Reproduced below is the twelfth entry in the memoirs of Joseph De Ville, a 2nd-century traveler of Route 14. To view other excerpts from his memoirs, click here.

September 15, 102 AT

The seven-day stretch of Route 14 that separates civilization from Outpost is a drunken serpent, a writhing tangle of arcs and loops.

When I first saw the road mapped across the ceiling of Madame Griddle’s, I assumed that it had been designed a thousand years ago, when topographical phenomena like jungles and mountains were still impassible, before man had learned to level or demolish any inconvenience that stood in his way.

But we alone possess height and depth in this distant void. We are interlopers from the third dimension. Or perhaps we are its only survivors. In either case, there is nothing else for Route 14 to wind itself around, no trees or hills to force its turn — only us. Yet turn it does. It winds and it curves. It doubles back on itself and swallows its own tail.

There are three escapes from this labyrinthine knot of asphalt, three so-called sanctuaries on the road to Outpost: first Orchard, then Library, and finally Tower.

Having spent a night with the thirty-two petrified goliaths who stand watch over Orchard, we had expected neither escape nor sanctuary in Library, let alone books.

Yet a book was the first thing we found there. The only thing, really. It was ten feet long and cast in iron, but it was a book nonetheless, complete with title and author: The Canturbury Tales, by Geoffrey Chaucer. It lay face-up and slightly askew in the silt beside the road — discarded, I briefly imagined, by some oversize robot with a taste for metallic literature, who had grown frustrated with Chaucer’s capricious characters and incomputable plots.

Andrea and I exchanged quizzical frowns. Could this really be Library? There were no signposts, no buildings. Certainly there was nothing so supernal or mystifying as that which we had witnessed in Orchard. There was only the metal book, a piece of cut-rate office-park art that might have fallen off a delivery truck a hundred years ago.

Still, we knew that Route 14’s lunacy was not random. Erratic, yes. Manipulative, no doubt. But in this place, nonsense was not the same thing as accident. The strange tome at our feet was no mislaid curiosity.

It was our confidence on this point that inspired us to return to the road and to inspect its surface. In Orchard we had found a golden plaque stamped into the blacktop; we surmised that there might be one here, too. Sure enough, a moment’s effort led us to a similar plaque, though with a very different poem engraved on it:

False pilgrims wend within;

Through blended unrealities they travel.

Yet on the bends of Route 14

True pilgrims come unraveled.

Galvanized by our discovery of the poem — though bewildered as to its meaning — we revisited the iron book with fresh resolve, convinced that some profound secret was encoded within.

Its two-foot thick spine bowed out slightly, with ribs appearing at regular intervals along its length in the fashion of early Renaissance bookbindery. It was otherwise unremarkable. Its deckled head, tail and fore-edge were equally unhelpful, and its back cover, which rested against the ground, was hidden from us entirely.

Only the book’s front cover yielded any clues. It was ten feet, top to bottom, and perhaps seven wide. Etched in baroque detail below its calligraphic title was a life-sized portrayal of its author, who seemed to be partially turned away from us, grinning mischievously and beckoning with a curled finger.

“Sorry, Geoff,” I said. “I’m afraid we’re not going anywhere so pleasant as Canterbury.”

“Neither is he,” said Andrea. She slid her hand around the back of my neck and pointed to the image. “He’s stepping into the book itself. See?”

I looked again, and this time I understood. Chaucer’s invitation was not figurative; he was not proposing that we join him on some journey of imagination, some adventure in storytelling. He was asking us, literally, to step into the iron book. The thing was a portal, a trap door.

I felt along the lip of the book’s cover until my fingers slid across a protrusion that could only have been a button. After warning Andrea to stand back — God only knew what horrors this road’s architects had spring-loaded into their handiwork — I held my breath, then pressed down on the cold metal nub under my forefinger.

There was a loud hiss, and the front cover of the iron book swung open on two pneumatic arms. A rush of cool, musty air issued from whatever chamber had lain sealed beneath.

We approached the edge of the opening as though it were the rim of a volcano.

What we saw within should not have fazed us. It would hardly have been noticed in any of Earth’s remaining cities. I had experienced it virtually every day of my life without even acknowledging its presence. But here, in this eldritch outland so utterly disconnected from the world’s power plants, from its technologies, from its networks and its grids, our eyes dilated and our jaws slacked when we beheld artificial light.

Just beneath the surface of the now-open book was a stairwell that descended not into darkness, as subterranean stairwells so often do, but into a large room filled with fluorescent light. Perhaps there were solar panels nearby, just out of sight. Perhaps there was a gauntlet of batteries buried somewhere beneath this place, supplying it power. Or perhaps there was no rational explanation for the electricity here.

So deep was our reverie that we did not notice when a car pulled up on Route 14, stopping just behind our own. Only when its doors slammed shut was the spell broken, and we looked up to see five people climbing out of a massive, gas-powered Buick, the likes of which had been obsolete for some two hundred years.

We recognized them immediately.

