The Midnight Vault • Paperback

From The HALCYONIUM by Clancy Steadwell:

Welcome to Saint’s Grove, USA, where there are streets named after trees, coffee shops named with funny puns, and dogs named for sports figures. Saint’s Grove—eminently Instagram-able, fit squarely within the frame of commercial America in all of the best and worst ways. 

There is no ambiguity here. Everything is documented.

Among places of quaint proportions within its confines: a bookstore, a bookish place for the bookish to portray themselves as such. 

...and the last known location of Owen Judd, aged 18. 

* * *

“So you saw he posted on Instagram a few hours ago,” says Detective Branthwaite. “From the bookstore? Couldn’t he just be...I don’t know...reading somewhere?” 

“It’s not like him to have his location turned off,” Mrs. Judd insists. “And I've never seen him read anything for more than 15 minutes.”

“It’s too soon to file a missing person report. But I’ll see what I can do,” he tells her. 

Detective Branthwaite reviews security cam footage of the bookstore. There’s nothing out of the ordinary. Young Owen Judd sat down in one of the more desirable leather chairs and used his phone to take a picture of his foam latte. As he did so, a woman dressed in black jeans and a black t-shirt entered the store with a box of books and began to stack them on the empty display table. Owen Judd eventually sauntered over, picked up one of these books and brought it back to the desirable leather chair and began to read. A little while later, he left with the book and forgot his phone on the nearby table. 

Detective Branthwaite does his due diligence and visits the store to retrieve the phone. He decides to let the shoplifting of the book slide. The kid is already having a terrible day, having lost his phone. Let that be his lesson. 

Mrs. Judd calls not a few hours later to report her son at home, safe and sound. 

“I have his phone here,” Detective Branthwaite reports. She says she'll come by and get it later. But she never does. 

* * *

The station has been inundated. The past few days have seen dozens reported as missing: 

“I just saw him, it said he checked in at the bookstore on Snapchat but I just went there and...now he’s gone!” 

“She went to a sleepover at the Judds’ house with her girlfriends but when I went to pick her up the next morning she didn’t come out to the car. She’s not responding to my texts, and neither are the Judds!” 

“Yes, I saw on Facebook she was having wine with the ladies at book club...”

Most have only been gone a few hours, but their disappearances are so complete and sudden and without trace that their loved ones feel compelled to engage the authorities, as though they could be of any help in the case that something has smote them from the Earth entirely. Nearly all those missing seem to return a few hours later and without controversy, allaying the worries of the police who, despite being unable to help file missing person reports, feel helpless in the face of this strange phenomenon. 

While Detective Branthwaite suffered many concussions in his football playing days, he is still lucid enough to deduce there is a common thread between all these disappearances—the book store, and those who visited it or visited those who did. 

He returns there and finds the same woman he’d seen on the security cam setting out yet more books on the display table. It must be a bestseller, because these books are going fast. 

“Excuse me, miss? Who wrote this?” he asks, gesturing to the table. “What’s it about?” 

“I did,” the woman says. She’s beautiful in the way people who are authors are beautiful, in a stately and unarrogant way that lends itself to turtlenecks and the insides of book covers. She wears all black again. “Read for yourself!” 

The book is a tome, manufactured in modern bindings and materials but with no hint as to its genre or contents, ill-fitted to its time in the simplicity of its design—a gold hardcover with no jacket, black serif lettering imprinted on the front: 

THE HALCYONIUM 

Officer Branthwaite has never seen a word like this. HALCYONIUM. He can’t guess what it means, or how to pronounce it, but it doesn’t put him ill at ease. It does the opposite. It makes him feel curious, if a bit ignorant. He opens to the first page, where it says only: THIS BOOK IS FREE. AND YOU CAN BE TOO. 

Officer Branthwaite disappears.

* * *

It’s only a few days before the National Guard has surrounded little Saint’s Grove and cordoned off all roads in or out. If they weren’t there to bear witness to its physical being, they could be for given for thinking Saint’s Grove was struck by an atomic bomb. In the last week and a half, no one from Saint’s Grove has posted a status on Facebook, ordered a package from Amazon, or shared a photo of their dog on Instagram. People with loved ones within its confines have not received from them a single funny meme or politically biased news article or even a text message. No one from Saint’s Grove has shared their location, or what they had for dinner, or even matched with anyone on Tinder. LinkedIns of the townsfolk are all deactivated. 

Meanwhile, a woman in black packs up the back of her station wagon with boxes full of golden book and sneaks through the blockade. The President of the United States, concerned for the nation’s GDP, makes finding and stopping her a top priority.

* * *

Saint’s Grove—a place once teeming with life and prudence, reduced to nothing more than a cadre of nobodies in a black hole. Whether these nobodies are better for it or not, the wider world will never know. But soon the world will know that they a have a choice as to whether or not to join the people of Saint’s Grove; that true solace lies not in escape without, but escape within, and that the black text on white paper in volumes like THE HALCYONIUM when combined could find you in the depths of an immaterial grey, a world of ambiguity and truth… wherever you might place it.