Waltervere, Oregon
26th of May, 1867

Mr. Burton has been missing for three days; and I, Arthur Shelley, have been assigned by the sheriff of the town of Waltervere to ask his family questions.

     A man of four and seventy, Mr. Luca Burton and his wife live in a little cottage by the banks of Black Bird Lake.

    "I waked to golden light spilling through the open window, rays of first daylight slipping in through the cracks of our curtains," said Mrs. Elizabeth Burton, his wife, a woman of three and sixty, "yet the space beside me was cold and empty—my beloved husband, Luca, was no longer by my side. I remember our moments the night prior—I was the first to lay on our bed, as the sun sank behind the horizon, bathing our home in the wonderful pink and orange hues of sundown, and my dear Luca drew the curtains closed ere he lay beside me, ere we both drifted off to sleep, side by side, husband and wife, lover and lover."

    Mrs. Burton then clutched the wooden pendant that hung from her neck by a leather cord, and she began to weep. "I searched everywhere," she said. "I searched the entire cottage, the yard outside, all the places he would frequent. Yet I found no sign of him, not even a passing of his familiar silhouette, tall and thin with a slight limp in his gait. Oh, my husband! Oh, my dear Luca! Where have you gone?"

    "Knock after knock after knock," said Mr. Benjamin Burton, the couple's eldest son, a man of one and forty, "the rapping at our door growing all the more frantic as each second passed. That was three days ago, around half past nine in the morning, I believe. My wife went to open the door, and very soon she brought my mother into our home, arm in arm. My mother walked, trembling and sobbing, and was given a seat by the hearth, where she wept all the more.

    " 'Your father, Ben,' she said, her words punctuated with sobs. 'Your father—Oh, my dear Luca—he is missing.' "

"We searched the entire town, and the townspeople helped us as well—yet all our efforts were futile: there was no trace of my father. It has been three days since his disappearance, and we might as well believe him to be—"

"No!" erupted the voice of Mrs. Elizabeth Burton. "How can you forsake all hope, my son? No!—do not say such things; I do not believe him to be dead. Until we find any proof that he is truly deceased, I shall cling on to the hope that your father is alive. Only lost, not dead—alive until proven otherwise."

"Grandmother is right," piped up a small voice. "Grandfather is not dead. He has only gone home."

We then turned to the source of this new voice. A little boy stood by the open door, a few paces from the hearth by which we sat. Mrs. Catherine Burton, Mr. Benjamin Burton's wife, held him by the hand. There was a noticeable look of shock and terror upon her countenance.

"He is not dead," continued the boy. "I do not believe he is. The light people must have taken him home."

"Oh, my son, bless your faith," cried Mrs. Catherine Burton, grasping the boy's hand a little tighter, lightly tugging him away from the door. She glanced somewhere far away, in the general direction to the right of the hearth, then to us, then to the little boy whose hand she held. Then she said, "Yet, my son, it is not right to speak of such things: as of the moment your grandfather has not gone to heaven—no, not yet—his time is still to come; the angels have not taken him to paradise; he still roams the earth, and he is merely missing, and your father and the townspeople are in fervent search of him. In God's gracious and perfect time, they shall find your grandfather, and he shall return home."

    The boy said, "He is home, Mother. Grandfather has gone with the light people, and they have brought him home. They have been waiting for him, at Black Bird Lake."

    "Oh, little Luca, you must not speak such nonsense."

    "I saw them, Mother," said the boy Luca. "I saw the light people walking upon the waters of Black Bird Lake. You must believe me, Mother. Please."

    "Luca," said his mother, pulling him over to the room at the right of the hearth. "All these stories your grandfather has been feeding your mind, they are only fairy tales. This world he told you about does not exist."

    "But I saw the light people, Mother," said the little boy, at the brink of tears. "I really saw them walking on the waters of Black Bird Lake. Grandfather saw them, too."

    "Oh, hush now, Luca. Your father and your grandmother are engaging in a very important discussion with the detective. You should not have bothered them."

The boy and his mother entered the room, then, disappearing from our sight, and no other sound followed, but the wailing and the sobbing of a child as he cried, "They are real, Mother! I saw them! I saw them!"

