Lodge

Hello Dear Readers!

    I sat in the passenger seat of Gemma’s Volkswagen as we made our way across town to the Telford Memorial Medical Center to visit Otto.  Apparently, he had collapsed two days before and had been rushed to the hospital.  Upon arrival, it was discovered that he had a severe case of pneumonia.

It’s evening and the sun is beginning to set.  I found myself looking out the car window as we drove.  I had never been to this part of town before and was trying to take it all in.  Gemma was in the middle of complaining about customers at the Steaming Mug when I saw a strange building on a hill.  It was just barely illuminated by the dwindling light.  It was squat and rectangular, the only detail I could make out was the outline of a door.

Me: What’s that?

Gemma: Huh?

Me: That!

Gemma:  Oh, that’s the lodge.

Me: Like the kind of lodge a secret society would meet at?

Gemma:  You would guess that first.

Me: What kind of lodge is it?

Gemma: I don’t know.

Me: Well what are the members called?

Gemma: Lodge members?

Me: Well, are they Freemasons?

Gemma: No.

Me: Rosicrucian?

Gemma: No.

Me: Skull and Bones?

Gemma: Does this look like Yale?

Me: Ordo Templi Orientis?

Gemma: No.

Me: Hellfire Club?

Gemma: No.

Me: Inverse Ku Klux Klan?

Gemma: Huh?

Me: Screaming Skies and Whispered Rooms?

Gemma: Look, TB, just leave the lodge alone.

Me: Why?

Gemma:  Because.  People don’t mess with the Lodge, it’s just not a good idea.  Listen to me this one time.  Okay?

Me: Well, who are the members?

Gemma: No one knows.

Me: No one knows?

Gemma: Yeah, they don’t wear rings or funny hats or anything.  Now just leave it alone.

    It took all of my restraint, but I did as my friend requested. At least for the moment.  A short while later we arrived at the hospital.  The Telford Memorial Medical Center consists of a large central building with many smaller buildings sprawling out from it.  We eventually found Otto’s floor.  The interior of the hospital was surprisingly serpentine.  On our second trip passed the nurse’s station we decided to ask for the directions.  When we told them we were looking for Otto’s room, the nurses all grumbled and I heard someone mutter ‘uncooperative’. 

Upon entering Otto's hospital room I was startled by the change in my friend.  He was pale and gaunt.  His black hair that he normally wore pulled back, was spread out on the pillow, showing a lot of grey.  When he saw us he smiled his same old mischievous smile and tried to sit up, which was difficult with all of the tubes coming out of him.  Gemma looked like she was holding back tears.

The knowledge that Gemma was capable of crying was probably the most distressing part of the whole situation.  The moment was broken when a nurse came in to change his IV and glared at him.  I must have given him a quizzical look because he said “I'm a lousy patient.  Junkies, former or otherwise, are always the worst patients.”

“He thinks we're trying to kill him.  “We're not.

“All I said was that you could kill me,” Otto clarified.

We made standard hospital small talk for a while.  Gemma made him promise to take better care of himself.  He complained about the food and asked when he could come home. Then he did something that took me completely by surprise.

    “Since I’ve had a lot of time to sit around I decided to record some more of my experiences of posterity,” from under his pillow he pulled out a crumpled stack of papers that were covered in his gorgeous script.  “I thought maybe you would be interested in these.  Not like there isn’t enough crazy crap going on around here at any given moment.”

I clutched the papers to my chest and thanked him.  “What is it about?”

    “Oh, the lodge.  Do you know about the lodge yet?”  I smiled and Gemma groaned and threw her hands in the air.

“Now if you guys will excuse me, I have a get crabby old woman to help me take a piss.”  With that, he pressed the call button for the nurse’s station and we said our goodbyes.

    While we walked out passed the nurses, we could hear them arguing who was going to have to help Otto to the bathroom.  When we were almost passed I happen to glance over at nurse who looked up at the same time.  The expression of surprise on her face when she saw me, stopped me dead in my tracks.  It was like she had expected to see anything else in the world but me.  And then I was passed the nurses station and it was over.  Strange, but unfortunately not that strange.

So now I will reproduce the contents of Otto's tale.

    

    So to start with, this isn't even my story.  I’m telling a story told to me, so you know how that goes.  This story was told to years ago by my friend Jimmy when I was still a junkie living on the streets.  We suffered from the same affliction and for a couple of years, we were inseparable.  When we couldn’t get our hands on any drugs and we were hurting and shaking from the withdrawal, we’d tell each other stories to distract from the pain.  So this is a story told to one junkie by another junkie.

I don’t know whatever happened to Jimmy.  Over time I started seeing him less and less, until one day he was just gone.  I always assumed that he probably drifted outta town.  You did that when you were homeless.  Always looking for a new place to crash or a place to score.  Or perhaps he died somewhere of an overdose, something that happens frequently to junkies.  I hope he’s alright.

Jimmy’s story takes place back when he a teenager.  He was living with his dad and was already getting into trouble.  Unlike myself, I didn’t start with drugs until I was in my twenties.  So Jimmy’s father was a Lodge Member.  He didn’t wear a silly hat or ring or anything, and it wasn’t anything he ever said to Jimmy.  Jimmy just knew.  His dad would leave for the evening once or twice a month, without saying where he was going, and not come back till almost dawn.  Unlike when he went out to the bar, he came home sober.  He would often smell of musk and damp soil.

