lux aeterna

Rule of nines.

My name is Darren Wells. When I was fourteen years old, I was put on a drug called vesperol. I remained on this antidepressant until I was twenty-seven years old. Thirteen years of my life were spent within a chemical haze that smoothed everything I knew into a gray existence. I lived in a world where sadness and depression couldn't reach me, but neither could much of anything else.

On my twenty seventh birthday, I decided to stop taking this medication, for no reason other than just to find out what it felt like on the other side. I had not told my doctor, my family, my girlfriend, or any of my friends what I was doing. If I had known what life had in store for me over the next several months, I likely would have reconsidered such a decision.

For almost two weeks I didn't feel any difference at all. I began to wonder if the medication had altered my brain chemistry in such a way that the effects were permanent. I'm not sure why I had expected to experience such profound changes so quickly. Despite this, I really saw no reason to continue taking the medication either. I had no withdrawal symptoms to speak of, and my body seemed indifferent to its absence.

Even with the best of insurance I could acquire through my job, it was still costing me over one hundred and fifty dollars a month from the pharmacy. Over the past six years, I'd spent nearly$10,000 on something I'd only now considered if I actually needed. On the third week, I was sitting in my girlfriend's apartment watching TV when a car insurance commercial came on.

It was supposed to be a comedic ad depicting a quirky father trying to teach his teenage daughter how to drive a manual transmission. The father winced and uttered some quip as his daughter grinded the gears of some unbranded vehicle at an intersection. In the end she figures it out and they share a small moment of pride before the commercial wipes away to the logo of the company.

I had not even noticed I was crying until Liz asked me what was wrong. The emotion and physical act were so foreign to me that they had not even registered in my conscious mind. I didn't have an answer for why a thirty second advertisement I had seen several times before had me in tears. Nothing about the commercial was even remotely relatable. It seems obvious now, but I really didn't put it together until later that night that it was the absence of the vesperal.

Afterwards I felt like I owed it to Liz to tell her what I was doing. She had always been very pragmatic, and I had expected her to say that I should consult my doctor before taking such drastic action. But she surprised me when she said she supported my decision and thought it was a very brave thing to attempt. Over the next two months, my emotions began to return to me in fragments.

I distinctly remember seeing a dog on my way to work one morning, and feeling an overwhelming sense of joy for an animal I had otherwise been completely indifferent to, just months ago. I had a new urge to be outside as much as possible. Every day after work I would sit on the roof of my apartment building, taking in the last of the evening sun, watching people walk by on the sidewalk.

On the same days I might also feel irrationally angry. I once became internally irate at a fellow co worker who spoke out of turn in a client meeting. I was thankfully self aware enough to understand that what was returning to me was not just happiness, but a full spectrum of emotions. It was something that I would have to learn to live with, if I wanted to continue living my life instead of watching it through a window.

About two months later I received an unexpected phone call from an attorney, informing me that my mother had transferred the ownership of her house to my name, It was the same small two bedroom home in Denora, Pennsylvania I had spent the first fourteen years of my life. The attorney explained that shortly before her sentencing, my mother had signed over the deed and This had the effect of pulling me into something that I'd been actively trying to avoid.

The year prior, I had become vaguely aware that my mother had been accused of killing a couple in Denora, but I had consciously avoided seeking out any details regarding the case. I had been making headlines in state and local news for several months, but I had not found it difficult to avoid. Since I have a different last name than my mother, I never had anyone asking me questions about it either.

Just before my fifteenth birthday, I left Denora to go live with my aunt in Pittsburgh after my mother's behavior became more and more erratic. My mother had always been eccentric in ways that I'd accepted as normal for many years growing up. But in the final months before I left, things had become so out of hand that my aunt had to step in. She had been trying to get custody of me for many years, and my mother's behavior finally gave her the legal standing to do so.

My father had been in and out of my life many times growing up. For a few months he would live at the house and then disappear for a year or more sometimes. A few times I came home from school and he would just be sitting at the kitchen table as if he never left. In my last year in Denora, my father had lived at the house for a full twelve months. It was the longest dint he'd ever spent in our home, and it was the only time I can ever remember feeling like a family.

I had begun to believe that whatever cycle governed his comings and goings may have finally ended. This ceased to be one night when my father came home late from work. He found my mother standing in the doorway, where she announced to both of us that an angel had appeared before her in physical form that afternoon. She told us that she had sex with him. She described him as angelic, well built, with dark hair that reached his shoulders.

She seemed proud of her actions. She showed no sign of shame or regret and beamed like she had been rightfully chosen. I don't think that either my father or I believed for one second that an angel had visited our home that afternoon. But with the conviction and brazenness with which my mother spoke, my father had clearly been convinced that she had an affair of some fashion. He left that night without saying another word to me. I have not seen him since.

In the weeks that followed, my mother continued to speak about the angel as though he might return at any moment. Whatever had happened that afternoon had fundamentally altered her psyche. She would tell anyone who would listen that she had lain with an angel, She made sure that the neighbors and all her co workers at the grocery store knew, but it was the church where she found her most captive audience.

Nearly every Sunday she would find someone new in the fellowship hall and recount her visitation with the same breathless certainty. The congregation seemed to tolerate it for what it was, but even at fourteen I could sense their patience thinning. The problem was that my mother often mistook their silence or deference as validation of her experience. But I caught all the sidelong glances and hushed exchanges that died when she approached.

Everything moved fast the day I came home from school to find my aunt's car in the driveway. She was sitting at the kitchen table with a police officer and a woman I only later learned was from Child Services. They made me sit down and told me that my mother had been arrested that afternoon for possession of methamphetamines and assault. They explained that she had attacked a woman she worked with at the grocery store, but didn't provide any further details.

