Have you ever played that old game “The Oregon Trail?”

There was a lot of death in that game.  If you played it you probably remember.  The goal is to get from St. Louis to Oregon’s Willamette Valley alive. It’s not easy, for a kid’s game. Your characters pretty regularly drop dead, from typhoid, or dysentery, or drinking poisoned water, or exposure, or the random bear mauling.  

The odd thing about it is that it’s an educational game.  The original Oregon Trail pioneers really did risk life and limb crossing the continent.  They’d bury their dead in random trail-side graves, rarely leaving any markers that lasted.  Those that do remain are practically enshrined now, after preservation efforts made when the youngest of the original pioneers were frail octogenarians.

What the game doesn’t teach you is that the pioneers didn’t stop dropping dead once they got to Oregon.  If you get off the main roads and travel across that still fertile valley on the smaller roads, it won’t take too long before you come across a pioneer cemetery, entirely randomly.  

It’s not that a lot of pioneers suddenly died of buffalo stampedes once they reached Oregon.  Yet it took decades before the little towns were incorporated, platted, and built.  First these towns were situated along rivers, the only practical means of transportation, and only later at crossroads; the roads themselves taking long to develop.  The priorities were farms, then places of employment, mills being the most common.  By the time the new towns could grow large enough to consider building proper town cemeteries, the original pioneer generation was vanishing.

That generation had always been considered a “breed apart.” The society they grew there would always recognize the original pioneers, and their descendants ranked themselves upon the generations of separation.  The pioneers had left their loved ones in lonely graves on the Trail, but now buried them together into little pioneers cemeteries.  Some were little more than family plots on private farmsteads, or little graveyards behind the first generation of log cabin churches.  They were never large, and once the more ‘official’ town cemeteries were consecrated, were never used.

As you could expect, in their disuse, these little cemeteries were neglected.  Weeds over grew them, the little ornamental trees grew into small indistinct copses of trees.  It was a few  decades into the twentieth century when a wave of nostalgia resulted in the creation of historical preservation societies. Some of this focused on maintaining and preserving portions of the Oregon Trail itself.  While the little log cabins were long gone, some of the clapboard houses they would build later sometimes survived to end up on historic registers.  So too, many of the cemeteries were cleaned up and restored.  Some of the prettier ones would get listed in little tourist pamphlets.  These would usually be pleasant little affairs on top of the low rolling hills or buttes in the valley.  They were the sort of places where you could take nice landscape photographs of old headstones, juxtaposed with the living vibrant valley in the background.

The most popular one is, unsurprisingly, a short drive out of Portland.  It has a rundown but picturesque chapel, not built by the pioneers, but by ‘conservationists’ in the 1920s.  It’s also purported to be haunted, in this case by the ghosts of a family annihilated by the father gone mad.  Visitors are likely to be disappointed if they go home and look up the actual history.  The family never existed, and the murders never happened.

Most of the pioneer  cemeteries get no such attention.   A few are tended to, still, by preservation societies, or other caring locals.  Some, those that escaped the attention of the early historical societies, were completely abandoned, unappreciated, and sat forlorn on private property.

I had no idea I had such a cemetery on my property.  I should say, on the property I rented.  I shared a large old farmhouse with several other students as I finished my graduate degree at Oregon State.  I happened to be alone one Saturday afternoon when the landlord came knocking.  This wasn’t something he did often, as the house was in excellent repair.  He owned about a hundred acres of farmland.  The house was built near the road, and while he or his workers would farm grass seed on the back acreage, they used a different access, and we rarely interacted.  

This time he had brought a visitor, a professor from the University, though as he was from the history department, so we had never met.   My landlord knocked on the door, and as I was the only one home, answered it.  He just wanted to inform us that he was visiting the property, with the said professor, so we wouldn’t be alarmed if we saw them treading about the grounds.

It took me a moment to realize what exactly he was saying, and that it wasn’t just some weird practical joke.  There was a pioneer cemetery on his property, and I had no idea it even existed.  The history professor was here to take a look at it.  It wasn’t that the professor was going to do anything with it, it was just that he wanted to confirm what he had found in the records, based on an old survey that had been compiled back in the 1960s.  

