I don’t expect you to believe me. I totally expect you to call bullshit, to call a thousand times bullshit. Or say, “You must have been on some good drugs back in those days, son!” Go right ahead. I would do the same thing. If I hadn’t lived it. But I did live it. And I want you to hear it.
I was young then. Nineteen. I lived in the boonies and I worked an odd graveyard shift in a warehouse as an order picker. That company moved out of state long ago, but in those days they built computer towers to order for businesses. It was just a temp job to me, one that could help me finally get some replacement wheels, since the transmission on my first P.O.S car had gone out in the spring, and I was forced to walk to work and back on the nights I couldn’t bum a ride with somebody. That job was a no-brainer, because the warehouse was within walking distance.
I used to get out of there at odd hours, three or four in the morning. I had a shortcut I took through some fields which had a rough sort of path running through them, and then I would walk down this lonely stretch of road that only had this one old house on it. Long abandoned, it had been some some sort of office space for railroad officials back in the day. It did look rather like a regular house, but old school, with a mansard roof like you see on those old houses in Edward Hopper paintings. It had these spooky dormer windows where I always hoped I wouldn’t see anyone staring out at me. The railroad tracks were only a few hundred yards from the building, but they were just two parallel strips of rust. That stretch of tracks was no longer used.
I used to get spooked walking by the house at four or five in the morning. It was always dark, of course, and I never had the impression that anyone was actually in there. Well, until the whole thing began that summer.
Even today, that road doesn’t get any traffic. And I would have been the only foot traffic that road saw back then, apart from kids playing down there, throwing rocks to knock out the few jagged teeth of glass left in the window frames of the old house. But that would have been in the daytime. There wouldn’t have been anyone around at night but me on that walk home.
One night, cutting through the fields with half a moon above, I saw the strangest thing going on at that house. There was a freakin’ tour bus there. Running. But with its lights off. Parked right next to that falling down house. I saw a bunch of people standing around the bus. They were only silhouettes to me. I had a weird feeling about the whole thing, so I made sure nobody saw me. I stayed in the fields, a good distance behind the house. I got on the road further down that night.
I figured that was a total fluke. Something that would just never be explained in life. Life is full of things like that. But then the next night the tour bus was parked there again. At four in the morning. I hid a little while longer that night and watched people coming out of the house and getting on the dark bus with its motor running. The house was entirely dark the whole time this was going on. Eventually, the bus filled up, I guess. Because it took off down the road, finally turning on its headlights when it started moving in earnest. Soon it was gone. A few hours before dawn. The house was quiet again. I wasn’t going anywhere near it though.
I hadn’t told anyone about what I had seen. I was pretty much a loner then. I only had my mom and I didn’t even talk to her much.
The third night as I crossed the field, I heard the bus motor again. Total disbelief. My curiosity was really starting to gnaw at me. I was hidden, crouched down behind some tall grass, watching silhouette people come out of the dark house and climb aboard the bus, when I heard a crunch on the ground behind me. Instinctively, I grabbed a decent-sized rock lying near me and whirled around to find myself facing a tall man. He was smiling. He wore the uniform of a bus driver. He had the blue cap and jacket. And the tie.
“Would you like to take a closer look?” the stranger asked.
“I don’t want any trouble. I won’t tell or…”
“You have nothing to fear, son,” the silver-haired man promised.
And I believed him. It’s hard to explain this, but he smelled so good. I’ve never smelled any cologne or perfume or anything that’s come close to the way this guy smelled. How can I explain it? He just smelled….good. Not like just sweet-smelling, but also kind and trustworthy. “How can that be a smell?’ you’ll probably scoff. But I’m just telling you how it was.
I kept thinking I was going to get murdered that night. For sure. Even though I trusted him. But I let him lead me to the house. I walked there beside him.
“What you’re going to see is something difficult to see. But I think you should see it anyway.”
“Okay?” I croaked in my nervousness.
I could have just taken off running. Zinged off. But I’d be lying if I didn’t say that the curiosity was burning a hole in the bottom of my soul.
We must have been a few dozen yards from the house when I smelled it. A whiff of the nastiest charred meat you’d never want to eat. It smelled ancient. An aroma like cruelty baking terror.
