The Last Man in Jasper, Virginia

turner cline

Silence looms in the pines and hills of Virginia, by the town of Jasper, where the mountains are as old as any continent in the memory of man. I was first attracted to the town, and the peculiar region, during a road trip. I was in my twenty-second year and eager to venture out and explore the foggy heights and swampy lows of the South before starting up the mundane rush of graduate school. What dramatically struck me was the sharp change of landscape. The pine trees and hemlocks which followed me on most of my drive into the mountains had vanished and gave way to a vast desert of stone. There was neither grass nor bush within eyesight, and the only thing indicating that vegetation once lived in these barren lands were the remains of dead trees. The trees were branchless, nothing more than empty husks of wood baking in the sun.

Driving past the collapsed, rusty gate to Jasper, my cheeks flushed with embarrassment, as the wooden watchmen stood with great vigilance, and looked down upon me as if they resented my ever being there, and were eager for me to leave. Up the hill, I passed many cabins and homes — long since abandoned and collapsing with age. A few of the homesteads were marked by only crumbling chimneys, and others with sunken and droopy roofs which pulled at the walls of the homes with immense weight. The abandoned shacks provided a much-needed visual contrast, as the exposed heaps of pink rock reflected all manner of light that hit it, leaving me nearly blind. 

Rolling my sluggish car up the steep mountain road, more and more homes began to clutter the rosy calamity. These homes seemed in more pristine shape than the outlying ruins, yet atoned for their condition by providing details that informed me of the dreadful zeal for which their owners abandoned them. Front doors hung wide open, clinging desperately with their hinges to the homes they were built to protect. The rust-colored yards were littered with trinkets and clothes, memories too heavy to be carried away. Pangs of sadness crept into my chest and throat when I looked upon the skeleton of a tricycle sinking into its muddy grave. A grizzlier place to live a childhood I could scarcely imagine. The Mainstreet had little in means to justify its name— a general store, an old church, and a large building of dusty brick with a large metal sign. Getting out of my car in the empty and cracked parking lot, I began my tour of desolation. A pathetic-looking marquee greeted me on the sidewalk to the front doors of the brick building. It was askew, kneeling on its three remaining pole legs with great burden. Had nobody bothered to let it know that its services were no longer necessary? The sign informed me in shy letters that I was looking at City Hall. Letting myself inside the lobby, I saw no fellow visitor, politician, or even a secretary at their station. The air was foul with the smell of mildew, and the remains of a small skeleton by a water fountain, likely that of a cat or opossum, startled my senses with a primordial shock. I must have been the first person to have made the pilgrimage into the establishment in several years. Turning on the pale lights, the corridors were lit up and deafened by the whining of fluorescent bulbs and the deathly chorus of flies and spiders, belting out pops and sizzles from the heat of this long deserted illuminance.

Along the moldy walls, parallel to a series of decrepit offices belonging to the sheriff, mayor, and other officials, was a faded mural that gave a timeline of the community in cracked and faded illustrations. Much of the early history of the community was illegible, having peeled off the wall in massive sheets which now laid flaccid and defeated on the floor. However, the work depicting the early decades of the twentieth century was still largely intact, and the bold colors and smiling faces of those painted showed that the artist felt great pride and belonging in the town of Jasper. It struck me that not long ago this village, before becoming the desolate heap on which I currently stood, pumped the heart of the state with its shiny black blood, and was as lively as any of the cities on the sea. Miners in blue denim walked into the mines with grins that gleamed like the picks they carried. Their painted wives and pastel children picnicked and played on the creek banks, along emerald wood lines. 

Venturing out from that ghastly place, I strolled among the neighboring buildings to see what it had left to offer. The general store, which seemed like an insignificant shack when I first saw it from the road, quickly caught my notice. The store was a two-story wooden structure in massive disrepair, with rouge planks, nails, and shingles springing out from nearly every angle of the colossal shack like the thorns of some wicked thicket. The structure was quite weak, and from my perception creaked and flexed with every slight assault by the breeze. The strangled whistling and murmurs of an old radio crept out of the structure and invited me in, like the siren’s sweet song, and gave me hope that there may be some other soul in this bleached desert to relieve me of my overwhelming isolation and to provide some context on how this place became the ruin for which my curiosity was linked.