The landlord took us across the back “garden.”  It had gone to seed years ago, despite half-hearted attempts by tenants to grow tomatoes and the like.  Back through the copse of trees planted beyond the garden, across a patch of open pasture, and down into a shallow gully full of cottonwood trees and blackberry bushes.  I’d seen this patch out the back window, but never explored it.

The professor had a little GPS device he kept checking, but the landlord knew exactly where the graveyard laid, even if he didn’t exactly know how to reach it at first.  It was the blackberries.  People think of blackberry bushes as a boon, especially in the early summer when they bear fruit, but this Himalayan variety, it’s an invasive species.  It kills everything, just chokes it out.  The landlord hadn’t been back here since the blackberries had been established.  We had to circle around them, looking for a route in, and only finding dead ends.  For a while it looked like it was a lost cause, but finally we found a narrow little path that lead us through, to a wide open spot, not a glade but at least a little forest of cottonwood and some grassy patches.  

I made it almost all the way across the cemetery before I realized I was walking through it. It was the landlord who found the first gravestone. It was well hidden in a tuft of grass between two large exposed roots of a cottonwood tree. “James Penderson. 1835-1895. Father,” it read.

After that, finding the other stones was relatively easy, despite them mostly being smaller and concealed by the foliage. They were all facing the same direction. All laid out in a rough grid pattern, spaced about as far apart as you'd expect in any cemetery.

“Thomas Wintergreen. 1874-1878. Taken by Cholera.”

“Mary Penderson. 1860-1877. Died in Childbirth. Infant, still-born.”

“Hester Wentworth. Died 1888.”

“Prudence Gage. Died 1889.

“Hortense Wentworth. Died 1890.”

We found twenty two in all. Some of the names and dates had eroded off completely. Others were obscure and only partially legible. The professor had brought paper and charcoal to rub out what might be too faint for the eye, with modest success. He took a lot of photos, and made some measurements with a tape measure. And then he was done. It was all he had come here for.

He pointed out that, tall as the cottonwoods were, they couldn't be more than eighty years old, so they hadn't been here when the cemetery was active. At one point, in the ancient past, the river had run through here. By the time the pioneers found it, and dug their first grave, it would have likely been open pasture. This was the bottom of a shallow depression, roughly an elongated ellipse from a bird's eye view. It probably would have been a picturesque spot to lay their loved ones to rest. With that, we headed back.

It struck me as odd, how such a solemn place could be so largely forgotten, hidden away in the weeds. The only interest it had gotten in decades was from this history professor, who only wanted to confirm what had already been recorded long ago. I couldn't imagine a better visual for the word “abandoned” than those lonely tombstones.

The professor and the landlord left, and I forgot all about it.

I didn't completely forget. It was just rarely on my mind. I'd finish a rough series of exams, and then that following weekend while trying to unwind, I would remember it again. “We have a pioneer cemetery on our land.” It was an intrusive thought, but meant nothing to me. What did it matter to me and my interests? Nothing.

I'd visit my aging parents for the holidays. On the long drive home, “We have a pioneer cemetery on our land.”

I'd wake from an intense dream that I couldn't remember. “We have a pioneer cemetery on our land.”

I never thought I'd end up a grave robber.

I suppose that's a lie too, like claiming I had forgotten the graveyard.

The thought had always been there since the beginning, just buried under the surface. It popped up here and there, another intrusive thought when I least expected it. The thought grew louder over time. More appealing. Less transgressive.

I had become interested with the reruns of an old British show about archaeology that somebody had uploaded to youtube. They covered all kinds of digs from all kinds of periods all over the Isles. Neolithic camps. Celtic round houses. Roman tombs. Viking settlements. English Civil War battlefields. The British had thousands of years of history buried under their fields. Here in the US we had nothing even remotely comparable in interest. Except we sort of did.

We have a pioneer cemetery on our land.

