Welcome to Uncanny Valley, Population 73.
The signs at the edges of the valley are quite large for the village it introduces, and the tall lettering is visible for quite a long way. Most locals never come closer than a few hundred feet, just close enough to read the whole sign in full. When I say locals, I mean people from outside Uncanny Valley, from the communities around it. Whoever those seventy-three people are, or were, they never leave the town, nor do we go into it.
Some people from further away have, on occasion, passed through it, seeing as it does cut a fair bit off the trip around the valley, and for some reason it still appears on regional maps, but as the whole area is pretty much out in the sticks, it doesn’t happen too often. Those who just drive through, never stopping, or at least never leaving their cars, have told stories about how the place unnerved them. The few townsfolk they see just stare at them from doorways or street corners. Those who do stop and get out… Well, I’ve never heard anyone tell that story, put it that way.
I suppose I lied a bit. Everyone round here knows not to go to Uncanny Valley, and almost no one ever does. Hardly anyone local even drives through there, unless it’s a real emergency. I certainly never had. It’s drilled into us from the cradle onwards. Don’t go to Uncanny Valley. And, with the rare exceptions of someone driving through the town, and locals going missing near the valley – a wandering drunk, an errant toddler – most everyone keeps well out of harm’s way. That kind of incident only really happens about once or twice a decade. Uncanny Valley’s never hurt anyone who didn’t go there, or didn’t stop there.
We. Don’t. Go. There.
So when I was driving home from a friend, late one November night, I don’t know how I found myself on the road there. I’ve driven from her place hundreds of times. Every time, I drive along the roads skirting the valley. Sure, I had been through once, about ten, fifteen years ago, when I was a dumb teenager trying to impress a boy, who was just a dumb teenager trying to impress a girl, both of us foolishly deciding that we’d accomplish this by being brave enough to face the fearsome town. Nothing happened to us, of course, but then again, we never stopped. I didn’t technically lie before, though, as Danny was driving. It’s still not an experience I like to recall, or talk about, but as I’m about to tell you about the second time, I guess I have to tell you about the first time first. And I have to tell somebody.
We felt it immediately, once the town came into view. There was something about it that made its strange name well-earned. As we entered the outskirts it was hard to pinpoint what it was, exactly, and that made the whole experience so much more unsettling right from the start. The dark-windowed houses seemed almost deserted, but there were kids’ toys here and there on the lawns, cars and bikes standing in driveways and garages, American flags hanging limply from poles attached to the walls of the houses. The few people standing in view at the doors leading into the houses, or standing on the driveways or lawns, all looked at us blankly. There were perhaps two or three kids in the entire town as far as I saw, also silently staring.
Somehow the feeling of unease grew stronger once I saw the people. I couldn’t tell you why. There was nothing evident that should have made them feel strange, out of place, not quite right, but that is how they felt. Sure, they all watched us in silence, never stirring, apart from turning their heads to keep looking at us, but that hardly seems enough to explain how strong my uneasiness was. At least… I thought they turned their heads, but looking back I don’t think I could swear that I ever saw them move even that much.
As we were passing a couple standing beside the road, on the edge of the town square, I noticed the smell. I don’t know if it came from them, or from the square, or if it had only just now seeped in through all the little gaps of the car. It was metallic, like the smell of freshly welded steel, but also had a greasy, rank, fetid quality. It was very faint, at first, and it never quite went away, not the way some horrible smells can be filtered out by your brain after a while.
The couple were dressed in plain, unassuming clothes. They stood perhaps ten feet from us, their dark eyes locked with mine. Danny would later say that they had locked eyes with him, not me, but given the weirdness of the place, I don’t know that we couldn’t both be right. It was as I was returning their stare that I realized that they couldn’t be human. There was something about them that was off. Yet, despite my best efforts, I couldn’t say what, exactly, was wrong with them. Their eyes, though dark, seemed ordinary, as did their skin, their hair, their clothes, the shapes of their faces. The overall impression was that something was missing, or was there that shouldn’t be, or that something that was there was in the wrong place, but whatever it was, I couldn’t put my finger on it.
Reading this over, it sounds like we must’ve parked beside them for a few minutes, but we never even stopped. We passed them at five, maybe ten miles per hour. All of this dawned on me during the few seconds we approached and drove past them.
Leaving them behind us we crossed the town square. We were close to one short side of the open, rectangular area. A couple of shops, a small church, what might pass for a municipal building, a car workshop with a pair of old-looking gas pumps. All of these buildings, and even the trees and bushes here and there along the perimeter of the square, gave me the same impression of wrongness as the couple did.
Now that I felt I had understood the reason why the whole place gave me the chills, it became easier to notice it, though in reality, all I’d succeeded in doing was going from not knowing what was wrong to knowing only that something was wrong. Now I could tell that the whole town seemed unreal, though in what way I couldn’t, and still can’t, explain.