I was informed I would be staying with my aunt in Pittsburgh for a while, until my mother's situation was sorted out. Within a couple of hours I had a bag packed and was leaving my house in Denora for the last time until it would become mine. This is why, thirteen years later, when I heard that my mother may have killed two people in Tenora, I was not necessarily surprised.

I had no urge to learn the details because it felt like a connection that only existed in another life that I'd since moved on from. I told Liz about it the day I found out. I had no idea whether she looked up the details of the case herself, but she was kind enough not to discuss them with me. The attorney had explained that the home had been neglected for some time and that all the deferred maintenance had taken its toll.

He suggested that some fixing up before any attempt to sell it would do it good for its price in a housing market like Denora. Had I still been taking the vesperal, I likely would have instructed the attorney to sell the home immediately. I would have told him to get what he could for it and just wash my hands of the situation entirely.

But now I was finding myself strangely reconnected to the boy who had grown up in that house. The child that had existed in my memory only as a collection of facts I knew to be true of myself. I sat down with Liz the following day and outlined my plan to live out of my old home at Denora while I tried to fix it up.

I explained how the commute to Pittsburgh would only be about forty five minutes, and how the money I would save on rent and from selling the house would represent a more than reasonable trade off. I realized while making the pitch how desperate I was for her company in Denora. But I also understood the position I was putting her in. She was in her final semester of grad school at the University of Pittsburgh, and I was asking her to abruptly change her life.

She did not reject the idea outright, but she did say she needed time to think on it. Her main concern seemed to center around the fact that I had no experience fixing up a house, and she expressed how much more difficult it likely was than I imagined. Although I had not really considered this, I did not let it stop me. Two weeks later I loaded my car and headed south.

I arrived late in the afternoon to overcast gray skies. It was exactly as I remembered it. Denora is an old coal mining and steel making town with a population of fewer than five thousand. Yet it is one of the most recognizable names in Pennsylvania, due to the infamous smog disaster. In nineteen forty-eight, an atmospheric conversion trapped emissions from zinc works and steel mills, sealing the town under a lid of toxic warm air.

The mixture of hydrogen fluoride and sulfur dioxide choke the streets, making it look like midnight at noon. This thick yellow smog persisted over Denora for five days, before it finally dissipated with the rain on Halloween. During this time, twenty people died from asphyxiation. Of the town's fourteen thousand residents, one third became sick, with an additional fifty passing away from relative illnesses within a month.

US Steel, the company which owned the mills and factories, never acknowledged responsibility for the incident and instead called it an act of God. To this day it is still considered the worst air pollution event in the history of the United States, and was the catalyst for the legal reform around the preservation of clean air. The gray skies that I now remembered so vividly covering Denora, almost daily, seemed to serve as a reminder of what happened there.

When I pulled into the driveway, I had expected to find something abhorrent. The house stood on a slight hill with its back to the thick woods that I remembered traversing as a child. The grass was overgrown with weeds that stood up to my knees in certain places. But when I stepped inside, I found that the interior was okay.

It certainly was not ideal. There were water stains that marked the ceiling in each hallway, and the carpet and a living room had been pulled away from the baseboards in several corners. But the bones seemed sound. It was livable in a way that I'd not allowed myself to hope for. I spent the entire first day making the master bedroom as livable as possible. I pulled all of my bags from my car and began consolidating everything into that single room at the back of the house.

Its only window looked out into the woods which was blocking most of the sunlight in the afternoon. Despite the fact that all of my mother's personal effects remained in the room, I still found it preferable to living in my old bedroom. The next morning I woke up early and began the tedious work of sorting through what remained of my mother's life.

I started in the living room where I found stacks of newspapers that had been piled up against the wall and tall columns that nearly reached my chest. When this became too much, I switched to the kitchen where I found cans and boxes that had been long since expired. I continued this spiral going room to room, hoping to find some manageable way to divide the task. By noon I had filled thirty trash bags and yet barely noticed a difference from where I started.

I'd not even touch my old bedroom or the basement. I estimated I'd remove maybe a tenth or even a fifteenth of what needed to go, and quickly realized I would need to rent some sort of dumpster service. My original plan of simply hauling the individual trash bags of my car to the local dump suddenly seemed incredibly naive.

After a prompt call to a garbage management company in the area and balking at the obscene costs of renting a dumpster, I found myself in my old bedroom, second-guessing my decision to fix the house myself. My bedroom had remained largely untouched since I left in a way that almost felt intentional. I permitted myself a moment to simply look through what was left without the pressing urge to fill another trash bag.

In my closet I found piles of old clothes, school supplies, and boxes filled with random assortments of toys. There were things I'd once judged worthy of bringing back from the woods, such as rocks, sticks, and leaves. I found my old Game Boy Vance sitting in the back corner of the closet. I had a strong urge to turn it on and spent more time than I'd care to admit scouring the closet for its charger.

In pursuit of this elusive cable, I found myself pulling out a large shoebox and opening it, expecting to find more childhood relics. Instead, I found myself staring at a collection of orange prescription bottles. There must have been at least fifteen or twenty, some completely empty and some still half filled.

I had completely forgotten that before the vesperal there had been other medication. My mother would come home from work and say she stopped at the pharmacy and would hand me a bottle, telling me I had to take one every morning or twice a day. For some reason I never questioned this despite really never going to a doctor's appointment. I knew other kids at school who had to stop and take medication in the middle of the day, and I just assumed that this was the way things were.

I started pulling them out one by one and reading the labels. The name that I found on almost all of the bottles was Cerotech XR. I recognized the name of this medication as a particular brand of antipsychotic that my doctor had me on for a brief stint before I went on the antidepressants. I remember it so vividly because of the terrible side effects I experienced. You don't forget something that causes you to throw up in the middle of the night for an entire week.

