Howdy. It’s that time again. You’ve decided to leave the region you know well in search of a more exotic locale. But you also want something familiar, a singular taste of home situated in a neighborhood not your own.

Unfortunately, you chose Valmar, ‘The Gothic Heart Of Delaware,’ as your destination. But while you’re here, might as well enjoy this warn…story of the town in its yesterdays…

VALMAR MOTION PICTURE THEATER

07.12.1974

          Most residents of Valmar know Cyrus Moor well. The cycle guy. A single human in ordinary attire wrapped in legend.

          “Thirteen Depravities set upon a single, blighted whaling ship bound for thirteen colonies, All came to the New World, dragged across the sandy breadth of unsuspecting Valmar. Twelve departed, one remained, yet all left their mark. Here spectral eggs gestate in the aberrant adulterations of a fetid placenta.”

          “Does it say anything else?” Cyrus asked, legs crossed on top of a heavy desk in a projection room filled with smoke. Skinny, floppy-haired, in corduroy bell-bottoms and T-shirt. Seventeen, old enough to be curious, young enough to  not care at the same time. 

          “You worried about the stupid tape?” his friend Brian, of equal age, held a hostile tone. “I’m tryin’ to sell this Magnetophon. You wanted to see it. My old man got it straight outta Nazi Germany!” He swiftly pulled out a worn notecard and followed it’s tutelage. “It’s the real deal, with the um, Ef-Ee-Two-Oh-Two type of tape. You know, the good stuff.” Brian followed this with a confident lean on the doorframe any used car salesman would approve of.

          Cyrus touched the machine, a cold block of metal, two grand wheel discs connected by a single sliver of iron oxide tape. Some buttons and a silver flicker switch. It could play back. It could record. This part made the brows go up. “It’s cool. But I had to know if it plays, ya know? This tape is full. Weird. I mean, I’d keep it just to see what old dude’s talking about, but does record work?”

          “Are you kidding?” Brian popped off the current tape and, from a busted, taped up cardboard box he lugged to the theater on his bike, brought out another tape. “My Dad has everything.”

          They attached the wheel and pressed RECORD. It made a hard, satisfactory click. Tape spooled. Cyrus spoke his name, the location. Brian pummeled the air with the lyrics from, ‘I Need Someone To Hold Me When I Cry’.

          Until Cyrus shoved him. “Loretta Lynn! What’re you, soft or something?”

          “I’m suave, man. I’m a lover. You gotta get with the times. Girls love country. And guys who sing.”

          Cyrus muffed up his friend’s hair. “You’’re even weirder than the old guy on the tape, loser.”       

          “Look, you want it or not, man?” Brian fixed his mane while growing irritable.
          “Yeah, yeah, I’ll take it off you. How much?”

          The realities of capitalism hadn’t occurred to Silas until then. “Uh, like, fifty?”

          “Fifty dollars!”

          “Hey, man, you got this swank movie job. I’m still looking for a gig and summer’s almost over. I need that bread, money.”

          “Okay…” Cyrus did an archaeological dig into the pockets of the bell-bottoms cutting off circulation at the hips, until he came out with a crumpled knot of bills, gum, and pennies. “Twenty, twenty-five, forty. Fifty. There. Go be rich. But I keep the blank tapes. How many you got?”

          “Deal.Three, I think? Yeah. Keep that used one, too. I don’t want some old Shakespeare from Nineteen Forty-Whatever anyway. Gotta go, might ask Cindy out.”

          “Cindy hates you.”

          “She loves Loretta Lynn and you just heard my melody voice, man. She’s mine by tonight.”

          “It’s melodious, not melody, and she’ll probably kick you you in the balls and I’ll have to swing by and scrape you off her front yard after work.”

          “No way!”

          “Betcha five dollars.”

          “You got it.” They slapped hands three times, then slid the palms back while touching and ended this ritual in finger guns pointed out.

          “ Catch you on the flipside.”

          “Yeah, later, loser.” Cyrus couldn’t wait until he was gone. The projection room to himself, another cigarette, the infamous Marlboro, that sweet conical light of a new action movie beamed to the faithful below. And while it played, he opted to throw on a bulky headset, and play the fossil of a tape.

          He chanced to note the wording in ink on the wheel’s casing, neat, polished. Far from his own chicken scratch, as one teacher called Cyrus’ handwriting. Marked on the faded, adhered square of paper:

             DELAWARE’S HUNDREDS CURSE

                        AN INTIMATE STUDY

                                     1910-1948

                          MADDI    N COHEE

          Cyrus assumed ‘Maddison,’ and returned the tape to the Magnetophon to hear everything it had to say. 

