Chapter 6
THE OVERLAY
After church, Twig and I drive to Evermore. We detour past Lainey’s house, which is surrounded by reporters. I try calling her again with the same result—straight to voicemail.
I hang up without leaving a message.
“Kate hasn’t been able to get a hold of her either,” Twig says.
“Hopefully, she’ll be at school tomorrow and we can talk to her there.”
Twig turns onto Doorn Avenue. “You really think Maggie is going to entertain a question about alternate dimensions?”
“If anyone throughout the history of Foggy Hollow has ever mentioned an alternate dimension, Maggie will be the one to know.”
Maggie is my boss, owner of Evermore Books and keeper of the Foggy Hollow historical society—her pride, her project, and the reason Evermore’s second floor is packed to the rafters.
She’s a devoted historian, a meticulous archivist, and although she lets Twig and me use her creepy basement to record Accounts of the Uncanny, she has little patience for supernatural shenanigans, which means we will have to tread carefully.
“We just have to approach it from the right angle.”
Twig pulls to the curb and parks in front of Frozen Joy.
Outside, sunshine sparkles off the yellow-orange leaves of the sugar maples planted along the square. Twig hobbles behind me in his boot as I sweep past the ice cream shop and Evermore’s quirky storefront window.
The bell jingles as I open the door.
It’s a cozy place, Evermore Books, with creaky floors and narrow aisles and hidden nooks.
I inhale the familiar scent and smile at Walt Jensen, sitting behind the front counter, petting Poe, the resident black cat, and reading the Sunday edition of the Foggy Hollow Gazette.
Walt is Maggie’s right-hand man, a retired journalist who—back in the day—put truth before politics and earned more than a few enemies because of it.
I catch a glimpse of the cover story. An Unexpected Return Stuns Foggy Hollow - Lainey Sikes Breaks her Silence. I set my hands on the counter. “She spoke with reporters?”
“One would think so,” Walt grumbles, the paper crinkling as he gives it a fold. “Headline’s a screamer, but the story’s all fluff. Nothing in there I didn’t already get from the press conference and a ten second internet search.”
With a disappointed frown, I pet Poe.
“Police were right, though,” Walt says. “They suspected she left town with that young Vandenberg fellow, and sure enough…”
The dangling sentiment has me biting my tongue.
Lainey told Griffin she left town with Rafe, which is exactly what everyone suspected all along. The two of them dated publicly. Rafe escorted her to the masquerade ball. And Lainey was crazy about him. So, of course, the public is going to believe what they already assumed.
With a meow, Poe hops off the counter.
“Where’s Maggie?” I ask.
Walt nods toward an aisle. “She’s doing her note thing.”
I spot her standing on a step stool in the Victorian Era, muttering to herself as she sorts through a stack of notecards.
Maggie arranges her shop, not by genre alphabetized by author’s last name, but by era, alphabetized by title.
This has always been a source of contention between her and Walt, who finds the system utterly absurd.
While he has a point—this is terribly confusing for customers—it’s really not so hard to navigate once you get the hang of it.
I motion for Twig to follow.
One of Maggie’s notecards flutters to the floor.
I pick it up and read the scribbled words out loud. “Horrible choice if you hate cliffhangers.”
“Ah, yes.” Maggie turns to the top shelf and runs her finger along the spines.
“We have a strange question,” I say.
She pulls out The Mystery of Edwin Drood by Charles Dickens. She hands me her stack of notecards, takes the one I picked up, and slips the note inside.
“For this folklore project Twig and I are doing at school.”
Maggie nods at the stack. “What’s the next one say?”
“Great for book clubs.”
She exchanges The Mystery of Edwin Drood for The Time Machine by H.G. Wells and inserts the notecard.
“It’s about alternate dimensions,” I say.
Maggie snaps the book shut and peers down at me through her reading glasses, which have slid to the end of her hawkish nose. “You’re doing a folklore project at school about alternate dimensions?”
