Come on, he said. Get in the car, he said. It’ll be great, he said. You’ll like it, he said.

You see this coming a mile away, don’t you?

“I’ll take you on a nice, scenic drive through the wine country, raincoaster,” said Metro. “Doesn’t that sound nice?”

Sure did. So into the car hopped one unsuspecting Vancouverite.

I should have suspected something when I spotted the sign that said we were on the road to the dump. “Sanitary landfill,” excuse me.

Eventually we toured quite a slice of the back country, the kind of mountains where the Akeleys and Whatleys confer on strangely bald mountaintops, between huge menhirs placed there by unknown beings long before the Poquassetts settled the land in the tenth century BC.

We passed the dump at about minute fifteen. I should have jumped. The raccoons would have been swift and merciful.

Instead, we did not turn around until well past the dump, well past the reservoir, well past the…fucking pavement’s end. Eventually the gravel turned to rocks and boulders, and Metro was persuaded to give up or sacrifice the undercarriage of the non-off-road-equipped Ford.

We turned around, actually, just past the sign that said we had reached Cowpat Farm.

We had left Lovecraft territory entirely, and entered Shirley Jackson‘s godforsaken lands.