‘Much of the Wayside will appear, to the traveler, prematurely aged. This is mostly due to lack of maintenance (which, in turn, is due to the lack of capital for passion projects). A rare few cases, however, mark the result of failed experiments and these are aged appropriately, though prototypical materials may wear poorly. A traveler will rarely see these experiments in their early days due to confidentiality protocols and a tendency for them to go wrong quickly and so disastrously as to leave no survivors. 

Some suggest this is by design.

‘The Anti-Sleeping Bench’ system in Broadbank, RI has managed to be just durable enough, and just harmless enough, to remain a valid destination since its installation in 2016. More than that, these benches have proven to be something of a seasonal attraction due to their changeable nature.

The pitch is something like this:

Imagine a bench meant to be as inhospitable as possible whilst still performing the minimum duties required for being a bench. Now, imagine all the simple hacks someone might employ to make this bench comfortable enough to sleep on: cushions, stacked boxes, twisted sleeping postures and so on and so forth. NOW, imagine a bench that can alter its design to combat these so-call ‘hacks.’ Imagine a bench system that’s shape can be changed from a central hub accessible only by the local government- a bench that hacks back, if you will (though not literally in this case). 

That is ‘The Anti-Sleeping Bench’ of Broadbank, though it functions a little differently than intended. Broadbank’s political climate is tumultuous and the warring parties have very different feelings about people who need to sleep on park benches. When the liberal party is at the controls, the benches become subdued but still quite uncomfortable. While the conservative party is in power, the benches blossom into wild and everchanging forms to ward off even the loitering sitters. 

The unfortunate truth is that the wealthy in both parties resent the unhomed equally and are only at odds about how massively to inconvenience them. It goes without saying that the voters of Broadbank are roundly depressed. 

-an excerpt, Autumn by the Wayside

Autumn by the Wayside is much like any other guidebook in that its directions are generally limited to the cardinal, which is to say, it mostly just tells you where things are before delving into the vague and sometimes outright dangerous advice is contains about actually navigating the Wayside attractions. I’ve come to appreciate the book for its consistency, at least. 

The entry for ‘A Food Oasis’ raises red flags almost right away.

‘One week before an attempt to reach ‘A Food Oasis,’ a traveler should begin to cut meals in half, or so, and be rid of snacking altogether. A day or two out, the traveler should subsist on coffee and, if they choose, water. Good and hungry, the traveler should proceed to Goose Lake, MI, where three superstores crushed the local groceries and then collapsed in on themselves, leaving the town wholly reliant on food from elsewhere. 

Unless one counts ‘The Food Oasis,’ which appears only to those who most need it (coordinates follow).’

Needless to say I do check the coordinates on a full stomach and find nothing but a rundown park and several scrawny kids who sell me a few cups of foul lemonade for the absurd price of a dollar-per. When I ask about ‘A Food Oasis’ they waggle their eyebrows and roll their eyes, neither wanting to suppress their contempt at this obvious tourist nor wanting to lose a valuable lemonade customer. I leave and begin the starvation diet. 

A week passes and I am hurting. 

When I return to Goose Lake, those same kids are there, standing outside a farmer’s market and still hawking their neon drinks. I push past them and walk up and down, waiting to see what trick ‘The Food Oasis’ has in store for the hungry traveler. When I break down and dig into my wallet to buy an apple, I hear one of the kids snickering. I look back at him and the illusion of the market dissipates- a mirage. 

From behind their lemonade stand, the kids bring a basket of grainy apples and I buy them happily.

-traveler

‘The Monster Simulator’ is billed as the first of a series of unmanned attractions to be installed all along the country’s interstates but I’ve never seen another and it’s been… a decade or two. ‘The Monster Simulator’ itself doesn’t look like it’s seen much maintenance in that time, its parking lot overgrown and its turnstiles spinning freely in their sockets. The building isn’t much to look at- a rusted tin-looking little shack, like the visitor centers you see at the less frequented national parks. 

The inside, though…

‘If this author were to take the sum of his experiences on the Wayside and attempt to identify some secret piece of wisdom that had been shared between its founders, his guess would be: “Make it underground.” 

So much of the Wayside is underground, reader, and here I am not speaking with double meaning. There seems to be this drive to amongst Wayside entrepreneurs to include some subterranean portion in their plans. Sometimes the fancy strikes right away, as one might see in ‘The Museum of American Darkness.’ Sometimes it strikes late, as with the many hidden passages beneath ‘The Absolutely Mundane House’ outside Springfield, Ohio. 

Often it is done in secret and then presented as a little surprise for the unsuspecting visitor. This is the case for ‘The Monster Simulator.’ There is more to it than presents on the surface.’

Having read this passage prior to stopping, I enter the false-upper of ‘The Monster Simulator’ with a puffy jacket and a flashlight, both of which are almost immediately necessary as the inside attempts no further illusion and descends, on stairs dangerously steep, into the sort of hollow pitch black that indicates a chamber. When the door closes behind me, the darkness becomes absolute. I shake out a glowstick and duct tape it to the bottom stair.

For the first time in a while, I feel like I know what I’m doing. 

‘The Monster Simulator’ has me on edge for about ten minutes before it starts to do its thing, which is to say, it starts to do something other than let me wander in the great vacant space beneath the shake. I begin to hear a voice, distant at first, but unmistakably miserable. As the program progresses, the voice becomes loud enough that I’m able to make out the clear boo-hoos of a small child, probably a boy. 

