Living Still

When you first step into this town, I guess the first thing you’ll notice is the quiet. The thick, heavy quiet, and the lack of people. Sure, most towns don’t have that much people anyway, but this town seems deserted. However, it’s not.

Welcome to Aldelati, the town where dreams come true. It’s situated in the middle of nowhere, and no crops grow here. The people are strange, and the animals are dumb. And to think that this place used to be so busy, too.

Used to be? Yes, my friend. This place wasn’t always like this. There was a time where Aldelati was the place to be. Placed in the intersection of several – several, mind you, not one or two – important roads, we can’t help but have all sorts of people coming in everyday, and different people coming in as soon as those leave.

And I’m in the place to know, too. See, my dad runs one of the biggest inns in town, and I used to get to meet all kinds of strangers every night. Tired businessman, laughing couples, noisy families, classy wives of merchants, you name it. We had it all.

Being the son of the innkeepers, I naturally run a bar on the ground floor of the inn, with me as the bartender and a couple of friends as waitresses. And, oh, my girl Relda. She’s the head waitress here. And between me and her, we had a lot of gossip coming in every day.

Sometimes the gossip had nothing to do with this town, sometimes it’s about some superstar, but most of the time, it was something close. Like how Mary Sue took two men home last Saturday night, or how Mr. White’s son sells crack at his old man’s farm. Petty things, really, but I like to be informed. It made the life in this busy town better.

So I guess I can only tell you what happened to this town only through the gossip I get. From what I’ve heard, it all started with Grendell deGract. She’s Relda best friend, and the second prettiest girl in town. After Relda, of course. So it’s no big deal to say that there’s a lot of gossip surrounding her.

To add to her popularity among the bar customers, her widowed mother’s rumored to be a witch, too. The people around here knew her as Old Witch deGract, but affectionately. See, Mrs. deGract is a good witch. She helped with the crops, gave blessings to newborn babies, helped in delivering them, and, as good as the gossips can tell, helped ladies stay young and beautiful.

One day, a fine young man entered town, Randy Lisper. He’s a good-looking man, and seemed quite rich, too. A lot of the ladies went crazy over him, but Grendell, she went head-over-heels in love with him. Now, it is said that Lisper was engaged in some other town far from here, and that he’s on the way to some other faraway town on a business trip, so I guess he’s not thinking of checking out the babes on his one night stay here.

But then again, I guess I was wrong. My guess was that Lisper saw how easy Grendell was going to be, and he took her with him for the night. But of course poor Grendell thought that Lisper fell in love with her, and she’s just heartbroken when she woke up alone next morning. She spent the whole night at my counter, getting drunk and crying.

When we had to close for the night, Relda sent her home, still crying. She told me that Mrs. deGract looked somewhat different that night, as if she hasn’t slept in days. What happened next, nobody knew. What we knew is that the next morning, there’s a huge uproar, and the whole town is in shock.

The local cemetery has been literally turned inside out, with tombstones and gargoyles strewn around as if they were swept by a hurricane, and each plot emptied. All the dead townsfolk are gone, and not a single bone remained in any of the coffins. Only one dead body remained in the whole cemetery, and it was Randy Lisper’s.

He was impaled on one of the spikes on the fence at the far side of the graveyard, facing in, with the spike going in the base of his spine and going out the back of his neck. The most disturbing thing about him was the fact that his face was frozen in a laugh.

Grendell and her mother was nowhere to be found. Some people went to their house and found it empty, but they saw something weird there. As soon as they entered the house, they saw handprints all over the place. Every square foot of the walls, ceiling and floor were covered with reddish-brown handprints, as well as their furniture.

The handprints came in all sizes, from adults to children to even babies.
Of course, nobody would live in the deGracts’ house after that, and the mayor had it burnt down. During the burning of the house, some folks said that they can hear Grendell howling, but some said they heard nothing. We set the graveyard in order again, and the mayor decided that we build a library on the foundation of the deGracts’ home. Lisper’s body was taken down and cremated, and his ashes were sent back to his hometown with no mention whatsoever of what happened.

Try as we might, the town was never the same again. Little by little people stopped coming in, and the roads leading in and out of our town became overgrown with grass. We never left, though. Soon we found that nobody was hungry or thirsty anymore. My bar was still filled with people, but people just ordered a beer and never drank it.

People also started looking older and became so thin that bones showed through their skins. I noticed that Relda’s cheeks have lost all flesh and skin, and now her teeth showed. Everybody looked almost skeletal, but nobody died. We just went on doing stuff that we do, but now we never went outdoors anymore. The sun hurts our eyes.

But if you happen to come here at night, you’ll find that this town is quite alive.
And that’s how Aldelati became what it is now. We’re still here, still living, but hardly any new gossip comes into town. If you do come by, be sure to stop by my bar. We’ll be happy to have you.