vi | 21 |she/they| artist, investigator, and taxonomist of unclassified beings | documenting various findings as I wander my beautifully bizarre hometown.
november has been a dark and dreary month so far, even for Gloaming. Thereâs always a bit of a lull in town between Hallowâs Eve and Christmas, but I guess thereâs still plenty to look forward to! oh, we also had a sudden cold snap yesterday. Nearly had our houseâs pipes burst in the night, haha. I even saw a snowflake. Just one.. But still, how exciting!Â
Cain hasnât been returning our messages all week. really hope heâs ok! I know things didnât go according to plan when we last spoke. even so, itâs a tiny bit disconcerting.Â
Also I spoke to Vi last night. sheâs doing a little better, I think? I wonder if sheâs ready to hop back online soon.
to those who are patiently awaiting the rest of the story: letâs continue.
___
I reminded Vi that I wasnât supposed to take personal calls in the middle of my shifts, but she insisted it was important, so I sat down and listened.
âWe have to go to the harvest festival.âÂ
I sort of laughed at this. We had already loosely planned to go some time later that evening.Â
âRelax, the ferris wheel will still be there tonight,â I joked. âRemember, no curfew on festival nights!â Vi sounded serious, though. Anxious, even.
âWhen does your shift end?âÂ
 I looked at the clock. It was barely 7 a.m.Â
âNot for another three hours,â I said. In a minute Iâd need to go face the reverend again with the check. I had a headache already.
âIâll meet you at the diner,â said Vi, and hung up.
The rest of my shift passed without incident for the most part. The reverend paid for his meal and left, still humming to himself. The place had started to fill up by then. Mill workers and shop owners came and went for their morning coffee. A group of older women who I recognized as the knitting club filtered in for brunch social. I was full of a fidgety sort of energy the whole morning, fumbling plates and mixing up orders. I think Viâs strange mood was starting to affect me, too.
Once my shift finally ended, Vi showed up at the front, looking as anxious as theyâd sounded on the phone. After surveying the rest of the customers, as if looking for someone, Vi seemed to relax, sinking into a bar seat.
I looked over my shoulder too. My mother was still in the back somewhere, probably doing paperwork.
âWhatâs this about, Vi?â I asked.
Vi explained that someone had hacked into the county website on the night of October 30th. Overnight, apparently the entire homepage had shifted around, entire elements deleted and replaced with a bizarre hodgepodge of gifs and photos.
 I knew she had been helping with the historical societyâs recent digitization project, often being tasked with updating the webpages and debugging here and there. Still, I couldnât understand why they were so shaken up about this.Â
âIt was probably a lame Halloween prank,â I said, pouring a cup of coffee for them. âbut it seriously sucks that someone would screw with your hard work like that.â
Vi took a sip of coffee too fast, definitely burning their tongue. I didnât mention it.
âI donât care about the code getting deleted, Sienna,â she said. âItâs what happened after.â
Vi pulled out a laptop and set it on the counter. She typed in the URL for the county site. Sure enough, the homepage was a mess. That creepy, kitschy little lamb mascot weâve probably had since the fifties was plastered all over the place. Ugly, pixilated word art stretched like a banner across the green background, reading: âwhat a lovely pumpkin patch.â I laughed a bit. It was just so inexplicable.
Then, the photographs loaded in. They were very old, grainy, and innocent enough, but the longer I looked at that slideshow the more uneasy I became. Silhouetted figures were captured in various scenes, all vaguely familiar and yet unintelligible. A figure standing in a graveyard, facing a casket. Several images of a man in a suit and tie, his face obscured.Â
âI donât even know where to start with the photos,â Vi said, beginning to scroll down.
As they did, an image faded into view on the screen that made my stomach sink. The scene is as follows: sunny, warm and bright. A little girl faces away from the camera, holding an Easter basket. She wears a white dress and a ribbon in her hair. A woman, presumably her mother, holds her hand, guiding her through the grass. Other children fill the edges of the frame, participating in the egg hunt alongside her.Â
âWait, what was that?â I said. Vi looked at me quizzically, scrolling up again. âIâve seen that photo before.â
âReally? Where is it from?â Vi prompted. I racked my brain for the distant memory that had suddenly popped to the surface, only to fade away again. Suddenly, I wasnât so sure.
