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_I have several memories of that time of my life in Virginia and for some reason they deal with death.

__________ Mark David Chapman

Behold - October.

If, in Appalachian Virginia, Summer is the time of warriors, blood, passion, violence, then September is the month to tend wounds, to kiss the forehead, to rock the babe in her mother's arms - this is the time of lonesome passions, of the murder ballad, down in the willow garden every youth cries well away. The trees will change color, the animals will hide for their hibernation, the geese take their inscrutable trek - the wood will be chopped and piled, the quilts and blankets will come out to bundle up in, and with them the smell of the months they have been hiding in the chests and boxes and closets...year to year do they remember, by candlelight, firelight, this flannel, this wool, they are the soft embrace, the enduring promises. And there are no other seasons like Autumn, for there are no other promises like the ones that Autumn makes.

Yet October comes as grim and sure as the stroke of Midnight.

It swims in the Druidic obsession of appointed times and desolate fortune, the great wheel of the year that forever spins - the harvest comes and there will be time for dancing, for fires on the hills amidst the shucked corn, carved pumpkins, because so it be that however vehement preaches the Scripture about witchcraft and no other Gods one cannot wipe out blood-destiny, or erase the delight of the crisp mornings amongst the golden fields, even as the Spook and the Haint draw ever nearer, and the hands held about in the circle around the bonfire are clasped not merely out of joy but also fear.

For indeed does the harvest come, this time, this time of the spectral, the unreal made real, for the time of harvest means, in its literal sense, a threshing, a reaping, and who should arrive, scythe in skeletal hand, but - the Pale Rider himself? It is in this way that humans will personify it, make it rather more like them, and therefore less frightening...Death, Death itself. And though we try everything to keep it away, Autumn comes, and reminds us, gently, that there is an appointed time for all, as beautiful as it is sad, like the morning mists on the mountaintops that evanesce by the hour but stay, wetly, on the heart.

It is impossible to escape October, the very darkness of Autumn, no matter how much it is ascribed with scenes of warm wishes and domestic coziness - the veil will be lifted, the creeks will murmur too loudly of forgotten things, the coffins will quake in the slumberous Earth aneath the pale and sickly Moon, the crows will gather in the trees whose leaves disappear day by day to tell their hideous jokes in great flocks, and when they fly way for the evening, they will blot out the clouds with their black feathers.

Of all the places in Appalachian Virginia, it is usually left to Botetourt, the county, and the nested collection of little communities that dwell inside it, to groan the heaviest under legendry and weirdness - of course there is the blood-soaked chronicles of Tidewater, and the tangled tragedies of Richmond and the heady days when it was capital of the Confederacy, and even the restlessness that throbs underground the Stepfordian tranquility of the D.C. suburbs...but for the quintessence of the strange, the weird, and the inexplicable, one must look to Roanoke and the counties that do it homage.

Botetourt, of them all, reigns dubiously supreme - like Smith Mountain Lake with its phantom towns drowned in its waters and hideous catfish that wax enormous and intelligent upon its depths; or Clear Brook with its repeated tradition of a Devil's chant that one can hear on dead Winter nights along the chill of the nightwind; or even Roanoke itself, with its sad whispers of haunted malls and benighted suburbs and the lonely woman cursed with a raccoon's head, for even in the modern there is no escape from the ancient occult evil, the dark splotches of superstition that mold over the shiny new concrete and glass.

It must first be said that outsiders are easily detected by how they pronounce the toponymy - Botetourt - it is unobvious at first but becomes apparent when one hears it: the correct pronunciation, such as it is, remains so common in those parts that, when given out wrong, it becomes unbearably jarring to the ear of the native.

Now then: there is a quality, a character, to Botetourt's strangeness that leaves one with the impression of being deeply, even cosmically wrong. It is often said by people who are not from here that Botetourt County is the portal to another dimension, or has within its borders - up in the mountains, an overgrown cemetery untouched since before the War Between the States, impossible to find by even the most experienced of hikers, now surrounded thick with enormous trees plunging their roots to feast on those that once lived - a doorway to Hell. Certainly people that _are_from here will have a story, maybe two or three, for these are the mountains, and the mountains are indeed host to all manner of the ghastly and haunted...

...though a select few usually come to mind.

