The Mysterious Case of Sal Hickory occupied a large but secret portion of Birdie's mind. For years, she'd worked at the Nowhere Post under the sickening rule of her boss, Sal Hickory, who was four years her elder and who had been in love with her since high school.
After Birdie refused to return his affections, he'd fired her from writing the ghost's obituaries for the paper.
Come to find out, however, Sal Hickory had been dead for nearly ten years.
It didn't make sense how she'd never even suspected that he'd been a ghost.
In retrospect, she'd never seen him around other people or heard him talked about by anyone else at the Post. She'd just assumed nobody wanted to talk about him, which was fair.
But why had she never felt his spiritual energy? Why was he so...human?
She'd been to the newspaper archives, searching for his obituary, and sure enough, she found the case of Sal Hickory. He'd died at age fourteen after drowning in a river.
His family lived on the outskirts of town, his father being the former director of the paper. After Sal's death, however, the Hickory's had removed themselves from society and nobody had heard from them since.
There was one question that was prominent in Birdie's mind.
How could a ghost survive ten years? He'd missed at least four eclipses and hadn't passed on into the afterlife. Most ghosts barely lasted to their second eclipse before fading to nothing.
Sal had done the opposite of fade. He was almost a living thing again. Except that now, since they'd awoken Gwydyr, she hadn't seen him at all.
This thought always scraped at the back of her brain as she wondered when or if she would see him again. And hoping, for the most part, that she wouldn't.
Sal's metaphorical ghost, however, still haunted her whenever she was in the newsroom.
She could almost feel him creeping around the floorboards, leering at her, glaring down her neck.
Especially when she was alone.
Georgia Taylor, the new director of the Post, had recently appointed Birdie to be the head writer and organizer of the Sunday editions.
Birdie had said yes immediately without thinking about her own schedule. She was in her last year of high school, and Nowhere prided itself on their educational system especially since it was such a small town, so her homework and studying had increased tremendously.
Her parents had said she could still work at the press if her grades didn't suffer the consequences, thus Birdie Penny was a terribly busy bee.
Currently, she had seven handwritten articles spread across her desk. Five of them were written by her and two of them were supplied by "Miss Myrna" and "J.D. Shaw", which were both the same person who wrote under different pseudonyms.
Since the paper was comparatively tiny to most tribunes, Birdie's duties as head writer also included editing.
She skimmed the articles, wrote corrections, changed many paragraphs in her own work before taking them to the massive printing press in the center of the room.
Her low-heeled Mary Janes made a satisfying thunk thunk thunk across the wooden floor and she began arranging all of the metal letters into their respective places along the wooden rows.
As she began the tedious task of arranging every word to match each article, she found that she enjoyed the simplicity of the process.
That was when the ringing began.
It only happened every few weeks, this painful, high-pitched squeal that drilled into Birdie's mind. If blinding white light had a sound, this would be it.
Birdie gripped the edge of the printing press, bracing herself against the pain and squeezing her eyes shut.
It had been happening ever since she'd performed the ritual that had brought Gwydyr to life. She would have died that day if it hadn't been for the forest, but ever since then, her mind was different.
Behind her clenched eyelids, Birdie saw the familiar Gwydyr in all its splendor. Golden trees. Sparkling brooks. Ebony earth.
But it was as if two images of the forest existed at the same time. Because coexisting with the picturesque scenery was death.
As black and violent and deep as the ink Birdie could still smell.
Rotten trees, decaying moss, gray leaves.
And behind that, a third image: People. Souls. Screams.
There were bodies trying to twist their way out of a tree trunk prison, reaching out for either help or escape.
Free us, free us, free us, they whispered.
Birdie started running, even though she could sense that her feet were still planted on the floor of the newsroom.
The screams followed her until she stumbled and fell to her knees.
Stop it, Birdie begged. Let me go.
The screams bounced through each hidden crevice of her brain until, slowly, they began to fade.
She opened her eyes.
She was back at the press.
She hadn't remembered falling to the ground, but now she stared up at the dusty ceiling, her chest heaving with panic.
She forced herself to take in a long breath and exhale slowly.
This type of episode had happened twice before and each time it was always the same. The screaming people in the trees. The pain. The noise.
Birdie assumed it was a side-effect of what happened to her in the forest, but why those images? She'd seen the same visions before they'd even performed the ritual when Gwydyr was trying to call to her. It made her wonder if the forest was trying to contact her again.