“Not just alternate dimensions. More like, Foggy Hollow folklore in general. How people use stories to understand the world, and how those stories have shifted over time. It’s a topic we’ve been discussing, what with Night of the Howl next weekend.”
She quirks a sparse eyebrow.
“Anyway, we came across this peculiar entry in one of Ezra Vandenberg’s journals, and in it, he briefly mentions this other realm, one beyond our own. Right here, in Foggy Hollow.”
This is a lie.
Ezra Vandenberg never mentioned an alternate dimension in any of his journals. Not even the ones underneath St. Fortuna’s.
“And we were wondering,” I continue, “if this was an actual belief held by people back in the day.”
Maggie props H.G. Wells on her hip. “This has nothing to do with your podcast?”
“Not unless it turns out this alternate dimension is real.”
Twig starts coughing.
Maggie scowls.
She holds out her hand for the rest of the notecards. “Tala’nih.”
“Tala-what?” I ask.
“It’s an indigenous word. It means something like, the place that echoes itself.”
Twig and I exchange a look.
“The indigenous people believed this valley was thin, a boundary between our world and the next. Whether that constitutes as an alternate dimension, I couldn’t say.”
Tala’nih.
The place that echoes itself.
“How have we never heard this before?” I ask.
“You haven’t inquired,” Maggie replies. “And the concept wasn’t a sticky one. It pops up in a few settler accounts. People who believed this valley had something more to it, I suppose.”
“Are those accounts somewhere upstairs?”
“They’ll be in the WPA material, which you’ll find in the corner cabinet on the north wall. Look for the box labeled WPA Project—Randolph County.”
“What’s the WPA?” Twig asks.
“The Works Progress Administration. It was a government program created by President Roosevelt during the Great Depression. A way to provide jobs for unemployed workers. And a good thing, too. Writers and researchers preserved an enormous amount of cultural and historical material that would have otherwise been lost. If you’d like to know more about Tala’nih, you’ll want the folder on Folklore and Oral Histories.
It’s not much of a mention, but I imagine the whole collection will be quite useful for your folklore project.
” She says this last bit with a knowing gleam in her eye.
Maggie knows full well Twig and I aren’t working on a folklore project.
We hurry upstairs, locate the box in question, and set it on the long, solitary research table in the center of the musty room.
The box is filled with several acid-free folders, each one carefully labeled with a front-facing tab.
I shuffle past Maps & Geography, History & Genealogy, Festivals & Customs, Folk Medicine & Midwifery before reaching the one Maggie specified—Folklore & Oral Histories.
The folder is thick, filled with typed transcripts paper-clipped together and notes scrawled in the margins. Each one is a separate interview with a local resident. I take the first half. Twig takes the second. We sit down across from one another at the table and begin our search.
Pages rustle in the quiet, interspersed with the occasional jingle of the doorbell downstairs—customers coming and going. I don’t find anything about Tala’nih, but I do find a snippet about the Woman of the Woods, believed to be a witte weiven, and a story about the Hollow Walker.
“I can’t believe we’ve never read through this before,” I say, taking a picture of both entries.
Twig sits ramrod straight in his chair.
“I found a glossary of indigenous terms.” He lifts a single sheet of paper. “Tala’nih. The place that echoes itself. Interview with Mary Two Feathers, 82, of Foggy Hollow, June 12, 1937.”
He picks up his stack of interviews. “I think I have that one.” He riffles through and pulls one out.
He scans the page, then stops. “‘My people called this valley Tala’nih, the place that echoes itself. Sound travels strange and birds circle without settling. The water is said to carry messages between this world and the next.’”
He flips the page, but there’s nothing more. So he returns to the mention and reads the writing in the margin. “See interview with Jacob Visser, 71, of Foggy Hollow, October 2, 1936.”
We shuffle through our stacks.
