You wouldn’t believe it unless you’d been there, but Alexandre Heights exudes tragedy like some little villages exude charm.

The first time my family drove past it, I didn’t understand a thing. All I saw was what was before me; a small village nestled strangely among a grove of pine trees, a few miles inland from the sea. My dad stopped there briefly for directions- I think- but the point is, our car was stopped for a good ten minutes, and there was nothing to do but stare out the window. My mom was asleep, you know, and my sister was seventeen and too cranky to interact with. Besides, it was an interesting place; very tiny, by now only a collection of square, sturdy, blue-white houses and a little post office patterned with sunlight and blue-green shade. Pine needles were scattered over everything, mostly dead and some dying; no brilliant green anywhere.

I leaned lazily against the car window and looked out, absently chewing bubble gum and feeling discontent bordering on distraught.

I didn’t know why I felt that way. Just that morning I’d laughed, and swam in the ocean till my toes and heels turned purple, and picked my way along the foggy shores looking into tide pools and admiring the starfish and the snails. Now it was afternoon, and warm, and full of promise, but I didn’t like it.

Something about this place was bothering me.

“Hey,” I tried out cautiously, poking my sister in the shoulder. “Is it just me, or is the light weird in this place?”

She turned and gave me a most condescending, ‘and when did you start thinking?’ sort of look.

“Uh, no…it’s completely normal,” she said, snorted derisively, and turned back away from me.

I blew a bubble disconsolately and flooded the car with the smell of fake green apple. If it wasn’t the light, it must be me.

Or maybe-

Not until my dad climbed back into the minivan and started us off again did it strike me; and then I wondered where it had come from and why it made so much sense.

Something very bad had happened here. It was as simple as all that.

I pressed my face to the window and watched intently, trying hard to take in every bit of Alexandre Heights before it got too far behind me for me to ever come back to it. There weren’t many people outside- that could have tipped me off about the place- the houses were so still it was almost as if they’d sunk into the kind of unbearable grief that slows down every muscle in the body. Squirrels skittered over the covered-up pools and front porches, and the sun still sparkled, but every window’s curtains were drawn.

On the surface the place was all cool sadness, but it was very obvious that the feeling went back into tremendous depths- fading bruises where there’d once been agony. I was ten years old and I couldn’t fathom it, but I could feel it.

I lay back against the seat, unable to express any small piece of what I felt, took my gum out of my mouth and squished it messily into my pocket. The smell was starting to gross me out.

(----------------------)

It’s a funny thing, but we came back to the town four years later.

Or, not exactly; but we did take another summer trip to Maine and wound up staying at a hotel not three miles down the road from Alexandre Heights. I’d forgotten about the place, oddly enough, only days after we’d left it behind, but it came back to me as soon as I saw it.

“Oh,” I commented. I stopped my CD player briefly. “I recognize this place.”

“We probably drove past here on our last trip up the coast,” said my dad, criminally uninterested.

“Yeah,” I said shortly. My throat formed a lump. One of the porches had caved in, but besides that, it looked just like the town of four years past- and more importantly, it felt the same. Maybe even a little worse, because I had become sensitized to these things by my age. Fourteen, you know. I was in the process of discovering surliness and self-centeredness and the opposite sex, which itself was a tragedy. The past year had been one long parade of telling myself that I was in every kind of pain imaginable.

But I had gained another thing in my last four years, and that was the ability to think for myself. The next day, I was allowed to go out on my own, and I immediately caught a bus into the Heights.

I liked being alone, and so consequently, as I stepped off the bus and into the crinkling pine needles, I felt fairly cheerful. I was wearing sunglasses and a sweatshirt and carrying a purse, so I assumed that no one would be able to guess that I was, essentially, just a kid. Now, where to go first? I’d planned out a whole host of things to ask the night before- all the curiousity of four years previous had come swelling back and I was ready to go- but I had only had vague ideas as to who I could speak to.

I stood and thought. A lady actually came out of one of the houses- I was mildly surprised that it wasn’t abandoned altogether- and I straightened my sweatshirt (I know that’s a little ridiculous, but didn’t I have to fix myself up somehow?) and headed over to her.

“Hello,” I said abruptly, and she politely returned my greeting.

