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The town of Fort Eugene has always been one of intrigue just on the name alone as there has never been a war fought there nor a single person ever named Eugene in its meek population. But if you were to venture into this sleepy little town on the rocky coast you’d find that’s where the intrigue ends, for Fort Eugene is as sleepy as they come; never a scandal has plagued the people that live there, no excitement other than when the circus passes through every summer has stirred them.
Though like every small town, entertainment is needed, and like every small town that entertainment usually is found not just in the annual circus, whose carnies stay at the inns and make the local children laugh from their own front porches, but in the unknown. In the case of Fort Eugene, where everyone knows everyone and the outsiders are friends so long as they’re kind, the house on top of Widow’s Peak is where their entertainment lies. This is because the owner of the small cottage that overlooks the sea never shows his face, and therefore no one knows a thing about him, which is most unusual for a place like Fort Eugene, and is why they saddle the poor stranger with their gossip and their rumors and their ill-placed humor.
Here is what the locals know about the man that lives up on Widow’s Peak, as told by the grocer’s delivery boy who brings him his goods every week and sometimes also brings his school-age friends along to spy:
He’s young, perhaps not yet thirty. Or maybe he’s older than the town itself?
He has golden hair that curls at the ends like a girl’s, or it’s short and black, or maybe he’s entirely bald.
His skin is mottled and gray but also perfectly smooth but sometimes it’s cracked like a China doll’s and oozes something foul.
He keeps flowers and herbs and taxidermy cats in all of his windows and speaks to them like children because his wife died in childbirth (or maybe he killed her?).
He has effigies made up for all of the townsfolk that he pokes with sewing needles and that’s why the butcher almost lost his hand that one time, and he keeps them all strung up in the cellar next to his jars of exotic fruits he brought back from his travels to foreign lands.
He talks like an actor on the stage.
He doesn’t speak a lick of English.
He’s kind.
He’s cold.
He’s not a man at all but actually a houseful of spinsters.
He’s tall.
He’s short.
He’s—
Well. It’s safe to say that the word of the grocer’s boy and his friends got quite lost in translation as time went on, and once the locals got their desperate hands on these accounts, whether the man up on Widow’s Peak was ever actually seen or spoken to at all, they twisted them up and turned him into someone to project their fears and desires upon, an unfortunate outlet. No matter who in town you may ask, he’s someone different to everyone and yet no one is brave enough to venture up the stone path that winds its way around the hill by the sea to find out the truth of the matter. This is Fort Eugene’s only flaw.
There is one person who is going to discover the truth though, accidental as it may be. This is because the person slipped upon the rocks that cover the beach at the precise time of night when the man goes down to collect seashells. His name is Frank, and he’s newly a part of the circus’s company, which arrived early that morning, and he decided to take a walk along the beach before the rain started, but that didn’t stop the rocks from being slick already from the sea spray. The man from up on Widow’s Peak saw the blood that covered the rocks beneath the stranger’s head and the dark tattoos that covered his neck and hands and decided to take him home instead of that day’s collection of shells. He carried him up the stone path carefully and brought him inside where it was warm and dry and laid him upon the bed he sleeps in every night. He admired the way his lips parted in his state of unconsciousness and how he was missing one shoe and his sock was a whimsical pattern beneath until the fact that there was a person in his home started to make his stomach clench, and he left to go fetch supplies.
Frank awakens in a stranger’s bed atop the blankets, the room lit by a single candle burning on the windowsill, his clothes oddly stiff and a thick bandage around his head. He has no memory of how he got here or why his head is bandaged and aching something fierce; the last thing he remembers is telling his friends after they'd all finished eating supper that he was going for a walk because he hadn’t seen the sea in a long while. And now here he is, lost and seemingly injured.
Rain pounds at the roof and the windows, a comforting barrage in an otherwise uncomfortable situation. Frank pushes himself up in the small bed slowly, like any sudden move might trip some invisible security system. He touches the back of his head to find it sore, and takes his hand away to find his fingers glistening and red. He’s about to call out when a mass of fur jumps onto the bed from the floor and he gasps. It’s only a cat though, orange with huge green eyes and a freckled nose.
“Hello there,” Frank says, pleasantly surprised, and the cat puts a single paw upon his knee as if to reciprocate the greeting. “I suppose you can’t tell me where I might be.” The cat mewls and Frank hums. “Thought so. Oh well, hopefully my death isn’t too painful.”