Amidst the noise of young Luca's protests, I continued to ask Mr. Benjamin Burton and Mrs. Elizabeth Burton questions: "Where does Mr. Burton significantly frequent?" "Has he mentioned anything during your time spent with him, anything rather strange or suspicious, anything hinting of a specific place?"

    I took note of their answers, and, after our discussion, read through their replies. Yet I found no clew, not even the faintest hint of where Mr. Luca Burton might have gone to. For we had searched all throughout the town of Waltervere—from the houses to the streets, from the fields to the forest surrounding the town, every nook and cranny imaginable—and have not found him till this very day.

    Yet I remembered the boy, little Luca Burton, and his words: Grandfather has gone home; the light people have taken him and brought him home; and his mother telling him, "All these stories your grandfather has been feeding your mind, they are only fairy tales. This world he told you about does not exist."

    I do not believe in this concept of light people, or the concept of this world, this home, the elderly Mr. Luca Burton must have told this child. As Mrs. Catherine Burton said, they are mere fairy tales; they hold no touch to reality. Yet, I thought, what if they were clews to M. Burton's disappearance, hints to his possible whereabouts concealed in stories he must have told his grandchild?

    I decided then that I must speak to young Luca Burton. Daylight was to fade in a few hours; it was about three hours past noon when the idea occurred to me—I still had time. And so I walked back to Mr. Benjamin Burton's cottage, and asked permission from him and his wife to speak to their little Luca, who I learned was the youngest of their children.

    "Father and Mother told me you wish to speak to me," said the boy, after his parents had granted me their permission.

    "Yes," I said.

We both sat by the hearth, upon a rug; for the boy had been hoisted up to a chair moments back, across from me, but he squirmed in his seat, discomfort evident in his movements and the pout upon his round face. I then requested his parents that we sit in such a manner that the child felt most comfortable, telling them that a conducive environment for their son was quite essential to the investigation. "The child must tell me all he knows of his grandfather," I said; "hence, there must be no hindrance, no discomfort—little Luca must be comfortable as he sits and tells me his story."

And that was what I told the boy—that I wished to listen to his grandfather's story, the story of the light people who walk upon the waters of Black Bird Lake, the reason as to why they would take Mr. Burton away from his wife and family and bring him to this other "home" (oh!—heaven knows where this other "home" is). A smile then stretched across the young boy's face, and his eyes sparkled with excitement and delight. I could not help but smile back at him.

    "On Sundays, after we go to church and listen to the pastor talk, me and my father and mother, and also my brothers and my sisters, go to Grandfather and Grandmother's cottage near Black Bird Lake. And my aunties and uncles and cousins would be there as well. Then Mother and Father would sit by the hearth with my uncles and aunties and grandmother to talk about the most boring of things—"

"I can imagine," I chuckled at the boy's evident disdain for adult conversation.

"Yes. They would talk about boring, grown-up things. And my cousins would play in the yard with my brothers and sisters. But I do not like playing with them—they push me so hard and roughly, and ridi-ridicoo—"

"Ridicule," I said, helpfully.

    "Yes! They ridicule me, and I find absolutely no joy in being pushed about in such a rough manner, in being ridiculed always by my cousins and brothers and sisters. It is horrible enough that they are all bigger and stronger than me."

"Indeed," I replied, with a small smile.

"So I go to Grandfather instead," said little Luca, smiling and rocking back and forth on his bottom. "He always sits by the lake, and I sit beside him, and he is always so nice. He does not push me and hurt me, and he does not redicoo me, and he does not talk about boring things. He tells me stories instead."

"I see," I said, nodding. "So tell me, Luca, what stories does your grandfather tell you?"

    "Grandfather tells me stories about the world inside the lake," said the boy Luca. "Father and Mother think it all foolish. They tell me they are only fairy tales, the same world and people from Grandfather's imagination he once told Father as a child. The other grown-ups tell me the same. My cousins and brothers and sisters laughed at me when I told them his stories. This is the very reason I no longer speak of them to any one. They all laugh at me. But my grandfather believed them, he really did." The boy looked at me curiously, then, and he was quiet for a moment, ere he said, almost whispered: "Do you believe me?"

