Not On A Map

I thought it was all just a part of his stories. It was never on any map of Mass I had seen. Yet I have stood on that cracked and overgrown street. The buildings around me were dilapidated and ancient, falling apart with age and disuse. I could hear the sound of a gull somewhere off in the distance. A cold breeze blew in off the ocean, smelling slightly of rotting fish. I've walked slowly down that main road looking at the empty and crumbling houses and the broken windows of store fronts. My head keeps telling me I couldn't be where I thought I was. I had little proof, there had been no signs for the town or on any of the streets. Yet still I knew in my heart that it was. If for no other reason than the remains of the church and the sign lying in front of it. No reason but an old worn name on a tombstone. How was it possible for this deserted town to go unnoticed for so long, and why it was left untouched, was not something I thought of then. Only later did it occur to me that maybe it was left to the ravages of time on purpose. Maybe it wasn't meant to be on any maps, or even known of by all of the lovers of his stories. Perhaps I should have left it all alone. Yet despite how I left that rotting town I still say with certainty that I saw nothing evil, nothing horrible. Just the work of an overactive imagination jumping at shadows.

I found it by accident. I was hiking in the woods of northern Mass, when I literally stumbled across the mostly buried train tracks. If I hadn't of tripped I would never have seen them they were so overgrown. I don't know why I followed them. Maybe just for something new to do. It was late and I knew I'd have to stop for the day soon. After about 3 miles I started to hear the ocean. When I made camp that night I figured I'd only follow the tracks about another few miles the next day before heading back. That night it was weird because I couldn't sleep due to the silence. It made me nervous, I've never heard the woods silent like that before. Normally you hear all the life in a forest at night. The owls, squirrels, and mice out for their nightly foraging. Instead there was nothing, just the sound of that distant surf made by the ocean. I sat up half the night wondering if there might be something out there that was frightening the local wildlife, a bear or some such large creature. I got an early start the next morning just because I didn't feel like lying in my tent listening for sounds. It was still dark out and I followed the tracks just so I couldn't get lost with them as a guide.

It was maybe 3 hours or so later that I came over the ridge and saw where the tracks were leading me. At first I thought it was just a normal town down there by the ocean side, although I couldn't think of what town was supposed to be around here. I figured maybe the tracks had lead me further of my hiking trail than I had originally though. It wasn't till I got closer, planning on stopping in to pick up some light supplies, that it occurred to me something was wrong. There was no movement on the streets, some of the houses looked like they were leaning oddly, and the only sounds was of a distant seagull. As I came past the first buildings on the outskirts of town and saw them to be crumbling barns I knew this town was deserted. Some of the mounds that I had first thought to be small hills were actually the rotting remains of houses. The whole thing struck me as odd because I'd never heard of a deserted town in this area. I followed the tracks down past the outlying crumbling barns and houses and towards the town itself. The closer I got the more buildings were still standing, even if just barely. On either side of the tracks it was all marsh land and I was worried about mosquitoes, but none bothered me. In fact other than the wind, ocean, and a far off gull I couldn't hear anything moving or buzzing about. Figured maybe the chill I felt wasn't just me, maybe it was cold enough this day to keep the bugs down.

I stayed on the tracks into the town until I reached what I figured was the station house. There was a street sign next to the falling apart train station, but it was too old and worn for me to read. From the looks of things this town was old and hadn't had a living soul in it for a long time. As I wandered through the wreck of a town I wondered about what had happened here. There were houses and stores and warehouses, but I didn't dare go into any because of how dilapidated they looked. I even saw an old worn and broken down truck, it looked like something out of an old time movie. On another street there was the skeleton of a bus, so badly rusted that it probably would have fallen apart if I touched it. As I continued down one street I saw what looked like an old processing factory. There was a sign on top but wind and spray had done the work too well and I couldn't read it. I looked into the stores and houses, there windows long gone. I even though of going in some to try and find some kind of identification to give me an idea of what this town used to be, but the buildings were so old and wind beaten I was afraid of one collapsing with me in it. At one point I did walk onto the stairs of what looked like an old world postal office, but the third stair collapsed under my feet which scared me enough to give up on the attempt. Throughout the town the smell of decay and rotting fish seemed to permeate the air. I wondered around town without any idea where I was until I found the church.