But while I was inspecting them, I felt something uncanny about the label. It wasn't just the plainness of the bottles or their lack of any kind of CVS or Rite Aid logo. I pulled out my phone and Googled Ceratech XR with a CK on the end, as it was spelled on the bottle. Within a second, Google returned a list of results, and at the top it said, Did you mean Ceratech XR? Spelled with just a C.

I dove back into the box and found every bottle Cerotic. I put them all in their own pile. Each one had the same misspelling with that extra K on the end that shouldn't have been there. I went back on my phone and triple checked that there was no other medication with this spelling, and that the medication itself had never been spelled this way before. Once I was satisfied that there was only one Cerotech and had but the one spelling, I began scrutinizing the bottles more closely.

I could feel my heart begin to race when I found four bottles with the same filled-on date. Each one said June 15th, 2008. I found three more bottles that had matching dates for October 19th, 2009. I sat back on my heels trying to rationalize this discrepancy. No legitimate pharmacy would misspell the name of a medication so consistently. Nor could I ever imagine a pharmacy filling four bottles of this stuff on the same date.

I had been in the local pharmacy in downtown Denura before, and nothing about it seemed illegitimate. my mind went down every possible path trying to justify what lay in piles in front of me. But every path led to the same conclusion. As I sat there, surrounded by evidence of something I could not yet name, the house began to feel very different. My mother, whom I had written off and placed into a mental box as a troubled and unstable person, now appeared to me as something else entirely.

This revelation gave my mental image of her a cunning and calculating aspect that was not there before. It casts an entirely different light on everything I knew of my life before I turned fourteen.

A cathartic endeavor, now felt like it was going to reveal things about myself I could have gone my whole life without knowing. But the box had been opened and what was known could not become unknown. I felt an unfamiliar anger rise in my chest. This quickly twisted into a revulsion of every pill I'd ever swallowed. I had been medicated my entire life and I had never once questioned it.

I thought about the stash of my last remaining vesperl, which I had kept as a backup that was sitting in my car. It suddenly felt like an insult to my existent I marched outside to my car in a fury that consumed and suppressed any rational thought I was capable of in that moment. I dug through the few bags that were still in the Without even bothering to close the trunk, I walked quickly into the backyard and up to the tree line.

With a grunt of pure loathing, I hurled the bottle into the darkness of the trees. I never heard it land, but I pictured it falling into the creek. I imagined the bottle flowing downstream, taking with it everything that had made me less than human these past thirteen years. I stood in the yard staring into the woods for several minutes, letting the adrenaline drain from my body, when another foreign feeling crept into me.

I suddenly had to know the details of my mother's case. Not knowing them made me feel as if I was in mortal danger. I turned back to the house, driven by a need for action. But I didn't feel like I could do what needed to be done inside. I shoved my laptop into my bag and hopped into my car. I drove south towards Belvern, a town that bordered Denora and had the only Starbucks I knew of in the general area. It was the only place that came to mind where I could sit alone with guaranteed Wi Fi.

When I arrived I ordered an iced tea that I had no intention to consume and retreated to a small booth in the back. As I pulled out my laptop and typed in my mother's name into the search bar, Katrina Caldwell, the results populated slowly from the store's internet, and when they did, I quickly opened the first five articles in separate tabs. My mother had been accused and convicted of killing Ed and Wendy Grant, ages 48 and 49, respectively.

The articles that were written after her sentencing described how she pumped sodium fluoride dust into an external air intake of the couple's home over the course of several nights. The autopsy report had concluded that the couple had died of respiratory collapse. The investigators found a hand cranked pesticide duster, with traces of the compound still inside in what was now my basement.

The articles differed slightly on motive, but the core details aligned. At a church fellowship meeting, Wendy Grant had publicly challenged my mother's claim of being visited and bedded by an angel. My mother was retelling her story when Wendy stood up mid-sentence, cutting her off and calling her a liar in front of the entire congregation. According to witness testimony, my mother then became irate.

She accused Wendy of making a pact with the devil. Only one article mentioned that my mother then said her children would take exception to her claims. As my mother's only child, I noted this inconsistency, but attributed it to the confusion caused by multiple testimonies. The article stated that in the weeks that followed, my mother began praying aloud during services for Wendy Grant to die.

She would beg God to strike Wendy down for the lies she was spreading, and to steal the life from her lungs. She did this repeatedly each Sunday until the church finally banned her from attending. Three months later the grants were dead. This left the defense in a desperate situation. They argued that the levels of sodium fluoride found in the Grant's home were absorbed into the slag brick insulation during the nineteen forty eight smog disaster.

They claimed that a geological shift under the property had triggered a sudden release of these stored toxins. They used the term micro inversion to describe this theory. They acknowledged the concern that my mother's prayers and rhetoric in the church may have had for the jury, but they claimed it was not proof that she had killed the grant. The jury deliberated for less than twenty minutes.

As soon as I closed my laptop, I found myself desperately hoping that Liz hadn't read any of these articles. I had thought reading them might provide some insight into what I found at the house, instead I felt a keen sense of embarrassment. Despite the fact that most people who I'd met in the last five to ten years had no idea who my mother was, I now felt strangely connected to these events. I instantly felt exposed sitting in public as if the people around me somehow knew exactly who I was.

I could picture it so clearly, too. I could see my mother crouching in the darkness beside someone's home with a duster pressed into the air intake. I could even see her brazenly walking back through the neighborhood afterward with it still in hand. The saddest part was how easily the image came to me. In that moment, I wanted more than anything to be numb again. I thought about my last remaining vesperal that was sitting in the woods somewhere.

