I was ripped from my half-sleep by the pungent scent of the sea invading my nostrils. As if I wasn’t already awake, I felt a tap on my shoulder.
“We’re here, sleepyhead,” Lyra whispered. I looked over at her side of the carriage. She was grinning as she stared out the window. I looked past her at the view outside. Our ride had stopped. By the side of the road, I caught a glimpse of a white sign that proudly declared, WELCOME TO LOVELY MIDDWICH.
They sure were proud of their scenery.
And by scenery I meant a flat, grey ocean that lapped at a grey beach smothered by grey fog that seeped from the bloated, grey sky.
“Looks grey,” I sleepily muttered.
“Hush, Bonnie. It’ll clear right up in a day or two.”
Lyra wanted to believe that and I did too. The thick, sloggy weather wasn’t usual for this part of the year. I thought, if I’d be stuck for five days in whatever backwater wharf Lyra whisked me away to, I’d at least like to catch some sun. She said it would be an “experience.” That’s the word she kept slinging at me. That and “adventure.” I’m not sure what that brochure put into her pretty little head, but it couldn’t have been further from the truth.
I squeaked open the carriage door and stepped out. My hooves, normally pale, looked bright against the (yep, grey) asphalt road. I groaned as I stretched my legs. Three hours sitting in a coach left my bones feeling stale.
Dampness stuck to the inside of my lungs as I breathed in the sea air. Taking a better look around, I saw some dull brick buildings a ways down the street. They were little miscellaneous storefronts, all tightly crammed together. A shopping district right off the bat—great. Lyra was probably going to buy me a snow globe or something.
“Here y’are, Missus Heartstrings,” creaked a voice. A grunt came from the other side of the carriage, accompanied by some thumping. “Yer luggage.”
“Oh, thank you, Mr. Stagecoach.” She sounded like an angel compared to the stallion. I wandered around the wide vehicle and found Lyra lifting her suitcase. Stood next to her was a slightly brown, slightly unshaven earth pony. His small eyes stared nowhere in particular as he held my suitcase in his mouth.
“Vhe fleasure iv all nine, na’an,” he muffled unconvincingly. Dropping my luggage to the ground, he thrust out a calloused, expectant hoof. “That’ll be twenty-three.”
While Lyra zipped open her coin purse, I gazed absentmindedly at our suitcases. Mine was bare and shabby; hers was enthusiastically plastered with stickers, country flags, and gift shop souvenirs piled on a half inch thick. Neither of us remembered what color it used to be.
With hardly more than a “Have a good’un,” the carriage stallion took the bits and pulled his rickety ride off down the road, heading away from town and eventually disappearing around the bend.
“Not a bad guy.” Lyra smiled. “Straightforward, at least.”
I examined a newly-broken wheel on my suitcase. “I’m just glad I didn’t pack anything fragile.”
She rolled her eyes. “Well, I didn’t want to be rude. He offered to carry our stuff, so I let him. Speaking of, want me to get that for you?”
I nodded graciously. My luggage lit up with a yellow aura and floated over to Lyra, where they hung above her head.
“Thank ya kindly, Missus Heartstrings,” I grunted.
She snickered past her hoof. “Real nice. The throat cancer cadence really gets me hot.”
“I’ll keep that in mind,” I chuckled.
We both began towards the town’s entrance. Clouded glass doors and faded awnings lined the road on either side, the shops going on for a few blocks. I sighed, “First thing’s first, we gotta get to our room. My flank hurts.”
“Yeah, your flank’s killin me too, Bon,” Lyra smirked. “Let’s look around. I think there’s a café a block down. The map shows—”
I gripped her by the shoulders and brought her face up to mine. I let her take in every syllable. “Lyra H. Heartstrings, you do not understand me. My butt is numb.”
“Oh my gosh, fine.” She giggled, brushing my hooves away. “We’ll go to the hotel, then we can shop later. Lessee …” Lyra unfurled a glossy map and poked at it, muttering to herself. “… west, up Neighton … turn on West Dustford … okay, I got it. Let’s get going.”
* * *
Markets and sundries, barber shops and florists, daycares and libraries, bars and restaurants. All jammed up against one another in some unholy rapid-fire consumerist paradise. A shameless tourist trap through-and-through. Except nothing was open.
