town (Soren's narration)

Do you know why so many stones statues of Ojiizo and foxes were red bips and have

pinwheels clicking softly beside them?

“Are you familiar with the one's popular beauty recipe of mixing rusty nails and iron scraps”

in a tincture of vinegar and strong tea? Also you can dye your teeth the most stunning shade of black. I'm author Theresa Matsura and for over 35 years I've been exploring the hidden, fascinating and sometimes terrifying corners of a country I call home.

If you too are termed by Japan and want to learn a little more about these obscure bits

of culture, or if you just want to put on your headphones, close your eyes and relax. While listening to me tell you about a yoke that licks the scum from your drain with its disturbingly long tongue, than uncanny Japan is for you.

“Now broadcasting from Spectre Vision Radio you can find and follow me on Spotify, Apple”

Podcasts or wherever you listen. And then...mata. My name is William Rodin. In October of 2005 I was checking the local paper for job listings, looking to make a few extra dollars with my video camera between wedding gigs.

When I came across an ad from a man looking for a videographer for a day, he was offering five hundred dollars to anyone with a high quality camera who was willing to sign a confidentiality agreement about the job.

“I sent an email explaining why I was suitable for this task and two days later I got”

a response. I was to meet this man who said his name was "Force Quarting" in the town of Robin's song Virginia, where I was born and lived until I was 12 years old. I returned there from my home in anapolis two or three times a year to visit my grandfather. According to Cording's deal I would be paid in cash and I would be asked to turn over

the tapes I'd made at the end of the day, never speaking of them again.

Before the day I met Cording he asked me to call him so he could explain what we would be shooting. The footage he needed to acquire was for a personal research project about the area. Mostly what he wanted to know on the phone was my history with the talent of Robin's song.

And if I had been aware of growing up of just how many unexplained crimes and disappearances there had been in the town, I truly was not. He told me I might think of it very differently after the 9th of October. I didn't understand what he meant, but I said I didn't think it would be a problem. When I got off the phone I looked up the name "Force Quarting" online.

I could find out very little about my employer, other than that he had apparently been a professor in the ancient study as department at the University of Toronto within the past five years. His name also came up in vague relation to something called the "projade to Meridio now." This was mentioned on three different academic sites having to do with the study of anthropology.

The phrase came up a fourth time on a dubious looking site dealing with the paranormal. It described the "projade to Meridio now" as an urban legend among fringe academics. Having to do with a privately funded group of five men, one of whom was named "Force Quarting", who had traveled the world for two years researching a supposed curse that had stricken

The details were sparse.

“On the morning of the 9th, I took the train from Meridio to the western edge of Robinson”

and walked from there to my grandfather's house at the end of Brian Lane, carrying the

Sony camera I had used to egot a living for the past three years. In fact, I had been in town with ten months before, shooting some preliminary location shots for a very friendly independent movie producer named the Trent. I had met him through a friend of a friend of mine and for several hours we had driven around town as he looked for locations to film part of a low budget horror movie.

That day's casual shooting of churches, parks and cemeteries had turned it to more of a private documentary for Trent. He'd grown up nearby in Hashem and he had me get shot after shot of the nicest parts of Robinson in order to convince his wife to move there so they could raise their children in a pleasant suburb.

The 9th of October was the day after my grandfather's 85th birthday. I spent a couple of hours with him before I was to meet Quarting. He'd gotten visibly more frail since I had seen him in March. We sat on his front porch on the quiet nine acres where I'd spent much of the 5th through 13th years of my life.

Without mentioning what I would be doing the rest of the day, I asked him if he regretted

never really leaving the town during his life except if I didn't want more to.

He told me he loved this place and the only time he had any doubts about it was during a period of five years in the 1970s when he said things had gotten "very sad" and very painful and "when I asked him when he meant the shook his head and said he was sorry he didn't want to explain it. I left him in about 10 a.m.

I met my employer for the day, Quarting, at the Robinson Commuter Training Station. He was younger than he sounded on the phone, it could have been more than 35. He was tall and gaunt, and his jeans had holes in them. He shook my hand without a smile and immediately took me aside to hand me the money I'd been promised in $20 bills.

He pressed the confidentiality agreement against a fair card machine so I could sign it on the spot. After he asked me a few technical questions about the specs of my camera and the duration of the blank tape side brought, we walked out of the station into a very light drizzle. Then he began to give me some instructions.

I was to tape Quarting and our surroundings constantly wherever we walked, which would probably be all over town, often doubling back if we had to. There would be a short break in the middle of the day so that I could recharge the camera battery. Though we wouldn't be talking to anyone specific or venturing into any places that were illegal or dangerous, he said I would most likely see or hear things that unsettled me.

“The important fact for me to remember he said was that these things absolutely could not touch me.”

It wasn't possible. So whatever my fears were, I was to just keep going and recording. I said I understood, though, inwardly I was quite confused. Quarting spoke almost not a word to me after our initial meeting of the train station. He walked along in silence.

I hung back a few steps and trained at the camera on the widest shot I could in order to get as much of these surroundings as possible. Having grown up in Robin's song, I was clueless as to what Quarting was possibly hoping to see. He seemed unfamiliar with the layout of the town and it became obvious he'd not been there often. He would walk in one direction for a quarter mile or a half mile, then stop to think for a moment

and go in another direction, seemingly at random.

He turned again and again, never telling me why we were going toward any particular place.

He walked quickly, that had some trouble following him while keeping him in a camera frame. He seemed to be looking for something. He did not enter any stores or go on to anyone's property or seem very interested in me faces with the traffic that went by us.

“From Skykel Road, I remember we went toward Alan Street, then Rosand,”

cutting across Mayberry Road to Devtail Lane. After five minutes or so on the cotton branch trail, which is a bike and foot path that runs for eight miles toward Goldman, Corning left it and walked over into a small fetch of trees

For such a long time that I was about to ask him why we had stopped completely.

“Before I could, he said sort of testily, "I need to just listen. I need to just listen."”