It was then I understood that the medication had not simply been dulling me of my emotions for all these years. In a way I'd been preserving my innocence. It had provided a protective ignorance that kept the blinds shut and allowed me to operate completely indifferent to what was happening outside. For the next several days, I created a routine designed entirely around avoiding anyone and everyone in Denora.

I would wake up each morning and drive forty five minutes to work in Pittsburgh. At night I would always make sure to bring back enough food to ensure I never had to go out. I simply felt that I could not risk running to anyone who might recognize me from my childhood. Each evening I filled more trash bags until the living room had become a storage facility for everything I'd already bagged.

Things hit critical mass when I could barely navigate the path back to the kitchen. I knew I had to call the dumpster company back. Hearing the cost again made me wince, but I simply had no other path forward. I scheduled a drop off for the following Saturday morning. That same afternoon, I received a phone call from Liz informing me that she was going to be joining me at the house that night. She told me that her professor had agreed to let her finish her remaining work remotely.

Despite the overwhelming relief I felt knowing I was no longer going to be alone, I still felt a strong sense of guilt. I was dragging Liz into a situation I had yet to fully explain to her. I spent the rest of that evening attempting to get the house into a less chaotic state. I cursed myself for waiting so long to order the dumpster, knowing that a graveyard of trash bags was the first thing that Liz was going to walk into.

I made sure to gather the prescription bottles back into the shoebox and banish them to the back of the closet again. I told myself that I was going to ask Liz how much she knew of my mother's case. I couldn't expect her to show up to my mother's old house and continue to act like nothing happened. But telling her about the medication felt like a bridge too far at the moment.

Liz arrived around seven that evening with a rolling suitcase filled with some clothes and what she needed for school. She did her best to keep a look on her face like she wasn't surprised by the mountain of trash bags that consumed the entire living room. I gave her a brief walkthrough of the house, which ended with her giving me a similar appraisal to the one I had come to. We both thought that the house was in much better condition than we had originally assumed.

I ordered Chinese for delivery from a place a couple miles from the house. It was something that had always been her favorite, and I was hoping it would ease some of the tension from what I felt like I had to talk about. We sat at the kitchen table which I had cleared for the first time since arriving, and ate in relative silence for several minutes.

I finally gathered the confidence to ask Liz how much she knew of my mother's case. She paused for a moment and then she claimed she didn't know anything about the case. Why had known Liz long enough to know when she was lying? I told her that it was okay, and that I knew as much as her probably, or more than her now. She looked visibly relieved, as if she was unburdened of a secret she'd been carrying for too long.

She quickly admitted that she had looked up the details even before I told her about it. She had seen something in the local newspaper and recognized my mother's name. Her understanding of the case largely aligned with what I now knew from the articles I'd read. She knew all the details regarding the sodium fluoride, the air intake, and the events at the church with Wendy Grant.

But then she did mention something that I'd not come across in my own research. She said that she saw that my mother had claimed to have become pregnant and birthed the children of the angel and I could tell that Liz had expected me to have already been aware of this because when I told her I wasn't, she became visibly upset. I assured her that it was okay, although my mind was already working to justify why this hadn't been mentioned in any of the articles I'd read.

Lyd suggested that it must have been an inaccurate piece of speculation from an unreliable source. This wasn't an idea my mind initially accepted, but I had to accept it eventually at face value. I could see that Liz was becoming more upset with herself for bringing it up. So I quickly changed the subject. I told her that the dumpster would be arriving tomorrow morning and that I could finally get rid of the trash bags in the living room.

I told her that she didn't even need to help me and that she could focus entirely on her schoolwork, and that I'd cleared a space for her to work upstairs in the spare room, and

The rest of the night passed uneventfully, and the following morning I found myself waiting on my front porch for the arrival of the dumpster. It came two hours later than expected, but I knew it was finally arriving when I heard the loud roar of an engine coming from down the street to the room. The driver of the flatbed backed into the driveway little less than accurately, pulling slightly onto the grass before releasing the dumpster.

When he saw me on the front porch and he got out of his truck, he gave me a half wave. He was a man in his late forties with a faded company polo. He walked up the driveway and greeted me as Ron. He didn't say anything about my mother or the house, but I could tell he knew who I was. But his expression was that of pity rather than judgment or contempt. He walked me around the dumpster and pointed to a red line which was painted along the inside wall, about three fourths of the way up.

He explained that if I filled the dumpster past this point, they would have to charge me extra for the wait. He handed me a card and was about to turn away when I noticed he clearly wanted to say something else to me. With great hesitation and without even looking at me, he began to tell me that he used to live next door to the grants.

He mentioned it in a way that made me understand he wasn't looking to accuse me of anything, or make me feel worse than I already did. He seemed like a man who had been carrying something for a while and needed to set it down somewhere. He said he saw them back there more than once, walking around with their rifles. He had uh initially assumed that they had seen wolves or a bear back there, but when he finally asked Ed about it, he told them that they had seen people walking in the woods.

He said it was only ever at night and that it had happened for a few weeks. He said that they'd gotten the cops involved more than once, but that when they took a look in the woods they couldn't find anything. I stood there silently as Ron explained this to me. When he finished, he didn't offer any interpretation of what he had just told me. He did mention he didn't understand why it wasn't talked about in the court case at all, but he clearly didn't want to offer any other opinion on it.

At first, I did not understand why Ron was offering this information to me at all. And then I realized that he'd been hoping that I had some explanation for this strange activity. I nodded slowly but then shook my head. Ron stared at me for a few expectant seconds, but eventually seemed to take this cue. He told me he would be back to get the dumpster in a few days, and he got back into his truck and pulled out of the driveway.