“What the hell is that awful smell?”
The bus driver guided me by the shoulders towards the house. We went in the back door through what looked to be a wrecked dining hall the railroad guys must have used. There was still old train company stuff hanging on the walls, mostly askew. Old calendars and timetables and stuff. But none of that really had my attention. Because from there I would see a glow of fire from the next room.
“The house is on fire!” I yelled, and started turning to run back out the way we had come in. But the man shook his head no, and continued guiding me forward, his hands steering my shoulders.
We stepped into the next room and I could not believe my eyes. There was a giant collapsed area in the floor of that high-ceilinged room. Inside that hole, I saw burning coal and ash, a slope of it that led downward into the earth. I could see flickering orange light from flames down below. And people were climbing up this burning slope of hot ash. On their hands and knees. Men and women of all ages. They were all naked. Crying out. Weeping and wailing. Many of these refugees from below were badly burned. I saw when one of them turned, a young woman, that her back was covered in long scars and fresh bloody wounds. Then an old man with similar markings on both his front and his back sides made it up and out. Some of those climbing up had mangled limbs that appeared to have been stretched on some medieval rack. It was all too much. I started to tear up and told the driver I wanted to leave. The fumes from the hole and the sight of the tortured bodies had nauseated me and sickened my soul.
He led me outside and I was able to breath a little better, even though I could still smell the stench of the pit. I watched in amazement as several other men in company livery handed clothing to the naked people emerging from the ramshackle house before helping them onto the bus with its motor still running. These clothes didn’t always fit, but the people sure didn’t mind. They seemed in shock, but were also so eager to board the bus. I heard so many different languages being spoken. Those speaking English were uttering words of gratitude. Some were speaking in strange dialects where I could not really understand all their words. But it did sound like a sort of English. Perhaps a very old kind of English.
I looked at the large logo on the side of the bus. “GREAT ESCAPES,” it read. The words were contoured around an image of a white dove in flight.
The bus driver noticed me reading the side of his vehicle.
“Sometimes a hole opens up. A way out. Sometimes it happens naturally, and other times a group of them manages to figure a way to force an opening. Poor buggers. We don’t have long. Maybe a few days if we’re lucky. We have to be discreet. Each night we have to fit a temporary seal in place. To let them know we’re full up on the bus for the night. They can’t break through it. It’s terrible to have to do that to them, but there are rules to what we can do on a rescue mission. Rules from on high. We want to rescue as many as we can, so we work fast, but He finds out eventually. And usually sooner rather than later. Then it’s all over. On to the next assignment. I was in China last week and Venezuela the week before that.”
“ ‘He’, you said? Who is ‘He?’ ”
“He,” the driver repeated, with a heavy underscore of darkness in his voice.
“Oh,” I said. And I knew for sure then.
“I’m not at liberty to talk in anything more than general terms. I can’t admit anything, really. But sometimes I think it’s important that someone on your side of things sees the truth.”
I didn’t know how to reply to that. So I just told him, “I’m going home now.”
The bus driver nodded and went to help some of those burned, excoriated people with the haunted eyes onto the air conditioned tour bus.
I thought of eyes looking like that for centuries, for thousands of years.
As I was walking away, I turned and shouted back, “I hope you get a lot more out! I hope they all make it out!” And I meant it.
“Thanks,” he yelled back, but he was occupied now in his real work.
The next night I had to stay at work past my usual, odd quitting time. I didn’t get out of the warehouse until nearly six a.m.. I walked home in the light instead of the dark. So I wasn’t surprised the tour bus was not parked next to the empty house. I figured it had just picked up its load of refugees and had taken them wherever it is they go.
I walked up to the back of the house and peered in. That’s when I realized the acrid smell was gone. I should have smelled it by then. I decided to step inside just a few paces, to see if I could pick up the horrible whiff. But no, nothing.
I screwed up my courage and creeped into the next room. There I saw a sight even more horrible than the burned, lacerated and mangled bodies I had seen crawling up that ash slope.
I saw that the hole through the floor, what had been a gaping maw in the earth the previous night, had been sealed shut. I knew this was not the temporary seal the bus driver had talked about. The hole had been filled and covered up with a huge mound of pitch which had hardened.