He closed his eyes for a full two minutes. I pointed the camera up the trail, stepping up a better to shoot. When he opened his eyes again, he shook his head, angry for some reason.

He muttered something under his breath that sounded like, "Well, never find her today. I know it."

He had me stopped taping for a moment, roll back the last two minutes, and to play them on the display screen while the sound came through a tiny speaker on the side of the camera. I wondered why he would want to watch himself standing there with his eyes closed. But while the video showed nothing but that, and my occasional board panning shots, the audio was different. The sounds of the breeze and faraway traffic were still there, but

“something else was on the audio track, too. It was completely clear. It was the”

voice of an old woman singing. What sounded to me like a sad folk song in a thick,

African dialect. She sang weekly and faintly. It sounded like she was standing only about 10 feet away from the microphone. This went on for almost 60 seconds. I was baffled. I heard nothing as I was recording, and there had certainly been no one around us. When the camera paned, the voice was heard more faintly, suggesting the singer was standing very close to recording, and it was briefly abandoned by the

new directional microphone. On the video screen, I could see recording turn his head slightly in the

middle of the song when there was an unusually long pause between words. He didn't seem surprised

“as he watched the tape. He told me to start recording again from that point, and we moved on.”

I wanted to play the tape again, and again, to figure out just what had happened. But it was obvious that recording had not come here to entertain my questions. In Robin's song, there is a small muddy creek called Rachel's arm. It flows out of the boy's river. Sometime around 11, I followed a recording along its bank. The drizzle had stopped completely, and the sky above us was thick with clouds but dry. He stopped near the creek's end

point and turned to me. He appeared to be appraising me somehow, considering how to proceed with me. Then he began to speak. I suppose he suddenly felt the need to start to slowly explain things, but it gave me no background about himself or his task. Instead, he told me a frightening story. One that I was already somewhat familiar with, but I didn't reveal this to him. He said that about 15 years ago. A couple of kids have been playing beside this creek when one of

them noticed a hand sticking out of the water. When they pulled on it, a mannequin came out, streaked with mud. It was dressed to clumsliness suit, and its face was very carefully painted to look like someone's specific right down to the brown eyes. The mannequin's pink plastic skin had been painted over from head to toe with a more realistic beige color. Clumps of human hair, real, human hair, had been very carefully fastened to the head. Inside the suit was a wallet,

and it belonged to a psychiatrist who had gone missing the month before, while on his way to see some relatives in Washington, D.C. his name was Steen. The face of the mannequin looked just like Steen did on the driver's license photo inside the wallet. The resemblance was uncanny. The police had already talked to all of his patients since his disappearance, and gone through his private notebooks, looking for any clue as about who might possibly have abducted him.

Then they realized that the creek, called Rachel's arm, was only about 500 yards away from the home of the patient of his. It was named Irwin Settle. One of the lead detectors in the case had already entertained the notion that Settle was possibly the killer, because he'd been ordered into treatment as part of a previous assault case, and because Steen's notebooks had made note that Settle's hobby in life was muddled trains, which he painted in detail, incredibly careful detail.

hard evidence on which to arrest him. They went up again to talk to him this time with a search warrant.

“When they got to his little white house, which sat on the top of the hill, looking down towards”

the creek, something was wrong with it. It looked like someone had started to paint the front of it brown and then suddenly stopped. It was just a bunch of messy wandering stripes that went nowhere. Irwin's Settle was not there to let them in. Inside the house, they found the body of his psychiatrist rotting on the living room of the floor. It became obvious that Settle had tried to paint the front of his house with Steen's blood, and at his trial it came out he had done it to

laugh at his neighbors who had no idea what was happening. They just went past it day by day as it dried there. The police found out from Settle's diary that his hatred for Steen was so intense

“that he'd painted mannequin after mannequin to look like him, and then he'd”

pretend to kill them in various ways by burning them, stabbing them, hanging them. He was trying to

stop himself from doing the real thing. But finally, after several hostile psychiatric sessions with

Steen in which Steen got settled to admit to a history of Necrofelia, he snapped and abducted the man. Before that night he'd dolled up and painted so many mannequins to look like Steen that they kept accidentally digging them up all over Robin's song for another two years. Cording told me they executed Settle in 1997. One of the last things he said in court supposedly was that he wished he was different but the town had made him sick. Cording pointed up the hill toward Settle's house. I could

“actually see the edge of the trees which during the prior two weeks had lost most of the leaves.”

I knew the story of what Settle had done. As a 12-year-old I'd have once gone with some friends to the property and dared them to go inside the house which had been abandoned since he'd been put in jail.

We never set foot inside, we'd been too scared. When Cording was finished speaking, giving me

no context for the story, he turned and walked on. We went for another 20 minutes or so until we came to Mount Halsian and Cemetery on Ridge Road, it slopes gently at the long hill and is bordered by a cremation garden. Cording walked very slowly through it. I got the sense that he was headed toward a certain grave. We went at a long straight line toward the very opposite edge of the cemetery. There the acreage Petered out into a quiet field, screened by trees from Bullar Avenue. The graves

became more scattered and more understated. Cording walked up to one of them. The headstone was not even marked with the last name, just a first name and a date. Sarah, December 7, 1985. He stood over the grave for a minute with his eyes closed. He told me that he had been beside this grave twice before in the past and it had given him a feeling he could not explain. Now as he stood over again he said the feeling was the same. He did not elaborate. He knew nothing about it was buried here

only that he suspected it was an infant. I kept silent. Finally he moved away. He kept staring at that one name on the stone as if he were unable to make sensible letters. As we left the cemetery the wind picked up and it became noticeably colder. And that simple and natural, a tumult change in temperature made me for some reason. Very afraid. I very much wanted to be away from town or at least

back in my grandfather's house. Having never met this man or taken his money. We walked from the

cemetery all the way to Cotton Elementary School on Cedar Road. Cording never told me the reasoning for his changes in direction. He would wait until he had a sense of where he wanted to go and then just go. Traffic and people passed us without noticing us. Cording very intentionally never made eye contact with a single person. He restlessly circled Cotton Elementary, which I attended from grades one through six. There was no one else on the grounds. The playground was almost

exactly as I remembered it. Then Cording told me another story. He seemed to become more and more

Irwin Settle, this was one I had never heard. Very early on a snowy December Sunday in 1999,

“the local airfield received a distressed signal from Missessna 182, coming from the north into”

Tessa, the town just south of Robinson. The traffic controller heard only the words Mayday, Mayday, and then the screams of a man and a woman inside the cockpit. The plane came in over the trees on the east side of the school grounds and crashed, less than 200 feet from the playground. It cartwheels along the ground and went into the woods, remaining mostly intact. There were three inches of snow covering the grass at the time after a heavy fall early on Saturday night.