Certainly there was that silliness many, many years gone with the Mad Gasser, whomever he - or, maybe, it - was, so long dismissed as mass-hysteria by the secular folk who claim to know better, and dim in the memory of even the longest still-living of the oldtimers in these parts, a footnote in an overly long, uncomfortable history of strange things in rural places.

After all, what can one say of a guy that dressed up in a bug-eyed costume that didn't look like it could have been made when he supposedly made it, who went out and attacked people dressed in his queer polymer suit with some sort of noxious chemical weapon, doing so for a peculiar sexual thrill?

All these years later, and some folk around there are actually waiting for him to come back.

Phantasmic things seem drawn to Botetourt as a lodestone.

Supposedly, there lives in the wilds of Haymakertown a kind of shaggy cow or buffalo - rather, it's called a cow, but it's clearly something which only superficially resembles a bovine - which attacks people and then turns them into one of their own kind.

The details are unclear, and people will have differing opinions about having seen it one night, or smelt it one dusk skulking around an old pasture. What is known for sure has been repeated and whispered about based on an old WPA pamphlet written on the creature that use to be in the possession of a man who ran a car lot in Montvale, quite a ways away, who would lend it out for a nominal fee.

This man, by the way, is remembered for several equally strange things as well: how he always had an astonishingly lucky collection of rare and antique cars on his lot, and seemed to know a great deal - more than was usually ever told him - about his regular customers.

At any rate, the self-stapled packet of papers this car dealer possessed supposedly described the beastly cow, in meticulous detail, with all the careful identifications the competent naturalist would make about a strange species. But whatever people read they still will not readily repeat in full - what was printed was so unwholesome, and worse, convincingly true, that few were able to read the whole thing through completely...evidently the method the cow, so-called, employs to make new members of its own kind, how it procreates, is shocking even by today's thoroughly jaded standards.

So what happened to the pamphlet? The gentlemen who ran the car lot died in 1977, and the fantastic and hard-to-find automobiles he had for sale were sold at cost - his son had the pamphlet and indeed most of his father's personal effects burned in a great bonfire on his land, puzzling and disturbing many, and which he never gave a reason for. When he moved out to Vegas to strike it rich in real estate, he never said another word to anyone who knew his father or his family.

The whole thing was very odd - his father seemed like such a kind, genteel sort of fellow, who never had a bad thing to say about anyone, even with the strange things he seemed to know about that cryptid-cow people kept claiming to see...but sometimes grief in the eldest child is an even stranger thing than love or money.

And as for the peculiar buffalo, or whatever it actually was - all that is left are hazy sightings and hearsay.

Probably of note: there has never been a trace of the WPA project which produced the pamphlet ever found.

On the subject of forgotten and forbidden lore, at least in connection to Botetourt County, there lies under lock and key at the library in Downtown Roanoke - in the Virginia Room, for those who want to know - a very strange, and indeed very possibly cursed little book.

It is a kind of gazetteer which details many of the city of Roanoke and most of its environs' darkest and most occult secrets in an easy, place-by-place geographical index. It is, for all intents and purposes, virtually a tour guide, but with elements of an old grimoire: there are meticulous annotations and footnotes of witches, spells, unsolved murders, and so on, from the first explorers up into the Roanoke River valley, up to and including around 1930.

On the front cover, in type, one finds: A Guide To Be Handy & Useful For The Traveller Interested.

Not particularly thick - two hundred pages at most, but typewritten in smaller than usual print - the book is divided into six chapters, with an index and two appendices, including remarkably detailed, hand drawn maps of most of Roanoke County and the surrounding areas, such as Salem and Craig and Botetourt Counties, a different one printed about every ten pages or so for guidance and ease of reference. No author nor publisher is given, but constant reference is made to the present author, friend of the proud Powhatan, which would, maybe, indicate authorship of a Native American. Confounding things further, the footnotes and citations are a mixture of unknown or extremely obscure works - there are apparently real-life authors mentioned, but cite volumes by them which were either never published or never existed.