And on top of this black mass, someone with a devilish sense of humor had placed a ROAD CLOSED sign.
I was young then. Nineteen. I lived in the boonies and I worked an odd graveyard shift in a warehouse as an order picker. That company moved out of state long ago, but in those days they built computer towers to order for businesses. It was just a temp job to me, one that could help me finally get some replacement wheels, since the transmission on my first P.O.S car had gone out in the spring, and I was forced to walk to work and back on the nights I couldn’t bum a ride with somebody. That job was a no-brainer, because the warehouse was within walking distance.
I used to get out of there at odd hours, three or four in the morning. I had a shortcut I took through some fields which had a rough sort of path running through them, and then I would walk down this lonely stretch of road that only had this one old house on it. Long abandoned, it had been some some sort of office space for railroad officials back in the day. It did look rather like a regular house, but old school, with a mansard roof like you see on those old houses in Edward Hopper paintings. It had these spooky dormer windows where I always hoped I wouldn’t see anyone staring out at me. The railroad tracks were only a few hundred yards from the building, but they were just two parallel strips of rust. That stretch of tracks was no longer used.
I used to get spooked walking by the house at four or five in the morning. It was always dark, of course, and I never had the impression that anyone was actually in there. Well, until the whole thing began that summer.
Even today, that road doesn’t get any traffic. And I would have been the only foot traffic that road saw back then, apart from kids playing down there, throwing rocks to knock out the few jagged teeth of glass left in the window frames of the old house. But that would have been in the daytime. There wouldn’t have been anyone around at night but me on that walk home.
One night, cutting through the fields with half a moon above, I saw the strangest thing going on at that house. There was a freakin’ tour bus there. Running. But with its lights off. Parked right next to that falling down house. I saw a bunch of people standing around the bus. They were only silhouettes to me. I had a weird feeling about the whole thing, so I made sure nobody saw me. I stayed in the fields, a good distance behind the house. I got on the road further down that night.
I figured that was a total fluke. Something that would just never be explained in life. Life is full of things like that. But then the next night the tour bus was parked there again. At four in the morning. I hid a little while longer that night and watched people coming out of the house and getting on the dark bus with its motor running. The house was entirely dark the whole time this was going on. Eventually, the bus filled up, I guess. Because it took off down the road, finally turning on its headlights when it started moving in earnest. Soon it was gone. A few hours before dawn. The house was quiet again. I wasn’t going anywhere near it though.
I hadn’t told anyone about what I had seen. I was pretty much a loner then. I only had my mom and I didn’t even talk to her much.
The third night as I crossed the field, I heard the bus motor again. Total disbelief. My curiosity was really starting to gnaw at me. I was hidden, crouched down behind some tall grass, watching silhouette people come out of the dark house and climb aboard the bus, when I heard a crunch on the ground behind me. Instinctively, I grabbed a decent-sized rock lying near me and whirled around to find myself facing a tall man. He was smiling. He wore the uniform of a bus driver. He had the blue cap and jacket. And the tie.
“Would you like to take a closer look?” the stranger asked.
“I don’t want any trouble. I won’t tell or…”
“You have nothing to fear, son,” the silver-haired man promised.
And I believed him. It’s hard to explain this, but he smelled so good. I’ve never smelled any cologne or perfume or anything that’s come close to the way this guy smelled. How can I explain it? He just smelled….good. Not like just sweet-smelling, but also kind and trustworthy. “How can that be a smell?’ you’ll probably scoff. But I’m just telling you how it was.
I kept thinking I was going to get murdered that night. For sure. Even though I trusted him. But I let him lead me to the house. I walked there beside him.
“What you’re going to see is something difficult to see. But I think you should see it anyway.”
“Okay?” I croaked in my nervousness.
I could have just taken off running. Zinged off. But I’d be lying if I didn’t say that the curiosity was burning a hole in the bottom of my soul.
We must have been a few dozen yards from the house when I smelled it. A whiff of the nastiest charred meat you’d never want to eat. It smelled ancient. An aroma like cruelty baking terror.
“What the hell is that awful smell?”