Entering the creaking doors to the forlorn establishment, I was first greeted by shelves upon shelves of bottled water. The plastic bottles seemed alien compared to their drab and wooden surroundings, and light reflecting from their translucent sheen gave the room the eerie feel of some lifeless aquarium. A bright yellow placard clung to the bottom shelf, and in bold red letters warned of the dangers of drinking the water from one's well or from streams and springs.

The creaking of the floorboards gave away my presence to the store clerk, whose sudden motion before me aroused quite a frightful stir. He too was equally shocked by my visage, looking at me as if I was more likely to be some burglar or ghastly phantom as opposed to a common customer. After staring me down with his inquisitive eyes and stony brow for what felt like a small eternity, his expression relaxed and we went forward with exchanging pleasantries and introductions. His name was Danny Sloan, and he informed me with a prideful boast that he had run this general store since he was only seventeen years old. He was quite gregarious, some would say excessively so, and often told the same anecdotes in three different ways before he was satisfied with the topic and switched to another tale. It took many attempts of questioning and probing for him to tell most of the details on any given topic and his fat tongue rolled sloppily around the concaves of his mouth with each syllable, making his tales a verbal slurry and filling my mind with images of barking bulldogs, their slobbering jowls only restrained by the chain that binds the beast. Mr. Sloan was an older man of an indiscernible age. He had good command over his movement and was quite agile, showing that he must have been no older than my father. Yet his face and body were well worn and wrinkled and folded fluidly with every movement of his mouth. Opossum grey hair grew around his scalp in indiscriminate patches of crabgrass, forming a bastardized tonsure. A thick mustache, in desperate need of grooming, drooped down from his fatty nose and limply hung around cracked purple lips. He bore a sallow complexion, which erupted with a rash of blisters along his temples. A pair of spectacles rested across the clerk's face and would have given him an air of sophistication if not for a missing left lens. He was not distracted by this missing glass and further took no notice of my incessant staring.

Between jabbering spells of long since forgotten fishing trips and the misadventures of distant cousins, I made my curiosities for the current circumstances of his village known. He took no interest in my question, and instead responded by informing me that he rented out rooms above the store. The message was clear. If I wanted the answers I sought, I would have to wait till late at night, when such questions can be answered without even the prying eyes of the sun taking notice. Eager for the truth, and feeling pity for the lonely old clerk, I rented the apartment for the evening. It was not till after midnight, spending the afternoon playing games of checkers and dining on the finest canned sausages and lite beer Mr. Sloan had to offer, that I dared again to broach the subject of why this village seemed better suited to the outback of Nevada or Utah than the hills of Virginia. He sipped on his beer and pondered. I first thought that he was going to ignore my questioning again, or simply head home and let me sleep; however, I now realize that he was waiting for himself, loosening his tongue with enough booze that he could be as far away mentally as the subject matter that eluded him. Collecting his thoughts and memories and distinguishing from what was fact, and what had withered into myth or dream, he began to speak 

He told me that it must have been the summer of 1962 when things began to change around the community. That was when Joe Cobb, his neighbor since childhood, went down into the mines as all Cobb men had done for three generations. He was part of a special crew sent deep into the belly of the mine to find a new vein of coal. The almanac was predicting a heavy winter, and the mine bosses wanted to maximize their sales before the rest of the tunnels proved too dry to be profitable. They must have been nine-hundred meters in when they found, under the desolate shale and rock, a substance so alien that none had ever even heard of witnesses to something so bizarre. It was soft and malleable, tearing off into heavy lumps when hit with a pickaxe. After each successful swing, the substance produced a tart, nauseating fragrance which choked and dominated the miners. The clay, if it could be called such a thing, had the color of putrid bile with sickly yellows and pinks battling for dominance among the gummy sediments. Cobb’s crew went to bring a sample of the clay to the bosses to see if they knew what it was, but as soon as it came into contact with the fresh air and sun it hardened into an orange scab and crumbled to ashes in their gloves. 

