Bledford

 

Carrington texted his agent about his script. No news, the agent responded.  In this case, no news was bad news.  He had written the script on spec, a low-budget feature called Old Mill on Blood River.  The agent didn’t like the title and wanted the word “zombie” in the name.  Carrington said that he didn’t mind what they called the thing so long as he was paid something for writing it.

Halloween was approaching.  A friend making content for WatchMOJO – nine to ten minute videos with sponsorship released straight to YouTube – offered Carrington a gig.  “Something to tide you over,” the friend said, “while you’re waiting for a nibble on your script for the horror picture.”  

Carrington asked about the assignment.  “It’s creepy pasta,” his friend told him.  They were in a tea house in Sawtelle.  

“Cut and paste a list of the top ten scariest small towns in America,” his friend said.  

“Budget?”

“There’s no budget – just ransack the web, loot other sites.  There are a million lists like this.”

Carrington’s friend took out his phone and emailed him the link to WatchMOJO.

“It’s all there, format, an engagement letter and so on.”

“Don’t tell my agent,” Carrington said.

“My lips are sealed.”  

There was an upfront stipend on offer, then, a payment when the creative content was delivered by download to WatchMOJO site.  Carrington had an option of a lump sum payment or a passive income arrangement, that is, payment at an agreed-upon rate for each click on the site, with a supplement for time that the user clocked on the link.  Carrington’s rent was coming due and he was cash-strapped so he elected for the advance with the lump sum payable on download.  

Carrington thought he could knock out a script in a half-day, some spooky innuendo with murky ambient mood music in the public domain.  WatchMOJO’s content marketer sent Carrington a link to a digital template.  The company wired the advance to his bank and told him to prepare an outline and, then, write a ten minute script, devoting 50 seconds to each of the ten villages that he featured in the YouTube video – the balance of the time would be for a commercial and some intro provided by the company with a “subscribe” offer.  The company had an AI voice program that it would use to sync the narration to the images.  

Carrington wondered if there were any real people working at WatchMOJO.  All his interactions with the creative director and marketing were digital, text messages or template downloads, with periodic and formulaic computer-generated inquiries as to his progress on the project.  He estimated that he could assemble the images from other sources on the web in about a week.  He had an idea for another script for the spec market, something nostalgic about his childhood in the small Minnesota town where he had grown up.  “The concept is like The Fabelman’s by way of Little House on the Prairie,” Carrington told his agent.

“I don’t want you to get disappointed,” the agent said.  “Let’s get ‘old mill zombies’ sold first.  Then, we can chat on something less genre.  Maybe, more personal.”

Carrington spent four or five hours watching internet slide-shows and videos on scary small-towns.  There was plenty of material and Carrington book-marked drone shots and atmospheric images of abandoned buildings.  He wrote some copy about not visiting the places identified on the video.  “You won’t be welcome.  These places don’t like visitors and more than one curiosity-seeker has vanished without a trace,” Carrington typed on his lap-top.  He, then, backspaced and deleted “without a trace” – redundant, he thought.

Centralia, Pennsylvania, of course, was one of the ten towns: rotting buildings on a wooded slope in Appalachia, driveways and lanes and streets to nowhere with fumes leaking from the burning underground coal mines.  Whittier, Alaska where all the inhabitants live in one big apartment building directly across from a predecessor structure abandoned to the elements, some silvery waterfalls plunging down fjord cliffs above the gaunt ruins.  Slab City, California, featured in Nomadland and Gibsontown, Florida (where circus people and carnival freaks winter), the polygamists at Hilldale, Utah, Ed Gein’s hometown in Wisconsin (Plainfield), the axe-murder house at Villisca, Iowa, Villaviciosa in Nevada, and the empty, debris-strewn streets at Cairo, Illinois. – Nine, Carrington counted. One more needed. He thought it would be fun to feature his own Midwest town, Bledford, the place in southeast Minnesota where his parents still lived.  Carrington thought it would be like affixing his signature to the piece.  

