Long before the first white man set foot here, the local Indian tribes called this place the dead land. Young children who wandered away from the tribe vanished into the heart of these woods, and sometimes, when the moon was full and the corn was ripe for harvest, a hunter or medicine man would be overcome by a sudden madness and take his own life. Blood would flow into the dry creek bed, and the land would lap it up like mother’s milk. Something old and evil had awakened here. It was weak yet, but it was patient. It knew how to wait.

In time, white men came. They built cedar cabins and tilled the earth and passed the land from father to son. But the troubles continued. A family was found hanging in their barn as if by suicide. The miller’s child went missing near the creek bed and returned three weeks later with worms in its eyes and a thirst for blood.

The land was thirsty too. In 1862, 60 Federal soldiers rode down Murfreesboro Road toward Lebanon. They passed the woods known as the dead land and were never seen again. The dead land—or the thing that dwelt there—had taken them.

Fate can turn on such small things—a stone turns beneath a foot, a man takes one road and not another, a wounded Confederate soldier named Herschel Walker returns from the war and passes a slave market just as the auctioneer leads a woman onto the auction block. Even in her slave rags, she is beautiful. The soldier’s mouth goes dry. He must have her!

The woman, Sarai, was a voudoun priestess who had been sold by the master of a Jamaican sugar plantation and brought to the mainland. Fate

If Herschel had been a kinder man, things might have turned out differently. Instead, at night, he visited Sarai while his pregnant young wife cried herself to sleep, and when the slave girl bore a child, he sold it, unmoved by her tears. But when the Union soldiers came, burning everything in their path, he ran to the garden, where Sarai knelt plucking weeds from between the rows.

He grasped her by the shoulders and hauled her to her feet. “That witchwork you do,” he said. “You’ll do a spell for me now. This land belongs to me and mine. You will make it so forever.”

“Forever be a long time,” she said. “There be a cost for that kind magic. Fresh blood. A life.”

He cast his eyes around the farm. “Take my mule, then. She’s a fine one.”

“What you think the lords of night need with him mule for?”

“Damn it all, take Eli, then.” He pointed toward the front porch, where his young wife rocked their infant son. “There’s more where he came from.”

The priestess smiled. “Bring that child me at midnight, then. And there be one thing more. My cost be freedom.”

He looked at her used-up body, webbed with scars, and nodded. “Your freedom, then. You have my word.”

It was a black and bloody ritual she performed that night, and when it was over, she reached for a cloth to wipe her reddened hands. When she looked up, his revolver was pointed at her head. She said, “You say you let me go.”

“No,” he said. “I said I’d set you free.”

He pulled the trigger.

The Union soldiers did not come. Herschel sired more sons, who married and raised families. Herschel died at a ripe old age and was buried on the property he had loved with all his wicked heart.

But this is the dead land, and not all who die stay dead.

A few weeks after Herschel’s death, young women of the town grew wan and pale, and sometimes they disappeared into the dead land and did not return. “Undead,” the townsfolk whispered. And, “Vampire.”

The voudoun priestess was all but forgotten. But she had not forgotten. She lay beneath the earth, and it drank her blood and ate her flesh. It fed on her hatred, and it grew strong. Like Herschel Walker and his descendents, she is one with the dark entity that haunts these lands. Damned by the ritual she performed that night, she guards the portal to eternity. But you know what they say about portals. Sometimes things slip through. Spirits, yes, and worse. On nights like this, when the veil between worlds is thin, they hunt these lands—these Dead Lands. Take care, Traveler, that they—and we—do not hunt you.