Chapter 5: On appleas and rituals - Part 1

I sat in one of the reading chairs, staring at the black record now held in my hands. "Subtleties and Oddities #26," said the faded, yellowed label. The number unsettled me. If this was the twenty-sixth, how many more were there? What did the other records contain? What other secrets were hidden here? The thought weighed on me—that this recording wasn’t something that had just appeared in this archive by chance.

But what did it refer to? What exactly had this particular record captured? Or perhaps, was it something the townspeople had intentionally recorded?

The song echoed in my mind, that voice... It wasn’t just a song; it felt like an echo, but not the kind you find in an empty room. There was something about the quality of the recording that gave me chills, as if it was forged with old, outdated energy, electromagnetism forced to form words.

I ran my hand over my bindi, a habit of mine when I was trying to focus. But this time, it didn’t help. That voice... That recording was strange, unlike anything I’d heard before. And yet, there was something familiar about it. As if it were the echo of a memory we had forgotten.

The voice of someone. It wasn’t just any voice. Not a mere echo of nostalgia or an ancient whisper. It was the voice of someone who had been present in our lives, in our past. But who? The question pounded in my mind, persistent.

I leaned forward, resting my elbows on my knees, letting the weight of the record rest on my thighs. The reddish lights in the room flickered around me, and I felt Mi Fan’s gaze on me. She didn’t ask anything, though I could sense her unease.

“Did you know they made an entire musical about cops’ lives in Cop Rock?” I said without thinking, trying to distract myself. “It was a crime show from the 90s… but with musical numbers in the middle of cases, as if singing about crime made it easier to understand. Pure madness.”

Mi Fan looked at me, blinking slowly, clearly having no idea what I was talking about.

We knew well enough. We needed this. We needed to stay in the present, to cling to the mundane to avoid being swept away by that strange echo still vibrating in the air.

“Well, let’s investigate,” I said, leaving the vinyl record on the table. I tried to sound more confident than I felt at that moment. Mi Fan continued watching me with those big eyes, full of curiosity and a hint of worry.

“Investigate?” the young lady asked, tilting her head.

With a theatrical gesture, I ran my hand over my face, a not-so-subtle attempt to calm myself. I needed to keep things light, to prevent her from noticing the tremor in my hands.

“Yes, this seems to be a psychophony. Something the townsfolk recorded, trying to capture the inexplicable. The name, Subtleties and Oddities, suggests that strange things have happened here, and this isn’t the first time. And they’ve had to… investigate.”

Mi Fan kept looking at me, her tail swaying side to side, as it always did when she was trying to piece things together in her head.

“And that’s what called you…?” she asked, uncertain.

I paused for a second, looking around the purple-lit room, the turntable, the stacked books. Everything in this town seemed to float in an atmosphere between the real and the surreal. We knew everything was connected, but I still couldn’t see the lines linking the pieces.

“I don’t know, little lady.” My hand brushed the vinyl, as if I could extract something more from it. “But this record, the dancer, the ritual… everything must be linked somehow, like pieces of a puzzle we haven’t managed to fit together yet.”

“Dancer?” she repeated, her tail swaying faster, her ears twitching as if she were trying to recall something.

I nodded, with a smile that concealed my growing unease.

“Another of the town’s subtleties and oddities,” I said, clapping my hands lightly, as if that could dispel the dense air surrounding us. But the truth was, the tension remained, crouched, waiting. Waiting for us.

I took out my notebook and let my hand begin sketching what I had in mind. We had always resorted to drawing when everything else seemed tangled, when logic became a knot even we couldn’t untie. The strokes were quick but precise. I drew the bear as I remembered it, emerging from the forest. Zombie, I sketched almost instinctively, though not the Romero kind, those who crave social change and fresh brains. This bear was more of an empty shell, devoid of any will of its own, moving like a ghost under the control of that voice, the song that had dragged it to the town.

Beside it, a quick sketch of Mi Fan and me. Mi Fan stared at her likeness on the page, clearly unhappy with the drawing. The expression on her face said it all: I hadn’t captured her essence. No matter. Right now, there were more pressing matters than her artistic approval.

I kept drawing, mapping out the sequence of what we had seen. The square, the dancer—or maybe singer, or maybe something else; it wasn’t clear. Too many titles for that raccoon who had vanished before our eyes and now haunted my mind like a disturbing cloud. I labeled her “Suspect A” in my notes. Her movements had been fluid, almost hypnotic, and the audience’s applause echoed in my memory, mechanical and hollow, as if they were following a script they didn’t understand. I drew the townspeople, clapping without knowing why. That bothered me, more than anything. No one remembered her. And that little detail made me feel that something was off.

Then, the sketch of Lassi's statue, covered in blood, with the dead bear at its feet. A quick ending, too clean, as if his mind was still absent, trapped in the trance. I made a quick sketch of the blood dripping down, an unnecessary detail, but one that helped me focus. The dancer remained the main suspect, yet something told me this matter went much deeper. Something didn’t add up.

