Ask anyone on this strip what lies south of the town and watch a grown farmer suddenly need to be somewhere else. It is the one question out here that everybody privately turns over and nobody will answer aloud. The Board’s usual work is to gather what people say, but on this subject people have made a life’s practice of saying nothing. There is evidence though, scattered and thin and never once gathered in one place, and I have spent this fortnight gathering it. What follows is not what the strip believes. It is what can actually be checked, weighed one piece against another. There is not much of it, and I will say plainly where it runs thin.

Before any of that, ask why no one will speak of the south and you get many different answers, since people do not usually keep a stack of reasons ready for a thing they claim never to think about. The devout give you the Evernal answer: keep your life within sight of your door, let what passes pass, and do not go courting a sorrow by naming it. The old ones give you something older than the faith, that asking after the south is how you get an answer you did not want, and that the map ends where it ends for a kindness and safety. They will tell you the blank paper is not ignorance but a fence, that somebody drew the line and stopped on purpose so the rest of us would not wander past it. I am not here to tell you whether they are right, I am just here to notice. What I notice is that silence this organized is not the absence of a thing, it is the shape left by one. Nobody builds a fence around nothing.

The first piece of evidence is maps. Every route we keep runs north, the Downs road runs north with its waystations and its lit windows, the strip itself is strung along the way to the gate and to Vaelthir. South is different, and the difference is a matter of record. When you read surveyors’ journals they discuss “heading south past the flat lands after the second creek” but all maps end past the last of the Thornby acres right at said creek. While this might not be the most objective metric, when you stare out past the creek it’s all flat. So, there was no geographical impediment to carrying on. The southern blank sits inside an otherwise meticulous record, which means it is not ignorance. It is a decision where someone, at some point, chose to stop looking and recording.

From there to the ruins, which is where the evidence gets softer and I will say so. A number of the older folk will tell you folktales that their parents told them. Stories about a country down south before ours, and they describe it with a consistency I could not ignore even as I could not confirm it. Standing towers of stone. Foundations set in the rock where no family remembers a house. Hundreds of Ashren trees as far as the eye could see. I could not find one living soul who had walked out and seen these things with their own eyes. Every account is inherited, always from a grandfather, always at one remove. By the ordinary rules this is hearsay and I file it as hearsay. But I note that unconnected people who have never met describe the same three particulars in the same order, and that this is not the signature of a rumor freshly invented. Fresh rumors grow in the telling, and this one has worn smooth from memory, the way old stories do when they have been handled for generations. I put it no higher than plausible and unproven.

And here the maps and the memory begin to agree, which is worth pausing on. I said every route we keep runs north, and that is very nearly true. The exception is a single road, and the exception is the whole point. One track runs south from the creek, and you will find it on no map, and you would not call it a road if you came upon it today, because the heather and the thornscrub have been swallowing it for longer than the oldest man on the strip has been alive. But it was a road. Under the growth the old bed is still there, straight and deliberate, laid by people who meant to go somewhere and meant to come back. Nobody clears a bed and sets a track toward nothing. A road is built toward something, and this one was built toward the south, and then it was left to the weeds when whatever it reached stopped being a place anyone would go. You do not have to believe a single grandfather to read a road. This one still remembers where it was trying to go, even as the strip has spent a lifetime forgetting.

Now to the harder matter of the disappearances, and I will be careful, because grief makes bad evidence and I have no wish to add to anyone’s. Many people have gone pale and slow this spring and then simply gone, and the strip has kept its own quiet tally. A disappearance, by itself, has no direction, and I will not pretend otherwise. The only direction in any of this comes from the sightings, and the sightings all point south. So let me ask one thing, and mark it plainly as a question and not a finding. I do not want to peddle needless hope, but not all of the missing were the pale and failing sort. Some were otherwise healthy people, and a healthy person does not only vanish. Sometimes a healthy person leaves. What if some of them went south on their own two feet, and made it somewhere, and never looked back? And what of our three pale visitors? What if they were guiding people instead of haunting them?

Which brings me to the sightings, and to the reason I undertook this review at all. These pages have carried accounts of the strip’s ghosts before, and this fortnight I have gathered more of them than we ever printed and could possibly print. I am not qualified to tell you what a ghost is, because it is not a question the evidence can answer. What I can do is attend to the one feature of these reports that is actually measurable, which is bearing. A light in one of the empty houses does not merely appear, it moves, window by window, from the north end to the south. A grey woman walks south down a road that in recent memory only runs north. A pale figure at the crossing stands facing south. Held in isolation, each of these is nothing but a trick of the dusk. In total, however, they might be something more, because imagination wanders. It does not, as a rule, agree on a heading.

So let me lay the evidence side by side. We have a south the strip has agreed, without ever deciding to, never to speak of. We have that area deliberately left off an otherwise careful map. We have a consistent, unconfirmed memory of an older settlement out in that same area. We have a single road built south with purpose and then left to overgrow. And we have, this spring, a strip full of haunted beings, and every sighting we can place pointing the same way. Not one of these is proof, and I will not call it proof. But five kinds of evidence, of wildly different reliability, gathered by different means and believed by different people, do not usually line up by accident. The convergence is the finding. And the one thing that convergence puts to rest is the comfortable notion that says there is nothing south but empty moor and no reason to go. Nothing does not have to be scrubbed off a map on purpose, nobody keeps a silence around nothing, and nothing does not pull the dead.

And so I will end a careful review with the one uncareful sentence the evidence has earned, and I will put my name under it. There is something south of here. I do not know what it is. I cannot draw it or name it or tell you what it wants, and I will not pretend the thin evidence lets me. But I have weighed all of it, the map that stops, the memory that will not, the road that grew over, the missing, and the dead who have picked a direction, and every last piece leans the same way, and a person who looks at that and still calls the south empty is not being careful, he is being afraid. So I will say the plain thing and let the strip make of it what it will. There is something down there.

Hollis Barrow writes for the Faded Lands Community Board. Documents, old surveys, and firsthand accounts bearing on the land south of the second creek may be sent to these pages by owl and will be held in confidence.