15

T

here was a hill just off the center of town, a lonely and inexplicable hill: a hill that should not be, for it blighted an otherwise perfectly flat and reasonable landscape.

The hill—and the house that sat upon it—watched over the people and buildings below, though it was the kind of gaze that left the back of one’s neck prickly and uncomfortable.

Without this hill it was just an ordinary Midwestern burg, a town that appeared almost magically when coal was discovered nearby and the rich barons from Chicago needed men to dig it up.

But the vein ran dry faster than in other parts of Illinois, and many of the men who came to dig went elsewhere to do their work, and the town became nothing but a dirt strip in between empty storefronts. The few people that remained spoke hopefully of one