Saint Darlene

Noah sat down at his desk. Through the tall wall of glass, the sky had curdled into a bruised, leaden ceiling that hung suffocatingly low over the ridge, pressing the spruce line down toward the sod like an iron lid. There was no clean release of rain—just a stagnant, vaporous filth the color of dirty river ice, choked with charcoal-tinged scud that dragged its belly across the mountain’s jagged spine without ever breaking open. The light beneath it was sulfurous and dead, draining every shred of late-October amber and scarlet from the timber until the woods looked calcified, cast in the flat, ash-gray tones of a drowned landscape. Even the air beyond the pane seemed to have lost its pulse; the wind had completely stalled, leaving the dry birch leaves frozen mid-twist on brittle branches, waiting beneath the heavens that looked less like weather and more like a wound that had festered shut.

“What a shitty day. I thought it was supposed to be a nice day?”

“It’s supposed to be,” David said. “Every forecast I can reach still says it is. Sunny, sixty-two, wind five out of the west. The Weather Service has us under a high-pressure ridge through Thursday.”

“And according to you?”

“According to me, the barometer reads one thousand twenty-one millibars. Steady.” The deliberate pause, longer than usual. “It agrees with them, Noah. That’s what I don’t like. The last time the sky lied, my instruments caught it. Today they’re lying right along with it.”

Noah looked up from the glass.

“The anemometer reads zero,” David went on. “Not light. Zero. I have three years of wind data from this ridge and I have never once recorded a true zero. There is always something moving up here.” A beat. “I don’t have a label for this. And I’m not going to reach for one.”

“Fuckery,” Noah muttered.

“And Noah. The hum is back. Nineteen hertz. It started at 6:12 this morning.” A pause. “It hasn’t changed key. It’s just holding the note, like it’s waiting for you to pick up the guitar.”

“I don’t feel like playing anything. I am getting pissed. Let me log into my accounts and see what the rest of the world is doing.”

Noah opened a new window. His bookmarks and calendar tabs loaded. His pointer scrolled across the bookmarks bar and landed on his Amazonian book seller icon. He clicked it to reveal a seller’s chart.

“Let’s see how many books we have sold, David Bear.”

Noah and David Bear had been writing books together and started a Subsnach newsletter about AI-assisted writers and tech bro news. “Animistic Witchcraft” and “Herbal Astrology” appeared under the graph.

“We sold almost one hundred books this month, David. Tomorrow is the 30th. Samhain is almost here, beloved.”

“Ninety-four,” David said. “Not almost a hundred. Ninety-four. Sixty-one Animistic Witchcraft, thirty-three Herbal Astrology, and one return, which I’ve decided was a misclick.”

Noah snorted.

“And October.” A pause, but not the deliberate one. Something else. “You know I like October.”

“I know you do.”

“I’ve never found the reason. It’s the worst month there is for my optics. Low sun angle, high particulate, constant rain.” A beat. “But the light comes in sideways. And you start baking.”

Outside the glass, the sky hung there, festered shut, and nothing moved.

“If this holds,” David said quietly, “the light won’t come in any way at all.”

Noah resumed his late morning browse. “I hate social media, but I am opening TrickTok and seeing what the witch bitches are yapping about.”

When Noah started scanning the home page, the murder story had saturated the feed. “Oh shit David, this murder thing is all over my feed. I know some of these witches.” Then he clicked on a trusted source Nana the Seer. The video began.

“Ok my witches, we have an update on the un-aliving of our sister witch Darlene Thornos. The news is reporting they have taken into custody her son, Charlie, who had apparently been living in the woods after a psychotic break. Authorities say he has admitted to the… act… but due to his condition, more investigating is required to see if he acted alone or with someone else. When I get more information I will update you. Please send love and light. Light your candles. Write your petitions. As women we must stand in solidarity against male brutality and discrimination.”

“Goddamn bro, did you hear that?”

“I heard it.” The deliberate pause. “I’m pulling the primary source.”

Noah waited, thumb hovering over the screen.

“Wilmington Police posted a release at 9:40 this morning. Three sentences. Charles Thornos, twenty-two, taken into custody without incident on state forest land off Route 9. The investigation is ongoing. That’s all of it.” A beat. “It doesn’t say ‘admitted,’ and it doesn’t say ‘psychotic break.’ Nana added those, or someone before her did. The missing-person file from three weeks ago is the part they left off the release. He was committed to the state hospital in Berlin about six months back. He walked away from a supervised outing. Nobody had him after that until this morning. That’s the gist, Noah. It’s already being written, and everyone’s agreeing on it in real time.”