The crew — concerned with what they encountered in the dark— filed a report on the matter with the foreman, Malcolm Holmes, who promised to bring in a geologist from Charleston to examine the mine and the anomalous clay, but if such a letter was ever sent, it was not their business to know. In the weeks that followed, changes began to creep into the village. The water, both in the taps and creeks, became oily and rank. Washing dishes and taking baths became a great challenge. After each wash, a thin, slimy film clung onto the surface of everything it came into contact with and required harsh brushing to remove. Even the bitter blackness of coffee could barely mask the metallic flavor of the water. Children, who would often play in the creek after they finished their classes and chores, began to avoid it as within hours of swimming their bodies became covered in burning, bumpy rashes. Dead fish became regular passengers down the winding creek, riding warm sheets of putrid foam. Wildflowers, which darted the valleys down from the village that was often sources of comfort and beauty in the summer heat, began to wither and fold in on themselves like brown and gray streamers. Dogs would bark at all hours of the day with manic fury, and bite at their fur till they were covered with bloody bald spots. The barking and whining got so bad that Malcolm formed a posse of volunteers and paid them a day's wages to track down every dog in town. The hounds were brought out into the woods, taken to a shallow pit, and swiftly put down. Many in the village felt anxious about the matter. Sloan recalled that there were several protests around the foreman's office, wanting clean water and a survey on what was causing all of this ruckus and poisonings but to no avail. Reverend Marshal Peters, whose sermons often focused on the divine virtues of labor, turned to other groups of virtue: the patient and the meek.

These sermons were of little comfort to the townsfolk. Week after week, their adgitations and anxieties mounted, bulging like psychic tumors into their already strained minds. Initially, the mental effects of this befallen curse went unnoticed. The erosion of simple niceties and politeness was just a mere trifle compared to the noticeable changes to the flora and fauna of the valley, but within months the growing madness within the populace was unavoidable. Few could walk down the street with their neighbor, kin, or even friend without the pair swiftly entering a hot argument and both parties leaving with clenched teeth and crimson faces. Drunken fights became so common and bloody that knives were banned from the canteen. This did little to dissuade the violence, and one fateful night a miner by the name of Glenn fell victim to that weakness when his eye was forked out of its socket, like canned meat. 

One day, Sandy, Joe’s wife, came into Danny’s store to buy some lye soap. Her soap at home was not strong enough to wash the smell from her and her children's clothes. She was expecting her fifth child and was nearing the end of her great waiting. This had been the hardest— and she hoped the last— pregnancy that she had to endure and was quite eager to be done with the whole ordeal. When she waddled up to the counter, with a poke of soap and groceries, she seemed to be in an awful spell. Her skin was pale and yellowish, and her brow was clammy with sweat. Danny said not a thing, not wanting to get a rise out of her, and sent her down the street. That very night he was awoken by the sounds of screaming and panicked running from outside his home. Sandy had awoken with the pain of labor, and Joe sent out his boys to search for a midwife. Danny dared not go back to sleep as his own fears of what could happen would surely permeate his dreams. Just before the sun pinked the sky, a change in the chorus of whaling occurred outside which shivered him to his core. Sandy’s voice fell quiet, and he heard the joyous cries that only the first breath of air can produce. However, this babe’s solo was sharply interrupted by the rusty whaling of a man's scream, which creaked and cracked like an old machine buckling from its own motion. With this, Danny knew the worst had come to pass. 

The midwife left to alert the preacher and the mortician and give them the bad news. Joe, disgusted by the wretch that made him a widower and left its brothers and sisters without a mother, cast the creature out of his home. Danny saw with astonishment as Joe took the child in an old blanket to the back of the home, where the family typically left scraps and garbage to be picked over by coyotes, leaving it there for him and the world to forget. Nearing the bundle, he was filled with disgust and pity. The creature, which was so removed from humanity in its appearance that using any other word but creature to describe it felt absurd, flapped and thrust its body defiantly in the morning dew. It was around the length of an adult's forearm and appeared quite heavy, weighing several pounds from Danny’s estimation. Its body was severely deformed with its arms and legs fused together with the chest as if the torso was that of a great fat worm or the freshly formed chrysalis of a butterfly. Its skin, still soaked in viscera, was covered with bright red blisters which erupted with pus after just the gentlest of breezes. The creature's head was elongated and dented as if the skull was so soft that it stretched like putty from its immense weight. Despite its enormous skull, the skin of its head and body hung loosely over the flesh of the creature and sagged into wrinkling folds towards the blanket. Down what must have been the creature's sternum, the skin had been pulled tight and was translucent, revealing a labyrinth of veins and muscle tissue. It took no notice of its visitor and seemed only preoccupied with its own survival. Darting its large, glassy eyes as far up and down and left and right that it could go, the creature mouthed at the weeds and crabgrass, trying to sup from a breast that would never come. Danny, mortified by what he saw, fled back to his home while the sun rose. He tried to put the vision of the wretched child and its fate out of his lucid mind and confined it to the realm of nightmare with little success.