          “I rest this knowledge in the marvelous confinement of magnetic sound recording tape in the hope that a future generation might better appreciate the severity of the unnatural, mystifying predicaments plaguing the nascent state of Delaware, especially concerning the root of its disorder whose origin rests in routine, ignominious Valmar in the county called Kent, and the unfortunate antiquated Hundred known as South Murderkill.”

          Cyrus stretched his legs as the Marlboro crawled to a slow demise on his lip. Dark hair, a slight curl in it, long, hung over the face. A plain T-shirt rocking Lynard Skynyrd winged skull-and-crossbones clung to the bones. He stared out at the movie projector light in the blank, open way youths process their environment. However, he disagreed with the tape’s opening salvo in one respect.

          “Town’s never been anything but boring.”

          But curiosity encouraged him to give the whole sordid story a chance, so he sat back, and, after hearing a litany of technical and geographical details about the town, Cyrus stopped the playback and rolled a mess of the tape forward in a frustrated attempt at hearing something more intriguing.

          PLAY

          “–unimaginable list of cemeteries in a single–”

          STOP. FORWARD

          “…tragedy after tragedy, until the Icarus Cannery finally collapsed under…”

          STOP

          A few more whizzes by what he presumed to be outdated news. Fingers finally tired of rolling, he settled into the last few minutes of the recording.

          PLAY 

          “–olice nor federal agents have believed a word of my provable research or dared look into it. But my reasoning is as sound as my work. I had no choice but to burn my papers, lest the Pleasanton family, already hunting for my very life, take it and use it against myself, my family, my friends. This recording will be all that remains of over thirty years’ research, tracking down survivors, gaining a foothold into and around the Veil, or what the colonists called Manteau. It is real. It is as magnificently tangible as static electricity, sticking inane worlds together with the atrocious, webbing up existences only dreams can decipher. For those who have ears to listen, the words, ‘Hraimaz, Scaepa, Stowocyllen aye Queme,’ will show you the way into this region’s nonlinear perceptibilities. Where you stand now. Anywhere in Valmar. Moreso in the decrepit salt marsh, and horridly so in the thrall of West Wallover Cemetery.”

          Cyrus brushed the back of his head in a huff and turned around. “Stupid mosquitoes.” The final words of the tape pricked his mind. “West Wallover’s where half my family’s buried. There’s…not a whole lot there.” But it stuck.

          Mr. Majestyk, a scorching action flick starring the rugged-faced Charles Bronson, finished dazzling the audience below, mainly teens tossing popcorn on the carpeting and playing cops and robbers in the lobby. Cyrus ignored them, because in his mind, he was mature. The job was more than money. It acted as a license for adulthood.

          Once they cleared out, he mumbled as any laborer does who is forced to clean up behind others. He did the work, secured the film in its case, and wandered the two theaters to make sure things were picture perfect. 

          On the way out to the lobby he met Terry, the boss. She came from in town, Valmar. That meant middle class, white, nice but unknowing. He restrained a teenage pout of annoyance.

          “Cyrus, good work on the camera. I think you can mind it every weekend, hmm?” She noted something on a clipboard. Then a few more items he couldn’t discern. “Made the rounds?”

          “Yes, ma’am.”

          “You’re such a quiet, respectable boy. Not like these anklebiters in town. I really think it’s because you’re more country. It breeds manners. In the blood, could be the mixing of races softens you more. I hear it’s how it works and Valmar’s got different grades of people you know not just whites and blacks but four pockets to dig into as we both know but I can see you dodge the ignorance of your darker parents and the childish ways of the poor whites on your father’s side. Overall you’re a poster child for your folks, and they should be emulating you, Cyrus. Being excessively handsome makes it all the better. You should be proud. I’m giving you a ten cent raise.” She hugged him, and stared into his eyes. Closely. 

           He shrank into some depth of confoundment. “…thanks.”

          “Now what are you going to do with the rest of your day? Say, you know what? I’m going to cook some shrimp and sit on the patio drinking wine. By myself. You’re welcome to come over and sit with me.”

          Cyrus felt entrapped within a bubble of conflicting pauses. At long last he broke through them in an uncomfortable, “I gotta go help my uncle work at the cemetery.”

          “…oh? Well,” she mustered a crooked smile, “it’s admirable to be so hard working at your age. You have a swell time and don’t work too hard!”

          He hustled out the glass doors and made a hasty march for the outdoors, and the bike.

