Secrets

Chapter 23

"V.F.D...," the young girl said quietly to herself.

Her mind chewed on these three letters for a long moment, watching as her hometown came into view upon the flat horizon, a phrase which here means a place of one's birth or early life or a current fixed location.

"What does it stand for?"

"Volunteer Fire Department," Mr. Caliban responded.

The name did not sound particularly scary or sinister; she knew that such organizations existed, especially in small towns or hamlets where there was no official fire department. In fact, her hometown located near the Fidelis Fjord was one such place. She'd even read about these teams of individuals in her local library when researching the history of the town. It didn't seem very special or important, at least not in the way her driver was making it out to be. If this organization was so important, why was there a long aphorism or motto to go with it? And why were so many people she allegedly knew a part of it? It certainly took all kinds of volunteers to put out fires, but why would there be codes and other mysteries surrounding it and evidently her life.

The yellow cab passed a sign saying:

Welcome to Arcanum

Town of the Fidelis Fjords

It was scribed in standard but bolded lettering and coloured in a rich shade of blue to match its nearby waters of the fjord.

Holly S. knew the sign very well. Often whenever she and her father had gone to the city or another miscellaneous location, she always felt great comfort when she'd see those familiar words. This meant that she was going back to a safe place and it was as if the sign was welcoming her back to where she truly belonged. However, this time was very different. There was no feeling of warmth or security filling her being as they passed the familiar sights of the Arcanum's Main Street. These included several clothing shops, a market that mainly sold freshwater fish, a few restaurants which were water or sea-themed, a post office, a small movie theatre, a motel, a general store, a photography studio, a synagogue, and a printing building. The loss of this feeling perhaps was due to her entering the town alone, without her father, or that she had just recently become aware of a grand and shadowed conspiracy surrounding her and many others' lives. Nevertheless, as the taxicab drove down the street of her hometown, she felt nothing but a sense of dread and coldness that shook her to the bones.

How Mr. Caliban knew where she lived was another unsettling component, but one she chose to ignore for the time being; assuming that either K.S. or her father had given him the directions. Her mind goes back to the thoughts of who K.S. was in relation to her or her father. Was he or she a friend or a foe? Were they relative she'd never met? Was it possible that her mother survived the poisoning and was now living under a different name, trying to communicate with her daughter?

While the final question was extremely unlikely and felt like false hope to the young girl, a phrase which here means having feelings about something that might not be true.

While the concept of hope itself is never a bad thing to have in one's life because it is what allows many of us to get out of bed in the morning, false hope can be a dangerous thing because it could lead to delusions of an unreality, misleading information, and unnecessary sadness. I can think of a leader on a certain island that tells his followers that this land is the only safe place and gives them false hope that it will always be safe so they can leave their previous lives behind. This is a misleading statement that is delusional and deceptive because I know as well as any person that a place can not be safe forever. Eventually poison, time, marauders, or fires can appear and that place is no longer considered safe for one to live and forget about a previous life. Another instance where falsehoods of hope are dangerous would be my own feelings that my beloved Beatrice somehow managed to survive that dreadful fire and was secretly working to contact me to find her children. It is all clearly a figment of my own mind and has to lead myself to perilous and unnecessary sorrow as every beautiful woman I see passing me by in a taxi cab or on a trolley has me staring at her longer than would be appropriate and causing me to begin weeping in a public place.