Phantasmagoria Spring 2021 To our readers: We as a staff recognize that this year has been new and difficult for everyone. There have been many changes in our lives with online schooling and new classroom requirements. The traditional Tome School Phantasmagoria magazine is no exception to change. We have hit many setbacks in creating this magazine, but we have also grown and adapted just like the Tome School community. This year, our entire magazine is online and in full color! We are also proud to introduce to you our theme which reflects the year that we have experienced together: Darkness to Light Despair to Happiness Bleakness to Hope Similar to how our year began with worries of health and ended with hope because of vaccines, Phantasmagoria shows through not only the content but also the colors how everything may start out bleak, but in the end, everything will be all right. We hope that you enjoy our magazine and thank you for all your support! Phantasmagoria Staff 2021 Phantasmagoria Co-editors: Taylor Fisher Sadie Lewin Staff: Zoe Ebersold J Lucatamo Cavender McCoy Natalie Millham Kaitlyn Mulcahy Logan Price Christina Rasa Jade Tusha Advisors: Mrs. Bohn Mr. Wirdel Front Cover Art: Emily Hubbs Back Cover Art: Katy Bullerman Contributors Melia Abbott (Grade 8) Christina Mulcahy (Grade 8) Katy Bullerman (Grade 9) Kaitlyn Mulcahy (Grade 10) Sam Busseau (Grade 9) Anthony Polizzi (Grade 7) Zoe Ebersold (Grade 11) Logan Price (Grade 9) Madison Hess (Grade 8) Beth Rasa (Grade 8) Emily Hubbs (Grade 10) Christina Rasa (Grade 10) Nellie Hudson (Grade 11) Morgan Reynolds (Grade 8) Cameron Lewandowski (Grade 11) Olivia Russell (Grade 8) Sadie Lewin (Grade 10) Alexis Senn (Grade 10) Andrew Li (Grade 10) Elle Turner (Grade 8) J Lucatamo (Grade 9) Jade Tusha (Grade 10) Ms. Mercaldo (Tome teacher) Mr. Wirdel (Tome teacher) The Results of Being Traumatized The arson was over. But what loathing I still had inside of me diminished as I spotted a struggling, suffering figure. I sprinted across the burning rubble to the hurting man. No, he was more of a boy trying to be a man than an actual man. He had a warm, familiar glow to his eyes as he struggled to take my hand in his. I hadn’t meant to hurt anyone; I just wanted to scare them, and tell them that I am human too and can commit just as much damage and trauma as they had caused me. But hurting someone? That was far out of my realm. The boy gazed at me with eyes that tugged me closer. That face. I knew this boy. He wasn't much older than me, but a raggedy beard concealed his small lips. I pulled my gaze away to look at his wounds. He was trapped under a massive metal support pole with a large pool of blood surrounding his dying body. He reached, with great difficulty, into the left breast pocket of his bleach-stained janitor uniform and handed me a folded yellow document. He smiled and shook his head, whispering, “The adoption papers to be with me. You know, you were always my favorite.” His eyes lost their luster, and his face turned a ghastly white as he went limp. I was terrified. Terrified of those eyes, and how quickly they lost their gleam. Terrified at what I just had done. But most of all, terrified at who I had done it to. How could I act so selfish? All those years of driving away foster parent after foster parent with resentment for losing him. He would have told me to cut out the nonsense, and that it isn't the foster families’ fault anyway. Before the fires, he was always the only one who could calm me down. And now, well… now my own act of anger and hate was the end of him. I collapsed at the edge of what used to be the building and broke. “Brother…” Sadie Lewin Grade 10 Jade Tusha Grade 10 Beyond the Mountains As a child, I was always repulsed by death: the way bacteria begin to eat the decedent’s tissues as soon as that elusive, indefinable spark of life departs; the way the dead smell, with the odors of putrescine and cadaverine overlapping to form a wholly offensive olfactory experience; the way that maggots become visible just hours after the onset of algor mortis. However, my early life nonetheless left me with extensive knowledge on the subject. My family has been overly concerned with the mechanics of death for centuries; it is a legacy passed on just as surely as our surname. My father was an eccentric who spent most of his time reading books of dark alchemy or conducting morally dubious experiments on animals bound shortly thereafter for the butcher. His ancestors, too, were more often than not morticians, funerary officials, body snatchers, or members of similar