I spent most of the rest of the day dragging trash bags out to the dumpster. Each trip gave me too much time to think about what Ron had told me. I kept picturing the grants out there, at night searching for my mother, or whoever it was they thought they saw back there. It was not lost on me that the woods that lined my backyard were the same ones that the Grants had been searching. Their house was in fact only a few streets down from mine.

Before the sun began to set, I gave in to my urge to take a few steps into the edge of the woods behind my house. I convinced myself I simply wanted to see if it still matched my memory. The tree line began about seventy five feet back from my back porch. When I was a child, I had spent countless hours back there exploring what lay beyond the first row of trees. I remembered it as a vast and endless expanse. It felt like a place where I could walk for miles and still not reach the other side.

When I got beyond the tree line I found it largely unchanged. The same fallen trees and logs laid exactly where I remembered them. Even the smell was the same. But what really struck me was how the woods still felt endless. I'd expected this to have changed as an adult and that my perspective would shrink the area. I knew now that they were houses just a mile on the other side of the woods.

But even as an adult I noted how the trees seemed to get taller and taller the farther back I gazed. I stood there longer than I intended to, trying to visualize the other side instead of the darkness that I could see.

That night I laid in bed beside Liz, unable to fall asleep for more than twenty minutes at a time. My mind kept wandering back to what Ron had told me earlier. But I must have drifted off at some point because I awoke feeling a sudden hunger that demanded action. I slid out of bed carefully as to not wake Liz and made my way down to the kitchen. I pulled out what little I had left of my Chinese dinner from the night before.

In a state of half sleep and half anxiety, I ate as I imagined my mother doing what I had just done, sliding out of the bed in the middle of the night, walking downstairs in the dark, But instead of going to the kitchen, she would have gone to the basement to retrieve the duster. I pictured her slipping out the front door into the darkness of the night. I ate quickly as if she might come back from her nightly evil and find me in her kitchen.

When I finished, I slowly made my way back up the stairs. My night vision was finally returning to me when I got back to my bedroom. I cannot say why I looked, it was not a conscious decision. But instead of getting back into bed immediately, I found my attention drawn to the only window in the bedroom. My breathing ceased immediately as I tried to work out what I was looking at. I felt my body flood with adrenaline.

Standing perfectly still at the edge of the tree line was a figure. It was not moving and was obscured by the darkness of the large oak tree it was standing next to. Every fiber of my being was trying to convince myself what I was looking at was a trick of shadows in the moonlight. But the longer I stared, the more certain I became that what I was seeing was real, and it was staring back at me.

The figure appeared to stand at nearly half the height of the tree beside it, and the tree itself was at least forty feet tall. All of its details were swallowed by darkness, but I could make out the general shape and something vaguely human in proportion. If it was a living thing, I was absolutely certain it was staring directly at me. I felt my feet glued to the floor. Neither of us moved for what felt like a minute. Suddenly I heard my mother's voice behind me. Darren?

My whole body jumped. I expected to see my mother in the doorway, holding the duster, but all I saw was Liz sitting up in bed. She looked distraught at my reaction and asked me what I was doing, but I couldn't speak. By the time I regained control of my body and turned to look out the window, the figure was gone.

I overrode my brain and took control of my feet again. I quickly moved to the window and pressed my face to the glass to peer as deep into the woods as I could, but I could find no movement at all. The only thing staring back at me was the darkness of the tree line. When I finally gave up, I turned around and found Liz still staring bewildered at me. What is it? she asked, but I couldn't even think of a lie.

She urged me back to bed to which I eventually complied. I subtly propped up my pillow, allowing me to stare out the window from my position in bed. I didn't sleep for another minute that night.

I heard Liz coming downstairs around eight the following morning. She found me sitting at the kitchen table where I'd been since the sun came up. I was ruthlessly ruminating over my blurry memory from the previous night. She asked me why I wasn't getting ready for work. I heard myself tell her that I had taken the entire week off. The lie came out so naturally that it startled me.

In reality, I had completely lost what day of the week it was. It could have been Sunday, Monday, or Friday, but my job in Pittsburgh now existed somewhere far away in a life that seemed less important. I could not even bring myself to care enough to call them and tell them I was not showing up. This whole ordeal was a reminder of why I had tried so hard to keep my life in Pittsburgh separate from the one tied to Denora.

I told myself I wasn't going to work because I had to focus on flipping the house as quickly as possible. But in the back of my mind I knew it was something else. I knew the boy in me was being drawn to the darkness my mother had created in this town. Liz sat down across from me and started talking about her coursework, completely oblivious to my inner turmoil. I nodded absently as she spoke, and she must have finally registered this because she stopped mid sentence and asked if I was okay.

I deflected and mentioned I was still going through some side effects coming off the vesperal, which wasn't a complete lie. After a few moments of silence and without really meaning to, I asked her if she really thought my mother killed the Grant. I watched Liz go quiet for a moment as she actually considered it.

I expected her to dodge the question, but instead she said she couldn't be sure. She said she didn't know my mother, but she did offer that her dad once said that the only reason he would ever kill someone was to protect her. I laughed at that and responded, Yeah, but your dad's a good guy. She smiled for a moment that didn't last long. Then she asked me what I thought. I stared at my hands for a while in contemplation, even though I already knew my answer. Yeah, I think she did it.

Later in the afternoon I told Liz I needed some supplies from the store in town. She offered to ride with me, but I insisted that I would be fine on my own. It was an older store that my father used to take me to as a child that doubled as a sort of hunting and hardware store. Frankly, I was surprised it was still open when I drove by on my first day back in Denora.