I leaned forward, closer to the boy Luca. "I believe you," I told him, in a whisper; yet I knew, as a man of four and thirty, that I did not believe him: firstly because the boy had not told me any of his grandfather's stories just yet; secondly, his parents were right, and so were the other adults who knew him, and so were his brothers, sisters, and cousins as well—all these stories his grandfather had told him were mere fairy tales; metaphors, if made concrete, that had absolutely no place in reality.

But I must encourage little Luca to speak further: any clew drawn from Mr. Burton's stories is vital to the investigation.

"You promise not to laugh at me, not to ridecoo me?" he said. There was a certain austerity to his voice, a graveness in the expression of his face; yet, with the high-pitched voice and the cherub-like face of a young child like himself, it all looked and sounded quite comical. Still, I kept my composure, and played along.

"I promise," I said.

    "Good." Little Luca smiled a triumphant smile. Then his face fell, not in an expression of sadness, but in an expression of deep thought. A moment's silence, then, "I do not quite know where to start," he admitted. "My grandfather has told me a story too plenty, that it has become quite a mess in my head."

    "You can start with the story about the light people," I suggested, "and why they took your grandfather home."

    Luca's eyes lit up, and I noticed then that they were a vibrant shade of purple, and that for a moment a spark, like a minuscule bolt of lighting, flashed through his strange irises. I dismissed it all as a trick of the eye—the peculiar hue perhaps caused by a play of light and shadows; the spark, a mere reflection of the fire that burned upon the hearth we sat by.

    "Of course, of course!" said the boy, enthusiastically. He thought for a moment, smiled to himself—as though he had found the beginning, the first words, of his tale—then he continued: "As I told you, me and my family would go to Grandfather and Grandmother's cottage on Sundays, after church. And I told you as well that their cottage is quite close to Black Bird Lake, and I would only walk and count to twenty from my grandparents' cottage to the lake. Grandfather would sit near the water, and we would sit together and he would tell me stories there.

"But there was this one time he was not sitting near the lake. He was standing, and he was shaking a little. I called him—'Grandfather! Grandfather!' He turned round when he heard me, and he saw me, and then he walked to me and took my hand very quick and very strongly, and we walked back to the cottage. He looked afraid, and that made me afraid, too. I asked him as we walked, 'Grandfather, why are we going back to the cottage?' But he did not say anything. We walked and walked, faster than twenty seconds, then we went inside and he locked the door shut.

    "He did not move, he did not speak. I simply stood at his side, and I said no word, asked him no question. I wished to speak, I wished to ask Grandfather why he was afraid, but it did not seem right of me to speak at such a time. Oh!—if only you had seen him! Grandfather was terrified, so terrified. I never thought grown-ups could be so afraid, yet Grandfather was terribly quiet, and he was shaking, and he had his ear pressed to the door and was listening as though a wild beast were prowling about outside the cottage, hunting us down, waiting for us. And if a grown-up, like my grandfather, is terrified, shouldn't I be all the more terrified as well, for I am only a boy of five?"

    I agreed, nodding, "I see; your grandfather's fear is surely a reason to make you, a boy of five, terrified."

    "Yes, yes," said little Luca, nodding fervently, rocking back and forth on his bottom again. "It terrified me so much that I felt my own legs turn soft, like water, below me. So I held on to Grandfather's coat, but still, I said no word, and remained quite still.

    "We waited for some moments by the door at the back of the cottage. No one had seen us: my mother and father were still with my aunties and uncles and grandmother, talking by the hearth; my brothers and sisters and cousins were still playing out in the yard. Then, after such a long time of quiet and stillness and waiting, Grandfather whispered to me to stay still, to stand by the door, hidden, while he looks out the window. Then my grandfather stooped low, to my height, and he walked to the window closest to us. He did not stand up; the top of his head only rose to the bottom of the window, and he looked out, at the lake. And he knelt there for quite some time, ere he stood up and told me they had gone."

    "Who had gone?" I questioned the boy.

    "The light people," answered young Luca. "They had come for Grandfather, and he was afraid they would take him."

    "And are these light people malevolent phantoms, vampires, devils, that your grandfather feared them and hid you both?"

