The roaring twenties became a different time for all of America as the economy took a massive plummet. The depression sank about every industry like a stone and families of every class felt the impact. Throughout the Hoovervilles set up around Riverbend, there was one man who seemed prosperous despite
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My name is Julien Serrault. It is the 7th of January, 1882. I am an innkeeper outside the mountain town of Briancon, at the base of the French Alps. The inn does not do much trade, and in the winter months I am sometimes alone for days at a time.
Awash with terror, I lay in bed jumping and flinching at every creak. The old country house had always made such noises at night. The beams would creak, the windows would knock and the wind would howl down the fireplace. I had not always been so afraid of these sounds,
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Dad said a man was coming from the city to photograph us tomorrow. I never had a photograph taken of me before. My parents had one taken with James when he was a baby. Eliza and I weren’t born yet. The picture sits over our mantle, embroidered in a gold
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Part 1 I was nineteen years old in the late summer of 1997 when my maternal grandfather suddenly became ill and passed away. He was seventy-two years old. In the span of only five short but grueling weeks, he was diagnosed with a particularly aggressive form of pancreatic cancer, went
The scene was the Savant Club in the last years of the 19th century. Despite the extreme lateness of the hour, a few of the regulars were gathered there for cards and conversation. The latter turned, as it often did, to the uncanny. “H’m,” said Nelson Hayes, one of the
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Grynnwald grabbed his son by his beaten breastplate and shook the hysterical young man, slamming him against a massive oak tree, nearly unleashing the chest-piece in the process. “Haurik!” he screamed desperately trying to break through the panic. “Compose yourself!” It took a moment for Haurik to fall silent, save