When I walked in, the same balding man I remembered stood behind the counter. He looked as if he had barely aged and wore the same exact clothes. I wandered the aisles aimlessly at first. I had never actually been in the store with the intention of buying something myself. I passed rows and rows of dusty tool sets and bins of mismatched screws. There were shelves of work gloves that I swore were still in the original packaging from when I was a child.

I found what I was looking for in the back corner of the store. Most of the section was made up of smaller traps for raccoons or possums, and even some small snap traps for rats. But lining the floor in rather plain brown boxes were the bear traps. I got down on one knee, ducking below the shelf above, and started flipping open some of the boxes. I was surprised at how large some of them were. The jaws on the biggest trap could have easily wrapped a man's full leg.

I didn't dare touch one, my mind was fueled with the foolish idea that they would somehow be set right in the box. I hadn't heard any footsteps approaching, but turned around to find a man standing a few feet from me. He had slicked back black hair and checkered vest. He wore no name tag or uniform that would indicate he was an employee, but he asked me what I was looking to trap in a helpful and cheerful tone that suggested he might work there.

I found myself unable to answer immediately while I stood, almost hitting my head on the shelf, Eventually I told him my family had a cabin up in the Laurel Highlands. I said we'd been having trouble with some aggressive bears who were making us feel unsafe. The man nodded slowly. His dark eyes didn't fully match his cheerful face, which seemed to watch me intently. He glanced at the boxes I had been rifling through and nodded approvingly.

Those will certainly do the trick, he said. I took a small step back. His proximity was beginning to feel uncomfortable. I'm not sure what I'm dealing with yet, I managed. Well, I should warn you it's technically illegal to trap bear in these parts. He paused and looked towards the front door as if to check if someone could hear our conversation. and maybe you shouldn't be doing God's work for him. I felt my face flush. I'm sorry?

I'm just saying, he continued, if something's been coming around your property at night, there are proper channels. But I wouldn't tell you what to do if you felt unsafe. I scratched the back of my head for a moment, looking away. How much are they? I asked, gesturing vaguely to the largest trap. The man bent down and read a few price tags on the boxes, clearly not knowing them off hand. He then watched me for a while, not ready to leave until I said something.

I cleared my throat. Okay, I'm gonna take this one. I bent down to pull out the largest box. To my embarrassment I could barely move it. The man quickly offered to help, picking up one side with incredible strength, leaving me with little to do on the other. He helped me carry it all the way to the counter, and after I paid, he even helped me out to my car, where we loaded it into the trunk.

I was opening my car door when the man spoke again. His voice had changed to a lower register from the helpful tone in the store. Make sure you know what you're catching. I turned to look at him, expecting to find some hint of humor in his expression, but his face was completely serious.

All right, was all I could come up with. He didn't wait for anything further. In my car I watched the man. Instead of walking back into the store, I watched him step onto the sidewalk and continue down the street.

When I got back to my neighborhood, I drove past my house and continued to a dead end at the far side of my street. I parked there and sat there for a moment, watching through my rearview mirror to make sure no one else was outside. I popped the trunk and pulled out a blue old tarp and laid it on the ground and getting the trap out of the trunk proved much more difficult without the man's help. I had to drag the box inch by inch until it finally dropped under the tarp with a loud thud,

I grabbed the edges of the tarp and slowly pulled the box into the tree line. For twenty minutes I dragged the tarp through the wooded terrain until I was aligned with my house. I was about eighty feet back from the edge of the woods when I started to open the box. I found myself handling the dark and oiled jaws of the trout with excessive caution. Despite its closed position, I still felt as if it might snare my arm.

I took a brief glance at the instructions, but they proved to be rather straightforward. It was not a job of great intelligence, just one of great consequence. I carefully yanked the jaws open near a large tree until I heard the springs lock into place. I pulled a large chain from the box and looped it around the thick metallic ring positioned on the left side of the trap, and then around the massive trunk of the tree.

It came with a key lock to secure the chain's ends, which I tested twice before slipping the key into my pocket. I figured concealing the trap would be easy, given the forest floor was covered with dead leaves and fallen branches. I spent a few minutes covering it with whatever debris I could find, but when I stepped back, the trap still stood out as the menacing mechanical contraption it was against a natural forest.

But I was tired, so I conceded to myself that it would be much more difficult to see at night. I gathered all the contents of the box and other evidence I had dragged into the woods and headed back to my car and When I returned to the house, I found Liz sitting at the kitchen table, which was cluttered with items I'd never seen before.

She had a look on her face I'd only seen once before, when she told me she had accidentally backed my car into a light post while borrowing it. It was a mixture of guilt and preemptive apology that made her look younger than she was. She started rambling before I could even set my keys down. She told me she just wanted to help me with the house and went on about how the basement hadn't even been touched yet.

I imagined that she had likely been the first person down there since the police had found the duster. Liz continued to tell me she had come across a box of items that contained a notebook. She admitted quickly that she had no right to be flipping through the pages, but she was disturbed by what she had found.

Liz slid the notebook across the table in my direction. It was a simple composition book, the kind with the black and white marbled cover. I took a hesitant look at her before I opened it up. My mother's handwriting filled every inch of the page. The same five words were repeated over and over. I am chosen, I am holy.

These phrases didn't just fill the lines but also spill into the margins, edges, and every available white space. I turned the page and found the same thing on the front and back. I only turned the page once more before I'd seen enough. Liz looked to me for some kind of reaction, but I had nothing to give her.

I imagined my mother not filling these pages over months or years, but instead hours, sitting here until her hand could no longer hold a pen. It was a great contradiction to the image I had been building of her since I had found the box of medication. I pulled myself together, closing the notebook but keeping it in my possession. I told Liz that it was fine and that I appreciated her help. She seemed relieved but also unconvinced by my reaction.

