Work Text:
Statement of Bernadine Smith, regarding a summer walk through The Green, in New Haven, Connecticut.
I'm not in New Haven all that often, especially now that I've moved out of state. I'm a local- the next town over, really, the home of sleeping giants and well off Yale employees who don't want to raise their family in the city proper. And as a local, New Haven is just a city you go to sometimes for the museum or concerts or the pizza. Christ, the pizza. They don't shut up about the pizza. But the ivy leagues and secret societies just kind of fade into the background of everything else.
It's not like you can really forget that it's Yale, though. There are reminders everywhere, downtown, 'cause in a lot of ways the school's stretched its roots into the city to become it. Like, the local Barnes and Noble doubles as a school store. In the kids section there are even wood cut outs decorating the wall of the school's brachy mascot, Handsome Dan, standing jauntily on his hind legs next to a banner with the school's battle song bulldogs, bulldogs, bow wow wow.
Sorry, I'm kind of avoiding the point, aren't I?
I was visiting my parents over the summer. I had gotten some time to myself to poke around old haunts, on a beautiful day that was unseasonably cool with a smattering of cloud cover, and I used that time to cross the border to head to the Peabody museum, then head deeper into town. Maybe get some lunch and eat it out on the Green, the main park that was lined with trees and old, stately buildings that were older than living memory.
As far as cities go, I don't think I'd ever call New Haven bustling. It's not like Chicago or New York City, with its swarming crowds of tourists and locals. It's somewhere people drift through its sprawling veins in search of something or other, with even that languid trickle bled away when school let out for the summer. But I swear it was emptier than usual. Only a handful of cars parked in the museum parking lot, even less people meandering the city streets.
In the museum there were a few parents herding excited children through the dinosaur exhibits, but beyond that I barely saw a soul. At the time I didn't think much of it, who would want to be in a museum when we were only a stone's toss from the beach? But as I left, stepping from the shadowed archway to the stone entry path, the back of my neck prickled, like someone was watching me. I turned to look over my shoulder, eyes narrowed in the sudden brightness, only to see no one there. The trees waved their branches at me in a slight summer breeze that carried the feeling of no longer being alone away.
I brushed it off with a shrug, adjusted my purse over my shoulder, and set off toward the green; too early for me to grab lunch but not early enough for a walk around the strangely vacant streets.
I took a wrong turn somewhere. I'd been away from the area too long, I guess, and I'd never had the best sense of direction. I grumbled goddammit and pulled out my phone so I could course correct instead of just wander aimlessly and get even more lost. On this new, circuitous path, the Beinecke Library loomed large on the street before me. A windowless square block of a building perched on supports that housed the entryway, harsh and imposing and in a way otherworldly compared to the historic brownstones.
I slowed as I approached it, staring up at the square patterns in the stone structure. The Beinecke is one of the largest rare book collections in the world. Did you know that? The stones are cut in such a way that light can filter through them, to help preserve the books housed there. The Voynich Manuscript is there, actually. A siren song to conspiracy theorists already drawn to the area for the secret societies and the dark dealings of rich kids. The types who don't realize the theories they breathlessly emailed aren't being read by some scholar who's going to think they cracked the code. They're being read by some bored, middle aged woman who doesn't haven even the faintest sense of whimsy.
It's just a building. Just a library. The lights are on in the foyer, somehow dim in the shadow of the main building. The arms prickle, the fine hairs standing on end at some unknown chill in the air.
There was a man in those shadows. My eye was drawn to him, not that I could tell you why. It's a library, in a college town. Why wouldn't there be someone there. But there was something... indistinct about him. Even in the shade and at a distance, a person's silhouette is clear. Distinct. This person's was almost blurry, like I was squinting and the world was losing its definition. Their clothes were shapeless, I couldn't even give you a height or build. And yet I could make out the shape of a book in their arms. Small and inoffensive and one I thought, at the time, couldn't have been from the Beinecke. Hell, I'm still not sure it was from there, but the damn thing just felt so wrong. Like whatever it was wasn't supposed to exist at all.
An aberration, you know? Like a shadow you see out of the corner of your eye, like something creeping out from the space between the cupboard doors. Gone as soon as you turn your head. Even at a distance.
I shook my head, shook out the buzz of restless energy that rested in the tips of my fingers. Turned before the person noticed me staring, if they hadn't already, to continue on my way.
As I approached the Green the sky had darkened. The puffy white clouds had been chased away by heavy gray ones, there movements a rumbling prelude to a thunderstorm even though none had been forecast that day. I cast my eyes skyward, searching for the remaining patches of eggshell blue and brilliant beams of sun not quite blotted out, not yet. Shadows overtook my path and brought with them a cold air, colder than it should have been for dead of summer.