The door creaks open, letting in more warm light from beyond, and the figure that peaks their head in is silhouetted by it. Frank can’t make out their features, and he squints hard enough his aching head begins to ache harder. The cat at his feet jumps down from the bed with a more enthusiastic cry and squeezes from the room. The figure doesn’t move, still and quiet as a sentry, but Frank can hear them breathing. These moments are very tense for both men involved.
“Hello?” Frank ventures, raising his voice slightly to be heard over the distant rumbling of thunder. The door promptly shuts, leaving Frank alone again. He decides no murderer owns a cat and that the person is just a kind stranger that rescued him after some unfortunate accident, so he tries again, this time with: “I’d rather not bleed on your pillow, unless it’s all the same to you.”
The door opens again, this time wider, and Frank can see now that his rescuer is a man, and he has a cat on his shoulder, a different one than the one that just greeted Frank. This man doesn’t say anything, nor his cat, he just comes in and begins lighting all the lanterns spread about the room with a sort of nervous fervor until Frank is able to see that he is young and quite beautiful. He has hair as dark as the night outside that curls around his ears and round cheeks slightly flushed. His eyes, which look like they may be some shade of green, are surrounded by long eyelashes that cast spiderweb-like shadows over his feminine face from all the small sources of light.
Wordlessly he sits down at Frank’s side, the straw-stuffed mattress bowing under their shared weight, and places a large, warm hand on Frank’s shoulder to guide him forward. Frank goes obligingly, enjoying the slightly spicy smell coming from this quiet stranger that might be cinnamon, or maybe cloves. He unwraps the bandage from around Frank’s head and brushes gentle fingers through his hair.
“I need better lighting,” the man says, surprising Frank both with the higher pitch of his voice and the fact that he spoke at all. Though he supposes someone who looks so much like a girl should sound like one too.
He gets up from the bed, all the while the small cat on his shoulder never wavering from its perch, and flitters into the hall with the soiled bandage in hand like he can’t bear another second in the small confines of his own bedroom while Frank is occupying it. Frank is only slightly put off by this behavior; he never was one to judge others, not when he’s spent the majority of his short life working amongst freakshows, both behind the scenes and not. So he gets out of the bed with confidence, as he appreciates those that put the strange in stranger.
Stranger still he’s only wearing one shoe, and he wiggles his socked toes against the cold floor. Between having one less boot and what seems to be a mild head injury, going down the hall in an unfamiliar house to find the equally unfamiliar living room is quite the spectacle; he lurches more than if he were in one of those fun houses they sometimes set up at the circus, with the tilting floor and misshapen looking glasses, and by the time he finds the man sitting comfortably at one end of the sofa, he’s nearly out of breath and almost totally unmoored. Frank pauses in the doorway to regain his senses, and as the world around him finally stills, he finds this small cottage he’s been brought to teeming with cats. Apart from the little black and white one that is seemingly always attached to the man’s shoulder like a parrot, and the orange one that greeted Frank when he awoke and who’s now sniffing at his sock, they’re everywhere. They’re sitting in the windows and on the tables and sprawled in corners licking their paws like they haven’t a houseguest.
“Come sit,” says the man suddenly in his high, sweet voice. “If — if you’d like.”
Frank hobbles over and sits across from the man, who is wringing his hands nervously in his lap like he hadn’t a clue what to do with someone like Frank. He decides to help him out, to break the ice, I suppose. He asks him a straightforward: “What happened?”
The man looks momentarily surprised, as if he wasn’t expecting Frank to be able to form sentences. That’s alright, it wouldn’t be the first time he was taken for an imbecile, and he’s sure it won’t be the last. The man wrings his hands harder, turning the pale skin a yellowish white. The small cat upon his shoulder makes a small noise and flicks its tail against his lips as if to urge him on. “Oh! Um, well, you see — There was an accident. You had! an accident. I supposed you slipped on the rocks.”
That does make quite a bit of sense, doesn't it? Frank touches the back of his head again and watches, from the corner of his eye, as the man stares at his exposed hand. “I suppose you might be right.” He has the urge to take his coat off entirely for him. It’s getting hot in here anyway. “Well. Thank you for coming to my rescue. Shall I see myself out?” A familiar tug in the pit of Frank’s stomach, like that of a guitar strum, warns him to get away before he lands himself in trouble. Fort Eugene is one of the circus’s favorite stops, and he can’t be ruining that for everyone. There’s only so much strangeness a person can marvel at before they’re calling the authorities on you for indecency.
