Dark Days In Fairfield

[Saxon]

(Solo)

The rain came down hard that dismal, gray afternoon in the city of Radasanth. While the city raced to unplug storm drains and find ways to funnel water from the cobblestone streets to prevent a deluge, the Salvarian Quarter was hit the hardest. What with its crowded buildings, narrow streets and the fact the entire quarter sat within a valley in the city below sea level, it didn't take long for the streets to flood. A clannish and quiet people, the descendants of the first Salvic immigrants to step upon Coronian soil in years had banded together to work around a way to push the water back out of the quarter.

While manning brooms throughout the entire town, the people stubbornly swept the water towards the outskirts and kept the levels down until the pump that had been broken was restored. The rainwater bled into the streets as it was sucked into the drains by a water pump that had to be powered by someone riding a bicycle that was attached to the device. It was ingenious.

There was a reason why Saxon liked living in this neighborhood, but it was perhaps for other reasons besides the ironclad resolve and ingenuity of these clannish people. Whether it was for one reason or another, the Coronian owned an apartment at the corner of Robin Street and Keyes. He had had it for years, but many people, namely his enemies had no idea that the hunter had stayed in the immigrant quarter. It was probably for the company he kept and his neighbors more then anything that Saxon often was left alone.

He liked that.

Having returned from a stay in Fallien where he had been in the pursuit of a witch, the hunter was exhausted. She had made it her business to roam from village to village and drown its people, searching for a man she believed could survive her terrible curse. Saxon didn't give her a chance to find him. His muscles still burning and his mind tired from the long and harrowing chase, Saxon had only stepped out of the shower and was rubbing his head furiously with a towel when he heard a knock at the door. An unusual and rare moment in his household, Saxon donned his bath robe and walked across his living room, wondering if his neighbors had seen him arrive in the dead of night yesterday.

A first look of his apartment would glean that Saxon lived a Spartan lifestyle. There was little furniture in the living room besides a moth-eaten sofa, a dining table, a fireplace and a single chair. All of them were spaced out across a long, and lonely mahogany floor that needed varnished and possessed a layer of dust so thick that it caked the soles of Saxon's bare feet in dirt. You could just taste the neglect of the place.

But, that was just the living room.

Turning the old, brass handle that still needed oiled, Saxon undid his only deadbolt and swung the door wide, looking out into the hallway. It took him a moment, but when he felt a small hand pull on the hem of his robe, the hunter looked down and saw the little girl standing at his feet in a ragged, hand-me-down dress that was a stained and faded red. She was about four or five and lived in an apartment on the ground floor. She had taken to Saxon like a moth to a flame and followed him everywhere when he was in town. Her name was Pavla.

She was holding a letter in her hand.

Tugging on his robe again she spoke with a voice that was not yet thick with an accent like her parents, "Tommy! Tommy! A letter came for you!" She crowed with a smile curling around her lips.

"Really?" Saxon said as he kneeled down and accepted the letter from her. "Thank you, Pavla. Tell your mother I'd like to come over for dinner some time as long as she makes that borscht I like."

"Yes, Tommy." The little girl said with a curt nod and turned away to march down the stairs when she turned around again with a perplexed look on her face, "Tommy?"

"What?" Saxon said, looking at her for the first time with his unwavering gaze since he had opened the door. With a letter in one hand, the hunter nursed a cigar in the other.

"Why'd you write a letter to yourself?" She said in a manner that only children of her age could as she twisted her face and posed the question in a manner that almost bordered between disgust and disbelief.

"Uh..." Saxon managed before he inspected the letter, his eyes following the carefully written cursive he knew so well. A memory he thought he had forgotten had traced itself into the dark ink that spelled his name. There was a two cent stamp of a blue bird flying from the branch of a larch. In the middle of the letter, in that delicate cursive he tried so hard to remember who it belonged to, he read his own name;

Thomas E. Saxon
45 Robin Street, Immigration Quarter
Radasanth, Corone

Dark fingers gently touched his mind as he concentrated hard on the pretty handwriting trying to clear the cobwebs of his memory of something that seemed so obvious he should've never forgotten it. For a long while Pavla stared at him as he ignored the fact his knees were beginning to burn from his awkward position, kneeling to the ground. Planting the cigar in his mouth and finally giving up, Saxon took a draw as the cinders crackled and aged, Fallien tobacco flooding his senses. Then he looked to the side of the envelope that indicated the sender of the letter. Gazing upon the beautiful, feminine writing that engraved itself into the white parchment of the envelope, Saxon was dumbfounded.