Little Luca shook his head. "No; they are not vampires, or devils, or evil ghosts—they come from Elysium."

"Elysium?"

"The Realm Above."

I thought a while, then said, "By saying 'The Realm Above', do you mean heaven?"

The boy was quiet for a moment, as he considered my question, his brows knitted together in thought. Then he looked up, and gave me a slow nod and a small smile. "Yes . . . I think. Heaven—something of that sort."

    "These light people must be angels, then, since they come from heaven?"

    "They might be," said Luca, after a moment of silence, of thought. "The light people—angels. Perhaps they are . . . or perhaps they are not. Grandfather never told me—simply that they come from Elysium."

    Mr. Luca Burton had predicted his own death, I thought to myself then, and said, "So these light people—these angels—have taken your grandfather up to heaven?"

    "No! no!" said little Luca, with a fervent shake of the head. "They must have taken him back home, to where he came from, to where he was born."

    I stared at the boy, perplexed. "And where, Luca, is this home of his? Where did your grandfather come from?"

    "Cris—Crisalin," said the boy, almost immediately. "Crisalin."

    "And where is this Crisalin?" I asked.

    "In the lake," he said, pointing somewhere behind him, to the open door that led to the yard of his home, to the place beyond the confines of their cottage, beyond their yard, past streets and other houses, to—"Black Bird Lake," he said.

"So this Crisalin is an underwater world, then?" I asked the boy. "Similar to the island of Atlantis, or those underwater worlds we read of in fairy tales, where merpeople dwell and swim about, unperturbed by mankind?"

"No, no; Crisalin is not underwater," said Luca, with strong, childlike conviction. "Grandfather told me so when I asked him if he and the people of Crisalin were mermaids. He laughed, but not the kind of laugh that ridiculed me—he thought it funny, he said—and he said they walked their world on two legs as we people do. He told me Crisalin is not a world filled with water, but a world on dry land, as our world is, and that it is a world of different countries and different people, a world of magic, a world of strange creatures and dragons and gryphons . . ."

    "A fairy tale world," I muttered to myself.

    Little Luca, however, had heard me, and shook his head in utter disagreement, and said, "No, no! Not a fairy tale. This is real! Crisalin is real!"

    "My apologies," I told him. "Although I do have a question: how are the light people involved in all this, since you said they come from—"

    "Elysium!" said the boy, enthusiastically.

    "Yes, Elysium. Yet you said your grandfather's home is in this world called Crisalin. And since these are two separate places, what business do the light people have with Crisalin and our very own world?"

"They are guardians," he said, purple eyes wide. "Guardians of the lake, guardians of Crisalin. I have seen them myself, walking upon the waters of Black Bird Lake. They have been there for the past few months, even until now—the very reason why my grandfather and I had not been outside the cottage, why we had not sat by the lake in days past. We had been hiding: they wished to take Grandfather back to Crisalin, and Grandfather wished not to return—he did not wish to leave us, his family, his children and his grandchildren. He wished to stay with us for ever."

"Yet the light people have taken your grandfather away," I said, "despite his refusal to leave."

The boy released a sigh, and said, "I believe so." He then turned his gaze to the fire that burned upon the hearth. "I do hope and pray Grandfather is well and happy in Crisalin, that the light people have brought him home safely."

I placed a hand upon the boy's shoulder, a gesture of reassurance. "I hope and pray so, too."

The look upon little Luca's face rend my heart—the melancholy in his peculiar eyes—how this young soul, so full of life and wonder, misses his beloved grandfather; yet beneath this sense of pity within me lay a certain satisfaction: from the boy's tale I had drawn out a lead as to Mr. Burton's disappearance and possible whereabouts.

I must tell the sheriff ere sundown, and we must make search of Black Bird Lake on the morrow.

27th of May, 1867

The sheriff, the men, and I arrived at Black Bird Lake at eight o'clock this morning, and immediately proceeded to make search of the premises. Some men road on boats, and sailed across the waters in search of a body; the other men and I investigated the bank. We had spent the entire day here, yet all our efforts had come to no fruition. We have found no body, no clew, no new lead as to where Mr. Burton had gone.

