“This is some seriously creepy territory,” Emily says, as they turn from the paved road onto one composed of half dirt, half stone.
“Yeah and this gravel road makes it even better,” Kay concurs, equal parts sarcasm and queasiness from the back seat.
“The funny thing is, I didn’t come this way last time,” Jeremy, their driver, tells them, “thank God for those maps on our phone. I must have taken a wrong turn away from the normal route, but this will work.”
“Wait a second – you’ve been out here before?” Kay gasps.
“Well yeah, whose idea do you think it was?” Emily wonders, smirking as she spins around to face her best friend. “He said he’s got something to show us.”
“That may be true, but…never mind. There’s a little one in the car,” Kay jokes, then glances over at her four year old son, Noah, and his hair. Yet the youth is mostly tuning out all conversation, sitting still and cataloging the scenery from his baby seat.
“I think I might start coming this way instead, though," Jeremy croaks, smiling though serious, pleased with himself, "the gravel road part’s a nice touch.”
"You mean you plan on driving all the way out here again?" Kay says, adds, "this better be good."
“What are we even seeing? You told me but I forget,” Emily says.
“You’ve heard of a gravity hill?” he asks.
“No….”
“Well, okay, a gravity hill they’ll tell you is an optical illusion. There are these places where it looks like you’re going uphill but you’re actually moving downhill. Except…I don’t know, you'll just have to see it. This whole area’s weird.”
Though the directions guiding him that first time were vague, with the false far outweighing the true – a common predicament, in the flood of information now overwhelming everyone online – Jeremy did manage to find this nifty little urban legend, or make that a rural one, just a week ago. Traveling alone and charting these winding roads through the forest, northeast of Stokely, itself a blip on the map and nearly an hour away from their own hometown.
Viewing this hill that initial occasion, at night, was spooky enough, but in a sense less satisfying. Too dark to really make out as much of the horizon, even with proper headlights and all. Now, however, accompanied by his girlfriend, Emily, and her faithful sidekick Kay, not to mention the ultra-impressionable Noah, it should not only prove more fun, showing them this peculiar sight, but also a little easier to discern visually by day.
“Isn’t this cool?” Jeremy asks, at the wheel even though this nearly brand new Beamer belongs to Emily’s parents. With those two out of the state on a mini-vacation, she determined on a whim that this would make the perfect vehicle for this quaint little day trip, even if she personally didn’t feel comfortable driving it and the car wasn’t technically supposed to leave the house.
“Yeah, we’ll see how cool if you scratch up the side of this frickin’ car,” Kay grovels, only three-quarters joking, as this gravel road narrows and overhanging tree branches press ever nearer, on both sides.
“Don’t worry, I think we should be back on solid pavement here soon,” he says.
“Yeah, I think I see it, actually,” Emily seconds, nodding to where this lane ends into an abrupt T-intersection ahead.
Just past where the trees finally open up again, with a charming stone cottage on the right and field to their left, another solid bank of forest directly before them, this stop sign presents its pair of choices. Even though the internet connection is spotty out here, memory and the occasionally cooperative maps on their phones both seem to indicate they should turn left, and so he does.
The three adult occupants are all 19 and have known one another since at least the third grade, possibly longer – on this point memories diverge, and nobody has yet bothered to unearth a yearbook from those elementary days. This pair of females, Jeremy knows, are both artistically inclined, live relatively close to one another, and share similar senses of humor. Unlike them, he's never really had a creative bone in his body, so it's hard to say how all three of them wound up so chummy, years before he and Emily began dating. Once middle school hit, or thereabouts, and it became more apparent that they were more or less central figures in their tiny village's in crowd, of course, everything about their friendship felt like a preordained eventuality, as did his courtship of this amazing woman beside him.
Though somewhat on the thin side, Jeremy's always been tall, and in at least as good of shape as basically every other average kid he knows. Thus he extended a token effort toward athletics, with modest interest and even less success, until his sophomore year. This roughly coincided with his taking up smoking, and also a burgeoning mutual attraction with Miss Emily Garverick. Somewhere along the line, it became obvious to both that the longtime friendship was turning into jokes about flirting, which itself begat actual flirting. Even so, it took them a solid year to really do anything about it, and begin dating in earnest.
