This is an automated archive made by the Lemmit Bot.
The original was posted on /r/nosleep by /u/RoseBlack2222 on 2024-09-21 11:04:37+00:00.
Deep in the mountains of Georgia is a remote town called Dead Leaf Falls. You won’t find it on any map, except Google Earth, if you happen to come across it at just the right time of day. Even if you knew exactly where this town is and went over to it, you would find nothing except trees for miles. How do I know it exists? The answer is simple.
It’s where I was born and spent the first twelve years of my life. If you happen across it while on a road trip, you may think it a nice little place, quiet, lots of scenery, and a community so self-sustaining the idea of outside contact is laughable. The issue is that this comes at a price.
“Tommy! Psst, Tommy!”
Groggily, I lifted my head up from my desk to find my best friend, Amanda shaking my shoulder. Our math teacher was explaining some word problems. I wasn’t paying attention, being focused on Amanda and wiping the drool off my face.
“What?” I snap back, louder than I intended.
“Mr. Ballard, were you sleeping again?” our teacher asked.
“No, Mrs. Hooper,” I answered, suppressing a yawn.
Her narrowed eyes studied me for a moment before she returned her attention to the board. When she did, Amanda immediately picked up where we left off as if we hadn’t been interrupted.
“So you know the Equinox is coming up, right?”
“What about it?”
Leaning into my ear she told me, “I think we should get a picture of the Fall Fairy.”
Mrs. Hooper dumping a cup of ice water in my head wouldn’t have made the tiredness leave my body faster than those words did. Amanda had the foresight to put a finger to my lips before I could have another outburst. She glanced at Mrs. Hooper who was watching another kid in our class trying to solve a problem on the board. Amanda lowered her finger.
“Are you crazy?” I asked her.
The Fall Fairy was the local legend. Here’s how it went. In the forest outside of town, lies a cave that only appears during the equinox. That’s its home. On the first day of Fall, it comes out to play.
Everyone says it’s friendly which is why we always found it strange that everyone stays inside during this time. I never thought to question it. Any excuse to be up in my room rotting my mind with movies and video games was always welcome. Amanda, though, was different, more adventurous and curious. She was a social butterfly with plenty of friends.
Contrastingly, I could count the number of kids I regularly interacted with on one hand. Some may say I was antisocial. While I don’t disagree, I think it’s more that I simply wasn’t a social seeker. I didn’t shun people who tried talking with me, but I never struck up conversations. Hell, I hardly raised my hand in class unless it was to be excused.
To this day, I’ll never understand what quality I had that made her want to spend so much time with me. Before you make assumptions regarding “young love”, let me assure you that our dynamic was entirely plutonic. In fact, if nobody in town knew us we could’ve been mistaken for siblings.
“So what if I am crazy?” she scoffed. “It’s better than being a wuss. Anyway, I already got it all planned out.”
She explained that she had nabbed her dad’s camera and wanted us to sneak out and search for the cave. There was an excited glint in her gaze that was at odds with the “bad idea” feeling I was currently experiencing.
“Amanda, I don’t mean to dash your hopes, but how would we even begin to find this thing? All the stories just say that it’s in the forest. That’s not a lot to go on.”
She grinned, indicating that she’d been expecting this sort of response. She unzipped her backpack, pulling out what looked to be an old journal.
“This belonged to one of the settlers.”
“Where did you get that?”
“I found it in the attic. My parents were making me clean it.”
“Wait, so it belonged to someone in your family?”
She smiled, nodding.
“That’s right. Isn’t it exciting?”
I looked at the journal again, the leather worn from age and cracking in several places.
“Have you already read that?”
“Someone bookmarked a page. I only read that part. Why? Do you want to borrow it?”
“No, that wouldn’t be fair to you.”
“It’s fine. I already got what I wanted to know out of it.”
She dropped the book into my lap. The rest of our school day was uneventful only being punctuated by the occasional remark from Amanda when our teachers weren’t paying attention. We lived in the same neighborhood and on the bus ride home, she caught me up on the latest gossip, having overheard her mom talking with her dad about it.