It didn't look like a church actually. It was an old mason building, the kind my grandfather had pictures of back when he was younger and went to mason meetings with his friends. But it was the first thing I saw that didn't look in total disrepair. In fact except for the dust and cobwebs it looked almost new compared to everything else in town. Some of the columns out front had fallen down and the paint was gone but it looked solid enough. There was a small graveyard next to it. The doors were shut and looked to be solid, the wood not rotted like those of the surrounding buildings. As I walked closer I saw that there was also a broken church signboard lying on the grass next to the stairs. It was old and covered in weeds and dust, yet I could still just make out the faint words etched into it: The Esoteric Order of Dagon.

My heart stopped when I read it. It couldn't be. It had to be some sort of joke or mistake. Yet the more I thought about his old stories the more I started to see the resemblance. I hadn't read the story in years, but he had been one of my favorite authors back in collage. The old railroad, the warehouses, the factory (Obed Marsh's gold refinery, my mind insisted on calling it), the waterfront, even the bus, and here was the church. Sitting here in defiance of the fiction section where his books are kept. Sitting here forgotten by time and man on this lonely streak of the Massachusetts shoreland.

He does write fiction, I reminded myself. But perhaps he had based at lest some of his locals on actual places. Maybe, my mind reasoned, he knew of this deserted place and had used it as a setting, incorporating an actual defunct church into his stories as he did with so many other writers work. Or maybe this had even been an actual living town in his day. If something had happened to cause it to be deserted wouldn't that make it a perfect local for a horror story? Add in an odd little religious sect and no wonder he decided to use it.

Feeling braver I walked up the steps of the church, the boards creaking but bearing my weight. I decided that since it looked so much more solid I would risk going into this piece of literature legend. Yet I was to be stymied in my efforts, the door was securely closed. I tried with all my might, pushing and pulling using all my weight, yet it wouldn't budge an inch.I even tried using a running start to break the door in, but all I managed was a sore shoulder. Frustrated I considered breaking out a window, the only intact ones I had seen ironically. They were so dirty as to be black and I couldn't see a thing inside, yet since they were the only ones left in town I was loath to be the one to destroy them. Instead I walked over to the graveyard and looked at the headstones there. Most were warn down to the point of illegibility, but one stopped me cold once again. While the last name and dates were gone the first name was marked clearly Zadok. Once again my mind went back to his story, remembering the drunken old man who told the tale of this town to the main character. I remember how in the tale he said that if they caught him telling the stories they would do horrible, unspeakable things to him before he died. My mind reeled at the thought of what shape I might find the body if I were to dig this grave up.

Then sanity stepped in. I would find nothing after all this time but dust, and even if I had it wouldn't be anything disturbing. All of it had been a story, even if some of the people and places were real. Perhaps Zadok had been the town drunk. Perhaps the factory I had seen had belonged to a family called Marsh. Maybe if I looked around I could find the falling apart Gilman house, that boarding house that the man in the story so narrowly escape from. But they were just place in a deserted town. Just like the state of Maine was just a quiet state no matter how many horrors Mr. King might place there. I was giving myself goosebumps for nothing. There was no evil here, no shambling monsters hiding away from the light. Nothing could be hiding away in these crumbling buildings, no deformed faces were watching me from the empty windows. In a way my brief fright was a testament to his writing abilities, able to give a level headed man the creeps over 70 years after the stories had been penned.

The cry of the gull startled me from my thoughts, and my mind for a brief moment thought that there had been some sort of creature in one of his tales that made a cry like a gull hadn't there? Some great horror from a tale other than the one of this town? Then I laughed at my own foolishness. I left the church intact, fending off both my irrational fear and my curiosity. I decided to head towards the sounds of the ocean. I figured if anything could clear my head it would be the reassuring sight of the Atlantic's vast blue waters. I could still hear that lone gull, and I briefly wondered at what could keep a single bird this far from any other sign of life. I followed the streets, looking at the clouds that had covered the sun causing me to shiver in the cool ocean breeze. The smell of rotting fish grew as I got near the water.

Then I came upon another confirmation from his stories. I found as I got near that all the buildings on the waterfront were destroyed even more so than those inland. There was unmistakable signs of fire and explosions, the buildings scattered wide open, the streets filled with debris, blacked and broken. I thought of how he wrote of the government dynamiting the area, and an urge came over me to look out at the sea. I climbed periously over the wreckage, strewn about possible even more by the winds and storms of years gone by, causing it to be even more dangerous than it would have been when the damage had first been done. Finally I stood at a clearing and could see the ocean. Yet what I looked for wasn't there. At first I thought maybe he had made the reef up, just a figment of his imagination to give his weird sea creatures a landing point. But once again my memory of the story stepped in and reminded me that at the end of it they had torpedoed the reef, destroying it utterly. So maybe it had existed. I would never know.

