Shotguns v. Cthulhu

by Larry DiTillio

  Most got the hint and headed for more southern climes.

  He looked at me for a moment, eyes a lucid blue shot with red, and then moved his hand away. As he did, I saw a thousand bouncing fleas on his jacket and I jumped back a little, self-consciously wiping the jacket where he had touched it.

  He stepped backwards, hands up. Was he old enough to think “peace” or young enough for a simple “dude”? I couldn’t tell. He didn’t seem dangerous. In any case, I’m a big guy. I had a foot on him, at least.

  As I looked at him, he seemed to shrink. He turned down the utility road next to Sharkey’s Pizza and walked away fast, a single unlaced boot flapping in the dirty snow behind him. He didn’t look back.

  For a moment I wondered what his life must be like. Digging through dumpsters behind Aces. Eating stale, frozen bagels out of fragrant plastic bags. Sleeping next to laundry exhausts and heated patios, under piles of papers and in crawlspaces. Burrowing into things for warmth. I tried to place myself in his world. But it all fell away as I thought about it, failing to come together in any clear narrative. Still, that lifestyle seemed familiar. Somehow.

  “How do you know where I’m going?” I shouted after him.

  I feel like I saw him more than once, so that could have been another day, or a dream.

  There was a night on Indian Hill where I almost killed someone. This memory is old. Tommy something. He’d been goading me all night. Mocking me. Pushing me, even though he was small, scrawny. We drank and listened to Radiohead and watched the stars, and at one point, it was like someone whispered something in my ear, and it was on.

  I looked up at Tommy and he was looking at me, smirking. And it was like it wasn’t Tommy. His eyes were lost in shadow, and his uneven teeth were lit with red and yellow from the fire. It wasn’t Tommy.

  People talk about their first punch. They say it hurts. They say it’s ineffective. This punch was neither. It didn’t hurt. Tommy went flying. He rebounded off one of the stones, rolled and then dropped into the fire, still rolling, pant cuff flashing with a momentary flame.

  And then I was on him. I beat him for a long time. I don’t know how long. I recall scraping up clots of earth and yellow grass and shoving it in his bloody mouth, up his nose.

  For a second I felt the pulse of a million dead generations. People half-naked and starving on the mountain who gathered together there to appease something unseen and sleeping. They fought, they fucked, they killed. We had hit a current there, at that moment. We tapped into something alive and older than anything.

  Finally, somehow, I brought myself under control.

  When I looked up, wheezing, Tommy was nothing but a broken lump of blood and dirt beneath me, shaking and bleeding. I saw a ring of faces, all lit by fire from below, staring at me. They didn’t look human. All their faces were illuminated with something other than the fire.

  Anyway, no one tried to stop me. Nothing came of it. I signed his yearbook later that year like nothing had ever happened at all.

  Maybe it hadn’t. It’s all so disjointed.

  When I was growing up, Indian Hill was called the stoner’s garden. It was about three miles from town, and by the time we were sixteen, we were tooling up there in a 4x4 to blast music and get drunk and smoke up. Everyone went there. All the kids from town.

  I spent a million drunken nights there in various states of adolescent disrepair. Once, I woke in my underwear, alone, on one of the stones in the middle of August, covered in dew. It was that kind of place. A place to try a drug for the first time, or to lose your virginity, or lose a fight. It was our clubhouse. Sometimes it got so you couldn’t think, being up there. Too many people, too much energy, too many drugs.

  Other times, we’d simply camp out near the ring, watching the stars and passing the bottle. It was the only local hang-out where we could get away with the things our teenage selves wanted to do. It was our place.

  Some time after New York, I found myself working up on Indian Hill, like an ellipses bracketing my life. I lived the cliché. Small town boy launches himself for wonderland, only to smash into the same small town on the far side of the arc. It didn’t seem like such a stretch. The Grove was putting a ski run up there, and due to insurance concerns, they’d fenced off the area around the stones and put up a guard shack.

  At dusk every night, I’d hike up the Booth road, take the cut off, and march up Indian Hill through the pines. Every morning I’d catch the first fuel truck down to town, drag my ass to my mom’s house, crash out and do it all again.

  (I haven’t seen my mom in some time. I can’t recall the last time clearly. Every night in the house seems the same now.)

  I rode that shack five nights a week, reading scripts and books on film-making, biding my time. Soon enough, I’d be back in New York, running around with a camera, playing pretend for twenty-six thousand a year. Nan would be there. But I didn’t like thinking about that.

  After New York, it was something like a vacation from people. It was nice, for once, to sit alone in the dark with the knowledge that nothing human was around me for miles. And to get paid for it, not so bad. I didn't mind the dark.

  Anyway I remember a lot of nights on Indian Hill. It seems to be all I can focus on, now. It’s hard to think of anything else for some reason.

  I also remember finding an animal, when I was...younger. Maybe half the age of when I was working up on the rise. This was near Indian Hill, in the woods. 1995? 1996? I don’t know. I was little. Years before Nan, New York and the guard booth.

  Why am I thinking about this? It’s hard to think about this.

