The Town Whispers: Season 1

Chapter 21: The Lessons of Edith Blackleech Pt. 2

Between the Sunday's on Heaven Hill, the week days in a tiny school classroom, with it's chalk tablets, and evenings reading far past bedtime. Between all of that, and more of life's little minutiae - Mildred had more or less forgotten about Sanctum.

She'd forgotten about her Mother's words in that grove of malicious and malformed trees, and she'd certainly forgotten about her chocolate brown leather shoes that she loved so well - wearing them paper thin, and proudly walking to town in them.

There was however, a silk thread - a fine hair that tickled the inside of her brain - a general sense of unease that wormed its way into Mildred's daily life - leaving her unreasonably uncomfortable.

While combing her hair before bed, the sensation of the bristles pulling at a knot would send vivid imagery of wet, tangled locks, and muddy feet into her mind's eye, and she'd know it was a memory, but she was unwilling to exercise any curiosity, and just let those telling images lay where they may in her mind.

As she read her books in the shelter of her room, when thunder clapped in a distant far off storm - and the electric charged scent of vicious ran wafted in through the cracked window, her cheek would tingle and chest would tighten - she knew exactly where that memory was locked away, but she refused to take the key and turn the lock, she refused to confront it - to face it.

And so the memories of Sanctum lay in a shaded valley - half sunken in a boggy marshTR , the corpse of what had been a day in Mildred's life, wrapped in heavy chains....

Slowly...

Sinking....

Lost...

Forever....

Unfortunately for Mildred Morthey, who would one day proudly call herself Mildred LaPonte - her mother, who while married to Mildred's father, still proudly bore her maiden name - Blackleech - was not done with her daughter's lessons.

EDITH: Wake up, Wake up, Wake up, Wake up

MILDRED: Mommy? What are you....

EDITH: Shhhhhh - be quiet, be so very quiet.

Mildred woke to her mother shaking her by the shoulders, she couldn't see in the dark of the earliest hours of morning but she could smell her mother's hair - it was earthy, and reminiscent of wet animal fur.

It draped over Mildred, and dragged against her cheek - the split ends leaving behind them damp, cool trails - Edith, had been out all night again, and she knew it.

Why couldn't her mother just be normal?

Mildred quickly threw on a moth-eaten sweater, and a pair of pant's her father's belly had out grown years ago that she had taken to wearing about the small home, when the night got colder, and it seemed silly and impractical to wear something such as a nightgown.

EDITH: Quiet, Quiet now - hurry hurry, come along.

Her mother pulled at her wrist, dragging her towards the front door, and out into the cold.

It wasn't unusual for her mother to burst into her room, rudely awakening Mildred, to take her out into a field or towards a creek - it was most often her mother's unbridled enthusiasm at some curiosity of nature.

Once it had been a 7 leaf clover - which Edith Blackleech had forced Mildred to eat - for a reason Mildred couldn't recall.

Another time she had dragged Mildred to a creek - where by the light of dawn she'd shown Mildred a school of tadpoles.

Each with a tail, as one would expect, but instead of the 4 tiny sprouts on the sides of their body where 2 arms and 2 legs would grow, there were 6, and Mildred never did learn if that meant 2 additional legs, or 2 additional arms

Sometimes, despite Mildred's contempt for Edith's odd behavior - and her desire to have a normal mother - she sometimes looked forward to these moments with Edith.

As long as Mildred forgot that what spurred those sporadic encounters with her mother, wasn't the love Edith had for her, and a need to share those things with her daughter - well then, so long as she could fool herself, she enjoyed those brief moments in time with Edith.

[frogs and rain]

EDITH: Keep moving, Keep moving - don't look too closely not yet. Keep your eyes down, and hurry, hurry.

Mildred had long since outgrown her chocolate brown leather shoes - long outgrown the unsolicited charity of others - she'd become more acutely aware of the pity in the eyes of others when they looked at her in her plain, and patched hand me downs.

She had once shrugged it off - when there was no consequence to that pity as a small child, when she'd only benefited from the benevolent kindness of others.

But she had grown into a young woman, nearly 13 in fact, and she was becoming the sort of young woman who wanted to be seen as pretty, and kind, and smart - who wanted to be her own woman, one that the boys would whisper about and the other young women in town would want to be - not just the poor girl with the insane mother, and lazy, good for nothing father.

So having long since outgrown those chocolate brown leather shoes with the silver buttons with the embossed letter "L" for LaPonte, she trudged through the wet earth, and fetid undergrowth in a pair of makeshift boots that were far too large for her.


Through the old pants she wore, the skin on Mildred's legs bubbled in goosebumps as the fog that hung low to the ground seeped through her pants and the light morning rain, made her scrunch her shoulders up as she leaned forward trying to will away the wet.

Mildred hadn't thought of her mother's special spot in the woods - that place she called Sanctum - she hadn't thought of it in so long, that she had forgotten the path that led there.

She'd forgotten the way the trail was marked by bent trees, as if they'd made way for the unmarked trail, she'd forgotten how at one point you needed to jump off into the thick bush next to trail most days in order to miss the lake of puddle which formed anytime the sky even threatened to rain, and she'd forgotten the way the roots the entire way there, stuck up out of the ground as they tried to trip her, and hold her back.

However, she did not forget that such a place existed - she'd only ignored it, as if by not acknowledging that Sanctum existed, by not acknowledging how her mother had slapped her, the last time she'd been there, by not acknowledging the strange words she'd heard her mother speak, and the way she demanded she'd sit on that flat rock in the middle of that unnatural clearing. As if by ignoring the entirety of that place, she could erase it from her reality.

Edith, barefoot as usual, leaped into the clearing with a rare show of childlike exuberance.

Mildred stood at the edge -