T. Saxon
731 Langely Boulevard
Fairfield, Corone

A moment passed before it clicked and the place he knew to be the town he had been born in and the street he grew up on finally made sense of the name. The dark realization caused him to look up at the girl and the cigar to simultaneously fall out of his mouth and hit the wooden floor.

"Tabitha." He said flatly, the name feeling like cold lead upon his tongue.

Without an explanation or even a goodbye, and forgetting his cigar as Pavla rushed to stomp it to ash before it caught fire to the entire building, Saxon turned and shut the door. Rushing with clumsy fingers to pull the letter from the envelope without destroying either, he mangled the envelope in his attempt and tore off a large chunk of the letter that thankfully had no writing upon it. Examining it carefully as the familiar scent of ragweed and dandelions that reminded him so much of home flooded his nostrils, once clouded by the smell of the cigar.

The letter was short and to the point, but Saxon could read between the lines of his sister's words;


Dear Thomas,

It has been years since you left home with Uncle Pete. Still, it is time to come back to Fairfield, Tommy. We are in trouble and the family needs you.

Please come before it is too late, brother. I beg of you, forget what our crazy uncle told you how to remember us and face your past. It has been waiting for you and preying on us since you left that day.

Others have given up hope, but I know our Uncle taught you better. How to kill these vile things. You still bear the Saxon name, brother. Our family has never bothered you and respected your decision to live under whatever delusions of us you might have gathered from other members of our family. But our survival depends on it.

Do not tarry,

Tabitha

Saxon stopped to turn over the remains of the envelope to look when it was postmarked. "Two weeks ago." He said softly, a hardness common in his voice suddenly missing after learning the dark news that his family was in peril.

He left for Fairfield the very next day.

[Saxon]

The trip to Fairfield had taken Saxon longer then expected. What he hadn't realized was how far out in the middle of nowhere the town really was. It would have been a different story nearly twenty years ago when his home was on the verge of becoming a boomtown. The Dunwich River twined along the outskirts of the town towards the infamous brick bridge that acted as the only passage directly into Fairfield. The only other entrance was nearly eight miles away until one could safely cross the rushing river again. In possession of the only mill and granary in the area, Fairfield had had ample food and plenty to trade with the other towns that had begun to crop up around it. As the town grew and prospered, so did the entire county.

It was almost as if Fairfield had become the focal point and center of attention of that area of the country and lives hanged by strings, acting as marionettes for some larger purpose. At least that's what it seemed like at the time. Saxon had barely learned to walk when the merchants began to set up shop in his home town, drawing business and wealth to Fairfield like a sponge. The desire to move to Fairfield became the talk of many a town as it grew and grew. Eventually it would absorb the village of Rittman which had long since seen its trade and travelers dry up to the rising prosperity of its quiet conqueror.

But that had been twenty years ago.

As Saxon broke off the cobblestone road that was being overrun with all manner of weeds, he passed the derelict bridge that had once been the funnel in which Corone was fed to the hungry town as it grew. The bridge was made up of a manner of brick and iron that had stood for well over fifty years of wagons, horses, and carriages. Now, the overpass of the bridge lay crumbling into the river as its once strong and reliable masonry became soft and pliable to erosion.

It was a sad sight.

Leading his horse, Ambrose, along the river with his head full of fresh, old memories that smelled of patina, Saxon ran the length of Dunwich in a matter of hours. Eventually he reached a spot where the river narrowed and the overgrown minnows concealed a path of rocks that had been constructed expressly to allow those on horseback to cross. The old sandstone had been soggy, however, and crumbled under the hooves of the colt as he passed. Eventually, the sandstone buckled and began to float as it broke away and drifted down river.