Most of the Bledford footage was cribbed from Google street view shots in various small towns in Iowa, Wisconsin, and Minnesota.  The municipal website provided Carrington pictures of welcome signs at the city limits. He found a drone shot on Bledford’s Facebook page, the airborne camera gliding over the white escarpment of a grain elevator with a litter of steel grain bins crouched in its shadow.  Another short drone sequence showed the dam on the Raccoon River with two old mills standing sentinel over a spillway from which the waterwheel had been removed (or, perhaps, washed away in a flood) a hundred years earlier. Carrington sampled a four second shot from a no-budget horror movie with some extras with red goo running out of their mouths and down their chins waving limp hands at the camera.  He edited some video cut and pasted from a news report on a church fire into the segment.  The billowing red flames and shadowy pillars of smoke made a nice contrast to the shuffling zombies and the ominous drone shots gliding over the rooftops of the small town.  His script said that Bledford was founded by a religious sect persecuted for their bizarre beliefs everywhere that they settled, but left unmolested in this small remote village far from the interstate, distant, even, from state highways – “Visitors will see bygone customs, strange rituals of shy secretive people in this tiny burg, if, in fact, you see anyone at all.  But don’t worry, they will be watching you.”  Carrington added “from the shadows” to the last sentence.

It’s a post-truth world, Carrington thought as he edited the video clips together. 

When he was done working on the bit, Carrington went outside for a walk.  He thought that he might stroll as far as the tea house.  Late October was dry and warm, sixty at sunrise and about 80 at midday.  The leaves on the eucalpytus trees were dull with dust.  It hadn’t rained for a dozen weeks and the canyons were dry and yellow.  Carrington looked at his phone to see if there was any update on the spec script.  His agent had texted him that he was taking some meetings earlier in the afternoon and that there were promising signs but... 

Nothing.

His weather app showed LA and, then, Bledford.  In his home town, it was 41 degrees with rain falling.  Dry fronds dropped from a palm tree blanketed part of the sidewalk.  The air was cool with sea-breezes that had wandered inland from the beaches at Santa Monica.  For just a moment, everything seemed like a dream to him.  But the mood passed.

*****

Billy’s older brother joined the Marines after High School.  His three-speed bicycle hung in the garage on several hooks screwed into the stud-wall.  When Billy outgrew his little bike, he took the three-speed down from the garage wall, walked it to the tire pump at the Casey’s station uptown, and, after inflating the tires, rode around town.  At first, he was a little shaky, teetering atop a seat that seemed too far above the pedals, but, with each block, his confidence increased and the shape of the bike seemed to fit him better and better and, soon enough, he could even ride without hands.  

The cicadas buzzed in the trees arched over the streets and the sidewalks were dappled with light and tremulous shade.  Sometimes, Billy pedaled around town with friends; on other occasions, he cruised the quiet streets alone.  There was always something to see: a new puppy, limbs and branches fallen after a thunderstorm, older kids working on their jalopies in the shade of the trees, girls in leotards practicing dance-line routines on the dewy grass next to the high school, big puddles of rain water in the potholes after the hail and wind, the taut surfaces of those pools reflecting the weave of leaves and boughs overhead.  

Downtown, the open door of a bar scented the sidewalk with the odor of beer and cigarettes.  A man with a wrinkled face and big droopy ears was sweeping the concrete outside of the tavern.  The sun was bright outside and so the cool dim interior of the bar, glimpsed as Billy pedaled past the place, seemed dark as a cave, a dense gloom in which a scroll of red lights advertised some kind of booze.  A cat sat in the window of the hardware store and some old ladies were gossiping in front of the post-office.  The town’s name was spelled-out in aluminum block letters on the post-office’s brick facade: in the morning, the letters bolted to the wall cast shadows in one direction – in the afternoon, the letters were outlined in black shade rotated in the opposite direction.  Billy paused on the bridge over the Raccoon River.  He stood against the iron rail lining the sidewalk on the bridge deck.  Old stone buildings flanked the stream where water was gliding in a dark sheet over an apron of dam.  When it rained, the water didn’t cling to the apron to glide smoothly into the lagoon at its bottom but rather rushed in white ribbons leaping from the concrete in pale jets that splashed below.  Three blocks of commercial buildings, most of them bearing dates from before the First World War stood around the river crossing that was decorated with six cast-iron street lamps vaguely antique in form that illumined the bridge.  The grain elevator with a baker’s dozen of bins bolted together from corrugated steel stood at the edge of downtown where empty lots and an ridge of pinkish gravel marked the location of a railroad siding now long abandoned and, indeed, its tracks and sleepers removed from the road bed.  The old railway trestle, its arches broken down, crossed the river in the wet flood plain where the ruins of several warehouses were overgrown with ivy and golden rod that was slowly chiseling away the red brick walls.  Kids sometimes clambered down the river bank to the base of the stone piers reared above the river to support the train-tracks.  Everyone knew that a kid walking his dog on the trestle had been mowed down by a train – the dog dived off the bridge and swam down the river and was, later, retrieved dragging its leash between its hind legs.  Dismembered parts of the kid drizzled down into the stream – at least, this is what people claimed.  Teenagers painted names and dates on the bland canvas of the old concrete piers, big billowing fields of blue and red and yellow.  Although there was a municipal swimming pool, complete with toilets and showers in a little bathhouse in the town park near the courthouse, daredevils dived from the ruins of the trestle and paddled around in the river’s murky water.