Now, officially, the book itself cannot actually exist, as the first published atlas of the county using modern surveying techniques was issued by the United States Geological Survey in 1946, with a frontispiece featuring a frowning William Embry Wrather, at the time Director of the United States Geological Survey, and it is this particular book that is readily available at the reference section at the Downtown library, and is the one inevitably handed out, not a little sarcastically, when thrillseeking schoolchildren or those obsessed with the morbid and the curious ask for what they call the old guidebook because they heard about the terrible thing that happened to the boy who stole it, once, on a dare. In fact it is something of a tradition in that part of Roanoke for adolescents of every stripe to legend-trip down at the library by asking for a copy of that supposedly cursed old tome, always near Halloween, spaced out long enough that the people at the reference desk forget about it but become readily annoyed and exasperated when it does happen, as Wheel of the Year spins toward Samhain.

For some years after its discovery moldering in some obscure archive - official sources differ as to which one - it was regarded as little more than a curiosity, with the unsettling peculiarities of its existence not fully known until it was examined after it was returned from an infamous theft in 1981.

It seems that when the book was first discovered, it was thought to be a work of fiction, a bunch of made-up stories that someone from several decades before had thought silly or morbid enough to pack into pages and pages of practical jokes - some librarian thought it would be fun to include it in a little exhibit for the kids around Halloween to get them interested in reading, surrounded by other books with spooky themes: a big book of Poe was the centerpiece, but A Guide To Be Handy would rest above it, in a small glass case.

While hard to imagine in our own modern age where nearly everything is constantly videotaped, it was easy enough back in those days for anyone to brazenly steal things with impunity - which is exactly what happened: group of cutups from some local middle school had dared a boy in their group to take the book out of the glass for whatever unfathomable adolescent reason.

He succeeded, but the boys were disappointed to find that most of what the book described no longer existed - half a century had gone by and many things were already gone.

But the boy who stole it seemed to have held onto it - telling nobody what he had done - and about a week later people noticed he had started acting strange, talking to himself in funny voices, and playing hooky from school to sit on lonely hills out near Franklin Road where he lived and stare at the sky for hours.

And then, finally, his strange behavior took a truly horrific turn - those old enough to remember will always remember, for it was a terrible night that October night, when horrible screams came from the boy's house:

_ Mama, mama! Your head is like a big pumpkin, mama! C'mere mama, c'mere! It should be a Jack o'lantern! I'm gonna carve that face up, mama - I'm gonna give you a Jack o'lantern's face, mama! C'mere, mama, c'mere - I'm gonna carve that face!_

Some years ago you would see his mother, poor woman, at the Kroger out in Daleville, where she went to live with her spinster aunt after the doctors at Lewis-Gale did the best they could with her - the aunt would send her to fetch milk or bread, but all the children would cry when they saw her, and too many people would grow pale and drop their belongings at the very sight of her, what her boy did to her, so that eventually she could not go out at all.

She still lives at that house, they say, though the aunt passed many years ago, and her boy, now a man, the one that stole the old book on witchin from the library, shrieks all day at the trees outside his barred window in the padded cell at the looneybin out in Catawba.

The antique gazetteer, the mysterious guidebook, was recovered from the boy's belongings and transported to the Virginia Room at the Downtown library where it rests under lock and key - the man who drove it there in an armored car hired for the occasion by some higher county agency died too, of one of those unlucky forms of cancer that always seemed to want to go into remission with treatment, but never did, lingering for years...oh, that forlorn hope, that thing with feathers blacker than Hell's own soot, which far more than the disease will end up killing the spirit.

But even this awful event cannot compare to the terrible affair with the two boys vanishing, not a trace of them ever found, back in 1983: Cooper "Coop" Haley and Axel Sizemore, gone too soon, so young and full of promise - it is still talked about even today, people who knew them both, who knew both families, turning uncomfortable and awkward when their names come up...it as if they know something, it is as if they are aware that they should say more, but cannot, should not. Perhaps ask them, sometimes, why the loud meowing of a cat will chill their heart, or why some swear that weird green eyes still peer from an unexpected bush where there are no lights and only shadows reign.

Now - what does this all mean? Is it really true that Botetourt County is a portal to another dimension - as some may contend? Is there something more at work in the heart of Appalachian Virginia than elsewhere in this dominion, cursed to magnetize elements of the strange and the wicked and the obscene and the supernatural since before the time that Raleigh named it so, Virginia, for his queen?

Who can say?

But - like all good tales - there is no adequate answer...nor should there be.

Behold, October - season of mysteries unsolved.