4.
 Now when you come to either of the flashing orange stop lights, there is a fork in the road. One branch in the fork takes you to the High Road, which for about two miles leads straight across the crest of the main hill around which the wealthier houses are built, or Devil's Hill. The other branch in the fork takes you to the Low Road, which winds down toward Beelzebub's River down below. The river isn't much—a few feet deep, of cold, clear water running over round rocks and the kind of slick, chilly green things that grow between such rocks. In summer, silvery fish dart about, snapping insects off the surface above them, but in winter, everything living that can move burrows into the muddy river bank to hibernate the frozen months away below the frost line. On the other side of the river is the River Road, with its row of dilapidated wood garages (that were horse-shoeing smithies once), and gift shops for the modern tourist, and a nice, well-lit strip mall with eight stores arranged like the letter C around a 20-car parking lot. There's a barber, a liquor store, a pizzeria, a used book shop, a hair dresser where women can also get their nails done, and an undertaker. You get yourself born 18 miles away at the regional hospital, but after that you can live in Alders and visit this strip mall, and here you can eat and drink your way through life, get your hair and nails done, get your toaster or your TV fixed, gossip at the Palace of Hairdos, and read a stack of books for entertainment. When your time is up—for one-stop convenience—you can get yourself decked out at the Alders Funeral Home for that stately ride to your final destination. Some take the high road, and some take the low road, and maybe that burnt smell down by the river banks isn't all chestnuts and alder wood. It's been said that if you hike by the river on a cold, clear night, you can hear the souls of the damned wailing down below where it's so hot that the rocks in the earth glow red like brimstone.
Alders may not be your big city full of excitement and parking meters, but some of the darndest things do happen here. If you are coming out of Salvatore's Pizza, and you happen to see a black cat looking at you while making a high back—friend, cross the street while crossing yourself. If there is a harvest moon so bright and luminous that it seems full of liquid gold and blinding, and it seems to lean in the grape bowers so heavily that you think it's going to crush the lattice, by all means don't walk under a ladder. Step on each square in the sidewalk just once without missing any, and throw a pinch of salt over your shoulder. On a night like Hallow E'en in Alders, you need all the help you can get. Here is just one of the stories Alders people tell, on nights when the wind howls outside, and leaves slap against the windows, and folks sleep with a night light burning.
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Copyright © 2018 by Jean-Thomas Cullen, Clocktower Books. All Rights Reserved.
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