1. Welcome to Nod’s Limbs, Friend
For the most part, Nod’s Limbs was a lovely place to live. It wasn’t a big town, but it wasn’t small either. It was, quite simply, an upstanding community of historic landmarks and charming shopping malls. The Running River cut through the center of town, although it really should have been called the Walking Stream or the Crawling Trickle since it wasn’t very wide and didn’t flow very fast. Seven covered bridges allowed people and cars to cross the river, and the townspeople were very proud of their covered bridges. It’s rare to see
one
covered bridge in a town these days, and Nod’s Limbs had
seven
. Theylooked like big red barns spanning the river, identical except for what was painted on their roofs.
Each had two words painted in big white block letters, one word on each side. If you were traveling the length of Florence Boulevard, each bridge added another word to a message, and the message was different depending on which direction you were traveling. From east to west, the roofs read WELCOME FRIEND TO NOD’S LIMBS STAY AWHILE . From west to east they said COME BACK SOON FRIEND AND TAKE CARE . However, since you could enter Nod’s Limbs from the west as easily as from the east, and leave in either direction as well, sometimes these messages made sense and sometimes they didn’t. But though you might be wished WELCOME as you left and greeted with COME BACK SOON as you entered, the residents of Nod’s Limbs didn’t mind because they thought it looked quaint.
But no matter how respectable a town is, when it’s large enough, it usually develops what the locals call the “right side of town” and the “wrong side of town.”
The “right side of town” is where the honest, hardworking citizens live. The streets are clean, thelawns are manicured, and people walk around with smiles on their faces and a kind word for their neighbors. On the “wrong side of town,” however, people don’t look each other in the eye when passing in the street. It’s where the disreputable people live, such as those who would deface public property—those who would take the sweet greetings of their town and alter them to say mean things like WELCOME FIENDS TO SMELLY NOD’S LIMBS DON’T FEED THE ANIMALS and DON’T COME BACK HERE EVER EVER EVER . The streets here are covered in trash and dirt, and the houses are dark, dilapidated, and terribly unpleasant.
Nod’s Limbs was large enough to have a “right side” and a “wrong side,” and you might think that both “sides” of the town would be about the same size. Not so in Nod’s Limbs.
“An honest day’s work for an honest day’s pay” was the credo of most of the town’s citizens, and because of this dedication, just about the whole of Nod’s Limbs could be considered the “right side.”
All, that is, except for one small block on the far end of town.
2. The Wrong Side
If you walked south through Nod’s Limbs, past the parks and trees and row after row of well-kept houses, past the zoo and the high school and the hospital, and finally past the solemn green hills of the Nod’s Limbs Cemetery, you’d come to Ricketts Road.
Ricketts Road ran along the edge of the Black Tree Forest Preserve from the east end of town to the west. It was a charming two-lane road, and the Nod’s Limbs Maintenance Department did an admirable job of keeping the pavement clean and the roadside vegetation trimmed.
However, just past where the back of the cemetery met Ricketts Road, there was a turnoff for a narrow little lane that was never touched by the Maintenance Department. The lane had no name, or at least no street sign, and it was badly in need of a new layer of tar. The broken, weed-choked pavement made walking hazardous and driving treacherous, so it was very rarely traveled.
The lane came to a dead end in front of a very tall, very narrow house that rose so far into the sky that you could fall over backward
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