Another exhale.
After her heart stopped racing, Birdie got up and continued her work. Her fingers trembled, which made it difficult to arrange the letters.
She'd only made it a few paragraphs until she had to stop, her head pounding too hard for her to keep the letters straight.
She stepped away from the press and rubbed her eyes, seeing blinking pictures of the faces in-between the white spots that danced behind her eyelids.
She squared her shoulders.
It was time to go home.
The walk to Anubis Avenue was a short one, but the northeasterly wind cutting into Birdie's coat made it seem longer.
The peach trees in the orchard beside the Penny house had gone from having clusters of bright fruits that smelled like summertime, to bare, dormant skeletons within a couple of months.
Now they reflected the sky--gray, cold, and monotone.
Birdie didn't mind. The cold air made her breathe deeper.
She rounded the white fence that looped around her house and, instead of going inside, detoured to the barn.
The chickens clucked curiously, peering down at her from their second-story coop, too cold to bother getting up and out.
Birdie stepped over a pile of tools and unlatched one of the stalls.
"Where's my little sweetheart?" she cooed.
A human appeared in the same stall and Birdie jerked back, hitting her head on a shelf.
"Excuse me?" Wyatt asked, half-amused and half-concerned.
Birdie's cheeks flamed and she rubbed the back of her head. "Not you!" she growled. "I was talking to Shady Sue!"
"Who?"
"The cow I bought. Where is she?"
"That three-legged thing?" Wyatt asked incredulously, then nodded to the left. "I moved her to the other stall while I cleaned this one."
"Oh." Birdie went over to the adjacent stall, where a rather terrifying cow stood, or rather leaned.
Shady Sue was certainly a specimen. She only had three legs and one of her eyes were sewn shut. Patches of fur were missing and her tongue kept lolling out of the side of her mouth like a half-decomposed dog.
Birdie kissed her nose. "There she is," she said softly, scrubbing the cow's forehead with her knuckles.
Wyatt stepped up on the slatted wall to peer down at the pair. "Is there a story behind this, or should I not ask?"
"I saw her at the auction last Friday," Birdie said, "just a few hours after you left for California. Unfortunately, you weren't there to talk me out of it, so here we are."
Nowhere had a weekly auction where farmers could sell all types of animals and equipment and most of its residents came, if not to participate, then to be entertained. The Penny family went on occasion, but rarely ever bought anything.
That is, until Shady Sue.
"They were gonna butcher her," Birdie continued. "She was attacked by a coyote a few months ago and the man selling her said she was useless. So, I got her because she's useful to me."
Wyatt squinted. He couldn't see how a three-legged, one-eyed cow could ever be considered "useful". But there was no sense in arguing with Birdie Penny once she made up her mind.
He hopped off of the fence and continued mucking the stall. "I read that book you gave me," he said.
"Let you borrow," Birdie corrected. "What'd you think?"
Wyatt thought a lot of things about it. He'd been thinking about it ever since he started it. In fact, he couldn't stop thinking about the thoughtful notes in the margins, the dog-eared pages, and tear-stained lines that not only brought him to the shorelines of Birdie Penny's island, but stranded him there.
Now that it was time to say it all out loud, he couldn't think of anything except, "Poets use a lot of words to describe something that could be explained with one."
"Mm, figures." Birdie sighed, picking up the brush that was balanced along the wall and running it along Shady Sue's side.
Before Wyatt could make a disastrous comment to try and cover up his nonchalance, Birdie rescued him by saying, "We haven't had any ghosts show up since the eclipse."
Maybe "rescue" wasn't the right word.
Wyatt bit his tongue, knowing that there was at least one ghost living in his greenhouse.
"Ever since Gwydyr showed up, things have been...different," Birdie said.
There was something in her voice that told Wyatt she meant a bad kind of different instead of a good kind.
"Maybe everything just has to get used to it," he said. "Maybe Nowhere doesn't like Gwydyr yet."
Birdie laughed. "That makes two of us." Her face sobered distractedly as she continued to brush Shady Sue. "Marigold seems to be pretty keen on it."
"Where is she now?"
Birdie lifted an eyebrow. "Take a wild guess."
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Hey guys! It's been raining all day, so it's perfect for another chapter!
~What do you think has happened to Birdie?
~Do you trust Gwydyr?
~General thoughts?
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