Kristen stumbled into the town like so many that she had serendipitously tripped over in her adventurous nineteen years of life. It was not a particularly beautiful town—or even friendly—but there was something about it that attracted her, like it had once been the “Place-to-Be” a hundred years ago. Its name was even super vanilla: Fairfield, Arkansas.

Maybe that's what she liked the most. It had old bones and giant monolithic city buildings of former prestige now boarded up and forgotten. Main Street was a nostalgist's fairy tale with its original buildings from the turn of the century that smelled like the past when you stepped onto their creaking boards and square nails.

Kristen loitered around the town all day, taking in the views from the visitor center's giant map on a yellowy, glassed-over board on an outside wall. She visited some of the more "famous" haunts of the town: Central Park, the old library, the new library, the zoo (now a reptile sanctuary), the town's first schoolhouse, and its original candy manufacturing warehouse, long abandoned. But what interested her the most—the place she seemed drawn to slavishly through no cognizance or recognition—was the old college dormitory: the only building left standing on a campus that closed after the Civil War.

When Kristen finally made it to the dormitory, the streets surrounding it were empty, as if she had been teleported to a ghost town. What she did not know, what no local chamber of commerce official would have ever told her, was that nobody—not even the cops—visited that section of the town after sundown. It had been shunned for decades as being an "evil fucking place," as Samuel L. Jackson would have concluded.

The dorm itself was charming in a boring sort of way, made out of bright red bricks that looked fresh and unblemished despite their 155-year history. The bricks had been poured, cut, stamped, and fired at a local brick factory that had used slave labor for decades to produce its product. It was famous for the quality of its bricks but infamous for the treatment of its brick-makers, which tended to be mainly Black slave women and their children who were considered to be more easily replaced when broken. No one is sure how many workers lived and died from its horrific working conditions, but someone seemed to expire daily from asphyxiation, heatstroke, cholera, snakebite, crushing, and sometimes even whippings. No one had ever found the burial site of these poor, abused, lost and tortured souls, but no one had ever really tried, since it was such an embarrassment to the town’s Progressive sentiments and civic goals.

The townsfolk just pretended that it had never really happened, demolishing the brick-making plant and building the first interracial college in the state over its original foundations, buried twenty feet below where Kristen stood. The dorm itself was surrounded by a wire fence, which she normally would have scaled, but this one was fifteen feet tall—too high to risk falling from, she decided wisely. So, Kristen walked around its perimeter, hoping to find a hole in the fence, but it was as pristine as the dorm's bricks. She was about to give up when she heard the noise wafting up a few yards into the woods behind her.

Kristen tilted her head up and tried to ascertain what it was that grabbed her attention. It would start as a gust of wind, but then whip through the trees, sounding more like the wailing of mournful mothers grinding their faces into their dead children's shrouds. It made her blood go icy and hot all at the same time. Shaking from fear or freezing, she started to turn back to the warm, comfortable amenities of the main street, but stopped when she heard a faint voice—a child whispering, "Help usssssss, Krisssssstennn"—from a dark void beneath an old prickly holly bush. She hesitated for a moment, her first instinct to bolt, but the child's voice pleaded again, more urgently. "Pleassssse, Krissssstinnnnn... Help usssssss."

Kristen's heart pounded wildly in her chest as she inched toward the holly bush. "H-h-hello? Who's t-there?" she called out in a fractured, frightened voice much higher than normal for her. The wind whipped around her, and the wailing seemed to swirl and circle her body, pushing her toward the dark void, from which she thought she heard the clinking and clanking of ancient machinery in operation. The closer she got to the void, a strong and growing putrefied stench assaulted her senses—a stupefying mix of ammonia, sulfur, and spoiled meat.

Kristen peered into the darkness and saw nothing initially, but then an eerie orange glow lit up the void briefly, unveiling uncountable shadows writhing and wiggling over each other, straining to get out. She held her hand over her mouth to stifle a scream and finally decided that she did not like this town enough to stay one minute more, when the gust of wind hit her back like a pallet of bricks slamming against her tiny frame, vaulting Kristen into the air and straight toward the void.

Kristen screamed as she landed on the holly bush, its thorned leaves cutting into her hands and legs as she felt her body being pulled down into the darkness by a thousand little hands too bloody and too calloused to belong to children made in God's image. She shrieked and screamed for help, feeling the crushing weight of the town's profane response to the murder of so many innocents, grabbing at the rocky soil, frantically kicking to escape as the cursed burial grounds captured another soul.

As she disappeared under the holly bush, the wind died down, its hunger temporarily abated. But deep underground, a young woman's wailing could be heard, another voice of lament added to the dirge for a life lost to the blasted brickworks factory.

The end.