I’m not even sure how I found the place, honestly. I’d never seen it on a map before, although that didn’t mean much. My personal experience with cartography boils down to using Google maps to find restaurants, and looking up the word “cartography” to make sure I’m using it right. I guess most stories like mine start of with someone taking a wrong turn somewhere, or getting some weird invitation, any intrusion into their normal routine that makes them stray off the beaten path.
Kinda wish mine had been like that. Then I’d know where things went wrong. Not me, however. Just my luck I run into this town doing something I always do: drive home from work. My commute is a long one, but not terrible. It’s a good 45 minutes from my duplex to the office, which is a private airport built out in the boonies. I mean, it barely qualifies as an airport: a single landing strip and a bunch of lean-to metal buildings calling themselves “hangars” with a straight face. Like a cattle farm for prop planes.
Not that that means anything now, but it’s where I was driving home from at 8:00 in the morning when things started creeping sideways. Like the slow pull of your car to the side then you take your hand off the wheel on a straightaway. Which was kind of literal in this sense, as the majority of my drive home is a straight shot down a country highway. It wasn’t even a case of me being low on gas, or taking a wrong turn. I just kept going straight, went through a dense patch of woods I’d seen dozens of times, and sometimes taken a nap in my car in when I wasn’t sure I could stay awake at the wheel, and when I emerged it was to a giant wooden sign I’d never seen before that said “Welcome to Sheolton”.
I’d pulled over immediately about twenty feet from the sign, as this was obviously not supposed to be here, and got out of the car. Yes, I was voted most likely to die in the horror movie first, why do you ask? The sign itself was real enough, probably oak or something, with a new-ish coat of paint. The colors were bright, but the paint had started peeling just a little, maybe because it hadn’t been applied properly? Look, I sit all day on the computer and put up with rednecks who think they’re the talk of the down cause they own a cropduster. I had no idea.
I also didn’t know where the hell the road behind me went, as the highway I was so used to now looked like a tiny two-lane road leading to a metal gate with a crappy “Keep Out” sign, doing its damnedest to protect the large number of trees that were sure as shit not there a second ago. SO I did what any red-blooded American of the 21st century does, I pulled out my cell phone and started dialing 911. I started, because it hit me halfway through that I was going to sound like a madman, or worse, one of those unhinged entitled people on the internet that calls the cops on people going into their own homes. I could hear the conversation in my head: “Why yes, officer, I’d like to report a bunch of trees and a giant sign. What are they doing? Well, for one thing, they weren’t there twenty seconds ago- hello? Hello?” Id didn’t help that I had no signal, which was the last surprising thing so far. It usually cut out about a mile from the airstrip and didn’t pick back up until I was about 5 minutes from town.
I must have stood out there for a good ten minutes, just not doing anything. The trees were real, as far as my now-reddened hands could tell, and the sign was, too. My car worked just fine, But I wasn’t about to drive into a town I’d never heard of, and couldn’t actually see from here. Beyond the sign all I saw was open field with more trees on the left and a large hill on the right where there had once been trees, I’m sure, but looked like it had been hit by a small wildfire forever ago and never quite recovered. That part wasn’t weird, I’d seen that all over. Brushfires are common in my state and sometimes the land just gives up the ghost for a while.
It was then that the reality of the situation started to creep in. I had no idea where I was, no signal, no way backwards, and no desire to go forward. I checked my phone for signal one more time, out of desperation: no dice. Double checked the fence: still real. So were the trees, so was the sign. I believe I was well within my rights to freak the fuck out, which I was very much doing.
So here I am, losing my shit outside a perfectly good Toyota Camry with nowhere to go but forward, debating whether or not that was even a good idea (and trying to figure out if I was hallucinating, asleep, or had just driven off the side of the road into a tree and crashed, and was now in purgatory), when I saw a car come up the road towards me. A cop car, it looked like. I tried pulling myself together quick as I could, so as not to look like a complete lunatic, and noticed something interesting about the vehicle. It was the old Crown Vic model that got retired a couple years back, in favor of the Tahoes and Chargers. Black and white, with SHERIFF on the side in big gold letters. It pulled up to the side of the road opposite me, on the other side of the Welcome to Sheolton sign, and the most Town Sheriff-y looking Town Sheriff I have ever seen stepped out. You know the type: wide-brimmed hat, stern build, glorious mustache. He paused as he caught sight of me, looked at my car, and just started cursing up and down. “Fuck. Fuck fuck fuck for god’s sake just FUCK.”