I don't know if my interest in the show was legitimate, or maybe my subconscious had led me there. It seemed like easy enough work. You dig. You see what you find. Of course the professionals dug very carefully, they recorded all of the locations and contexts of their finds, and interpreted the history. I could do that too.

I wouldn't have published anywhere, of course. I wasn't a professional. I wouldn't interpret the history, why would I? The history is pretty well known. So there'd be no need to record anything. That would make it easier.

I watched every episode of that show. They talked about grave robbers all the time. They seldom had a site which wasn't disturbed in one way or another. There were the gentlemen antiquarians of the 19th century. Rich fops with too much time on their hands, who dug up old ruins for the fun of it, barely doing any proper record keeping at all. There were the peasants who had robbed out old Norman fortresses and churches to use the stones to build their cottages. There had been the Normans before them who had repurposed older buildings to build their castles.

So what was so bad about grave robbing? Humanity has always been doing it. The only time I could remember it being a serious issue in all of history was when doctors had paid grave robbers to supply them with corpses back in the early Victorian era. Yet that had been a noble cause. They needed to understand anatomy in order to advance the field of medicine, and they needed cadavers to dissect. Ever since then, the mere suggestion of graverobbing has been demonized and stigmatized, often with the most lurid fictional boogeymen. Consider filthy Igor, digging up the grave to supply his master with body parts. His master was a doctor, remember. One of those “villainous” scientists who only wanted to better the world. The victimless crime of graverobbing has now become irrecoverably twisted, its perpetrators depicted as Ed Gein-like perverts and monsters. Yet are archaeologists any better?  Ignoring the archaeology?

Maybe I'm defending myself too much. Maybe I should be ashamed of what I've done.

We had a pioneer cemetery on our land, and I dug it up.

I won't say I didn't hesitate. I spent months telling myself the idea was ridiculous. That it was deeply immoral. That I'd get caught. That I'd be humiliated. That I'd be wasting my time. That I'd be doing a lot of physical labor and have nothing to show for it.

The day I finally went through with it, I didn't hesitate at all. I simply noticed I was home alone and no one would be around to witness me; and I realized that if ever I were to do it, it'd be now. So I stood up, grabbed a shovel from the back shed, headed out past the garden, past the trees, across that pasture, and into that cottonwood gully. By now the blackberry vines were stretching their tendrils past the narrow path we had discovered before. They tore at my pants and the skin underneath. No bother, next time I'd bring hedge clippers and cut them back. Not too vigorously though, inaccessibility meant more privacy for me.

I knew it wouldn't be easy digging a grave. I once helped a friend dig a three foot deep trench for some plumbing he was installing. That took all day. Going six feet deep seemed like a whole new league. The pioneers, I'd always been taught, were a hearty breed. They wouldn't have been so lazy that they'd bury their dead in shallow graves.

The soil, it turned out, was better than I expected. Fairly soft and stable. There were many alternating layers of sand and clay, no doubt deposits from the river that floods regularly, or at least used to before all the levees were built. As I dug the whole deeper, a little of the sand from the sandy layers would pour into the hole, like a baker might dust a layer of wet dough with a little flour, but it was inconsequential compared to the rate that I dug.

It still took me hours. Six feet deep. Maybe seven feet long and four feet wide. I don't know if that's how grave robbers dug down, but it looked to me like how proper grave diggers dug theirs in the movies. Nobody saw me, nobody could have. I was alone and I could do as I pleased here.

The first grave I dug had been in front of a tombstone marking the burial of Abigail Penderson, died age 58. I had no way of knowing, but I assumed she was the wife of, and 'mother', corresponding with James Penderson 'father' whose tombstone we had first found.

I'm not sure what I was expecting. Your shovel doesn't strike the hard surface of a casket the way it does in the movies. Yet there most definitely was a casket. When you scrape away the last of the soil you can see its outline. It was just an old fashioned pine casket. Those elongated hexagons with the trapezoidal end for the head and shoulders; the kind you see in cheesy vampire movies and decorations for haunted houses at Halloween.