That night I laid in bed, unable to sleep again. I kept turning the notebook over in my mind. I was unable to reconcile the frantic scrawl with the calculating woman who had manufactured fake prescriptions and taken the life of the grants in such cunning manner. Both of these versions of my mother existed simultaneously in my head.

The sound of metal coming together somewhere in the woods woke me in the middle of the night. It took several seconds for my mind to catch up to what was happening and remember where it was. I watched to Liz stir, but she didn't wake. I softly made my way over to the window and peered into the moonlit darkness of the backyard. I held my breath and listened intently, yearning for some creature to cry out, but the night returned nothing but silence.

I waited at the window for ten minutes, listening. I thought surely there could only be one thing that would produce such a noise in the night. I wanted to go out there and investigate immediately, but I knew how foolish that was. I didn't want to risk Liz seeing me walk out there. And surely if there was something in that trap, it would be weaker by the morning. I spent the rest of that night awake with every little sound from outside causing my heart to jump.

When Liz finally woke up around nine, we laid in bed talking for a while. She seemed to be adjusting to the living situation better than I was. She mentioned that she had to take a two-hour online final around ten that morning. I waited around, trying to appear casual until I saw Liz gather her laptop and notes and disappear into the spare room. The moment I heard the door swing shut, I was already pulling on my boots.

I slipped out the back door and crossed the yard quickly without looking back at the house. The morning air was much colder than the usual June mornings of Pennsylvania. I slipped into the woods by a clearing at the edge of my yard where the damp leaves were already soaking my shirt. I quickly found myself disoriented. I had been in those woods hundreds of times before, but my mental note of where I'd set the trap was relative to entering the woods from the dead end of my street.

I was far too afraid of someone seeing me to do the rational thing and enter from where I did the previous day. Instead, I walked deeper and deeper into the woods. Every second that went by made me step more cautiously, fearing I may step into the trap myself if it truly hadn't been set off.

At one point I ended up so deep into the woods I thought surely I had gone too far. But just before turning round I recognized a small rock formation that had stood out to me when I'd been pulling the tarp through the woods. Sure enough, only fifteen feet away was where I was looking for. But the trap was gone. The chain that had secured it to the base of the tree was gone as well. I did a double take, not daring to move as I scanned the area.

It was not until I was standing almost directly on where it had laid that I realized that the ground was soaked with blood, an ungodly amount of it. The dampness of the morning had turned it into a much deeper shade of red. In that moment I should have felt a sense of fear, if not only out of pure survival instinct.

But I must admit I felt satisfaction. It felt like I had taken a chunk out of whatever darkness my mother had left for me to find. At the time it did not matter to me that none of these thoughts or feelings were logical or rational. I snuck back into my house with my heart still pounding. The adrenaline that was only now starting to dissipate from my veins made everything feel sharper and more vivid.

I found myself pacing the kitchen, unable to sit for more than a few seconds. My mind kept returning to the missing trap. I had this urge to go back to the hardware store immediately and get another one. But as I thought through this urge, I began to realize how out of control my thinking had become. I felt untethered from myself in a way that frightened me.

The satisfaction I had felt from coming off the medication and feeling life again now felt dangerous, not only to myself but to those around me. Not once had I ever truly contemplated what I was doing for the previous forty eight hours. I'd been driven completely by emotion. I'd not even challenged if what I saw in the woods that night was even real. I stood at the sink staring out into the yard as I tried to steady my breathing.

I saw myself dragging that trap through the woods. Then I saw my mother walking through the darkness with her duster in hand. Both of us moved with the same desperate certainty that what we were doing was justified. I gripped the edges of the sink, not wanting to confront the question of whether the only thing that had separated us was the medication. I just couldn't accept that. I refused to believe that my capacity for emotion was somehow tethered to whatever madness had consumed her.

I became aware that I desperately needed a distraction. I resorted to doing the only thing that had become to feel normal in the house. I pushed the door open to my old bedroom and found boxes and boxes of things I had still not gone through. I spent the next hour sorting through the boxes. Old textbooks, broken toys, and clothes that no longer fit all went into trash bags.

I felt no sentimentality toward any of it. That was until I found that notebook. It was a smaller one than the one that Liz had discovered. It was a spiral bound with a faded blue cover. I recognized my own handwriting immediately with all the looping letters I still used. I finally sat down on the floor and began a reading through some of the pages. It was a diary of sorts that I'd also apparently used for drawing and random lists of things like the books I'd read or movies I'd seen.

I started reading through some of the entries, but they were mostly nothing. Almost like a stream of conscience about my complaint at school or the things I wanted for my birthday. They were truly the mundane recordings of a 14-year-old with nothing important to say. I flipped towards the end and found an entry dated just three weeks before I left Denora. It read, I think the medicine is finally working. My mom says I will feel better soon, and I'm thinking she is right.

I woke up today and didn't feel so heavy. I wanted to go outside. Can't remember the last time I felt like this. Maybe things are going to be okay. I searched my memory for this feeling, but it was one I could no longer remember. I read the passage again and again, but it never came back to me. I kept flipping through the remaining pages, drawn by some morbid curiosity to see what else I had recorded. The entries grew sparser as I went, and the handwriting became more erratic.

When I got to the final page of the notebook, it fell from my hands. I am chosen. I am holy. The text filled the page in the same compulsive pattern as I had seen in the notebook Lizard found. The margins, the curve of the page, and the edges where the spiral binding met the paper were filled. The same six words repeated until there was almost no white space left on the page.

