin crawl, especially since He already feels like He is being watched from afar, like some other voice has begun narrating His life. Will He ever learn that the only author of our existence is soulless chaos? I like to think I will be the one to tell Him should He ever find his way to our pleasant little town.
As far as He is concerned, the only explanation for the mad wind, the bending trees, the scurrying wildlife, and the heavy whup-whup-whup sound is black helicopters. If you asked Him why He thought such a thing, He would show you a photograph of the dismembered UFO enthusiast and remark, "Why do you think they call them choppers?"
How quaint. Black helicopters are so 1990s. As we all learned on the recent PBS documentary Secret government conspiracies do not bother with aircraft anymore, not when they can get everything done with a stroke of a keyboard and a blast of microwaves.
And speaking of microwaves, today's installment of Muldwych After Dark is brought to you by Hubbard Brand Aluminum Foil. Settle for less and you might lose your mind!
Now back to our story about Him.
Clouds, those earliest adopters of recycling, have begun to creep in from the west and He is pacing. The urge to go home is strong but He is afraid He will miss something if He leaves now, but in the end we all miss something; every day we miss a million somethings, we glimpse people and places we will never fathom. We overhear conversations that were never meant for us. We walk away just before miracles or disasters begin. Here in Muldwych Corners we find that state of confusion to be a delightful thing. Something to be savored like raspberries on the tongue.
At three AM, that most desolate hour of the night, He hears a whup-whup-whup sound approaching from the east. He moves towards it, pushing against the sudden roaring wind. The trees bend, the leaves flutter and tear free of their branches. He hears a panicked Lesser Zoog hiss and scamper away. He does not see it. People rarely do. With each step closer His straw fedora threatens to go flying from his head and He has to use His free hand to keep it in place. His free hand is almost always His left one. It spends a remarkable amount of time holding that fedora in place.
The louder and closer the whup-whup-whup sound gets the more He comes to understand that the sound is not really like a chopper at all. The wind that whips around him is thick like the breath of reptiles. The urge to run screams up from His hypothalamus but He ignores it, as He usually does. He and his hypothalamus have rarely aligned.
He has to see.
He has to see.
He has to know.
No matter the cost. And He knows better than most that the cost can be terrible.
We interrupt this story about Him to bring you this important announcement.
It has come to our attention that sources close to Muldwych Corners mayor Timothy Knight report that he will soon come to a decision about installing a display of the Ten Commandments at the county courthouse. While most of the residents of Muldwych Corners support the idea of a giant granite display of religious principles being erected in a municipal government building there has been a long and frequently violent debate about which religious principles it could be. No matter what the final decision is, local Atheists and adherents to the Code of Hammurabi plan to protest.
With that bit of business done we will return to the story about Him.
He is standing still now, frozen in place. Four lights wink into existence. They grow larger. Wider and wider. The whup-whup-whup has become a thick, droning buzz. He raises His iPhone, unsure if the fusion of first world technology and third world labor will be enough to capture the image of what He sees.
What does He see? The silhouette of an impossible wasp, larger than His car and smaller than the helicopter He had expected. The outline is dark and jagged. It hovers in place. The cold phosphorescence of its quartet of eyes reveals a swollen, savagely hooked proboscis.
Now He sees.
Now He knows.
And it, this creature that is not a chopper, this wasp that is too large to be a wasp, sees Him as well. An edge of hunger has crept into the droning of its wings. Those wings that move too fast to be seen but are undeniable in their force, the force that drives Him to His knees and sends His straw fedora fluttering away.
There is no doubt in His mind that He is doomed, that at any moment He will be swallowed up and all but His least desirable morsels spit back into the forest.
All He wants is one picture, an image his smartphone will automatically upload to the Internet. He wants the residents of the ordinary world to see the truth as He sees it. It is the only legacy He has ever wanted.
He lets the lights get closer and closer still.
The creature’s proboscis quivers in anticipation.
He snaps the photograph.
