Introduction

I stood in the gallery, surprised. The new “Rural Life” photo contest had caused me to leave my normally secluded life and travel to Charlotte, NC to view the collection of photography from across the state. I had been enjoying the various landscapes, pictures of freckled faced, overall clad youths and studies on an assortment of farm-life objects: plows, daisies growing in tin pots, wagon wheel sentinels on dirt drives. Then there it was - a black and white photograph of a too familiar road, that road. That road, eternally dark and damp, always leading out of town to the same house, the same now seldom remembered history. The story is all but gone as are those who where there, but I am thrown back tonight, to a time before, a time before I knew of malformed creatures and a darkness so completely void of light that it could seized your spirit in terror, a time when I was waiting beside that road...