"Welcome to Tammond Dale, Pop: 462" The sign again, windswept and weathered, blankly regurgitating its banal knowledge of the lost ruins mere yards ahead. Were those shallow depressions on either side of the supports, and the badly mangled beam dangling broken over a sharp rock, some sign of his previous passage? Maybe the wind strove to erase that evidence, and being here at all was a tremendous risk. When Kyle closed his eyes, spinning vertigo and visions of bursting organs blasted them open again. If anything, that was his best answer to brave the mere menace of wind and blistering cold: anything but the visions.
At just that moment, the wind picked up in strength, hitting him like a clenched fist, sending his cap whipping into the distance and his coat flapping loudly under the uneven assault. Maybe I spoke too soon. Kyle found himself barely able to stand, driven low by brutal currents skating along the open plain he'd covered while crossing the valley. The very air carried a momentum unyielding and vicious, his ears stung as if torn by thorns and brambles; he had to hide somewhere, or find his hat—maybe both.
But the depressions in the snow traveled toward a leaning brick wall not too far away, and though Kyle gazed forlorn into the distance where his hat sailed possibly miles beyond, the gusts were a more immediate concern. Even a city-boy knew the word "frostbite," and though uncertain exactly what that was, he didn't want to find out. He followed the shallow footprints and hid behind the one intact wall that stood more than three feet high, cowering in its incomplete sanctuary. Better than a swim in the nearest volcano.
He could hear his mom now: "If you start to feel warm, you've got hypothermia. You'll think you're hot, and want to strip down to your skivvies. Well, don't. You'll definitely die, then." There was a comforting thought: feeling warm meant death. No, he was definitely cold, wrapped in a thick down jacket, two shirts, a sweater, long-johns and robust jeans capped with steel-toe lumberjack boots. He'd growl in the wind, cover his ears with his gloved hands, and shiver like a newborn calf, but he'd survive.
An especially merciless gust howled like a banshee through the ruins, and Kyle braced himself behind his makeshift shelter, hands digging into the uneven mix of fallen bricks and snow. A silver sheet of snow crested over the wall, arcing like a frozen bubble over him, so brilliant and solid it whipped and undulated like untethered exotic silk. Kyle longed to touch it, let it slip weightlessly through his fingers. He shook his head and blinked hard; that was sleep talking! It was definitely a solid crest of snow arcing over the wall, but it wasn't silk, and he couldn't hold it. God, I'm losing it!
It died down eventually, and Kyle found his hands buried several inches below the abused crust of snow to his sides, his left hand lashed to half a brick, and his right to something wider. Intrigued, he curled the fingers of his right hand tighter, digging them deeper into the packed snow until his middle finger probed an opposite edge; definitely thinner than a brick, and wide. He knifed the rest of his hand behind that seeking finger, and wedged the whole hand beneath something flat and yielding. He twisted his body slightly, bringing his left hand around to the same area, pushing it into the cold snow just to the left of his right hand, feeling for the same edge, stopping only when his thumb and index finger were separated by a hard shape.
And then he leaned back and pulled, sending his body and considerable leverage into the bargain. A groan of icy protest seeped from somewhere below the surface. That thin support of ice never stood a chance to over one hundred pounds of teenager, and it gave way, sending Kyle crashing onto his left shoulder, holding an object rectangular and battered. Kyle had his prize: a tattered hulk of leather and weathered paper about an inch thick, six inches wide, and nine inches long. A book, or diary, or journal, from library, store, or kitchen. With all the surrounding brick, it was hard to tell, but to Kyle, a cookbook was the most likely answer: something small near a stove or chimney, now fallen off a mantel, weathering over the decades.
Still, Kyle opened it. Maybe he'd chance upon a recipe for rabbit chili, and he could set traps for snow hare, and survive in this scoured wasteland, away from Tammond Dale and its unlikely escape from time. No luck, it was solidly frozen. He banged the spine against the brick edifice behind him, knocking several chunks of ice loose, some of which slid wetly down the cover, revealing a cheap monogram scorched into the leather by an engraving iron meant for wood. "Sam Z.," said the black, deeply-etched mark.
Sam Z? Maybe Zerbinski? Did Zerb keep a journal? Could Zerb keep a journal? The guy was barely capable of walking upright and held terrible grades in school, so Kyle found it impossible to imagine that hulking mass of raw meat, capable of reflecting on life's subtle moments. He slapped the book against the gritty bricks repeatedly, each time trying to crack the spine and open the paste-like mass to a page, any page. Who knew how many years that book weathered in rain and sun, turned into a roughshod block of paper mache, some weird prop to complement this staged wreckage.
When it split, Kyle wasn't expecting the instant release and accidentally tore the book in two pieces, his left hand holding about a third of the pages, with most of the unglued spine dangling from its top edge. Oops. But luckily, though the pages melded and formed a chemical soup reminiscent of presswood, at least two pages still held words, though spotty and mostly indecipherable. Really, only one paragraph meant anything, and it was half faded, bled to death by water-damage.
"... diary ... weird. I dun writ ma ... go'on 'gain. Pa says I spends too much time wit' the forest folk, but ... crazy. Redcaps, Satyr, an' Leprechauns ain't real, but ma words is. Past week, t'sall the same. Gonna track 't, if I can. Heaven ... can."
Kyle shuddered without feeling cold, warmed by the sense of dread that spilled into him, making him hot with fear, ready to fight some invisible enemy or perhaps bolt wildly into the distant speckled haze to retrieve his knit cap, and lose himself in the blizzard. He must have read it ten times. Twenty. Each drove a smoldering spike of apprehension into his normally carefree soul. Sam knew, maybe decades ago, but he knew! Now he's like all the rest. How could he be any different than good 'ol Sam, with a brother in New York, if such a sibling existed at all.
Kyle gripped the half of diary that held the broken, stunted words, discarding the rest, and leaned tightly into the wall, curling into a fetal position while the wind howled and moaned desolately though crevices and leaning edifices spread across the dispersed teetering heaps dotting the remains of Old Town. It churned currents of air like an organ, pipes and tunnels bemoaning sins and lauding saints from low, rumbling bass that sickened Kyle's stomach, to ear-splitting whistles that sang like the smallest hummingbird, piercing through his desperate isolation like an icepick through the temple.
No escape, damned fool, taunted the whistling melody.
Maybe not. But he could wait. The storm would blow itself asunder soon enough, if he could persevere through the roaring fury, after the churning tempest became but a feeble whimper, then he'd be free. Safe to walk home with his prize: the ice-crusted mass of pulpy fibers holding fragments of a single paragraph that proved the entire town and its questionable history were forfeit. Kyle could then throw it atop Arin's diary, the other book he'd brought home some previous day, the same day, when he explored with Jason Manny, or nobody at all.
The tumultuous confusion made Kyle incapable of keeping anything straight. But he had new evidence, and his own journal, which he wrote in even now. It was his last bastion, the single solid refuge so far untainted by Rue and his devious machinations. He'd document this, tell a story to himself, and he'd never have to come here again. There were other matters to attend to, and repeatedly visiting any place just wasted time.
Groveling behind a dangerously weak wall, he wrote and outlined. He'd had his vision, and now he'd follow its insight. What other choice was there?