A towering silhouette with amber eyes returned to Elm & Second on Tuesday last — and this time, one witness says, it turned and addressed her directly, in a voice she could not afterward recall.
For the third time in as many months, residents of the central commerce district have reported an unusual silhouette atop the old Harwick Mercantile at Elm and Second. The figure — described by all witnesses as enormous, dark, and possessed of eyes that catch light in a manner inconsistent with any known animal — appeared shortly after nine in the evening and remained visible for approximately forty minutes.
Raymond Toll, who operates the adjacent feed store, was first to see it. He had stepped outside to investigate a disturbance among his horses when he noticed the shape. "It was looking at me," Toll reported to this newspaper. "Not the way a bird looks. The way a person looks when they already know what you're about to say."
His wife Maren corroborates his account but declines further comment. She has not slept more than three hours nightly since the encounter. She keeps the lamp burning.
Most remarkable is the account of Cecelia Drum, 34, a seamstress of Birch Road, who claims the figure turned toward her specifically and produced a sound she describes as speech. "I cannot tell you what it said," she told this reporter. "Not because I won't. Because when I try to remember, the memory isn't there. There is only the feeling that I was told something important."
"There is only the feeling that I was told something important."