Chapter 1 – The Tale

Blackwoods Bend sat directly between the Middle of Nowhere and the back-forty acres of Hell. It would have seemed normal enough, if you just passed right through on the main highway. There wasn’t much to the town itself, and if you blinked you’d miss it. There were houses scattered among the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountain system, which made up the terrain. The Barton River ran through it like an artery, and rural lands bled into suburbia. Just thirty minutes in either direction were outlet malls and modernity, but in Blackwoods Bend time seemed to have settled in the mid-20th Century, and decided that was as far as it was going to move.

There was nothing very much out of the ordinary at first glance, except for Blackwoods Bend Road itself. The infamous road was nothing but a dirt strip that ran through Blackwoods Forest; a name that sounds more vast than it actually was. The forest was about six acres long and approximately twelve acres wide, and it was named for the looming black-barked trees that made up the area.

No one was really certain who planted the blackwood trees there. They weren’t a native species to the region, so they didn’t grow there naturally. Yet, there they stood; tall as time, as big around as the sky, draped with vines and kudzu. Tornadoes came and went, and not one tree around that road was touched. It was always dark there, it was always a little cool—even in the ninety-five degree heat and humidity of August—and it was always misty.

The last occupant to live just shy of Blackwoods Bend Road died in the 1960’s from suicide, and in the note they left they sited the strange occurrences on the Road finally being too much for them. In modern times, a person could get an idea of how big Blackwoods Forest is from looking at a satellite view of the areas that surround it, but no one had ever surveyed it on foot. At least, those that did try to find its specific measurements never returned.

When you lived in Blackwoods Bend all of your life, things really didn’t surprise you that much. While normal cities had their crime rates, and their political debates over what to legalize and when, Blackwoods Bend simply trudged on against the grain of whatever haunted us. The small town existence was your life; people were born, people died, people got married, people got arrested, and people got eaten by some unidentifiable hell-beast. It all trickled down through the grapevine, was processed, and then we moved on.

The things that no one could explain got swept underneath the rug by a tattered old broom, and we pretended that the house was really clean, never mind that the house was also on fire. The passage of hot gossip—as if the information was a black market commodity—was how we all found out about the disappearance of Jessica Hayward, as soon as the day after she vanished. “Blackwoods Bend Road got her. I saw her headin’ off that-a way,” said one of the old miners at The Hilltop, a local convenience store-slash-bar.

“I saw it, too,” someone else proclaimed. “It was that werewolf out there in that holler. Had to be. Carried her off screamin’.”

“You’re full’a shit, Woods,” another miner scoffed. “No, it was definitely one of those big tree monsters.”

“I am tellin’ you, it was angry Indian spirits. That’s what it was that got her,” an elderly lady rasped, turning to face the men as she paid for a carton of Marlboro Reds.

Stories went around and around, but the truth of the matter was that no one knew what got her. The day after her disappearance all of the police patrol vehicles went out in threes, one car behind the other rolling swiftly down Blackwoods Bend Road, calling for her over megaphones. They never got out of their cars, just rode through the bend, back and forth as fast as they could, without losing sight of the car in front of or behind them. Everybody knew that you never stopped your car on Blackwoods Bend Road. You most definitely never got out of the car, and setting the soles of your shoes on its red, clay-dirt surface meant that you must have had a death wish.

It isn’t just that it was spooky. This was a place where no one was sure what happened, or why, but if you didn’t pass through fast enough, you were never heard from again. There were no exceptions to that rule, no matter who you might have been, or where you were from. If you spent longer than the necessary amount of time it took to speed through there, you just seemed to go. This was the reason why the posted speed, for that section of road alone, rose from forty-five miles per hour to seventy, then back down to forty-five.

People were always suspicious of the Road, but there was a noticeable uptick in activity that started in 1965, when the cars started ending up just outside the forest, empty of any and all passengers. It started with one car that belonged to an older man, and it was assumed that he was senile, and that he had gotten out and wandered away. A search party was organized to comb the forest, but then they all vanished without a trace. After that it was assumed that there was a serial killer in the woods. More and more cars started showing up on the other side of Blackwoods Bend Road, belonging to people from all walks of life. Whole families would be in the wind, so it was assumed that someone must have hitched a ride, killed the people, then driven their car to the end of the Road.

The only odd thing about that theory was that there wasn’t a sign of a struggle in any of the cases. It seemed like their occupants had just gotten out, walked off, and disappeared. The car would be parked right at the end of the Road as if it just rolled to a stop. Most of the time, if the cars still had gas in them, they’d still be running. No one was ever able to find a sign of the missing people, or of anyone hiding out there on the Road that could have killed them off. Four or five more men and police officers were lost while out in the woods searching, and eventually the mayor at that time called everything off. He petitioned the county for a new road that would circumvent Blackwoods Bend Road, Highway Seven was constructed, and Blackwoods Bend Road became an abandoned side-road of dirt and dereliction.

We all grew up thinking that it was just a fairy tale to keep us from going out to the woods to do what we weren’t supposed to do, but it became hard to convince ourselves of that when people we knew ourselves started to vanish. By the age of seventeen we all knew of at least one kid who went out there, on a dare, and never returned. Their names would be listed in the yearbook under memorial, and nothing else would ever be said. After a while you just accepted that things just happen on the Road, and in this town.

Wherever you’re from, I’m sure that you’ll understand, at least in part, what I mean. Every town has their boogeymen and their urban legends. Those tales of strange, horrifying things that go on everywhere, even in your backyard under the moonlight, when all the world is asleep. Most of the time you never know it, and life goes on as normal, with only a few so-called crackpots, who say that it happened to them. None of us in Blackwoods Bend were as blessedly oblivious, not after one-hundred years of township, and a few hundred dead or missing.

“We believe that Jessica Hayward has left Blackwoods Bend of her own volition,” the police chief said on the news two nights after Jessica’s disappearance. “Our sincere condolences go to the family, and we hope that she gets in touch with them soon.” When someone from the local newspaper asked the chief if that was all the authorities had to say about the case he just blinked at the woman. “She’s twenty-two. She can do as she pleases.”