“You didn’t bring us to a ghost town, did you?” I half-joked. Lyra and I had taken a quick wander around the sullen streets. An empty neon sign (YES, WE’RE OPEN) hung in a nearby smudged window. I cupped my hooves to the speckled glass and peered in. Unoccupied. Empty flower pots and fluorescent tubes sat alone in the dark, caked with dust. Some of the shops looked they went unused for years. Maybe decades.
“Hey, Ly, wanna see if any of these doors are unlocked?” I called. “Maybe we can jack a cash register.” I anticipated a sigh from her. No response. I turned around. “Lyra?”
She sat on the sidewalk opposite of me, gazing into a dead clothing store. Rows of bare coat hangers hung in the window like a ribcage. Something behind them. My heart leapt—another pony lurked in the dark. The figure was yellowed, scraped to hell, and torn at the seams … a mannequin. Posed to look like it was prancing or running. I felt like a spooked cat, literally jumping at shadows.
I trotted up beside Lyra. “See something you like?”
In the cloudy glass, her reflected gaze switched from the mannequin to me. “It’s just kind of sad. Imagining what used to be here, I mean.” Her eyes flicked back to the model pony, to where its face might have been. “It’s like everyone up and left all at once. This place probably used to be crazy busy back in the day. What do you think could have made this town dry up so fast?” She pried her eyes away from the model and onto me, curious.
I shrugged. “Suicide cult?”
Lyra snorted. “Yeah, that’s it.” She turned and started off down the street. “We should get to the hotel before the hatchet-slinging fish-ponies try to eat us.”
Couldn’t argue with that. I followed after her into the white air.
It was a quiet walk. The kind of quiet that felt like deprivation. I didn’t hate the silence with Lyra by my side, but it still wasn’t a pleasant silence. Straining my ears, I could barely catch the faded waves from the distant beach. I found relief in that, that there was indeed still a world beyond this street. Otherwise, even the wind had left us alone. Silence permeated the fog, and the fog permeated our throats. I shivered in the tingly sea chill. For a moment, two sets of hoofsteps made all the noise in Middwich.
That hotel room couldn’t come sooner.
* * *
“Aw, c’mon, Bonnie! This is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity! How else are you gonna learn about … uh …” Lyra looked back at the little wooden billboard next to the building. “… about the town’s colorful past as a fishing village?”
The Middwich Historical Society was a squat, admittedly funny-looking little establishment. It was repurposed out of what I guessed was an old house. The rough wood siding was bleached and salt-soaked and a little warped. Behind the seaside building, a lone jetty reached out into the waves that licked at its algae-slimed support posts. A sign out front advertised the various “attractions”. I rubbed my forehead and groaned. This just had to be on the way to the hotel, didn’t it?
“There’s a lot of information I can stand to miss out on.” I sneered. “Especially about the technological marvel of the modern flotation device.”
Lyra’s face fell. She walked toward me—I’d kept my distance from the Historical Whatever Place; I wanted nothing to do with this town’s disturbing buoy obsession.
“Please, Bon?” Gently grabbing my foreleg, she murmured, “Can you just do it for the sake of doing it? Just to say we did?” A little tug. “Just on the off chance you won’t hate it? I promise … I won’t even make you read about the buoys.”
Her innocent sincerity about it made me laugh. How was I supposed to say no to those round eyes and floppy ears? “Okay, okay. You convinced me.” I threw up my hooves in false surrender. “Maybe it won’t kill me to step inside.”
Lyra smiled back. “Glad to hear it. We don’t even have to stop at the gift shop.” She pulled me towards the scuffed wooden door. “Just a few minutes here and we can go to the hotel, okay?”
* * *
It smelt as musty on the inside as it looked on the outside. The faintly moist carpet on my hooves made me shudder. Despite the lights being on, nobody else was around. Just a couple dumb tourists. Everything—the loose wallpaper, the stale lighting, the cheap flooring—it all carried an ill, greenish-brown affliction, like the room itself was seasick. Various placards and displays sat on the walls, all telling of Middwich’s sufficiently boring history.
