Hell City

To any outsider, during the day Hell City is a nautilus of a hundred lights, a sea of greens and blues and yellows and reds, the streets all filled with laughter and song. It's a safe haven of beauty and riches and warmth.

Anyone who lives there can tell you otherwise.

There're potholes in the road, wide and round and hungry. Asphalt and tar are costly. Crews fill them in with something that satisfies the roads and the people, and now there's a wet, meaty squish whenever a tyre rolls over one that people pretend not to hear.

They say not to swim in the lake. No-one does. Far away in the water, there're strange shapes that look like people. Nobody ever goes fishing.

The cotton field is unnervingly stark and blinks at you as you go past.

The cornfield is fine when it the stalks are lush and tall and golden, because when they brush together you can tell yourself it's only a trick of the sunlight and there's nothing walking amongst them, nothing dark and hulking and with teeth meant for tearing.

To an outsider, to someone who drives through during the day and doesn't look twice, Hell City is beautiful.

It isn't. Any insider would tell you so—if they told outsiders anything. If they didn't hide behind smiles and hospitality.

That's just during the day.

Nobody dares to go out during the night, when cicadas sing and deer's scream and the children's lullabies are the same: a wet, throbbing heartbeat that doesn't belong to anything human filling up the dark. The elderly are almost deaf to it. Everyone who comes to Hell City never leaves. The adults don't talk about it. The children who whisper of it in hushed voices disappear within a week.

Nobody dares to go out during the night.

Except when the children do.