The Dictionary of Imaginary Places
RAMPART JUNCTION, Iowa, in the United States, on the Chicago-Los Angeles line.
Built on the banks of a small river, Rampart Junction is a typical American rural town, with a dusty main street and wooden, flaking houses. The main store, Honegger Hardware, closes at four o'clock sharp. Travellers arriving in Rampart Junction will see an old man, deep in an ancient chair, tilted back against the station platform wall, his dark face full of lizard folds and stitches, his eyes in a perpetual squint, his ash-white hair blowing in the summer wind. For over twenty years, this man has been sitting on the station platform, waiting for someone to arrive. Throughout his life, he has accumulated a deep hatred, risen from minor things, small inconveniences that have angered him beyond endurance. To purge his wrath, he has decided to wait for a complete stranger to arrive in town, for someone to get off the train for no reason, a man nobody knows and who does not know anyone in Rampart Junction. When the traveller arrives, the old man will follow him, get into conversation with him and then kill him. This fate is similar to the one experienced by a certain Arab fisherman who discovered a brass bottle in the sea, and to that of Mr. Juan Dahlmann, in the south of Argentina. Travellers are advised to depart before the end of the proposed ritual.
(Anonymous, The Arabian Nights, 14th-16th cen. AD; Jorge Luis Borges, "El Sur," in Ficciones (2nd edition), Buenos Aires, 1956; Ray Bradbury, "The Town Where No One Got Off," in A Medicine for Melancholy, New York, 1959)
Text from The Dictionary of Imaginary Places, updated and expanded edition by Alberto Manguel and Gianni Guadalupi (Harcourt Brace & Company, 2000)