Why blood? Why a ritual? As I drew a ghostly hand writing with blood on the statue, I couldn’t help but think about the symbolism behind that action. We had seen many strange things, but this… this had a darker meaning. It wasn’t just a murder. It was a message.

And then, Miles. The bear, with that absent, almost dim look. And yet, he’d taken documents from here. Maybe it had nothing to do with his death, but my instinct—that instinct that never failed me—said otherwise. We knew well that the details are the key, and those documents could be far more important than they seemed at first glance.

I closed the notebook, looking over the drawings. They weren’t answers, but they were a way to organize the pieces, an improvised map of what we had so far.

“Mi Fan, do you remember how the bear was in the library? What do you think he was looking for?” I asked, tucking the notebook into the inner pocket of my vest. The question hung in the air between us. I didn’t expect an immediate answer, but I wanted to hear her instinct.

Mi Fan’s ears twitched as she thought, processing the question with the calm of someone raised in a disciplined environment.

“Something from the past, maybe. Something that mattered to him… or something that mattered to someone else,” she said, in that almost philosophical tone she used when trying to emulate her parents.

Exactly. Something that mattered. We knew the most important thing here wasn’t the murder. It was what that murder represented. And Miles, that absent-minded bear, was part of something.

I walked lightly toward the file cabinets, the creaking of the floor barely audible in the sepulchral silence of the House of History. Something didn’t sit right with me about Miles and his relationship with this place. If he’d taken documents, there had to be some record of it, and we’ve always been good at finding what hides in plain sight.

My fingers ran along the spines of the files until I found the one I was looking for. Names. Borrowing records. And there it was: Miles. Three important files, not books. Files.

“SMp 145; Ajk 256; NmO 138,” I read aloud, a smile breaking through, a fleeting sense of triumph. At least we had something.

Mi Fan approached, standing on the iron ball still chained to my ankle, looking down at me with a mix of incredulity and curiosity.

“And that?” she asked, as if expecting me to explain why I was so excited.

I looked up from the file, still smiling.

“It’s been years since I’ve seen something like this, but they’re train engine numbers, from the transcontinental trains.” I paused to gauge her reaction. “The series and letter numbers indicate the year of manufacture and the components used. In short, these are documents about the schematics and repair of the trains.”

I looked back at Mi Fan, who was now balancing herself playfully on the iron ball, as if it were just another game.

"Trains… I would've loved to see them," Mi Fan said in that wistful tone only children use when they dream of seeing something they know no longer exists.

I stepped closer to her, unable to hold back a grin.

"They were majestic, my little lady; they crossed the oceans as if they were bridges over water," I leaned in to whisper in her ear, "but inside… they held a terrible secret… they ATE NAUGHTY CHILDREN!"

Mi Fan jumped, her ears perked up in alarm, and she lost her balance, falling off the iron ball. I laughed, amused by my little prank, and extended my hand to help her up. But, of course, she refused, pushing my hand away with a childish pout of annoyance before retreating to a corner, clearly upset. We always managed to get on her nerves, but over time, she'd learn to laugh at these things… or so I believed.

"Sorry, Mi Fan," I said, softening my tone, though I kept the smile on my face. "These are things only the Mahayans can understand. And, to be honest, the more they forget about these things from the past, the better for our family."

The little tigress didn't respond, but I knew she was listening.

There was something more, something ancient that resonated with the secrets of the trains. Something that needed to remain hidden, even from Mi Fan.

I stretched and walked among the shelves, running my fingers along the spines of books and folders, until my eyes settled on a spot where a few were missing. I took one from the gap and opened it on the nearest table.

The pages were filled with notes on engines, technical specifications, and diagrams, but many of the sheets were smeared with grease, as if they'd been handled recently.

I flipped through the pages, and upon reaching the specifications section, I found something more unsettling: red notes scrawled in the margins.

"Error. Error. Attempt failed."

My heart skipped a beat. These weren’t just old notes. Someone had been experimenting, trying something, and failing.

I rushed to another folder, hoping it wouldn't be the same, but those red marks were there too. The same annotations. Only this time, there was more: hypotheses scribbled on the sides, strange equations and mathematical calculations, far beyond what I could decipher.

“The stones respond to the energy… but the drain is unstable… strange symptoms in the terrain… repeating the mistakes of the past…”

I turned one page, then another. Drawings of the earth, of continents. And over them, lines traced with precision: ley lines, those channels of energy that supposedly ran through the earth according to legend, though we knew the truth. But that wasn’t all. Among the calculations were doodles, symbols I didn’t understand, even sigils drawn with quick strokes, as if someone were desperately trying to unite science and magic.

Mi Fan was already by my side, poking around the folders, her tail flicking back and forth with nervous energy. This time, I couldn’t push her away. We didn’t fully understand what we were seeing either, but we knew we were on to something big. Something beyond what we had expected to find here.

The most intriguing thing of all was a symbol that appeared repeatedly on most of the pages. A circle, made of rails, divided into three equal parts. I observed it for a moment before copying it into my notebook, sketching it with precision. It was as if those lines held a meaning that was eluding us, something hidden behind their simplicity.