Several people in the neighborhood heard the crash, but the police and ambulance response was

slower than normal because of the snow. The first person to get to the crash site was actually

an eight-year-old boy. When the authorities arrived on the scene, the boy told them what he had seen,

“but they did not believe him. He claimed that when he had gotten to within the view of the plane's”

cockpit, something enormous said, slithered out of it. To him it looked like a gigantic crocodile, except its skin was a perfect white. Its head was quite small and it seemed to have dozens of small legs on each side of its body. Legs that grasped the side of the plane and held tight as it moved. The boy said the creature had moved quickly, going deeper into the woods and disappearing. Inside the cockpit, the authorities found the remains of two people, a man and a woman.

They had been completely ripped apart. Their heads, arms, and legs torn off their torso. There was no possible way the crash could have done that sort of damage to them. The cockpit was almost entirely intact. A policeman noted in the report that there was a long winding indentation in the snow, starting from the ground outside the cockpit and moving into the trees. But no one else was found.

“According to me that several months after the crash, he was finally allowed through a secret”

contact in the state police to search an archive of the man and woman's possessions. They had married each other in 1987 and had lived mostly in Egypt. According to said, he believed they had been coming to this place on that day in order to confront someone. But, quote, "She got them first." Unquote. Once again he left me with the questions I didn't feel ready to ask.

I put a new tape into the camera and we moved on. My legs were getting tired,

courting never slowed his step. The day was unexpectedly divided into two after a bizarre incident.

As we crossed the very small park of Lord Street, courting suddenly stopped and swore, angrily under his breath. He was looking to the edge of the park where a man was sitting slumped awkwardly against a bench as if his body were completely broken. Courting started to walk toward him and I followed. But he turned and told me to stay where I was. Courting went over to the man and crouched before him. I could tell he was speaking to him,

but I couldn't hear anything. The man was dressed only in torn sweatpants and an old dominos pizza t-shirt and he wore nothing on his feet at all. He had pulled what looked like a white sheet around his neck for warmth. It bunched awkwardly around him and draped down almost to the ground. He moved only his head, turning it very, very slowly toward the sound of courting the voice. He looked to be only in his 20s with long, unwashed hair.

Courting spoke to him for almost five minutes. More and more I noticed how awfully pale the man's skin was, drained of all color, almost a white gray hue. When courting stood and walked back towards me in the camera, leaving the man to sit undisturbed, he seemed furious. He said nothing to me as he passed me. I got one last shot of the man on the bench and then kept up with the courting. The man's head was cocked back and he gazed at the sky.

Courting went only as far as the closest bus stopped. He said he had something to do. A bus came quickly and we got on board. Courting asked the driver if it went straight down

that I had taken home from school sometimes when I was growing up. We traveled about a mile and then

“got off the bus and a lower income residential neighborhood called Galendon. We walked deep into”

it past modular houses and a few trailer homes until the road simply ran out. There was a small green house beside the dead end. Its lawn was overgrown and no one had yet made any attempt to rank the fall of the use out of it. Courting crossed the lawn quickly and stood up to the front door. He had obviously been there before. He moved so quickly that I almost had to trot to keep up.

Courting banged up the front door. At first there was no answer. So, courting began calling out

loudly again and again for someone named Mr. Coclin. Eventually he got a response. We heard a week gravelly drunk sounding voice from behind the door. The man would not open it though. Courting demanded that Mr. Coclin tell him why we had just seen his son in the park.

“The answer came back after a long pause. I don't know. This upset courting even more.”

He informed Mr. Coclin that his son was still "holding the sheet you wrapped him in." And quote. He asked Coclin what he intended to do about it. Again, the answer came in a sad, tired voice. I don't know. Courting yelled at Coclin through the door saying that this was

absolutely the last time anything like this was going to happen. And that now,

Coclin would either let the boy rest or according would take permanent action. The last thing courting said to him was to ask if he had a shovel in his shed. Courting walked around the side of the house, passed a forgotten tomato garden to the dilapidated shed. He rummaged through it for a moment and came out with a rusty shovel. With it, we walked back to the bus stop.

“As we waited for the bus to pick us up going in the opposite direction.”

Courting said that what he needed to do might take a while and that he might need my help. This sent a shutter down my spine. We rode back to the park. When we got off the bus, courting saw right away that Mr. Coclin's son was no longer on the park bench. Courting turned to me, looking ill, and said he thought he knew where he had gone. He changed his mind on the spot and said he didn't want what was to come next recorded on the video tape.

Instructed me to recharge my camera battery and meet him in two hours in the far side of the park. Then he left me walking toward Rundwick Road with the shovel. In a days I shut off the camera. I tried to think of where I might recharge my camera battery and walked down the road three quarters of the mile into a Shelton Brook. The neighborhood where my best childhood friend had lived. He still lived there with his parents. I went to his house, needing to sit down and relax.

I convinced myself as I walked that if Steve were home, I wouldn't tell him what I had seen or what I was doing. Only later, if I was able to tell him without anyone else and for finding out what I do with that. Steve was home and had just gotten out of bed. He was happy to see me and I told him I had been in the area taping a wedding reception. We sat in his basement and talked about old times. He noticed that I looked a little sick, but I told him I was just getting over the flu.

