Story: The Lesser Founts at Ilmarinton

This is a story I submitted to the 2020 Parsec Ink short story contest. It wasn’t accepted, obviously, so here it is, for free.

Mrs. James Livermore’s lantern’s light gleamed pale orange onto the weary faces of little Liliana Livermore and her younger brother, Junior, upon their hasty approach to Mrs. Livermore and myself. The children themselves carried an illuminated countenance beyond the glow of the lantern. Its flame’s reflection danced and bobbled as the childrens’ merrymaking bubbled up and frothed over, and now they were unable to contain their play any longer. As one, the children turned and dashed again away from us toward their opposite goal: the backs of the train conductor and his secondman, paced not even fifty feet from us on the train tracks, walking and talking as we were, all the way back to Eastleigh station.

“Won’t be far, now,” I assured Mrs. Livermore, with mustered cheer, in a voice quavering from carrying our suitcases, and my leather shoulder bag. Over my shoulder, I glanced at the dark corpse of the train’s caboose, which listed left from the train’s misalignment.

Mrs. Livermore’s watchfulness stayed the course, aimed straight ahead at her children, and her lips broke into a wan, genuine smile. “We have a ways to go, Mr. Oxwirth; we just started.” She directed her smile at me. “But your presence with us will make it that much shorter.”

I couldn’t help but return the smile. She had an endless store of such energy deep within her, as her face had lit up with the expression countless times since making her acquaintance a few days earlier.

The siblings once again made their return race to us, their feet quickly but carefully tapping rapidly on the track’s wooden cross ties, and their intermittent squeals sounding out amongst the cricket chirps, through the heady warmth of a summer night. Predicting their path, I stepped to the side.

They crashed into their vigilant mother with an embrace and more hopping and squealing, actions which almost made her drop the lantern, and drew out of her a loud, short laugh. Then, though seeming reluctant to leave their mother, off the children dashed, beginning another back-and-forth cycle. It was as though Mrs. Livermore held an invisible cord between that attached to the two children—a cord that gently persuaded them, if they should stray too far ahead in their improvised game, back into her presence.

# # #

Mr. Eastham, my newspaper’s head editor, assigned me to travel and journal anecdotal accounts of the aftermath of our nation’s war efforts. My schedule brought me to a few stops along the Thornburgh line, most prominent being the Eastleigh stop, northwest of the city. The station lay on the very edge of Ilmarinton, which was my main destination, where the widow of one Pvt. James Livermore lived. Pvt. Livermore received a gunshot wound in the thigh the last night of the war, but he died from an infection while hospitalized.

The morning before our ill-fated departure from Ilmarinton, I had showed up in the early morning, unannounced, at the Livermore’s doorstep.

A slant of sunlight landed on ten-year-old Liliana’s brow when she opened the front door. Her drawn eyes spoke of another night of chasing sleep unsuccessfully.

“Mr. Oxwirth!” she exclaimed with a smile. She hopped up and down, holding her arms back from embracing me.

As though suddenly remembering her manners, she cleared her throat and curtsied. I, with my bowler at my chest, acknowledged her with a brief bow.

“I thought you were leaving today,” she said. “Please, do come in.”

“Your mother offered to help with my notes,” I said, stepping into their foyer and into the dining and commons room. “And I wanted to pay a visit one last time.”

“Mother! Mr. Oxwirth is here!” she called out.

I took in the room, now so familiar to me. Many of their belongings and decorations, with which I became acquainted over the last few days, were absent.

My attention was soon redirected, as Mrs. Livermore appeared in the kitchen doorway, wiping her hands on a dish towel. She was gaunt, pale, bedraggled, but beaming; she must have had a similar night as Liliana.

“You’ve a big task ahead,” I said as I placed my shoulder bag of loose papers, with my hat, on a wooden bench leaning against the wall in the dining area.

“Are you still up for it?” I wondered if she would still have a willing heart, given her family’s situation.

“I am, providing you breakfast with us. It’s almost done. We’ve—oh!”

Junior, two years younger than Liliana, barged past his mother from the kitchen, curving around the dining room table, and straight into my unprepared midsection with an embrace as large as he could muster.

“Junior,” Mrs. Livermore said, reprovingly.

“It’s no matter,” I said as I feigned a struggle in prying Junior’s arms from around me. “No matter at all, Mrs. Livermore.”

Junior and I continued our mock wrestling while Mrs. Livermore and Liliana brought the food out.

