Read The Journey to Northumberland and the Rise of the Undertoads Page 6
~Chapter 3~
Walpurgis Night and the Widdershins Dance
The quaint city of Centerville is found in America's heartland. This charming farming and dairy town is surrounded by rolling, low lying green hills and lush grass covered basins. All interlaced and intertwined with amber colored brick roads. The farmhouses are mostly covered with grass thatched roofs that cover selfsame red bricked buildings. This is a simple town with simple townsfolk, nothing more and nothing less.
The early nineteen hundreds was a peaceable time here, it was almost like time it's self stood still. Flocks of migrating birds could be seen returning to their spring nests in the local birch and pine trees, as early spring rains filled the small streams and rivers in the outland areas. Slow moving clouds lazily drift by from the north this time of year, as all the friendly inhabitants go about their daily chores. Brightly colored March flowers fill the flower boxes in the kitchen windows of most homes, and the smells of fresh baked breads waft though out the town with the changing directions of the soft inviting winds.
Robert Louis Parks was born and raised here.
His mother Hattie May is a simple farm girl. She is slim for her advancing age, attractive, wholesome and warmhearted. She wears her lovely oft-white color hair always tied in a bun at the back of her head, and is never seen without her favorite blue and white speckled apron tied uniformly about her thin waist. She has been married for over to twenty years to Louis's father, Captain Jeremy Parks. He had been off to war overseas now for close to two years, thus leaving little Louis alone to be raised by his mother and the next door neighbors, Ms. Abigail Beamer and Mr. Thomas Costello Beamer.
Being an only child was hard on Louis, and missing his father, only made things that much worse. But with the help of his loving mother, his doting neighbors and his friends at school Louis managed to get by the best he could. It takes a community to raise a child was never more evident, as it was here with the precocious and the little by little devilish Louis.
It seems Louis knew everyone and everyone knew Louis, and everyone now knew that the Terror from the North was now in town and soon to be in Louis's immediate future. But tonight would be a night that Louis and all of his friends would remember for the rest of the lives, and change their lives forever, for tonight was the first day of spring, and the night of a full blue moon rising. The Hare Moon was to wax out of the western sky at midnight and bring with it the splendiferous and wondrous Walpurgis Night.