I know it won’t help you any, but I do my best to explain. “It’ll keep getting worse. The last time it wasn’t fed when the stars were right, feeding it one or two meals wasn’t enough anymore. You’ve heard ‘it takes a village?’ It took a village.”
You start to whimper and then to cry.
“I don’t want to die.” A bit of snot looses from your nostril.
“No one wants to die, son, not ’til they’re real sick in some ways.”
“Why are you doing this? We didn’t do anything to you.”
That’s a doozy, but in your place, I get how you see it that way. “That’s neither here nor there, son. Sometimes you have to consider the greater good. There’s more to this world than you or me, and if we don’t feed that hole there, it all goes to hell.”
“What the hell’s in that hole?”
“Son, the words for what’s down there don’t exist. Not in our language. It’s too old for words. It’s emptiness. The type that consumes everything around it. We can keep it sated, but that’s the best we can do. And if we don’t do that… You’ve heard the whispers. Its hunger will ripple outwards until the world devours itself in chaos.”
You start to cry louder. Your face is thick with tears. It takes me a moment to make out what you say, it’s so covered by crying. “But I haven’t lived yet. All I’ve done is work.”
Wow. I hadn’t counted on this, that I’d feel bad for you. This hasn’t happened in years. Usually, when of the hole’s meals starts whimpering, I think of it the same way as any other animal and realize it’s time to put the poor thing out of its misery. But there’s something about that look in your eyes, something about the way you plead for your family.
I know what I have to do. I drop my kit bag to leave the tools for Ricky. I reach out to you, put my arms over your shoulders to comfort you, and I throw us both into the pit together.
***
I have no idea how long we’ve been falling before you finally stop screaming. You screamed through the first part of the fall, when we first entered the near dark, where the walls of the pit are slick with blood and caked with the decaying tissue of appetizers past. You kept screaming as we burst through the phlegmy membrane, the strands of mucus creating the veil between the false substance we inhabited before the fall, and the void that we now plummet endlessly through.
You stopped screaming momentarily, but just to vomit. Thanks for that. Waiting to wither to death and dust in this emptiness, your puke is exactly what I wanted to be coated in. I really feel that I made the right decision in taking pity on you and trying to comfort you in this time. No booze, only half a pack of smokes, this will be great.
To make matters worse, the moment you were done puking, the screaming started again.
I think you just screamed until you had nothing left. Your eyes dart about the black like they’re expecting to find something to focus on. Either that or the emptiness is itself too much for you. I hadn’t thought of that. That it wouldn’t be dying, or more accurately, the loss of your life that would break you, but the emptiness.
Though it’s not entirely empty. There is occasionally dust. Or other flecks. And some of these give off light.
When I look into your eyes again, that manic ping-ponging has stopped and been replaced by a strange serenity.
“Are you still alive?”
You smile. It’s almost more upsetting than when you puked. “Yes. I am fine.”
“Fine? You were screaming a moment ago.”
“I know. I think I’ve been screaming for years.”
“Then why are you happy?”
“As long as I can remember, I’ve been falling. There’s always too much to do. I fell behind in school and screamed and fought to keep out of that hole. I couldn’t catch my breath. There was no time between that pit and falling into the one at work. Seven-day weeks, only time off to sleep a few hours, maybe do laundry. Until I couldn’t take it anymore and got drunk until I’d wake up the next day and do it all again, scraping by to keep out of a pit of debt and hopelessness.”
“But why are you happy now?”
You grin. There are still flakes of puke adhered to your front teeth. “Because I get it now. There’s nothing I can do. I’m always going to be falling until I’m dead.”
I’m stuck with a philosophizer. I should have shoved you in on your own. But it’s too late now. We fall and fall together.
RECORDING DEVICES
D.J. Butler
The old man’s gnarled right hand stopped, springing into the air above the trembling banjo strings and freezing in clawhammer shape, index ever so slightly extended and thumb to the square.
The short sustain of the banjo meant the strings sang their final chord with power, but briefly, and then fell still and silent.
John Hanks reached over to stop the recorder and set the microphone down. He leaned back on the three-legged stool next to the open trunk of the 1937 Ford that held the bulky recording device and wiped sweat off his forehead.
The musician’s name was Roscoe, wasn’t it? Suddenly he wasn’t sure. He’d recorded the songs and playing of so many of these hill folk that their faces and names were starting to fuse, Earl and Sunny and Andy and Roscoe. John’s eyes and ears itched, and he rubbed them.
“Thank you, sir.” He’d just avoid the name entirely, it wasn’t worth wasting any time on it. “You sure that’s the last one you know?”
The old man’s head swiveled on his neck. His jaundiced eyes, punctuated with glittering dark irises, pierced through the trees surrounding his dog trot cabin and seemed to search out the entire knob of rock that in this part of the world passed for a “mountain.”
“Waall…” The banjo player popped his neck by cranking his head in a circle and licked his lips. “Not all songs is proper to sing. Not in public. And some songs just en’t proper at all.”
John restrained a sigh. Instead, he dug into the cash in his waistcoat pocket and pulled out thirty-five cents. “There you are, Roscoe,” he said. “Seven songs and tunes I haven’t heard before, a nickel apiece.”
