A Lewisian Year

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Presented in partnership with the Lewisia Communications Board and Lewisia Public Library

Sponsored by The Historical Society

Hello, readers, listeners, and psychic osmosizers! Welcome to A Lewisian Year, a monthly showcase celebrating the rich culture here in the Lake Lewisia district. Each month, we'll highlight some seasonal events, local celebrations and interpretations of national and world holidays, and historical tidbits.

OCTOBER

Lights on the Lake

You don't know for sure what brought you out to the lake, this cool and misty Halloween night. There are so many bright delights to be enjoyed in town, more festive settings than this stretch of pebbled shore. The moon, already set and no more than a sickle anyway, would do little to illuminate anything more than the glassy surface of the lake nearest to you. Farther out, even that fades into a wall of fog. You just knew, somehow, you were supposed to be here. And you aren't the only one: other people assemble on the shore in uncertain silence. You all look out across the lake, wondering why you are here.

You don't have to wait long. Something appears in the fog out on the water. Just a patch of brightness that could be no more than a particularly thick clump of mist, if it weren't for the way it slowly approaches the shore. It bobs a little as it comes--something is floating toward you. Several somethings, you realize, as more lights emerge from the fog. Soon, a whole flotilla of lights can be made out. And now, by their collective glow, you can see how they are traveling to you.

Each light rides within a pumpkin, a little ship of hollowed squash. Tiny Jack-Be-Littles, great lumpen Knuckleheads, frosty blue Jarrahdales. The ghostly white of Cotton Candy, and the iconic roundness of Baby Bear. Some pumpkins carry but a single ethereal light, while others are crowded with a dozen. They drift in a wobbly, uneven way, suitable for a squash attempting to cross a lake, and yet they also approach so quickly, you have hardly had a chance to look along the length of their assemblage before they are nearly to the shore.

Already, with the pumpkins still several yards out, people have begun to stumble into the water. In the dark on either side of you, some give little cries of recognition as they lurch forward. Others splash out to meet their pumpkin, their lights, in silences grim or reverent. In time, you too will realize which little harvest ship is yours. You too will wade out into the water, heedless of soaked shoes and heavy pant legs. Because you understand, now, in the dark and the mist, what the lights are. You know how far they've come to be here tonight.

It is Halloween, and your beloved dead have come out to see you again. The pumpkins ferry their little soul lights from the misty underworlds and afterlives they inhabit, on this night when such visitations are possible. I will not hazard a guess as to who has come for you this year, nor speculate about what messages they might bring. No matter how many assemble on the lakeshore in a given year, we all meet the lights alone.

Search and Rescue

As you make your way back through town, you watch the more mundane joys of Halloween, in all their glittery, sugar-stuffed glory: trick-or-treaters. Even before the night itself, there are harvest events all month to draw out crowds. It's easy to get lost in such a crowd. Easy for a group to get smaller by one or two people without anyone noticing right away. Easy for someone to get lured away from the group and the safety of the path when there are so many delights to look at.

When that happens, someone has to track them down. Enter the Lewisia Search and Rescue Collective, a loose association of public servants, private trackers, and independently operating animal guides. Given the unusual terrain of the Lewisia area, both physical and ethereal, it takes more than just a sniffer dog and an unwashed shirt to track down a missing person. The LSRC can handle everything from underwater searches (trained kingfishers and a pair of selkie sisters) to dimensional rift retrievals (several retired time travelers and the single skinniest, most disreputable- and ancient-looking black cat I have ever seen). They even have multiple successful faerie abduction recoveries in their history, but they declined to give any details about whom of their associates had handled those cases.

October sees more mysterious disappearances than any other month of the year in the greater Lewisia region. The town's ability to draw in outsiders raises the statistics for seventeen counties beyond its immediate reach as well. (Your humble host has spent a lot of time looking at microfiche records of missing person reports in the last month. A lot.)

Of course, a missing person isn't always a bad thing; a mysterious disappearance isn't always an involuntary one. Whether it's down to October's metaphysical properties, the changeable fall weather, or just the prospect of facing the coming winter cooped up somewhere, or with someone, you hate, this is the time of year when people make their escapes. Plenty of fairy rings are approached with clear eyes, rather than blundered into. Sometimes maw-like eldritch portals swallow a person AND the suitcase they packed ahead of time. Sometimes, a missing person does not need or want to be found. After all, sometimes those missing people end up here in Lewisia.

Mating and Migration

While we're on the subject of local population fluctuations, I have a repeated and intense reminder from Dr. Ben Langston in the Biology department of the community college regarding mating and migrating creatures this autumn:

If you encounter a local animal, cryptid, ambulatory plant, or other apparently non-rational life form, and it seems like it really wants to eat, breed with, or flee from you or anything else in the immediate area? Strongly consider getting out of its way.

This time of the year, several of our local species leave on their yearly migration to warmer climates in the south. Tawny unicorns and scorched-beak falcons have both already left us. Snowy púki and glass bats will likely be seen headed along their usual paths bordering the Briarwood district. These habits are driven by seasonal changes both obvious and subtle, written into the genetics of creatures and taught from one generation to the next.

It is a drive stronger than your desire to cross a particular road just then. It is an impulse older than your ideas about private yards and landscaping. Let them pass.

All of which is nothing compared to the mating impulse in some creatures. I don't think I need to explicate the mortal danger faced by anyone who gets between a bull moose and his paramour. And while Old Tommy, the goblin crane who lives out by Stoneheart Manor, is generally friendly with the public, that dance he's doing for the next month is not for your benefit, and you should consider using an extremely long lens if you feel compelled to capture his moves on film.

If anything should decide that you are, in fact, the intended subject of their amorous attentions, it is recommended that you seek shelter indoors. Cars are not the deterrent you might hope, except in cases of relatively small unwelcome suitors. A sturdy door and/or high fence will offer more protection until their interest turns elsewhere.

Of course, if you decide you quite fancy one of the human-compatible creatures currently seeking mates, we won't stand in your way. Advice and resources for negotiating an interspecies relationship and parenting any resulting hybrid children can be found through the library's life skills programming.

This Month in History

October 17, 1937 saw the first public distribution of the newly developed vaccine against Custler's Influenza, also known as Gothic flu. Symptoms of Gothic flu include paleness, wasting away, light aversion, mysterious billowing winds centered around the afflicted, and a compulsion to find moorland and cliffs on which to wander. Though not directly fatal, the impulses caused by the disease frequently lead to misadventure. Several of Lewisia's older architectural wonders are thought to have begun as visions of designers suffering from undiagnosed cases of Gothic flu, as the disease is also known to cause obsessions with houses.

Efforts to explore a vaccine or even study the disease had been hindered for years by the tendency of any laboratory setting to go moderately weird within six months of introducing live virus samples to the space. Teams of sensible researchers were assembled based on testing for resistance to romantic notions and delusions of grandeur. Special ultramodern workspaces had to be built, including numerous south-facing windows to counteract the dark and withdrawn tendencies brought on by proximity to the virus. Thanks to their efforts, Gothic flu is now a rare, and rarely life-altering, affliction that seldom does more than cause a temporary flare for flowing poet's shirts and antique literature.

That's a taste of what October has to offer us. See you next month, when November replaces werewolves with regular wolves, donates an hour, and once again brings a covered dish.