“We’ve already packed, so I have plenty of time to tend to your notes,” Mrs. Livermore said brightly, after we sat down and said grace. She gestured to the empty walls and cabinets of the dining area. “My younger brother in the city was able to accommodate us sooner than we thought. He’s boarding near university now, so it will be close living until I can make our own arrangements.”

“How fortunate,” I said, matching her enthusiasm. “When do you leave?”

“The last train out tonight, quarter to midnight.”

“My very same schedule! You must let me assist you all.”

“Oh, no,” Mrs. Livermore said. “I couldn’t possibly. We’ll be fine. We’ve only a suitcase. Our other things will be sent for—”

Her refusal elicited protests from Liliana and Junior. I insisted, as the thought of a war widow with her two children, walking by themselves in the dark, installed a wholly unsettling image into my immediate imagination.

Mrs. Livermore’s defenses crumbled under the bombardment lobbed by the three armies encamped at her table, and she happily surrendered. The children—and myself, for that matter—were pleased.

“While it’s on my mind,” Mrs. Livermore said, “I know of some local happenings that may interest you, if you have the time today to investigate.”

I was loath to follow leads suggested by interview subjects; there is a tendency of townsfolk to exaggerate the scale and import of the affairs of their own community, but I humored Mrs. Livermore as she announced a list of standard gossip. One item, however, did catch my ear: one of Ilmarinton’s pasrons and his estranged cousin had gone missing.

Mrs. Livermore directed me to a Mrs. Harold Whitmere, the mayor’s wife and unofficial town historian. I mulled it over as we breakfasted; I had the time, and Mr. Eastham angles for mysteries in the Courier; there is always one more he is willing to add, no matter how outrageous or unfounded.

I met with Mrs. Whitmere—a proud, stout, loud, affable woman—later, over tea, in Ilmarinton’s council building.

“They jus’ upped an’ went, Parson Clements an’ ‘is cousin, th’ proprietor o’ th’ pub ‘cross th’ way ‘ere,” she explained. “The rectory’s secr’tary reported Parson missin’ this mornin’ after he never showed up in ‘is office. Now, this was a man who never missed a day o’ work in th’ twenty-odd years he’s been ‘ere at Ilmarinton, through sickness an’ th’ death o’ ‘is sister. I seen them both, Parson an’ ‘is cousin, last night, ‘round suppertime, sep’rately. They probably met for a walk ‘round town, to th’ outskirts—they’ve done’t before—and that’s probably where they saw th’ bonfires. That makes th’ most sense, given th’ clandestine type o’ relationship they had.”

“Beg your pardon, a ‘bonfire?’”

“Ay,” she confirmed. “But no, not an earthly bonfire, y’see. You could call’t a ‘light without heat.’ They saw’t an’ it took ‘em. Well, t’be more accurate, they chose t’ go. Th’ bonfires don’t force’t on anyone.”

“Force what, exactly, Mrs. Whitmere?”

She shrugged one shoulder. “Force ‘em to wherever th’ bonfires take ‘em. That’s what th’ bonfires do. I know what yer thinkin’, but they’re not will o’ th’ wisps, I can tell y’that much. They’re diff’rent. They’ve been ‘ere for centuries, only ‘round Ilmarinton, on th’ edges, in th’ forest, appearin’ every so often, no pattern to their comin’ an’ goin’. One person can’t see ‘em; it’s got t’be two or more. My own eyes I saw ‘em, once, maybe las’ summer. Harry saw ‘em, too, as he was with me. He was too spooked t’ get closer. But we saw ‘em.”

“So Parson and his cousin must have seen one of these bonfires? If they require more than one person to see them, as you say.”

“Ay, mos’ likely.”

“You mentioned they had a ‘clandestine’ relationship.”

She nodded her head vigorously. “Only on th’ outside were they estranged. Th’ real relationship was their friendship. Publicly they couldn’t let it b’known they ‘ad a bond; mighn’t be good for their respective reputations. But their friendship was a bit too strong t’ let that get in th’ way, seems. Fancy that! A teetotallin’ man o’ th’ cloth and a man makin’ money from drainin’ casks.”

“How were you aware of their friendship. Mrs. Whitmere?”

“Well, some o’ us wives, we do club at th’ church hall a few nights a week for tea. I’ve eyed Parson Clements sneakin’ out th’ rectory and pace down to th’ pub’s back entrance. Th’ barkeep has his residence on th’ second floor. They play cards, debate, trade prurient jokes, what whatev’r else men do. You know better’n me, Mr. Oxwirth.”

