Now Entering Dale View, NY

A few of my stories are all based in the same town, Dale View. I've been writing interconnecting stories of mild horror for awhile. This is a story of a little girl walking through the town.

   A little girl no less than ten years old stands at the town line of Dale View, and debates whether to cross in or not.  The city of Dale View was like a slowly dying music box. The tune hypnotically started but slowly lost it’s strength and unwound into a contorted séance that not even the devil could stomach. Worst of all, this story takes place in the dead of winter.  

From the girl’s perspective Dale View appeared to be encased by a thin layer of glass of a snow globe. She could almost trace her hand along the glassy ridge. The town appeared perfectly nestled at the foot of the Adirondack Mountains. And for all intensive purposes the town was perfect. Several veins of smoke rise from chimneys. The evergreens are white with snow. The streets have yet to be plowed clear. The sidewalks haven’t been shoveled, nor would they be tonight. The town is pure, everything is level for once. Not a single footprint marks the sacred ground. But here comes a ten year old, without adult supervision, no doubt she’ll stomp through the pure snow, create outlines of angels, and destroy any chance of the snow looking perfect. For this Dale View fears the girl more than anything in the world.

  With a final stand the girl decides she came this far. 

She crosses over into the town into Dale View. The town shudders for only a second. An intruder has set foot on sacred ground. Normally the town wasn’t so picky about tourists, but on a snowy night in February, the ground only wondered her motives.  Something wasn’t right with this….

                                                            Outsider.

   The evergreens seem to bend around the edges of the snow globe. Snow had not just been glittered on the tree limbs; they had been unmercifully broken under the weight of the fresh powder. The Outsider’s bare feet dug deep into the blistering cold snow.  She headed down what she had assumed was the sidewalk admiring the sleeping village. Most of the lights were out for the night. A few lights above the stores are on, all of them cheap flats for both the storeowners and immigrants looking for a fresh start in a dying town.

Despite the snow storm The Sea Crimp is still open for business. The tavern’s name is a subtle hint at one of Dale View’s many ghost stories and urban legends enfolding a gang of marauders being tracked down by a bloodthirsty crimp. The bartender watches the snow fall from the window as one of his customers drops dead of a heart attack. It was only a matter of time. 

   The Outsider carries on past the depressing tavern. 

   Next-door things were slightly chipper. A shipment of one hundred used classic novels had arrived at With Pipe and Book. Tracey, the owner marvels at her new stack of loot. Each book would be read twice before she sold them. Tracey lugged the box into her second floor flat, poured herself a glass of bourbon, and fell asleep mid page turn.   

   The smell of tacos wafts past the bookstore. The girl tracked the smell of the tacos to the last store in the village. A nearing retirement couple had perfected the six cheese ultra burrito just in time for the first thaw. Sadly no one would be leaving the warmth of their couches tonight to get a so called ultra burrito. The depressing note here entails the wife living, while the husband’s shattered ribcage pokes through his skin, blood streaks across his face, and he stalks the streets for fresh meat for a brained human burrito.  

A snowplow tears through the snowy mountains of chaos, pushing them aside safely. There would be only one minor fender bender on the account of black ice. Which was partially the snow plows fault for not salting the spot. When Chuck, the driver had been distinctively told to do so.  Who much later would take a towel rod through his head. The attacker was only trying to survive in a horror-ridden world that Chuck had become apart of.  

The Outsider passes several warped signs showcasing the lost art of clairvoyance, with the proper balance of experimental potions, and of course educated in tarot card readings. Several run down houses leaned on each other hoping for a group sense of warmth. These houses are the soul reason for the veins of smoke being sacrificed into the sky. The Outsider continued on, knowing full well what her psychic time line entailed, no fraud could tell her otherwise. She had controlled and shaped her own fate since age seven.    

The Outsider crept into the woods unnoticed. Every single one of the trees had been fighting the good fight, without a single shred of leaf thread armor. The trees were more powerless against the raging winter than a newborn without a pacifier.  

   Far beyond the outskirts of town rests a small cabin, the owner sleeps soundly to the rhythm of snow trickling against the roof and his fire crackling. He tries his hardest not to choke on his dreams. A ripped and burned page had been nailed above the cabin door. A title was written in type set, A Rotting Life. The outsider’s eyes grew wide and she quickly turned away.  

   Seeing the cabin The Outsider is more scared than she had ever been in her life. She circles back as fast as she can. The house quietly chuckles as she runs faster and faster out of the woods. She would never be able to outrun the sleeping antagonist.   

Closer still looms a greater terror. A lumbering mansion rests just as soundly as the man in the cabin. The mansion sits under three straight months of relentless snow. The mansion was the first permanent settlement of Dale View. Not to mention, the halls are full of hyper spiritual activity. An even darker activity is brewing in the basement in the shape of one of the angriest spirits that has ever been forced to decay in this earthly dimension.

 The Outsider quickens her pace, but the snow holds onto her every chance it gets. 

Seven doors down the street, a boy begins a painful transformation. One that would grant him life but would destroy his mother. The boy howls into the night as his father tries to hold the boys sanity. His bones crack and fuse into something much more sinister.

   Hoping a fence, the outsider cuts through a yard, and finds herself one street over.  The boy’s best friend slash sidekick has dreams and visions of being invisible.  His dreams would come true one day, whether he liked it or not. Four teeth were smashed from his mouth by the time he was twelve. Not because he was the sporting type, rather he was bait for bullies. And he had a loud mouth knack job for pissing off the grimmest of bullies. The boy would grow up and disappear, but would continue to have his teeth punched out and his bones broken as he attempted to rid the streets of the black art of voodoo from New Orleans, a city that had grown infested with soul snatchers, spell casters, and blazingly loud Stratocasters.  

She ran toward the heart of town. A lonely man took a drag from a cigarette as eh stood in the town band shell trying to get out of the wind. Behind the man looms town hall. A desperate and frazzled time traveler’s sizzling bones would suddenly appear on these steps nineteen years into the future on this very day.     

The outsider let out a scream that was never answered. The town was destroying itself from with in, but it was trying to hold itself together the best it could.

   The town whispers, “She’s not from here. She needs to leave.” Whipping snow into the outsider’s sore face, the wind screams a banshee’s inharmonic tone. The outsider stands at the edge of town. The historical society is going through its first renovation since its construction in 1927. The curator is away in Brazil, hunting down an amulet, which belongs to a mysterious group that he is apart of. His bones twist and contort, but it’s in an ordered rhythm that could be perfectly backed up with well-timed jazz. The curator momentarily reflects the image of a composed monster with a thousand rows of teeth.

   The Outsiders practically flaying away from her body as she’s forced out and into exile, as the town regains its sleepy composure and rests for the night.

 

Author's Note

A Rotting Life is the name for my first unpublished work, that is referenced in this story.

Reviews

[Delmar Cooper]

I read through the first three or four paragraphs. The story is a massive information dump. You have the idea and the material to create a wonderful, entertaing tale. Why not write this story with the notion that a reader is actually involved in the process?