Watching him reflect the very sentiments I was expressing as he pulled up, I decided to let him get whatever this was out of his system, as approaching an irate officer with a gun was very low on my to-do list, especially one who had watched me kick the shit out of a bunch of innocent grass as he approached. Not that I had one at the moment, outside of a giant question mark followed by LEAVE in large print. After he’d calmed down a second, he started towards me, so I stood up straight, kept my hands where he could see them, and stayed shutting the hell up.
“I don’t suppose you know where it is you are right now, stranger?” he asked, looking very much like he already knew the answer.
“That would be a negative, sir,” I responded evenly. Not that I had done anything wrong, but when the first person I’d come across after entering the Twilight Zone had a gun, I didn’t want to press my luck.
“Well shit. SHIT,” he said again, loudly. “Alright. Well, you obviously have a lot of questions, and I’ll start by answering the most obvious: my name’s Sheriff Richard Sykes, and no, you aren’t under arrest or anything like that. Not to say you aren’t in deep shit, but it’s not the law enforcement kind. Now, I can understand your lack of willingness to drive into a town that I’m pretty sure didn’t exist wherever you were half an hour ago, but I can assure you there’s nothing back thataway-“ he gestured towards the sad looking fence and sturdy treeline, “-except a rather irate old man who lives about 100 yards deep in those woods. He’s the one who called me out here, after you appeared out of thin fucking air on his camera.” He pointed again, at an angle, towards one of the trees directly behind the sign, where I noticed for the first time a small white camera bolted to the side of the tree about ten feet up. It was pointed in my general direction. I waved, and it didn’t wave back.
“So your options are to A: freak out in front of your car till the heat death of the universe, or worse, or B: follow me to the station where I can answer the rest of your questions. I’m not gonna force you to do anything, as again, you aren’t under arrest or anything, but I can tell you I have food, water, and information, and the man in the woods has a gun, a short temper, and spent all of his allotted goodwill for the year calling me to tell me you were here. Dealer’s choice,” he said.
I thought about that for the entire half second it took me to realize this “short-tempered, well armed recluse” had probably just watched me melt down on camera, and decided to go with the… other short-tempered, well-armed man.
--
The town itself looked like every forgotten small town in America: once postcard-perfect, now left behind by technology, infrastructure, and the desire to see more than the same 400 people before you die. It looked surprisingly busy, though; people milling about on every small street we passed, most of the small mom-and-pop shops usually driven out of business by big box stores still thriving, people playing in parks, almost like a photograph of what people considered “simpler times’ nowadays. I wasn’t exactly receiving a warm welcome, though. The people that noticed me, and realized pretty quickly that I wasn’t a local, all wore the same expression: a sad, consoling look that only comes from watching something awful happen to somebody you don’t know, and can’t do anything to help. It was a practiced look, too. I don’t know if there was comfort in that, in knowing I wasn’t unique in my situation, or despair, for much the same reason.
Pulling up to the sheriff’s office felt strangely anticlimactic. I don’t know what I was expecting, but in all fairness, every step since coming out of the woods was just further into uncharted territory. I waited till Sheriff Sykes got out of his car, and gestured for me to get out of mine. I nodded as he held the door open for me, and walked into the crowded station. What greeted me was a room full of normal-looking people, all wearing the same sad expression I’d seen on the drive in. A younger deputy behind the counter looked up from his conversation as I walked in, gave me a once over with a stern expression, and grunted some swear words under his breath. Sykes walked in from behind me, and turned his attention to the younger officer. “Wilkes, you in the middle of something?”
“This lady lost her cat,” ‘Wilkes said matter-of-factly, nodding his head at an older woman on my side of the counter.
Sykes turned his attention towards her. “Miss Lutherly, I’m sorry about your cat, but we kind of have a bigger problem…” he started apologetically.
The woman, who I assumed was about mid-fifties, gave me a sad smile. “Oh it’s all right, dear. Take care of the young man. The first day is always the hardest.”
The sheriff nodded, and motioned for me to follow him. All of a sudden I felt like I was on death row. He led me to his office, which was kind of a relief, as I still hadn’t shaken the notion that I was somehow guilty of something, and stared at the interrogation room as we passed like it was a trap in waiting.
The sheriff sat me down in a chair in front of his desk, sat down in his, and offered me a bottle of water from his desk. I took it, mainly to have something to do with my hands so I didn’t relapse into whatever panicked state he’d found me in outside of town. “I haven’t asked your name yet, son.”
“I’m Jhona. Jhona Monroe,” I said. “I work at an airfield outside of town. Well, outside of my town. And I don’t really get… any of this.”
He didn’t say anything for a moment. He looked like he was getting the measure of me, trying to find his next words. When they finally came, he looked at me solemnly, and said slowly and purposefully, “I’m going to start with the hard part. This town’s name is Sheolten, and you’re going to die here, Jhona.”