The same went for the buildings. Every plank of wood, every brick, seemed like it must’ve just come back to its proper place in the structure when I looked at it, and I felt that whatever parts I wasn’t looking at somehow must be careening around just outside my field of vision. At the same time not a single one of them looked quite as though it was in the right place. Not one detail about them ever seemed quite right.
It was then that I noticed the faint sound. It was almost entirely drowned out by the car engine and I don’t know how long it had been going on. It was like the sound of escaping gas, or like an only partly depressed aerosol can – a faint, but sharp, continuous hiss. It wavered in volume, and sometimes gradually transformed into the white noise between two radio channels, always changing, never stopping.
The people around us were staring intently. Their dark, unsettling eyes were fixed on us. I felt like they hated us, that we were intruding, and that if we didn’t get the hell out of there, we’d find out just how mobile they actually were. I was paralyzed by fear, however, and couldn’t even force myself to close my eyes. Tears were running down my cheeks, cheeks that ached with the effort of clenching my jaw shut. My breaths were short and shallow.
I tried to will Danny into driving faster, but he continued at a crawl, probably less than five miles per hour now, even though I could tell from his white knuckles and the beads of sweat on his forehead that he was also affected. It wasn’t before we reached the end of the square that the car began picking up speed. Slowly, we reached perhaps five miles per hour, passing through rows of houses just as eerie as on the other side of town. As we passed beyond the last house, leaving the last couple of townsfolk staring at the back of the car, the speed picked up more quickly. By the time we passed the town sign, we were hurtling along at sixty, seventy, eighty.
“Stop!” I cried out, my tongue and voice suddenly my own again, as we were bearing down on the T intersection where the road to the town met the road going around the valley. Danny slammed on the brakes and even pulled the handbrake. We were drifting, tires squealing like stuck pigs, my own shriek joining their choir, as we slid to a halt, the front wheels digging trenches into the verge as we nearly drove into the ditch.
I don’t know if the engine stalled or if Danny turned it off, but we sat in silence for several seconds, as the dust of the gravel verge settled and the smoke from the burnt tires cleared, before either of us even dared to breathe. Raspy breaths from both of us mingled with my sobs and the throb of my beating heart. He whacked the steering wheel with his fist. I jumped, but it was as if the sudden noise somehow gave me leave to speak again.
“Why didn’t you drive faster?” I asked, tears still flowing, voice breaking as if I’d been crying for hours.
“What? I was fucking flooring it from the moment we reached the square,” said Danny, a frown disturbing his pale, sweaty face, dispelling, momentarily, the fear mirroring the one I felt. “It’s a wonder I didn’t hit any of those goddamn weirdos,” he added with a surprising amount of vehemence. His voice was far from collected, but the note of terror in it had an edge of anger to it that I didn’t feel myself.
I said nothing about my own experience right then, too dumbfounded and in shock, still, to address the differences in our experiences. We just sat in silence, waiting for our friends, who would drive around the valley to meet us here.
By the time the others arrived, he was standing outside the car, half-leaning, half-sitting on the hood, smoking a cigarette held in trembling fingers that he fought to keep steady. I was in the passenger seat, hugging my legs, and no longer actively crying, but I still felt the moistness of the tears on my cheeks. Our friends asked about how it was, of course, but neither of us felt like talking about it. I just shook my head, refusing to answer, though Danny snapped at a friend of his who kept pestering him, and he even shoved him quite hard.
I got into one of my girlfriends’ car, and during the ride back home I reassured them that Danny hadn’t done anything “untoward” while we were waiting or during the drive. In fact, nothing ever did happen between Danny and me. For my part, even the sight of him brought back the memory of that… I’m going to have to use the word, don’t I? Of that uncanny town and its eerie people. And every time my heart sank, and a rill of ice water ran down my spine. If he felt the same, he never said it, but he never approached me either.
He moved away after high school, and stayed away. Myself, I came back after college to help my parents with their hardware store, and sort of got stuck here. “Stuck” is an unkind word for it, though, and I am genuinely happy in my home town, but it was never something I planned on. Dana, my friend who I went to visit that more recent night, was one of my oldest friends, and she was one of the few to whom I told more about my experience than just the staring townsfolk. Not much more, though, because once we’d got out of there, it all seemed so silly, so impossible, especially for a teenager not yet well-read enough to have the vocabulary for the task. None of the rumors I heard that probably stemmed from things Danny had said were much more informative than mentioning staring townsfolk, so I guess he didn’t say much else either, if indeed he had experienced more at all.
