Estimated reading time — 16 minutes

So I’ve been busy going through the archives and you know, doing my job, so I haven’t had a lot of time to type up much. Tall Jim needed to start work shortly after he relayed the stories I posted before but he said I could hit him up during his break if I was around. There was a lot of stuff to unpack from everything he said. That was about a week ago, for people keeping track, and I haven’t met with him again since there’s been a ridiculous amount of work to do.

A lot of the documents are, as you’d expect, undated and unsigned. That kind of stuff gets sorted into the ‘strata’ of other documents around them – kind of like a miscellaneous bucket at the end of the dated papers from each year, decade, and township. The organization of the papers is really the biggest stumbling block to collating and I guess that’s why the period of work was left open-ended on the job posting. In for a penny, in for a pound, right? I can’t complain since the accommodations are good and the pay is great. But, yeah, these weird notes and IOUs are just building up and the miscellaneous catch-all gets bigger every week. Given that most of these kinds of notes are just a statement of work done or debt owed with no ‘to’ or ‘from’, not to mention no location – well…you can understand why collating is the most maddening (and never-ending) task on my plate…

From what the director and the Buzzard have said it seems like there used to be a central county archive in Brahms and a storehouse in Cold Spring. I guess that makes sense since Brahms has the county sheriff station and there’s a Lake Champlain Museum in Cold Spring. I’ll probably visit both eventually. I’ve got some friends from Castleton making the trek up here after the school year ends and the MILF has already said I could have a week off since she’s going down to Boston for a conference. So if I find anything cool when I visit either place I’ll keep you guys informed, of course!

Anyway, apparently a few years ago the area had a mother of a blizzard, or really more like seven in a row over three months, and the ice damage ended up flooding the old archives, resulting in the warehouse in Cold Spring just completely collapsing. I guess it makes sense considering the odd assemblage of cartons, suitcases, trunks, and plastic totes all the papers are stuffed into – the whole thing is haphazard and a headache. So the van der Voort Historical Society decided to take everything in and digitize the archives so something like that doesn’t happen again. The Historical Society was, like I said in the first part, originally a museum but I guess they couldn’t keep on the historical landmark listings if they didn’t try to broaden their mandate so the original private library became a county repository and the basements started filling with the waterlogged documents. Some of the papers were victims of mold, moths, or silverfish and had to be destroyed or given to a preservation company to try to salvage what they could, I don’t deal with that kind of stuff. Everything I touch is dry and while there’s sometimes mildew I don’t deal with the black mold. I’ve got a thick polyethyline waste barrel with a hinged lid for those types of documents; the Buzzard – while a pain in the ass – is serious about ‘his’ collection.

But never mind the boring stuff. One odd thing I noticed almost as soon as I arrived was the preponderance of cats in Precipice Bay. It makes sense, I guess, since fishing is a major business and the lake has no end of tiny crabs, dead fish, and birds. But it’s the amount of cats that’s surprising: virtually every person owns a cat – Miss Angie has four – but nothing is made of it, it’s not like there are posters advertising the benefits of cats or a cat festival or anything. It’s just a way of life, I guess; just another in The Bay’s odd peccadilloes that I mentioned in the last entry. Walking down the streets you see cats of all shapes and sizes, breeds, and genders sitting on stoops, on outdoor café tables, or begging for food from restaurants. And the children in town walk their cats on leashes! Toddlers, teenagers, everyone walks around like having a cat on a leash is the most normal thing in the world. Now I like cats, don’t get me wrong, but there’s something disconcerting about passing a playground with a clowder of cats (that’s the technical term) sitting in the sandboxes staring at you as you pass – like that scene from The Birds but with fur and claws.

I asked Miss Angie if she knew why cats were such a big thing in The Bay but she just waved me off, saying that they came over with the fisherman and it’s the way life’s always been. All the townies I know basically said the same thing. The weird thing is that there aren’t any cat breeders in the county. I mean some of the strays are pregnant but the number of cats far outweighs the output, especially considering that so many of them are spayed or neutered (they have the tell-tale clipped ear and humane societies boast about the number of strays fixed each month).

