The Ever After

Prologue

MAY ELLEN BIRD WAS BORN ON A SATURDAY, in the east wing of the third floor of White Moss Manor. Tiny and squishy and curious, she balled her little fists and noticed many things: the spider snoozing in its nest in the window, the thick smell of the woods crouching outside the house, and the shadowy figure that hovered over her crib when no one else was around.

Just a simple baby, she didn't know she had any reason to be afraid. She didn't know that Briery Swamp, West Virginia, had lost seventeen people to mysterious causes.

In 1897 one Bertha "Bad Breath" Brettwaller, age eighty-three, hobbled into the woods to forage for wild garlic. She didn't come back. When the townspeople searched her house for clues about where she'd gone off to, they found nothing curious, except that she did not own a toothbrush. Three nuns moved into a cottage on Droopy View Hill in 1902 to live a quiet, holy life and teach a small group of Appalachian children to spell "Appalachia" and other words. One April morning the three, up to shenanigans on their day off, skipped into the woods for freeze tag and a cool dip. They were never heard from again.


At a lake deep in the shelter of the trees, a mother duck was sunbathing blissfully when her seven ducklings waddled off for a swim. They floated out onto the water, happily quacking the latest duckling gossip to one another, when there was a splash. They vanished completely. Their mother waddled forlornly along the water's edge for three days before quacking her sad way south. Being just a simple duck, she could not report the incident.

The biggest and most shocking tragedy to hit Briery Swamp came in 1927. That was when twelve fur trappers, meeting for a trappers' convention at that same lake in the hills, went in to bathe under three feet of water and didn't come up again. Nobody in town knew of anything amiss for three days. They didn't know the trappers or even that they were in the area. Nobody ever would have known if it hadn't been for Elmo Peterson.

Elmo was the thirteenth trapper. He straggled onto Main Street that third day, tired, hungry, and smellier than any skunk Briery Swamp had seen since Tickles, the stuffed skunk that hung on the wall of the old post office. Jada Lincoln Tully, a reporter for The Briery Inquirer, never did get the story, because Elmo Peterson had gone stark raving mad. He took to wearing footy pajamas and jogging circles around the town at midnight. The bodies of his friends were never found.

After that, people started to move away.

Judge Fineas McCreely said that he'd developed allergies to the West Virginia jasmine that bloomed nightly, and moved his family to Montana. A whole slew of lawyers and their families left with him.

Alligator Jasper, who was named for the teeth scars he'd obtained as a toddler on a visit to Louisiana, got his seventeen cousins, who made up half the town, to go on safari with him in Africa. They were trampled by a rhinoceros.

Aida Peterson, the town beauty who married crazy Elmo Peterson, because of his fame as sole survivor of the tragedy, claimed they were moving to be near her ailing aunt in Tampa. But everybody knew Aida Peterson didn't have any kin still living.

The truth was, everyone was afraid. After a while the only residents left in Briery Swamp were the postmaster and Tickles, the stuffed skunk.

Soon a drought came to the town, and the swamps dried up—all but for one lake in the mountains, back behind skunk- weed and sinkholes and brambleberry bushes, where no one bothered to go.

Eventually the postmaster died. The post office saw its last letter come in 1951, nearly a year later. The mailman who delivered it wandered off his route into the woods that same afternoon and disappeared.

The letter sat in the post office for many years after that, unread. Fifty years later a young woman, with the last name of Bird, moved into the old Brettwaller place, and had a child. Briery Swamp slept. And May Ellen Bird, only a baby after all, who did not know the strange history of her town or even the name of it yet, was blissfully unaware that it slept with one eye open.