By the time it was late in the afternoon and the sun began to sink overhead, Saxon made it to the remains of his hometown and saw that it was in worse shape then he could have ever imagined.

[Saxon]

The ruins of Fairfield, derelict and ravaged by age, fell into the soft coppery purple of twilight as the sun began to fade behind the Comb Mountains and into nothing. Knowing full well what may have still dwelled in his place of birth, even after two long decades, Saxon chose to find his home and quickly before the last of the light had left its watery candle. He rode through the main street of the town, looking upon the faces of the remaining buildings that had served to support his case that he had once lived here when he was young.

Wooden and brick buildings of all manner and kinds lined the boardwalks that lie on either edge of the roads. The old overhangs that followed the boardwalks as a cover for inclement weather looked like they were the first to crumble. The buildings that had once pumped lifeblood into the town now thrived in their own ruin. Saxon passed a saloon whose name he could still remember even after all of the beer he and his friends had drank over the years.

The Blind Crow, his memory recalled as it licked its lips in quiet approval of such a place that once contained the best of alcohol, call girls you could pay top dollar to and as many games of Faro that you could stomach to lose. There were definitely a lot of fond memories as a teenager that Saxon had left there.

A lot of bad ones too.

He passed a hardware store that had belonged to an old soldier who claimed to have been in an infantry company that had seen war in just about every continent. "The Old Man." Saxon said, repeating the nickname everyone had once called the wayward soldier. His war stories had been the stuff of legend and kids of every age would always sit on the stoop of his house and talk to him every Sunday when the store was closed. Saxon remembered being one of those kids once.

Saxon passed a bank, a bookstore, and a telegraphy too. He passed all manner of trade that had helped temper the town of Fairfield and allow it to progress. As he passed the Pony Express that lay deep within the town, Saxon ushered Ambrose faster. While memories poisoned him with nostalgia as he stared at the broken buildings with chipped paint and shattered glass, Saxon knew he was running out of time. Darkness would fall soon.

Winding around the town that was slowly being reclaimed by nature, now overgrown with weeds and flora that crept up the buildings, Saxon hurried along the dirt path that began up the winding hill. There sat a single, double-story house that had been his childhood home. As the remains of the sun hang in the background and the soft glow electrified the purples, reds, oranges and faintest of blues that struck across the sky, it made a magnificent backdrop to the house whose windows flickered with the only electric lights in the entire town.

Riding to the top, Saxon moved his feet from the stirrups and swung his legs over the black colt as he jumped down. Leading Ambrose to the porch that was beginning to wither and become chipped like many of the other places in Fairfield, the hunter patted him softly on the head. Filled with memories of a time long forgotten, Saxon walked up the three creaking steps to his porch and to the door that had been reinforced with plates of steel.

Suddenly, Saxon knocked on the door and the clang of his fist against steel reverberated around the porch and boomed down the hill to the town below. It wasn't long before other members of the Saxon family came and opened the door for him, flooding the porch in a soft, yellow light.

[Saxon]

Tabitha Saxon was thirty-two years old, but she looked much older. The woman who was a mother of two and a widow to a husband many thought to be mad, her face was weathered with the erosion of age and fear. Her age had traced deep lines into her face and looked that if someone had splashed water on her she could look remarkably ten years younger. Her hair showed split ends and waves of gray that could have only come from the stress of raising two children in a ghost town. What Saxon always remembered of her younger sister were her soft brown eyes and how caring and loving they could be.

Now, they looked like chips of cold coal that bore a smoldering resentment for this town and everything in it for however long she had chosen to stay here. In truth, Tabitha had been the only one of four daughters to survive past the age of six to yellow fever. All of the sons, and there were three of them, had survived but had always carried a reminder of that accursed sickness somewhere on their body. Just as well, his sister had been the first Saxon to give birth in three generations. All Saxons by blood had been males and many had either fallen in battle, sickness or ruin. Many had always said that the face of the Saxon name had always been pockmarked with tragedy.