“You know Mr. Turner?”
“Kind of, he lives across the street from you, right?”
“Yeah, anyway, his wife caught him kissing another woman and kicked him out.”
“That’s pretty crazy.”
“That’s not the crazy part. You’ll never guess who he was with.”
“Shoot.”
“Mrs. Hooper.”
I thought about how irritable she’d been the last few days.
“That explains a lot.”
“It sure does. Then Mr. Hooper ran into Mr. Turner at the store and they got into a big fight. It was bad. They had to get the cops involved. One of them got a black eye and the other had to get stitches.”
As I was making a mental note to stay off the Hooper and Turners’ radar for a while, the bus brakes were screeching as we came to our stop. We and some other kids got off.
“Remember, the Equinox,” Amanda said.
I nodded, then she was yelling for her friends to wait up while jogging after them. I watched her mingle with them before turning around and walking to my house. When I got home, my parents greeted me with the usual questions, “how was school?”, “Have you been talking with anyone new?”, that sort of thing. Dinner that night consisted of pumpkin chili and apple nut muffins for dessert. It was common for people in our town to have seasonal foods in the days leading up to Autumn.
“Hey,” I spoke up, prompting my parents to look at me, “I was wondering something about the Fall Shut-in.”
“What about it?” my dad replied, returning to his book.
“Has anyone actually seen The Fall Fairy?”
I may as well have questioned the existence of the sky with the way my parents were staring at me then.
“Of course, people have seen it, that’s why we stay inside,” my mom answered.
“What does it look like then?”
My dad slammed his book shut. Growing up, he was an intimidating man. He never beat me or anything. It’s just that he carried himself in a very authoritative manner. When he spoke, there was always a finality to his voice to let me know he was entirely in control of the conversation.
“You’ve never cared about this before,” he said. “Why the sudden change?”
“I heard someone at school talking about it and got curious.”
That was technically true.
“Well, that’s why you shouldn’t eavesdrop,” my mom told me. “We thought you would have learned that by now.”
This was coming from one of the biggest gossipers in town. I decided to drop the topic and finish eating my food. My dad talked with my mom about seeing if he could squeeze in a hunting trip with his buddies the day before the shut-in. Meanwhile, my mom was going shopping with one of her friends. Our town was behind the times in terms of technology so cell phones or the internet weren’t a thing for us.
With my parents out of the house, it was going to be me by myself which is something I have gotten used to. Reading was a big part of my childhood. It was always fascinating to catch these little glimpses into the outside world even if the stories were out of date. I spent that night and the day before the Equinox pouring through the journal. Part of me is glad I read it before her.
There were passages in it that would have made her ashamed of her family name. The short of it is, the natives (Likely Cherokee based on the region. Though, the journal never specifies) lived here before our ancestors settled and well, the transition of ownership wasn’t peaceful. There was a name mentioned in one of those harrowing passages that was familiar to me. Going through my stuff, I realized it was the same as someone on a family tree project I did for school. That means someone I’m related to assisted in that slaughter.
As if I wasn’t already dealing with enough. I thought about bringing this up to my parents. However, I knew they would deny it. Everything had to be perfect. I’m not bringing this up to alleviate familial guilt, by the way.
I do it because of the subtext present in those pages our ancestors chose to ignore. When our ancestors first invaded the land that would become Dead Leaf Falls, they noted how strangely the natives acted in response. They said of them it was like they were fighting to try and warn them away. I wish I could be surprised. If there’s one thing people in our town were good at, it was ignoring problems staring them in the face.
There are only two passages I can share verbatim due to them having been burned into my mind. The first is below.
We have finally managed to clear out the last of these savages. Now we can utilize this land as our Lord intended. I know in my heart this was right and yet I am troubled. We looked into the eyes of our enemies in their final moments and saw no resentment, only relief.
The second was written months later.
We were blind.
That’s where the journal ends. I wanted to tell Amanda, but she was so excited for our trip. I didn’t want to deter her. There was something else I could do to ease my worry. My dad kept a gun cabinet in his trophy room.
He never kept it locked because I never had any interest in weapons up to that point. …
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