After about ten minutes, that sadness becomes deafening. I deploy ear plugs.

Dim lights appear at the edges of the chamber, revealing it to be rectangular. There are curtains draped haphazardly along the walls. They shift and sometimes pull up entirely. It’s all fairly eerie but the first real shock I get is when the ceiling above me bulges downward and again when the bulge moves to one edge of the chamber and massive mechanical fingers descend along the wall to tentatively feel along the dusty pavement. 

The fingers retract suddenly and the bulges reappear, pressing downward toward me one after the other until the ceiling threatens to crush me into the ground. I suspect there are safeties in place to prevent this sort of thing happening but the place is old and I don’t want to die alone so leap out of the way, kicking off the sudden protrusion as it begins to retract. With that touch, the room is silent, again, and still and it remains that way for a minute or so- long enough for the fight-or-flight to leave my body, anyway. 

I take the walk back to the exit slowly, in case there are more surprises in store. It isn’t until I’ve stepped onto the first stair that I notice something glowing behind me: two luminous eyes, each my own height in diameter and positioned to form the illusion of a giant, its face upside down, peering down at me from above what I now understand to be a child’s bed. 

I’m the monster, here.

-traveler

It’s been about a year since I finally escaped ‘The Library of Book Levers’ which, if my rough estimations are correct, stocked a real-book to lever-book ratio of about 10:1. I understand the importance of displaying a subject in its context, here meaning that the lever-books would look silly on their own and even sillier on a shelf with dozens of other lever-book, but it meant I had to pull a whole lot of books off shelves before things started moving. There’s also something to be said for the ease with which a person, like me, is able to accidentally trigger the first lever when things are light and easy and the contrasting difficulty of finding a similar door-trigger when the situation has devolved and an exit is important. 

‘The Library of Book Levers’ became increasingly difficult to appreciate and navigate the further in I got, is what I’m saying, and it put me off libraries for a while but now I’m here at ‘The Library of Hollowed-Out Books’ and I know, already, that I’m going to regret going inside. 

‘Nobody stashes something mundane in a hollowed out book. Do you know why? Because hollowing out books is harder than it looks. It takes strength and determination to get through a book of any useful size. It takes care to keep the page-edges straight and natural-looking enough to pass a glance.

Then, there’s also the importance of finding the right book which, as we’ve discussed, has to be at least a little thick and probably hardback and, if you’re wanting to be clever, the book should be one that doesn’t seem an outlier on your shelf but, at the same time, certainly can’t be a copy of something you already own. So then there’s the need to hunt down a book that you probably would enjoy owning but, rather than enjoy it, there’s the reducing it to a cover which, as the saying goes, is the least important part. It’s a painful process for any book-lover, this disemboweling and this making-a-pact to never own a legitimate copy of such and such title. Most hollowed-out books function as a sort of tell-tale heart for their creators until they are beyond bearing and are emptied of their valuables and passed on to ‘The Library for Hollowed Books’ which proudly claims to be the nation’s least verbose library and which adamantly denies that one of its hollowed out books contains the winning ticket to a soon-to-expire lottery ticket and further asks that people ‘please stop spreading that rumor because it’s a pain to have to shelve all these books every time some down-on-his-luck wacko thinks he’s the first person to hear it.’’

There’s something very acoustically wrong with ‘The Library of Hollowed-Out Books.’ It’s something to do with the inaccessible honeycomb of open space on the shelves, of having to slip between those shelves carefully, so as not to disturb them, because they are kept close together and because the books they hold aren’t heavy enough to anchor them. Air passes through the books and mimics the muffled static of a stopped-up ear. Real, unhollowed books have been placed at stations throughout as anchor points and I find myself needing to use them, to feel the heft of an unmangled novel- to hear its wooden thunk under my fingers. 

There’s something especially disturbing to me in this collection and it isn’t until I’m leaving that I realize what it is:

These books are all beginnings and ends, their middles pulled out for space.

My story has been all middle for a long, long time. 

-traveler

‘The child-free have a difficult time understanding ‘The Baby Zone’ which is, by all appearances, a dark, baby-sized cavern accompanied by a crudely painted sign indicating its designation as ‘for babies only.’ Someone without children would assume that, under no circumstances, would any caring parent allow their baby to enter ‘The Baby Zone’ unaccompanied. Why would they?

Well.

Babies seem to love it in there. They come out, usually within a day, happier and healthier than they were when they entered. These are facts, verified by grimacing pediatricians and child psychologists, all of whom are bound to admit what they are witnessing but who also feel obligated to say they do not personally recommend babies enter the cavern. If pressed, those same doctors might also admit that babies who have spent a day or two in ‘The Baby Zone’ at any point of their lives tend to make more money as adults and rate themselves as happier than those children who were (and here the doctors airquote) “deprived” of ‘The Zone.’ 

So, to those travelers unburdened by parenthood, the situation is not so clear cut, is it? What parent doesn’t want the best for their child, even if it means making decisions that feel like risks?

It should be noted that ‘The Baby Zone’ rejects the notion of fur-babies, which is to say, it kills trespassing dogs. 

-an excerpt, Autumn by the Wayside