Tabitha wore slacks and a cotton shirt that had been held up by suspenders that could barely contain her breasts. She was shorter then Saxon by a good foot, but looked to have wasted away from the lack of food. She looked to be bordering upon emaciation. She had definitely lived a hard life.

And she hated Saxon for it.

"It's good you've come!" Tabitha exclaimed when she had finally sized him up, pulling him in with surprising strength and shutting the door behind him.

"I came as soon as I got your letter," Saxon replied and with a quizzical look, he asked, "How'd you know where I lived anyway?"

Tabitha gave a soft smile and shook her head. "Our family has watched you for quite some time, Thomas. Uncle Pete didn't just take you off the grid when you left Fairfield after that tragic day. We've kept tabs."

"Oh." Was all that Saxon could reply with, his eyes wandering around his long forgotten home, a mixture of emotions running through his agitated mind.

Tabitha turned to click a mechanized lock that took up the length of the door and secured it with two flat bars of steel that moved automatically into place. The brassy, polished sheen of the machine looked to be of his father's work who had spent his life as a watchmaker.

"I passed his shop on the way here." Saxon said to himself, seeing flashes of a quiet, taciturn man playing with the innards of a watch he would later sell in the haunted corridors of his memory.

"He was always a skilled craftsman," Tabitha said, her voice dry. "He died a couple years after you left. Mother said it was of a broken heart, but I saw he had had some sort of herb added to his tea the night before."

"He never did that before." She said, trailing off into the impending darkness.

Saxon was given a tour of the house as they talked for maybe an hour or so. The Saxon household had once been lavish with all manner of decoration, as the family had always had its finger on some size of wealth every generation. But none ever seemed to know where it came from. The chandelier that decorated the entrance hall glimmered brightly at the soft electric lights that had been designed as candles, having glowed for quite some time judging from the marks of dust that had melted black upon their glassy surface.

The floor had been decorated in an expensive obsidian tile that had become cracked and worn over the years, bearing the burden of many a footstep over the long years that had finally fatigued it. As Saxon walked around the house and eventually up the long, elegant staircase with the aid of a maple banister, he toured the rooms of his loved ones. Most of them were long since gone.

Tabitha had made her own touches to the house as he passed windows that had become barred and others nailed shut with wooden boards. The room that had belonged to his father had become an armory where all manner of weapons lay stacked against the walls. There was even a table and a kit to case ammunition for the old repeating rifle she had inherited from one of her brothers.

Eventually they stopped in the room of their remaining brother, Howard. It was a simple affair with a bed and a desk as well as its own private bathroom next to the alcove, but it laid covered in stacks of paper, journals and notebooks that had belonged to his brother. It seemed as if it were a temple to his memory.

"He still around?" Saxon asked plainly, his hands in his pockets and his worn fedora still perched on his head.

"Yeah, Tommy." Tabitha replied after awhile, looking at him and then over the many stories and tales that lay unfinished or unread except by his family and friends. "He got worse with age. Took him to Merrywurth years after you left. It broke mother's heart to watch the alienists take custody of him."

Saxon felt a fire grow in the pit of his stomach as looked upon his sister darkly, "You know he never wanted to go to that place. That Asylum nearly destroyed Great Uncle Douglas when he was ten. It scarred Howard!"

Tabitha looked at him with a piercing gaze, opening her mouth to say something but dropped the subject and instead turned around and walked out of the room. The debate over their youngest brother's health, which had been diminishing from his madness had always been fiery. There was absolutely no reason that Saxon could think of to keep his brother in that accursed place that was famed for its barbaric methods and treatments that bordered upon the strange.

The tour was over shortly after.

Saxon lingered in his brother's room for awhile and opened his tomes and flipped their the yellowed pages, trying to recall his face before he had left with his uncle. He could not. All of Saxon's memories had come flooding back when he returned to his place of birth, but strangely most of his memories tied him to names and places, with a little history to everything he saw or touched. However, he could not for the life of him pierce the veil into the deeper reccesses of his dark and velvet memory. Faces were still a mystery to him. Seeing only his brother's frail form cast as an unrecognizable sillouhette in his mind's eye, Saxon felt a profound mixture of both sadness and shame for being unable to open some of the locked doors to his past.