    "You think him mad?" the sheriff had asked me the evening prior. "And you think he had drowned himself by the hand of this delirium, these so-called light people?"

"Yes," I had replied. Yet I never told him that young Luca Burton had seen them, too: I decided some details were better kept secret—Mr. Burton might had merely convinced his grandson to believe in such things for little Luca to say that he saw these light people as well.

By sundown, it was decided we would continue the search on the morrow, and everyone had left Black Bird Lake, save myself. I sat upon the slope of the bank, my journal laid upon my lap, my eyes glancing at the words from yesterday, my mind flooded with theories and possibilities and clews I had gathered from my conversation with the boy Luca. A lantern, a fire burning within, sat next to me as the sun made its descent, painting the cloudless azure sky of the hour prior into an effervescent tapestry of purple and pink, the shadows of the night creeping upon the edges of the expanse.

    I heard footsteps approach me, and I turned round to see Mrs. Elizabeth Burton standing behind me, a cup of tea in hand.

    "It seems to me I am not the only one who has not lost hope in finding my husband," she said, handing me the cup.

    I took the cup from her rather gingerly, blew upon the surface, and took a small sip. "I assure you, Mrs. Burton," I said, turning back to her, "we will not lose hope until we have gathered credible evidence that he is indeed gone."

    She sighed, gazing across the waters, looking out into the silhouette of trees against the darkening sky.

"I remember the day I first met him," she said. "The first time I laid my eyes upon him, I was a young girl—well, a great deal younger than I am now—back then a girl no older than eighteen. My family and I found him here, washed upon the banks of this very lake. However, remembering it all now, it was Luca who had found us—my father, to be precise. He grasped onto my father's ankle as my father walked along the edge, ere my beloved—not that I knew he would be my beloved in years' time—Luca, dear Luca, fainted. My mother, brother, and I then heard my father's cry, that a man had possibly drowned and had washed up upon the silt, and we hurried to where he knelt, beside the stranger. We thought him dead, we did. But my father, hopeful, pressed two fingers to his neck, and pressed his ear against his chest, and my father heard his beating heart. He told us the man was alive, and that we were to move swiftly and nurse him back to health in our cottage."

"What a strange place to find a man," I said.

She was quiet for a moment, then said, "A strange place to find a man, yet an even stranger turn of events after we had found him, and an even stranger series of events that led to his arrival.

    "Once Luca waked, Father asked him where he had come from, if he was lost, if he had any family we can tell of his whereabouts. Yet he spake a language none of us understood, a language so foreign it almost sounded like nonsense. We took Luca in, nevertheless, for he seemed not to have a home. A lost man in a strange world. A promise of a few days turned to weeks and months and years, until he came to live with us, eventually learning English a few months ere he decided to stay for good. Yet the beginning of that, of him becoming family, was even stranger than the manner in which we had found him.

    "I seemed to be the only one who ever had the truest memory of him. I write in a diary of my own, too, you see." Mrs. Burton gestured to the journal that lay upon my lap. "Always did ever since my father had taught me to write. And on the day Luca first came into our lives, I wrote of him. The morning after, as I was reading of the events of the day before from my diary, I heard my father yelling somewhere in the cottage. I left my bed and hastened over to my father. He was yelling at Luca, demanding from him an explanation to as to why a stranger was sleeping in our cottage without our letting him in. Of course, Luca understood no word, and stood still and silent. And in his silence, my father thought him to be a dangerous madman. My father raised his fist to strike Luca, but I stopped my father ere he could do any more harm to our poor guest. I then told my father that we had let him in, and showed him my diary—proof that we had brought him to our cottage of our own accord and that we had nursed him to health as the Good Samaritans we were taught to be.

    "Yet the days went on the same, with the rest of my family terrified and perplexed at the sight of Luca in the mornings. As the days passed, however, we learned of his peculiarity, and found our ways of overcoming this difficulty."

    "And what peculiarity is that?" I asked, interest piqued.

Mrs. Burton turned to me, and said, "I believe you have heard the proverb 'Out of sight, out of mind'?"

"Of course."

