PORTA LUCIS // PRIVATE MAIL
DATE :: XX/XX/199X (Sun.) @ 09.25p
FROM :: ReverendMoonlighter [Moony]
SUBJ :: Paradise Local
> I need to ask you a favor.
> Not board business. Not moderation. Not a test of insight, faith, courage, or your willingness to turn over big rocks that might have bugs underneath because someone on a bulletin board weaponized your special interests.
>
> I have reason to believe you are in Paradise, or close enough that getting there wouldn’t cost you enough in gas money to be put out by it. This is not mysticism. You call in from a local exchange. The board logs what it logs. This is my house, etc..
>
> There was an incident at Lake Gelid early Sunday morning. It will have been this morning if you check the board as often as I think you do. A painted Dodge Tradesman ended up in the water. Dane County registration tags. The owner is one Hunter Varner, esq.. You will likely hear his name first, and loudest, because it is his van and men with little notebooks prefer the kind of story where the owner of the vehicle is the locus of the event.
>
> He is not.
>
> Or at least, not in the way they will want him to be.
>
> I have it on good authority that Mr. Varner was half a state away when that van was put into the lake. He was there before, and he is still there now, unless someone with a badge has finally made the correct phone calls and found him cold, embarrassed, and telling the least helpful version of the truth.
> The girl who may have been driving is my sister.
>
> Her name is Violet.
>
> The police probably do not have that name yet. They may by tomorrow. When they do, it will become very easy for everyone to pretend they had it all along.
>
> She may have used the name Scarlet if she thought she was being followed, or watched, or overheard. She may also have written it rather than saying it. If you see SCARLET anywhere near this business // a sign-in sheet, a tape label, a margin, a bathroom wall, on the return card of a library book // do not decide it is unrelated just because it sounds like the sort of thing people use to make ordinary doldrum seem more exotic.
>
> I am not asking you to find her.
>
> I am asking you to go near the lake tomorrow, if the inevitable search effort becomes what search efforts become in towns like yours: good natured worry, stale coffee, bored troopers, church women with blankets for shawls, grown men standing around and pretending not to gossip, and teenagers hoping the sight of blood will improve their sorry lot.
>
> Wear that as camouflage. Bring coffee in a big travel mug if you need a reason.
>
> Look at the scene the way a cop would not. They will be looking for intoxication, theft, panic, a body, a guilty party, and a ditch to put the paperwork in. They may be right. I would prefer it that they were right.
>
> If they are not, I need to know what gets sanded down before it reaches Madison.
>
> Plain facts first:
>
> Whether anyone is saying there was a girl, BEFORE it becomes part of the story.
>
> Whether anyone says the names Violet, or Scarlet.
>
> Whether anyone says Hunter was found, called, arrested, or “still at large” in that confident way people use when they have not asked the right questions.
>
> Whether that old summer camp is being searched, avoided, or otherwise given undue gravitas.
>
> Whether anything was removed from the van before it became official evidence.
>
> Whether anyone mentions a map, a cassette or tape, a songbook, loose pages, or drugs.
>
> Whether the story at noon has different bones than the story at breakfast.
>
> Do not collect folklore for me. Paradise has ghost stories. I know. Every old town with bad drainage and no future has ghost stories. I do not need Mrs. Androsen’s upstairs-window-man unless he was seen last night holding my sister’s purse.
>
> Use tired judgement. Assume people embroider, misremember, drink, lie to feel useful, and repeat the version of the story they like the best.
>
> Still, note the following:
>
> The colors, RED / BLACK / YELLOW / WHITE .
>
> I’ve written like that because while the order is not the point, the arrangement is. If those four are present in roughly equal measure, and if they seem placed rather than merely present, pay attention. A good indication will be your stomach yearning for the service hatch when you look at it. Do not stare longer to confirm the feeling. That is not how one confirms the feeling.
>
> Songs. Songbooks. Pages from songbooks. Camp songs, hymnals, lyrics, handwritten verses, anything someone is humming without knowing where they heard it.
>
> Mixtapes or personal cassettes. Hand-labeled, especially. Voice recordings. Tape cases with the wrong insert. VHS tapes too, if one turns up where it has no reason to be.
>
> Drugs where drugs should not be. I am aware this phrase loses footing in a town with more teenagers than opportunities, but I mean placed things. Drugs as offering, sacrament, apology, or bait. Drugs somewhere too clean, too visible, too carefully hidden, or too politely left behind. If anyone mentions weed with a source they cannot explain, step away from it. THE WEED IS NOT FREE.
>
> Effigies, cairns, totems. Loose terms. Little structures. Little bodies. Markers. Sticks, stones, wire, cloth, toys, bottles, hair and bones if Winchell Country is feeling literary. Things made to stand in for an absence of something else.
>
> Their absence may also matter, but only if that absence announces itself. If you look at a place and immediately think that something should be poised there but isn’t, note the empty place. If you have to persuade yourself, leave it. That is how people become useful to the wrong end of the argument.
>
> One more instruction.
>
> Do not make a complete picture.
>
> If accounts do not match, do not force them to match. If someone describes something badly, do not help them to improve it. If you find a drawing, do not redraw it. If you see writing that seems like nonsense, record where it was before you record what it says.
>
> I am aware this is a strange request from a man who spends his nights begging strangers to be more precise. Consider it evidence that I am taking your wellbeing seriously.
>
> Reply privately. No public thread on the board. No “anyone heard anything weird about Gelid”. No clever subject line. No anonymous survey of local cranks.
>
> Names. Times. Places. Objects. Who said what. Who else heard it. What was moved. What was missing. What somebody tried just a little bit too hard not to mention.
>
> If this is ordinary, I will have wasted your time and exposed a private family terror to someone whose chief qualification is proximity. I can live with being sorry about that.
>
> If it is not ordinary, proximity is the only qualification that really matters.
>
> -- Moony
jbbartram-illu
vaporwave
stormborns
theartofmadeline
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