Helvetia did not look cursed when Vera arrived. That was usually the first disappointment in a case built out of superstition. People wanted curses to announce themselves with black windows, bad air, and doors that groaned before anyone touched them. Appalachia had plenty of those places, but Helvetia was not wearing that kind of trouble.
Helvetia wore color. The floors were green, some of the walls were blue, and the sky was shining like the sun. Vera did not know it yet, but she would hear that same wrong-color logic again before the case was done. For now, it was just a town dressed for a parade that kept finding a way to happen. Painted signs, bright trim, festival markers, and little houses standing in old celebration colors made the end of the world feel rude but not convincing enough to cancel anything. She stood at the edge of it and let the complaint settle.
The masks called them in. That was what the local at The Wayward had said. He had said it the way people say things they know sound foolish, careful at first, then louder once nobody laughs. The glowing masks called in the still ones.
Vera did not believe that. She did not believe masks called people anywhere. She did not believe color had a voice. She did not believe a painted face could summon a Traveler into a room and make them forget the rest of their body. Belief was cheap. Evidence was harder to carry. Still, she had learned not to throw away superstition too quickly. Superstition was often a bad explanation wrapped around a useful observation. People guessed wrong all the time. They noticed right more often than they deserved. So she ignored the part about being called and kept the part about where they gathered.
The still ones were seen most often in the old house near Pickens Road, the one with the attached garage and the back rooms that had once been turned into a kind of festival welcome center. Brochures, local notices, old visitor junk, whatever a town puts out when it wants strangers to feel invited without letting them touch anything important. That was where the Travelers came. They stood in the rooms, filled porches, and occupied corners the way old furniture does, quietly, stubbornly, and in the way. Some faced walls. Some watched empty space. Some stayed long enough that locals stopped speaking to them and started speaking around them.
Vera wrote none of that as haunting. She wrote: repeat location behavior.
People gathered for reasons, even when they looked like they had forgotten how to move. The welcome center had the right kind of sadness for it, not dramatic or theatrical, just emptied of the thing it had been built to do. A place meant to receive people had been left receiving only bodies that did not answer. Vera paused in the doorway longer than she meant to. There were rooms that made a person feel watched. This was not one of them. This one made her feel left. She did not write that down. Detectives had no business making feelings look official.
Instead, she moved through the place and looked for what could be touched. Old papers. Storage boxes. Festival notices. Anything that tied the glowing masks to something less imaginative than a curse. If the still ones were chasing masks, then the masks had to come from somewhere. If the still ones were not chasing masks, then the room still mattered because everyone kept ending up in it. Either way, the house had earned a search.
A local had told her the attached garage might hold old festival materials. Ledgers, receipts, parade supplies, the kind of paper trail people saved because it once mattered, then forgot because survival got louder. Vera tried the garage first. The handle gave her nothing. The door held. No festival marker explained it. No current lockout notice. No fresh repair tag. Just a sealed bay attached to a building that kept collecting motionless strangers.
She photographed it because a failed access point was still evidence. She photographed it because someone had thought enough of whatever was inside to keep it shut. She photographed it because the door bothered her, though that reason stayed out of the file.
With the garage closed to her, Vera returned to the welcome center rooms. The office in back had been treated badly by time and worse by neglect. A shambled desk. Split drawers. Paper softened at the edges. Tourism scraps mixed with festival paperwork, as if somebody had once tried to make Helvetia presentable by burying the useful records under cheerful ones. That felt honest enough to be true.
She found the shipping logs in a box that had sagged around them. Not all of them. Never all of them. Enough. Festival preparation entries. Banners. Brushes. Mask blanks. Finishing supplies. A partial receipt with Helvetia listed cleanly and a routing mark that pulled the line away from town.
Morgantown Trainyard.
Vera read the entry twice. The still ones had led her to a room. The room had led her to paper. The paper had led her to freight. That was how superstition usually died, not with a scream, but with a receipt.
She folded the copy into her notebook and looked back toward the garage before leaving. The building still felt abandoned. Not empty. Abandoned. There was a difference, and some part of her knew it before the case did.