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There wasn't any “thunk” when I first struck it with my shovel. It had been rotting for over a hundred and twenty years, turning dark and soft. It crumbled quite easily. It was only just intact enough for you to realize what it was. I had to lift the lid away in several pieces, the hinges, if there had ever been any, were no longer attached.

It hadn't held up its structure, either. The soil had filled in the void space of the coffin. I suppose at first rodents would have tunneled their way in, and then the natural motion of the groundwater slowly filled the space with mud during the wet winter months.

I was aware of what I was doing, while I was doing it, but strangely the whole process felt... sterile. Enough time had passed. There was nothing here but good clean dirt, and beneath that... bones. No stink, no rot, just dry, more or less, bones. There was the white dress she had been buried in as well. The fabric was falling apart, and seemed of little consequence. Bits of lace that fragmented and mixed in with the soil like pieces of so many old leaves. Some of the smaller bones were also broken and rotted away, most were at least discolored, including the skull and pelvis. The teeth seemed the whitest among all the remains. Perhaps some of them were false.

It was the bracelet that caught my eye. Her family had her buried with it, it must have been precious to her. It was gold, not much, but striking. I wondered if the family had been sorry to see it go, forever beyond their reach. It reminded me of a photo I'd seen of the victims of Pompeii. While some bones were missing, here was a clear skeleton of a forearm, half buried in dark soil and darker remnants of a pine coffin. The gold gleamed through it all, as shiny and polished as if it were brand new. Here was my reward. My first archaeological dig, and I'd already struck gold.

Filling in the hole was much easier than digging it. The scar in the earth made it clear the crime I had committed, though nobody would be back here before it filled over with dry leaves and vanished. Nobody would ever know. I went in through the back of the house, up the backstairs and to the shower. While my roommates were home, none of them noticed I was covered in dirt, nobody stopped me. I then returned to my room, and took the bracelet from my pocket to admire it. Obviously nobody but me knew that it even existed. The descendants of that woman weren't even aware of her grave, let alone grave goods. It might as well not exist. There wasn't a lot of gold, I might have been able to get a little money pawning it, but no. This had sentimental value, this was something I was going to keep the rest of my life. My secret, my treasure.

The casket of Peter Moore, which I unburied the next weekend, was more intact. So too were his clothing and skin beneath. It wasn't at all a mummy, just a skeleton with a few patches of skin holding the bones together in the same place they had been in life. His beard was still here, as was some of his hair, which showed he had been balding in life. Other than that, there was little to indicate what he might have looked like. There was no way to tell if the toothy wide grin he bore now reflected a jovial personality that he may have had alive. It did reveal, however, that he had four gold teeth, which were easy to pull.

He had been buried in what was probably his best, something that might have sort of approached a suit. I checked the front pocket, and sure enough, here was more treasure. A gold pocket watch. I don't know much about these things. I don't suspect it was fine quality; it was a working man's pocket watch. But it had been his treasure once, and now it was mine. I turned the little dial and listened, but there was no tick. What a find that could have been. I suppose over time some sand had gotten into the mechanism. I'd have to find a specialist to repair it, but once I had found one the pocket watch would tick again, and I'd hear the same sound the man had.

At his right side, near the hip, was the man's revolver. I don't know what the story was. I hadn't heard of people burying their loved ones with guns. I'd have thought them too practical to leave behind in a grave. Maybe a farmer had no use for a six shooter they might have needed while on the Oregon Trail. Maybe they hadn't made ammunition for it anymore when the man had died. A funny thought occurred to me. Maybe they thought the man would need it in the afterlife, fighting off demons from hell, or the souls of those he had wronged in life. At any rate, it was unloaded, and quite rusty. So, like the pocket watch, I'd have to find a way to get it restored some day.

Third weekend, third grave. Hester Wentworth, died 1888. Maybe it was the calluses on my hand. Maybe it was the muscles in my back, now used to the strain. The actual digging flew by, I hardly remember doing it, even though it would have taken me hours.