I turned our talk to what Robin Song was like after my parents had moved us to an apples,

but I was 13. Steve had never really liked the town that much, but he didn't seem able to

leave, never having found his life's purpose. In his early twenties just a few years before he had a breakdown and spent some time in the hospital. I wasn't sure if he had even worked since then. He reminded me of the Halloween night when we were 18 when he driven all the way to an apolis unexpectedly to see me after he'd gotten a bad scare in Robin Song that he'd felt foolish about later. He'd been a little drunk and high and searching on foot for a party he knew about,

and he got lost at a neighborhood he'd been to many times. He'd started thinking about a murder that had taken place in Robin Song a few months before. A blind girl that would once attended our high school was abducted from a local pharmacy and killed. Her captors hadn't believed she was blind so they had actually taped up her eyes before they killed her. After that people said that whenever anything was broken or damaged around town it was the girl's ghost blundering around

trash cans and street signs being knocked over with no apparent purpose. Early on Halloween night

he'd made the mistake of going on the internet and finding a picture of what the girl's face had looked like when she was found. And that night as he walked alone through the streets he got very frightened. So frightened he got it into his head to get in his car and drive all the way to my house, no one's top. Somehow he got there okay. I remembered that night well. I asked him if Robin Song seemed like a place where strange things often happened. He said, "Oh god, of course." He tried

“and vein to remember the details of another rumor that had fluted around Robin Song. One from our”

elementary school days. Something about a baby that had been found burned beyond recognition at St. Martin's church in the buried in town, ever having been accurately identified. I vaguely remembered what he was talking about. I left Steve's house eventually after asking him to visit me soon. On the way down the street his parents passed me in their car coming home. They got out to speak to me. They had seemed very old when I'd done them as a teenager and now they were quite elderly. They told

me that just a few weeks before Steve had been found wandering in Mount Halcyon cemetery, having heard voices recently. Strange female voices. Every day it about dawn. Telling him to go there and make sure that certain graves weren't visited or even touched. They'd begun to worry about him again. They weren't sure what sort of treatment he was going to need next. I left them and went slowly back to the park on Lord Street. There I found

courting sitting on the ground, legs crossed, smoking and looking out over the road. His clothes were street with dirt and there was a nasty scratch on the back of his right hand. The shovel was gone but in one hand he now held the dirty white sheet that Mr. Cochlan's son had with him on the bench. Without a word to me, he gestured for me to start the camera again. He got to his feet

in the second part of our day in Robinson began. Things went from bad to nightmarish very quickly.

“We walked. I remember going past all the minor land marks of Robinson that I used to think”

nothing of but now seemed sinister to me. We walked similarly without purpose, slowly making our way back toward not housing. After almost a full hour of laundering, we came to an anonymous little forested area beside a self storage rental facility. We were a steady trickle of water flew through the mud between two cement pipes as tall as we were. There, according told me he needed to a track. It was going to make him incredibly weak he said, but it needed to be done

before the entire day was lost. He might need my help walking it first when he finished. He

descended the small bank beside the tiny stream without a white sheet in his hand, steadying himself by grabbing onto weak tree branches as I into the camera watched him.

“He crouched and dipped the sheet into the slowly running water that he pushed it deeper into the”

mud below. He held his hands there, eyes closed for a full minute. When he brought them above the surface again, the sheet was black with mud, water dripped steadily from it. He ascended the bank again. He moved away almost as if he had forgotten I was there and I had to catch up. In 10 minutes we were back at the cemetery, according walked all the way there with his hands and the sheet covered in mud. People had noticed but they said nothing. Most were too busy shrinking against the

cold wind that was getting stronger and stronger, blowing deadly everywhere. According went toward the eastern edge of the cemetery, toward the grave it stood at before. Frightened eye, hung back as much as I could. I watched according crouched deeply at the knees and folded the wet filthy sheet several times until it was an almost perfect square. Then he placed it softly on the patch of earth in front of the infant's grave. He said something to me I couldn't hear so I moved closer.

He was asking me to help him up. I put the camera down for just a moment and put my hands into his shoulders and lifted him. When he was on his feet again he seemed all right just a very weak and tired like an old man. He told me to pick up the camera again and wait with him on a bench in the cremation garden a few hundred feet away. He and I sat there for at least a half an hour and one

into a light meditative state. I smoked several cigarettes and we did for according to tell me what

“our next move was. Eventually we rose again and walked back to the grave. According picked up the sheet”

or maybe I should call it a shroud and then had me follow him again as he carried it away. We went past the cremation garden and into a small grove of bushes. There, according set the shroud on the ground one last time and unfolded it a little by a little until it was back to its full size. He told me to get a close shot of it. There were actually letters on it now. Twelve inches high somehow etched from the mud that it kicked onto it as if small fingers had

used at his paint. The writing was very clear that the letters were spiky and shaky. The words were Giora L. That was it. Nothing more. According stared at them for a time, seeming a little confused but not scared like I was. Then suddenly he seemed much more certain about

“where we were to walk. He gathered up the sheet and dumped it into the nearest trash can.”

From Mount Halsian we went down Boulder Avenue then headed south. As we walked and I video taped, according stopped a recorder a mile or so and thought for a moment trying to

sense something but always moving in more or less a straight line. Then there came a series of

turns. He took that exactly duplicated the way I used to walk from a 711 to my grandfather's house. I watched in disbelief as he even veered off the sidewalk beside the house where a family called of the Vities used to live. The giant oak tree on the edge of their front lawn was split neatly into at the trunk and according stepped onto the lawn and bi-sectored that tree the way I used to. Every single time I encountered it from the age of six, you kept going without looking back

“joining the sidewalk again. It was a move completely out of character for recording and made”

no earthly sense at all. The moment when we reached Brian Lane was the real turning point

for me. The time when I most considered dropping the camera and just running away from this awful

task, we left Brian Lane and started to walk up a long winding path onto private property. The path led between reeds and trees starting to shower leaves onto us under the weight of the wind, according with small in the camera frame. He stopped entirely for a minute looking around. Then he gestured from me to come closer. He said to me, "It's here. Something's here. Be very quiet."