Jimmy’s father didn’t pay much attention to Jimmy, except when he got in trouble, which was a lot of the time.  Jimmy paid attention to him though.  Over the years Jimmy had noticed his father go into the spare bedroom and lock the door, He could hear him moving things around.

One day, when Jimmy’s father was at work, Jimmy was searching the house for money so he could go out and get high.  Unfortunately for Jimmy, there was no money around and his father seemed to own nothing of value.  Then he remembered the spare bedroom.  He searched the room and found nothing.  He pulled the bookcase away from the wall and found a hidden compartment in the back.

Sitting in the compartment was a wooden box.  He said there was something strange about it from the beginning.  It was painted black but had some sort of design painted on the top, also in black paint.  Jimmy could barely make it since it was black on black.  He said it looked like a strange geometric shape.  Looking at it made him feel disoriented.  But wasn’t what he was interested in, so he pulled the lip off and tossed it aside.

Inside the box he didn’t find money or valuables.  What he found didn’t seem important to him at the time, but as he looked back on it over the years, it seemed more and more unsettling.  Inside the box were three seemingly harmless objects.  There was half a torn black and white photograph.  The picture showed a woman and young boy facing the camera.  The woman had one arm around the boy and on the other hand, she grasped a crumpled piece of paper.

When he turned the photo over there was a word written on the back that he didn’t know, ‘cztery’.  Years after the last time I saw Jimmy I looked this up online.  It’s the polish word for the ‘four’.

Also in the box was a flat stone with a fossil in it.  Nothing exciting, just a fossil of a small fish.  He said it was about the size of his finger.  When he touched it he could taste brine in the back of his mouth.  It made him uncomfortable to hold it.  So he tossed into the box with the picture.

The last thing in the box was an old coin, not any kind that Jimmy recognized.  Really old, like an antique.  He thought for a moment that it might be valuable.  But as he turned it over in his fingers he kept forgetting what was the on the other side of the coin.  He’d turn it over and look at it, then forget what her just seen.  He placed it back in the box, and then couldn’t remember what was on either side of the coin.  He decided it wasn’t worth his trouble.  It’s not like he knew any antique dealers or anything.

So he returned the box and moved the bookshelf back.  Then he left the house to look for trouble elsewhere.

You may find yourselves wondering how it a teenager who was on the hunt for money to spend on drugs could recall these details so accurately.  Perhaps they’re made up.  The product of a drug-addled mind by the time the story reached my ears.  But Jimmy told me that that was not the last time he looked at the items in the box.  Until he left home when he was seventeen he’d look at the contents of the box after every time his dad got back from the lodge.  He said he never knew what he was looking for, but he had to keep checking.

But my tale doesn’t end quite yet.  Many years after I lost contact with Jimmy I was walking past his dad’s old house one day.  There was a foreclosure sign in the yard and grass hadn’t been mowed in months.  The first thing I thought of was the hidden box.  I casually looked through one of the grime covered windows and peered inside.  The place was still full of furniture.  If I was lucky, it wouldn’t be the only thing that got left behind.

So a few evenings later, I casually forced open the back door and walked inside.  Now, I had never known Jimmy when he was a kid, so I’d never been inside, but he’d pointed it out to me on multiple occasions.  The house was small, so even though I was unfamiliar with the layout, it didn’t take long to find the spare bedroom.  There was the bookshelf, still in place and covered in books that I can’t imagine Jimmy or his father reading.  My heart began to beat faster.  So far everything in the house was still there.  I wondered if I could be lucky enough to find the box of strange artifacts undisturbed.  I pulled the bookcase from the wall and found the compartment in the back.  Empty.

Well not entirely empty.  There was no box and no photos, fossils, or coins.  My heart sank.  Jimmy’s dad must have taken it with him.  Or someone from the lodge came and got it.   Then I saw a sheet of paper lying flat.  I picked it up and read the neatly written text.  ‘What if they are just outside, waiting for us to contact them?’  I had no idea what it meant.  I still don’t.  I folded up the note, put it in my pocket, and got the hell out of there.

So there you have it, mystery, intrigue, and no useful information.

Well, that certainly was a curious tale!  I still have no idea what the Lodge is, who the Lodge Members are, or what they do, but it’s as intriguing as I thought it would be.  The geometric figure on the outside of the box interests me.  I wish there was a better description.  I wonder if it’s similar to any of the figures in the Codex?

The objects in the box is fascinating!  They don’t point to anything in particular.  They don’t even point to the existence of the lodge or lodge members.  Perhaps Jimmy’s father just liked to hide away strange knickknacks and look at them after a late night of rolling around in the dirt?

I find it strange that after all the time I’ve spent in Kevin’s Crossing, collecting strange stories and experiences that this is that first I’ve heard of the Lodge.  Could it really be that closely guarded of a secret, that everyone knows exists but no actually knows anything about?  When I asked Robyn about it, she said didn’t even realize that Lodge was a real thing.  She thought it was just another story.  My curiosity is palpable!

FUN FACT!

In Kevin's Crossing, they use the unique euphemism ‘moved to Treakle Street’ to refer to someone having died?  How peculiar!  I wonder what the home values are like there?

I’ll keep you updated!