“Name’s Earl.” The banjo player looked down at the dull change in the palm of his hand: two dimes, three nickels, ten pennies. “I got another, I reckon. It’s gettin’ dark, though.”
John patted the microphone. “The folks hearing the recording will see you just as well in the darkness as in broad daylight,” he cracked wise. “And if you’re worried about me getting back down the… mountain,” he swallowed the word in one bite, “the car’s got headlamps.”
“It en’t that. It’s only… iffen.” Roscoe licked his lips again. No, Earl. “I need the money. Nickel goes a long way these days.”
John let him think about it. Some of these old folks up in the hills couldn’t wait to get someone to listen to their treasure trove of nursery rhymes, blues, ballads, and hymns. Others acted like they were sharing the most precious thing in the world, and had to be bribed, coaxed, reassured, and sometimes even tricked.
“You jest gonna record it on that… what’d you call it?”
John nodded and grinned. “It’s a mobile recording device.” The recorder was a chunky machine that ran off the Ford’s battery and turned sound waves into grooves in a wax cylinder by way of a handheld microphone. It was state of the art, or at least as state of the art as you could reasonably be expected to drag up into the hollers of Appalachia.
“It en’t dark yet,” Earl decided. “You hold a red an’ a white thread side by side, an’ iffen you can’t tell the difference, it’s dark. En’t that what them old presters used to do? Let’s git this one down, an’ fast.” He leaned over his banjo to whisper to John, and his voice dropped an octave. “An’ I en’t singin’ the words, not to this song, nuh-uh. But I’ll play you the tune, an’ I wager you en’t heard it. That worth a nickel?”
“Has it got a name?” John turned on the recorder and held the microphone up to Earl. Still plenty of juice in the battery, he was sure—he had no de
sire to spend the night in Earl’s dog trot.
“No, it en’t.” Earl squinted. He must know, from all the tunes he’d already recorded that afternoon, that John wanted some kind of label, a way to catalog any piece of music. “But it’s a tune as old as the hills.” As he said it, he was adjusting the tuning on the banjo. At first, John thought it was just tuning up, but then he saw and heard Earl drop the second string an unnatural amount, and when the wiry farmer ticked the strings off one after the other with his fingernail, the resulting chord sounded… off. Modal, but beyond modal. Microflatted. Intervals all wrong. Unearthly. “Old as the hills,” the old man repeated.
“Let’s hear it.”
Earl played.
True to his word, he didn’t sing. His tune was long and discordant, a double drone that must have been some sort of diminished fifth by way of interval, or maybe a diminished sixth, but it seemed to John that the distance between the drone notes grew and shrank as the sound moved through time. The drone was accented by choppy bits of melody on the first, third, and fourth strings, shreds of sound that seemed to John like voices.
Not human voices. And not singing.
Old Earl’s drone felt like the thrum of earth moving through infinite time in mist and darkness, and as John’s eyes seemed to fill with those mists, he would have sworn he saw standing stones jutting from the mists, and heard voices shrieking in joyous celebration. Only the voices weren’t human—they sounded more like birds, but not any bird he’d ever heard sing before.
John wanted to rub the hallucination away from his face, but he had to hold his position very carefully or he would fail to capture the sound on the recorder. His eyes and ears itched and his legs felt asleep. Too much time sitting on this stool.
The banjo shrieked again, or was it a bird? Or was it Earl?
Or was it John?
The tune stopped, abruptly.
Darkness had fallen. Darkness as Earl himself defined it; John could no longer tell the white stripes from the red in Earl’s old cotton shirt.
“The nickel,” Earl said.
John fumbled for the coin in the darkness. “You say there are words?”
“I won’t sing ’em. En’t no place safe to sing ’em except mebbe in church on Christmas, an’ then I reckon it’d be spittin’ in Jesus’ eye.”
John found himself curious. No, not curious. He found himself craving. He had a strong and unexpected desire to know what words went with that strange, shuddering, atonal tune.
And publish them.
“What about written down?” he asked. “Would you write them? Or do you know where I could find them written?”
Earl was so still that for a moment, in the darkness, he was invisible. When he shook his head it was in a shudder, a sudden paroxysm of motion that almost knocked John backward. “I cain’t.”
“Or won’t?”
“Difference don’t matter.” Earl stood slowly. His banjo was a light one, an old Sears Roebuck model with an open-back pot, but the slow hunch in which he rose suggested a heavy burden on Earl’s shoulder.
Arthritis, John told himself. Bad nutrition. Inbreeding, maybe.
“’Cept mebbe one person,” Earl said. It was an afterthought, spoken from the dark shadow of the dog trot running between the two cabins of Earl’s house. “Up top of the mountain. Name’s Hodder. He’s got books, an’ I reckon he might have the words written down somewheres.”
“‘Hodder.’ Is that his first name, or his last?”
“All the name he has. He ain’t got a clan, not like most folks.”
“What do I ask him for? I can’t just say ‘the song as old as the hills,’ can I?”
