DBD Novelization - Ch. 2
Previous Chapters:
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Part One - Awakening
Chapter 2
Everything is cold now, and I’m not sure how I’m supposed to fix that.
When I come back home after the funeral, I walk through the front door half-expecting the house I grew up in to feel… I don’t know… haunted? I expect to feel like my mother’s ghost is lurking around every corner but what I actually come home to is almost worse.
It’s empty.
Just empty.
There’s no warmth or welcome, no sense of unease or chill up my spine. There's no feeling of life at all. It so empty that not even a ghost would haunt this place.
I can't stay here.
I storm through the house like the halls are on fire, sprinting through the familiar rooms and catching glimpses of myself in the hanging mirrors and closed windows; carrot hair pulled back into a pair of stiff french braids soaked with rain because I hadn’t had the energy or presence of mind to open my umbrella during the burial service. Watery blue eyes with dark bags deep enough to warrant a tag if I’d been traveling by airline glare back at me anytime I paused, so I keep moving.
Shouldering my door open, I stumble in, peel off my black dress skirt and white blouse, and throw them onto the floor. I kick off my flats and they bounce across the carpet into the corner as I pull on my track leggings, my faded pink, sleeveless top, a jacket, a ballcap, and then I’m running again.
I skid to a stop at the door, I can’t stop moving for long, I have to run. I have to move or my bones will shake right out of my legs! I drop to the floor and pull on my shoes, they're track converse, easy-fit, although they feel strange with the dress socks that I forgot to switch out.
It doesn’t matter, I’ll live through doing one run without the right socks on.
Then I’m out the door and sprinting as fast as I can. My feet carry me down the sidewalk and suddenly I’m tearing down the streets of Wetherfield.
I spent my whole life in this miserable town and now it’s empty, or as good as. It’s raining, but not hard enough to deter me. It could probably be hammering down in blinding sheets and it wouldn’t be enough, though, so that’s probably a bad barometer.
Right now, I just need to run.
Run where? Good question.
I turn off of the main drag and down into the forest of Coalwood. The tall, thin, and tightly packed trees loom over me like judgmental angels, and I put on another burst of speed to escape their eyes, even though I know the path I’m on just takes me deeper and deeper into the forest.
Coalwood.
I used to run here with her. Mom and I would go jogging, and as a kid I would always race ahead of her. She would shout at me to come back but I’d only ever run faster.
It didn’t matter where I was running to, just that I was running. So long as I was running I felt alive. I would feel the blood pumping in my veins and my heartbeat deafening me to the rest of the world.
My lungs are burning, and leaden exhaustion starts to replace the adrenal rush that had been driving me forward. I don’t stop right away though, that’s never a good idea. I can’t let my muscles grow lax and cold or they’ll stiffen up and cramp. I’ve seen runners go down for hours with bad leg cramps and the last thing I need is to keel over in the middle of the woods.
“Damn it.” I hack and spit, my tongue feels thick and dry, and my throat is tight as I drag in heaves of cold, wet air.
I lag to a jog, forcing myself to keep moving at a steady clip as I wind myself down. A familiar burn settles into my limbs as I hit an even and comfortable rhythm.
Probably should have brought a water bottle or something, but as the thought occurs to me another one follows right on its heels and I tip my head up and open my mouth, letting the rain splatter across my lips as a few clean, cold drops hit my tongue.
It’s good.
Cold, but good.
It can’t put the fire out, it just makes it burn hotter against the chill of the rainfall. So I keep running, my eyes pinned to the shifting trail as it winds and coils and-
I stagger to a stop as the woods break suddenly, and for the first time in months all thoughts of the funeral and my mother and the cold, sterile hospital vanish.
How fast had I been running? Did I lose track of time?
Maybe… maybe I did. I wasn’t exactly paying rapt attention but still, this didn’t make any sense. I couldn’t have come this far this quickly. I’ve run this trail hundreds of times. Less lately, sure, but I know my way around the Coalwood and the surrounding area. It might be a big forest, but a local wouldn't get lost this badly…
Not badly enough to end up in Weeks.
I’m standing where the trail terminates at the top of a small hill and joins up to a goat trail that winds down and down and down towards a fog-shrouded ghost town of Weeks.
Wetherfield is a Pacific Northwest postcard brought to life. With its manicured lawns, middle-class neighborhoods, and school pride, it’s as cookie-cutter as it gets. It’s painfully normal, all except for its single claim to fame which is really more of a curse if you ask the locals who have to deal with the slew of ghosthunters and paranormal ‘investigators’ toting around vans full of electronic crap that pop up like bed-sores every October: the infamous ghost town of Weeks.
No one talks about Weeks, despite it being closer than the next town over. The place has the worst kind of local legends attached to it, and there’s no quicker way for someone to announce that they’re an outsider than to so much as mention the ghost town.
All my life my mother pretended the town didn’t exist, with a single, lone exception.
It's why I know this hill, I recognize it because I've been here once before.
I lower my gaze to the soft earth I’m standing on and for a moment I imagine I can see the little footprints left behind by nine-year-old me's shoes next to the larger tread of my mother’s running shoes, even though I know it’s stupid and impossible.
