Mountbridge
| Type | Town |
|---|---|
| Notable sites | Mountbridge High School, Mountbridge Psych Ward, Halo Creek Farm |
| Notable inhabitants | Beatrice Tidal |
| Status | One resident missing |
| First appearance | Sacred: Eslura's Calling |
Mountbridge is a small town on Earth, home to one thousand two hundred forty-six residents and to Beatrice Tidal before the cave portal took her into Eslura.[1][2] She left it for a week at Camp Tossbridge and has not been back. What she remembers of it first is its high school and its psychiatric ward.[3][4]
Mountbridge is not lettered on the map of Eslura, because it is not in Eslura. Almost everything recorded about the town is Bea remembering it after she has gone.
The town
Little of Mountbridge is described. The one account of its main road is a comparison made the other way about: Bea thought Haberpaw, with its squat homes standing along both sides of a well-maintained dirt road, looked a lot like Mountbridge's main stretch.[4] Nothing in the books says how the town is governed, how far it is from anywhere, or what its people do.
Halo Creek Farm lies outside the town and keeps horses. Bea knew them well enough that a florahorse in Eslura, whose body is made of grass and whose mane is woven vines, reminded her of them at once.[5]
Fran and Joe Dildecker, the couple Bea was placed with, keep a farm of their own at the end of a dirt driveway. It has an attic where Bea chalked the days off on the wall through the years her mother was missing, and which is bitterly cold on a deep winter night. Fran's voice, by Bea's reckoning, could have woken every one of Mountbridge's residents if she had willed it to. Bea moved in with them a year and one hundred sixty-four days before the morning she was sent to camp, having lived until then in the woods with her mother.[1][5][6][7]
Mountbridge High School
Bea attended Mountbridge High School until she was pulled out of it, which made her, in the words of one of her tormentors, Mountbridge High's only dropout.[3] The soccer field is laid with AstroTurf, and Bea recognised the feel of it again in the coat of a florahorse.[5]
The principal's daughter, Wren Grout, leads a group of cheer girls whom most of the students call the clones, on the grounds that they cannot manage separate personalities between them. Wren, her identical twin Ava and Krista Letting all went to Camp Tossbridge the same summer as Bea.[3] Bea wondered later what it would have been like to attend an academy in Eslura instead, and winced at the thought of ever seeing the three of them again.[2]
Mountbridge Psych Ward
Bea spent three days in Mountbridge Psych Ward after what she calls the incident: she had pointed out the five-fold symbol to Fran on the bottom of a grocery bag, and Fran took her there the next day. She describes the ward as a cage and the three days as spent trying to prove her sanity. It cost her her place at school as well, and Fran and Joe went on taking her to doctors for weeks afterwards. One of them, Dr. Lizzar, asked her whether the symbol called to her, and wrote down everything Bea did instead of answering.[1][3]
The ward outlasted the town in Bea's mind. In Eslura, having admitted aloud that she thought she saw someone, she wished at once that she had not: the last time she said such a thing she was in the psych ward almost immediately afterwards.[8]
Notable events
- Bea was placed with Fran and Joe Dildecker after her mother disappeared, having lived until then in the woods with her.[1][3]
- The incident, and the three days in the ward that followed it.[1][3]
- Bea was enrolled at Camp Tossbridge and driven to a community centre to meet the bus. She never came back for the return journey.[1]