“You’re leaving?” The man jumps from the couch before Frank can even stand. Frank doesn’t know this yet, but this man before him has never had anyone in his home before, and the initial shock has started to give way to an intrigued sort of wariness, the intrigue being a touch stronger than the wariness. He wants Frank to stay, and luckily he doesn’t need to flounder for an excuse. “But — but it’s so late, and the weather! If you leave now — you’re liable to fall again.”
The man makes some very good points, Frank observes as he looks out the window and into the night. It’s best to stay put when you’re in an unfamiliar area, though he only wishes he told himself that before he wandered off after supper. “Well, I don’t want to impose…” He mustn’t seem too eager though; his mother taught him better than that.
“No imposing!” the man insists, flashing his small, white teeth. “Make yourself — you know — at home.” And with one last anxious flutter of his hands, disappears around the corner with the black and white cat now laying around his neck like a scarf.
Frank once again does as he’s told, having no preconceived notions about the man that lives up on Widow’s Peak, and begins taking his coat off before half a dozen glowing eyes. In fact he doesn’t even know he’s on Widow’s Peak, or that the man he is in the presence of has any reputation at all.
The longer said man is gone the more Frank’s tired eyes roam his living space. It’s small and cozy, with a fire blazing steadily on from one end. Drawings and lithographs hang from the dark walls, and plants of varying shapes and sizes fill in any otherwise empty spaces. Frank sees knickknacks strewn about and shallow bowls of potpourri and crystals on every surface like the ones the circus’s resident palmist wears around her neck. A cat with long white fur ambles over and rubs itself against Frank’s leg, and he reaches down to stroke at it with the hand whose fingers aren’t stained with his blood. When the friendly cat meanders away, becoming more interested in a frayed yellow string trailing from a basket of yarn at the base of a standing lamp, Frank unlaces his other boot, tucking it politely away, and stands. The room only spins a little when he’s upright, which is good considering he’d rather take in the space with clear eyes. Upon his short circuit he finds this is not the home of an ordinary man, but that of someone that could very easily fit in with his circus’s company. Next to the bowls of potpourri he finds small animal bones, feathers, butterflies in frames on the walls next to the landscape paintings. Herbs that don’t look nor smell familiar hang in bundles from the rafters, and what he took to be candles burning on the fireplace mantle turns out to be vases of incense.
The gentle, domestic noises from the kitchen cease, and a moment later the man appears with a mug in each hand. His eyebrows, as dark as if they were corked on but a dozen times neater, are raised almost to his hairline. (To his widow’s peak, if you’re a fan of humor.) His cat, no longer lounging across his shoulders like a stole, comes padding over to sit on the floor beneath the table. “Tea. I made some! If you’d like it.”
Frank can’t help the smile that overtakes his face. “You’re a witch.” He’s always enjoyed being in the presence of a witch — or any sort of being who claims they are magical. He enjoys their words and soothing hands and strange decks of cards. Though he’s never met a male witch before, and this fact is turning his unfortunate accident on the beach into a happy one. Do male witches follow the same practices as their female counterparts? Worship the same divine beings?
But the man is looking at him with terrified eyes now, and says, as if reciting from a speech: “I don’t know what you mean.” He carries the tea over and sets the mugs down with slightly shaking hands on the table the little black and white cat is sitting under.
“It’s alright, you don’t need to be afraid around me,” Frank amends, and sits down when the excited beating of his heart makes him dizzy. “I’m with the circus, a part of the rarities exhibition.”
The man looks less frightened, though still not entirely convinced. Luckily he sits down at his end of the couch instead of running away like Frank was beginning to worry he’d do. “That doesn’t mean much to me.”
No, Frank supposes it wouldn’t. He’s seen plenty of time in all the years he’s toured with travelling circuses, people in the company turning against one another for being too much of a, well, a freak. It never made sense to Frank — they were all strange and extraordinary in their own ways — and it’s the largest reason he has yet to stay on with a company more than a couple seasons.
The man continues, rather shyly: “Your circus has — has been coming through this town every summer since before I lived here and, well,” this next part he says quickly into his mug of tea, “you’re the first person I’ve talked to.”