With prickling skin I crossed an empty street and onto the perimeter of the Green. The overlooking trees rattled their branches at me in a gentle breeze, their rich greens deepening without the sun to filter through their leaves. I stood there and stared and all I could think of were skeletons tangled in the mess of roots just beneath my feet.
My mind wandered to when Sandy tore through the east coast. The hurricane's howling fury uprooted one of the dead out here on the Green, a centuries old settler woman who had merged with the foliage, like the seed had been planted in the hollow of her ribs. A glance at my phone tells me that the day will be no more than overcast, not even a chance of rain.
Stop being paranoid, I told myself.
I should've just gone home. The sense of foreboding had burrowed into my skin, ever since I saw that figure in the shadow of the Beinecke. Something in the back of mind prickled, tugged me forward step onto the grass. And I did. One step, then too, a gentle push in the small of my back until I was off the paved path and standing on the empty expanse of greenery. At first there was nothing, and a giddy relief began to pool in my gut. And then the ground shifted.
The earth pulsed beneath the soles of my sneakers. Slow and methodical, not a harried rush of disturbance under the ground. Just a gentle rise and fall that reverberated up through my calves, into my spine, now that my prey animal brain decided to acknowledge that it was there at all.
Up and down. In and out. A slow and steady breathing. I know there are explanations for this, natural ones, perfectly reasonable explanations for why the earth does what it does. All thoughts of that fled from my mind, leaving only skeletons.
The Green had been a graveyard, once, back when the area was first settled. It became a town center soon after, even before the revolution happened. The townspeople shuffled the headstones into the basement of a church, where they stood like jagged teeth, but the bodies remained. People there don't think much of the dead that cling to New Haven, when they set up their tents and concerts and student welcoming parties. But they're there.
The sky above darkened, a new promise of a storm that the meteorologists denied. A gust of wind rose, shook the tops of the trees and grabbed at the loose folds of my clothes, grabbed at my hair. That instinct to run that lived in every prey animals heart screamed from the far corners of my brain, so sure now that a hawk had caught sight of me standing in this open field. Sharp eyes burned into my back, and I couldn't turn. Couldn't even twist my neck to see the lack of people and cars around me.
Long and agile fingers had risen from the dirt to wind up my legs, invisible to the eye even if I were able to look down. This billowing thing did not want me to leave.
I strained to hear past the roaring din in my ears. Not a trace of cars, even in the distance. No bird sang. The rustling of the trees grew muffled, as though a hand had smothered the world.
There was a give in the ground, more like the softening of dirt after rain that opening up to swallow me whole. Grass rippled, gripping at my feet, hungry and waiting, ready to pull me down to some open maw with its gnashing tombstone teeth. My breath knotted in my throat, tight enough to choke on, and my eyes burned with tears the blurred my vision.
Please move, I thought. Prayed. Pleaded with whatever entity shifted under New Haven to let me go.
In the distance a car honked. The ground solidified, the grass parted. The clouds overhead rumbled, ambling on their merry way to darken some other sky. The eyes watching me blinked. I stumbled, suddenly under my own power, almost falling to my knees.
I ran shaky hands through my hair, breath coming in great trembling gasps. For how eerie it was to be so alone, I was thankful that no one was around to see me collect myself.
"Ma'am?" came a voice at my shoulder. "Everything okay?"
I jumped a foot. Whirled around to come face to face with a man maybe a year or two younger than me. His mouth was curved into a smile that showed a glimpse of too white, too straight teeth, and his blue eyes shined with some secret I wasn't privy to.
"Sorry," I said, hand on my chest. "I didn't hear you approaching."
He waved a hand, a lazy flick of a wrist adorned with a wristwatch that cost more than most make in a year. "Most people don't notice me," he said, his smile stretching ever wider.
I almost joked about rich kids being impossible to ignore, but I swallowed it. "Sure," I said, searching his face. I almost asked him if he'd just seen that, felt it. But the words just turned to ash in my throat. "And I'm fine, just got...caught in my own head."
The stranger hummed, cocked his head to the side. His golden hair caught the light of a sun just reemerging from a blanket of clouds.
"It is pretty empty today," he said. His hand curled around his shoulder bad, an old leather thing out of place on someone so crisp and new. My eyes darted to the bag and my skin prickled; there was something in there that should not be.
I dragged my gaze back to his face. He bore an expression of knowing. Of knowing that I knew. It was such an easy, coy expression that grabbed my heart with an icy hand.
"I'm sorry, I came by you during an experiment of sorts," he said. "Be more careful next time."
With that he turned to leave. I stood there, sputtering, a call to him building in my throat where I ended up killing it. I didn't what to know, I didn't want to chase after him, I wanted to get out of there and forget the whole thing. I'd just get lunch at home.
I tried to push the ordeal out of my mind, go on with my life as it always was. Not caring about the goings on at Yale, the goings on of spoiled rich kids. But I can't. Not really.
I don't think it was the dead that stirred that day.