With that, he continued to move up the dirt path which bent slightly to the right and which in about a hundred feet would lead directly to my grandfather's backyard. When Grandpa's house came into view, I couldn't move any further. I said nothing. I would tell a recording where we were and why it was so ridiculous that we should be here. Only after he'd completed whatever task he had in mind. I wanted to hurt him somehow to make him feel utterly foolish.

I would let him look around and then I would explain to him that his instincts were completely wrong. I would even keep taping so I could document his wrong turn. But deep down, I feared that something very awful had gotten too close to Grandpa's house. And that recording had tracked down. Grandpa's old truck was gone and the house was obviously empty. He'd probably gone out for groceries or to visit a friend. He still went out a couple of times a week

despite his old age. After looking at the house briefly, and at the wide, acreage surrounding it, which was bordered on all sides by woods, according turned his attention to the old horse stable. My grandfather had essentially left a rod decades ago. Cording opened the rusting gate that separated the backyard from the grassy lot on which the stable sat and went through it. I followed him. It was as if he was being led by a

center of sound that only he was able to experience. Cording went into the horse stable. He lifted the lid of an ancient wooden storage bin and hesitantly looked inside it. There was nothing in there. Then he moved to the other side of the short wall. I saw some old furniture left to sitting in the dirt for years. Nothing more than a home for spiders. And then noticed, even before Cording did, a tall wooden stick rising out of the dirt

to the top of the stick. It was a color photo of a young boy about eight in my never seen.

“The boy was wearing a hooded sweatshirt and smiling at the camera as it photographed him standing”

in front of a movie theater. Because of the exposure to the elements, the photo had faded somewhat, but it was probably no more than a few months old. I touched it as I moved to the camera in to get a shot of it. I got the feeling that Cording knew right away what the stick and the photo attached to it signified. To me it was a complete mystery. The property seemed idiously silent. The silence was then broken by the sound of an engine approaching. My grandfather

was coming back home. My first instinct was to walk out of the stable and agreed him, but

Cording reached a hand out and grabbed my forearm. He put a finger to his lips to tell me to keep quiet.

It was then that I realized that what he feared was not something nameless that had infested my grandfather's property, but my grandfather himself. I did as I was instructed. As my grandpa's truck closer, the sound of the engine got louder and Cording stepped deeper into the mustiest stable to keep a lot of sight. Soon we could hear the truck loss and a hundred feet beyond the stable, coming up the path and bumping over the grass in the backyard.

Little by little, Cording crept toward the edge of the stable that he could lean around the corner in a subtle way and watch to see what happened. I heard the sound of the engine cut off in the truck's door open. Cording took a few more steps forward and depressed his body flat against the side of the stable, hiding behind the vines that grew there. Over his shoulder, I could see my grandfather making his way up to his front door. Having no idea what we were there, he walked

or theoretically up with three steps I myself had climbed so many times before and then he disappeared

“inside. When he was gone, Cording turned to me. I remember his hair blowing”

crazily in the wind. He whispered that we would come back later to see if the man had left again. He said he needed to get inside the house. We crept off the property, keeping well out of sight. That was when I told him that the man we just seen was my grandfather. Cording looked at me with absolutely no expression. His eyes were blank, dead. He said to me, "And tonight you'll call him and get him out of the house." And it will go in.

It was about three o'clock and starting to drizzle lightly again when I was attacked. It happened in a small public overflow parking lot, tucked at the end of strip mall that faced where there was end of road. I was about 15 feet behind a courting as we crossed the lot towards it. There were about 10 cars parked in the lot and no human activity. We were near the rear entrances of a used bookstore, a laundromat,

and a local hardware store that was the first business ever to set a shop in Rob and so on.

Cording was saying something to me and I had to strain to listen. He was asking me if I wanted to stop somewhere and get a wind breaker or something because of the dropping temperature. I said, "I thought I'd be fine for a while." And then he started to ask me if there was any chance the camera could be damaged if it rained again. Halfway through his sentence, he turned to me and kept speaking, but right away I froze.

And he stopped and asked me what was wrong. Cording's eyes were taped over completely, rendering him blind. It looked like two-fraid pieces of cardboard had been put over them and sealed there, clumsily with several short strips of black tape. There was a thick smear of

“dried blood on the side of his face, almost entirely obscuring one cheek. I remember pointing at his”

face and being unable to formulate words to tell him what I was seeing. He put a hand to his eyes to feel the tape when something struck me hard on my right side. So hard that I and my camera went flying. My wind was knocked right out of me and I fell to the cement. It felt like a light human body had collided with me at top running speed. And for the briefest instant, I know I felt a human hair, long human hair greys my face, and I detected the scent of perfume. The back of my hand

was scraped and there was a lot of pain, but I managed to quickly grab the camera and whip it all around me, trying to pick up a physical image of what had struck me. There was nothing. When the

his eyes taped that tape was gone and so was the blood smearing his cheek. He tried to help me

“to my feet, but I pushed him away. I lay there for a few minutes, trying not to cry. According”

and I exchanged no words, I checked the camera and it was all right. When I started to rewind to the tape to watch the last minute of it, according assured me I would see nothing that explained what had happened. And it was true, but the camera had at least caught, incontrovertibly, the black tape on his eyes. His confused reaction to my shock and the sound of a body slamming into mine as I lost all control over the frame into the picture with his cue. The sound of the air

being knocked out from my lungs had been delivered directly to the microphone when the camera twisted toward my face. It had all been real. There was just no sign at all of the cause. And I remembered how courting had told me that nothing could touch me here.

