The air in the pressroom of the Philadelphia Chronicle was Alistair Finch’s preferred incense: a heady mix of hot lead, cheap coffee, and the cloying scent of fresh newsprint. It was the smell of truth, hammered into existence by the percussive sermon of the great Hoe rotary press in the basement.
From his desk, Alistair could feel its rhythmic thunder vibrate up through the floorboards, a pulse he had come to associate with victory.
Spread before him was the morning edition, still warm. His byline sat proudly beneath a sensational headline: “SPIRITS SILENCED: MADAME ZORA’S GHOSTLY CONSPIRACY EXPOSED.”
His piece, a meticulous deconstruction of the city’s most celebrated spiritualist, was a symphony of cold, hard facts. He had documented the hidden wires, the confederate in the back room who rapped on the walls, the subtle trick of light that produced the so-called ectoplasmic apparitions.
He hadn’t just reported a story; he had slain a dragon of deceit.
“Finch! My office.”
Alistair looked up. Marcus Davies, the Chronicle’s editor-in-chief, stood in his doorway, a bulldog of a man whose suspenders seemed the only thing preventing his ambition from spilling over his belt.
He didn’t beckon so much as command presence. Alistair folded his paper, savoring the crispness of the fold, and followed him in.
The office was a chaotic shrine to the printed word. Galleys and proofs lay in teetering stacks, and the air was thick with the smoke from Davies’s cigar.
He gestured to the worn leather chair opposite his desk.
“Damned fine work, Alistair,” Davies grunted, tapping a thick finger on the Madame Zora article.
“Sales are up twelve percent.You’ve got half the city praising you as a champion of reason and the other half burning you in effigy. That’s how I know you’ve hit the mark.”
Alistair allowed himself a thin, satisfied smile.
“People are eager to be fooled, Marcus. I just provide the service of showing them the strings.”
“Precisely. You have a talent for it. A nose for humbuggery and a pen sharp enough to lance the boil.”
Davies leaned forward, the smoke from his cigar swirling around his head like a profane halo.
“Which is why I have a new assignment for you. Something bigger. A real career-maker.”
He slid a dog-eared dispatch across the polished mahogany. It was a letter, written in a spidery, uneven hand on cheap stationery.
Alistair picked it up. The postmark was from a town he’d never heard of: Whisper Creek, North Carolina.
“Read it,” Davies commanded.
Alistair’s eyes scanned the page. The letter was from a country doctor, pleading with any major newspaper to investigate a phenomenon he could no longer abide.
He wrote of a woman, a “mountain healer,” who was luring the sick and desperate away from modern medicine with promises of miraculous cures.
“‘Seraphina Mayhew,’” Alistair read aloud, a note of derision already creeping into his voice. “‘They call her the Miracle Woman of Whisper Creek.’
She uses herbs, prayers, and the laying on of hands to cure everything from croup to consumption, apparently.”
“Apparently,” Davies echoed, his expression unreadable.
“This doctor fellow claims she’s a menace. A charlatan preying on the ignorance of those mountain folk. But here’s the thing that’ll sell papers, my boy: people are starting to travel to see her. From Knoxville, even as far as Richmond. The story is growing legs.”
Alistair’s mind was already at work, the gears turning with a familiar, predatory click. He could see the angle, the structure of the exposé.
It was Madame Zora all over again, just with dirt floors and the scent of pine instead of velvet curtains and patchouli. Another false prophet to unmask, another idol of superstition to topple.
“You want me to go down there and debunk her,” Alistair stated, not as a question, but as a conclusion.
“I want you to bring the truth to light, whatever it may be,” Davies said, though his smirk betrayed the expectation.
“But yes, a man of your… skepticism… is uniquely suited to this task.
Go to this Whisper Creek. Interview the healer, interview her flock. Find the trick. Is it folk medicine she’s passing off as divine intervention? A hypnotic suggestion? A network of paid actors feigning illness? Find the strings, Alistair. I want a series. ‘The Case of the Mountain Healer.’”
Alistair felt a surge of exhilaration. This was more than a story; it was a crusade.
Each of these articles was another brick in the wall of reason he was building against the tide of blind faith that had drowned the world in ignorance for centuries.