Within three days, Stacy Cobb lay in the dirt with the worms and beetles. Joe, so distraught from his loss, sent his children off to Wilksburg to stay with an old aunt of his. He then went off to work, only returning up from the abyss in the glow of sunset and rarely for food and water. Many of the womenfolk, hearing of Stacy’s fate, came to the conclusion that whatever cruel fate befell her was linked to what was killing the fish and driving the dogs to madness. They thought that it must have been something contaminating the water, being dumped upstream by the mining company. Though a few of the more supernatural and spiritual folk speculated that something must have been seeping into the underground lakes and reservoirs which supplied the local springs, disturbed for the first time in millions of years by the miners' constant bombardment of the mountain's fragile core. One by one, the wives and their children trickled out of accursed Jasper with the clothes on their backs and what few treasures they had to carry, leaving their husbands behind to work the mines. And to the mines, they went. Soon enough, these men stayed in the mine for as long as Cobb, preferring the heat and dust and darkness to the loneliness of their empty homes, which sat picked and vacant like the carcass long scavenged by vultures. In the mines, the seasons passed unnoticed. Sunshine, leaves, and snow all feel the same underground. To keep the men from starving, Malcolm had Mr. Sloan would send crackers, jams, and meat down the elevator at least once a day. By nightfall, empty jars and wagons of coal were the only things that rode up from the abyss.

This went on for two years as things continued to deteriorate in the village. The trees, after shedding their leaves in the first fall never recolored in the spring, and lost their limbs so that only their great trunks could stand erect, like spears warding off all who may enter the valley. The grass too, the basest protector of the soil, soon fell, dissolving into brown clumps with bitter rain. The wildlife became scarcer and scarcer to find. Occasionally, a fox with patches of fur and bleeding tumors would stumble apathetically into town before leaving with the same disinterest that it arrived with. Once on a hike, Malcolm found two frogs fused together, conjoined at the back, and flopping over and over again in order to try and hunt insects until they succumbed to exhaustion. Soon though, these anomalies too perished or fled, and even the gluttonous birds, which had fattened themselves upon the near-boundless corpses departed for bloodier pastures, leaving only Malcolm and Danny in lonely silence.

It must have been the end of October, for the wind whistled sharply through the skeletal trees when they began to worry for the miners. They had not eaten a thing or delivered any wagons of coal in over a week, and they knew something must have gone horribly astray below. Malcolm and Danny went to investigate, to see if any of the boys were still alive, and what happened to them. Boarding the elevator, they descended into the smokey blackness of the abyss. As Danny approached the depths of the cave, the wretched smell of the clay became overwhelming. He was choked to tears and fits of wild coughing, which echoed down the jagged hallways and tunnels of the mine to no end. Soon, the air was thick with insufferable heat, becoming as heavy and oppressive as the fumes it carried. The burning of salty sweat in his eyes was the only indicator to Danny that he still controlled his senses and was not under the fever of claustrophobic delirium.

They pressed onward, until coming across the original encounter with the clay at the end of the mine, and found the entrance to a massive chamber. The chamber was larger than any building Danny had ever seen or been in and was coated with the chromatic and malignant clay, which Joe had discovered those years ago. The floor of the cavern easily gave way under the sudden force of Danny and Malcolm's boots, dispersing in all directions as if having the disposition of fine-grained sand, only to regain its nerve and congeal around their feet, making movement through a terrible slog. Stalactites hung with strands of what resembled sinew dangling from their points, connecting them to the walls and ceiling like spider webs. Occasionally, the dark chamber was illuminated with pulses of light which glowed from within the clay itself and traveled down the corridor aways till it was too far to see. Ba drum, ba drum, ba drum, went the belching of the chamber's light.

On one such pulse, they saw what happened to the miners. Some were clinging to the walls, engulfed in the clay so that only the backs of their coats or the broken lights of their helmets stood out, yet to be digested. Others wandered around mindlessly and shocked the duo with their extraordinary deformities. From their long exposure to the accursed chamber, the miner's skin and musculature had slowly transformed them into the wretched loam of the chasm. The malformed miners lurched slowly down the passageways, lazily dragging their bloated and dripping bodies down the passageway. Their faces gave off no known emotion to Danny and hung from their deflating skulls as if they were ill-fitting masks. One such person, who had become so deformed that he could no longer be recognized as the man he was before the transformation, turned to acknowledge them. A clump of his face, so scrambled that Danny could no longer tell if it was his jaw or scalp, dripped off of his cheek and onto his arm and reincorporated itself just as easily as it separated. Danny called out to the melting ones but his calls fell on deaf ears, and they kept lurching mindlessly into the dank darkness.

