Dead Echo

  Chapter 1: History

  From the air, the area known colloquially as Leszno’s Acres appeared as a rough rectangle, its southern extremity pulled down slightly to follow the contour of Mill’s Stream. Highway 27, Old Perkins Way, bisected what had originally been almost a thousand acres of hardwood and swamp in its isolation, though everything on the east side of the highway had been sold in the late 1940s and for the most part remained untouched. This stasis, however, was slowly changing as the influence of Macon’s Bluff, a city of almost 45,000 souls ten miles to the south, pushed outward. Already land on the west of 27, almost three hundred and fifty acres cut from the original one thousand, was being scraped clean to accommodate a hundred and fifty unit housing development due to open in the spring of 2014.

  Back on the eastern side of the highway, Leszno’s Acres tracked north to a long defunct spur of the Illinois Central Railway. During the dawn of rail travel it had served the growing cities of Blackburn and Angle Sides for most of a generation, but a mysterious outbreak of smallpox in the early 1900s had decimated Blackburn and business between the two quickly perished. The line limped along for another decade but eventually failed due to incompetent managers and the onset of trucking.

  Gulliver’s Creek dipped away from the wide, muddy Turnley River near the dilapidated bridge the Illinois Central had left in the earth and ran a zig-zag southwest, transecting all that remained of the Acres to its farthest western boundary, the state line. Here Neadles County and Pharsee Parish met in a delineated stalemate south and north, facing each other across a vast tract of pine forest, owned for the past hundred and thirty-three years by the PetaCollins Paper Mill, only recently declared insolvent. Gulliver’s Creek joined Asdlundt Lake at the far southern extreme, yawning an oval five acres back into the forest. The company had stocked the pond years back for employee picnics and other such forgotten get-togethers but a spate of unusually wet seasons had spilled the lake over its bank, stranding and killing most of the fish in spread out oxygen-starved shallow pockets and creating a vast bog that mudded and made untenable most of the southwest corner of Leszno’s Acres.

  And there it was. With boundaries thus defined, the encompassed seven hundred acres were nothing to shock the imagination (as it would in the future) or cause sustained pause. Any magazine on farm and woodland would have contained its various elements, the cleared areas for grazing, the wooded for shade and protection, the ponds and creeks supplying water and irrigation. But it was what had happened there over time that made all the difference, the creation of the thing that refused to lie quiet beneath the earth.