That was what the original inhabitants called it, anyway. Inhabitants is perhaps the wrong word. Nobody ever lived there. The local tribes stayed far away from that place. Said that their children were born wrong and their cattle grew oozing sores even at the borders of the forest. That the water tasted sour and even the smallest ponds or streams seemed not to have a bottom, like they were cracks in the very fabric of the earth. Animals that walked on two legs like men. Men that crawled on all fours like animals.
Those were things we were not told when we sent in the settlers and the soldiers. Ah – but we wouldn’t have listened. We just went right on ahead, churned up the poisoned earth and threw shacks on top. Killed or drove out anyone who would’ve warned us that the land was sick. Farmers pulling up lumpen tubers, enough food to a grant their family another year of slow malnourishment. Missing children, here or there. Tales of abandoned homesteads, deeper in the woods. If you saw them you just kept on walking, you didn’t even make to turn your head towards those sagging windows filled with thorns.
None of this stopped us. Then came the mills, and the factories, staining the bricks with soot the colour of bile, churning out ugly tools designed to break, pumping effluent as deep as it would go. Slums spiralling outwards, ash falling like snow. Workers in the factory had accidents often, limbs getting snarled up in those machines that wouldn’t stop, not even to pull the shards of bone from their teeth. Everyone eventually got sick, withering even as they threw themselves into their menial tasks with vigour. Those left on the factory floors just sneered, as if they didn’t realise that they too would be next, that the whole enterprise wouldn’t allow anything other than an exact specification of human misery.
Then the world moved on. Muscle and bone were supplanted with steel. Dull human paste was at record surplus. Most left, sensing the rot had already overtaken them and yet desperate to outrun it, becoming the new dregs, barflies and brutes of the surrounding districts, tracking that stain from the deep in with them like shit on shoes. Others stayed, becoming the ancestors of those men and women you see at the side of the road, morning through to night. Just sitting there, waiting.
So the factories grew cold and hollow. Houses were found empty on smoggy mornings, the doors unlocked and banging in the wind, their owners gone, likely to become derelicts in a foreign town. Cottages collapsed into their cellars, cellars collapsed further still into sinkholes, underground streams. Even the roads buckled and warped in the summer sun, with nobody ever coming to tend to them again. Especially the paths that jutted off from the main trunks, leading into tall grass or gates held together with rusted barbed wire and plastic ties.
They say a bunch of scientists went there a few years ago, with fancy radar imaging gear. Planned to map out all the land for mineral exploration. Turns out, not only is the ground barren grit, fit only for weeds and trees the size of children – not only that, the sinkholes are everywhere, just a few meters below the surface. Like swiss cheese. Or a wasps nest. I saw the pictures online. There was one huge one down there as well. Like an underground lake or something, or even bigger than that. They packed up pretty sharpish after that. Guess they didn’t like what they saw.
Anyway…if you’re still planning to make the trip, I’d recommend driving through there as fast as humanly possible. Take plenty of food and water. If you hit anything, don’t get out of your vehicle. No, that’s not a joke. Just keep driving, trust me.
Alexander James 