“Whoa …” Lyra was off snooping around while I watched from a couch in the corner. “Hey Bon, say the name of the town we’re in!”
“Tartarus,” I replied. Despite her facing away from me, I knew she rolled her eyes. “Middwich,” I corrected before she could chastise. “Why? Do you die if you say it three times in a row?”
She turned and grinned at me. “Ah-ha! You’ve been saying it wrong this whole time! It’s actually pronounced ‘Mid-idge’.”
“Okay. Why?” So were you, idiot! Like I cared. But I humored her.
“Griffons are why.” A big, important plaque on the wall told her so. “It’s an old Groveric name. It says here, around half a century ago, the town received huge wave of Griffonstone immigrants. Griffons are carnivores, so they had to find an unintrusive supply of food. They ended up teaching the native ponies how to fish.
“This led to trade alliances being set up between pony and griffon nations. The town’s economy soared, and Equestria’s first fishermare boom town was born! In appreciation, the native ponies let the griffons rename the town.” Finished, she turned to me and smiled proudly.
“Cool,” I yawned. “I think ‘fishermare boom town’ is the least interesting thing I’ve ever heard.”
Lyra huffed and went back to studying. “But what’s weird is that it doesn’t say what Middwich was called before that. I can’t find it anywhere …”
She searched for an answer among the exhibits. In the meantime, I was lectured on the more exciting parts of the town’s history. Things like Middwich’s town fish (the Equestrian Coalfish), the lighthouse’s foghorn (still hoof-powered!), and griffons (do YOU know what an “omnivore” is?).
I groaned as I lifted myself from the sofa, shaking off the cramps. “Lyra, look … I know you love this kind of stuff. I really do. But right now, I’m so tired I can feel my body shutting down. Can’t we please just do this tomorrow or something?”
She turned around from poring over some model boats and sighed. “You gave it a chance, and I guess that’s all I asked for. Let’s go.”
We stepped out together. I didn’t like seeing her so down, but I really was exhausted. “So did you find out about … uh, Middwich’s old name?” I struggled to pronounce it the right way. Hell if I wasn’t going to keep saying Mid-witch in my head, though.
“Hey, you actually remembered something.” Lyra smiled weakly, but shook her head. “I swear I looked everywhere, but I couldn’t find a thing about it. I don’t know if it was an oversight or what. You saw how crazy they were about their history.”
Silence triumphed for a minute.
“I mean, don’t you think it’s weird?” she continued. “I’m sorry, I just—this is really eating at me. They documented every little detail. Why wouldn’t they say what it was called before Middwich?”
I patted her on the withers. “Jeez, Ly, don’t blow a capillary. Maybe they just … I dunno, forgot it? Didn’t you say it was renamed like fifty years ago?”
“That’s not …” Lyra trailed off, sighing sharply. “Whatever. I’m just being an idiot.”
I awkwardly mumbled, “Not really.”
* * *
Things were quiet again as we made our way through the town, soon passing the edge of the shopping district. We turned onto West Dustford, a road that followed the outskirts of a modest little subdivision. Tiny one-story houses spanned a few blocks down the street. Totally desolate, of course. I caught glimpses of garden tools or trash cans in the front lawns, the tool sheds … but the windows were always dark. We walked along still, down the one long road, for what felt like miles. My legs buzzed in agony, desperate for rest, but we couldn’t stop now.
“Look, Bon.” Lyra broke the silence at last, pointing over the thick horizon. “Almost there.”
I had to squint through the fog, but I could just about make it out. A large building, towering four stories high, stood in the distance. Black windows neatly lined the façade, whose aged architecture clearly labelled it the oldest thing in town. All things considered, it really didn’t look half bad. Old as all hell and kind of creepy—the kind of place that just screams, haunted!—but not in ruins by any stretch.
Face it, I thought. You’ve woken up in worse.
* * *
Middwich Seaport Hotel
* * *
The Seaport Hotel had an otherworldly air. Not a bit like the salty mist in the town; in fact, it was like the reception had all its humidity sucked right out. I felt my lips chap by the second. And the smell—I wrinkled my snout. Like snorting a pile of dust. Eye-watering fumes of disinfectant wafted from the carpet. Despite that, I felt like I needed a mask, else my lungs would absorb some ancient disease floating around. I darkly smirked to myself, pleased that it was precisely as dreary as I expected.