This surprises Frank, and he reaches for his mug as well. He hasn’t been with this particular company long, but they seem a lively bunch, and the man on the couch next to him seems friendly enough. When he takes a sip of the steaming tea, it’s bitter on his tongue and rather unpleasant. Whatever he was going to say next vacates his brain entirely. “Ack! Sorry — Not to offend you or anything, but this is the worst cup of tea I’ve ever tasted. Do you have any coffee?”
The man looks a single muscle twitch away from actually cracking a smile, and his pale cheeks redden with the effort of not seeming amused. “It’s — Um, well, it’s ginseng and arrowroot and some other things. Good for immunity so you don’t catch cold or a — an infection. Oh! I nearly forgot about your head wound!”
What Frank didn’t notice, as he’s sucking the acrid taste of this strange man’s tea from his teeth, are the medical supplies on the table. At least he thinks them to be for medicinal purposes, as the only thing that would lead him to believe they’re of the sort is the roll of bandages.
“Could you — turn around? If you don’t mind?”
Frank foolishly thinks, for a brief moment, that the man is asking him to turn around because he’s embarrassed, but then he remembers that — yes — the wound is at the back of his head. He does as he’s told, maneuvering himself on the old lumpy couch until he’s nearly straddling the arm. He makes uncomfortable eye contact with a blue-tinted cat that’s dozing beneath the window. Before he can ask what the man is going to be doing to him (he’s let witches have their way with him before and it’s rarely had favorable results — One time he went to one in a previous company for a mild earache and left her tent not being able to speak for a fortnight!), a warm, wet cloth is being pressed into his hair. The water runs down the back of his neck and into the collar of his shirt and Frank shivers.
“Sorry,” the man murmurs, and even a single word is stilted by his nervous stutter.
“When you said I’m the first person you’ve talked to,” Frank starts, a notion coming to him, “you did mean the circus?”
Ah, now we’re getting to it.
The warm cloth is taken away as quickly as it had appeared, leaving Frank damp and shivering more. While he waits for the man’s answer patiently, he listens to him crush something methodically with a mortar and pestle, the soft scraping mingling with the steady rain outside in such a way that he could fall asleep right here. But then the man’s fingers are in his hair again, this time spreading some sort of sticky paste on his sore wound. Frank expects him to take his hands away, but he doesn’t, not entirely. One of his hands stays cradling the base of his skull while the other, as Frank can see from his peripheral vision, picks up a squat, clear crystal from the table. His hand and the crystal disappear from view, and a moment later he can hear the man murmuring from behind him, and his soft, low words cause an entirely different sort of chill to ripple through his muscles.
When the incoherent blessing or such is over and the crystal has been returned to the table, the man finally says, “You’re the — the first person in the whole of Fort Eugene I’ve spoken with. Or had in my home.”
I don’t even live in this town, Frank thinks as the man picks up the bandages next. “The first? How?”
“The only ones that have ventured up here are the grocer’s boy and his friends every week. And they only stay long enough to point and whisper.” Though he doesn’t stutter this time, his voice is quite sad. Frank doesn’t even know this man, but he gets the urge to find the grocer’s boy and his friends and give them a piece of his mind.
“Well don’t you ever venture down?” Frank asks as the bandage is wrapped tightly around his head.
“I do, to the beach,” he says, close to Frank’s ear. “I collect shells and such along the shore each evening. That’s how I found you.”
When the warmth upon his back from the stranger’s closeness disappears entirely, Frank turns back around on the couch, happy to be looking at his cherubic face again instead of the wall. “What’s keeping you?” he asks, though he thinks he already knows the answer. And he knows it better than anyone in this town.
But the man doesn’t reply, probably thinking the same thing he is as his light eyes roam languidly over Frank’s tattooed arms, the dark ink that covers his hands and disappears up into the short sleeves of his shirt. He busies himself instead with his crystals, and, probably sensing some sort of distress from its owner, the small black and white cat jumps up and resumes its post upon his shoulder. He seems to visibly relax some.
“Does it have a name?” Frank decides to ask next, and the look the man turns on him is one of genuine pleasure.
“Savanna. Like the desert.” The little cat looks at Frank too then, and he can see up close that the pupil of its left eye is larger than the right and misshapen, like a blot of ink. “Don’t tell the others, but she’s my favorite. She was the runt of the litter. That’s why she’s so small, you see.”