Nearly as tall as Jeremy, and a curly haired blonde to his sandy brown, Emily has thus far successfully avoided taking up smoking, and of course she's always had her painting obsession against his total lack of interest in the arts. But in nearly every other aspect they are pretty much the same. They fall into your same basic late teenage category, given to a little bit of partying with alcohol and maybe the occasional weed, nothing else really edgier than this. Still, a little shiftless, which is maybe the product of their nothing town – a town almost as lame as that Stokely or whatever it was they just drove through – and working stupid jobs with no real prospect of anything else on the horizon, though they’d all performed at least decently in school.
Of course, when her lifelong best friend, Kay Hutchison here, found herself with child at the age of 15, that did somewhat complicate matters in her specific case. Especially as baby’s daddy was basically of no use at all. Even in these modern times, there’s a horrific stigma attached to pregnancies at that age, and Kay’s suffered all manner of abuse in the court of public opinion, basically just for deciding on her own that she was quite happy and excited to have this kid. Even Kay's own parents have made little effort to disguise that they’re not exactly thrilled by this development, yet have if nothing else allowed her to remain living at home without pressure to figure out a career, thus far anyway.
Jeremy has just begun to wonder if he made a wrong turn somewhere, when he rounds a corner and realizes they have crossed the top – or is that the bottom? - of the hill he’s been seeking. It just looked different this time, having approached from the opposite direction. And though he says nothing, the first words out of both girls’ mouths are some variation of a “whoa” and a mild curse, marveling at all this graffiti on the road.
Some in paint and some chalk, these markings cover much of the expected bases in defacing the road. Mostly lighter colored and/or pastel, featuring a wild assortment of handwriting styles and subject matter, plenty of names, few actual drawings, but maybe just a little more demented bent than usual, given the nature of this site. Among these are a baby sized chalk outline of a body, an assurance that CLOWNS LIVE HERE, as well as a question written in a girl’s looping cursive, asking simply Do ya love me?
Having reached the bottom of this hill – or the starting line, to be more precise – Jeremy knows he’ll have to turn around, and yet there’s no immediate place for doing so. He continues ahead as the road inclines upward once more, then at the peak of this slight rise, finds a gravel drive leading to a rickety, wooden, two story house, its exterior grey and warping. An old man in the back yard is burning trash in a barrel, and turns slowly to regard them with a dirty glare.
“Ooh hoo hoo!” Kay chortles from the back seat, “did you see that? He looks pissed! I’ll bet he’s tired of this shit.”
“Well yeah!” Emily agrees, “wouldn’t you be? He’s probably burning the bodies of the last dumbass kids to try this!”
“It could be their spirits haunting this place,” Jeremy cracks.
Upon turning around, he creeps down the current hill until bottoming out. Here, after lining up his car as well as possible between two wooden posts that someone painted with single, horizontal purple stripes, to mark the proper starting place, he comes to a complete stop.
“So what is the point of this, anyway?” Kay questions.
“Just watch,” Jeremy tells her, then demonstrates. “Okay, you’ll see that the car is now in neutral and that we are completely stopped, right?”
“Yeah,” both girls reply at once, with a tone of voice suggesting a shrug.
“Okay then, so see what happens...when I take my foot off the brake...,” he mutters, lifting his knee a little more than necessary to show them he has done so.
Though staring at a fairly steep incline, with no gas and the car in neutral, the BMW does indeed begin to ascend this hill. Will continue doing so for approximately a quarter mile, even around a curve in the road. Though Kay insists this must be some sort of trick, especially as she can’t fully see what Jeremy’s up to in the driver’s seat.
“You’re hitting the gas!” she declares.
“But even if I was, it’s in neutral!” he points out, directing both of his hands toward the steering column in the middle. “We were dead stopped and the car’s in neutral!”
“Whoa...,” Emily says, running a hand through her long, curly blonde hair with a wicked, appreciative grin, “that was...tripped out...”
They are stopped at the top of this hill, near where the curve in the road straightened out and momentum ground to a halt at last. Still, no other cars have materialized, which affords them a chance to deconstruct this occurrence. Jeremy shifts the gear into park, and they sit for some seconds in pure silence.
“Okay, so what is this place allegedly about?” Kay asks.
“Well, actually, allegedly,” Jeremy explains, “common sense would bear this out, and there also a number of similar places around the world, but...apparently you are not really moving uphill here. It’s an optical illusion. Apparently we are actually moving downhill. Although, man, I don’t know...it doesn’t look that way, does it? Plus I have another theory on that, which I wanna point out to you guys at some point.”