I think that’s why I had a dream about cats last night. I don’t normally dream and when I do I don’t remember much. I’m a little weird that I’m always seeing dreams in third person, watching myself or whoever I’m dreaming of as an outside spectator – making dreams where I do appear (and that I remember) particularly disconcerting. Anyway…

I was standing on the boardwalk of the bay nude and the only light in the whole world, it seemed, was the spinning beam of the lighthouse. But it wasn’t true dark, it was more of a murky russet color like pre-dawn mixed with a warm blue that illuminated everything. It wasn’t pitch dark but it also wasn’t bright enough to see anything beyond what I was focusing on, say, four-or-five feet in front of me.

I wasn’t concerned about my lack of clothes – in fact I felt really calm and warm like I was standing in a hot bath. I began walking slowly from the center of town north to the Four-Points Lodge and the outlet of the Sarafan River, for what reason I couldn’t remember – only that it was where I needed to go – passing by city hall, the courthouse, the library, then countless apartment buildings and homes. It felt like a double exposure photograph, like I was simultaneously seeing the town from street level and in extreme zoom out so the town looked like a bunch of models in a diorama. But I just kept walking until reaching the old docks below the tall cliff that held the Four-Points, except the wood in my dream seemed smooth and new whereas I knew in reality it was a rotted, mossy ruin held together by sand and police tape. Just as I reached the endpoint I realized that I was surrounded by cats, seemingly every cat in town sat in neat little rows stretching down the boardwalk, regimented like a marching band, but I wasn’t scared or surprised. Only seeming…bemused?

One of Miss Angie’s cats, Bigelow, was sitting directly in front of me. He’s an old long-haired tabby with Maine Coon mixed in and generally just sleeps on the upright piano in Miss Angie’s parlor. Just a big fat flurry orange marshmallow. I knelt down to stroke him on the head and spoke:

“How are you Bigelow?”

Bigelow’s ears perked up and he sat straighter then suddenly he spoke!

“How do you know my name?” It came out in a sing-song meowing way that now seems silly but in the dream immediately chilled me. I wasn’t frightened in the beginning, but his response viscerally terrified me – the first scary thing in what I now view as a nightmare – and I stepped backwards off the boardwalk into the bay.

I sank deep into the water, deeper than that part of the bay is in real life, then rose up as if pulled by an invisible hand. I stood up on the surface of the water and the twin beams of the lighthouse came together, focusing on me like spotlights. Looking back I realized that the twin beams of the lighthouse were two separate lights, one beside the other, and each had a slit pupil in the center. It wasn’t the lighthouse on Hope Island in the dream, it was an enormous cat!

Suddenly a rumble erupted all around me like a vibrating wave as an enormous silhouette, taking up the entire horizon, materialized from the hazy blue fog. It had no features or limbs, like a shadow puppet without rods or a cosmic cut-out. It moved impossibly fast, gobbling up the sky like a slithering snake on fast-forward, until it was literally the only thing I could see – just a pulsing wave of scintillating black as far as the eye could see – then contracted until it was merely the size of a mountain.

Only the eyes moved and burned into my body before sweeping across the boardwalk (which was now far away as I floated in midair in the middle of the bay). I watched as all the cats meowed in unison – a deafening warbling tone rattling the world – and disappeared except for Bigelow. The landscape curled and stretched as the giant cat continued rising from the water and reached a paw full of murky darkness out to me. It swiped and I hurtled back across the still water of The Bay backwards until my feet dusted the docks by the center of town, featherlight but muted like a numbed limb or the way you can touch part of yourself that’s fallen asleep and don’t feel it but your mind sees you touching and gives you, like, a quarter of the sensation. Bigelow was already there looking up at me, and nodded to the cosmic cat before rubbed against my legs.

Against the dim gloom, four glowing points appeared against the backdrop of The Bay and I felt myself ‘split’ again, as if seeing two displaced images superimposed. One was my boardwalk-POV and another of the entire town macro-sized like a 3D terrain map. The four golden points pulsed from the cave beneath the Four-Points Lodge colloquially called ‘The Devil’s Anus’, the lighthouse on Hope Island in the middle of the bay, the old van der Voort cemetery on the cliff between the town and the Historical Society building, and somewhere North, beyond the Four-Points. It was just a glimpse, a fraction of a second, but I felt them burn into my eyes like flashbulbs.

Then I woke up.

