Quick orientation, because if you're not from here, none of the rest of this site is going to make much sense.
Nowhere is a real town up in the mountains of West Virginia. Population 247 on a good year. We sit inside something called the National Radio Quiet Zone, thirteen thousand square miles where, by federal law, you can't run the things the rest of you can't live without. No cell towers. No WiFi. No microwave ovens past a certain block of Main. The official reason is the Big Ear, the giant radio telescope out past the ridge, so sensitive that your phone buzzing in your pocket forty miles off would scream in its ear. So they made the whole valley shut up. For science.
That's the version on the welcome sign. I grew up on it. Believed it right up until I was old enough to notice my dad didn't.
Because people feel the quiet here. There's a kind of person the doctors have a name for, electromagnetic hypersensitivity, the ones who get migraines and worse off cell signal and live wire. They drift to Nowhere on purpose, like the town is the one place the static stops hurting. My dad's theory, the one that earned him funny looks at the diner, was that the quiet isn't protecting the telescope. The quiet is a lid. Switch off everything that hums and the wall between here and somewhere-else goes thin. The dish isn't pointed at space. It's pointed at the lid. It listens for the thin places to open.
I used to think that was the grief talking. I don't think that anymore.
Ask the message board. Ask the people who showed up for the show. Nowhere has more sightings per head than any place its size has a right to. Things out of the old Appalachian stories. A Mothman that turns up before the bad ones. A Flatwoods thing. A Hidebehind you only ever catch in the corner of the frame. The Wendigo when it's hungry, and it has been hungry. Machines that go sideways for no reason inside a zone where there aren't supposed to be machines. The woods past the Beaumont place rearranging themselves between a Tuesday and a Wednesday. Whole streets sharing one dream and comparing notes over breakfast like that's a normal thing to do.
Once a year, somewhere around the middle of October, the entire town has the same bad night at the same time. We don't talk about it. We have gotten very good at not talking about things. This town has been practicing that since 1959.
You'll see these names on the wall, so here's the map from where I sit. One guy's read. Take it for what it's worth.
The Beaumonts. Founded the town in the 1880s and still own the bones of it. Dr. Thaddeus Beaumont is the patriarch and the polite version of a brick wall. He knows something about my dad. I'd bet the store on it. He smiles at me like he's sorry in advance. There's old talk about the family and a cult. Mithras. The bull. Candles in a room under the manor. My dad had one of their cards folded in his wallet. I don't trust a Beaumont as far as I can throw the manor.
Clara Sterling. Thaddeus's “assistant.” Ageless in a way nobody comments on, which is its own kind of comment. She warns people off, gently, right before things go bad. So either she's looking out for us or she always knows what's coming. Haven't decided which one is worse. She frightens me more than the cult does.
Abigail Fleming. New in town. Came here to enforce the Quiet Zone, of all the jobs a person could pick, and it turns out she's one of the ones who feels it. We work things together. She's the steadiest person I know and I'm not putting more than that on a website she can read. She was right about the wall. She's usually right.
The Nakamuras, Satoshi and Keiko. They run the restaurant where half of this started. Satoshi has looked out for me since my dad went, and he's seen more classified weird than he ever lets on. If a thing has teeth, I call Satoshi. There's a lot more to Keiko than the menu. The list of people I trust in this town is short and they are both on it.
Doc Bailey, Ian. Town doctor, fungus obsessive, paid-up member of the everyone-thinks-we're-nuts club. Jenn hears things she shouldn't be able to hear. Willow is a kid. Leave her out of it.
Asher Drake and Sasha Black. Newcomers. Money, art, tech that shouldn't work in the Zone and somehow does. Both of them magnetic, and I notice that I want to be around them, and the noticing is the only reason I keep my distance. Asher's “experiments” keep turning up at the edge of my dad's story. I'm watching that one. Carefully.
That's the town. That's who's up at night with me, whether they'd admit it or not. Everything else is on the wall, and more of it shows up every week, which is either the best news I've got or the worst one.
in Nowhere nobody can hear you scream. except everybody. small town. /B