Excerpt: The kids went out there anyway. How could they not? The warning signs were like invites, gilded and promising all a pleasant diversion. Under the yellow lights, the words “Non-Patrolled Area” were an official designation for badlands, lawless prairie, go at your own risk. Signs were placed to remind the locals that the authorities did not venture into the void unless summoned in an emergency. There were not enough peace officers to cast a wide web, and besides, the town had never incorporated the empty spaces beside it. The hamlet was close to the openness of the undeveloped side of the county, and for years the places outside of town were frolicked in daylight, shunned in darkness. That said, rogues and mischievous teenagers gathered out there at night, and on Halloween kids would run through the long grasses looking for goblins. This was all before the real trouble began.

Sometimes you can hear things coming, but this all started with a silent flash of light. The sound came later, a strange hum, like an old green fridge on a crooked floor and it seemed incessant until it suddenly stopped for moment, and then started up again. The sound is was brought authorities, and others, to the unpatrolled area – at first nobody believed those who were out at night looking west at nothing who then reported the flash.

The authorities and many other sleuths, including amateurs from the town, blanketed the area with searches, moving way, way out; in time, almost to the end of the county, 7 miles away, in search of the producer of the sound. Their searches provided no clues. The sound never got louder, or more muted, never peaked or fell in pitch, and never modulated. It was all around, enveloping, and its locus was untraceable. Returning searchers reported finding nothing, and seemed unchanged until a local doctor noted strange elongations in the fingers of some of the scouts. There seemed no other physiological changes in any of the subjects, and as the years passed without any pestilence or psychosis attributed to the sound, the town got used to the strange mutation. The Doc called it piano finger syndrome, because of the sound, and the newfound ability of the deformed to play the notes of two octaves with one hand. Town elders held a meeting to decide whether to inform outside authorities, the army, the federal civil service, of the relevant events. After a little discussion, it was decided that the townspeople did not want to be exposed as freaks, or invalids, or even non-conformists, any of which might turn the town into one big circus tent, and invite outsiders to venture in to humiliate the innocents affected. It was also decided that the physiological anomaly would be ignored by the townspeople and the elongation of fingers would forevermore be treated as the normal and proper proportion of digital extremity. The townspeople, relieved that they would not become media curiosities, agreed to the stricture.

A generation has passed since those events. The signs are still posted on the edge of town. The sound is still everywhere. There is more music emanating from parlor windows now, as the townspeople are especially proficient jazz pianists. The mystery of it all abides, and sometimes chills those that think too much about it. Life is about accepting new normalities. Halloween brings scary stories and horror films to a town with an unknown force teeming at its edge. The day also finds young people frolicking, in costume, all over the unpatrolled area.

There is ample to be afraid of in their modern world, and yet the kids still go out there. How could they not?

–Danny Grosso

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Artwork and text copyright Danny Grosso