          Vista Three-wheeler. He unfolded the machine in haste and hopped on, Magnetophon and tapes in the rear basket, and took off.

          He left the plaza parking lot’s minimalist design, the Woolworth’s store, barbershop, etc., for the beige sandy, potholed one-way old way called Potter’s Neck Road, which ran behind the plaza and originally connected Valmar’s farming establishments to the northern part of the state before Route One fomented in the 1910s. Potter’s was, ‘the vacant lot of the Northeast,’ as beautiful in phragmites, stunted dunes and a plethora of pine trees from shortleaf to loblolly as it was strewn with the discarded trappings of McDonald’s burger wrappers, crushed beer cans, and broken Coke bottles.

          Cyrus chanced on biking up to West Wallover and camping out for the night. He was off next day, parents were away camping down in Cape Henlopen (which he thankfully evaded by claiming he needed to work to save for a car), so the world lay wide open for exploration of the past.

          A quick stop at Wilson Gas & Convenience for expedition supplies: two Hershey bars, Fanta fountain drink, pack of Marlboro, plus last month’s issue of The Mighty Thor from the spin rack. Then, a lonesome ride down Potter’s Neck with only the occasional passing pickup truck, the clickish calls of red-winged blackbirds in the reeds.

          West Wallover Cemetery had a peculiar lore in Valmar. Occupying its northernmost limits, the graveyard being the estate of a Swedish family called Fleming who erected a substantial house with long walls in the 1650s. Over the course of time, the Dutch and later English would revive the walls as it formed the borders of what was then all of Valmar.

          The fire of 1745 reduced much of the acreage to blackened char. West Wallover had already housed many graves by that point and so became simply the largest cemetery in the area. Plain. Spacious. It never acquired the lustrous mausoleums many of its peers did as the Victorian Age flowed in.

          The cemetery Cyrus encountered that day kept only the most recent wall at the entrance as Potter’s Neck curved eastward, a thing like stucco branching up into an archway from which hung an antique wrought iron lantern. Above this the words in the same material:

                WEST WALLOVER CEMETERY

          Cyrus could already make out an unending series of headstones in dizzying varieties across the flat, green tract of land. In the distance he noticed the trees of the distant salt marsh watching over the dead. He proceeded in, biking all the way past the main markers. All the way to the rear, to the Wall, the last vestige of the 17th century. It crumbled and flaked, exposed dark bricks softened by weathering. Ferns, ivy, and a few shrubs strangled the venerable stronghold while the wicked roots unsettling witch hazel shoved the westernmost section up from abstruse earth.

          Cyrus noted the burned out corner of what must have been an old house.

          “Cool,” he whispered, and now this hunk of dead architecture made Valmar so much more appealing to his eyes.

          “Be it’s from like, forever ago.” He touched it, only to jerk back in horror as a piece of it fractured and Daddy Longlegs scurried out.

          He turned round, out of breath, wiping hands on bell-bottoms to catch three does eyeing him near the treeline. There were three Turkey Vultures in the air, circling the bluest sky.

          He took in this little corner of reality and felt, real. Adult. He was on his own, doing what he chose, venturing forth without chaperones. This was a kingdom he could understand, cultivate. Conquer.

          After giving the wall a cursory review, he set to the Magnetophon and replayed the old tape.

          “…‘Hraimaz, Scaepa, Stowocyllen aye Queme,’ will show you the way into this region’s nonlinear perceptibilities….”

          Nil

          “Ouch!” He slapped the side of his neck. “Stupid bugs. Should have known not to come out here in the heat–”

          Cyrus jumped left. He looked at the air where he had stood. Nothing there.

          “What was that?”

          Suffereth

          Cyrus touched his chin and tried to look down at it. He was certain, absolutely certain, that something tapped it.

          Suffereth for aeon

          He spun about. Three taps from nothing. Now he was wiping his face, assuming he had stepped into a web and was trying to remove the spider that must be with it.

          But he felt nothing but sweaty skin and floppy hair.

          “What is that?”

          Who beeth?

          Cyrus stumbled backward. He fell over a piece of the wall and on his backside, staring at the charred skeletal remains of the house.

          “Who? Who’s there?”