When my headlights lit up the sign that night I felt the hairs on the back of my head and neck stand up. If I’d had any sense I’d’ve stopped, made a U-turn, and left the way I came. I guess I was too tired to think or react quickly enough. The all-smothering darkness of the world beyond the headlights on an unlit road in the middle of nowhere can get to you under normal circumstances. Given where I was headed, my mouth felt dry, my hands clammy, my heart was racing and my breaths were quick. The panic never really set in, though. It lurked just under the surface, ready to break through once something actually happened. But then again, why would something happen? I’d come through the town before and survived. This line of thought grounded me enough to keep the panic at bay for a while longer, until the road clearly began showing signs of not being quite right. It was straight as an arrow, but I had to keep adjusting the steering wheel to keep from driving into the ditch.
Soon I saw the garden fences on either side of the road, and hints of lighter shadows where the houses lurked, just beyond the influence of my headlights. I was actually glad that none of the houses had any lights on. Seeing more of them would have been worse than the fading memory of my previous trip. The gardens were creepy enough with their strange, formless shapes of bushes and low trees. They kept drawing my attention, for some reason, but I tried my best to keep my eyes on the road. My heart was still beating fast, its quick rhythm thumping in my head, in tune, as it were, with the sound of the engine and the faint crunch of the gravel beneath the wheels. Was the road actually covered in gravel? I tried my best not to look at what was clearly a paved road. Or clearly a dirt track. As I said, I tried not to look and tried not to think about it.
The darkness of the gardens was full of eyes. I couldn’t see them at all if I looked straight at them, of course, but I knew they were there, staring in pairs, in singles, in threes and more. I was as convinced of it as I am of the reality of the keyboard under my fingertips as I write this. Throughout the entire journey into town, I saw no living thing. I saw none of the eyed creatures who were following my every move. The fences on either side of the road were as fickle in shape and nature as everything else in the valley, but once they disappeared I almost wished they had stayed. Ephemeral though they were, they were still a barrier between the car and the eyes. Once I entered the town square, I left the dark shadows of the houses and their adjoining gardens behind, and the absolute blackness crowded closer again. The black, unseen eyes crowded closer, in their ever-shifting groups, just out of sight. Their bearers were unaffected by the light reflected from the ground, and yet I knew that they were in front of me as well as behind me, watching, waiting, always moving to stay out of the light.
The car stopped. I don’t mean that the engine cut out and the car slowed to a halt, and not that it was abrupt, as if hitting an obstacle. It simply stopped moving forward. There was a small jolt of motion, probably far less than I ought to have expected, given the speed I was going at, but the road outside became motionless. I kept pushing down on the accelerator, feeling the car vibrate as if it was still moving, still accelerating, but the twin cones of light showed the same, cracked concrete. It was surprisingly persistent, I realize, looking back, but at the time I was more preoccupied with my mounting panic attack. I felt faint, my chest tightened, and a thin, wordless wail began rising from my throat. I began to sob, begging the car to start moving. The strange metallic smell began entering the car, and in the silence the faint hiss was creeping into my ears. Both were growing stronger by the second. My eyes were tearing up as I sobbed and struck the steering wheel several times. Then I saw…
…it.
Ahead of me, on the edge of the headlights’ reach, beyond the cone of light projected onto the ground, the darkness had a shape. Moment by moment it grew clearer, as it entered the light. I say entered, but it was not moving, not in any normal sense of the word. Nonetheless the man, now more a dark gray shadow than black, crept closer, standing upright in front of my car, his eyes fixed on me. No, it wasn’t a man that grew more distinct the closer to the lights it moved. The woman’s eyes were fixed on me. No, I had been mistaken, it was clearly a man. A boy? A young woman? It was becoming brighter, but wasn’t it still almost entirely black, as if unlit by the headlights? Wasn’t it already so reflective it made my eyes burn? Wasn’t it both? Neither?
The impression was changing so rapidly now, becoming so muddled that my brain couldn’t keep up, yet I couldn’t look away, out of sheer terror. I couldn’t bear the thought of what would happen if I looked away. Oh, God, what if I blinked? My heart was pounding in my chest, and pain surged through my head with each heartbeat. I mustn’t look away.
In an instant that lasted an infinity, the thing – it can’t have been human – closed the distance. The one unchanging feature in that cascade of unseen faces was the pair of dark eyes, bottomless pits so black that the darkness around me faded to gray. Not that I saw much else than those eyes by now, anyway. I was transfixed like a hypnotized victim in a bad vampire movie.
The thing moved. It raised its arm, now a thick, burly laborer’s arm, now a child’s, now an elderly woman’s, now… something different. It reached through the intervening space, which felt like a mere mile one second, and an impossibly untraversable inch the next. It reached through the car windscreen, piercing it without shattering it. The metallic stench grew instantly putrid, to all appearances mixed with toxic fumes. The hissing sound grew from a whisper to a roar, accompanied by a shrill, ear-rending note.