It was the most vivid dream I’ve ever had and when I sat up Bigelow was watching me from outside my window. He likes to walk around and sleep on the part of the roof outside my room so on any other day I wouldn’t have paid it any mind but after that dream I couldn’t help feeling on edge. Like he was judging me from behind the pane of glass. Like I said, I like cats, but I don’t like having to lint roll my black jeans or black shirts every day just because a cat likes to open the dresser drawers in my room and rub orange fur all over my clothes so I keep my door shut. Maybe it was my residual weirdness from the dream but I opened the window and Bigelow jumped in and nestled on the bed like he owned the place.

I cannot emphasize enough how off-kilter I felt that day. Every time I looked outside I saw a cat and I swear every time they’re looking at me, watching me, before turning away. Even the director noticed how discombobulated I was and let me leave early. So I went over to MacAddams and drank. After getting good and drunk, drinking until Tall Jim kicked me out, I went over to the coffee shop in the center of town for a couple of good espressos and some danish. I couldn’t just stumble drunk back to Miss Angie’s – drunkenness is one of her major pet-peeves (I don’t know why) – so I tried to sober up a bit.

Turns out it was the perfect place to be when Steve and some other townies came in around 10 PM after going to the movies in Birkinsfield. Needless to say they immediately noticed that something was wrong and I ended up spilling the whole thing.

And they didn’t say a goddamn thing; nothing about how I was nuts or how I shouldn’t let a stupid dream shake me up so much, they just gave me these smug looks that made me want to punch them in the face.

“That’s just The Great Mouser. Everyone in the Bay gets visited at least once. I guess you’ve spent enough time here that she figured she’d introduce herself.” This was from Amanda, one of Steve’s friends.

“Sorry we didn’t warn you.” Kitty – Steve’s sister – bought me another triple latte and they sat around me at the booth. “We figured since you’re just visiting you wouldn’t catch her eye but I guess we were wrong. People who’ve worked in town but don’t live here usually don’t get a visit – I totally understand why it freaked you out!”

So I asked them what the fuck it was, this ‘Great Mouser’.

“It’s a town thing,” Cecily – another of Steve’s group – explained, “see Miss Angie wouldn’t have told you about it since it’s really…really something specific to this town. She’ll tell you all about the legends and rumors but the Mouser is one of those hush-hush things only we talk about.” She indicated the whole room.

“We just take it for granted but there’s some strange stuff here, I don’t know if it’s a mass hallucination or what but we’re told about the cats from a young age so that might explain why we all have the dreams but not you.” Steve sipped his coffee and idly pointed outside the window at the clowder of cats sitting on the fountain in the town plaza. “Now that you’ve had the dream it opens up a lot of questions.”

Yeah…like if the fucking cosmic shadow cat god in my dream is real? So I asked what happens after the dream? Am I going to be haunted in my sleep by a giant cat for the rest of my life?

“In the dream you’re given a cat, well, really it’s a kitten or at least it was for all of us, and you get to take care of it – think of it like a familiar or The Great Mouser’s advo-cat? Get it? Advo…anyway…that’s really it. You get a cat and that’s pretty much it. At least I’ve never heard of there being anything else? That’s definitely something Miss Angie would be able to answer.”

I don’t even remember walking back to the B&B but suddenly Steve and his friends were walking away and Miss Angie was pouring me a mug of tea. After four triple shots I was jittery as hell but I drank the unsweetened herbal tea anyway – I think it was Sleepytime tea.

“Oh you have had a start, haven’t you? I’m so sorry, I didn’t think you’d get a visit so I didn’t want to frighten you and that’s all backfired on me, hasn’t it? Would you like to talk about it?”

So I regurgitated the dream again.

She didn’t say anything but looked pointedly at Bigelow who was sitting on the opposite end of the couch.

“Well, I guess there’s nothing for it, looks like old Bigelow is yours.” No sooner had she spoken then the shaggy tabby stood up, padded over to me, and sat himself on my lap. He craned his neck up to look at me and slow-blinked in apparent satisfaction before curling up for a nap. “Poor dear was Charlie Cosgrove’s cat before he passed. Charlie lived next door before the Velascos moved in, he worked for the DPW and was a bit of a ladies man in his youth. Got the cancer and just wasted away, not even that old of a man, really, he was only forty-seven. Bigelow came trotting over after the funeral and I couldn’t just leave this handsome man outside in the cold!”

Miss Angie ruffled the big cat’s scruff and he seemed to take that as his queue to leave.

