The Harbinger of Silvermine

“Pull your chairs close and keep your backs to the fire. Out here the dark has old habits.

They call this place Natchaug: land between the rivers. The Nipmuc named it that long before our trail maps were drawn up, because the waters keep splitting and braiding back together, and things get lost in the in-between. You can feel it at the fords, where Bigelow and Still come down and make one river, and where the mist sits low in the mornings, like held breath.

There was a sickness once. Well, more than once, but the bad year people remember is when word of cholera crept up from the cities. Men in these hills tried to keep their mills running and their families safe. The sick were told to stay inside. Door latches were tied with rag and prayer. Some healers wore long-nosed masks, like ravens, to make death forget their faces. But death does not forget. It listens. It learns what you fear. (They wrote about that cholera year in Connecticut, 1832, down by New Haven. But news travels fast up rivers.)

The old folks say that fear gave something a body in these woods, a stature too long for a man and too thin for a bear. Fourteen feet of shadow and sinew, wrapped in tattered black, with a raven’s head like those long-beaked masks but fused to bone. It walks the ridges above Silvermine and the old CCC roads, where the boys who built the bridge learned how the forest keeps its own count. When the Harbinger passes, the frogs go quiet and the wind forgets your name. 

If you want to know where it lives, follow the ruins: cellar holes swallowed by fern, the old chimney where General Lyon’s birthplace used to be, the stone laid by hands that aren’t here to argue about it, the mysterious cemetery near the stone-lined pipeline. The Harbinger favors places that remember people. Watch the tree line across from the Silver Mine horse camp. Sometimes two embers float there like eyes, level with the second story of the pines. Whatever you do, don’t blink back.

Some say it’s a shepherd of contagion, driving fevers away from the villages, herding them into the green to die where the waters can carry them away. Others say it’s a collector that breathes you in like cold air and holds you in its chest until your name means nothing.

The years turned and it slept. For years, for decades, it slumbered under the roots, lulled by quiet times. But when the world locked its doors again, when masks returned to faces and the parks sat silent during COVID pandemic, the Harbinger stirred. The fear, the isolation, the whispered bargains, they were the same offerings as before. The old sickness called it into being, and the new sickness woke it again. Some swear they saw the eyes glowing through the fog in 2020, walking the same paths as in 1832, patient, waiting.

If you wake to silence, no owls, no insects, just the tick of cooling metal from your truck engine and the hickory trees muttering above, don’t get up. Don’t open your trailer door. The Harbinger is courteous. It will wait at the trail head, or at the hitching post by the horse camp. Here, the sand shows tracks like open hands. It won’t come for you so much as invite you to come for it.

And if you do go, you’ll find the old road and follow it by habit you didn’t know you had. Your steps will remain clear until the trees thicken. Then your prints will stop. Not at a cliff or a brook, just a sudden stop. Like something tall picked you up under the arms and carried you off between the trees.

In the morning, your friends will check your pen, the Lyon monument, and the five mile loop out of camp, and the only thing they’ll find is a pair of ember-burns high up on an ancient tree, too far apart to be a man’s eyes. They’ll say it was campers, or hunters, or headlights from Route 198 bending through the spruce. They’ll say anything but your name. Because names are invitations. And, out here, the dark has old habits.”