I looked around for the gull who's cries had been the only sound other than the wind and surf, but couldn't locate it. I would have welcomed the sight just so I could see another living creature here. The desolation and lifelessness of the place surely contributed to my early odd unease. After a few moments of fruitless searching for my only companion I turned from the sea, dark under the clouds instead of blue and reassuring as I had hoped, and headed back into the town main. I climbed once again over the wreckage. Even though it was still midday I felt tired and weary. It was if the town had sapped my energy, all the emptiness filling me up and weighing me down. I was debating if I should continue exploring for the day, maybe find a place in town to camp later that night that would be more secure than what I had seen so far. I argued this against the thought that one of the major problems with staying here would be that I would be far too afraid to light a fire to cook my dinner with all the dry wood around. Just one spark could turn this place into a as giant blaze. Mayhaps I would be better heading back to the woods tonight and then coming back tomorrow to finish exploring. Or maybe just heading back altogether, getting some friends to come back with me next time so that they could see this for themselves.

This was the state my mind was in when I came upon that which sent me from the town. I am ashamed to admit that I ran, scurrying through the streets until I by chance came upon those train tracks once again nd followed them out of that deserted place. I ran as far and as fast as I could, not stopping till the adrenaline rush wore off and pure exhaustion overtook me so that I collapsed in the woods next to the tracks. I must have run for several miles straight from that place in my unreasoning terror, for when I awoke I could not hear the ocean anymore. I walked back to my original campsite, leaving those weed covered tracks far behind. Although I know now that my flight had been unwarranted I yet have no desire to go back to that place and explore further. I feel that since it has been left undisturbed for so long I would do no greater injustice than to open it up to others to go in and perhaps damage it. Let time continue to erase it, and allow his fans to think of it as all pure fiction. I think it would even do him a disservice, making people think that he was merely describing something he had seen instead of coming up with it all in his own head. The reality of the town might distract from what a genius he was at storytelling. Let it stay off the maps and in the realm of imagination.

Also, I am embarrassed by my flight. Saddened that a grown learned man should come unglued over such a small thing. I'm sure upon reflection that I must have loosened it in my earlier attempts to enter. The wind must have finished the job my efforts had begun at undoing what the ages had accomplished. I know now in retrospect that it was just my odd turn of mind that made me take flight when I saw the door to that old accursed church standing open, the darkness within untouched by the little light that was filtering down through the clouds. That door that had seemed so immovably locked when I fought with it earlier now offering me egress as if something hidden away inside had decided to invite me into it's black and secret halls.
Yet I say there was nothing. No monster or horrible ending, just my over active imagination that caused me to flee. I could go back if I wanted to. Go take pictures and map out the place, maybe see if there is any gold left in the Marsh's warehouse or any precious books in that church....that church.... no, I have no need to go back none at all. Let it lie there hidden and forgotten. There's nothing there and I shall not go back. Not because I'm afraid, I just don't want to.

This is my first attempt at writing in about 12 years or so. I have been published before, although I don't admit it to those in my life anymore. I had given up writing, along with drawing and poetry, after the death of a close friend and the depression it had sent me into. I figure that if I am to perhaps start again I will do it here where those who know me will not know of it. I also decided that since I am so out of practice that I will use H.P.Lovecraft's established Mythos that I so love as a basis to my work. I am working on several pieces right now, but this was the first that I came up with and thought it only fiting that it be the first that I finish. Let me know what you think should you stumble upon it and have the time to read. I have always been a harsh critic of myself and have never considered anything of mine to be worth letting others read, but since I was published atone point I realize that perhaps I'm not the best judge of my own work. Any input would be appreciated. It would help if your familiar with Lovecraft's other work or the stories done based upon his work by other writers.

Testing

I'm still trying to get a hang of the whole picture posting thing so I figured I'd practice here instead of my regular blog, just in case I screwed something up it wouldn't be as bad a loss. So far so good.
This shot I took at a graveyard in North Branford, I loved how the face seemed to be looking down at me. Also, although you can't see it very well, due to years and shading although the left eye apears fine the right eye actually looked like a tiny skull instead of an eye, which I thought was just awsome. Maybe I'll go back someday and try and geta closer shot of it.