“Let’s do it again!” Emily cheers, softly clapping her hands together, “I wanna film it!”
Just as Jeremy is about to shift into drive, Kay blurts out a suggestion. "Hey! We should back down the hill. Wouldn’t that prove...something?”
Jeremy weighs this thought for a second, lips pursed, before sharing a glance with Emily. When they shrug in unison, he nods and agrees to give it a try. Throwing the car in reverse, they begin creeping back the way they came, in the same lane, gradually picking up steam as they approach and then reach the longer, straightaway portion.
“This is so weird!” Kay marvels, facing forward again. She extends her arms and flaps her hands to indicate the breadth of this scene. “I mean, look at this! This is clearly a hill!”
“I know!” Jeremy agrees, half turning in his seat toward her.
“I wanna check something,” Kay says, extracting her cell phone. With the photo app pulled up, she points it at the road, though not actually snapping any pictures. “Now what does it look like...,” she wonders, “if I zoom in to crop out the horizon...hmm. No, I guess it still looks like a hill, either way.”
As they bottom out near the purple striped posts, backing ever so slightly past them, they can feel the car strain up the next hill behind them, until Jeremy brakes and then shifts into drive once more. He coasts again to the starting line, and Emily pops her door open, begins climbing out before he's even arrived at a full stop.
“Alright, I’m getting out,” Emily explains, phone in hand, “I’m gonna post this and see what everyone has to say.”
“Good idea,” Kay tells her, “Jeremy here's gonna do the same.”
"I'm gonna do the same?" he questions. "How's that?"
"Yes, because I'm driving now. I gotta find out firsthand if this for real!"
Jeremy waves his hands around at the dashboard, console, and pedals before replying, “but you can see, I’m not performing any, fuh, uh, sleight of hand up here...”
“Yeah, I know, I know, but it’ll drive me nuts not to prove it. Just let me try.”
As Emily exits, Jeremy slides over to accommodate Kay, with Noah remaining alert yet wordless in his child seat. Kay slips in behind the wheel, and they begin moving once more, while Jeremy, though only remembering to do so a quarter of the way through, starts filming their journey on his phone. Noah at last seems fully engaged now, wide eyed and open mouthed, staring out the window - if still not fully comprehending what makes this such a peculiar phenomenon. Kay continually mumbles that she can’t believe this, can’t believe this, and at one point even throws it into park. As expected, the vehicle jerks to a halt, though the instant she switches back to neutral, they begin accelerating all over again.
After rounding that bend in the road, and the car finally stops, Jeremy mutters, “actually, that made me think of a second reason why this is just wrong....”
“Mom, what are we doing here?” Noah questions at last, despite untold minutes of silence throughout this process. This causes both adults in the car to break out laughing, though the kid remains in character, so to speak, appearing completely serious.
“I’m gonna stay behind up here. There’s something else I wanna see,” Kay announces, and then steps out, as Jeremy immediately does the same.
While they stand for a moment in the road, staring down the apparent bottom, a white minivan materializes, creeping down the opposite hill, near the old man's driveway, and pulling up beside Emily at the starting block. A light mist has begun falling, to accompany the thin veil of fog which never evaporated on this cool summer morning. Figuring that this minivan is surely here to commence its own experiment, and can spot them at the top, Jeremy declares that he should move the car, then begins in that direction.
Jeremy executes another nimble turn, on this flat peak bordered by a slight strip of woods and field beyond on both sides, then makes his way down in proper fashion. Still, the minivan has yet to move. The driver is a lone middle aged man, a bit on the hefty side. Emily is leaning against his vehicle, talking to him through the passenger window he has cranked halfway down. Jeremy also hits the button to drop his own window, which Kay must have rolled up, and shouts a hello out to the two of them.
“You tried this before?” Jeremy asks the guy.
“No, but I’ve been meaning to,” he says. He has curly black hair and just the faintest trace of beard stubble, smiles broadly and readily enough, although it does bother Jeremy, for reasons he can't place, that this dude is wearing a business shirt and tie. Not to mention wraparound shades, despite it not being the least bit sunny today. “There’s all kinds of urban legends online about this place, too,” he adds, turning to nod his chin at the road ahead.”
“Yeah, I read some of that junk myself...,” Jeremy replies.
“Urban legends?” Emily asks, perking up, intrigued by this angle.