occupations, ranging from the mostly respectable to the wholly illicit, but almost invariably connected in some manner to death. Because of this legacy, I was expected from a young age to have a more than passing knowledge of death. Perhaps unfortunately for my mental well-being at the time, I never felt the positive fascination with it that I observed all around me, but I nonetheless grew to know a fair amount regarding death and its surrounding circumstances. It was having already acquired this knowledge that I left my childhood years behind me, and with them, my parents; at the age of thirteen, I went to live with my cousin. The daughter of my father’s brother, she too had been enveloped in the family obsession with death. However, to me her opinion on it seemed to be far more adjacent to my own than to those of my other relatives. From this somewhat morbid beginning our friendship blossomed, and we grew quite close. She studied alchemy instead of the cessation of life, and applied it not only to the dying but to relatively healthy patients as well. In fact, her stance on death had seemingly transformed in the last few months to be even more distinct from those with which I was more familiar. To put it bluntly, she had recently expressed a desire for personal longevity bordering on obsession. I feel ashamed to admit it, but I fear that the family’s closeness to death may have had an adverse effect on her psyche, for her thoughts on the matter, which she has excitedly though discreetly shared with me, are indubitably heretical. She speaks not of the immortality which is said to be granted by the mythical philosopher’s stone of old, nor does she speak of an endless youth such as may be accomplished by the rearrangement of cells. She was invariably hesitant to outright say the word, but it was clear to me that her ideas centered on the art of necromancy. This knowledge of her private interests is what caused me to have such conflicted emotions when I received the news of her death. She had been travelling back from a neighboring town, where her skills as a doctor had been requested, when she was apparently overcome by a sudden heart attack, whereupon she collapsed dead in the scarce-travelled road. A friendly woodsman then found her body, and it was identified the day before yesterday. And so her funeral was arranged for the next day. I attended, of course, for she had been like a sister to me. However, it was a closed-casket service, and I was never permitted to see the body, and so doubts began to ferment inexorably within me, for I had never known my dear cousin to fail in anything that she truly wanted to accomplish. And so, thought I, she surely would also be able to evade death through the art of necromancy, if she had so determined. I returned to the church late at night in the hope that my cousin may still live, and found to my dismay that she had already been interred in the family tomb. I had not been informed of this beforehand, and so I naturally assumed that she may also have expected to remain above ground for longer, in the event of sudden death, and I thought that perhaps this unexpected event may interfere with her postmortem plans. Our town’s cemetery is surrounded by ancient trees and vines that have been slowly encroaching on its borders for innumerable years; as a result, there is now a leafy canopy that stretches over the graves and shields the tombs from the light of the stars and the moon. This particular night, a stifling fog had washed in from the nearby foothills, lingering and growing denser as the day grew cold and dark. I stood behind a large stone grave marker just inside the cemetery gates. The necropolis stretched out before me, obscured by the gray mist as it whirled silently along the ground, lapping over gravestones and hiding them from sight in a slow but inescapable wave. I shivered, subconsciously pulling my cloak closer around myself as I was suddenly struck with a vivid image of all the trapped souls within these tombs, their lamentations and ululations forever unheard by the living as they lingered on indefinitely in their own dessicated corpses. The moment passed, and I returned my attention to reality, hurrying forward through the mist to stand in front of the family tomb. I removed the key from my pocket, feeling as I did so the brush of my fingertips against paper and pencil, which I realized I had forgotten to remove; I had used these earlier to note a few key phrases from the funeral, particularly the mentions of the decedent’s circumstances of death, on which I had later planned to ponder further.