I hadn't expected a mummy. I'd seen bones and hair and shriveled pieces of skin, but an intact mummified corpse shocked me. The casket had been solidly preserved, maybe that should have clued me in. Even the hinges worked. The only mark on its surface had been where my shovel had struck it.

I dusted off the exterior, bent over it, opened that lid with only a slightly rusty squeak, and I nearly jumped out of the grave with the sight of that body. She might have appeared this way when they first lowered her into the ground. Except for her eyes. Her eyes were just two bottomless empty sockets.

I couldn't be sure this was how she had appeared, minus the eyes. She looked like a terribly old woman. Perhaps that was brought about by mummification. Her skin was wrinkled as a rotten apple and dry as parchment. Her hair, despite being tied in a bun, was wild, kinky, and bone white. Her bare hands, folded across her chest, still showed traces of the veins and arteries which once ran full of blood. I had no idea how old she had been when she had died, the tombstone hadn't displayed a birth. Perhaps she had been a wizened old woman when she passed, and, except for the eyes, mummification had done little to change her appearance.

I had a strange impression that she had jewelry, heirlooms, secreted in some pocket under her clothing. If she had not been so intact, I would have removed or torn apart the clothing to search. This time I demurred. Not for the sake of human decency, no. I had this irrational fear that if I exposed her dried flesh, I'd find the mummified grossly metastasized tumor that had killed her. Why I thought this, I couldn't say.

I'd still take my artifact, though, my treasure. It was right there, clutched to her chest, beneath her folded hands. It was a book.

It was a very large, heavy thing. When I lifted it out, the woman's arms fell away easily, and there was a large rectangular depression on the remains below. I had to heave it up and out of the six foot deep hole. Come to think of it, I don't remember filling the grave back in either. I must have. During the fourth dig, the hole was no more.

I wish I had studied that book more. It wasn't that I didn't try, it was that it was a difficult read. It was the handwriting that made it so dense. It wasn't that it was bad writing either, no, it was actually very fine. Too good. The writer, who I presume to be Hester Wentwork, wrote in an intricate cursive style, calligraphy, really. It was very fine and small lettering, so stylized that it took a reader a great while to interpret each word.

I suppose she had never intended it to be read. The book was a diary, or something like it, hence the presumption of the authorship. I started in back, and read the entries in a reverse order, skipping over large sections where writing was particularly crabbed, and I assumed were largely redundant in content. Again, I wish I had read more carefully.

Firstly, or should I say at the end, it appears she was aware that she was dying. She didn't mention a specific disease or condition, simply that she was supposing it was “her time” and what should be done upon her death. For years of entries, she describes the daily simple life of a farmer. The weather, the crops, the sales, most of it very mundane, hence why I skipped a lot. She went into detail on her family, relations, and neighbors. Many of the names were of people also buried in the same cemetery. Prudence and Hortense were her sisters, it appears, with Prudence marrying a man named Gage, and Hortense a spinster who never left her side. There was the Wintergreen family. The Pendersons. Somebody named Wokokkon.

She described traveling on the Oregon Trail, and here my interest perked up. She mentions fording rivers, seeing dramatic and surreal landscapes, encounters with Native Americans, some cordial and profitable in trade, others confusing and terrifying. She discussed, in some detail, fallings out she had with other pioneers in the same wagon train, or the soldiers and officers in the various forts they stopped at.. She regularly presented herself as the aggrieved party in these disputes, though I question the reliability of the author in some of those encounters. She describes their camping spots with vivid detail, perhaps because this was when she had found time to write. The images she evoked were haunting, in the literally terrifying sense. The feeling of isolation and exposure in the hostile wilderness are palpable. A high desert cluster of boulders, white as bone, surrounded by whitebark pines bending and whistling in the cold night air, once the fire burned out there was nothing above them but the icy uncaring stars. For all the romance of the Oregon Trail, to have actually put your life on the line must have been a terror.