If it was the enthralling power of curiosity, or the irrational cravings for action only known by those who have known true hopelessness, cannot be said for certain. What is certain is that Danny and Malcolm pressed on, following the melting ones along with the cursed earth. The darkness of the depths afforded no interpretation of time, but the regularity of the pulses gave the impression to the explorers that they had spent at least an hour in the cavern. The pulses grew louder with each passing yard, their volume swelling with overwhelming dread, like the low belching croaks of a great toad in a dark pond, who waits greedily for the meek and minuscule gnats. After what felt like four hours in the grave tunnels, the chasm opened up to an even larger chamber. The chamber was conal, with the tunnel they had traversed opening above a gradual slope which descended gently, until suddenly giving way to a deep and black pit. Along the horizon of the chamber, there were three other tunnels that met, leading on to unknown depths and crevasses within the mountain. Above the pit hung a fleshy mass of immense girth, the conduit of the caves pulsed and danced sickly in the air in grotesque splendor with each wave of light: the beating heart of the world. Bearing witness to the heart, the melting ones rushed towards it with zealous madness. They crept around the edge of the pit and kneeled, extending their slimy and wretched arms out to grope at the sacred tumors of their vulgar God.

As Danny and Malcolm approached the heart, they succumbed to unimaginable terror at what they witnessed. Sinking into the pus-logged orifices of the structure was the gaping visage of Joe Cobb. His face was pulled tightly by the sucking miasma and gave a hideous and painful expression. Joe’s glassy eyes took notice of his two guests, and he began to move his mouth to speak. At this moment in the story, Danny’s eyes were locked with mine in dead focus, allowing the voice of memory to speak through him as he delivered this haunting quote. In the clearest detail he could muster, the old clerk gave these words:

From ol Joe’s ol’ Joe's mouth I heard the chant. “We ain’t supposed to be here. We gone too deep. It sucks and it berns, and came from before. We gone too deep, and now it knows…”

In his terror, Danny flinched away from the mass, but Malcolm was caught in Joe’s haunting gaze and dark hymn and felt enraptured by them. His terror flew from him, and his body overcame the presence around him. He lurched forward, stretched across the pit, and embraced the mass. Danny saw with great horror as Malcolm began to sink and melt into the flesh, soon disappearing entirely. With this final scare, he took flight, running with great swiftness away from the accursed cathedral of flesh. His thoughts of the deep horror and the melted ones were soon replaced with the crisp refreshment of the autumn air.

In the following weeks, the coal company sent men in dark coats and big vans to dear old Jasper. They demolished the mineshaft with dynamite and filled the elevator shaft with concrete and any rubble that fell down the slopes of the mountain. They posted signs warning of toxic ash along the creeks and dead pines and put releases in all the newspapers that the mine had run dry. Danny never saw Malcolm escape and tried to not think about him assimilated in that chamber of wretched flesh. The only traces left of those bad days now are four pillars of steel that stand like tombstones where their elevator once descended. But Danny knows the truth. The mountains are patient and endure most anything. They will let us cut down its trees, break its rocks, and mine deep into the crevices of its soul; but there is a reason that the mountains have been here long before we came here and will be here long after we depart.

After a sleepless night, I left the store in a mad rush, leaving enough cash for my bill and a large tip as the only thing placing me there. I zipped my car out of the parking lot at a breakneck pace, with full intent to rid myself of those accursed hills. That was until I was blinded by a spark in the new morn sky. Out in the distance, up a washed-out trail leading away from town, one of the four pillars was visible. Was the story real? Was this the wellspring of ruination? I had to see with my own eyes the horrors I had only heard. Getting out of my car, I trekked up the forlorn bluff which glowed with creamy fluorescence and was greeted by the rusty juggernauts with their cool indifference. The blasted cluster of rocks sat before me, calling my investigation. Nearing them, I laid prostrate against the chilled stones and fixed my eyes to the cracks and crevasces that the boulders couldn’t fill. First there was darkness, eyes dilating to the descending labyrinth of quartz and shale. A faint hiss floated up from the abyss, and as my eyes  adjusted to the dim surroundings I was filled with indescribable horror as not but ten feet below did I see a bubbling pool of clay.