The Musical Mystery of Wormroth, Maine

The story might seem small and whimsical in the re-telling, but that does the people of Wormroth, Maine, a disservice, because it has been a harrowing few weeks and there is a palpable sense of relief in town, now that the mystery of Rankin’s midnight music has been solved.  I ask the reader to suspend judgment and show some sympathy for the actors and brace yourself for a sad denouement.

True though, Wormroth is a small and isolated town where not very much happens, and the locals do therefore tend to blow small things out of proportion. Like the time when Stephen King asked for directions to Bangor at the crossroads near the CVS drugstore. Or the summer festival at which the Blueberry Queen – prim and proper Maeve Wilson – twerk-danced in front of the Regional School Board members.

That was nearly five years ago, now.

Anyway, you get my point; Wormroth is a small town, but that does not mean that the residents are small-minded (twerking aside) or ignorant, or that they don’t know the difference between fact and fiction (some wag sent Stephen King south, toward Portland, in his big beige Buick). They are overwhelmingly fisherman and farmers, so our lives and livelihoods depend on common sense and curiosity in a way that city folk might not understand.

Penelope, daughter of Erskine Rankin the Lobsterman and Joanna Rankin the Kindergarten teacher, was a bright and enterprising teenager. It was the end of the school year, and as a reward for a near-perfect GPA, her Aunt Sophie presented Penny with a zither. It seemed an odd choice for a teen in the era of Taylor Swift and Tik Tok, but Penny took to the instrument like a gull to the sky (Wormroth is on Penobscot Bay) and by early summer, she had learned John Denver’s “Take me home, country Roads” and Fleetwood Mac’s “Landslide”; daughterly choices that were for-sure parent-pleasers. By mid -July, the teen started practicing a third song “What was I made for”, by Billy Eilish, and the unlikely sound of the zither became commonplace in the Rankin home owing to the girl’s two hours of practice each day before leaving for her summer job at LoLo’s ice cream stand. 

Penny stored the zither in a beautiful purpose-made maple wood box, on the credenza in the living room.

July 21^st was a hot and humid evening. Erskine was aroused from sleep by a noise at around 2 am. Downstairs, he could hear “Landslide” playing on the zither in a pitiful manner, expressing a transcendental sadness.

“Is that Penny playing on her zither at this hour?” asked Erskine, which woke his wife up.

“If it is, then she’s in big trouble tomorrow. Waking us up at this godforsaken hour”, said Mrs. Rankin, irritably.

Mr. Rankin got out of bed and went downstairs. The music was beautiful, he was enormously proud of his daughter, but he was also desperate for a couple more hours of sleep. Summer hours for the Maine Lobsterman are long and the work is arduous.

He padded down the stairs and the music stopped abruptly, mid-chorus. The living room was dark and empty. He turned on the lights, inspected the maple box on the credenza; the zither was inside.   He checked in on his daughter.  She was sound asleep in her bed.

“I must have been dreaming”, said Erskine to his wife as he got back into bed.

“Next time keep it to yourself” she replied in a groggy between-state from which she fell back into deep sleep.

The next day, around midnight, Erskine was disturbed from his sleep by the same tune coming from the same instrument, downstairs.  This time he slid out of bed without disturbing his wife, snuck downstairs, but the music stopped again. It was all very strange. Unable to sleep, he briefly searched other rooms but found nothing that might explain the midnight music.  

At the Harbor-Front Pub, Erskine seemed slow and listless to his quiz-night buddies which he ascribed to his lack of sleep that night. His judgment was trusted and widely sought to the point at which his friends were encouraging him to stand for the Select Board in the upcoming municipal elections, but talk of mysterious midnight music, a slight hint of superstition or the occult, was quite disconcerting to this small gathering. He felt slightly embarrassed to have raised the subject and decided to keep it to himself going forward.

But at night, when the Rankins were upstairs reading or sleeping in bed, the zither would spring to life, tunes would spontaneously occur at odd hours. "Landslide” rendered in that sad-sack way, “Take me Home” ponderous and peppered with fingering mistakes. Sometimes the music would stop, start and repeat, as if the musician was practicing a riff.

Erskine and Joanna searched the house top to bottom, turned the furniture upside down, opened up neglected cupboards and forgotten storage boxes, they even looked inside the old cedar linen chest and the broken grandfather clock, both untouched in years.

“It’s that blessed Alexa”, said Joanna, unplugging the small Amazon device, “spying on us, and finagling its way into our lives”. She threw the small puck-shaped device into a drawer.

“Perhaps it’s your Siri on your darned iPhone?” said Erskine.

The music continued to disrupt their sleep.

At their wits’ end, the Rankins summonsed some of their closest friends to their house, but the collective wisdom of the broader community yielded nothing but a growing sense of discomfort and concern. Word soon got around that the Rankins were experiencing domestic problems, conflicts of a sort, that their once-envied marriage was on the rocks. 

Alex Bogley, Wormroth police sergeant, came by on a casual visit, just checking up on things, no specific reason, keen to hear about Penny, who went to school with his son. He’d seen her at the ice cream stand on Main Street. 

“Everything good?” asked Alex.

By this time, sleep deprivation and the mental anguish of living with a mystery was weighing on the Rankin family psyche – at least that of the parents.

“Alex, I am so glad to see you. We are dealing with the strangest phenomenon,” said Erskine who then launched into a detailed description of their problem.