“I see,” Frank echoes, and reaches out to rub a finger along Savanna’s cheek. His hand ends up brushing against the man’s stubbled jaw, and he pulls it away quickly with a clearing of his throat. “She’s cute,” he says, at the same time the man blurts, “I’m an orphan.”
They both rear back, like neither one of them can quite believe what just escaped the man’s hesitant mouth. “Uh — close your eyes?” he hurries out, and Frank does so he doesn’t embarrass the man further. Despite the mishaps he’s experienced with witches in the past, he finds himself trusting this one. Perhaps it’s because he’s a man — Frank’s always enjoyed being in the presence of men more anyhow. The one on the couch next to him speaks while shadows pass before his closed eyes. “Forgive me. For my — manners. Um. My mother and father both died from smallpox when I was still in school, and it took my younger brother not long after.”
He pauses, and Frank feels it safe to say: “I’m sorry.”
A nervous laugh escapes him, and it plumes over Frank’s face. The man whispers a few lines of something that can’t be English and continues. “You would think after a loss so large at such a young age one would join the priesthood. But I wanted to speak to my family again, and the only apparitions I would see if I became a man of the Church would be that of the Blessed Virgin.”
“So you chose spirit boards over the Bible.”
The man laughs again. “In a way, in a way.” The shadows are replaced by a burning smell, but Frank keeps his eyes closed. “I learned very quickly people don’t take too kindly to — to my kind. And I have everything I need here — so long as the grocer’s delivery boy doesn’t lose interest.”
“Aren’t you lonely?” Frank asks. That all-consuming feeling of calm starts to wash over him again, and he finds himself wilting like an over-watered flower. He wonders, vaguely, what o’clock it is, and if his company is missing him. At this very moment he wouldn’t mind if he missed every show they had planned for Fort Eugene.
“I have my cats,” the man tells him, with a false sense of enthusiasm in his voice. He speaks quietly. “The townspeople always abandon their cats at the bottom of the hill because they know I’m willing to take them in.” Bitterly, he adds: “I’ll bet they think I cook them up in pies.” He doesn’t need to communicate with anyone in the town to know that, and he’s almost correct in it; that is one of the rumors that’s surrounded him.
Frank’s head sinks into his chest, but somehow he’s able to continue as part of the conversation. “I would tell you that not everyone is the same and that you should … give them a chance, but we both know that would be a lie.”
“People fear what they don’t understand.” Has the man from up on Widow’s Peak read this story before? Those words sound awfully familiar.
“That’s why I ran away and joined the circus.” Frank finds himself falling forward, and falling right into the man’s hands, so big and sturdy. He must be well past the point of pure nirvana, because he opens his eyes and immediately kisses the man right upon his mouth.
Now the man doesn’t remember the last time he kissed someone, or when he was the one doing the kissing, and although he’s terrified (he’s been terrified since the moment he found this tattooed enigma unconscious on the beach, but he’s been good at hiding that terror so far, he thinks), he finds himself melting into the kiss. But just as soon as the man is kissing back, Frank is pulling away entirely, far enough away that the man’s hands fall from their bracing hold on his shoulders.
Now it’s Frank’s turn to be terrified — horrified, even. His head, which was starting to feel better with whatever the man was doing to him, starts throbbing like it has a heartbeat of its own. “I’m so—”
The man, whose cat is climbing down his back to give them some privacy, grabs the front of Frank’s shirt so he can kiss him again. Well! Frank was not expecting this when he decided to take a walk along the shore this evening. But he is surely not complaining — Perhaps this is part of the man’s practice. Perhaps kissing heals and he just never knew it. His mouth is hot and sweet despite the horrendous tea he served them, and he kisses clumsily, like a teenager. They kiss until one of the cats startles them apart with a sudden, random cry for attention.
They’re left breathing heavily and in each other’s personal spaces, and the man lets go his grip on Frank’s shirt like the fabric physically burns his hands. His face is as white as bone. He opens and closes his mouth a few times like a gaping fish, but Frank finds his own words crawling up his throat too quick to swallow back down.
“I have a friend! in the company. He’s a fire-eater — I don’t know how he doesn’t light himself up every night with the head of hair he’s got—”
“What?” the man interrupts, suddenly looking as though he’s unable to understand a word Frank is saying.
He swallows, catching his breath; he can still taste the man on his tongue like a tobacco. “He’s a good friend. You would like him, I think.” When the man is still looking at him strangely, tongue darting out of his mouth periodically like a snake’s to lick at his bottom lip, he puts a hand on the couch in the space between them and says: “I think you should join us.”
