The Archive and the Curator
The air in the County Courthouse Archives basement was thick and stale, smelling sharply of aged paper and dust. The concrete walls were painted a sickly institutional green, and the fluorescent lights hummed with a monotonous, draining drone. Kathleen had been assigned to a small, isolated table near a set of steel shelving units, the silence broken only by the squeak of an ancient library cart and the scratch of her pen.
A man shuffled toward her table. He was the Archivist, a thin, stooped man in his early sixties whose name Kathleen had already forgotten. He was unnervingly quiet, moving with a gait that suggested he preferred to glide rather than walk.
"Here is the first of it, Ms. Rowe," the Curator spoke in a dry whisper that seemed to come from the dust itself. He set down a box marked "Morrison Group Deeds, 1870–1900."
Kathleen sighed dramatically as she looked at the box and thought about the others stacked to the ceiling waiting for her. "It looks like it will be a long day." She tried to give him her most professional smile.
The Curator didn't smile back. He just peered over the rims of his glasses. "The records are here for the public, my dear; take all the time you need." He then glided away, disappearing behind a towering stack of microfiche machines.
Kathleen had sat frozen, a shiver slowly moving down her back. She had seen the same woman, dressed in blue, reflected in the Curator's glasses. Her mind reeled as she searched for an explanation and refused to turn and look behind her.
Papers slid somewhere behind her, and she sprang from her seat, dust seeming to clog her nose and her brain.
She worked to calm herself, her hand patting her chest as she turned a complete circle, trying to see every inch of her surroundings. It took long minutes for her breathing to calm and then more for her to convince herself there was a rational explanation. A flash of blue spectrum from a window, a blue sheet of paper reflected in the curator's glasses, now gone due to the movement she heard earlier. The movement was just pests common in archives like this.
She sat down and forced herself back to work, her mind on edge, her senses wound tight.
She was searching for anything relevant to Willow Shore. She found her first documents in a file marked "Structural Amendments."
The documents were brittle, but legible. Kathleen frowned as she confirmed the pattern Marcus originally discovered. She found permits detailing the perimeter wall being torn down and rebuilt multiple times.
She looked on in confusion as she found permits chronicling a cycle of destruction and creation over and over. She found herself wondering if the wall needed to be remade so regularly, and if so, why.
The permits started from 1960, with the last one having a date of September 20th, 2020, five years prior. Her mind froze as she flipped through the permits over and over again, looking at the date.
• September 20, 1960: Wall height 39.50 feet (12 meters)
• September 20, 1980: Wall height 56.75 feet (17.30 meters)
• September 20, 2000: Wall height 74 feet (22.30 meters)
• September 20, 2020: Wall height 91.25 feet (27.80 meters)
It was exactly every 20 years, as if it were the anniversary of something special. Then the heights themselves hit her. Exactly 17.25 feet taller every year. She sat back in her seat. What did it all mean?
She rubbed the back of her neck and leaned forward to dig back into it.
The same names kept reappearing on the contractor line: a company called Jasper & Sons Restoration. The repetition was startling; why would a property owner repeatedly hire the same company to tear down and rebuild a perfectly good wall every twenty years?
Was the wall perfectly good? Maybe there was some odd corrosive mineral seeping from the ground. If that was true, the property would be worthless to Allen Developers. She smiled as she felt she had stumbled onto something important.
Kathleen immediately pulled out her laptop. She needed to contact them. She quickly searched for the company's information, found a number, and arranged an appointment to speak with the current owner.
As she entered the meeting time into her calendar and hit the "Save" button, her laptop screen suddenly flashed blue and sparkly, emitting a high, agonizingly unnatural tone that cut through the silence of the basement. Kathleen jumped, knocking her coffee cup. She stared, heart pounding, but the screen immediately returned to normal; the appointment was saved. The only thing out of place was the tiny ripple of coffee spreading across the dusty table.
Static. It was just a weird surge of static electricity from the old wiring.
Trying to shake off the unsettling event, Kathleen walked toward a different aisle to retrieve a map she needed. The aisles were narrow, and the stacks of boxes loomed over her like institutional cliffs.
As she passed a row labeled "County Assessor's Misc.," a box on the shelf above her was slightly ajar. The label was faded, but she could read the handwritten note beneath the main title: "Cold Case / Unidentified."
Kathleen froze. She didn't want to look. But her eyes were drawn to the contents: stacks of yellowed file folders. A loose sheet of paper had slipped out, and on it, handwritten names and dates were circled. The geographical location noted on the top of the sheet was clearly Willow Shore.
She frowned. 'Disappearances? The entire box could not be associated with Willow Shore, could it? First a corrosive mineral and now what, a serial killer? What is going on?"
She put the map on top of the box and pulled it off of the shelf. It was heavy, and she placed it down with a thud. Her frown changed to wide-eyed amazement as she looked through the box. Missing boys from last year to the 1920's.
"What the hell is going on at Willow Shore?" She whispered to herself. The answer came soft and directly in her ear. She stood abruptly, the box of missing persons files falling to the floor and all the documents sliding across the floor away from her.
She backed away, truly rattled, the words still tickling her ear.
"He just wants to be happy."