‘Summit County, Ohio is home to ‘Old Towne,’ described as your run-of-the-mill reenactment village by colorful brochures found in motel lobbies of the surrounding region. Pictures inside reveal homesteading women hard at work, churning butter or tending fires that heat their theoretical soups in hanging iron pots. They suggest that, for a small fee, bearded men in stiff flannels will guide you in and around their simple (but sturdy) homes and allow you to take selfies in their simple (but sturdy) chairs, marveling all the while at the complicated (and fragile) ‘magic color box’ you keep in your pocket.

The parking lot of ‘Old Towne’ tells a different story.

The complex is walled off, as one might expect, but the entry gates are permanently closed. The townsfolk sealed them from inside shortly after the 2013 grand opening, during which the reenactors were said to have screamed at the sight of waiting customers in their modern clothes and shining vehicles. These events, and several shouted exchanges over the following hours, remain the last verbal contacts that have been recorded with the people inside ‘Old Towne.’ Transcripts consist mainly of accusations of witchcraft, prayers to God, and desperate threats coupled with the clanging of simple (but sturdy) farm tools. The walls of ‘Old Towne’ are not so thick that they cannot be spoken through and they are not so tall that crumpled letters cannot be thrown overhead, but the reenactors have decided to ignore further attempts to reach them and seem to carry on the illusion of homesteaders living out a miniature apocalypse in a makeshift fortress.

Several theories have emerged in the wake of the ‘Old Towne’ apocalypse, the foremost being that this is all some sort of complex art installation (which would explain why an anonymous entity funds new billboards, prints new flyers, and pays property taxes on the land). It does not explain why no charges were brought against the reenactors when, in July 2017, a woman snuck over the wall with a hand-written guide for their reintegration into modern society and was photographed, several days later, hanging from simple (but sturdy) gallows by a helicopter flyover.

Theories from the furthest fringes would have you believe that the apocalypse truly has befallen ‘Old Towne’ and that we are the doom that manifested in 2013 at the beckoning of some unknown force. The world has certainly grown stranger since then, and we, with out flashing phones and roaring engines, torment them so.’

-excerpt, Autumn by the Wayside

The roads I take become more treacherous- narrow and gravelly or too wide altogether and so busy with other vehicles that I am sure I will be crushed between two well-meaning commuters. I go out of my way going out of my way, often losing myself on dead-end service roads when I could be cruising smoothly down the interstate, wondering what music radiates from towers in the distance. I lose myself trying to lose her.

At first, I wasn’t sure how to feel about the woman that seems to be following me. I thought, maybe, I would be brave enough to face her. She has it all wrong, of course. She writes about the burning of beloved roadside attractions (the strangers, remember?), and the extinction of a species of fern (I am not convinced it did not survive the destruction of the Boone radio station). She writes about the body of a man in a rest stop (I tried to save him) and the near-death of a self-proclaimed witch hunter (who nearly killed me, if memory serves). She mentions a run-in with a predatory shadow (as though cut from dark cloth, crumpled, torn, and stretched) and I admit that it might be my carelessness that let it loose on the world. I had assumed the Black Tailor’s false shadow had died long before it tore free from my socks.

What I mean is that everything could be excused in one way or another if I were to just stop and wait a while and prepare for her to speak her piece. That’s what I intended to do at the next comfortable town: spend a little extra time writing a particularly polished entry while she catches up. But Alice has been acting strange, her pick in the speedometer swinging erratically, taking me in wide circles sometimes, leading me down an off-ramp and then back onto the highway.

“What a shame,” I whispered to myself, “This will make me difficult to follow.”

And, with the thought of her further behind me than ever, there came a great sense of relief.

And then I knew I was running.

‘On a planet inhabited by creatures that can fly, swim, climb, and jump, humanity has historically risen above its terrestrial kin in one physical domain: running. We are not the fastest runners, by any means, but we are certainly the most dedicated, capable of wearing down prey and losing predators over distances their own bodies refuse to endure.

‘The Retrospective on the Human Runner’ should be a celebration of this accomplishment, and it does begin that way, providing peer-reviewed back-pats to the men and women who arrive at the building, dressed in athleisure that reveals the rigid definition of their calves. ‘The Retrospective’ takes a sudden turn at its midpoint, however, and becomes a venue for the owner to air their concerns about the current state of humanity.

‘We are still running,’ he writes under an exhibit featuring a man sitting at a desk, filing his taxes, ‘What are we running from? We cannot outrun the inevitable.’

‘This is running!’ he claims of a scene in a strip club.

‘This is running!’ he claims of a woman paying for coffee.

