THE CHRONICLE

EASTON CITY, Saturday, October 18, 2025, just after midnight. Something moved through the waterfront tonight, quiet as a thought and heavy as a secret. Streetlights along Pier 7 flickered in a tidy line, one after another, as if saluting someone only they could see. A gull cried, then stopped mid call, and for a full ten seconds the whole harbor held its breath. When the lights returned, a single violin note hung in the damp air, bright and thin, with no musician in sight. Dockworkers said their phones jumped three minutes ahead at exactly 12:03. A barista in Old Quarry swore her wall clock did the same, and her espresso shot pulled itself too long, leaving a bitter aftertaste she blames on time behaving poorly. A city maintenance crew discovered footprints on the rain lacquered boards near Pier 9, small and neat, drying faster than the wood around them. The prints began by the water, then veered away, then vanished at the chain link gate that should have been locked, but was somehow resting open like a yawn. A limo driver, who asked to be named only as R, reported seeing a woman in a pale coat near the ferry terminal, collar turned up, eyes like a storm about to start. He blinked, and she was gone, leaving only the smell of cold roses. Cameras on the terminal loop show two minutes of static, then a clean feed with the benches in a slightly different order. The city says wind could have done that. The wind refuses to comment. At the center of it all, the violin. Residents on Harbor Row heard it, one note at a time, rising and falling like someone practicing a scale in the dark. No buskers worked tonight, the permits list shows none, and the ferry conductor says he searched the platforms with a flashlight, coffee in one hand, patience in the other. Nothing. No case, no bow, no player. Just the music, arriving from everywhere and nowhere, and the feeling that someone was counting.