When I was a kid, back when my family was still pretending to like one another, we took a trip to Colonial Williamsburg. It’s this place where everything’s like Colonial times—horses and buggies on unpaved streets. There’s stuff like blacksmith shops, too. My sister, Meryl, and I had fun with the employees because if you ask them stuff like which way to Starbucks, they act like they don’t know what you’re talking about. But it got weird after a while. You wondered if they seriously didn’t know it was the twenty-first century. I was ready to go home at the end of the day.
The place on the other side of the hedge is sort of like that. I mean, not just old. Pretty much everything in Europe is old and falling apart and important, but this place takes historic preservation to a whole new level.
“Do you think it’s, like, a theme park?” I say to Travis.
“No one here.”
“Maybe it’s just not open yet. Or closed. Is today Sunday?”
The streets are unpaved, and even if they were, they’re barely wide enough to get one of those little European cars down. But the transportation here is horses, judging from how many are tied to hitching posts, sleeping. There’s not a McDonald’s or a Gap anywhere, only one building with ALEHOUSE painted on it in peeling, old-fashioned lettering. And the plants look bad. Some are overgrown, but a lot of stuff is bare, like the grass died years ago.
“Definitely not the beach.” Travis starts pushing through the brambles.
The brambles have settled into the same shape they were before we went through them. I do not want to go through those bushes again.
Travis must think the same thing because he steps back. “Maybe we should eat lunch first.”
Something about this place is really weirding me out. “Let’s wait for a while. Who knows how long it will take to get back to civilization…and sandwiches.”
Travis thinks about it and gets this worried look on his face. “Okay. Then we should get out of here.” He starts pushing through the brambles again.
“Wait! Maybe we should start looking for a different way out or at least see if anyone around here has a chain saw.”
“You see any people here?”
“There’s horses. And they’re tied up. That means there are people somewhere.” The weird thing is, I sort of want to look around a little bit. This place is cooler than anything else we’ve seen on this trip. At least it’s outside, and Mindy’s not here telling us what to think. “We should look for them.”
Travis glances around. “If there’s people here, they’re really not into mowing and weeding. But if you say so….”
“I do.”
He shrugs but follows me. We walk down the street, which is really more of a pathway with weeds and stuff growing on both sides. I point to the alehouse. “Let’s try in there.”
He nods. “It doesn’t look like the type of place where they’d card.”
The alehouse has steps in front of it. When I put my foot on one, it squeaks and moves under me. I step on a better, less rotted part, but even so, it quivers and shakes.
“This is really weird, Jack. You think maybe the whole town died or something, and there’s nothing but a bunch of dead bodies?”
I remember when we went to Colonial Williamsburg, they told us about all the diseases people got in those days, like yellow fever, black plague, and scarlet fever. Meryl and I joked that all the diseases back then sounded really colorful. But now it’s kind of freaky thinking about some sickness taking out the whole town. Maybe Travis is right, not necessarily that everyone died, but maybe a lot did and the rest decided to get out of Dodge.
But I say, “That’s stupid. There’s no abandoned town in Europe. If there were, someone would turn it into a museum. They’d widen the streets and bring people here by the busload and torture kids on tours.”
“I guess you’re right.”
“Of course I am.”
And to prove how right I am, I walk to the door.
But I still can’t bring myself to go in, so I look through the window. It’s easy because there’s no glass in it, and I remember that a lot of places didn’t have glass windows in the old days, only shutters to pull down at night or if it got cold. I can’t see much. There’s no light inside and nothing moving. We stand there so long that I’m almost expecting someone—possibly a ghost—to come up behind us and ask what we’re doing here. So when Travis says, “Come on!” I jump about three feet.
He laughs. “Not afraid of dead bodies, huh?”
“Nope.” I push open the door.
The room is dark. There are lanterns, but none are lit. It takes my eyes a minute to get used to it. Even so, I see there are people there, sitting on barstools, but they’re really quiet. No music, no laughter, no talking, and when my pupils finally dilate, I realize the people aren’t moving at all, like they’re dead.
But they can’t be dead. If they died long ago in some plague or massacre, their horses wouldn’t still be tied outside, and they’d be reduced to skeletons.
Unless they got mummified. I saw this movie once where this guy killed someone. He mummified her body and sat her in an upstairs window. You couldn’t tell the difference unless you saw her face.
I take a deep breath and let it out real slow, prepping myself to walk around and look at their faces. That’s when it happens.
One of them snores.
“What was that?” Travis says. He’s hugging the door.
“It sounded like a snore.”
“A snore? Like they’re sleeping? All of them?”
“I think so.” I walk over to the side of one guy. He snores, and I see his stomach moving in and out. He’s alive. He’s definitely alive. I’m saved! I don’t have to touch a mummified corpse!
I tap his shoulder. “Hey, bud.”
He doesn’t answer. I shake him harder and yell louder. “Hey! Dude! Hey, you!”
Now that it’s that obvious they’re not zombies or anything, Travis steps forward and starts shaking a different guy. “We’re sorry to bother you, but we’re looking for directions.”
Nothing.
There are five guys on stools and the bartender asleep on the floor. Trav and I spend five minutes shaking, yelling, pulling, and practically dancing with them. They’re definitely alive, but they’re totally asleep.
“I think we need to try another place,” I tell Trav.
There’s only one person at the next shop, an old lady asleep with a bunch of falling-apart hats on stands. We shake her, but she doesn’t wake.
We try three more places, and they’re all the same.
“Freaky,” Travis says when we step out of the greengrocer’s. There was nothing in the bins, not a single grape or carrot. The grocer was napping on the floor. “Can we leave now? A grocer without groceries is just…wrong.”
I sigh. “I guess so.”
But when I turn the corner, I stop.
“Whoa!”