We had spent two days and a night at Madame Griddle’s in the company of these pilgrims. They, like Andrea, had been memorizing contours and waypoints on the cafe’s ceiling, preparing for the journey northward.

Reggie, the de facto leader of the group, had probably been to Library a dozen times. He was one of the few professional guides — perhaps the only one — still alive and active on Route 14, and rumor had it that he’d ventured as far north as Outpost. Most of his clients were rich, bored thrillseekers with more money than good sense. They made the trip just to brag about it later, to spin yarns about there-be-dragons places like Orchard and Tower from the safety of their cigar lounges and dinner clubs. Some died on the road before they could do so.

One such well-heeled thrillseeker was Claude, who owned and drove the Buick, and who was perfectly content to cede gobs of wealth to his aegis in return for being thrust into — and snatched from — the jaws of death. He had seemed the sanest of Madame Griddle’s lodgers, always joking and laughing and uncorking wine bottles. I had liked him, despite this masquerade.

Then there was the old man, Farmer, who couldn’t have been born long after the Third. There was smoke in his eyes and dirt in his fingernails, and there was a sickle where his left hand should have been.

Farmer had shown me this terrifying prosthetic at Madame Griddle’s. He had held it up and turned it over a couple of times, scattering the cafe’s flickering lamplight. The thing was a bright, maddening crescent, a sinister smile, with irregular nicks and indelible discolorations along its blade that testified to its use.

Old-timers like Farmer were the only ones left who used analog prosthetics. The rest of the dismembered world — and plenty of the fully membered world — had grafted on cybernetic limbs casually referred to as utensils — tensils, for short — that blinked and whirred like they were trying to prove something. They came in all sorts of ghastly varieties. Some were bloated, hydraulic implements capable of punching of a hole through a bank vault. Others featured built-in firearms or saw blades or cameras. They were an addiction, like tattoos. It wasn’t uncommon to catch some pink-haired adolescent lighting a cigarette with her finger.

Indeed, tattoos and tensils were among the few technologies that had not been lost to us since the end of the Third, when humanity had begun its long, backward slog to the primordial ooze.

Scia did not share Farmer’s distrust of these new technologies. She had embraced them enthusiastically, almost defiantly, as though she were trying to one-up whatever cosmic force had been responsible for her natural biology. One of her eyes was bionic. Her left arm ended at its elbow, from which protruded a form of tensil commonly referred to as a multihand. This particular model featured three artificial hands; one primary, life-like but with seven fingers, and two smaller appendages with three fingers each. When they were not in use, these smaller hands folded neatly into the instrument’s shaft. There was still natural flesh above Scia’s elbow but, like the better part of her body, it was covered with nightmare-images — swarms of rats and armies of roaches, all in grey and red.

Scia’s twin sister, Clara, was the last passenger to emerge from the Buick, and a suitable grand finale. Perhaps Scia would have been beautiful, too, if she had not corrupted her own humanity with so much ink, metal and hair dye. But Clara was ravishing enough for the both of them. She had the kind of face you watched eagerly, waiting on tenterhooks just to see it smile, certain that when it happened, flowers would bloom the world round. Golden hair, doe-like blue eyes. Dimples.

Andrea caught me looking and thrust an elbow into my ribs.

Reggie boomed: “You figured that out pretty quick.” Wielding a shotgun as though it were a wand, he pointed to the book’s open cover.

“Andrea figured it out,” I said. “She’s the brains of the operation.”

Reggie looked at her, then back at me, and spat onto the ground.

In the bizarre cult that has sprung up around Route 14, it is an unthinkable sacrilege to ride the road south. Its disciples insist that Route 14 is a one-way highway. They call it the River. They say that it flows only north. And they regularly beat and even kill those they find swimming against its current. They therefore despise Reggie, who ferries so many paying customers in both directions, treading wantonly over their dogmas and superstitions. But, though their eyes burn with hatred and their throats fill with bile, these zealots do not raise a fist to this man, whose minatory frame and calloused knuckles deter even the most reckless of enemies.

Ironically, it was the same qualities that made Reggie so effective as a guide, as a guardian — his dauntless cocksuredness, his unflappable pragmatism — that ruined him as an adventurer.

For example, when I asked him what he thought of the poem engraved on the golden plaque, he shrugged and rolled his eyes. “It means nothing,” he said, “like everything else on this godforsaken road. It’s all just bullshit, Joe. Every bit of it. Some of it is beautiful. Some of it is just downright weird. But it’s all bullshit. The minute you try to figure it all out, to infer some deeper meaning in the chaos, or to trace some pattern — that’s when you start to lose your mind, like the rest of these Route 14 nuts. Take it from me: Don’t study the poetry. It’s just graffiti.”

I nodded toward the staircase. “So there’s nothing interesting down there?” I asked.

He pointed to the sun, a splayed grapefruit that hung over the horizon, leaking color into the sky.

“On the contrary,” he said, smiling, “there’s light down there, and a safe place to sleep.”