He would pack his sharpest suits, his keenest intellect, and his unshakeable conviction that miracles were the opiates of the simple-minded.
“I’ll need a week to prepare,” Alistair said, his voice crisp with purpose.
“Take two. From what I hear, it’s a different world down there.
God’s country, they call it.” Davies paused, taking a long drag from his cigar.
“Just make sure you find out which god is pulling the levers.”
The editor’s choice of words snagged on something deep inside Alistair. God. Prayer.
The terms were clinical to him now, specimens to be dissected in his articles. But they had not always been.
As Davies droned on about train schedules and expense accounts, the smoke-filled office began to dissolve. The rhythmic thunder of the press faded, replaced by a silence that was far more oppressive.
Suddenly, he was no longer a 28-year-old journalist in a fine wool suit, but a boy of fifteen, his knees raw from kneeling on a hardwood floor.
The air was thick with the scent of lavender water and carbolic acid, a futile attempt to mask the cloying sweetness of decay. It was the hottest July on record, and the room was a stifling box of held breaths and whispered pleas.
His younger sister, Lily, lay in the bed, her small frame a fragile bird beneath the thin sheet. Her breaths were shallow, rasping things, each one a tiny, failing engine.
The doctor had already left, his face a mask of professional pity. “In God’s hands now,” he had murmured to Alistair’s parents, a phrase that offered no comfort, only an abdication of responsibility.
So they had prayed. His mother, her face buried in the sweat-damp linens, her voice a broken mantra.
His father, standing stiffly by the window, his lips moving silently, his gaze fixed on a heaven that offered only a blank, indifferent blue. And Alistair, kneeling beside the bed, his hands clenched so tightly his knuckles were white stones.
He prayed with the desperate, transactional fervor of a child. He begged, he bargained, he promised a lifetime of devotion.
He offered up his own health, his future, his very soul in exchange for one small miracle. Just one.
Let her breathe. Let the fever break. Please.
He focused all his will, all his desperate hope, on the small, pale face on the pillow, believing with every fiber of his being that if his faith was strong enough, it could physically manifest as a healing force. It was a lie he clung to as the hours bled into one another.
And then, in the suffocating quiet of the pre-dawn, the tiny engine of her breathing simply stopped.
The silence that followed was absolute. It was not a peaceful silence.
It was a vast, deafening emptiness, a void where God was supposed to have been. In that moment, kneeling beside his sister’s cooling body, Alistair Finch’s faith did not waver; it shattered.
It was a cheap piece of glass, and the truth was the stone that had been thrown through it.
There were no strings being pulled from on high. There was only biology, chaos, and the cold, indifferent mechanics of the universe.
Prayer was a shout in a vacuum. Faith was a crutch for those who couldn’t bear to walk on their own two legs.
“Alistair?”
He blinked. The clatter of the pressroom rushed back in, the smell of cigar smoke sharp in his nostrils.
Davies was looking at him, a flicker of concern in his eyes. “You with me, son?
You looked a thousand miles away.”
Alistair’s jaw was tight, the ghost of that long-ago ache still clenched in his chest. He forced it down, burying it once more beneath layers of cool, intellectual certainty.
That boy on the floor was gone, replaced by a man who dealt in evidence, not hope.
“Just thinking about the headline,” Alistair lied smoothly, his voice steady. The brief, agonizing memory had not shaken him. It had fortified him.
This assignment was no longer just a job. It was personal.
It was a chance to prove, on a public stage, the truth he had learned in that suffocating room: that those who sell hope in the face of death are the cruelest frauds of all. Seraphina Mayhew was not just a charlatan; she was a purveyor of the very poison that had failed his sister.
He stood, his resolve as hard and clear as glass.
“Don’t worry about me, Marcus,” he said, his eyes glinting with a cold fire. “I’ll get your story.”
He walked out of the office, the weight of the commission settling on his shoulders not as a burden, but as a mantle. He would travel into the dark, superstitious heart of the mountains, a missionary of reason.
He would find the strings this Miracle Woman used to manipulate her puppets, and he would sever them, one by one, for all the world to see. He would bring the truth to Whisper Creek, whether they wanted it or not.