One of the Whitmere family maids entered to fetch our teaware.

“I’m of a mind,” Mrs. Whitmere continued, after introducing me to the maid, Ms. Cooperton, “that only th’ greatest bonds between us are left when they are tested an’ found true. I think that’s what th’ bonfires do: they take those of us that’ve learn t’ connect with another, after th’ heat of life’s crucible’ has burnt everythin’ away. For what purpose, who can say? Another mystery to add t’ th’ list.”

Ms. Cooperton, after collecting the dishes to her tray, let the mayor’s wife know of a matter that needed tending elsewhere. Mrs. Whitmere bid me a good day and left.

“She hasn’t been on about those bonfires since about a month ago,” Ms. Cooperton said, “when that one couple went missing.”

“Husband and wife?”

“Betrothed. Their families weren’t the most approving of their engagement. But they were very attached to each other. It made sense they would elope.”
“So you don’t put stock in the bonfire tale?”

She smiled a knowing smile. “I’ve heard her bubble on about many an old wives’ tale; kidnapping bonfires are the most tame of the lot. She’s always talking of imps or shades or ghouls. When she hits her stride it’s all she can talk about.”

I stood to take leave myself, and Ms. Cooperton began wiping down the table with a damp rag.

“Mrs. Whitmere is right about Parson and the barkeep, though,” she said. “They really were the best of friends, in secret.” Her wiping slowed down and paused. “It is funny that they disappeared at the same time. They had no extended family left to visit outside of Ilmarinton, and their whole livelihood was here. Hmm!”

I was confounded, but my mind leapt at recalling a pair of overheard conversations during my time here. The first was a warning Liliana made to her brother the day before, about one of the “fires ‘round the town” that will steal him away if he hides her dollies again; the second was a conversation between two women seated behind me on the train ride in, about rumors of curious, unexplained, lights in the thick of the forest all along the Thornburgh line. I didn’t think it worth looking into at the time, as every town has its own tales of assorted nocturnal hauntings and curiosities, but the fact that Mrs. Whitmere made a certain connection between the two missing men and the fires beckoned me to investigate. My journalist’s mind bristled at only having Mrs. Whitmere’s quaint rambling as a causal connection.

However, my attention was required for gathering my belongings for the train ride back to the city. Mrs. Whitmere’s mystery would have to wait to be resolved.

# # #

We continued on the train tracks through a gauntlet of lanterns hung on iron poles as we finally approached Eastleigh station. The Livermore family was behind me, walking three abreast. I walked in front to avoid having to negotiate the slight downslope of the ground on either side of the tracks.

I aired some mundane question to Mrs. Livermore, and as there was no response, I repeated it and looked over my shoulder. The Livermores were not behind me.

I looked off to the sides of the tracks, but there was poor sight outside the cones of lantern light.

I engaged the two passengers who had been walking behind us, two younger gentlemen. They’d hadn’t noticed the family stray off the tracks, but I must have been visibly desperate, as the pair offered to notify the secondman ahead of us of the situation while I searched for them. I left our suitcases and my bag, thanked them, and slipped off one side of the tracks. The mountainous shadow of the forest loomed against the dark blue of the clear night sky.

I picked my way carefully into the forest. My lantern began to dim, and fiddling with its knob only produced a brighter glow for a short moment; it went completely out. Instead of darkness greeting me wholesale, the dull vertical orange of the tree trunks before me remained. I blinked to clear the strange vision, but it remained. Were the trees themselves trying to guide me farther in?

After an uncountable length of time and distance in, I had found them! In a small clearing, Mrs. Livermore stood tall, holding the hand of Liliana on her left and Junior on her right. Their backs were to me, and they stood still, appearing to look down at the ground. I had made an enormous racket in finding my way to the edge of the clearing. Did they not hear me?

I stepped farther into the clearing and walked around to address them head on, when I was blinded by a great orange-white light sprouting up from the ground directly in front of them. I dropped the lantern, covered my eyes with my arms, and reeled back. I tripped on a fallen branch and fell back.

How had I not seen the light before, when I first spotted the Livermores? It was bright enough to be seen yards away, while I was still deep in the thicket of woods. Did it ignite just now, when I moved to the family’s side?

