“The Doom Statues” — Chapter 51

The latest Saturday tour draws just seven paying customers, three of them at the kids’ price. This latter development occurs late in the afternoon, even, as a woman with three kids she is babysitting arrives and tells Grace, “we had a terrible time finding this place! It seriously took us over an hour, and I live just down there off the state route, in Stokely!”

“Really? I’m sorry,” Grace tells her, exuding genuine warmth, “I know someone else was telling me something about…uh…a GPS…”

“Well yeah the GPS!” the woman cuts her off, “it had us all over the place. Sometimes it didn’t even show this road, then other times it did. But I’ll tell ya, you guys need to get some signs up somewhere, too. I mean they ain’t even one down at the end of the drive yet, at the entrance.”

The woman is otherwise genial, however, and Grace’s much more intimate 4pm tour proceeds without a hitch. Still, this piece of news, while disturbing, does help solve for them the declining attendance mystery. Somehow nobody noticed — although it’s true that few of them ever leave the place, and even then only rarely — that the giant wooden sign at the bottom of the drive was indeed gone, and the same applied to a pair of much smaller ones, at each end of this relatively short road.