“Um.” Great. Now I was floundering. What exactly was it that I’d planned to say, anyway? “Oh. Do you- umm. Do you know someone who can tell me about this place? The history, I mean.” I smiled what I tried to make into an encouraging smile- I was really condescending at the time, and had the idea that whoever lived in touristy areas such as this one was immediately a naïve idiot drunk on quaintness and old world charm. “I’m curious about it.”

The lady looked surprised- very surprised, she practically reeled- and thought for a moment before responding.

“Well. Uh, I suppose my next-door neighbor could,” she thought a moment longer. “Yes. He could probably tell you. I just moved here a month ago, but I’m sure Marc knows a thing or two. You could ask him, he’s very nice. I’ll go with you if you like.”

You know, it’s only just started to occur to me how phenomenally stupid I was being. I, with not one thought to the possibility that these people were psychotic freaks just waiting for an unsuspecting fool like myself to lure into the depths of their little blue-white houses and- well, it could happen.

The point was, I trustingly followed the woman as she went to the very same square little house I’d seen gray squirrels skitter over ten years previous (I hadn’t forgotten even that small detail) and knocked on the door.

I had expected quite an old man, but actually, Marc June wasn’t very old. He was middle-aged, obviously forty-something but already gray-haired. He was nice; he invited me right inside, and even offered both myself and the lady- Laura something- a lobster roll. I hate lobster rolls, but took one politely and sat down at the kitchen table with him.

Thin sunlight filtered in on us, and I believe there was even a sad quality to the sun in Alexandre Heights.

“So,” he said, smiling encouragingly (right back at me…). “What would you like to know?”

I decided to try the direct approach. On occasion, that worked like a charm.

“What happened here?” I asked him. I nibbled my lobster roll pensively. “Because-“ I swallowed once “-I guess I just got the impression that something did.”

There was brief silence. Marc June’s body seemed to still, all the little movements that everyone makes at any given second coming to a halt. He looked once into my eyes- his were incredibly dark- and seemed deeply interested.

“You would be right,” he said softly.

And here is the story:

In 1967, when Marc was just a kid- ten years old, coincidentally- the village was a lot bigger than it was today, or even four years ago. There was a fairly good tourist business going on and the people who lived there year round were, on the whole, doing very well for themselves.

Of course, things can’t go on that calmly forever.

There was an illness. Not in one person, and not a mere bug or bout of flu- a freak strain of a virus that was anything but the common cold. I didn’t really believe it myself, but he actually went into the living room and retrieved an old newspaper- and there it was, across the front page, the black headline that read;

ALEXANDRE HEIGHTS PUT UNDER QUARANTINE.

“No one was allowed to come in,” he said quietly, looking oddly hollow about the eyes. “No one was allowed to leave. The tourists- they had to stay, too. You can believe they gave us hell for it, but they couldn’t go, they could have all been carrying the virus for what we knew. “

Over half the people in the town became sick. All of them died.

I had never heard this story before. I mean, it might have been mentioned to me at some point, referred to briefly by a newsperson, but I didn’t remember it. News of it had been all over the country at the time, but maybe this was one of those things that’s quite simply too short-lived and too bad to remember.

Marc June lost every single family member living in the Heights. His mother had been the first to come down with it, but his sister, Aimee- had had it the worst. She’d burned with virus for a night and a day.

“Here,” he said, holding up an old photograph. In it was a girl about my own age- dark-eyed, olive-skinned, with shoulder-length dark hair and a horrible, bitter expression on her face. She was wearing a pale, khaki jacket and that was all I could see of her.

“She was never very happy,” he said. “She wasn’t intelligent- was never good in school- but-“

He didn’t have to finish. We all wordlessly acknowledged that.

Now I sometimes have nightmares about that little town. Or, maybe not precisely nightmares- the dreams are only very sad. I cry in my sleep, thick bubbling sobs that don’t make a sound, and nobody knows about what I see.

And I can’t stop the plague from coming, because it’s history and no matter how much you want to, it’s impossible to stop the past from happening.

A.N) Now wasn’t that the most hilarious thing you’ve ever read in your life??...actually, believe it or not it is based on a real-life experience, buuuut, very loosely. I do have this weird memory of driving through this little town on a trip up the coast, and I really did get this strong and horrible feeling about it…but unlike in this story, I never found out why. That’s life, right?