I tried to read on before this, but I grew weary. I think the handwriting may have been giving me eye strain. Now I wonder if the book didn't want me to read. It mentioned the outset of the trip from St. Louis, the famous starting point of the Oregon Trail, where they had joined up with the Wintergreens. James Penderson and his kin, were from Ohio, it turned out. The Wentworths had been living here near the Pendersons, with Wokokkon, for some number of years before deciding on their migration. Yet there was plenty of life that Hester had lived before her life in Ohio. Albany. Providence. Lexington. Salem. All the time her sisters had been with her, them and Wokokkon. There are other names here, families they knew that did not come with them. Havershams. Molnars. Whateleys. All of the time Wokokkon was with them. If anything, the writing seemed to get harder. Not so much the lettering but the language. Turns of phrases I didn't recognize, slang, compound words unfamiliar to me. It talked about troubles. It talked about wars. It talked about plagues. It talked about the Crown and colonies. Hester must have lived a long life, perhaps her dialect had changed in that time. She talked about other voyages. Over the sea. The old world. Times before that. Always Wokokkon.

From here on I skimmed a few pages. The writing was essentially ineligible, but clearly still Hester's. Only one word I recognized, Wokokkon. It appeared identical regardless of how far back. Every instance stood out among the chicken scratches. It made my head hurt.

I closed the book. It was the last time I opened it. That would have been yesterday. No, the day before.  Wait… it’s all blurring together.   I remember seeing it, but not registering it explicitly. I only stored it in the back of my mind. I suppose only now I got the significance of my observation. I had been reading back to front, back through time. I went back and through what should have been the beginning of Hester's diary, but it only kept going. I had only gotten, perhaps, a sixth of the way through the diary before I stopped. There had been much more. Hester Wentworth had no date of birth on her tombstone, nor her sisters.

There was one grave left.  19 undug graves, but only one I was going to rob.  I knew that now, one more, and I’d be done on the fourth weekend.  I knew which one it would be.  The landlord, professor and I had thought it was just a large unhewn rock when we first saw it.  It took a moment to notice shallow lettering had been carved into one side.  It was too shallow, the stone too rough, for any of us to tell what it had said back then.  But now I know.  I’d recognize those eight letters now anywhere.

I started on a Saturday, as usual.  Thought it would take the normal amount of time.  Again, I didn’t notice time passing.  I didn’t notice anything at all until I felt the strain in my arm and my back. I had been lifting the shovel up over my head in order to toss the soil to the side. I was standing in a hole some eight feet deep.   This grave was deeper than the others.  I didn’t even consider that it wasn’t a grave at all, I simply knew it was one, and I needed to keep digging.

Of course, I’d also need a way out.  I couldn’t just dig myself in.  So I started attacking the top of the foot end of the grave.  Digging myself a ramp.  It took a lot longer.  I made sure it would be long enough and shallow enough that I could keep digging no matter how deep the hole got.  I stopped when it got too dark to see.  I retreated back through the blackberries, across the pasture and garden.  

This time my roommates noticed my condition, covered in dirt, knuckles and calluses bleeding.  They noticed and I didn’t care.  I just grunted a non-explanation, and showered and collapsed into bed.  I couldn’t sleep, what lay beneath that stone called to me.  

I started again at dawn the next day. The hole grew deeper.  The ramp leading out grew longer, having to curve to avoid the roots of a tree.  When it happened, it happened all at once.  I felt the ground shift, sickeningly, as that last strike with the shovel punched through.  

I’d like to think it was reflexes, grace.  It was more of a fall,  I collapsed onto the ramp behind me as the soil gave away.  What had been the bottom of a deep grave had given away, fallen into a hole.  Now all there was left was this hole.  I couldn’t see the bottom.  I don’t think there was a bottom.  The only thing I could see was the sides of this hole, indistinguishable from the hole that I had dug with my own hands.  Alternating thin layers of clay and sand.  All the way down, disappearing into darkness.  

Here was when I realized my horror, my mistake.  The rush of air that came up out of that hole was only the harbinger for what followed.  The air was terribly cold, arctic.  It had a stink worse than death, I don’t understand how air that cold could hold such an intense odor.