Eventually a voice boomed from below. It was his sister. "Thomas. Come down for dinner. I'm sure you'd very much like to meet my children." She called, her voice layered with a kind of resentment that stabbed him every time she spoke.

"Sure, I'll be there in a minute," Saxon called, closing the book of one of the first stories Howard had written several years after his brother had left. From what he had read of it, it had been the story of merchants who had happened upon a gypsy camp one night and had been robbed and tortured by people who had long been consumed with greed. Howard's stories always seemed to have a kind of dark moral behind them. Saxon placed it on the empty desk and decided to come back to it later.

He never did.

[Saxon]

Dinner was a simple affair that took place in one of the biggest dining halls Saxon had ever seen. The room was large enough to hold banquets or parties in which the citizens of Fairfield would gather for a night of sloth and decadence. While socialites and pillars of the community would come to grease palms and talk of deals that would guide the course of the young and booming town's prospering future. For it was the responsibility of the Saxons and others like them to host events like these to keep the community tight and focused on their common goal. At least, that was how Saxon had remembered it.

But, that had been years ago. The town now laid in ruin and its people either long dead or escaped from the decaying remains of what they had thought they were building as their own Garden of Eden. Those memories of men and women mingling in the large and profound banquet hall in the middle of a masquerade, something Saxon remembered as once being bright and vivid when he was a boy, now grew dark and grey with the curse of age and forgetfulness.

Bathed in the warm light of the entrance hall, Saxon had been standing and examining the remains of the cavernous black hall when his sister beckoned for him to join them. Obliging them, he stepped from the world he knew and into the dark, frigid reaches of a time long forgotten. The hall was in such disarray that when Saxon came to join the remains of his family, he could scarcely recognize it.

The room was dark save for the wet, smoldering candles that flickered upon the only table that remained within that accursed hall. The electricity there had stopped working long ago, having yielded to the darkness that loomed hungry and malevolent in the silent black of the vaulted ceiling. The soft and warm lavender that had decorated the walls had long since peeled and chipped from the humidity, and much of the paintings that had been carried over with the Saxon family from the ancestral home were now grey and faded, beyond the reach of any hope of restoration. And the tables and furniture had disappeared along with much of the weathered, rotten mahogany floor that had been ripped up and obviously used by the family for kindling during the long and grey, insipid decay of the winter months. It would make for a perilous journey to that lonely table where three figures sat, waiting for him.

Tripping and almost breaking his ankle twice as he crossed the large hall, Saxon joined his family and took a seat at the far end of the table. Tabitha sat at its head and her sons on either side of her. With an exchange of greetings, the family sat and dined on what had been their latest catch. Saxon noticed that the two men who sat at the table looked eerily similar of members of the family. The youngest of the pair sat with fork in hand and gazed upon his food from lenses perched on an aquiline nose. He was small and surprisingly rugged for his age, but he didn't seem to have been suffering from the similar effects of jaundice and starvation that Saxon had noticed in his mother. Saxon's nephew reminded him distinctly of Howard, but he couldn't put his finger on what exactly.

The eldest son didn't care for his uncle at all. He wouldn't even look at him with eyes that bore the same chillingly pale blue hue that Saxon had. He was tall and well-built with the frame and attitude of a man who could handle himself in a fight and wasn't afraid to lend a hand when it came to labor. It was an attitude that Saxon immediately began to respect, but he could see how attached he was to his mother. That kind of bond would probably ruin whatever relationship either of them would have so long as his uncle and mother were at odds.

With a knife and fork, Saxon attempted to navigate through the dark innards of an old and scrawny gamecock. The meat had been a touch too pink and far too greasy for his liking, but he didn't say much about it. Save from the main course, there were spattered remains of gooey, spoiled rice and greens that had long since turned. In fact, the only thing that Saxon found to be edible were the dinner rolls, hardened with age but softened by the presence of maggots that had been carefully extracted by his sister only hours before.

