Page 39 of Folds
Sarah’s dad runs the historical society. I’ve extracted every possible piece of context surrounding the broody house perched on the hill south of Main Street, where light seems not to reach, or zoning, or records.
It started as a mild curiosity. Researching chronotypes, especially mine, it was almost inevitable that I would eventually be drawn to places that function in an unusual amount of night.
I never expected an outlier to be tucked away in the middle of Alberta, Canada. Drayring Valley, a sleepy little town with one of the only known populations of genetically diverse nocturnal botany in the world. Of course, I was curious. Perhaps that would have been where it ended if I could have just had access to the grounds. Now, curiosity bumps uncomfortably against obsession.
I’ve filed requests, dug up records, and hit dead end after dead end, again and again, for the last year.
“I’m sure it’s just an investor, or a corporation, some oil money real estate tycoon who passed it down to a nepo-baby grand kid that is just waiting to see what to do with it.”
I shake my head almost too violently.
“You don’t understand, Sarah. No one is recorded as owning it, but someone always pays for it. On paper, anyway.”
Rowan’s body angles toward mine, and our eyes lock. There’s heat pooling in his intense gaze, and a vision of him pressing me up against a wall and claiming me with his mouth slams into my thoughts, forcing me to blink and glance away to steady myself. When I look back, he’s inspecting the ground again, and I have to wonder if I imagined the heat.
Sarah draws my attention back, continuing the conversation I had almost forgotten we were having.
“Well, if someone pays for it, they own it, and they probably just don’t trust the idea of a PhD student having access to their property, maybe it’s condemned or a liability. It doesn’t have to be sinister.”
I open my mouth to protest, and her eyes narrow slightly. That familiar response that I’ve come to know from Drayring locals creeps across her features. Distance.
“It’s just a rotting old house, Burn.”
And maybe I’d believe her. Maybe I’d buy the calculated disinterest in this one particular topic that happens to be the thing that consumes the majority of my waking thoughts. Maybe I’d believe that the two people with whom I instantly clicked, who I share so much in common with, who made this place feel like a home and not another stopover town to write a paper on could happily listen to me talk about moss and trees and leaves and chrono-cycles endlessly for hours on end with a real interest, not the polite, eyes glazing over kind. Maybe I could believe this one topic, Hill House, is uninteresting.
Maybe. If I didn’t catch the decidedly panicked look they share every single time I bring it up.
be careful what you wish for
The most difficult part of trying to access Hill House has been a constant, if understandable, inconvenience in my life. Business hours. The second most difficult part has been the general disinterest that every single person in this town seems to have in regard to everything about it. Which is frankly completely incomprehensible.
The haunted train station is the pride of Drayring Valley; the idea of being near it past sunset is enough to make the hair on locals’ arms stand on end. The eerie feeling in the woods and the way the wind howls menacingly through the trees is a tourist attraction. This valley has built a reputation on oddities and unexplained spooks, yet Hill House isn’t feared; it isn’t even considered. It is simply avoided.
Arguably, the phenomenon of Hill House should be one of the primary tourist attractions in the valley. I thought perhaps the importance of its strange absence of daylight was underappreciated.
I still feel queasy when I remember breathlessly explaining the rare species of moon flower and nocturnal orchids I saw through the sturdy gates, only to be met with a lukewarm reception at best.
The interaction with Sarah and Rowan, the day before, comes to mind. It’s not normal the way people act about this place.
“Fancy seeing you here, Miss Kent.”
I don’t have to look up to tell who it is. It should be comforting that the crime rate is so low in Drayring that local law enforcement has nothing better to do than come talk to me every night. Except for the fact that I don’t find the company comforting.
“Good evening, Elias.” The local sheriff is a handsome enough white man in his mid-thirties with a go-to moustache. I suspect he’d be less severe if his blonde hair weren’t always slicked back with sharp precision, and if his pale blue eyes weren’t so cold, though I suspect that’s my doing. I know he’d prefer I call him Sheriff Carston, which is probably why it always happens to slip my mind.
“There are many better places for a young woman to be than sitting out here after sunset, Auburn.”
It’s the same song, the same dance. He leans against the stone pillar across from my perch, projecting authority and unearned annoyance at the perceived lack of respect he’s done nothing to gain from me. It’s almost funny, watching him pretend he isn’t exactly my age. Perhaps he’s just built that way. He’s all ancestral roots in this dirt, while I’m just a transplant that might not take. I suppose our contrast is striking. His uniform is pressed and ironed every day, and I’ll admit that level of detail suits him. In comparison, my thrown-together outfit of leggings and a thin hoodie that I definitely rescued from being abandoned on the back of my couch is emblematic of the lack of precision by which I live my life.
I’ve only been in the valley a year, yet the sheriff treats me with the weary patience of a man who’s been watching me disappoint the standard of normalcy for a lifetime.
“I’d have to agree, I’d much prefer to be on the grounds, but your records-”
He cuts me off before I bring up theconfusing, and frankly incomplete, public record trail on the stone house tucked up the long, overgrown driveway.
“I’m not getting into this again. You’re a civilian, and you’re not entitled to any of that information.”
I study him as he resets his jaw after delivering the line I’ve heard more than a few times now. It does make him seem older.