          Then he realized, “It works? Holy cow, it really works.” He felt exasperated and fantastic. He got up, dusted off, and grabbed the Magnetophon. He smelled it and kissed it. “I don’t know what’s going on, but old dude, you’re gonna make me some money. Now let me see–”

          REVERSE. STOP. PLAY

          “…‘Hraimaz, Scaepa, Stowocyllen aye Queme,’ will show you the way into this region’s nonlinear perceptibilities…”

          Suffereth til thy End Resurrects thee

          Cyrus quivered as something, anything, strode across his chest and excited the skin. He was afraid. He was out of breath. He felt it–

          “Tickles! Ho boy! Brian’s never gonna believe this! I should’ve went by his house first.” He considered this, then felt, “No. This is mine. I’ve gotta see it through, then tell everybody else. I can put Valmar on the map.” Thoughts of a movie flittered through his mind. One filmed in the dark, eerie, him as director. The money. Attention. Three new cars in the driveway. 

          But this would come only after he knew what this tactile shade was and from whence it came. He got serious. “Hello? Can you hear me? I’m, Cyrus. Cyrus Moor. Do you know where you are?” He looked over to the far off entrance, terrified visitors, or the cops, might show up and steal his thunder.

          He waited in the lull, only to receive no reply. Five minutes passed before he remembered the Magnetophon. He replayed the indecipherable words once more.

          Sickness bringeth understanding bridge thy gap heareth a scent made bitter

          Cyrus fell over from the power of the words tickling him. It came in hard, fast. Then, uncomfortable. He was on his knees. No breeze to account for. No spiders, worms, ticks, and so on. He never had a particular talent for logical deduction. School grades floated in a sea of Cs and minuses. But now, the brain reasoned in overdrive.

          What is this doesn’t make any sense is this Hell or Heaven is it God or what? You can’t feel words you can’t gotta get through this with a clear head come on, Cy, think it out. Wait. Wait a minute.

          He formed a stiff upper lip and once again, got on his feet. “Are you the Manteau? Do you know it? Are you talking to me from like, another place?” He reasoned it might, just might, make some sense. Perhaps the air was different ‘over there’. Words carried in a distinct format. Perhaps voice was touch. If so–

          What’s scent? Hearing? Love. Fear?

          “Come on!” He rewound the tape and replayed it, this time talking over it. “There. It’s from Professor,” he stopped to recall, “Cohee. Do you know him? Did you, meet?”

          Cyrus began stumbling around the wall, giggling, coughing and finally, choking. He hacked up a dry heave as words vocalized across his form, knocking him silly. He made out only some.

          Manteau. Poureth thy soul upon…

          “It’s real. You’re real. Okay.” Cyrus took in a big gulp of hot summer air. “If you’re can, show yourself. I can’t see you.”

          Revelation?

          “Uh…yeah?”

          A curious cloud of gnats arose from the bushes, but Cyrus found them not irritating but rather, perfumed. They titillated his nostrils, filled them with a rosy essence. Startled by this, he again watched the entrance. No one. People were like thieves now, and anyone might sneak into this hallowed ground and steal this covert bounty.

          He felt the grass at his sneakers hum. He knew he was moaning but the sound took on more of a waspy brushing against the air in front of his face, a foaming hive his face leaned against. Sound as touch. Sight as scent. He giggled more, but this time from a disassociated mental high.

          The Magnetophon took on the tang of well aged papyrus.

          “Groovy.”

          He touched the cloud in order to add sound to smell and found the gnats were comforting. He forgot the heat of the day, the sticky humidity because now they were vibratory harmonics pulsing the ears into a sedate rhythm. Summer hit Cyrus like old jazz. His body danced.

          As the air around him shifted, he experimented. A bite of Hershey’s went onto all-seeing taste buds. He saw mastication take place from a thousand, chocolate-drenched simple eyes. Insectoid transfiguration. Swallowing became hard seeing how the whole process destroyed, liquefied. Lost form.

          Now spoken-felt enunciations from afar gave the young man more comprehension. His entire body oscillated beyond the Known.

          Cast off thy feeling

          Cyrus, giddy, hearing the chorus of green grass, turned left, closed his eyes and looked deeper within.

          He opened them precious seconds later to see West Wallover Cemetery rewritten by a cosmic hand. The sky in firecracker burst-burn purples, grasses high as his shoulders swaying a capella. 

          He laughed out loud, skin afire, hair floating up. The Vista bike folded of its own accord, scorching marshmallow fever scent. 

          But then, after riotous joy eased, he noticed no headstones, nothing to mark the burials of the dead in this speculative graveyard.

          Until forces moved towards him through the scented grass.

          He couldn’t discern them, outside of the vaguest imagining of humanoid forms. He made out eyes as cinnamon in waves moving around sugary, indecent heads. The world appeared sickeningly sweet and somehow, in some way, this ruined Cyrus’ exuberance. He heard internal dins of insecurity. Paralyzing organs grinding an archaic emotion.