Behind the check-in counter there was a mare (another real live pony that actually existed, oh Gods!) intently focused on … whatever receptionists do. I supposed it was foolish to expect the hotel to be barren too, but relief swept over me. I’d half a mind to bound over and hug the stranger.
The unicorn looked well enough, I thought, if maybe drab. Her mane and tail hung flat like drapes, her chalky green and white colors reminded me of boring flowers. Her irises, though, were vivid, bright, bright yellow. I could have sworn they were glowing behind her bangs. She was glued to something on her desk, not appearing to notice us.
“You can just sit there and look pretty, Hot Legs,” Lyra teased, setting our two suitcases down. “I’ll check us in.”
I stuck my tongue out at her, then sucked it back in before it got dusty. She’d call me absolutely hilarious names like that whenever I couldn’t keep up pace. I firmly held that Lyra only went on those constant jogs around Ponyville to spite me. Still, I limped over to a lounge in the corner.
“Hi, excuse me—”
Crash!
Before I could sit, there was a cry from the reception. I whipped my head around. The pale unicorn stared wide-eyed at Lyra.
“No!” The desk mare yelped and jumped back, knocking down her chair, tumbling off books and papers. Dozens of keys jangled. She scrambled to the far end of the desk where she huddled and shook. “Please,” she whimpered, gripping her horn tightly, shakily. “Get … s-stay away!”
Lyra froze mid-step. She pleaded my help from the corners of her eyes, but I had nothing to offer. The desk mare’s jittery pupils darted from Lyra, to me, and back. Her breathing gradually softened as her terror hesitantly turned to odd curiosity. She tightened her brow. “W-wait, you …” She swallowed. “You’re not …?” Cautiously, she arose from her little ball in the corner. “Who … are you?”
Lyra blanked. “Uhh … I …”
“We’d … like to check in,” I finished, warily joining Lyra’s side.
“Er—right.” Lyra nodded and edged forward, raising a civil hoof. “And I’m really sorry if I startled you, ma’am.”
The receptionist’s eyebrows rose, and she stifled a gasp behind her hoof. “Oh … oh my goodness, I-I’m so sorry, I was so caught up in my … my work, I didn’t realize …” Trailing off, the unicorn rifled under her desk. She hefted up a big, wide book and flipped through it. “Um … we have plenty of vacancies. H-how long are you staying? Sorry …”
“It’s okay, really.” Lyra grinned awkwardly. “We’ll be here for five days.”
The desk mare lit up. “Oh! A-are you on vacation? Um, also, if you’d sign here you’ll be all checked in …” She scooted the logbook forward.
“We are, and we’re new to the town.” Lyra didn’t notice the mare flinch as she levitated a pen. “Are you from around here?”
The receptionist observed from a safe distance, then stowed the book once Lyra finished writing. On a big board behind her, from rows and rows of dangling keys, she reached up and picked one from the top dozen. It sharply scraped the wood as she hoofed it across the counter. “Your room number is 408, like on the key,” she said, ignoring Lyra’s question. “Also, have … you been to the beach yet? It’s very … very nice. It’s not very far, either; it’s just on—um, on the other side of the hotel.”
Lyra shook her head. “Not yet, but we’ve explored the Historical Society.”
The pale unicorn suddenly became lost. “The … the what …?” She scrunched her eyebrows together again, her yellow eyes wandering like she was solving a puzzle. “S-sorry, I just … can you …?”
“We’ll check the beach out later, thanks,” I interrupted, swiping the key. Leaning in to Lyra, I hissed, “Get the luggage and let’s go.”
* * *
“Look, I’m just saying you could’ve been nicer.”
I shot her a sidelong glare. “Yeah, sorry for not being friends with the psycho.”
“Bon, don’t be like that. She’s the only other pony we’ve seen and you were rude.”
“How the hell was I rude? I said thanks.”
Lyra sighed.