“Yeah...something about...this girl felt some thump on the back of her car,” the guy tells Emily, “that part must have happened right here? Anyway, supposedly she got to the top of the hill and got out to look, and saw fresh handprints on her trunk lid?” Turning to Jeremy now for confirmation, he asks, “that’s pretty much the story, right? And it all took off from there?”
“Yeah but why would you just randomly get out to look at the top of the next hill? In the middle of nowhere, in the middle of the night? Seems a little too convenient.”
“Exactly, exactly,” the guy agrees, nodding as he stares at the road some more.
“Anyway I don’t really care about any of that crap,” Jeremy allows, “I just want to know what is or isn’t actually happening. But yeah, Emily, allegedly that’s how this all started.”
After the man sighs and says something about he supposes it’s time to try it, they wave and wish him good luck. Jeremy’s watching the minivan in his side mirror, then the rearview, while Emily, though also glancing a couple of times up the road at his progress, crosses and eventually climbs back into the passenger seat. Within thirty seconds, a panting Kay arrives, reclaiming her original spot as well.
“What was that all about?” Jeremy asks.
“Well,” she wheezes, winded though having merely strolled down the road, “you’re probably not gonna wanna hear this, but...I decided to walk it, except with my eyes closed. And if you do that, I mean, you can tell after one step that you’re actually moving uphill. Even though it looks downhill. I mean it’s completely obvious, trust me.”
Emily isn’t sure why, but feels as though she’s been punched in the gut with this revelation. Furthermore that for some strange reason, she’s fighting off the urge to spin around and reach over and – only playfully, of course – strangle her lifelong best friend here. Just wrap her hands around Kay's throat and give it a healthy squeeze. How dare Kay deflate one of the most interesting mornings they’ve experienced in who knows how long, possibly years? But instead, Emily offers a fake, though passably authentic looking smile, and suggests, “hey, didn’t you say something about a lake? The first time you came here?”
“Yeah,” her boyfriend nods, flicks an index finger at the road ahead of them, “I came in from that direction. You drive past this fairly good sized lake. Not much going on, but it's pretty.”
Emily shrugs and offers, “let’s go that way, then.”
They begin moving in this direction. Past the old house and possibly even older man still burning trash in a barrel, eyeing them warily. At the top of that crest, just past the home, there’s another dip and a gradual bend left, down and up another rise, where this road abruptly ends into a more significant one. Faced with this pair of choices, knowing his way home from here, Jeremy turns left.
Something about this terrain reminds Kay of what she always pictured Scotland would look like. Hilly and fog drenched, sure, but abundantly green, too, with the road a series of long sweeping curves. But it’s not exactly a land she would care to walk, say, alone on a moonless night. Which is why it so startles her, bogged down in these thoughts, when Noah speaks up, croaking something about this small cemetery on a hill to their right.
“That one doesn’t have too many doom statues,” he says, pointing a finger in that direction.
“Doom statues?” she and Emily repeat at the same instant, with Jeremy joining in as all three of them share a laugh. Obviously, by this he means tombstones, though she doesn’t bother to correct her son. These little slips of incorrect phrasing will someday seem charming – in fact they already do – and she’s in no hurry to rush through this era.
“No, I guess not,” Kay agrees. As they pass the graveyard, she observes that many of the tombstones are faded, the names barely legible, and some have even fallen over with age and neglect.
“Grandma told me there are ghosts in the doom statues,” Noah adds, in the same deathly serious croak.
Kay clicks her tongue and says, “grandma told you that? I’m gonna have to have a word with that woman...”
“Yeah,” Noah nods, “but only if there are evil men there. And zombies, vampires, or skeletons.”
“Noah honey, that’s not true,” she says, “for one thing, there’s no such thing as zombies or vampires or...well...uh...”
She trails off, fighting back a sudden urge to ask Jeremy to floor it, anything to change the subject matter. But the boy, to his credit, has always been headstrong, he is not easily shaken from a topic that holds his fascination.
“Can I come visit you when you’re in your doom statue?” he asks Kay, peering up at her with expectant eyes.
“Yes, Noah, of course. Now can we drop it?”
“You gotta wait at least five years for that, buddy,” Jeremy jokes, half turning to hold up all five fingers in his right hand.
Everyone laughs, including Kay. Noah doesn’t seem to get the joke but is giggling along with it anyway. Yet even despite the laughter, which feels like a tremendous release at this point, she’s also shuddering, wishing they had never come this way.
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