The bus driver guided me by the shoulders towards the house. We went in the back door through what looked to be a wrecked dining hall the railroad guys must have used. There was still old train company stuff hanging on the walls, mostly askew. Old calendars and timetables and stuff. But none of that really had my attention. Because from there I would see a glow of fire from the next room.
“The house is on fire!” I yelled, and started turning to run back out the way we had come in. But the man shook his head no, and continued guiding me forward, his hands steering my shoulders.
We stepped into the next room and I could not believe my eyes. There was a giant collapsed area in the floor of that high-ceilinged room. Inside that hole, I saw burning coal and ash, a slope of it that led downward into the earth. I could see flickering orange light from flames down below. And people were climbing up this burning slope of hot ash. On their hands and knees. Men and women of all ages. They were all naked. Crying out. Weeping and wailing. Many of these refugees from below were badly burned. I saw when one of them turned, a young woman, that her back was covered in long scars and fresh bloody wounds. Then an old man with similar markings on both his front and his back sides made it up and out. Some of those climbing up had mangled limbs that appeared to have been stretched on some medieval rack. It was all too much. I started to tear up and told the driver I wanted to leave. The fumes from the hole and the sight of the tortured bodies had nauseated me and sickened my soul.
He led me outside and I was able to breath a little better, even though I could still smell the stench of the pit. I watched in amazement as several other men in company livery handed clothing to the naked people emerging from the ramshackle house before helping them onto the bus with its motor still running. These clothes didn’t always fit, but the people sure didn’t mind. They seemed in shock, but were also so eager to board the bus. I heard so many different languages being spoken. Those speaking English were uttering words of gratitude. Some were speaking in strange dialects where I could not really understand all their words. But it did sound like a sort of English. Perhaps a very old kind of English.
I looked at the large logo on the side of the bus. “GREAT ESCAPES,” it read. The words were contoured around an image of a white dove in flight.
The bus driver noticed me reading the side of his vehicle.
“Sometimes a hole opens up. A way out. Sometimes it happens naturally, and other times a group of them manages to figure a way to force an opening. Poor buggers. We don’t have long. Maybe a few days if we’re lucky. We have to be discreet. Each night we have to fit a temporary seal in place. To let them know we’re full up on the bus for the night. They can’t break through it. It’s terrible to have to do that to them, but there are rules to what we can do on a rescue mission. Rules from on high. We want to rescue as many as we can, so we work fast, but He finds out eventually. And usually sooner rather than later. Then it’s all over. On to the next assignment. I was in China last week and Venezuela the week before that.”
“ ‘He’, you said? Who is ‘He?’ ”
“He,” the driver repeated, with a heavy underscore of darkness in his voice.
“Oh,” I said. And I knew for sure then.
“I’m not at liberty to talk in anything more than general terms. I can’t admit anything, really. But sometimes I think it’s important that someone on your side of things sees the truth.”
I didn’t know how to reply to that. So I just told him, “I’m going home now.”
The bus driver nodded and went to help some of those burned, excoriated people with the haunted eyes onto the air conditioned tour bus.
I thought of eyes looking like that for centuries, for thousands of years.
As I was walking away, I turned and shouted back, “I hope you get a lot more out! I hope they all make it out!” And I meant it.
“Thanks,” he yelled back, but he was occupied now in his real work.
The next night I had to stay at work past my usual, odd quitting time. I didn’t get out of the warehouse until nearly six a.m.. I walked home in the light instead of the dark. So I wasn’t surprised the tour bus was not parked next to the empty house. I figured it had just picked up its load of refugees and had taken them wherever it is they go.
I walked up to the back of the house and peered in. That’s when I realized the acrid smell was gone. I should have smelled it by then. I decided to step inside just a few paces, to see if I could pick up the horrible whiff. But no, nothing.
I screwed up my courage and creeped into the next room. There I saw a sight even more horrible than the burned, lacerated and mangled bodies I had seen crawling up that ash slope.
I saw that the hole through the floor, what had been a gaping maw in the earth the previous night, had been sealed shut. I knew this was not the temporary seal the bus driver had talked about. The hole had been filled and covered up with a huge mound of pitch which had hardened.
And on top of this black mass, someone with a devilish sense of humor had placed a ROAD CLOSED sign.
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