It was a meal that probably would have made the hunter violently ill had his long career in the Coronian Army not toughened his nerves and provided him a reputation for a cast-iron stomach. Staring down at the greasy, stringy bits he had pulled from the gamecock's remains, Saxon adopted a long and hard-learned practice of ignoring what it was he was about to put in his mouth and imagined something much more pleasant he'd rather be eating. This sort of method took him a great deal of concentration as the pinkish, undercooked meat was pulled by his fork and he clumsily slurped it down without as much as a wince.

It must have been something all of the Saxon family had been doing, because much of the dinner was spent in silence as they turned over bits and pieces of the remains of their meals for some kind of morsel. It went on for a good quarter of an hour until the din of silverware ceased and the meal was finished. Wiping the grease and flecks of flesh and spoiled rice from his face with a napkin, Saxon stifled a belch. Looking up from his plate for the first time in several minutes, he noticed that the others had already long finished, pushing their plates aside and were staring at him.

"Tabitha," he said, "Your message said it was urgent. Just why have you asked me to come back here? And how did you even find me?"

Tabitha's small, worn face crinkled as her lips curled into that of a smirk. "Why, brother, the Saxons always watch after their own. I thought you would remember that after that.. Uncle of ours.."

"Tabitha." Saxon said flatly, cutting her off right at the pass as his temper flared, revealing much more of the sudden irritation of the defamation of his uncle's character then he cared to. "I did not come all this way to talk about Pete and our history with him. You know as well as I that he was only trying to do what was best for the family back when we were kids. Our parents didn't heed his warning after everything that happened and look what happened? The least you could do is respect his memory and his sacrifice."

"Sacrifice?!" Tabitha said shrilly as her look darkened that both her boys reflexively shrank back in their seats. As she closed her hands against the silverware until her knuckles were white, Saxon's sister took great care in choosing her next words, as if she had practiced this argument over and over again in her head before he had even arrived. "Your uncle, Pete, was at the right place at the right time with you that night. If those lunatics hadn't come across you, you both would've surely perished in that burning barn. But no, after it was all said and done, Uncle Pete brought you home and called our parents cowards. The old drunk then stormed off and you followed him. You!"

"I only left because it wasn't safe here any more," Saxon hissed as he glowered at his sister. "Our parents would never have left this manor unless it was set on fire and it went up like kindling. They, like the other wealthy families in this town, didn't see it as their problem of the plague spreading through this town. It wasn't a matter for a watchmaker or school teacher to tend to. They cowered in this house even when the people who were sick began to change and the killing started. They did nothing to protect us, sister!"

"You lie." Tabitha whispered, her resolve beginning to crumble under her brother's unwavering gaze. As the memories came flashing back in her mind of days now long lost and of a town amidst trebled slaughter. It soon became too much for the middle-aged woman to bear and she stood abruptly, knocking over her chair. But, before she turned to flee to the kitchen, she stopped and looked to her brother. "Thomas, my sons and I are all that is left of the Saxon bloodline aside from you and Howard. I asked for help because our pantry is bare, the wild game has moved on and this is no place for my teenage boys to carry on into adulthood. We have no where to go and you are the only one that can gaze upon this town's black, beating heart and slay the monsters that have plagued us for so long. We need you, more then you need us. That is all."

With that, Tabitha turned and stalked off to the kitchen, her face red and stained with angry tears as she confided in someone she so bitterly resented and did it in front of her own children. Swallowing her pride and bringing all that a ruined woman has to bear, Tabitha had begged her brother to help her. It left the grizzled chunks of greasy gamecock that rested in Saxon's stomach to feel cold and heavy like lead.

After awhile, the two quiet young men that Saxon knew to be his nephews stood and excused themselves as they went to console their mother. While the eldest son had quickly adopted his mother's view and began to have nothing but contempt for his uncle, his brother was not the same. In fact, as Saxon stood leaning over the table, watching them disappear into the oily black, the youngest son lingered for a moment and was about to say something when his brother called for him.

Saxon then stood alone, in a broken home and a world of shadows.