So that’s what happened last Tuesday/Wednesday before last and Bigelow has been following me around ever since. He sleeps outside my window at night and I open the window in the morning and he lies on my bed while I get ready. He walks with me to the manor and does whatever cats do while I work, then walks with me back to the B&B or, if I go out to the coffee shop or MacAddams, he meets me back at the B&B at night.

Here’s the thing: cats didn’t proliferate in The Bay until the late 1700s when colonial expansion and the Revolutionary War brought bloodshed and death to the region. I’m not saying that the French/British/Iroquois/Abenaki mingling didn’t produce bloodshed but domestic cats weren’t indigenous to the area and in fact weren’t introduced until much later. British officers and Revolutionary troops seemed to bring the cats to the area or at least ushered in the time when cats became a huge thing.

The Great Mouser, as the townies call it, seems benevolent and lives on Hope Island in the middle of the bay where the lighthouse sits. That’s literally all that I could get out of Miss Angie and Steve & Co. It’s kind of a hush-hush thing so I was warned not to go running my mouth off at other people in town. I haven’t had another dream so I guess I’m in the clear for mystical cat gods invading my sleep time. Am I the weird one for thinking this is insane? Steve and his group all just take it in stride and don’t remotely believe anything is wrong with a dream cat giving out mysterious town cats to people! I’m seriously second-guessing this whole endeavor and I don’t like the idea that some creature has gone into my head and EFFECTIVELY WARPED REALITY TO GIVE ME A FREAKING CAT!

Anyway…there seems to be a couple of odd ideas about the cats in any case. Steve and his sister seem to think the cats come from Hope Island, like the Mouser is birthing cats and sending them to town. Cecily believes the cats come out of the forest and the Mouser isn’t really a cat at all but takes the form of one since the dreamers associate whatever thing it is with cats. That’s all a little too subconscious for me but then again, who am I kidding? We’re literally dealing with either the strangest mass hallucination ever or actual contact with a god/deity/spirit. I’m not sure which explanation is better. Tall Jim – who’s real name is Jimmy Cesar, BTW, yes…from that family of Cesars that fell to ‘winter misadventure’ in the 40s – believes that the Mouser doesn’t exist at all. He told me he’s never had a dream and that he doesn’t own a cat. But he did clue me in on something that opens another avenue of investigation: he said that cats are the mortal enemies of some fairy folk that live in the forest. He called them ‘gracklins’ and that caused a light to go off. I’d seen that word before!

I was going through farm lists and manifests from the early 1800s a couple of weeks ago when I came across a farmer’s journal. Most of it was the usual “Bessy isn’t givin’ no milk so I had to sell her”, or “foxes raided the hen house” kind of things – not really interesting stuff – but early on there was a weird word I’d just put off as bad penmanship but it certainly looked like ‘gracklins’.

I’d thought they were writing ‘grackles’ since the journal was found among grain manifests but now it’s clear that ‘gracklin’ is a very specific word for a very specific thing…well that and the fact that one entry reported 2 baby goats and a lamb were taken by gracklins in the night. This area has more than a couple of stories about giant birds but I don’t think they were talking about giant grackles…

A google search gave me a couple of hits for ‘gracklin’ that ended up being an LLC and artwork of a dragon so clearly this was something regional. I brought it up to Miss Angie, telling her what Tall Jim said, and she laughed in that oddly condescending way someone laughs at ignorant children.

“My oh my, I don’t know where you heard about that silly children’s nonsense! ‘Gracklins, gracklins, hiding in the night fens’ and all that rot! Fairy tales to scare misbehaving children more like, bastardized over the years into these tall tales. Why you’d be interested in those fairy tales is beyond me.”

She did tell me about them but only after a very long preamble about how she didn’t believe in any of it and that everything was hokum: “window-dressing”.

Okay, so Jim gave me some info on what he says are the ‘gracklins’ we’re talking about. The Abenaki have several myths about little people living in the forest, from ‘Manôgemasak” – river elves that cause mischief, to “Pukwudgies” – dwarves or fairies that are dangerous if disturbed. Jim thinks they’re all the same thing, what the people of Darabont County call gracklins. The Abenaki myths characterize the dwarves as curious creatures eager for mischief but not outright violence but that could also solely be due to the fact the Abenaki never lived too near the forests…

Miss Angie says that gracklins are short, emaciated, skeletal creatures with no eyes that live in the forest and prey upon hapless people walking in the forest alone. Darabont County has two nursery rhymes about gracklins, one from The Bay and the other from over The Tall Men in Frasier Lake. Gracklins are blind and hunt by sound, following unwary travelers by the crunch of their footsteps in the forest before incapacitating them with sharp talons and dragging them into darkness. Whether they eat them or not is up to who’s telling the legend – Steve and his friends maintain that gracklins eat their victims, stringing them up in caves and slowly tearing strips of skin off to prolong the freshness of their meat, while Miss Angie only says they take their victims away for some nefarious end.