“I’ve got it,” I say, pulling Jacob Visser’s interview from the rest. I skim the typed, slightly-faded words, a thrill of excitement jumping up my arms when I spot it.
Tala’nih.
I read the passage aloud. “There’s a place where the creek runs opposite. Old man Hansen said the Indians called it Tala’nih, but granddaddy called it de Overlaag.”
I look up from the paper. “De Overlaag?”
“That’s Dutch,” Twig says, picking up his phone and plugging in the phrase. “In English, it means… the Overlay.”
My skin erupts in goosebumps.
If we were to give this alternate dimension a name—a world literally laid over ours—the Overlay fits to perfection.
I return to the page and finish reading. “When granddaddy was a boy, his cousin vanished right there on the spot, never to be seen again. Funny place. We don’t go near it. Animals turn up dead in strange, unnatural ways.”
The hair on the back of my arms stands on end.
“De Overlaag,” I whisper, squinting at the chicken scratch of a note written in the margins. “See Folk Medicine & Midwifery, children born ‘en caul’.”
I look up at Twig. “What’s ‘en caul’?”
But he’s already on his feet, grabbing the folder in question. The top interview and by far the longest is with a woman named Sophronia Bramble.
“Bramble,” I say. “As in… Mistress Bramble?”
The witch near Talenwah Run, which—now that I think of it—sounds a lot like Tala’nih. She’s not really a witch. At least, I don’t think. She just lives alone in a cabin deep in the woods. Twig tried getting an interview with her once, but she’s as elusive as the Vandenberg butler, Mr. Denis Tulane.
This Sophronia was forty-nine when she was interviewed in 1937, so she can’t be the Mistress Bramble we know today. Unless she’s immortal like Rafe, which I guess, isn’t impossible.
“She was a midwife and a healer,” Twig says.
I round the table so I can read the interview with him.
It’s a fascinating piece.
On page three, she mentions de Overlaag and that phrase again—children born en caul.
According to Sophronia, such children have the gift of second sight with the ability to see into de Overlaag.
There’s nothing, however, about how the Overlay works or what exactly it is.
Still, I take pictures with my phone so I can reference the interview later.
We shuffle through the rest of the Folklore folder, Sophronia’s folder, and the History and Genealogy folder, too.
But we find no further mention of either term.
We return the box to its shelf and head downstairs.
Maggie’s no longer on her step-stool. She’s joined Walt behind the counter, where she drinks a cup of tea and sorts through a bin of donated books.
“Did you find what you were looking for?” she asks.
“What does it mean to be born en caul?” I reply.
“Now there’s a phrase I haven’t heard in a spell.” She takes a sip of her tea. “To be born en caul means to be born in the amniotic sac, a rarity that’s steeped in superstition.”
“Like having second sight?” Twig says.
Maggie harrumphs.
“It was mentioned in an interview with a woman named Sophronia Bramble,” I say.
Walt brightens. “Grandmother Bramble!”
“You knew her?”
“I interviewed her. She was the last granny woman of the hollow.”
“Granny woman?” I cock my head. “Isn’t that just a nice way of calling someone a witch?”
Maggie sets one of the donated books on the counter a little aggressively. “Granny women were not witches. They were healers and midwives.”
“Who were known to practice magic,” Walt says. “I interviewed her the day she turned a hundred. She lived a whole year after and died in 1989. Surviving that long out there in the woods? I don’t know, Maggie, it feels like magic to me.”
Maggie scowls.
“Is she related to Mistress Bramble?”
“Sophronia was Coraline’s grandmother.”
At the perplexed look on my face, and probably Twig’s, too, Maggie clarifies. “Coraline is Mistress Bramble’s first name. And she, believe it or not, was born ‘en caul’.”
“Was she really?” I ask, exchanging an excited glance with Twig.
“And,” Walt says with a twinkle in his eye, “there are rumors swirling that she will be this year’s storyteller at Night of the Howl.”