Lyra had kept to herself a collection of different sighs. Each one reflected a certain feel, and on occasion, she’d create a new sigh to express some new form of distaste. I was most often on the receiving end of Lyra’s sighs, so I had more knowledge than anyone of their intricacies. I’d found that there was a limited set—that she would reuse them often enough for me to tell a pattern. Even to my trained ear, every sigh of the same type sounded precisely similar; I found this impressive as in the vein of carrying a tune or acting in theater. What Lyra had given me now was familiar: a short rush of air that stayed in her throat, accompanied by tight lips and strained eyes. It was her you’re too dumb for me sigh. It was old enough to evoke some nostalgia of our earliest years together, but it always mixed bitterly with irritation.
We finished climbing the third flight of stairs, now in a long hall lined with five doors on each side. We looked for the third on the left. My legs wept. My neck. I wondered if having a room on the top floor was another quaint little way this town could find to spite me.
“I guess we’re Salt,” said Lyra.
I dug my hooves into the carpet to stop from bumping into her. “What?”
She pointed at a door labelled 408, and … it said Salt. On the metal plate fixed to the door, under the room number, it nonchalantly displayed the word.
Lyra smiled. “Salt!”
“Alright,” I huffed. “And that means?”
She gestured down the hall. Another door down the row, 409, had Breeze on it; another, 410, had Coral.
“I was wondering why the key said Salt on it,” she said, turning over the bit of dark metal in midair. “The rooms all have their own names. I guess they’re all sea-related, isn’t that neat?”
“Maybe,” I hummed, more on instinct than in agreement. “But Salt? Really? That’s just gross.”
Lyra gave me a quick exhale through her snout, known to me as her quit whining sigh. She jammed the key into the slot under the doorknob and a thick clunk from the lock’s insides let us in.
* * *
408
* * *
The springs inside the mattress creaked and rocked as I flopped down and stretched out, popping the stiffness from my joints and falling pleasantly limp onto my back. A great sigh of contentment escaped my throat. In the room’s shade, I could have easily slipped right into a deep sleep … except for someone throwing herself onto the bed with me. I shut my eyes tight against the oceanlike heaving. The mattress sank as I felt four heavy hooves on either side of my body. With great effort, I peeked through one lid. Lyra’s shadowy form, silhouetted by the window’s grey light, gazed down at me with half-moons heavy with implication.
I groaned. “Not now, Ly.”
“Come on. How long has it been?”
“We did this three days ago.”
“Ooh, look who’s been keeping track!”
“Please, Lyra, I’m really tired. I just want to rest.”
A smile curled onto her lips and she drew in closer. “Oh, that’s fine,” she breathed, caressing my shoulder. “Just lay back and relax, my little Bonnie Bon. You don’t have to move a muscle. I’ll take care of you—”
“Lyra!” I snapped up and pushed her off. “Enough! Okay? Just leave it.”
She shrank back, taking her hooves away. A blank expression covered her face. “Sorry.”
I didn’t feel like I could fall asleep anymore, but I was still exhausted. My head sank into the cool pillow. Lyra stared into space. I studied the ceiling.
* * *
“Don’t roll your eyes at me,” she snapped.
“I didn’t.”
“I saw you.”
“I was looking out the window.”
Lying ass, told her sigh.
“You don’t have to be a bitch,” I said.
I couldn’t see Lyra’s face, but she didn’t answer. Not even with a sigh.
* * *
“Come look at this view, Bonnie.” She tapped on the glass that offered such little light to the room. “We’re not on the beach side, but I think you can see the whole town from here.” As Lyra hoisted the window open, it let out a whining screech, sliding up, wet wood against wet wood. Wispy curtains floated like spider webs, a damp chill set into the room, saline mist seared my nostrils.
“This place is so different!” Her excitement was almost as thick as the salt that hung in the air. “I’ve always had a soft spot for funny little towns like these, you know? My parents took me to places just like this when I was little. It’s offbeat, but it’ll grow on you. It’s really … traditional.”
I grimaced, wincing as my dry lips split open, stinging from the air. “How many words can you find to describe this place that aren’t ‘disgusting’?”
She tisked and elbowed my side. “Oh, come on, Mrs. Grumpy. We’re out here to have fun. Nobody is going to have a good time if you get into one of your bleak moods again. I bet it will be nice and sunny tomorrow. We can even go to the beach!”
