The Change of the Seasons: The Long Sweat

Chapter 7
Interlude

Chapter Description: A teenage girl discovers a magical secret and begins a mission that will change her town forever.

[size=2]It was the perfect storm on the perfect night and Sarah Longview was ready for it. At 15 years old, Sarah looked kind of ridiculous standing in the rain the way she was in her gothic get-up. She stood on her back porch, hands at her hips, ready to accept whatever fate New Springs had in store for her. She didn’t want to change, she liked being a teenager. But, if she was going to carry out her plans, than she needed to offer herself up to the force of nature that controlled this valley. Otherwise, she would likely experience a fate far worse than death.

A bookworm a decade in the making, she had read a great deal about New Springs’ power in her two years spent volunteering for the New Springs Library. Hidden away in the special collections section were several tomes that chronicled the discovery of Old Lake Valley that were written by frontiersmen Daniel Edwardson, Lambert Morrison, and Greg Harrison who would eventually go on to found the settlement of New Springs some two and a half centuries ago. Each frontiersman was a specialist in a different field: Edwardson was a cartographer and mapped the valley while recording its geology; Morrison was a naturalist and vividly described the valley’s plants and wildlife; while Harrison was an ex-solider turned proto-anthropologist who wrote about the local Native Americans that had lived in the area.

It was Harrison’s journal entries that had initially engaged Sarah at first. She had stumbled upon an interview he had conducted with an old Native American woman who told him a tale of pure fantasy. Supposedly they were not the first white men to discover the valley. Several generations before their arrival, when the old woman herself was a young girl, nearly a hundred settlers had shown up. Commentary from the third New Springs founder suggested that these settlers were very likely a band of brigands and whores that probably intended to establish a base of operations inside the valley. Though they originally made peace with the local tribe when they arrived in autumn, once winter started, they betrayed them and killed their chieftain in a surprise attack that forced the survivors to flee the valley altogether.

Gathering allies, the tribe returned the following spring to retake the valley. Astonishingly however, they found the entirety of Old Lake Valley empty of humans. The fort that the brigands had built was abandoned with its gates wide open. Inside, the only thing they found were some deer and horses. Tracking human footprints out of the fort, they discovered that the tracks became more and more hooved with each frantic step. The tribe’s new chief, in what Harrison calls a political ploy to appease his people early in his reign, concluded that the Valley itself must have retaliated against the white man. In order to placate their tribe for its failure to protect them, it turned the men into deer to be hunted as game and turned the women into horses in order to better serve the tribe in traveling across the valley.

When Sarah read the tale at the impressionable age of 13, it no doubt influenced her obsession with the mysterious and occult. Desperate to uncover more, Sarah researched more recent history for an answer. It didn’t take long for her to uncover the account of the serial killer Harold Graver, who had went into hiding within Old Lake Valley a century ago after committing a series of gruesome murders throughout the state. Hunted by the authorities and vigilantes, Graver managed to disappear into the deep forests of the valley near the end of summer and was never seen again. Fear of the serial killer’s return was rampant in New Springs, but it was only intensified when in his stead appeared a massive man-eating wolf that terrorized the town for nights on end until it was finally put down a month into its slaughter.

Similarly was the case of the disappearance of Julia Reynolds, a famous and vain fashion model who was hired by Old Lake County to promote its newly created artificial beach for the upcoming summer season. Various interviews of the locals by the national news after her sudden disappearance labeled Julia Reynolds as a terrible and disrespectful person. Local and State police could not find a single trace of the woman. It was like she had just randomly vanished, leaving behind all her personal property; even her fan-favorite outfit, which was worn by a mannequin awkwardly placed in the very center of the room. To this day, some locals say it was the most intricate kidnapping of the 20th century, but the event was barely acknowledged today save for the odd mystery show that visited the valley. As sad as it sounds, the initial media circus covering the disappearance did more for the county’s tourism than Julia Reynolds’ photoshoots ever did.

All three cases shared one thing in common: a disappearance in unison with the beginning of a season within the valley. Collaborated with the Native American woman’s story, it seemed that the more recent cases followed the same logic. People who disrespected the valley were forever changed into something else, either living or inanimate, by the valley itself through some force of will. Sarah was both terrified and captivated by her discovery, she didn’t know if she had doomed her entire family by simply being curious.

But she had heard other legends in her time growing up in New Springs, much happier ones:

of a newly orphaned girl finding herself transformed into an independent young woman,

of a dying single father finding himself becoming a joyful baby held in the arms of his adult daughter,

and of an elderly woman who never had kids of her own finding herself young and fertile again.

All these stories convinced Sarah that the valley fairly transformed those that lived within it, the wicked were punished and the kindhearted blessed. Going back to the tomes written by the founders that had started her research in the first place, she delved into Old Lake Valley’s geography and natural history and came to the conclusion that the source of the change must be triggered by the namesake of New Springs itself, the water that flowed through the town and into Old Lake via the surrounding mountains and caves.

It was the first day of summer and Sarah was determined to prove her theory, once and for all. She understood the tremendous power of New Springs and wanted to control it, but also believed that the power behind the transformation had a will of its own. If she was to carry out her plan she needed to reason with this godlike entity. If it considered her a threat, she figured it would change her here and now while she was drenched in its water. Sarah hoped that it would simply slap her on the wrist, undoing her time and dedication spent on this futile quest by sending her back to middle school when she first started volunteering for the library and ignorant of the power of New Springs.

Perhaps it would do more; she could end up really becoming the baby of the family or being progressed to an advanced age of senility. In either case, her basic research notes were in her desk drawer so at least her family would know of her intentions. And thus Sarah Longview stood before the storm and utterly at the mercy of this ancient entity. Rain poured and poured on her, making a mess of her short black hair and eye liner, effectively ruining her shoes, completely soaking her black shirt and pants. Yet despite it all, she did not change.

Sarah smiled, either her predictions were correct or she had gone completely crazy at this point. In either case: it was time to get to work.

Grabbing the buckets nearby, she strode across her backyard and towards one of the nearby creeks, its usual slow flow of water was now much faster due to the rain. She set about carefully filling the large buckets full of water and bringing them back to her family’s garage, where she placed the buckets in the freezer. Bucket by bucket she did this until the freezer could hold no more. Her task completed, she closed the freezer door allowing the spring water to fully freeze over. If she could preserve the power hidden within the water by freezing it, than she could use the power of New Springs at any time she pleased, so long as she had time to thaw the ice first.

She retreated to the bathroom she shared with Samantha and started a hot shower. Now it was only a matter of formally proving the powers of the water in person, she had plenty of it but she wanted to avoid resorting to throwing buckets of water at random people, else she risked the ire of the local police. Relaxing in the steamy shower she hoped mostly for herself, If only the power of New Springs was at work today.

The Long Sweat continues in Chapter 8: The Changing of the Guard[/size]