Ashes to Ashes - Remembering Krem (Part 2/6)

Retold by LoreKeeper Casstiel of the Bridge of Souls on 27 December 2013
Regarding the events on 26 July 2008

As much as I don’t wish to take credit for getting my friends in that mess, it was me encouraging a drunken trip into the dark and gravel of North Dakota off-roading.  That’s right, the same stupid shit that killed one senior in one of the sister high schools every single year.  Brilliant.  Andrew (Nergal) was the least drunk, in fact he and Andrew (Loudon) seemed completely immune to the effects of alcohol, so he drove.  We piled into his sedan after grabbing some supplies from our cars.  I still had my Red Cavalier (this was before I started flying in and using Mom’s green Bravada… that we blew up…) and I searched around in the trunk.

Another disclaimer here.  We were always an odd bunch.  I mean, trench coat mafia running around with display Katanas kind of weird.  Whenever we snuck out after curfew (11:00pm for kids under 18) we were clad in black ninja/matrix apparel and armed with all the knives and swords we owned.  Nergal and Kairos actually had a few guns, a .22 and a 9mm handgun if memory serves.  We transferred them into Nergal’s eclectic trunk of wonders and proceeded on with non-alcoholic high-caffeination doses in hand.

From the lake we took a quick right onto 1604 and then left down highway 49.  49 ran North and South, the lake to the south and the main interstate through the middle of the state about 30 miles North of Beulah.  Before we got to Beulah we reached the first crossroads and took a left down highway 200.  It was the back road of the state.  I commonly took my Cavalier down this scary back road all the way to College in Grand Forks, 350 miles to the East.  We have all seen shit on 200, dense fog, black ice, tons of migrating deer, a stray elk, a pack of coyotes running down the middle of the road.  The road lead through the heart of Hazen, the sister town of Beulah, both born of Krem… the town no one knows about.”

We took a left down a paved country road which winding up at the Garrison Dam, Pick City and Underwood beyond but took another left onto gravel, drawing close to the Neuberger farm.  Most people don’t appreciate light like a drive in the desolate back country.  Nighttime is truly dark outside the towns and their streetlights.  Here was a blackness so thick that the meager beams of our headlights only seemed to reach out thirty feet in front of us.  Later on it was a blessing the moon came out.

We tracked through and then backtracked, trying this bumpy road or that.  We listened to loud metal and managed a haphazard search of the roads right around the spaces the rumors spoke about.  Supposedly you could get to Krem by means of a deep rutted road that reached back to 200 after passing a few dead ends.  Truthfully I have never been a good navigator.  Even now with my understanding of distance and location I can still be overwhelmed by the calculation and motion of a relative position and velocity.  After some time we got pretty lost, well I was lost, we never said we were but we tried to find familiar landmarks to get us back to civilization.  We weren’t scared, not in each other’s company with the lights of the paved roads somewhere to the north and west of us.

We past under a large tree after picking up speed from a shallow hill, getting ready to turn around and head back to the trailer.  At the very bottom of the hill the headlights revealed deep trenches in the road filled with dark water and mud.  The car jounced hard as we bottomed-out and I might have hit my head on the ceiling if not for the yanking restraints of my seat belt. 

That caused us to slow down and when we did we saw something that we might have missed if we would have just blown by at top speed.  It was a barbed wire fence blocking another dirt road, slacked by weather and age.  It was easy to move the flimsy old gate of two strands of barbed wire aside and for us to drive the car through.

Another mile down the road we came up on a wind-belt and a grove of half-collapsed walls and sunken basements.  A crumbled church further down the road.  We didn’t need to discuss it, this was it.  This was the only place it could be and what did we expect it to look like?

We got out of the car and broke out the flashlights to begin our investigations.  We had sobered up nicely by this point, the cool summer air and the singing of the insects brought what was left of Krem into stark relief. 

It was a bit disappointing, truth be told.  Only a half-a-dozen buildings remained along the curve of the overgrown wind belt.  The best of the wood must have been cannibalized when the town reconsolidated, the heart of this supposedly cursed place existed in our town and Hazen now.  The scraps were left behind. Whose great idea was that?  Stoic farmers who refused to believe in the curse.  But this was all speculation, we had no evidence something bad even happened here.

Some of the walls had some old bottles or identifiable debris At least two of the buildings had fire damage, the walls blackened by an old blaze.  Maybe they were burned down these structures with town disappeared.  My imagination ran wild, in my mind’s eye I could see the center of town nestled along this tree row.  A general store, a sheriff’s office, and town hall… coyotes sang in the distance and they sounded very close.

We also saw signs that confused us.  Plastic food wrappers, muddy footprints that didn’t look old, empty Miller light bottles and a plastic bottle fill of tobacco water.  Repulsive gobs of chewing tobacco and sip stuck of the side of a rock pile could have been fresh.  It had been a wet summer with thunderstorms rolling in every couple days, hard to tell in this soggy meadow.

So someone already knew about this place and frequented.  Maybe the damage done to what was left of the town by looters was still ongoing.  Kairos, Nergal, and Loudon were both elated at our success and disappointed by the empty open fields surrounding the center of town.  Of most of the homestead there was no sign.  It was so plain and anti-climactic we decided to do a quick search of the buildings and surrounding fields in the dead of night.  Maybe we would find something that could lend credence to the urban legends.