          Survival.

          He jumped over the wall and tried to run. Pulsations of electric red harps stymied his advance and he tumbled into strained cello ivy shackles.

          Hands drummed his person. Dozens of them. Voices leapt out from nowhere, serpentine slitherings across the young man’s epidermis, burrowing into the muscles.

          This beeth a portal?

          A door a boy all the same 

          Maketh the way

          Cyrus, hair pulled violin sharp, cried out a sandpaper wail. He scraped oboe soil but got nowhere, frantically crawling in one spot as the hands, the clove-raw fish-open sewer-cake batter hands restrained the boy.

          Over and over he screamed for help but the entrance to West Wallover was sour methane tower fumes making the outside world a heat rising blur.

          Facing oblivion, captured by hands and a hundred staggering emotions, Cyrus rolled over to face the stalkers in order to kick, punch. Die fighting.

          He accomplished this, but in doing so, now had to contend with the fullness of his captors. They were not people. His mind could only discern them more in terms of humans wracked in eternal agony, disheveled bodies visible only through stretched membranes of onyx carapaces. Humans inside of large deer ticks. Nozzles as arms, feeling, reaching. 

          He felt as if life was being taken out of him. He arched his back hard, a last ditch attempt at power, and flung the blackened parasites off.

          Cyrus reached for the Vista and, seeing them redouble their efforts, swung it left, right.

          “Get away! Leave me alone!”

          Portal asketh for this aye revelatory sanctuary vitae kisseth suffering 

          “No!”

          Deny. We?

          “You’re evil! This is Hell! Get away from me!” His mind panicked as the Vista went round and round, Cyrus spinning in a defensive chaos of self defense.

          “Hey, kid! You okay? Almost hit me with that damned bike!” 

          Cyrus staggered away from a rail thin ma in a denim jumpsuit smoking a cigarette.

          All the young man could do was glare, eyes watering, bike in hand, and laugh. “Keep outta Hell.”

          “What now?”

          Cyrus swallowed, He gripped the bike until he lost feeling in his fingers. The cemetery smelled of blood and newborn babies and the sky cried blue feathers as sucking sounds were heard coming from a void.

          He about faced. Then, as the man approached, he turned back and raised up the bike. “Are you sure?”

          “Look, I maintain the grounds and I got no tolerance for you druggie teens. You hit me with that bike an’ I’ll kick your behind all the way to the police station, you hear me?”

          “Watch out!” Cyrus swung the bike at the wall, smashing it, the force pulling him forward to tumble into the pieces.

          “That does it!” The man grabbed him by the shirt tight and dragged Cyrus, begging laughing crying out of the cemetery where he tossed him on his bottom beside some trash along Potter’s Neck.

         “Go on! Scram! Stupid junkie!”
          Cyrus paced outside the archway, panting. Sweating. Cold over hot. Senses coming in from the wrong organs. He had to . He had to! Something had to stop it. Whatever it was. He needed weapons. He needed faith. He needed–

          Cyrus slammed himself on the bike seat and rode off in a crooked path to no destination.

          An hour later, someone found him along Route One, having smoked two packs of Marlboro, shirtless, clutching a sharpened sassafras stick and glaring, from his deposition read later in court, “at the gate of Hell to help Jesus.”

          Most people in Valmar know him. To his peers and elders he’s the man who let his life move beyond him, who traded a future for an eternal present of addiction. A junkie. To those born later, he’s Crazy Cyrus, the bearded, long-haired ‘hippie’ who rides a weathered tricycle ever so slowly down every side street. He stops only for those who walk down Valmar’s lanes and sidewalks to glare at them. 

          Brown hair. Gray hair. White hair. Cyrus never sees the decades evade him. Time has no scent.

          The eyes don’t blink. The smile is genuine. His inquiry to all the same year after year. 

          “Are you sure of Heaven?”

          No matter the response, he nods, and continues the ride. The friendliest man in town. The loser. He stares at every street and sewer cover, on the hunt. At night, he can be seen by the wary in West Wallover Cemetery, sometimes passed out under a hail of crushed Pabst cans given to him by generous souls. Other evenings he spouts gibberish, banishes the Other back to the Manteau. Threatens drivers in bizarre tongues. Recalls a collapsed youth.

          Plays a broken Magnetophon an dances to the beat of another place.

          Everyone knows Crazy Cyrus.

          No one knows Cyrus Moor. Every town has at least one.