Three churches were lined up at the foot of Barn Bluff.  The bluff was loaf-shaped with gouged-out limestone chutes on its sheer side.  Trespassing on the bluff was forbidden – the heights were said to be very perilous with undercut cliffs and narrow paths that skirted the hill’s edges, dense brush tangled with poison ivy that concealed the drop-offs that snared unlucky hikers. (Innumerable paths trampled through the tangle of trees crowning the hill proved that the ‘no trespassing’ signs were not a deterrent to exploration but, in fact, an incentive.) Each year a couple of kids had to be rescued from haphazard perches in treetops below the bluff’s cliffs, bowers into which trespassers had dropped upon losing their footing on the tricky trails overhead.  (Injuries were usually minor, but, sometimes, there were broken bones and, once, a boy was impaled on a sharp branch and had to be transported to the hospital with the tree-branch spear still piercing him.)  From clearings on the bluff’s summit, Billy could see the roofs of his little town, the church steeples under the hill and the white thumb of the grain elevator with its round bright bins and the serpentine curve of the Raccoon River where it meandered through the village.  Across the hollow in which the town was located, more hills arched upward, “goat-prairies” as they were called, sheer steep meadows studded with limestone outcrops.  Several vee-shaped Indian mounds, perhaps depicting birds in flight, marked the grassy terrace beside the river.  The mounds were only 18 inches tall and invisible except at dawn and sunset when the raking light cast the little embankments into relief sufficient to be seen.  Above the mounds, a conical hill showed a bare spot like a marquee on which a large “B” was displayed.  The “B” was formed from fist-sized white rocks studding the meadow and city crews mowed around the insignia on the slope to keep it clearly displayed  Carrington recalled thinking that the “B” initialed the town with the first letter of his first name (not “William”, but “Billy”) – this was his place.

From the patio at the tea house, Carrington could see three or four bicycles locked to the iron staves of a bike rack.  Despite a lock made from forged carbon steel, someone had stolen Carrington’s brand new bike a few months earlier.  Carrington looked at the bikes and their locks and recalled that, when he explored the heights at Barn Bluff, he just left his three-speed in the ditch resting on its side next to other bicycles from which he could identify the kids who were currently clambering around the steep hillsides.  Jeremy would be above him on the hilltop somewhere.  He was a cruel kid who placed toads atop ankle-high mounds made by red ants.  The toads were always moist from peeing in the palm of your hand and, when Jeremy put them on the ant-hill, the creatures just blinked with their bulbous black eyes, twitched a little, and, then, hopped away into the grass.  The red ants lived in mounds with scuffed, denuded surfaces along the trail that switchbacked to the top of the bluff.  On a ledge a dozen feet below the ridge, a fissure shaped like a canoe opened into the hill.  If you slipped inside at the height of summer, there was a small chamber with black mud oozing around a dirty sliver of ice.  The ice lasted all summer but when it was winter, for some reason, the cave dried-out and the ice vanished.  This seemed paradoxical to Carrington and, as he sipped his tea, he wondered if he remembered this accurately.

Time had softened his memories and rubbed away the sharp edges.  At the end of his childhood, Bledford was peaceful, as he recalled it, a little boring, always summertime, it seemed, with school out for the season.  Some bad things had happened to Carrington when he was a teenager, awful events but remote now and vague except for the dull aftermath of pain that he couldn’t quite escape.  But the town wasn’t to blame for what had happened to him.  Everyone suffers.

