Ethan's Gang : Unholy War : Book I

Chapter 1 - Intro

Not too very long ago, in a land of brooding fields and silent trees, there was a town called Boboville.  It was halfway between north and south; halfway between here and there.  Primarily known to outsiders as the home of Ware-Wolfe State University ( and yes, everyone cracked jokes about the name ), the town was known to those born and raised there simply as their home.  There were streets and cars and houses and buildings; there were lawns and alleys and teenagers; there were trees and streetlights and songbirds, and-- if you listened to the old-timers--- reindeer, mutant dogs, and headless horsemen.

     Boboville was also a peculiar place in that during the past four years, all manner of bizarre atrocities had occurred.  Nearly half the population had been murdered by local teenagers, though nobody could prove it; the high school and the hospital had both been ransacked and blown up …and then rebuilt without comment, as if nothing had happened.   

     Rumors and half-truths and legends spoke of a man with a black hat and fake cardboard nose who lurked in abandoned farm houses and behind chain link fences, enveloped in a shimmering fog, whispering words from 1985 and 1827 and 1706, burning words of cold, telling of cycles and prophecies and legacies of blood and bones.  The man had once been a boy, or a ghost, or a corpse, or the ghost of a corpse of a boy.

     Rumors told of sexy yet murderous teenagers who lived and died and lived again.  Indian burial grounds were suspected; Catholics brandished huge smoked fish and screamed of the Devil.  Magic and Witchcraft and psycho-plastic dementia were secretly studied by various ordinary-looking citizens.  A woman once paraded down the street dressed like Satan, in an attempt at developing psychic control over dead bodies, so she could bring her 18 slain family members back to life.  Her scheme obviously failed, and she was hauled off to the Crispi Psychiatric Care Center ( known colloquially as the Crispy Madhouse )  in the larger city of Urboppolis, 50 miles away, and put in what had come to be known as The Boboville Wing, with nearly 900 other townsfolk who had gone mad   over the past 5 years.

     Some old timers had tried to maintain a precise record of the things that had befallen their town over the past four years or so, but even then, no pattern or logical progression could be found.  The town librarian, Miss Elaine, had tried to study old newspaper clippings and hospital records, but had gone physically mad, transforming abruptly from a thin, spinsterish old woman into a big fat cackling guy on a motorcycle who went racing away down the street, squealing like a pig and laughing like a madman, before blowing up.

     Most of the citizens, and the present police force and city hall regime, believed in neither magic nor science. They gave little credence to the tales of ghosts, reindeer, or occult patterns.  They didn't believe that people were simply being murdered by ordinary household teenagers, either.  They simply ignored everything and went about their business on a day-by-day basis, pretending that nothing at all was amiss.

     Lately, or at least for the past four months, things had been calmer than in years past, and this allowed the town to forget. Only three or four dead bodies were being discovered every day, instead of dozens or hundreds. So now, over this past summer, when faced with an apparent homicide, nobody tried to connect it with previous events, and if at all possible, they would deny it was even murder.  They simply concocted whatever weird theory would require as little investigation as possible.

     Of course, those under the age of 20 knew more about what was really happening, since the young were the ones chiefly responsible for the four-year campaign of mischief and evil.  Yes, the young.   Teenagers and children, all of them evil, living amongst the other townsfolk, yet separate from their banality and lack of soul.

     There were houses inhabited by kids, where no adults ever went.  There were keys to the underworld hidden in stony old graves.  There were leaves, there were leaves, ah yes, those beautiful leaves.  Dry, brown, yellow-- the leaves of the end of autumn, gathered and hidden in staircases, under shrubs, in the voids outside the consideration of the tunnel-vision of the modern professional mainstream world; leaves in places where once had stood small pools of cold, pure November water, and where once again such pools would in time stand.