  I’d walk the woodlots on the lower mountain when I was little. Summer break. Wandering through silent woods, listening for animals in the underbrush, spying on the few people I’d come across. You didn’t see many people up there, then.

  When I heard this, I knew it was something special. The noise was bad. Something small and in distress. The noise carried.

  Anyway, I followed it through the ferns for ten minutes, maybe twenty. Finally, I thought I had it boxed in, near a deadfall and some old trees. Something furry and small and making noises in the underbrush.

  There was something wrong with it. I thought it was a cat. It wouldn’t let me see it. I caught a glimpse of it in the brush, something grey and white, but it skittered away from me, making noises that were wrong. It sounded like something in pain, something squealing and mewling but trying to be quiet at the same time.

  I chased it. It’s what kids do, after all.

  I caught one clear view of it, pulling aside one of the big ferns in time to reveal it, frozen in fear, in the middle of a clot of dirt next to a rotting stump.

  It wasn’t a cat. It was a rat. A rat as big as my arm. Grey and white. Something was wrong with it. The front third of its body was knotted with some transparent grey web. Something like a cord of latex filled with pulsing curd. These webs went down its throat, up one nostril, and kept its mouth open so that it left a constant pool of dribble as it went. It was wheezing with terror.

  It looked up at me, almost resigned to its fate, trembling with exhaustion.

  I stopped in my tracks, terrified to go any closer. It ran off into the woods. I never saw it again. Never thought about it again, until now.

  I could find it now, I suppose, if I looked for it. It’s still here, somewhere, I bet.

  What a strange thought.

  One of the millions of evenings on the hill, I let myself in the gate, and carefully pulled it shut. It was winter, but still early. So there was standing water during the day at least.

  The road, what of it there was, was ripped up. Mud flung everywhere in frozen chunks, the grooves from giant tires cutting patterns in the earth like maps. My boots squelched as I climbed the incline, trying to keep out of the deeper mud, preferring the frozen edges, which cracked under foot.

  Martin was there, outside the shack where I knew he would be, but he didn’t see me. He was flushed red when I came up the rise,
and a plume of white poured from his lips as he flicked the cigarette out into the pines. He leaned his head back, put his hands on the small of his back and stretched, letting out an audible grunt.

  Martin was built like a leprechaun linebacker. He was tiny, but strong and wide and a little bit scary looking, with a ruined nose and thick cheeks crisscrossed by burst capillaries. Anyway, he was old, or older than me. That’s about all I really knew about Martin. We’d exchanged some forced pleasantries in front of the company man, once, and since then, it’d been hand-off after hand-off. Nothing much more.

  “Missed some shit today,” Martin said when he saw me, obviously pleased.

  I raised my eyebrows and stepped past him to the shed. Checked the fuel on the heater, and put my stuff down. Unperturbed, Martin just kept on talking.

  “Some nut was up here. Took a crowbar to the bobcat. The cops just hauled him off.”

  I stopped.

  “One of the Dowdys?” The Dowdys owned a house on the far side of the run, and they weren’t too pleased with the construction. There had been words on more than one occasion.

  Martin shook his head.

  “No. Like I said, some nut.” Martin surveyed the road going up the slope towards the stones.

  “How’d he get to the site?”“Didn’t come in the gate. Must have hopped the fence.” Martin turned and looked at me with a smirk.

  “Huh,” I said, thinking about the man on the street this evening.

  “Anyway, he didn’t stop shit, they hauled off the second stone before the whistle blew.”

  For a moment, I felt light-headed.

  “Where did they take it?” I asked.

  “What?”

  “The stone? Where did they take the stones?” Even in the memory, the fact seemed important, monumental. Vital.

  He glanced down and smiled with a look on his face like an adult talking to a child. He shook his head.

  “Kid, who the hell cares? Not me.”

  And then I was alone for the night. Whatever night that was.

  The memory fades away like a dream when you first try to recount it. I used to write them down, but my handwriting is poor. Gibberish is all I get from those half-sleep composed notes. Anyway, the thought, it was about Martin, Martin and Indian Hill.

  I try to focus on Martin. I close my eyes and all I see is the back of a naked man, face down in the winter mud, his head split open like a gourd with pink-white brains spilled out.

  It is night, and his skin glows blue white, as the blood and heat leave his body. His head juts mist as the warmth inside him spills out to fill the night.

  And a voice inside me is muttering a million different things. Threads of thought so fine they form an unbroken wall of ideas so complex and interwoven that looking at them simply throws into focus how incapable of understanding them I am.

  I’m weeping there, in the memory, I think. If it is a memory. The voice is there too, muttering, chanting, speaking to me, but it is too much. Someone else is speaking.

  “I’m sorry, I’m so sorry...”

  It’s my voice.

  I’m thinking too much about Indian Hill. I need to think about other things, but it’s like the further they are from the Hill, the more difficult they are to focus on.

  I think about Nan. Even though it hurts, I think about Nan.

  There was a time when Nan was calling me. The phone was ringing but I was far away. My head aching, my hands raw and numb. From my vantage point, inverted on the bed, I was looking at four stretched squares of light crawl across the ceiling in time-lapse. Everything felt wrong. Time was like a greased rope, spilling out of my hands and into the black, I was dropping with it.