âI donât know,â I admitted. âItâs just familiar.â
âNo, I get what you mean,â Vi said. âLet me show you something else.â
I guess thatâs where you all come in. Vi explained that some randos on the internet not only brought the glitch to her attention, but pointed out something hidden in the code of that hot mess of a website.
Something like a message. Maybe an invitation.
âThis is as far as I made it,â Vi said, clicking through to a grainy image of the iconic festival ferris wheel, its neon lights glowing against a twilight sky. It had been flipped upside-down, superimposed with a tiny glittering GIF of a merry-go-round. âI think whoever hacked the site wants me to meet them here.â
I studied Viâs face, looking for a slight upturn in her lips, any quirk that would give away the joke. The thing is, Vi has always been a terrible liar, at least to me.
They were dead serious about this.
âNo, youâre not really thinking of meeting this wack job alone, are you?âÂ
âWell, youâll be with me,â Vi said simply.Â
I opened my mouth to argue, but something told me that there was no reality in which Violet Egress did not go to the festival today.Â
The only choice was whether or not I would be there too. God, can they be frustrating sometimes. (If they read this entry later, I said what I said.)
âYou can count on me,â I said, defeated. Once they were convinced that I wouldnât bail, Vi said their goodbyes and rushed off back to the historical center.Â
So, it was decided. The ferris wheel would be our first destination on our quest to meet some mystery person from the internet at sundown on Halloween night.
âHey Sunny! Glad to hear from you. Vi has mentioned you a little, mostly that you seem to be pretty close, and want to hang out more, so Iâm happy the two of you have each other with all these freaky things going on.â - Anonymous
hey! thnx. wish the circumstances were better, but it has been a good chance to catch up, if nothing else! <3
A totally valid question. Iâm still trying to understand it myself! Too much. Too much happened.
Iâm going to break this up into parts. Letâs start with the morning, ok?
The day began with a song. On the final day of the festival each year, the shrill whistle of the alarm system is replaced with a musical chime that rings out from the center of town.Â
You can hear the alarm all over, even way out in the backroads like where Vi lives. We used to call it the train whistle when we were kids, but thereâs no station in Gloaming. There were plans for a line once, a long time ago, but they mustâve fallen through for one reason or another. The railway passed us by! Now weâve just got a couple of mills, some dead tracks, and the old emergency siren.
Today, though, we got a song. Iâve never been able to place the tune. Itâs pretty, like an old hymn I can almost remember singing in church. Cain swears itâs just a hauntingly slow rendition of âshave and a haircut, two bits,â but that man says a lot of things.
I was up early to help my mother open the diner for the day, like Iâve been doing pretty much every week since moving back home. She smiled when she heard those beautiful chimes ringing out through the open window like silver bells, humming along in perfect sync as she switched on the lights. I asked her what the tune was. She just chuckled and batted me with a menu playfully. Then she left for the back room to talk with the kitchen staff who were just clocking in. She seemed happy, whatever the case, so I let myself be happy too. I let the music carry my mood on through the sunrise, up until the front door flew open.
Mr. Jimmy Caplan was our first customer of the day. He was humming, too.Â
Not to be rude, but the reverend looked rough around the edges, like really rough, like heâd hardly been sleeping. Leaning in to hand him his menu, I saw dark purple bags stamped under his eyes. And there was the smell.
When I went to church regularly way back in high-school, I remember him as a fresh-faced, clean-shaven guy with these blindingly white straight teeth. He never had a hair out of place, even when he was preaching with fire, gesticulating like a madman to keep the crowd laughing or singing out or hanging on his every word. Vi and I used to joke that his haircut was painted on, it was so slicked down. Every Sunday he wore the same boxy old-fashioned suit with a little gold angel-shaped lapel pin over his heart. He would speak way too close to me. I always held my breath when he closed in to keep from choking on his cologne, thick and smoky like my Gramâs wood-burning stove.