“The call,” Earl said slowly. He had disappeared entirely into one of his cabins, and John couldn’t even tell which. “Just tell him you want to know the words of the call.”
***
“I don’t really understand what you’re doing.”
John Hanks and Dr. Bender stood inside some sort of laboratory space belonging to the professor. He must be a professor of anthropology, John thought, judging by the twisted masks, dream catchers, untutored paintings, and oddments of wax and feathers that lay strewn on the great trestle tables.
“Oh, and isn’t that just life?” Dr. Bender chuckled, chalking the floor around John’s feet.
“I’ve heard stories about the faculty and their… interests. Look, if we’re going to do something crazy here, can I at least sit down?”
“My dear Dr. Hanks.” Dr. Bender straightened to his full height, looking down into John’s eyes from a few inches away. “I mean, you’re not technically a doctor yet. But you will be, and what are a few formalities and a sheepskin between friends?”
It was John’s turn to chuckle. “Okay.”
“I don’t know what kind of crazy thing you’re imagining we’re going to do, but you’re mistaken. This is just a little something that will help you remember.”
“A mnemonic device.”
“You could say. Yes, a device of memory, that will help us remember.” Dr. Bender turned to light three candles. John didn’t know what kind of off-brand wax they were made off, but they candles sputtered horribly and they stank. “A recording device.”
“Us?”
“Mmmm.” Dr. Bender handed John a mannequin—an unpainted wooden puppet that flopped all loose-jointed in John’s two hands. “Here now, hold this.”
From a pot on the trestle, Dr. Bender took a fingertip’s dab of some kind of oil or cream and dotted it on the puppet’s face in four places, where its eyes and ears would have been. He put a final dab on the doll’s belly, and grinned at John.
“To give desire,” he said.
***
The drive back down the mountain was physically no different from the drive up, but John Hanks hit the bottom harrowed. Three times, he nearly wrecked the car: twice over sudden precipices and a third time running it into a grove of tangled trees.
At the first cliff, he found himself tapping the steering wheel with the fingers of his left hand in a repetitive figure; at the second, he started a second pattern with his left foot. The two overlapping patterns felt familiar, deeply rooted in his being.
The recognition that the rhythms were the two entwined drone rhythms of old Earl’s banjo was what nearly sent John into the trees.
Hawthorns. But there shouldn’t be hawthorns on the mountain, should there?
After that, he found himself humming a melody. A drone, punctuated by birdlike cries.
John’s hotel was a shabby boarding house called McCord’s. He’d been staying there for three weeks while he tooled around the mountains, passing out nickels to the locals in exchange for any piece of music he hadn’t heard before. Though he knew exactly where it was, McCord’s still managed somehow to catch John by surprise and throw an azalea bush under the wheels of the Ford before he managed to stop.
Sheepishly checking for witnesses and seeing none, John backed the car up, rolled it around behind the boarding house, and set the hand brake.
He was drenched in cold sweat.
***
John dreamed.
He looked down from a great height. The height, he knew, was part of what would make him a god.
Although height alone would not do it. Nor would the birds circling him, whose eldritch cries spoke hidden wisdom into the torn and shredded sockets from which his mortal, worthless ears had been removed.
To become a god, you participate in the banquet of the gods. This was the feast of Tantalus, the feast of Atreus, the feast of Moses and the elders of Israel on the Mountain of the Gods.
John heard a low rumble, and the stone supporting him shook.
The gods came.
He let out a piercing cry. The cry contained the wisdom of the birds, the cry was the call that summoned the gods to the feast.
***
In the morning, John checked out of McCord’s.
“Got what you came for?” asked the old woman at the desk.
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He stared into her toothless mouth longer than was strictly polite while the question registered.
“Not yet,” he finally said.
“Oh? What’cha gon’ do, sleep rough while you git the rest of yer music?”
Her words seemed to come from far away.
“Iffen yer short on cash, Mr. Hanks, I reckon we could extend ye a little credit. You bein’ a university man an’ all.”
“Oh, no.” It was a cool morning, if humid, but John took a handkerchief from the breast pocket of his waistcoat and swiped at his forehead. “No, I have one more person to see. Up on the mountain.”
“Old Earl? Earl picks a fine clawhammer.”
“I saw Earl yesterday.” John’s hand trembled as he handed cash over to the proprietress to pay his bill. He must be sick. “If I could have a receipt, please. No, Earl suggested I see his neighbor.”
“Earl ain’t got neighbors.” The old woman said it matter-of-factly, printing dates and numbers in large block letters on the top page of her receipt pad.
“Well, perhaps not his neighbor. Another resident of the mountain, further up.”
The old woman shook her head. “Ain’t been no one further up the mountain from Earl for twenty years.”
“No?”
“Not since old man Hodder died.”
The ground beneath John’s feet shifted. Somehow, the old woman didn’t notice. She finished printing his receipt and handed it to him. He tipped his hat, a deeply sweat-stained fedora that had once been dapper, and walked outside.
He tossed his valise into the back seat and stood beside the car to think.
He had many recordings. Surely, as many as Professor Bender required.
Redneck Eldritch Page 2