“For a time, courting and I did nothing, but sit on Rosanda and watch the annual”

autumn festival that was taking place that weekend. Robin Song's main street had been closed to traffic and to townspeople swirled all around us, smiling, laughing, doing all sorts of things. Dozens of small booths and tables were set up, selling everything from homemade jewelry to old books to ethnic food, courting drank a cup of espresso he'd bought from a church group of the corner and I tried to eat something. We just watched all the people who were so unaware of what

sort of place they lived in. I spotted a face I instantly recognized as I stood to stretch. Across the street was the independent movie producer of my shot tape for 10 months before. I told courting I would be back in a few minutes and walked over to talk to Trent.

“We shook hands and I asked him if he had wound up moving to Robin Song, as had been his plan.”

He said that he had, his wife had been convinced by the town's charm when he driven her through it. And they'd bought a small house in the edge of town near the train station. I asked him if he still liked the area as much and he said that he did. He'd been trying to get some time off to take a long vacation though because of a problem that had arisen with his eight-year-old son. The boy had one day developed a severe case of agrofobia. He not only couldn't bring himself

to go to school, but even going shopping with his mother or beyond up the front yard may have feel afraid and sick. It happened overnight and he wasn't able to tell anyone what it caused it. He had missed a week of school before he overcame his fear and went back to normal, but both his mother and father wanted him to see a therapist soon. Whether it was a real psychological problem or just bully related or maybe just a reaction to something his teacher had

done, they had no idea. We parted and I never saw a trend again. I wanted to tell him

why I was there that day and when I had seen, but even more, I wanted to tell him that I understood what his son was going through because the same thing had happened to me when I was 10 years old. It was something I never revealed to anyone. I was in fourth grade at the time. I had a walkin in the middle of the night at the sound of something striking my window pain again and again. There was nothing to be seen, but the next morning I was afraid to get out of my bed.

I made myself get up and walked to the bus stop, but every step I took, I was afraid something was coming to get me. In school I couldn't concentrate and when the bus let me off at the end of the day I ran as fast as I could back to the house. For two days I told my mother I was sick with a

stomach ache, but on the third day my excuse is dried up and I had to go over the weekend to go

worse and worse. I did not go out and play. I could only sleep and fit since starts. On Monday I shook when it came to walk to the bus stop. I cried silently at the bus took me home, knowing that I would have to run hard as soon as it left me behind. Every sound made me flinch. For some bizarre reason I couldn't look at animals or specifically their eyes, the eyes of dogs, cats, even birds and squirrels. When I did they seem to possess a look of

agonizing pain near death pain. Another strange symptom of my sickness was that I became a possessed with the fact that outside of my school every girl or woman I saw in Robin's song and

to this. It was as if some secret covered that appeared in my town and though they seemed to pay

“no attention to me every time I saw a female approaching me I would see the inevitable black hair”

and run in another direction. It was a sort of irrational terror only a child can feel and it sunk deep into me for a time and then just as mysteriously left me. Things went back to normal. My worst moment during my time of fear was on a snow day when school opened to hours late. A neighbor's mother drove two kids and me to school that day and a truck. When I got in the

truck and saw her straight black hair, I started to cry. I swear she took no notice at all. Never

even glanced at me in the rear room mirror. Even as her two sons made fun of me. I said I had hurt my knee somehow. The woman was totally silent throughout the trip. I stared at the floors who was not to look out the windows and see any more black hair just as I did when I was on the bus. When we were dropped off, the woman didn't even respond to her son's goodbyes. She looked through the front window and she held a never-turned-er head. I thought she was scared of me.

“That she knew I was aware of her secret.”

At a four o'clock, according to I got moving again. The energy had been drained from them and his headache was worse. He flinched the slightest noise. I told him if you wanted to look at something different we should go across Rosanna to the market street. From where we were all we had to do was cut through a thin strand of trees to get there. We started to go through them and I expected we would be on the other side of them in less than a minute. Instinctively I started to video

taping again. Something happened. The trees kept going and going and for a second I thought I had made a mistake but I couldn't. I had taken this shortcut dozens and dozens of times as a kid. I didn't remember a path leading into the woods but there was one and we just naturally found ourselves on it. Since I hadn't been in that spot in many years I assumed the path had been somehow formed in the interim. But finally I called out for according to stop walk. He turned around

it to ask me what was wrong. I wasn't sure. The woods went in all directions seeming thicker than I ever remembered. The path split them perfectly. Somehow we had gotten lost or construction of the

years had moved things but construction only took forest away never added it. According asked

other woods bigger than you thought. I said yes and that we should turn around. We started walking back in the other direction. After only 50 yards the path began to bend dramatically to the right. It hadn't been curved before. Nothing could be seen to the trees. They marched back infinitely. I stopped and stared at the path my eyes wide. According looked at me and did not seem surprised at my confusion. He told me if the path was not what it seemed it would do no good

to try to go back the way we came. We would walk and that was all we could do. I protested but he only said again there's nothing we can do but walk. So we went. The trees surrounding us were like any others and the path was nothing more than a neatly beaten line to the grass. We could hear birds overhead but no traffic in the distance. The wind was higher than it had been. After

“curving to the right the path straightened for a time going to the west. I remember the position”

of the sun which was almost entirely hidden by the clouds. The path continued and did not appear from its westerly direction. It stayed that way for what felt like almost a half hour before it changed in any way. I don't recall the various turns it took. They were meaningless. According walked with his head down, resigned. He moved at a steady pace despite the fact that

his breathing was becoming ragged. If I'd been alone I would never have kept going in a relatively

straight line but according had the air of a man it would have been through something like this before and knew that plunging into the woods would be a mistake. We were lost in the middle of a forest where no forest had ever been. It would have been impossible to walk through Robin's song such a steady rate and not emerge into a street or a lawn or anything at all. Time passed. If the sun disappeared over the horizon I would scream for help. I would not be able to control myself.

grassy clearing set of house, a single story white house, overgrown with weeds and vines,

“looking decrepit and erotic. It didn't take me long to recognize this house. It had once belonged to”