  My face felt puffed, my nose was raw, my eyes nearly swollen shut. Was I crying? Who knows.

  The phone rang again, and each time it would reach its peak, the sound would shake through the air, shaking my head, shaking my fillings, blurring my vision. Each time it stopped, I thought it would be the last, but it wasn’t. It kept ringing.

  I felt exhausted. Cracked open and hollowed out. Empty. Nothing could bring back the order to my life now. It was too late. Too much had happened. It was beyond me now. I was just reacting. Everything was jumbled up already.

  Something had happened on the Hill.

  Finally, after what seemed like hours, the ringing stopped.

  I slept.

  I dreamt of swimming in warm water. Floating around me in the current were the prone bodies of others, people drifting along in an amber river, still. As I watched, through the blurred water, I saw them twitching, as if asleep.

  What a strange dream. I don’t like thinking about it.

  And just like that, it fades away.

  Night on the mountain comes on like this: first, everything settles, then it fades.

  On this night, it wasn’t winter yet, but there was some snow, and moment to moment, it seemed to bleach the warm colors out of the world like a photo fading in time lapse. The yellows and reds thinned, leaving purples and blues, split by black pickets of trees, until the sky at the forest’s edge was the only bright thing in the world.

  I had been up here a thousand times. A million. I had seen the play of light before dusk in rain, in heat, in winter. I felt I had seen all that Indian Hill had to offer me, still I watched it, arm propped up on the plywood table in the shack, with the lights out.

  Finally, like some magic trick, someone turns it all down, all the colors. For a few minutes, as the last of the air fades to black, I sat in silence in the booth, in the dark, listening to my breath. Finally, with a click, I snapped on the lights.

  All that’s left by five-thirty is the guard shack; a wave of light in four directions from the windows, the dim pearly glow of nearby snowbanks, and silence. You couldn’t see the town. There were no other lights except the shack.

  I turned the heater up, spun the egg timer for thirty minutes, folded open my book on Tarkovsky, and began reading, but the page seemed uninviting. I kept starting and stopping and turning back to the beginning. The words seemed to drop from my mind as my eyes tracked them.

  This could have been any of a hundred nights. A thousand.

  Then this other time, I’m running in the woods. This is recent. I think. I’m running with a slung shotgun and a flashlight. Every footfall the shotgun swings away from my shoulder, and every other footfall, it smashes into my shoulder blade. But I don’t care.

  I’m very, very frightened.

  My feet are screaming. My back, bent. I’m stumbling on snow and branches and over deadfalls, flatfooted and without any grace—terrified. I’ve dropped the gun and the flashlight more than once, and scrambled to pick them up just as quickly. My breath is coming out in plumes that are lost behind me before I can even see them.

  It feels like I’m surrounded. In the dark, just past my vision, it feels like a crowded room. Like a theater after the lights go down, like I am the main attraction. I am being watched. I am the focus of something terrible which waits for me in time.

  Confusing. Is Martin here?

  Sitting on the mountain seems to take up much of my mind.

  Guarding something as ambiguous as a proposed ski-run is difficult to picture, so I’ll walk you through it. The timer goes off, you pick up the shotgun and flashlight, and walk the run. The shotgun was standard now in podunk assignments, as Vermont was going through a nasty resurgence of its Black Bear population. Having been chased by one the previous summer at Yale Lake, I didn’t need to be told twice. Anyway, everyone local knew their way around a scattergun.

  The flashlight didn’t do much. I mean, it’s big and heavy, but the light is pathetic in the face of the night. It’s like walking along the bottom of the ocean. Your breath in your ears, the crunch of snow and pop of twigs, a dim light plucking a tiny circle of normal out of the black.

  Thanks to the recent snow, you could find the footpaths. There was the main run, from the entrance to the stones, and then a skein of boot marks tracking
an octagon around the perimeter of the fence. I followed that one. Walked it. Maybe it was a mile all told. Didn’t see anything except trees and snow and dark.

  When I cut back on the far side to walk to the stones, I stopped, shifted hands, trading the shotgun and light, and began up the hill.

  About five minutes up, the men had been to work. The old growth trees that had crept in in all the years of my youth around the stone circle had been plucked like rotten teeth. A nearly perfect rectangle of cut trees swept past the stone circle like a frame pointed at the sky. The ground, which was once covered in thick yellow grass was bare mud, torn up by construction equipment.

  In the center were the stones, or what of them were left. There were nine when I was a kid. Nine big rocks cut at strange angles worn down over time. Older than the United States, older than the Indians. They were carved and cut and graffitied by a million hands throughout the years. I myself spray-painted my name on one in the summer of 2005, the year I graduated high school.

  That stone was still there. Others, two of them, had been plucked from the ground leaving an ugly black and brown squelch in the ground. Each of these holes had been marked by pickets of snapped paint-sticks, painted with fluorescent orange to mark them.

  I stopped at the peak of the hill, huffing. I shone the light around up there, marking the stones and the lack of stones. It felt wrong, unbalanced. But I didn’t know if that was just the artist in me. For no reason at all, I wandered over to one of the gaps and looked down into the hole.