"The Events at Poroth Farm" - Horror Hill

**Erik Peabody** (0:01)
As soon as the phone stops ringing, I'll begin this affidavit. Lord, it's hot in here. Perhaps I should open a window.
Thirteen rings. It has a sense of humor. I suppose that ought to be comforting. And somehow I'm not comforted. If it feels free to indulge in these teasing, tormenting little games, so much the worse for me.
The summer is over now, but this room is like an oven. My shirt is already drenched, and this pen feels slippery in my hand. In a moment or two, the little drop of sweat that's been collecting above my right eyebrow is going to splash onto this page. Just the same, I'll keep the window closed. Outside, through the dusty panes of glass, I can see a boy in red spectacles sauntering toward the courthouse steps. Perhaps there's a telephone booth in back.
A sense of humor. That's one quality I never noticed in it. I saw only a deadly seriousness, and it's clear, an intelligence that grew at terrifying speed, malevolent and inhuman. If it now feels itself safe enough to toy with me before doing whatever it intends, so much the worse for me, so much the worse perhaps for us all.
I hope I'm wrong. Though my name is Jeremy, derived from Jeremiah, I'd hate to be a prophet in the wilderness. I'd much rather be a harmless crank, but I believe we're in for trouble.
I'm a long way from the wilderness now, of course, though perhaps not far enough to save me. I'm writing this affidavit in room 2K of the Union Hotel, overlooking Main Street in Flemington, New Jersey, 20 miles south of Gilead. Directly across the street, hippies lounging on its steps, stands the county courthouse where Bruno Hauptman was tried back in 1935 Did they ever find the body of that child? Hauptman undoubtedly walked down those very steps, now lined with teenagers savoring their last week of summer vacation, where that boy in the red spectacle sits sucking on his cigarette. Did the killer once halt there, police and reporters around him, and contemplate his imminent execution?
For several days now I've been afraid to leave this room. I have perhaps been staring too often at that ordinary-looking boy on the steps. He sits there every day. The red spectacles conceal his eyes. It's impossible to tell where he's looking.
I know he's looking at me.
But it would be foolish of me to waste time worrying about executions when I have these notes to transcribe. It won't take long, and then perhaps I'll sneak outside to mail them and leave New Jersey forever. I remain, despite all that's happened, an optimist. What was it my namesake said? Thou art my hope in the day of evil.
There is surprisingly some real wilderness left in New Jersey, assuming one wants to be a prophet. The hills to the west, spreading from the southern swamplands to the Delaware and beyond to Pennsylvania, provide shelter for deer, pheasant, even an occasional bear, and hide hamlets never visited by outsiders. Pockets of ignorance, some of them. Citadels of ancient superstition, utterly cut off from news of New York and the rest of the state. Religious communities where customs haven't changed appreciably since the days of their settlement a century or more ago.
It seems incredible that villages so isolated can exist today on the very doorstep of the world's largest metropolis. Villages with nothing to offer the outsider, and hence never visited, except by the occasional hunter who stumbles on them unwittingly. Yet, as you speed down one of the state highways, consider how few of the cars slow down for the local roads. It is easy to pass the little towns without even a glance at the signs. And if there are no signs? And consider, too, how seldom the local traffic turns off onto the narrow roads that emerge without warning from the woods. And when those untraveled side roads lead into others, still deeper in wilderness, and when those in turn give way to dirt roads, deserted for weeks on end, it is not hard to see how tiny rural communities can exist less than an hour for major cities, virtually unaware of one another's existence.
Television, of course, will link the two. Unless, as is often the case, the elders of the community choose to see this distraction as the devil's tool and prescribe it. Telephones put these outcast settlements in touch with their neighbors, unless they choose to ignore their neighbors. And so, in the course of years, they are forgotten.
New Yorkers were amazed when in the winter of 1968, the Times discovered a religious community near New Providence that had existed in its present form since the late 1800s, less than 40 miles from Times Square. Agricultural work was performed entirely by hand. Women still wore long dresses with high collars, and town warship was held every evening. I, too, was amazed. I'd seldom traveled west of the Hudson and still thought of New Jersey as some dismal extension of the Newark slums, ruled by gangsters, foggy with swamp gases and industrial waste, a gray land that had surrendered to the city. Only later did I learn of the rural New Jersey and of towns whose solitary general stores double as post offices, with one or two gas pumps standing in front. And later still, I learned of Baptist Town and Quaker Town, their old religions surviving unchanged, and of towns like Lebanon, Lansdowne and West Portal, close to Route 22 and Civilization, but heavy with secrets undreamt of by city folk. Mount Airy, with its network of hidden caverns, and Mount Olive, bordering the infamous Bud Lake. Middle Valley, sheltered by dark cliffs, subject of the recent archaeological debate chronicled in natural history, where a wanderer may still find peculiar relics of pagan warship and, some say, hear the chants that echo from the cliffs on certain nights. And towns with names like Xeraphath and Gilead, forgotten communities of bearded men and black-robed women, walled hamlets too small or obscure for most maps of the state. This was the wilderness into which I traveled, weary of Manhattan's interminable din, and it was outside Gilead where, until the tragedies, I chose to make my home for three months.