My eyes grew accustomed to the light, which, in detail, was a swirling, spinning tunnel of illuminated tentacles of air, colored like a comforting, robustly-burning hearth in wintertime. The tentacles snaked up from solid ground and twined expertly, like so many long, translucent fingers, straight up into the sky. At the base of the light-tunnel was a wreath, like the buds of a lotus, of more solid yellow and orange tendrils of light that writhed and wriggled in a curious, playful, child-like manner.

The cause and power of this light was not anything known on this earth. Could this have been one of Mrs. Whitmere’s bonfires?

The bonfire began to pulse and grow gently outward; the twisting vortex spread outward until it settled to a mere inch from the noses of the Livermore family. As I was fixated so wholly on this singular spectacle, I hadn’t tended to the Livermore family themselves. Here another amazement showed itself to me: they, all three of them, had risen during my fixation on the light, and now they hovered in the air! They engendered not a look of surprise, fear, or even amazement, as they continued to levitate and focus on the vision of unearthly light. What they expressed in their countenances was peace.

An aspect of the bonfire intensified; I’m not able to determine what exactly increased, but the Livermores, still hand-in-hand, rose even higher into the air in reactio. They ascended, with a kind of new complication of light surrounding them, not a part of the bonfire. It was a bright, thin, wavering rope, oriented horizontally, running along through them, as though an invisible weaver had picked his shuttle—pell mell, warp and weft—through and around the Livermore’s bodies. One end of the rope hung down to the ground next to me, gathered in a small coil that unwound as the Livermores rose higher. I found the other end of that coil: it had slithered inside me as well! What a wonder to see it drawn out from my midsection, its very end falling to the ground, and sliding away to dangle in the air, like a bridal train trailing the Livermores in their flight.

The family had disappeared into the dark cloth blanket of the night sky. But, oh! My heavens! Unending waves of the mysteries of creation crashing and breaking on the rocks of human faculties! If I could somehow remove a sliver of my mind so that all of humanity could understand what I saw, what I sensed, what I experienced by some other apparatus I cannot explain, and leave me the dullard, I would do so a thousand times over. Magnificent, phantasmagoric, incomprehensible, impossible creatures appeared—or emerged into my senses, as they seemed to be always there, however cloaked they were in nature’s shawl. How unseeing we are, how concerned with the stuff of temporary endeavors and trinkets of civilization to not see them! There in the sky, there were many-winged, bird-like gliders; formless mists of flashing lights and streaks of pure black emptiness; great swirling torrential flocks of feathered flapping things, all too many and varied to assign names. Other creatures were earthbound yet so large that they loomed alongside their airborne brethren: shaped like men, shaped like animals, shaped like nothing at all, shaded dark and clouded, yet glowing, or in colors that have no analog to our material eyes, or as the faint, scribble of an outline of a living thing filled with unfathomable complexity at its center. The entire pantheon, gathered in array all around me, crowding out horizon and sky, raised their heads high and directed their attentions to the center point where the Livermores had ascended, and, as one mind, cried out in a great echoing call, as though sounding out the final, rejoiceful notes of a long-awaited dirge.

I don’t know how or when it ended, but I made it back to the inn and into a bed. How this came to pass escapes reason. Perhaps I slept. Maybe not. In the dim light of dawn, I noted that I had brought back the Livermores’ luggage as well as my own.

That rope of light—ruminating on this fantastical fabric, drawing out of my addled memories to piece together a coherent account to myself of what happened, the more I understand: the illuminant rope was, in fact, always there, like the magnificent creatures that sang to their departure. The rope was fashioned and run through their familial triangle by the Livermores themselves, and, to a lesser degree, myself. In life, those connecting strands that lash us together, designed and formed by the unspeakable tragedy of the death of a loved one, can in one circumstance become like the cold fetters of unforgiving iron, enslaving one to another in torturous grief and desperation; yet in another circumstance, like the Livermores’, they become like glittering chains of refined gold, bonding one to another in warm affection and devotion.

I would have to schedule another departing trip to the city, but already I was planning to return to Ilmarinton for an extended stay. I would have to report Livermores’ disappearance to the police this morning, but there was the separate matter of Mrs. Livermore’s brother in the city. How should I explain everything to him? Should I dare to confide in him the reality of what I saw, or simply repeat what I would disclose to the police: that they lost their way and, despite my best efforts, I could not find them. Mrs. Livermore mentioned that her brother had aspirations towards journalism. Perhaps he could meet me here in Ilmarinton, share a drink, exchange university stories, banter about the written word during a nighttime stroll?