Magnolia's Code

Jay Tanner

The thing about small, nondescript cities is that they yield little to no help when someone needs it. Tim discovered this pretty quickly when he posted fliers seeking someone with experience of the woods around Magnolia Caverns up around town. Everyone scoffed at him, just like the grocery store owner had done when he had gone to buy groceries. No one offered to help.

    Tim had expected this to some degree, but what he hadn’t expected was a pile of soggy, torn-up fliers dumped at the front door of his apartment. He poked at them with his shoe, disgust welling up in him at the sodden mess. He heard a door creak and looked up to see the old woman living in the apartment opposite his leering at him.

    “That’ll serve you right,” the woman cackled, the wrinkles in her face making her look like a baboon. “You shan’t go looking in those caves with any help… oh, no…”

    Tim slammed the door, leaning on the inside of it for a moment and breathing heavily. Everyone in this town creeped him out. He had no idea what he was going to do, or if he could even continue in these conditions. If he had no one to help him with his research, then he was sunk.

    He padded to his small kitchen to make himself a cup of tea, which was low-quality and almost not worth it in the first place. He remembered with a shudder how dirty the inside of the grocery store had been, and resolved to only eat packaged food while he was in DeVuo City.

    As he sipped his watery tea, Tim sat down at the kitchen table and sifted through a few papers that he had printed off from the internet about Magnolia Caverns. There wasn’t much of value; mostly just articles about the missing people that Mr. Downing had already told him about. He had already gone over them at least three times, looking for anything that Mr. Downing had neglected to tell him about, but the old man was a competent storyteller, and Tim couldn’t find anything that he’d missed. But he still looked through them, half out of boredom and half out of the hope that he’d find something he looked over the first three times.

    The words all seemed to blur together on the pages until Tim was reading the same three words over and over again. He threw the papers down and rubbed his eyes, sighing.

    Tim’s apartment was small and cramped--or cozy and comfortable if you wanted to be optimistic--with low ceilings and white walls. He hadn’t bothered to change out the furniture in the living room (a dirty, well-loved couch and a couple of easy chairs) or the kitchen (standard appliances), but he’d insisted on buying a new bed, as the old mattress had a weird green stain covering most of it. It had been dark until Tim had had new lights installed, because the only thing Tim couldn’t stand for in a workplace was dark rooms. Now, he almost wished he'd invested in a better apartment; if he was going to be shunned and ridiculed for investigating Magnolia Caverns, he'd rather be comfortable. But there was no help for it now, he reasoned. The University of California wouldn’t have reimbursed their half of his rent if he’d found a more expensive apartment. He put his head in his hands, trying to erase the old baboon lady from his mind.

Maybe he should just go back to college, like everyone was saying. There was nothing for him here except a hole with some stupid rocks in it. He almost laughed at the idea that his career consisted of him investigating holes in the ground. What had the world come to? With a sense of ever-growing shame, Tim realized he must seem like an idiot to the people of DeVuo City. There were others before him who had done exactly what he was about to do, and they had all gone crazy. No wonder nobody wanted to help Tim with his research--they all knew what would happen if they did.

If the walls hadn't been so thin, Tim would have screamed in frustration. But he had too much damn respect for his neighbors, even if they didn't give a whit about him. Also, he was too non confrontational. He couldn't talk to people without stuttering.