It put its icy fingers against my skin, passing through my clothes as though they were nothing more than mist. It felt like being stabbed by sharp spikes dipped in liquid nitrogen. The burning cold spread from my chest, and the pain at last made me scream, scream louder than I have ever done. Still I could not move. The cold continued to spread, down my chest, around to my back, up my neck. The pain made me lose my grip on reality, such as it was, and through the haze of it I wondered whose shriek I heard, whose ears were savaged by that roaring, shrill chord, whose nose and lungs were being assaulted by that fetid odor of sharp, burning metal and a mixture of noxious chemicals and decay that would have made me retch at any other time. The cold crept down along my hip and thighs, and up through my shoulders and into my arms, spreading like roots through my torso and limbs. It slid up my neck, over my scalp, down my gullet and down through my feet. As if it had forgotten it until now, it then bit at my heart.
The darkness that followed was the wholesome oblivion of unconsciousness. I don’t know how long it lasted. I may have recollections of seeing the starlit sky and weeping with relief at having escaped, but that may have been a dream that came later. I do not recall being found in my car, in the ditch opposite the road to Uncanny Valley, dangerously hypothermic and unresponsive. I don’t recall being rushed to the hospital, or what they did to me once I got there, though I’m told I grew panicked almost as soon as I came back to consciousness, raving confusedly about “It’s inside” and “It’s gone through” amidst cries for help. I don’t remember those moments. Later that day I was more lucid, and that’s where my memory picks up, with my mom and dad crying tears of relief at my side. There’s a mark on my chest, at the middle of the sternum. Five reddish spots in a circle maybe three inches across, that the doctors said looked like the beginning of frostbite. If they were the points of a pentagram, it would be inverted.
After a day or so I was able to have visitors other than next of kin, and Dana was full of tears over having been the reason I was even in the neighborhood of the road through Uncanny Valley. I did my best to assure her that she wasn’t responsible in the slightest, but I think she still blames herself.
My recovery has been slow. Mom insisted I move back in for the duration, so I’m back in my old room. I suffer from aches in most joints, making it pretty much impossible to help out at the store. The doctors haven’t been able to pinpoint the reason why yet. In addition to that pain making it difficult to fall asleep, I have nightmares about the event almost every night. It’s always confused, and the details change and are quickly forgotten, but at their core is always that dark, staring, freezing cold thing. Mostly I manage to shrug off the memory of the dreams over the course of the day, but the terror at the time is exhausting, and I usually cry myself into fatigued, dreamless sleep in the small hours. During the days I’m tired, and most days I just shuffle through the chores Mom allows me to do, to at least give some sort of structure to my days. She wants me to rest, but I was getting stir crazy once I was well enough to do more than just sit around and think. After the chores are done I mostly lie around on the sofa downstairs, watching garbage on the TV, or lie in bed in my room upstairs, scrolling through garbage on my phone.
About five or six weeks passed, and other than my nightmares and my aching joints, I didn’t seem to suffer any lasting problems. I was even starting to feel like I was getting better physically, though I was still constantly mentally exhausted. The dreams were getting slightly less frequent, at least with regards to my being wakened by them, though my nights were still far from as restful as before.
Then the nausea began. After a few mornings of vomiting I realized that I had missed my period. Twice. A cold knot lodged itself in my gut once I realized that. It remained there as I went to the pharmacy, driving my car for the first time since that night. The windscreen was as pristine and unbroken as it had ever been.
I felt numb as I picked out one of the tests. I felt sick to my stomach as I waited in line, oblivious to my surroundings. I didn’t really hear what the woman behind the counter said as I paid by card. My mouth was dry as I stepped out into the pale, gray afternoon chill.
The uncertainty broke me, and I went across the street to a diner opposite the pharmacy and used the bathroom there. As I waited for the result to show up, the night in the Valley returned to me in full force, though all jumbled together, with flashes of memories of the time in college when I’d had a pregnancy scare when the condom broke. It had been the worst anxiety I’d ever felt up to that point. Now it seemed almost insignificant, both through the passage of time and through the greater ordeal my drive through the valley had been.
That time the result had been negative. This time it wasn’t. That time I’d had sex within the time frame that would’ve made a positive result possible. This time I hadn’t. I tried another strip from the packet. Positive. The third one was also positive.
I left the bathroom with an even lighter head than I had gone into it with. I focused on the exit and on reaching it without falling, which was difficult given how the whole room was spinning. At the time I didn’t really register anything that was being said around me, but somehow the conversation between two guests at the counter suddenly penetrated the fog of my mind just as I reached for the door handle.
“Did you hear? The sign’s changed.”
“Changed?”
“Yeah. Drove past it myself yesterday. Now it says ‘Welcome to Uncanny Valley, Population 72.’”
All of a sudden, my stomach didn’t feel quite…
…right.