The Town Whispers: Season 1

Chapter 10: The Secrets of Mildred LaPonte

There was something in the waters of The Fort.

There was something in the dirt, and the food which grew in it.

There was a wish maker that made all that a person doesn't want to confront just disappear.

It might have been Sleep herself that whispered worms made of coiled dreams into the ears of the townsfolk, or it might have just been human nature.

Whether it was apathy born out of a thousand little cuts and scrapes born of things beyond imaging, or some subtle magic that made the insane, mundane, and thus invisible or incomprehensible, or unnoticeable.

Tom knew many things, but he didn't care about a single one of those secrets, or unseen sights. He did not care, and he could not care, because for reasons beyond his understanding he simply took it for granted that life was just that way.

Like all the other children of The Fort, both those that still played hide and seek amongst the thick bush of the hedges bordering the town, and those children who had grown old and wizened, and who had survived the trials and tribulations of their more vulnerable years, and dreading those vulnerable years to come.... Tom could not see what was right in front of his eyes, and what he had been confronted with over the years, because it was held too close, and blurred.

Living anywhere else, it's easy to blame the simple troubles of life, the troubles that seem large and looming, but in fact are just the sharp edges of that life, on some omniscient and conspiring universe. But living in The Fort, those troubles come too fast, and too often, for Tom and the other townsfolk to have time to think perhaps the empty void above which held their world in its uncaring palms, actually was alive, and the source of their trials and tribulations.

In The Fort, which was not the true name of the place known as The Fort, but merely the name which ignorant settlers had once given it, a person didn't have to walk far to encounter unseen adversaries. If you lived in The Fort, and you opened your eyes, and I mean really opened them, you wouldn't want to be looking to the sky for swirling messages of warning in the clouds, or signs in the constellations, when that which hunts, that which bites and chomps, was in fact much closer and more by proximity, more dangerous.

They were the trees that spoke when wind blew through their leaves, that the townsfolk could not hear because they merely thought that's what a simple gust of wind sounded like.

They were the caves which stood open with jagged lips, that would close and consume; trapping those few brave enough to see what secrets those dark pits held.

They were the swirling eddies that made the river an impenetrable wall, that corralled the sheep, and spit out the bones of anything caught in their torrent.

And most importantly - they were those seeded with the secrets of the long shadows, which walked around plain faced, amongst their neighbors.

Mildred LaPonte walked the path to Riverside Sanitorium, feeling ragged - her soul wasted and worn to the core of her being. She'd been unable to sleep, attending to the thing she'd come to call William.

The days were easy enough, William slept cradled in the dirt beneath the LaPonte home, nestled beneath the floorboards of the pantry, and kept company by a swarm of spiders that warded away what spirits may be reaching for the child.

But each night, William would wake, shaking the walls, with his banshee like screams. Terrorizing Mildred with the incessant needs of raising a thing such as William was.

So Mildred walked the path to Riverside sanitorium, quietly, unable to muster the energy to say hello to anyone she passed, and dreading each footstep as one came after the other, over and over again.

Riverside was further, and more hidden away, secluded in the palm of the temperate rainforest with its towering cedars, and pine. It looked to Mildred, that the road was being swallowed by the collective consciousness of nature, the hive mind connected by an unfathomable network of interconnected roots. The sheer size of that being made up of many trees, which was legion, reminded Mildred of her insignificance in the world.