“The circus?”
He nods.
“I don’t — I don’t want to be part of some sideshow attraction—”
“We have witches in our company!” Frank tells him, almost desperately. He knows near nothing about this man, not even his name, and yet he’s afraid of never seeing him again once the circus moves on. Or worse yet, only seeing him once every year. He’s only kissed him the once and yet he can’t imagine never doing it again. “You’ll be welcome, I’ll see to it. And you could bring your cats — We all have pets, even I have a dog, a mangy old thing. You could see the country.”
“I…” The man looks around his living room with pained eyes. “I’m not sure I care to see the country.”
“You’re serious?”
He looks at Frank, swiveling his head on his pretty neck; the knob of his throat bobs nervously. “Why would I want to be paid to have people like the grocer’s boy gawk at me all day long? I do it for — for free! Right here in the comfort of my own, stationary home while all the pointing fingers stay far away at the bottom of the hill.”
Frank is taken aback, and left feeling ashamed, as the man makes a very good point. He still wants to argue, to tell him that some people haven’t the luxury of using magic to obtain everything they need and then hiding themselves away, that some people take what they’ve been shunned for and make use of it in order to survive — but he’s tired and hurting and he doesn’t want to ruin a friendship before it even has a chance to blossom. And besides, it’s like he said: He doesn’t know this man. So Frank swallows his pride, a feat worthy of earning him another exhibit in the circus, and says: “I apologize. That was out of line of me.”
The man begins wringing his hands again. “I’d have nothing to show anyway. I don’t perform miracles or do parlor tricks. I — I make tonics for my cats when they’re ill, and put blessings upon my garden if the weather isn’t kind to it. I use crystals for my own well-being — and on you, now, I suppose. Don’t you see? I would be useless! Unless every customer wouldn’t mind a cup of tea for their troubles.”
Frank finds himself laughing. “Oh, please, they’d be shutting us down.”
The man smiles at him, shyly. “So you understand? I appreciate the offer — I do! But I don’t read palms or look into glass balls. I haven’t even been able to make contact with my family in all the years I’ve been trying.” The smile turns sad. “And yet I’m still just a touch too odd for modern society.”
“Who needs modern society?” Frank offers, trying to cheer him up. “I gave up on it a long time ago, that’s why I take their money now. But I do understand. Though you wouldn’t have to be part of the show, you know. You could just … tag along.”
“Tag along?”
“Sure! You know—” Frank shrugs. “Do our laundry. Make ointments for our rashes. You’d be surprised at how fast sickness can spread among a bunch of freaks.”
The man lets out a hearty chuckle at that, going red in the face again, and rubs at the back of his neck. “I’ve always wanted to be someone’s mother.”
“And you could! if you decide to come. But really what I’m saying is that you could make some friends. Ones that respect you.” He tips his head. “For the most part. This seems like a good bunch I’ve picked this time though, even if none of them have ever bothered to knock on your door. I would enjoy having you.”
“Um, it seems a … tempting offer,” the man says, his dark brows furrowed. “It’s — quite a large one too, at that. I’m not sure what to say.”
Thunder cracks outside and two cats scatter in opposite directions. Frank says: “We could discuss it further over breakfast? Unless you’d like to kick me out now.”
That shy smile makes another appearance, and Frank enjoys immensely the way it makes his cheekbones look. “No, I wouldn’t dare. Though I’d rather take the bed, if you don’t mind.”
Frank holds his hands up. “I am merely a guest. Or an intruder, depending on how you view the situation.”
“Right,” the man says thinly, and stands. Savanna appears from wherever it is she ran off to to paste herself at his ankles. “Right, well. Um. Goodnight?”
“Goodnight, then.” The man starts to leave but Frank stops him. “Wait — I never caught your name.”
He takes a stray lock of black hair and tucks it behind his ear. “Gerard. I’m Gerard.”
Frank’s mouth splits open in a smile that isn’t entirely voluntary. “I shall see you in the morrow, Gerard.”
And so the first person in all of Fort Eugene to find out the story behind the man who lives up on Widow’s Peak isn’t even a local at all, but instead simply like-minded. And better still, he may even rescue him from this town that doesn’t care to understand. Perhaps Fate sent him.
(Fate always makes sure these sorts of things have a way of working out.)