I was never afraid of small towns.
Small towns are places of secrets, of mysteries, and of histories better left forgotten but I never feared these things. I had grown up in a small town and had seen the ugly black heart that pumped the bile of untold generations through its limbs. I had seen the worst a small town had to offer and it was nothing, nothing like the things that hid in the shadows of skyscrapers or scurried beneath the streets of the cities. Small towns are organic things, like animals gone mad over time, but they were still beasts and as such could be tamed by the right person. Ah, but the city, the city is a thing made not by Man, no, the city is a thing that is far more ancient than humans, who were foolish enough to think we had thought up the concept ourselves.
But that’s what they wanted us to believe. That’s what they always want us to believe.
Mankind was nomadic for a reason, a reason we forgot as we pushed the shadows away with fire because there were things in that darkness that were older than we were, that were hungrier than we were, and that were far, far more diabolical in their thoughts and actions. When we had learned how to stave off the darkness we stopped running and made villages and towns but always made sure to have our own space because it was the treachery of others, the treachery of the anointed that had spelled doom for so many in those grim days of old. The anointed had become traitors to their own, promised lives that would last for all eternity if they served, not understanding that that eternity would be one of servitude. But they served, many of them, and drew people from their tribes into the darkness and into the bellies of the vile things from beyond time.
Humans grew wise to this though and the anointed and their tricks soon stopped working so the darkness created a new trick – the city. A place where all the people would gather in one area, a place where there were deep, dark shadows and places that ran below the earth. Places where the darkness could bide their time until they could feed again. And feed they did and feed they still do because the in moving to the cities Mankind removed the walls that had keep the things at bay. Man had served itself up on a platter.
No, I do not fear the small, isolated town with its inbred ideologies. No, I fear the city and the things that breed in the darkness there and caper and plot. I fear the things that use us, and devour us, and have plans vast and awful for the human race after these things have fed, and well, on us. A day will come when these things have had their fill of Man and they call to the Outer Beasts that lie just beyond the edge of sanity and it is then that Mankind shall finally be no more.
The Spooky World of Chris Ringler 