“The only bleak thing here—” I pointed at the grey abyss outside “—is the freaking weather, Ly. Nobody can have fun here. That’s why it’s abandoned. It’s not going to clear up tomorrow. It’s not going to clear up ever. So for five days, we’re going to sit in a damn moldy hotel with nothing to do but stare at the wall.”
“Why the hell don’t we just leave then?” She whipped around and glared.
I shut up. She bared her teeth.
“If you hate this place so much, why don’t we just go home already? You’ve complained at every single turn, and it’s getting hard for me understand why I dragged you along. I tried to keep your attention. I tried to make it fun. I tried to give you chance after chance after chance, but you never look on the bright side!”
And now she was yelling. Already, I wanted to shut her out. One of these fits again? Lovely. Even back in Ponyville, she’d been on this loose trigger for a good while. Step on her the wrong way, and bam, she shuts on me like an iron trap. It made me grind my teeth like nothing else, but I sat and endured it like always.
“And you know what?” she went on. “This place does suck! It’s awful! But because you refuse to find something good in this trip that I saved money for, we all have to suffer. The whole reason—”
That’s far enough.
I shot up from the bed. “Is that it? I refuse to wear your rose-colored glasses, so I’m the big bad guy here? This trip …”
“That’s not—”
“… that you saved money for? Yeah, your money, right? Not ours?”
“Bonnie …”
“And what the fuck made you think this was a good place for a vacation? In fact, what the fuck made you think, ‘oh, we should spend our money on a vacation,’ anyway?”
“Listen to …”
“You’re right. You shouldn’t have dragged me along. If this fish town is so great, you should have just gone here by yourself.”
“Bon Bon!” she screamed.
“What?”
She grasped my shoulders hard. Since the argument I hadn’t paid any attention to her face, but I saw her now, staring into me. She was shivering. Her cheeks were wet. Her bright yellow rings had gone pale and misty. “For Gods’ sake, look at us, Bonnie!” she choked. Her trembling grip rocked my shoulders. “I know this place is shit. I don’t care. The reason I brought us out here is so we could get away from … this. This has been our lives for the past … Gods, I don’t know, a year? I just wanted to have fun together. I wanted … I just—”
I yanked out of her hooves. “So you took us to a discount tourist trap? Is that how you’d prefer to deal with it—just sweep it under the rug? Fuck me.” I stormed towards the door.
“Bonnie … wh-where are you going?”
“Out. I’ll be back.”
Before she could respond, I ripped open the door and slammed it shut in one swift movement. My legs carried me briskly, hotly, down the hallway, nowhere precise in mind. I needed to cool off, and I sure as hell couldn’t inside there.
* * *
I winced at the occasional vibrations of my hooves grazing the asphalt. My stride stayed low and quick as I glided off down the lane, away from Seaport, retracing that road, West Dustford—not for any reason, certainly not for pleasure—because it was a place to go. A place that didn’t have a Lyra. Only me, my thoughts, and the pavement. That’s all I wanted.
Whenever I got flustered and went on a walk (which Lyra had named “Grumpy Time”, bless her), I always came back with one of three very specific, very contained results.
The first result: after thinking with a cool head, I’d lay out the situation into something resolvable. Things like spending too much money or not cleaning the house for three months—there’d be a clear solution. This was Lyra’s favorite result and mine too.
The second result was more difficult. I would come back … unsure. Or “all frowns”, she’d say. Unsure how to fix things, unsure of our future, unsure about us and we. Our problems weren’t always so pleasantly material; things like a family member getting sick or dying, whether or not one of us cared, paranoia of being with other people, true or false, no trust, no faith—a lot of things. Unsure. I really, really hated being unsure.
The third … I’d get worse. That’s it. And she’d wait. Lyra had a fairly accurate premonition of how my walks would end up, and she’d always await them at home with a cup of tea and a book. How she’d feel then, waiting for Bon Bon Number Three to get home, I hated imagining. Waiting to hear that twisted creature stomp up the sidewalk, catching glimpses through the window; how her poor heart survived it, I didn’t know. I didn’t know how she survived Number Three crashing through the front door, roaring and spitting and giving her night terrors, flashing its fangs, leaping after her, making marks, I didn’t know, I didn’t know, I didn’t—
Where am I?
