Arkadia

In the middle of Maine is a small town called Arkadia; population, 579. It is virtually unknown by the larger portion of Maine and it is doubtful that more than 100 people in other parts of America have ever even heard of it. The town boasts a small grocery store, a single restaurant, a bar, and not much else. The only contact the town has with the outside world is the monthly supply truck and the very occasional visitor or newcomer. Before January 1st, 2010, the town’s main claim to fame was an earthquake that had devastated it sometime in the 1800s. It is December 24th, and events are afoot that will make the town the most famous in America.


Chapter 1

Most of Arkadia and its surroundings are bare, but in the center of the town, a large park takes pride of place in front of the grocery store and the Inn. It is infested with trees, trees of every shape, size, and color. In the summer and spring, it appears to be a small forest, but as Christmas approaches, the leaves have fallen off and the trees are decorated only by long chains of cranberries and paper rings. In the center of this tangle of inter woven limbs is the largest tree of all, known by the locals as “The Grandfather”.
People wander through the trees, laden with last-minute Christmas shopping and groceries for Christmas dinner. They chatter amongst themselves, happily talking and making plans for Christmas day. A crowd of children runs between the old trunks, throwing snowballs and making snow men. If any of these people bothered to look up, they might see the lone boy with midnight black hair perched high in the topmost branches of the Grandfather. It is a cold day, with a crisp breeze running through the air, turning cheeks red and swaying the taller trees to and fro, but the boy is dressed only in jeans and a white t-shirt. The top of the tree is blowing back and forth, but he seems perfectly comfortable and safe. His legs are outstretched and crossed one on top of another while he presses his back against the thick trunk of the tree. In his hands is a book, the only thing that seems to cause him any annoyance, as the pages are fluttering and attempting to blow over his restraining hands. He is far too high for someone on the ground to read the title of the book. Then, still unseen, he makes the first move he has made since he first climbed the tree earlier in the afternoon. He laid the book on his lap and stretched, still with no apparent concern for the fifty foot drop on either side.
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Lief put his book down, its cover splayed upside down across his lap, the grinning face of Daniel Radcliffe grinning up at him from underneath the large inscription Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone.
He looked down at his watch, an early Christmas present from his mother, Elene. It was of black metal, with a black leather band and the sword-shaped minute and hour-hands indicated that it was almost six o’ clock. Lief groaned. He was late for dinner again. Elene would not be happy and Sonia would get to wear her annoyingly superior smirk as their mother berated him. He dog-eared the book and shoved it hurriedly in his pocket before beginning the long climb down to the bottom of the tree. He wasn’t worried about falling. The tree had enough branches that he knew he would be able to catch one before he hit ground. Furthermore, at fifteen, he had an uncanny grace that seemed to elude most teenagers of his age.
But as he neared the ground, he looked up from his climbing and saw a man, a very peculiar man swathed all in robes of a hue that seemed deeper than black. They seemed to suck in the scant twilight illumination around him so that he was enveloped in a more impenetrable darkness than any Lief had ever seen. He stood on the edge of the park, in plain view of all, but nobody seemed to notice him. This in itself was astonishing, for he was a very queer sort of fellow. His face was oddly sallow and thin strands of black hair peeked out from under his cowl. His hands were also deathly white and his fingers long and brittle-looking.
As Lief watched, frozen, he brought his hands up, pulling the robe with them and revealing the bottom three inches of a pair of black boots. His fingers curled into a fist and then he suddenly opened them, as if to flick something at Lief. Some part of Lief’s brain thought this was funny and he considered laughing, but the specter in black was frightening and something in the air seemed to be sucking all of the humor out of him before his brain had registered it.
Then something struck Lief and he knew pain, tremendous pain. It seemed to absorb his whole body, charging through his innards like a firestorm. He dimly felt his hands slip off the tree trunk and he was dropping the last ten feet to the frozen ground where he landed with a thud on the snow. The pain remained for several more seconds, or was it minutes, hours, even days? Lief saw the world through a haze of pain, saw a pair of skinny ankles hobbling towards him under a heavy plaid skirt, felt two scrawny hands pull him into a sitting position, and saw a piece of tan, wrinkled leather sway before his eyes.
No, not leather, he realized, as the image of the rag sharpened, revealing two hazel eyes, a long hooked nose, and a mouth downturned in worry. It was Mrs. Widders, the old widow who lived across from their house.
“Lief, Lief?” she shouted in his face while continuing to shake him by the shoulders. Slowly the pain dwindled, until all that remained was a smoldering ember in his gut and a splitting headache.
“I’m okay,” he said, “I saw--“. He stopped. “I just…fell out of the tree.” He had been about to tell her about the man, but a little voice in his head seemed to be telling him not to mention what had just happened. She’ll just think I’ve gone mad and I’ll be carted off to an asylum and maybe I am mad. I can’t tell anyone about the man.
“I saw that,” Mrs. Widders said kindly. “Looked like a nasty fall, that one.”
He grimaced and got up. “The landing hurt more than the fall.”