Irwin Settle. The man who had murdered a psychiatrist in 1991. This was not where his house should have been. He lived on Kotler Road but here it was. The brown streaks of his doctor's blood were gone but still the place was surrounded by an aura of dread and sickness. We walked around checking out every angle. Cording noticed something on the side of the house. When we got closer we saw that it was a paper flyer, taped up hazardly to a drain pipe that forgot me. It showed a child who'd gone missing

from Robin's song. The paper had been posted by the state police and provided a number to call with information as well as the date the boy asked to be seen. The child's name was Daniel Catrell,

“H9. The photograph was identical, absolutely identical to the one fastened to the end of the wooden”

stick inside my grandfather's horse stable. Because the size of the photo was also the same, one could easily surmise that the one taped to the wooden stick had for whatever reason been cut carefully from one of the state police flyers. Walking closer to the house we could begin to see into the windows. The glass had long since been broken and removed. Standing on my toes I could see that while the exterior of the house had gone to seed, it was true what they said about

the inside. It was clean and untouched. There was no graffiti, no vandalism. The walls and floorers were bare of even cobwebs. It seemed like no one had ever dared enter. I had to remind myself this was not a real house but the prop of some force beyond my understanding that it put it here to haunt us toward the end of our inspection of the property. I spotted something inside one of the rooms, something taped to the wall of what was probably Irwin Settel's bedroom, the layout of the house

suggested it. The dusk shadows obscured this second exhibit and my eyes could not make out what it was,

the camera failed to do so as well no matter how I zoomed in past the window pane and into the room. I got up on the air conditioning unit outside the bedroom window. Standing on it I had to lean way over to my left balancing myself carefully to get close enough to the window to set one elbow on it and push the camera into the room. I got a very shaky shot of the object on the wall and then

“jumped it down. Cording asked me what I had been looking at and I told him it wasn't important.”

He was satisfied with that and then gestured for me to start walking again. And I did, but when Cording thought I hit the record button to start taping again, I actually queued up the

playback to see what I could see. Finally I pieced the image together enough to realize that

what was on the wall was another missing person of the liar, identical in format to the one pleading for help for the missing child, except that this one showed, forced Cording. The photograph depicting his thin, haggard face appeared to be a still frame from me, very videotape I had been shooting that afternoon. The last scene on date on the flyer registered on the tape very clearly. It was the current day October 9, 2005. There was another 15 to 20 minutes of walking on the trail

and then the path simply ended. We were in front of a thin screen of trees and something could be seen through them, houses. We went through the trees and it came out roughly where we had intended to go hours before. We were on Marquette Street. It was as if we had merely been displaced by a few hundred yards. It was twilight and we were both exhausted beyond words. Looking back, I saw the path still there, waiting for us to return if we were insane enough to do it.

At the salmon-man diner, we sat and drank strong coffee as night came. There and our booth in the

be able to forget. It all finally came out uninterrupted in a very calm monotone

“as if he were delivering a lecture to a class of one. He told me of a 10-year-old girl who lived in”

Robin's song 25 years ago and of the freakish twist of faith that had befallen her to turn her into something that was less than human. He told me how his mentor had traveled across the world to Robin's song in order to kill the girl and remove her horrible influence from the town. But over the past few years, Cording had come to doubt entirely that the task had truly been completed. He believed that the girl named Gretchen Plaza had survived somehow and had been

sheltered in Robin's song since that time by people who surely knew how destructive she was.

Cording told me how every act of madness, every unnatural emergence and every corruption of reality and Robin's song was due to plousers' presence and how she had to be found at all costs. He needed help from people he would not tell me about. But without documentation of her effects on the town he would not get it. He told me not just about Gretchen Plaza and Robin's song, but of two other small unnoticed areas in this world where a similar sickness had descended over

people who were unaware that anything was truly wrong. It was obvious that Cording could not rest

“as long as these places continued to fester. I believe the only time Cording ever spent in”

the United States was spent in Robin's song two or three times a year if he had to. He was an old man with the body of someone in his 30s. He reminded me to keep the confidentiality agreement I had signed the beginning of the day and that was when I knew he might not be long for this world. If he was so diluted into thinking that I or anyone could possibly go to my grave without confessing the events of that day to a single person, his mind was not operating logically.

I wondered how many other people he had unwittingly brought into his secrets. I realized what I had to do to bring the night to an end and so I did it. I used the payphone inside the restaurant to call my grandfather. When he answered, I concocted the most plausible lie I could to get him out of the house. I asked him to drive well outside of town to rescue me from car trouble. Of course he offered to help me. When it was done, I went back to the table

recording was waiting. He said, "Let's go." With the night came temperatures in the forties. We walked to the emptying streets and passed only a single person on the way to our destination, a young girl walking our dog. We stopped only once after that to buy a flashlight. Cording hadn't expected to be in town this late. I got the impression that it's atmosphere weakened him. So greatly that his body could only tolerate

a limited amount of time there, like a diver needing eventually to come up for air. But where a diver could return to the surface right away, Cording needed weeks even months to decompress after a day in Robinson. I'm not sure exactly when we got to the edge of my grandfather's property. We walked up the winding path that led to the house of total darkness. Cording trained at the flashlight edifice. He did not trust fully that my grandfather had left, and so he moved with

the great care, trying to spot the place where the truck had been parked before we could be seen. The truck really was gone. We had the property to ourselves. As scared as I was, looking at all the trees surrounding the acreage made it even worse, they hid expanses of woods

deep enough to become lost in. I knew that my grandfather always kept his doors unlocked,

in all the time I had lived with him, no one had ever entered his house unwanted. But now it was different. The front and back doors were not open. Cording pulled on them very gently, not wanting to make any sound. To ask me if there were some other way into the place he had to get very close to me into whisper almost in my ear. I shuddered to have him almost touch me. At the back of the house there was a window into the cellar,

“set into the cement foundation. It was the best way in. It's lock had rusted away years before,”

and I thought it might just slide open. Once again we were reported. The lock had at some point

foot, then having no other choice of action he broke the window in with a single kick. He put a

“shirt back on and shivered a little on the cold. We climbed carefully into the cellar. The window”

was just barely large enough for us. When my feet touched the cement floor and I let myself drop

fully in, I felt criminal and unclean. The first thing Cording did was reach back up through the window

and pull the video camera down to us. The darkness was total, and he had to hold the flashlight in the camera so I could find the record button. Then he pointed the flashlight beam in front of us. In one corner of the room there was a water heater and the old bureau I remembered dragging down the steps about five years before. Beside the bureau was something odd. It was a pair of shoes sitting on the cement floor, sneakers, very small ones, beaten and dirty. We moved closer to them,

“and I saw that they must have belonged to a child. Before I could dwell on them,”

Cording had moved the flashlight to the wall opposite. There, drawn in very large blocky chalk letters, were four words, something like hand-tainous, crick, guillera, l. Cording moved the ray of the flashlight past them so quickly that he must have expected

those letters to be there. Their image was in my mind one second had gone the next, burned there.