Pointlessly, I turned and fled.  I didn’t know what was coming. I knew its name, but not its nature.  Fleeing was all I could do.  

I ran.  I’ve been running since. I only passed through the house to grab my car keys and wallet.  I didn’t stop to explain myself to my shocked roommates.  I didn’t bother to try to warn them.

I’m still driving.  My hands are still filthy.  My sweat had turned the grave dirt to a thin mud, which is now all over the steering wheel and the rest of the interior in reach.  There’s a big brown spot on the radio power button.  I keep turning it on and off.  At first I was waiting for the radio to mention it.  Then I couldn’t listen to it once they did.  I still flick it on for a few seconds just to check it’s still reality.

At first I didn’t know which direction.  I just knew I had to get away from that place as fast as I could, which meant the freeway. I-5.  North or South.  I was already northbound when I thought about the consequences of those two choices.  

If I had gone South, I’d have about 20 hours of road in front of me before I’d get to the Los Angeles metropolis and its network of freeways. That would have been a trap.  By 20 hours, they would have known.  They would have been panicking. They would have been crowding the freeways into gridlock.  I’d never make it the extra hundred miles or so to the border. That would have been the end of my road.

If I had continued Northbound, it’d have been only five or so hours to the Canadian border if I drove fast.  I probably wouldn’t have made it across in my current condition, covered in filth and lacking a passport.  Even if I had, there aren’t many good roads going much further north beyond Vancouver.

So East it was.  I-84.  As the sun set, it cast beautiful color across the great cliffs of the Columbia River Gorge.  The irony would only occur to me slowly, later on.

I only stopped for gas.  Thank god I remembered my wallet.  I’d lost my appetite.  I don’t expect I’ll ever get it back.  The sun came up in what I guess was Wyoming.  It was a broad flat expanse of desert.  I’d never been to this part of the country before.  It was beautiful.  It didn’t look particularly hospitable.  I can see why the Oregon Trail pioneers kept heading west.  Now here I was, on almost an identical route but heading east.  Trying to flee what those pioneers, those witches, had planted in that fertile Oregon soil.

I looked back after the sun had risen, into my rear view memory.  I thought maybe I could see it, but I couldn’t yet.  Maybe it was those rocky mountains.  Maybe it hadn’t risen above the curvature of the earth.  I knew it would soon, I don’t know how, but I did.  What I did notice is that Westbound traffic had stopped completely.  By now people had found out.  This was why I had avoided LA.

Somewhere in Nebraska I did see it.  Coming up over the horizon like a storm cloud.  It was black.  I had expected that.  But deeper in, it was blacker than black.  I didn’t expect that.  How could I?  I still can’t even understand it in my brain.  I can’t describe it, let alone think about it on a higher level.  It’s just a sort of indiscrete black glow, but with form.  And the things on the outside, I don’t know what those are either.  Wisps?  Tendrils?  Roots?   I can’t call them tentacles, tentacles are things that make sense, they’re too normal.  These things defy reasons.

I saw that, then turned the rearview mirror to an extreme angle where I wouldn’t glance at it. For a while, I kept moving it back and looking, the same way I had done by turning the radio off and on.  I don’t know why.  I already knew what I’d see.  It was getting bigger.  And getting closer.  Later on I just snapped the damn mirror off.

I’m still heading East.  Not sure why.  Basic human preservation instincts, I’d guess.  It won’t do me any good but delay the inevitable.  The Oregon Trail in reverse, heading towards doom instead of a new life.  

I don’t know what that thing is.  I know what its name is.  I know that it means the end of the world.  I wish I’d read that book in more detail.  Those witches were behind it.  Summoning something they would never live to see.  I wonder if they prophesied me. That thing was fine and happy until I dug it up.

The Eastbound traffic is getting busy now.  There aren’t many people in these little towns in the middle of the country.  But they all add up.  Now they’re trying to flee east too.  Traffic is slowing down.

I don’t think I’m going to make it to St. Louis.