“What’s past is prologue.” — The Tempest, Act II, Scene I
The Steamboat Gazette Special Correspondence from East Bellmont, November 1932
By Mr. Jonathan R. Keeler: Adirondack Guide, Amateur Antiquarian, and Reluctant Witness to Metallurgical Misfortune
Mr. Editor,—
I beg your indulgence to print a matter which—though clothed in the absurd—carries a ballast of truth heavier than any ore barge. Something uncanny has transpired upon our lake, a phenomenon concerning that relic of the Iron Age which once hauled pig-blooms and charcoal across Chateaugay’s waters. I speak of the Parson Barge, lately exhumed from its mire of reeds by a band of historians from Albany. Alas! These gentlemen sought to preserve our heritage, but they have instead stumbled upon a geometry of the woods that defies both history and reason.
It began with the pumps and pulleys of Professors Downing and Harkness. By the second evening, the barge’s timbers loomed upon the Narrows like a coffin cracked by frost. But as the iron was exposed to the air, the environment itself seemed to protest. Young Clute, the surveyor, was the first to fall; a winch spool burst free with a violence that Gideon Forbes, our local trapper, described as “unnatural.” He claims the wood shrieked not with the sound of snapping grain, but with a metallic hunger.
Professor Harkness’s subsequent discovery in the bilge provides a chilling framework for these events. He recovered a corroded plaque, its inscription suggesting the barge was less a vessel and more a ritual emissary: “What we take from earth, we return to water—blood, iron, and all.” He posits that the vessel was wrought in 1875 to appease a “covenant of mass”—a localized distortion where the lake acts as a receiving ledger for the minerals torn from the Adirondack peaks.
The Evidence of the Narrows
I. The Statement of Gideon Forbes (Trapper) “The wind didn’t blow; it pushed with square edges. I seen the barge move, Mr. Keeler, but there weren’t no current. A chain rose right outta the black, fat links drippin’ like leeches, and then I seen the tracks on the shore. They pointed out, toward the water, deep-pressed as if somethin’ heavy was yoked to that boat. It ain’t the wood that’s cursed; it’s the magnetism of the place. Somethin’ is walkin’ on the lake floor, draggin’ that iron back to the dark.”
II. The Statement of Baptiste (Night-Fisherman) “The barge, she lift her nose. The iron, she start to sing—a ding-ding-ding like a heart tickin’ wrong. I see two lanterns: one faint on the deck, and one green, deep under the keel. I row for the shore, but the shore, she stay the same distance, like a bad card shuffle. Then—poof. No barge. Only a ripple like a serpent’s wake. The boat, she do not want blood; she want weight. She is a magnet for the very soul of the mountain.”
III. The Letter of Miss E. A. (Radcliffe-Trained Naturalist) “At two ante meridiem, I observed a palimpsestic time-shear. From the barge emanated a trochaic metallic prosody—a rhythmic resonance of the iron itself. My dilemma is stellar: the reflected sky appeared twice. One Orion was faithful; the second was corrupted, drifting sternward against the breeze as if hauled by a teleological undertow. My Brownie plates show the barge overlapping itself by a yard, a transparent double-image superimposed upon its own memory. It is as if the iron possesses a mnemonic function, and the lake is a medium that refuses to let the year 1875 dissolve.”
A Warning to the Curious
To the skeptics who guffaw at ‘lake ghosts,’ I issue this challenge: come to the Narrows at moon-rise. Bring your slide-rules and your spectrometers. Explain the ‘Two Orions’—one in the heavens, and one being pulled backward through the depths by a force that ignores the laws of hydrodynamics.
Our historians have fled, muttering of ‘metallurgical possession.’ Yet the barge remains half-raised, straddling the surface like an indecisive revenant. Each morning, fresh rust blooms along its sides like unclosing wounds, and the water around it remains unnaturally still, as if holding its breath.
If this be merely a legend of the Shatagee Woods, then it is a legend written in the language of physics and minerals. Should the Iron Age yet demand its tithe, let the Gazette preserve this warning: do not disturb the Parson Barge. Some things are interred in the deep not to be forgotten, but to be kept away from the light of day.
I remain, sir, your faithful correspondent,
Jonathan R. Keeler Adirondack Guide & Innkeeper
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What mysteries of Chateaugay Lake haunt you?