“Come on, then. I’ll take you home.” Lief tried to protest that it wasn’t necessary, but Mrs. Widders would not be dissuaded and, together, they walked away from the park and towards Lief’s home, she, hobbling with age, and Lief, walking very carefully so as not to make his migraine hurt more. He did not look back for the man but if he had, he would have noticed that the man had vanished without a trace.
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It took the pair ten minutes to arrive at Lief’s house, where Elene awaited them on the porch, wringing her hands in a frenzy of worry. “Where have you been, Lief?” she said, angrily. “I’ve been out of my mind with worry! You’re nearly twenty minutes late for dinner and—,“ she broke off, taking a closer look at his face, and noticing the large red mark that was already beginning to resemble a singularly impressive bruise, even for Lief’s standards. “Whatever happened to you? You haven’t been fighting, have you?” she asked, suspiciously.
“No, no, Ms. Elene,” Mrs. Widders assured her. “He just had a bad fall out of a tree trunk and I thought I should walk him home to be on the safe side.”
“He fell out of a tree?” Elene queried incredulously. “He’s been climbing trees since he was 7 and never once fallen out of one.”
Lief began to tell her what had surprised him and caused him to fall out of a tree for the first time in eight years. “I saw--,” but his tongue seemed to draw up towards the roof of his mouth, preventing him from speaking.
“Saw what?” Mrs. Widders asked. “I didn’t see anything out of the ordinary.”
“Nothing,” Lief said, his tongue unsticking as he decided on an alternate explanation. “I just slipped and fell.” But Elene was looking at him shrewdly and he thought she knew he was hiding something. For some reason, this seemed very unlucky. The little voice in his head certainly seemed to think so. NoNoNoNo ,it was shouting, and his head twinged painfully, causing him to wince.
Unfortunately, Elene noticed and she swooped, hawklike, down upon him. “You’re to go straight to bed. I’ll bring you dinner and an aspirin. Oh, and grab some ice for that bruise. I don’t care if you don’t like how it feels, it’ll help.” For the second time in as many minutes Lief found himself protesting that he was fine and being just as thoroughly ignored by Elene as he had been by Mrs. Widders. He slumped of towards the stairs, getting some ice from the refrigerator before going upstairs and collapsing on his bed.
What had that man done to him that could have hurt him so badly from such a distance? He thought of some kind of nonlethal gun, but he hadn’t seen anything in the hand that pointed at him, as though to strike him down with magic. He shivered. Magic wasn’t real. It was just a thing from a fairy tale. Wasn't it?
Strange and unexplainable things did seem to happen occasionally around the house. Inanimate objects sometimes seemed to move of their own accord, and more than once, Lief had seen their cat, Dragon, looking at the books in the library as though to read them. Whenever he had voiced these notions, however, Elene had waved them away and Sonia had jeered at him for being so childish. Childish! he thought, annoyed. Sonia was only five minutes older than him. What right had she to treat him as a foolish little boy!
He was interrupted from his thoughts by his Elene, who knocked on his door and walked in without waiting for his answer. At another time, he might have been annoyed with her for not waiting for his permission to come in, but she had a tray of steaming hot food, mashed potatoes, piled high with gravy on top and a slab of steak that seemed too perfect to be genuinely organic. She laid the tray on his bed and he dug in with gusto. His mom just sat on the bed and watched him eat. “You’re welcome,” she said sardonically as he finished of the steak.
“Mmmph, fank yoo’, Mom,” he managed through a mouthful of potatoes. The food tasted amazing, but he was beginning to worry that there might not be enough.
Elene had been twiddling her fingers, but now she suddenly looked up with the air of someone about to ask a surprise question and hope to get an answer in an unguarded moment. “So how did you really fall out of that tree?” Lief’s tongue locked again at just the wrong time and he choked on his new mouthful of food. Elene got up, a concerned look on her face, but when she saw that he had the food under control, she sat back down. “I thought so,” she mused out loud. “Who did you see when you fell out of that tree, Lief?”
Lief started to answer, but his tongue did that annoying flip upwards, stopping him from saying anything. Elene sat and waited for an answer, but when none was forthcoming, she began to look impatient. “You need to tell me, Lief,” she was looking distressed now. Lief pointed mutely at his mouth and tried to speak but no sound came out. The light of realization dawned on Elene’s face and she let out a little, “Oh,” of surprise. Then she did something very strange. She put her hand up and pulled it back, closing it as she did so, as though to pull a cloth off of a table. Lief started. It looked like the gesture the man in black had made but reversed. He flinched, waiting for the pain but it didn’t come. Nothing happened. But suddenly, his tongue was unstuck, and his story came pouring out in a garbled jumble of words.
“Slow down,” Elene said gently, her forehead creasing as she attempted to make since of his story. When he came to the part of the man who had made the strange gesture that was similar, but not similar to her own, she gasped. “No, not him,” and a look of horror fluttered over her features.
“And when he made the gesture,” Lief went on, “I hurt all over and I fell out of tree and he was gone.
At this, Elene looked puzzled. “You hurt? But ours doesn’t hurt. It doesn’t feel like anything at all.”
“Your what doesn’t hurt at all, Mom?” Lief asked curiously.
“Oh nothing, dear,” she said, with the mildly annoyed expression of someone who has recently let slip something that they would rather keep quiet. “I’ll go get you some more food,” she picked up his plate and walked out the door, leaving Lief to look after her in bewildered puzzlement.