‘Never step foot in that town, okay Megan?’ I could hear my mom’s voice in my ear like she’s right beside me.
'Why?' I remember asking with the kind of open, absolute curiosity that comes from being nine.
‘You can feel it from here, can’t you?’ She had answered. 'How does it feel?'
‘It’s… it's cold, mom,’ I remember saying, and even now I can still feel it, but it’s so much more than that. So much worse than my little, nine-year-old brain could really grasp. ‘It feels mean.’
A grim smile twists my lips into a thin line as I stare out over the shrouded, collapsing roofs of the town.
‘It feels mean,’ was the best way I could say it back then, but right now I have a better word for it.
“Hate,” I mutter as I raise my head and look out over thick fog towards the towering stacks of the old MacMillan Ironworks that have been cold and dead for decades. “This place feels like it hates me.”
To my surprise, I realise that that’s actually appealing, although I can't say exactly why.
Maybe because it's so unlike the house I’d left behind that’s empty in the same way that a show house feels empty; with all the furniture in place and everything smelling vaguely and pleasantly of lemon freshener, but despite the veneer you can feel it in your gut that whatever roots may have been laid down there had long since been torn up.
No, Weeks definitely still had roots.
They were dug into the bedrock, and despite myself I felt a smile curve over my face as I took one step, then two, all the way down the hill until I was jogging again.
Weeks… everyone always acts like this cursed town doesn’t exist, or like it never existed, but no one ever talks about why. All I know are a few facts and no context, something about the mine and the MacMillan Estate, stories about accidents but no details.
But I can feel it.
I can feel the town breathing around me, and it feels alive in a way that even Wetherfield doesn’t.
The dust and debris of the unkempt main street crunches under my shoes as I jog between the buildings. All of the shops and homes I pass look like they should have long since fallen apart, especially with the rainfall we get.
I can, from a completely practical perspective, understand why my mother never wanted me to come here.
Any one of these buildings look like they could collapse under a stray breeze, but somehow I’m positive that’s not why she told me to stay away. I mean, I’m sure that was part of it but… no, I’m certain it’s just because of the feeling of this place. Even if mom didn’t know what happened here, I’m sure just looking at it was all it took.
I pause at a crossroads where a bone-dry fountain sits empty of anything but some rubble and a few long-rusted pennies, and I collapse onto one of the stone benches beside it.
Weeks is watching me, I can feel it.
There are roads in front, behind, and to either side of me, and I can feel it watching me from each one with a burning intensity.
How is it that a long-dead town can still have a fire in it and my mother doesn’t?
“What a miserable joke,” I grumble as I stand up slowly, giving my stiffening legs a few good shakes to keep the blood flowing.
As I do I kick something metallic, and the rattling clangor of it makes me jump. It sounds so much louder in the fog.
“What the…” I kneel and turn over the contraption, and it takes me a moment to realise what it is.
A bear trap.
There was a bear trap sitting in the middle of the Weeks town square. It’s closed and rusted, and looks as ancient as anything else in the town, but what I can’t figure is why it would have been here in the first place.
“I thought this was a mining town,” I mumble as I turn it over, and on a whim I work my fingers between the teeth of the trap and pull.
The trap yields with only the slightest squeal of its taut coils, opening up like the maw of a predator until it latches with a dull click.
“Well that’s not creepy or anything,” I say to the empty fog as I stare down at the now-open trap.
A bear trap, at its core, is a simple device. It isn’t much more than physics given teeth; just a set of metal braces, coils, and jaws.
But it was all metal.
These aren’t even steel as far as I can tell. They’re made from iron, and not even high quality stuff, probably castoff from the Ironworks, but by that logic they should just be one rusted lump by now.
They shouldn’t be able to open, they sure as hell shouldn’t open that easily.
“Poachers?” The thought occurs to me as I stand and look around, training my ears for footsteps or voices.
There’s certainly wildlife in the Coalwood, but somehow I doubt any self respecting animal would come to Weeks. Animals probably have more sense than to step a toe into this place, which probably says plenty about me.
And the trap hadn't even been set. It was just lying on the ground when I found it, as forgotten as anything else in this town.
“Whatever,” I groan as I grab a rock and toss it on the plate in the middle of the trap.
No sense leaving a hazard in the road in case some poor bunny hops by.
The snap is deafening.
It’s so loud that I jump back and have to stifle a scream. My heart is pounding in my ears and all of a sudden everything feels claustrophobic, as if the town had been dozing and I’d just jolted it awake.
The pounding is like a migraine, and before I can think about it, I’m running again. I don’t know why, all I know is I need to get out of Weeks and I need to get out now.
Strangely, the closer to the town’s edge I get, and the closer to the Coalwood’s boundary, the less the pounding in my ears hurts, and by the time I’m climbing the hill again it’s receded to a normal, steady beat in my chest.
My blood is hot and surging in my veins though, and despite myself I laugh as I clamber up and into the woods.
I know I ought to get back home before it gets dark, but I don’t relish stepping back into that empty house. I want to turn back around and go to Weeks again, to feel alive again.
I’ll come back another day, maybe tomorrow.
The old town has haunted these woods for better than a century. It would keep for now.
And so will I.
I hope.