I wasn’t sure how long I had been running. The last time I looked up, I was near the Dustford houses; now, I stood panting and sweating cold in the middle of town, rows of urban shops flanking me. Everything in between was a melty blur. So absorbed in thought, I had a fugue state. Great.
Navigating the street, I scouted for an intersection. Buildings loomed on either side, acting as walls that bathed the road in shadow. I shivered as I walked. The sun was getting low.
A sign!
The dense mist ahead revealed a guide. I quickened my pace to the street corner and peered up. Two crossed plates said:
Cat St.
Knell St.
In the four-way intersection, I was on Cat.
I frowned. Just where did I take myself? Must be the commercial zone, right? I sighed and gave the sign pole a passing kick, then swore as I shook my newly throbbing hoof. The metal sent long reverberations through the fog, bouncing between the buildings, sounding like an enormous instrument. If Lyra were here, she’d bust her sides, I'm sure.
Lyra…
I played her joyful laughter in my head and smiled faintly. “Lyra,” I murmured, wanting to hear the name out loud. “You probably miss me right now.”
I shook my head. With a deep breath and a strong guess, I turned left onto Knell Street. No map meant I was flying blind. I didn’t recognize the street or store names, but I had to end up somewhere familiar eventually. As I plodded along, all alone, looking up at storefronts for familiar names, I felt utterly small. Feeling small was all I could do until I reached the next intersection, where I’d make another blind toss. Would I arrive at a familiar sight or would the familiar escape? I tensed my body against the pervasive chill, damning myself for not packing a coat.
* * *
In a dash of luck, I had gone the right way—I was on Neighton now. Neighton Avenue spanned through the whole zone and led to West Dustford, so it was a straight shot back to Seaport. I silently cheered myself on as I hurried through familiar sights. The sign (YES, WE’RE OPEN). The shop with the broken light tubes. The empty clothes store with the shattered window. And of course, the Middwich Historical Society …
… was not there. Not anymore. I came upon the spot where it had existed—undeniably, I thought—where Lyra and I had visited a mere few hours before. Instead of something, there simply wasn’t. The sign out front, the jetty over the water behind it, those were still there, safe and sound. Clear as crystal. But …
Black sticks. Nothing but giant, black sticks held up by clumps of rubble, jutting tall into the sky like a comb’s teeth. Wide, splitting cracks veined their way through the planks, and a thin white grime coated everything. In the center, a black-dripping chimney towered alone, marking the building for as long away as the fog let you see. I gaped at the wooden skeleton, heart in my throat. The size, the location … I caught a piece of untouched wood; it was the same old bleached color. Was there always a chimney here? It was insane, impossible, but it was the same building. Right?
I approached where the front door once was. The concrete foundation was caked in blackness. On the “inside” of the museum, dark, oily curds gathered in piles; I was careful to step clear of whatever it was. I spotted a vertical board close enough to examine the white grime. It scraped off easily by my hoof. Salt. I flung it off, grimacing. That explained the watery, sour smell circling the ruins. The whole area was porous and moist; by the fog, the surf, the surely common storms, it felt on the verge of being washed away. Plaques, paintings, dioramas, any traces of Middwich past, I assumed they now resided in the black heaps on the floor.
Right in the center of the post-museum-house loomed a narrow smokestack that sat on a wide hearth. As I peered into the bare fireplace, I realized what most of the blackness was: wet ash. It had mixed and coagulated with the seawater, creating those unpleasant clumps that preferred gathering in corners. Someone must have been careless and torched the place … how long ago? Centuries of rot don’t just appear.
Leering past the hearth, I noticed a room behind it, hardly wider than the fireplace itself. With the walls burned away, exposed studs and joists clung together against the elements, yet they were considerably more intact than the rest. I thought something about the space felt off. Then as I narrowly squeezed between two boards, I got it—there were no doorways. There weren’t any gaps in the studs large enough. Secret? Lost in thought, I nearly tumbled face-first into the hole in the floor in front of me. In the middle of the tiny room, a set of stairs dropped steeply down into the concrete. A funny thought struck me. Your obsession with exploring stupid old museums … I get it now, Lyra.
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Middwich Historical Society
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