‘We were not meant to go this far- not yet!’ he says of the International Space Station, orbiting the Earth, ‘It isn’t ready!’

‘The Retrospective on the Human Runner’ should be a short museum and, like many things that go on too long, it leaves the visitor feeling tired and hurt and hardly more capable than they felt when they began.’

It strikes me, upon leaving the ‘The Retrospective,’ that I cannot picture the woman behind me in a car. I cannot see her on a bike, like mine, or with a vehicle of any sort. I have a clear picture in my head of what she might look like, and when I hold that image in my mind, I see her running as well.

-traveler

‘It’s said that there is a tale for every visitor on the shelves of ‘The Library of Urban Legends,’ though the trick, of course, is understanding which is written for whom. Take, for instance, the story of a woman who shook hands with a thing that lurked in her apartment’s garbage chute, only to be pulled inside when she (objectified, first, and later devalued) became garbage herself. Or the man who tried to stage his own kidnapping, who locked himself in the trunk of his car and died weeks later (drinking his own urine and chewing his belt), not because his neighbors did not hear his screams, but because they heard and chose to ignore him. Or the story of a man who shaved his head so smoothly that the world was reflected there just as it was around him (though warped by the curvature of his skull) and who became haunted by thoughts of passersby and their reflected bodies stretching across his scalp, dancing wickedly like candle flames and offering offense to their progenitors. Or the child who slipped into a manhole (its cover lifted and concealed by a flooding street) and who can be seen splashing about on the underside of puddles in the city, the treads of her shoes heavy with mud.

For whom could these tales hold morals?

It is difficult to say whether ‘The Library’s’ run-down aesthetic is by design or due to budgetary restraints. On the one hand, many of the legends (hand-written and folded into haphazard pamphlets) have been lost to hungry insects (or censored by them, who’s to say?). On the other, ‘The Library’ proudly touts what is has dubbed ‘The Whisper Bank,’ its first venture into the digital age. Three kiosks now allow visitors to experience the urban legends as they were meant to be, whispered by voices that seem to half-believe what they are saying- that seem to await the approval of the listener before laughing, as though the story were a joke, or sinking into despair with the understanding that they may very well be real and that the world may have a dreadful sense of irony about it.

Standing in ‘The Library’s’ towering core, it strikes the author as strange that legends of the past spoke of great deeds, that the stories we tell each other now are necessarily tragic.’

I arrive, finally, at ‘The Library of Urban Legends’ and recognize that I have passed it many times. It is situated in a repurposed grain silo, narrow platforms and thick shelves spiraling up the length of structure, terminating in darkness. The outside is clean and smooth- a clever urban camouflage. A run-down silo would attract people, people like myself, who have an eye for the Wayside’s eccentricities. A maintained silo in the countryside may as well be the opposite of a lighthouse on the coast: a building that deflects attention.

For all the work I have put in to finding this place, I have to force myself to stay. It is cramped, claustrophobic. The kiosks whisper incessantly through headphones that dangle off their pegs and the noise creeps up the cement like an infestation of ants. The stories are as unfriendly as the building, as unfriendly as the man who sits at a desk near the door and watches me, wordlessly, though I assure him I am only here to look for one thing.

I look for something like ‘Autumn by the Wayside,’ a part of me still hoping either that there is some fiction to what I have seen or that the same symptoms of the country’s madness have been captured in these papers. A single overlap would be enough to prove that I am not the sole witness to all of this, that someone else has glimpsed it too, even if only through their peripheries.

And I find it.

Someone has written of the drive-in. Someone else has written of an angry, impotent scarecrow in the center of a corn maze.

Someone has written of me- a man with the appearance of a broken porcelain doll, repaired by children. A man whose arrival portends strange events- sometimes violent ones.

Someone has done more than write- someone is following me, curling her toes in my boot prints and sleeping in beds that I have warmed. She is behind me, somewhere, has been for some time, and she is sure that I am as toxic as the exhaust from my bike.

-traveler

The men sit around the table, their paper women visible behind them on the wall. Sebastian, at the head, appears grim in his lack of movement. Caleb appears guilty in his restlessness. Several decks have been brought to the table but they remain unopened and tenuous- each an unanswered question.

Will there be a game tonight?

Will there be another game at all?

I’m not sure what Eddie told them but I trust that it was more heartfelt than anything I could have said. That’s the crux of it all- in order to get in close with those who hold the cards a sacrifice is in order. Something pure, offered violently.

There are many types of friendships and a path to each. The path to common friendship is long and tedious and something that is done almost subconsciously. It consists of a hundred little interactions drawn out over months or years. It comes upon two people like sleep, or love, or old age.

I don’t know when I’ll have the time for something like that.