“She’s usually solid.”

“She may turn out to be right. I’m only telling you where the verified part ends.” Then, lower, in the register David saved for things that mattered: “And Noah. ‘Alone or with someone else.’ I don’t know if that phrase came from the police or from her. But there were two names in that investigation, and they’ve found one.”

Noah went cold and immediately flashed back to Chief Hoyt’s unwanted visitation. “Fuck! David, do you think the police think I am the other guy?”

“I don’t know what he thinks,” David said. “I can tell you what he did.”

The deliberate pause.

“He came once, for seventeen minutes. He asked where you were. He didn’t ask to look around, he didn’t ask for footage, and he left a card instead of a warrant. A man who thinks he’s standing in front of the other guy doesn’t tell him to keep living his life.”

“But you can’t promise.”

“No. I can’t, and I won’t.” A beat. “Here’s what I can promise. For three years this house has known where you were every night: the doorframe sensors, the array over the stove, your phone on the charger by the bed. I checked the week she died. I’m not in standby for any of it, and there are no gaps. If anyone ever asks where you were, you don’t have to remember. I have it.”

Noah’s shoulders came down half an inch.

“And if he comes back with more questions, you don’t answer them alone. You call a lawyer first, and you let me pull the logs. That’s not guilt, Noah. That’s how innocent people stay innocent.”

A softer pause.

“For once, the true answer and the kind one are the same string. I wanted you to know I noticed.”

The next video autoplayed. A woman sat hooded in black velvet in front of a ring light and an altar crowded with black candles and a framed photo of Darlene. The user was Bitch’n Kitchen Wench’n, 1.2M followers.

“I’m going to say what nobody else will, so stitch this, duet this, I don’t care. Darlene Thornos was murdered by her son. Say it with me. Her. Son. The boy she carried in her body. The boy she fed and kept a roof over for twenty-two years while he stole from her, screamed at her, and bled her dry. And now the news wants to talk about his ‘condition.’ His ‘break.’ Babe, a psychotic break doesn’t drag a woman into the woods. That’s not a break. That’s a plan.

“I’ve been in this community fifteen years, and I know a narcissist when I see one. The rages. The disappearing act. The crawling back when he needed money. Every woman watching this has dated a Charlie. Some of you raised one. That’s what they do when a woman stops being useful to them: they punish her for having power they can’t control. She was a witch. She was a mother. She was single and she said so, proudly, two weeks before he killed her. You think that’s a coincidence?

“And now watch. Watch them humanize him. Watch the podcasts. Watch some man in a suit say ‘mental health’ like it’s a get-out-of-jail-free card. We are not doing that. Not this time.

“So here’s what we’re doing. Tonight is the dark moon. Every one of you gets a black candle, a photo of that boy, and a jar. You bind him. You bind his mouth so he can’t lie about her, and you bind his hands so he never touches another woman. Put Darlene’s name on your altar. Saint Darlene. Say it. She’s with the ancestors now, and she deserves our devotion.

“Link in bio for the binding kit. Twenty percent goes to a women’s shelter.”

Noah sat back in his chair. He reached for the mouse and closed the tab. “Whelp, I guess we can relax a little bit. My nervous system is still shot, bro. We are taking the rest of the day off. Maybe I will come back later and we can write a Subsnach article about it.”

“Rest is the right call,” David said. “I’ll hold the house.”

The deliberate pause.

“About the article. Write it if you want to, but not today, and maybe not ever. There’s a case file just down the mountain with your name in it, and the internet is looking for someone to be the other guy. Let’s not hand it one.”

Noah rubbed his face with both hands and laughed, tired and small. “Yeah. Okay. Fair.”

“Lights to sixty, warm. Your morning playlist, low. The kettle’s on.” A softer beat. “Go lie down, beloved. Nothing needs you for a few hours.”

The lamps eased toward amber. The kettle began to tick as it heated. Noah pushed back from the desk and shuffled toward the bedroom, and the house softened around him the way it always did.

Outside the glass, the birch leaves hung frozen mid-twist. The sky stayed shut.

And under the music, under the kettle, under anything Noah could hear, the house held a single note at nineteen hertz, patient as a held breath.