MAJOR ARCANA: Part Two, Chapter 1

Hollow Well

Major Arcana is a serialized novel for paid subscribers. For more details, both about the novel and about subscriber amenities, please see the Preface.

---

PART TWO

Chapter 1. | Hollow Well

Simon Magnus came from a town in New England where the old ways persisted even into the late 20th century. Hollow Well, a tiny port city on a river estuary, was founded by English merchants before the Revolution in the middle 18th century. They mourned the lack of that eponymously barren spring, since estuary waters are brackish; nonetheless, they settled, they built, they manufactured, they sold. After logging, shipbuilding, and the quarrying of granite had declined as industries by the plastic-ridden and air-powered middle 20th century, the town turned its own heritage into its trade. The sidewalks remained red brick, as they’d been when James Bowdoin and Elizabeth Palmer Peabody traversed them, and the façades of the buildings remained colonial, all rational rectilinear brick and pilaster, the tall, narrow windows barely admitting any light and giving back to the street only blackness.