Alex was skeptical, “perhaps you need your hearing tested?” he suggested.

“What, both of us!” said Joanna.

Alex conceded that it was unlikely that they would both be hallucinating in the same way at the same time, but police work takes you to strange places and confronts you with many variations of the human condition, some downright bizarre.

“Why don’t you stay overnight?” said Joanna.

Wormroth is a quiet town by New England standards, but nonetheless subject to occasional fentanyl-related crime, DUIs and family bust-ups. It mattered little to Alex where he spent the night-duty hours – at the station, in his patrol car, on the Rankin sofa - just so long as he could be reached on his Motorola radio by the 911 team. He agreed to stay in the living room that night. 

Around 11.00 pm Alex was jerked awake by “Country Roads” playing on the zither. It seemed to be coming from the hallway, but when he rose from the sofa, the music stopped.

With the mysterious midnight music now confirmed by a credible third-party, the people of Wormroth rallied around the Rankins. Many theories were discussed, offers of help were extended, various dignitaries and experts dropped by, including the Baptist Minister, the Harbor Master, and the Secretary of the Elks Lodge. A lady from the Council of Paranormal Affairs, phoned, unasked, and offered technical advice on how to rid the house of poltergeist. 

But then, yesterday, Sunday, after church, things came to a head. 

Joanna took her daughter, Penny, to visit the aunt that had gifted her the zither. Despite the torment of the midnight music, Penny’s mother was swollen with pride and keen to show-off her daughter’s talent. Penny was also quite excited by the prospect of playing the device for her beloved Aunt – she had mastered a third song, the Billy Eilish song, and she knew her Aunt Sophie, a big fan of the Barbie Movie, would be thrilled by it.

Lobstering is hard work and drains a man. It being Sunday, Erskine was enjoying the day of rest. In fact, no sooner were the Rankin women on route to the aunt, than he fell asleep on the living room sofa, and, of course, lickety-split, “Landslide” woke him up. Motionless, he opened his eyes and concentrated on locating the source of the music. It was coming from out of the grandfather clock!

“I heard that damned tune for about the five hundredth time,” said Rankin to a rapt audience at the Harbor-Front Pub, later than night. “When I cleaned the old clock, I accidentally left the panel door open, so from where I was lying, I could see directly inside without moving or making a sound. Inside the clock there are coiled springs and thin wires that once drove the movement of the sun and moon in the clock face. I could see them clearly from where I lay”.

Josie the owner of Myrtle’s pub, placed a second pint of IPA on the table in front of Erskine and he took a deep draft of the beer before proceeding. The quiz-nighters were leaning in, hanging on every word.

“And that’s when I saw this big gray mouse sitting on his haunches, busy front paws held up in front of him, striking at the spring with his little sharp claws, plucking away like a harpsichord...”

“Like a zither?” said Sergeant Alex.

“Beautiful it was – not just to listen to - but to see the big fella strumming away like that. Reckless abandon, filled with spirit, like Jimmy Hendrix, or Prince. And then, suddenly, he’s joined by three tiny little mice”.

“Pups?” said Josie from behind the bar.

“Also known as Pinkies” said someone else, unhelpfully. It was quiz-night so there was a lot of know-it-alls in the room.

“Pups, Pinkies, baby mice,” said Erskine. “They take up positions at the coil and next to the down-wires, and the big fella steps back a bit, starts waving his tiny black paws around like a conductor in front of an orchestra, and the little ones start playing – Landslide – really let it rip they did, like they were putting their heart and soul into the music, the big fella keeping time with his paws. I nearly cried.”

Sergeant Alex Bogley turned to me, “Did you get all that down?” he said on behalf of the entire audience.

I’m a staff writer for “Elevator World” magazine in Mobile, Alabama, working remotely up here in Maine. For reasons unclear, my professional position has conferred on me the local reputation of being both worldly and writerly, a chronicler of sorts.  

I nodded that I had done so, word for word. I showed Alex, Erskine, the other men and women in the pub my notepad. I promised them that I would write up the story, though for what purpose I wasn’t sure. It was a human-interest story and didn’t really fit the needs and style of the Crowton-Wormroth Gazette. I explained my professional predicament.

“What about the Boston Globe?” suggested someone, “or WFVX morning show?” suggested another.

“The problem is that it sounds more like fiction than fact”, I said, “also it might not translate well to outsiders”. Wormroth, remember, is a small-town, not small-minded, and – as such – intensely self-aware and somewhat sensitive about the way in which it is perceived. We could collectively deal with irony, but not with ridicule.   

“What about America’s Got Talent!” said Josie, which elicited laughter and cheers and general merriment at the absurdity of the idea – performing mice - but the commotion abated, and the group became more pensive.

“Actually, it’s not a bad idea”, suggested Sergeant Alex. “Why the heck not?” he said turning to Erskine.

Erskine looked very glum, all of a sudden, and a dark mood overtook the pub.

“Oh Erskine, tell us it’s not true?” said Josie, expressing a question that we were all thinking. I imagined the poor wee mice laid to rest in peace in an empty cigarette box, buried beneath the rhubarb patch, never again to play “Country Roads” or “What was I made for”. The pub seemed to overflow with sadness at the terrible loss.

“Problem is”, said Erskine, his nose dropping into his half-empty glass of beer, “they already have a manager and a contract, and they left town yesterday. I saw them climbing into the back of a big beige Buick down by the crossroads. The big fella didn’t even wave back at me”.