That morning, the reverend still smelled like a house fire, mixed with something pungent like cocktail olives and gin. It was bad.Â
He looked different. Not too aged, but changed. Several hairs were out of place, all falling down over his shiny forehead, and he was growing stubble in unkempt patches. Heâd also swapped his old brown suit for a dark maroon one of equally boxy proportions. The tailoring looked new, but it was oddly stained around the cuffs. Despite looking like a train wreck and a half, he was positively radiant in spirit.
âWell, what are we gonna tell your mama,â he sang out. As he took the laminated menu in his leathery hand, I saw that it glittered with brass rings. âWhat are we gonna tell your pa?â
I smiled at him reflexively, in the way I usually do to placate older men who spout confusing, generally out-of-pocket things in my direction while Iâm on the clock.Â
Jimmy winked. I spat out my canned hostess phrases and left in a hurry because like hell was I going to stay in a room with that rancid energy.
âSay hello to Lucy for me, sweetheart,â I heard him call after me. I was in the back room trying to cleanse the slime off of my soul when I realized that he had probably been singing along to the jukebox earlier. Not like that made the interaction less freakish.
It did cross my mind that our lovely friend Cain had invited me and Vi to a private chat just a few nights before to share his theories on the reverendâs recent behavior. Apparently he had tried to interview Jimmy Caplan for a piece he was working on, and the good reverend didnât exactly like, appreciate his line of questioning? Probably told him off, which I wouldnât even blame him for given Cainâs take-no-prisoners approach to journalism.
What did raise a red flag were Cainâs last words before my internet service conked out:Â I donât think that man is fully human.Â
Peering back out, I took a good long look at the reverend, who was now taking leisurely sips of coffee and doing a crossword. His shiny wingtip shoes tapped to the beat of a Frankie Valli tune while he hemmed and hawed over a particularly tricky clue. He looked human enough to me.
Sure, Mosniâs a talented journalist, but the guy has a flair for the dramatic. I tried to put the thought aside.Â
I was printing a receipt later on when the dinerâs phone buzzed. It was Vi.
if you donât know me, (you probably donât yet lol) I go by Sunny online. I have no idea how much people knows about the situation yet, but Vi asked me to take over her blog while she takes a short break.
The festival hit her pretty hard. donât know how much Vi wants me to share here about that but maybe theyâll be willing to talk about it after recovering.
Like theyâve mentioned having a blog or something a couple times offhand but I guess I didnât realize just how important this project was to them until now. i still donât really get it. Iâll do my best though.
now I donât consider myself to be an archivist or anything, but I have my own notes on recent events, plus all of Viâs sketches and scribbles. going on what we gathered, if Iâm understanding right, weâll need to tread lightly. Iâm totally freaked out by this whole thing, but I guess Iâm in the best headspace to keep things running.
I've gotten so many today I've lost track. So, some freak hacked into our county website and undid some of our hard work, at least temporarily. Clearly whoever it is wants us to be scared, or at least wants us to notice them, to give them some form of fame or reverence?
I haven't had time to dig into all the details, but it's a lot of jumbled information about hidden webpages, even some things linking specifically to that old blog that S and I used to co-run way back in middle school. And yes, the Gloamingcounty.com hack also incorporated some familiar names. Family names.
I don't know what it all means, but I'm going to find out.
HOWEVER. I'm also not going to stop living my life in light of this new information. In spite of all of this chaos, I'm going to the festival tonight. Several people discouraged this, but otherwise I'll just sit at home pacing in my room, nerves and paranoia turned up to 100. I need to clear my head and just have fun for once. Everyone on the team has been working too hard these days. I'm tired.
Don't worry, I'll wear a silver charm as you all suggested.
Thank you for all the kind words. Truly. I know now that my words are reaching people outside of this town. That's all I need for now. I'll sift through them in greater detail when I have the energy to do so.
Happy Hallows Eve. Stay safe and stay near, friends.
-Vi xo
(Plus, the annual harvest festival is a great place to gather information... consider it a supplementary investigation.)
areudirty
origamiaround
gracieabrams
vaporwave
kianamaiart
2087