The sky wasn’t wide or threatening over the town.  The bluffs and wrinkled hilltops supported the blue and yellow heavens like a overturned cup.  It was hot and sticky and the trees (and even the utility poles) were shrouded in tangles of wet-looking green vine.  On the first street crossing the county road where the Rotary Club had erected its welcome sign, a famous architect had built a warehouse shaped like a Mayan Temple.  It was the architect’s maiden project, the first building erected from his plans.  Of course, the architect immigrated to the city and, then, designed projects all over the world, including Los Angeles where one of his mansions hung like a hammock in a cleft in the Santa Monica mountains.  Carrington remembered tourists with sunglasses standing on the sidewalk in front of the warehouse taking photographs.  The sun was always shining as Billy rode his bike around town, over the Raccoon River and past the grain elevator, along the gravel country roads where the bicycle was a little unsteady as its wheels coursed over the pebbles.  He sat in a small cemetery among soft eroded stones and low grassy mounds. (Why had he spent so much time alone?)  He saw cows in the fields, grazing along the fence-lines, looking curiously at him as he rode past.  He climbed on Barn Bluff and lit firecrackers that exploded erratically in the alley ways and waded across a sandy creek that drizzled down, one step at a time, into the river.  A snake crossed the asphalt.  The Summer was warm and the heat made him thirsty, very thirsty, but Carrington recalled that sensation with pleasure – such thirst made that first gulp of cool water wonderfully delicious and refreshing.     

*****

With the some of the money from the settlement of his lawsuit, Ridley bought a motorcycle.   He put a change of underwear in a backpack and drew up an itinerary based on some internet sites promoting “dark tourism.”  Ridley was scouting locations where bad things had happened, paranormal encounters, sightings of ghosts and cryptids and UFOs.  He downloaded cell-phone videos, notes, and narration to his blog Morbid Curiosity.  At present, he had no sponsors but people’s appetite for the eerie and weird is insatiable and Ridley thought that with the proper click-bait, he could attact enough eyes to his site to support two or three advertisers and turn a small profit.  

On a warm and sunny day, perfect motorcycle weather, Ridley visited a river town in a lovely green valley.  The courthouse dome had metal ribs that glinted in the morning light and brick church steeples like smokestacks pointed at the sky from terraces on the river bluffs.  Where the water in the river-bed bent sharply below rational and elongated embankments built by the Army Corps of Engineers, a couple of bridges spanned the stream and the site of the hanging was marked by monuments between the road decks.  Traffic coughed and chugged over the river and a bison carved from white slippery-looking marble stood at the location where the scaffold had been.  The public library was across the street where a stone Indian warrior shaped like a over-sized chess piece gazed sadly at the bison commemorating the place where the hangings had taken place.  Some flower beds colored the grass lawns with streaks of red and daffodil yellow.  Ridley parked his motorcycle at the library and, then, limped across the boulevard in the direction of the bridges and the monument.  Birds darted from under the bridge decks and spun in circles overhead exploring the cool pockets between updrafts from the concrete road surfaces.  It was all very sad and dignified.  The City Fathers were in a war with local kids to keep graffiti off the marble bison, the explanatory marker, and the stoic Indian with fluted feathers crowning his brow.  Ridley could see the ghosts of letters and words scraped off the stone, names and numbers.  The site was matter-of-fact, prosaic, bordered by moving trucks and cars – it was the opposite of eerie.

The prairie above the river valley was flat with grids of trees in old shelter belts.  Ridley rode east on empty open roads. His plan was to reach Plainfield, Wisconsin by sunset.  Ed Gein’s house of horrors was gone, of course, but there was a clearing where the place had once stood and several cemeteries at the outskirts of the small town from which cadavers had been stolen.  And midway between the monuments to the hanging and the Wisconsin village, there was another remote and evil village, reputedly the home of a sinister religious cult, a scary place recommended by a video that Ridley had seen on WatchMOJO.