Tall Jim says that gracklins are scared of only two things: cats and hawthorn wood. The Abenaki carried needles and stakes made from hawthorn in case they ran afoul of the creatures while once cats began proliferating in the area it became apparent that the creatures went out of their way to avoid the animals. The connection is clear. What isn’t clear is why some cosmic entity took it upon itself to protect people from gracklins by spreading cats all over the place? Anyway, here are the two version of the rhymes:

Gracklins, gracklins, hiding in the night fens / Jumping in the trees and eating all the birdies.

Gracklins, gracklins, killing all the egg hens / Walk in the moonlight and pray upon their mercies.

Gracklins, gracklins, slaughtering the pig pens / Look them in the eye / You will surely die / All your friends will find your bones buried in the night fens.

(This is the version from Frasier Lake)

If you go walking in the forest at night / Better be wary of winter’s cold bite

The pain you may feel is not by the cold / You are caught in the vice of a gracklin’s tight hold

Arms and legs and fingers and toes / Spindly and twisted they’ll gobble your bones.

Dancing on treetops in the dead of the night / In shadow and murk they lurk out of sight

Screaming and fighting will all be for naught / As soon as you hear them you’re already caught

Arms and legs and fingers and toes / Spindly and twisted to gobble your bones.

So if you go walking in the forest at night / The gracklins will feast on your flesh in moonlight.

(This is the Precipice Bay version)

So…according to Steve and his friends the best way to avoid gracklins is to have a cat. That was obvious even to me considering all that I’ve been told. But if you are walking alone near the forest (Cecily stressed that you didn’t actually need to be in the forest, just walking along the tree-line is enough) there are telltale ways to know if gracklins are hunting you. First, if you hear twigs crackling underfoot or the sound of something knocking on tree-trunks like a woodpecker and it clearly isn’t you and you don’t see anyone nearby…you’re probably being followed. Second, if the treetops begin swaying as if in a strong breeze but there is none then that tree is full of gracklins. Kind of like the hide-behind, gracklins conceal themselves on the far side of trees to avoid being seen. They use some kind of echolocation to hunt and the knocking is them sensing prey – likewise with the whipping noise of upper tree branches. Once close enough, they cut your Achilles tendons and vocal cords then drag you away to their lairs where the aforementioned eating takes place…no explanation on how blind creatures can accurately target those two specific areas of the body, I guess they’re something like Daredevil?

The only means of avoiding such an end are simple: snap your own twigs and knock on the trunks of nearby trees. Gracklins are (apparently) insanely selfish creatures and when they hear other snaps or knocks they’ll believe that another gracklin is hunting you and try to locate its rival, giving you enough time to swiftly reach safety. If a bite of gracklins (The Bay’s name for a gathering of gracklins…I didn’t ask why) is hunting you from the treetops there isn’t any assured method of tricking them – you just avoid the tree/forest until the bite goes away. This actually explains why the farmhouses closest to the forest have large open fields separating the tree-line from the houses/barns. It always struck me as odd that houses in Precipice Bay often have a football field length between forest and home, now it made sense to create a buffer zone if horrible things approached from the trees. If anything about the ‘gracklins’ were real, nothing could leap from the treeline to any of the old farmhouses; and no stories mentioned that the creatures could fly.

So that’s what’s been happening since the last update. I’m still trying to work through this guardian cat nonsense…it’s been a fight to not just run screaming and crying from the town. The only thing keeping me rooted is that no one else ‘touched’ by the Great Mouser is going insane or running away. Steve and his group are indispensable since their casual acceptance of such bizarre cosmic phenomena means I don’t need to be worried that my brain is suddenly going to run out my nose or that Bigelow is going to eat me in my sleep. Still…what was up with the glowing areas of The Bay in my dream? And what does this whole Great Mouser thing even mean?!

Credit: Jenni Kinoshita

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