"So was the case with Luca," she said. "Unless he was within sight, or unless he left a trace of himself others could perceive, he would be forgotten. This is the very reason I write of him in my diary, every day, without fail; this is very reason I always keep this around my neck." Her fingers held up the wooden pendant she wore about her neck, strapped to a leather cord. Images of flowers had been carved into the wood. "He made this for me," said Mrs. Burton. "Luca is a man of skill, an incredible painter and carver. For my family and I to remember him, he had painted tapestries and hung them on the inside walls of our cottage. Besides our children, these are the traces of himself he had left behind in this world."

"Why are you telling me this, Mrs. Burton?"

She smiled. "Ben had told me you and my grandson Luca spake the day before, and I had the night to myself to ponder on what my dear little Luca had said."

"You believe him?" I said. "You believe your husband's stories to be real?"

    "I do," she said, smiling. "I have always believed in my husband's stories, as much as my grandson believes in them. My children, however, have drifted away, lost belief in their father's history, and have always impeded me from giving Luca even the slightest insinuations of encouragement in the matters of such 'fairy tales'."

"So you believe he had come from another world?"

"I believe that Luca had been a slave treated harshly by his master, that he had run away from that cruel man, and in his journey he had almost perished, and in his exhaustion he had fallen into a lake and had found himself on the other side, washed upon the banks of Black Bird Lake." She looked at me, then. "I believe he had come from another world, the world of Crisalin."

    Mrs. Burton placed a hand of my shoulder, her touch gentle and soothing, like a mother's. "Daylight is fading," she said, glancing up at the darkened sky; only a small part of the expanse still glowed red in the distance far away before us, where the sun—concealed behind the shadow forms of the trees—was sinking, or had sunk, beneath the end of the horizon. "You must return home, get some rest."

    "Worry not, Mrs. Burton," I said. "I shall return home ere night completely falls upon the town. Allow me to spend a few minutes here by the lake, to write down the last of my thoughts. And thank you," I added, handing her her teacup, now drained empty of its contents, save for the moist black fragments of tea leaves.

    "Thank you for not losing hope," she said, smiling. "He is alive, I know it. Yet I do hope my dear Luca is safe and sound on the other side, and I still cling on to the hope he would return to me and our family. If indeed you find him, Mr. Shelley, upon his return, may I be the first to see him, to hold him in my arms?"

    "I promise you so, Mrs. Burton," I said.

    And with one last glance at the lake, Mrs. Burton turned round and walked back to her cottage, the door producing a soft thud behind her, and she was gone.

Terrible! terrible, it was! I had so narrowly escaped!

    I had left Black Bird Lake as quickly as I could, and in my haste I had left my inkwell on the banks—most likely spilt its contents onto the grass-strewn ground, for I had felt my foot kick inadvertently against the little jar—but by the grace of God had clutched on tightly to my journal as I rose and ran, so as to still have it in my possession. And, oh!—all more by the grace of God am I still alive; all more by the grace of God am I able to write in this journal of all I had so terribly witnessed.

    When Mrs. Burton had left me to my own devices, in solace, I then wrote of our conversation, scribbled the new important memory into my journal. Yet ere I could write down any conclusion, I glanced up at the lake, in thought, and to my utter horror descried two figures in the distance: these two figures stood at a height above any man I had ever laid eyes on, massive wings enshrouding what might have been their nakedness; these men—if I could call these beings so—walked upon the waters of the lake with ease, every atom in their immaculate structures glowing a brilliant light against the shadows of nightfall.

These are the light people little Luca spake of, I thought to myself, and I sat there, horribly still, my limbs lifeless in utter terror. I knew it was only a matter of time ere they saw me—and behold! they did, and turned their bodies in my direction, and glided across the water toward me. And it was then and only then that my brain, made dull by this perceivable horror, wakened itself to full consciousness. My legs pushed myself off the ground out of sheer instinct; my hands reached for the lantern and caught the journal that had lain upon my lap. And I ran, ran as fast as my legs could carry me, away from the lake and the light people and Mr. Burton's cottage.

This I testify to, for I have seen them with my very own eyes: the light people and real; and the reality of these light people so proves the existence of Elysium—or heaven as we know it—and so proves the existence of the other world, Crisalin.