The flash of his smartphone's LED lights up the forest at the edge of the Croton Falls Reservoir.
The wind stops, the quartet of eyes flicker and go out. The droning roar becomes a whup-whup-whup sound that grows further and further away until it is lost to a single, whispering splash.
It will take Him a few minutes to catch his breath and half an hour to find His hat. In an hour he will realize His picture never came out.
But in this moment He is overwhelmed with the ecstasy of insight.
Was it the flash of the smartphone that frightened the creature away?
Was it some electromagnetic pulse beyond the range of human hearing?
Was it irony?
Was it luck?
Or had the creature merely seen enough of Him?
This concludes our story about Him and tonight’s installment of Muldwych After Dark. As the dayfall begins we will close out the show with a rare bootleg recording of the Captain and Tennille covering Joy Division’s classic tune ‘Love Will Tear Us Apart’.
Good morning Muldwych, good morning…
###
...I had to sit back and think for a long time about what I'd just heard. Sara needed a price check and had to call my name three times before I even realized it. Still dazed, I wandered over, did the price check, and that's how some lucky schlub got a flat-screen TV for sixty bucks.
Sara didn't stop the sale because she was too busy watching me. After the customer left, she told me I looked pale. She thought I was getting sick. I shrugged it off and blamed it on working too hard.
Instead, Sara decided to close the shop early, leave the electronics downstairs, and take me upstairs.
The rest of the night was blissfully, stubbornly in the moment. A snapshot of something better—the kind of life I wanted for the rest of my days.
We slept in each other’s arms until I woke up at 3 a.m. It wasn't my bladder; it was that the itching in the back of my brain was back again. I thought of Sweet Jane’s voice;
“He has to see.
He has to see.
He has to know.
No matter the cost.”
I stared at the ceiling for a little while longer before getting up to make this post.
I don't share every part of my life here. There are false leads that don't pan out, periods when I spent more time playing Madden NFL 12 than trying to figure out what the Hell a Zoog is.
So now I can tell you that yes, indeed, I was deep in the woods surrounding the Croton Falls Reservoir on the night of April 2, 2010. Back then, I would have told you I was there because I wanted to disprove all the online chatter about UFOs—chatter whipped into a frenzy by a death that had begun to reek of a cover-up.
Now, though, I sometimes wonder if I was really looking for a way to get myself killed. I wasn't in the best place back then. When you've lost your family and your dreams, Internet fame isn't worth a jug of warm spit.
I did write the whole strange story up, but I never posted it. I just deleted the file, afraid you, dear readers, might think I'd spent the night smoking weed and watching Ray Harryhausen movies.
Obviously our relationship is better now.
But here's the important thing: I was alone, and I never told anyone—before or afterward—where I was going. Not you. Not Mrs. Vincenzo. Not my new friends from the FEAR AND TRUTH message board. Not my parole officer. And certainly not some obscure radio personality from who knows where.
Item: The station that broadcasts Muldwych After Dark has no call sign, and there is no town named Muldwych Corners on any map. The program ordinarily covers local news and politics, traffic, weather, upcoming festivals, and community events. Broadcasts are frequently interrupted by philosophical digressions, sponsor messages, and ruminations on the unending chain of linked cosmos-atoms which makes up the immediate super-cosmos of curves, angles, and material and semi-material electronic organization.
There. See? I can do it too.
But anyway, I guess Sweet Jane figured my adventures would be good for sweeps week.
Item: The recording ended before the music started to play and now the thought of Toni Tennile singing the lyric ‘…There’s a taste in my mouth as desperation takes hold’ is haunting my dreams.
Item: There have been no further sightings of that insect-like creature. I am pretty sure, or maybe just hope, it has retreated to wherever it was hiding beneath the reservoir.
I wish I had more answers. I wish I knew how Muldwych After Dark saw into my life, into my very thoughts. I almost wish I'd never pressed play.
Most of all, I wish I knew what was waiting for us once we got to Delaware.
But all I can say now is good night, Sweet Jane. Wherever you are... good night.