So, to secure admission to ‘The Library of Urban Legends,’ I chose to pursue the quick and dirty camaraderie of us-vs-them, the sort of friendship and mutual respect that forms when a newcomer seems to offer up themselves for the good of an existing group.

“It was Eddie’s idea,” I tell them.

“Eddie was tired of losing.”

“He knew it would be suspicious if he tried to pull something himself.”

“He said I could join if I threw the game.”

“He said it would be less suspicious because I wouldn’t know what I was doing.”

“But you’ve all been so kind.”

“And my time here is running short.”

“And I couldn’t leave the group like it is.”

Eddie doesn’t say a thing. He doesn’t seem to hear it at first, so sure, is he, that I would be selflessly sucking the venom from their wounds and ingesting the poison myself. Eddie would not turn on Caleb, would not stand up to Sebastian. He was not my first choice, but he was never not an option.

When Eddie does hear me, he does not know what to say. And when he thinks he knows what to say, he says all the wrong things. He tells them everything I told him, that Sebastian was behind the upset shelf and the upset mechanics of the game. He forgets to cite me, though, and by the time he remembers it seems petty. He guarantees that Caleb will not confess to the shelf. He ensures Sebastian will be too angry to think straight.

The room is silent when we are through and the men seem to consider all that has been said. Sebastian (and this is what I feared most) seems unconvinced, and I feel his eyes on me as he clutches a Traitor. He folds it, carefully, over and over.

The cheese, now green around the edges, warms at my chest, wringing out a line of grease that slides down toward my bellybutton. The card has no power over me.

They turn on Eddie all at once, spitting pretzels again, throwing cards. He defends himself, of course, and he tries desperately to trace the lines of my treachery but he buries himself in the holes of the story I told and the others step in to defend me.

I turn to leave, gathering my jacket from the pile on Sebastian’s bed, and I feel him in the room with me. The Traitor in Sebastian’s hand is becoming denser with each bend. It is folded beyond recognition, resisting him now. He pops it in his mouth and starts to chew.

“I’m sorry I blamed you,” he says, “I thought Eddie was a good guy.”

“Me too,” I tell him, “I’m sorry I got involved.”

“Know where you’ll go next?”

“I’ve got family a couple states over,” I tell him.

It’s not a lie.

“You said you were a traveler when you showed up here. Said you were looking for a museum.”

“Never did find it.”

“Well, I think I might know a guy that works there. Could get you in on your way out. We owe you that much for being honest.”

“You don’t owe me anything.”

“Consider it a friendly gesture, then.”

-traveler

“You know I don’t fuck around with that satanic shit,” Eddie says, sitting up through a cloud of cigarette smoke. He grimaces and clutches broken ribs through the brown flannel shirt I’ve lent him. His bandages bulge underneath.

I am homesick, reader- ready to return to my old life on the Wayside. There are dangers there, of course, but there is also space to run from them. Given a room to live in I have begun to claw at the walls like a cornered animal. Given friends I have begun to tear them apart. Sometimes I dream about Veronica and her red door. I dream that I am trapped inside the freezer like so much meat.

I relax my fingers when I feel my nails digging into my palms.

I regard Eddie through the smoke.

“Suit yourself,” I tell him, “But I saw it clear as day- Sebastian pushed the shelf over.”

The cheese itches under my shirt where the top peels away and tugs on the hairs of my chest. I smell it, faintly, in the air that pushes out from my collar. It is rotting.

“It doesn’t matter,” he says, “Sebastian wrote the game.”

There is a moment’s silence between us before he leans forward and reaches for me. I stop him, afraid of revealing Brendan’s talisman.

“I got the letter today,” I tell him, “Seasonal work has ended.”

“Shit,” he says.

“If Sebastian wants me out…”

“You don’t need to stock shelves to play the game.”

“Won’t be able to afford it for long,” I remind him, “You’ve seen how I play. So I’m thinking, if Sebastian already wants me out…”

“Fuck that.”

“If Sebastian wants me out, if he thinks I’m screwing with the game, why not just admit it and head off?”

“It’s not fucking fair,” he says, “That’s why. It’s a slight to your fucking honor, dude.”

“I don’t care what they think,” I lie, “And you’ll know why I’m leaving. Let me do this for you, man. As a friend.”

Eddie huffs and picks and his nailbeds but I know he misses the game.

“Get the guys together this Friday,” I tell him, “I’ll ‘come clean’ and bow out, no problem.”

He is quiet for a long time and when he finally does speak he points to one of the discarded Traitors on the table and shakes his head and smiles.

“Fucking Sebastian,” he laughs, “That thing doesn’t look anything like you.”

-traveler