Narrow highways writhed over a complex landscape of densely wooded ravines and ridges checkered with small fields of tasseled row-crops.  Abandoned farmhouses were decaying next to big accordion-shaped barns collapsed into themselves, some stalwart brick and tile silos sturdily resisting time and decay.  Small creeks emerged from under tunnels of tangled undergrowth and where the streams undercut their banks, squat limestone cliffs stood like pale ghosts in the thickets.  Ridley saw a dead fox squashed on the centerline of the county road.  At the bottom of a long slope, the town clung to the edges of a muddy river, some old, angular mill buildings defending a single bridge that crossed the stream near a dam slick with feathery falling water.  The name of the village was inscribed on a sign sponsored by the local Rotary Club.  Ridley made a couple turns in the town, crossed and recrossed the river and, then, pulled into the shade of some trees at a roadside park next to a big box-shaped bluff wild with foliage and vines and the bleached, pale trunks of dead ash and elms still standing like the columns of a Greek temple on the sheer hillside slopes.  Some garbage cans smelled of rotten food and spilled beer, bee and flies buzzing in sunbeams falling through the leaves, and a noisome privy slouched against a flare of cypress trees.  Ridley knew that the town was infested with cult members from some sinister religious sect and he wondered if there were ritual altars on the upper slopes of the square bluff.  In his initial survey of the town, he had noted a strange-looking structure, standing apart from the other buildings, and modeled, it seemed, on a Mayan pyramid – perhaps, this was the cult’s headquarters.  High-pitched hooting sounds came from the brush plastered along the steep hillside.  Ridley saw some bikes lying in a heap next to a picnic table.  A trio of churches, all alike, stood across the street from the little park.

The plates and screws in Ridley’s legs ached as he labored up a narrow, crooked trail leading toward the top of the bluff.  The hooting continued, voices from invisible people sounding from the undergrowth, and Ridley thought he heard a throbbing undercurrent, faint chanting, perhaps, coming from the other side of the hill.  Perhaps, this would be a true adventure.  He was on edge, hyper-alert to the sounds emerging from the twists and drifts of brush.    

The path emerged from the green gloom and led Ridley to a scuffed, bare clay shelf hanging over the tree tops.  The village was spread out below, lit by the sun mirrored in the steel bins flanking the grain elevator.  Ridley took his camera from his pocket and scanned the valley.  This was the domain of the devil.  A white, shriveled cliff, twisted like a smirking lip, was underfoot.  Ridley felt something on his ankles and calves – it seemed that a small twig or branch there was tickling him.  He looked down and saw that he had planted his left foot in the middle of a bald hump of twigs embedded in sand swarming with ants.  The little red creatures were crawling up his leg.  Ridley hopped up and down and kicked with his leg and, then, lost his balance.  At first, he slid very slowly down the bare, gravel-strewn slope but, then, his speed increased and he was rolling, bouncing against a wall of jagged rocks and, at last, for a second, airborne, falling free from the side of the bluff.

Ridley found himself draped over a tangle of big limbs that storms had knocked off an old tree.  There was blood in his mouth and running into his left eye.  The hillside sloped down and away from where he was suspended, a steep drop-off in the green shadow.  He extricated himself from the sharp broken branches that had gouged and cut him and took a step downhill, but his leg collapsed under him and he fell, rolling again on the slope.  It was level at the bottom, a thicket of thorns and tall brown grass and slender bushes flaring with small yellow and white flowers.         

He crawled for a long time, head down, dragging himself through the rot and debris beneath the bluff.  The phone was no longer in his hand.  At last, he saw a pile of pale gravel ahead of him, the side of the narrow, asphalt road.  He reached the warm black asphalt and rested there panting.  A grain truck appeared at the bend in the road and rolled toward him and Ridley thought that the driver was distracted or that the sun was in his eyes or that he was malignant, malicious, cruel with the intent of driving his big wheels over his broken body.  But the truck gasped a little, let out a sigh of hot air, and stopped in the middle of the road.  

The driver climbed from the truck and approached.  Ridley imagined that he was at the man’s mercy and that soon he would be sacrificed in some horrible ritual.  He remembered the Indians hanged on the banks of the river.  The truckdriver had his phone in his hand.  He knelt by Ridley and asked him about his pain.  A few minutes later, an ambulance appeared to take him to a nearby town where there was a small trauma center at the local hospital.