It was definitely my own handwriting. I foot back to an older entry and compared just to be sure. I closed my eyes and searched the depths of my mind, but I had zero memory of writing this. I quickly ripped the page from the notebook and began shredding it frantically with my hands. Small bits of paper split from the binding as I tried to erase the words from my mind.

I finally stopped when I was sure that the paper was in at least a thousand different pieces. They were scattered around me like evidence of a crime I couldn't remember committing. I began to realize that I could have gone my whole life without seeing this page. I felt like I absolutely had to be numb again before I could do any more damage to myself. I'd open some door inside of me that desperately needed to be closed.

I moved through the house and out the back door, no longer caring whether Liz saw me or not. I tried to remember where exactly I'd been standing when I threw the vesperel into the woods. I tried to imagine the arc of my arm and where it would have landed. When I was past the first row of trees, I started to realize how tall this task was going to be. I kicked at a pile of debris and scanned carefully, but I truly had no idea if I was even in the right vicinity.

I couldn't know if the bottle had ricocheted against a tree or if it had simply cleared everything and fallen farther back. After half an hour, I found myself pushing farther and farther back into the woods. At some point I had made it way farther back than I or any human could have possibly thrown the bottle. But I kept convincing myself that perhaps an animal had carried it off, or maybe the wind had blown it deeper into the woods.

When I was at least two hundred yards back, I suddenly felt the ground shift beneath my right foot. There was this fraction of a second where I understood what was about to happen, but could do absolutely nothing to stop it. The jaws snapped shut just below my knee with a crunching sound that I will never forget.

The pain was immediate. I collapsed onto the ground with a scream that almost tore through my throat. My hands quickly tried to pry the jaws from my leg, but this did nothing but seemed to sink them deeper into my flesh. I could already see blood pooling in my pants where the teeth of the jaws had penetrated. Through a haze of pure agony, I looked at my surroundings.

It was definitely not where I had originally set the trap. The chain was now secured to a much larger tree. The chain itself barely made it around the trunk of the tree, but was somehow locked again, Both the key and my phone, the only things that would secure my release from the Jaws, lay back in the house where I'd left them.

I screamed and screamed, hoping someone would hear me. But I could no longer see my house or the end of either side of the woods. I wondered how far back I'd let myself search. The pain came in waves that made my vision blur and kept me from trying to pry the jaws open again. At some point I stopped screaming and simply laid there, staring up through the canopy of trees. I continuously meandered from states of absolute pain to blackout.

Each time I woke up, it seemed to be later and later in the day. Several times I swore I could hear something large moving in the woods around me, but my nervous system was so fried that I couldn't even properly register the fear it probably deserved.

The next time I opened my eyes, I was no longer alone. The man from the hardware store stood a few feet away, looking down at me with his hands in his pockets. The setting sun obscured my vision, making his expression unreadable. Please, I managed. My throat felt raw from all the screaming. Please help me. The man crouched down on his heels, examining the trap, but didn't reach out to help. Did you find what you were looking for?

I reached out for him and tried to respond, but I only let out a wet cough. The man studied me for a moment, but it felt impossible to meet his gaze. You don't know what you're dealing with out here, son. I don't know anything, I replied in frustration. I don't understand any of this. Your mother did in her own way. He paused and stood up. She thought she could protect what came from that union. I wanted to respond, but I felt my head fall back. I fought against blacking out again.

This has happened before, Darren. Right here, here in this valley. And God dealt with it then too. He sealed the skies shut for five days. I felt my consciousness waning. Please, just help me out of this. I have the key in my house. I can't do that, he said, looking towards the deeper part of the woods and whatever moved in the darkness between the trees. You'll be okay, Darren, but don't try to do God's work anymore.

He put his hands back into his pockets and walked deeper into the woods without another word. I slapped the ground twice in agony before letting myself lose consciousness once more. When I opened my eyes again, the sky had turned black, but the world around me was lit up.

Several spotlights have been set up around me, belonging to the firefighters and paramedics who are working to free me from my own trap. A woman's face appeared above mine and her features were haloed by the shine of the headlamp. She kept saying my name, but I only watched the firefighter who was using a reciprocating saw on the chain around the tree.

Once the chain was released from the tree, I could feel hands slide beneath my shoulders and knees. I begged them to release the trap, but they said they couldn't do that in the woods. They carried me out on a backboard where every jostle sent a fresh wave of nausea and pain through me.

It was only once I was fully in the ambulance that I had regained my wits enough to tell them I had the key in the house. I think I must have blacked out when they finally got it off because I don't remember that part at all.

The doctors told me I was lucky to keep the leg. Three surgeries over four months and enough physical therapy to make me wonder if luck was the right word for it. The trap had shattered my tibia in two places and severed an artery that nearly killed me before the paramedics arrived. Liz told me later that she had heard my screams from inside the house and called 911. She found me unconscious in the woods using the flashlight on her phone.

I never returned to the house in Denora. I couldn't. Whatever had happened in those woods had closed a door in me that I had no intention of reopening. I asked Liz to go back one weekend with her brother and gather whatever I had brought with me. She never told me what she saw there, and I never asked. I sold the house through the attorney for far less than it was worth. I didn't care. I told him to handle everything and to never contact me again once it was done.

It's been four hundred forty-five days since I last took any vesperl. of the wildfires in southwestern Pennsylvania. We've just received word from the State Emergency Management Agency that the town of Denora in Washington County has been overrun by the fire. Evacuation orders went into effect around midnight, and as of now, authorities are saying all residents appear to have made it out before the flames reached town around three this morning.

Route eight thirty seven is shut down north and south of Donora. Fire Marshal Dennis Kowalski says conditions are too dangerous for crews to enter at this time. The American Red Cross has set up emergency shelters at Charleroi High School and the Manesson Community Center for those displaced.