What happened on October 31st? (2)
november has been a dark and dreary month so far, even for Gloaming. There’s always a bit of a lull in town between Hallow’s Eve and Christmas, but I guess there’s still plenty to look forward to! oh, we also had a sudden cold snap yesterday. Nearly had our house’s pipes burst in the night, haha. I even saw a snowflake. Just one.. But still, how exciting!
Cain hasn’t been returning our messages all week. really hope he’s ok! I know things didn’t go according to plan when we last spoke. even so, it’s a tiny bit disconcerting.
Also I spoke to Vi last night. she’s doing a little better, I think? I wonder if she’s ready to hop back online soon.
to those who are patiently awaiting the rest of the story: let’s continue.
___
I reminded Vi that I wasn’t supposed to take personal calls in the middle of my shifts, but she insisted it was important, so I sat down and listened.
“We have to go to the harvest festival.”
I sort of laughed at this. We had already loosely planned to go some time later that evening.
“Relax, the ferris wheel will still be there tonight,” I joked. “Remember, no curfew on festival nights!” Vi sounded serious, though. Anxious, even.
“When does your shift end?”
I looked at the clock. It was barely 7 a.m.
“Not for another three hours,” I said. In a minute I’d need to go face the reverend again with the check. I had a headache already.
“I’ll meet you at the diner,” 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 Vi’s strange mood was starting to affect me, too.
Once my shift finally ended, Vi showed up at the front, looking as anxious as they’d 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.
“What’s this about, Vi?” 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 society’s recent digitization project, often being tasked with updating the webpages and debugging here and there. Still, I couldn’t understand why they were so shaken up about this.
“It was probably a lame Halloween prank,” I said, pouring a cup of coffee for them. “but it seriously sucks that someone would screw with your hard work like that.”
Vi took a sip of coffee too fast, definitely burning their tongue. I didn’t mention it.
“I don’t care about the code getting deleted, Sienna,” she said. “It’s what happened after.”
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 we’ve probably had since the fifties was plastered all over the place. Ugly, pixilated word art stretched like a banner across the green background, reading: “what a lovely pumpkin patch.” 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.
“I don’t even know where to start with the photos,” 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.
“Wait, what was that?” I said. Vi looked at me quizzically, scrolling up again. “I’ve seen that photo before.”
“Really? Where is it from?” Vi prompted. I racked my brain for the distant memory that had suddenly popped to the surface, only to fade away again. Suddenly, I wasn’t so sure.
“I don’t know,” I admitted. “It’s just familiar.”
“No, I get what you mean,” Vi said. “Let me show you something else.”
I guess that’s 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.
“This is as far as I made it,” 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. “I think whoever hacked the site wants me to meet them here.”
I studied Vi’s 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.
“No, you’re not really thinking of meeting this wack job alone, are you?”
“Well, you’ll be with me,” Vi said simply.
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.
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.)
“You can count on me,” I said, defeated. Once they were convinced that I wouldn’t bail, Vi said their goodbyes and rushed off back to the historical center.
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.