Each letter was more than a foot high and done with great care. Cording moved closer to the wall and trained at the light on a roof index card that had been taped there at eye level. The index cards were old and yellowed, and on each had been drawn a simple, featureless

“human stick figure, one per card. They were lined up in a row, six of them, beginning at the”

far right edge of the strange words on the cement. A card table had been set up on the side of the basement opposite where the bureau was, he stepped over to it. Now I could no longer feel the cold air outside the cellar touching my back. On top of the card table was an old cassette tape recorder, as we watched, the recording wheels moved slowly round. A sound inside the cellar was being taped, but no effort had been made to hide the recorder. The side it was a shoebox

full of cassettes. Cording lifted a couple of them up to my camera, one said stage one, and another just had a date on it from a previous year. He set the tapes back in the box very gently. When we had seen all there was to see in the cellar, there was a noise from above us. It was a shifting sound like something being moved across a floor and then footsteps. We froze where we were standing above us. After a moment we heard the footsteps again,

creaking in the ceiling, moving the rest steps and stopping. I began to sweat.

Finally, according moved toward the old wooden stairwell that led up to the first floor of the house.

He put his hand on the railing and stopped listening. There came to us the sound of a female human voice singing softly in an African dialect. The elderly voice I had heard on video tape back on a cotton branch trail. It was muffled by distance in the floor boards above our heads, but we could hear it all the same. We listened and did not move. It's sang for about 30 seconds, seeming to back in us and then stopped. There was only the sound of the wind outside. Almost

immediately after that there was a different, very distinct, deep, sharp female voice from just beyond the top of the stairs behind the closed door that separated the two floors. It said just one word and an accusing, angry voice, "Liar!" I jerked back so severely that the camera lost its focus and a sputtering sound of complete terror escaped my throat. I had reached my breaking point and was in shock, all rational thoughts suspended. That one word was meant for recording.

slowness, placing his feet right in the middle of the steps who was not to make them a creek.

“He turned to me in the dark and it was for two words. Stay here.”

Carrying the flashlight and leaving me behind, recording one of the stairs. I started to back instinctively away from the staircase when the recording reached the top of it. He turned to the flashlight off and I could just barely see his silhouette above me. I shut down the camera and said it on the floor beside me. I'm not sure how I was conscious enough to make that decision. I heard the door opening and being pushed outward. According moved a few steps forward

and then he was out of sight entirely. In my fear I moved backwards across the cellar to stand

beneath the window he'd come through. At least there was air into the faint sounds of the wind

and the trees outside. Beneath the window was where I would wait for recording to return.

“I pushed my camera up and out into the grass then stood rigid in the dark.”

What happened two minutes later as I calured in the basement is something I can't and won't describe. I've used these pages to tell of what I could but some words can't leave my fingertips because they are so hideous and so unbelievable. No human imagination could conceive of the images I saw of the terrible struggle that recording engaged in inside my grandfather's house. I will only say that the fight came down the stairs as recording either tried to escape or

tried to lower his enemy down to a place where I might be able to help him but I could. My nerve failed me as soon as I heard the door crash open above and two sets of footsteps rush down the wooden stairs. When I caught just a glimpse of someone or something larger than recording the through the gloom, I leapt up into the window desperately and dragged myself out of the house scraping my stomach and my arms badly and my shrieking effort to get away.

When my hips got caught I wrenched them free and felt grass ripped in the waste of my jeans tearing my flesh. Once fully outside I grabbed my camera off the ground. I ran toward the woods 20 yards behind my grandfather's property. The thought that those woods

might mutate and change to engulf me never entering my frenzied mind. I didn't look back.

I heard one last sound of something heavy, body slamming into a cement wall that I was gone, running blindly through the trees, branches cutting my face. The geography of Robinson remained rational for me as I fled. Within three minutes I reached the road and kept running. It wasn't far to the commuter train station, which was unattended and dimly lit. I got onto a waiting train car with my return ticket and collapsed alone inside. Tears and sweat were pouring down my face.

I was bleeding from dozens of small cuts but I felt pain. Blessedly, the train left almost immediately, taking me far away. But just before it began to move, I caught sight of a solitary figure on the tile platform. A woman walking along very slowly, and with seemingly no thought toward boarding the train. She was holding one arm as if injured. As the rear car I was in rolled, slowly past her, I saw that she had long, straight black hair.

I jerked my head away from the window before she could see me. I spent the rest of that trip trying to bind my wounds with the sleeves I ripped from my shirt.

“I've tried several times to write down what I think I saw in that cellar, but the words always fail me.”

The tapes I shot that day have stayed in a bottom drawer unloved. Once I dialed courting's phone number, but it had been disconnected. And I have not contacted my grandfather, not at all. I've begun to subscribe to Robin Song's local newspaper. Every night before I go to bed, I scan it briefly to take note of the missing person's cases that spring up.

And every other unusual current is the vandalism, whether damage, freak behavior from someone passing through from out of town, or isolated and forgettable incidents of violence. Last week, the front page carried a story that riveted Robin Song for several days. An independent film producer named Trent, who had not so long ago supervised the shooting

stabbed his wife to death as she slept. The police found him sleeping naked in the woods. No motive for the killing could be cleaned.