The Mammoth Book of Cthulhu: New Lovecraftian Fiction

by Paula Guran

  Then he produced the picture, the first one, black and white in a thousand grainy shades of gray. It had a vintage look, a vintage feel, showing a square-faced, wavy haired man who cracked a grin both impish and wise as he gestured with a cigarette pinched between his thumb and forefinger. Did men in the prime of their lives even look like this anymore? Clarence had never seen one.

  The old man dipped into memory’s well and came up empty. “Can’t say any of it rings a bell. Should it? What did he do?”

  “He disappeared.”

  “Sorry to hear that.” The old man’s sympathy was genuine and matter-of-fact. You didn’t get to be this old without a long acquaintance with loss. “When?”

  “A little over fifty years ago.”

  “Mercy. That is a spell.” From behind black-framed glasses sturdy enough to take a punch, the old man peered at the photo again, maybe looking for something familiar. “Did he come from around here? Have kin around here?”

  “No sir, he didn’t.”

  He took one more look at the photo, then gave them a fresh appraisal, seeing the connection in Clarence, maybe. He had inherited the square features, if not the freewheeling demeanor. He had the knitted eyebrows of a born worrier.

  “Are you kin to him?”

  “He was our grandfather,” Clarence said.

  The old man seemed to understand their need without having to know anything more. “A thing like that never does scab over, does it?”

  Next came the second photo, along with a grainy enlargement of just its subject. “I know there’s not much to go on with these, but is there anything here that looks familiar? The place, or who this might’ve been?”

  This time the old man took the photos for himself. People did that a lot. They seemed unable to leave them on a counter. They had to pick them up, had to stare as if to prove to themselves they were real. Not that there was anything, on first inspection, that appeared false, or even out of the ordinary. Perception demanded time. People noticed the wrongness of it in subtle ways they couldn’t identify, as if something fifty years behind this moment had left hidden hooks in the image, to hold their attention until they truly saw, and then forced their hand to thrust the photos back.

  “No,” the old man said. “But wherever this is, I think if I’d come across it once, I would’ve known to make sure I never went back.”

  Will nodded and slipped the photos into their folder again, the way he’d been conceding defeat for years.

  “Did she have something to do with him disappearing?” the man asked. “That is a woman there, isn’t it?”

  No matter how many times they’d heard the question, there was still no easy answer.

  “As far as we know,” Will said, and left it at that.

  Clarence stepped forward. “One last thing. Could we trouble you to listen to a recording? If you’ve ever heard anything like this, or about something like it?”

  The old fellow was game, and slipped on the compact pair of foam-padded earphones Clarence gave him. They were downstream of an old Walkman cassette player, a clunky and outmoded thing to be toting around these days. But Will Senior had lived as an analog man in an analog world, and had made the original recording onto tape. For no reason Clarence could prove, it would’ve seemed wrong to digitize it for convenience; reducing it to a file would erase some ineffable quality in it that might be preserved by dubbing it to a newer tape.

  He pressed PLAY.

  The seed man listened privately in the baked stillness of the day, nothing but the chirring of insects outside and the chirping of birds that would eat them if they could. As went the photos, so went the tape, a slow-burn reaction that creased the old man’s face with gradual repulsion. The recording went for a little over three minutes, but he had the earphones stripped away in two.

  Clarence pressed STOP.

  “Is that supposed to be a song?” the old man asked.

  “I guess so. We don’t know what else to call it.”

  “Call it quits, why don’t you? Sounds like that aren’t supposed to come out of folks’ throats. No sir.” The old man reached up to rub the back of his neck, bristly with gray stubble and as creased as a tortoise’s skin. “The closest thing I ever heard to it . . . I come from a long line of Swedes. The women used to have a cattle call song they brung over. You don’t hear it anymore. It was an eerie-sounding thing, if you heard it at some distance. But you could still tell it was a woman’s voice. But what you’ve got there . . .” He shook his head, then regarded them with an uneasy fusion of suspicion and worry. “You seem like nice boys. Why would you want to go looking for anything to do with that?”

  “You said it yourself,” Young Will told him. “It’s a scab thing.”

  They were both named for dead men, grandfathers they’d never met. Men who had died when their parents were still youngsters. For all Clarence knew, it was the first thing their mother and father discovered they had in common.

  The carrying on of someone’s name was apparently supposed to be an honor, and perhaps it was, but many were the times Clarence wondered if their parents had ever stopped to consider the obvious: the bigger the trophy, the heavier it was to lug around.

  Clarence and Willard . . . neither quite felt like a twenty-first-century name.

  As Clarence was the firstborn, Dad had gotten first crack at him, saddling him with the moniker of a man who’d succumbed in his thirties to the black lung he’d carried up out of a West Virginia coal mine. His end had come hard and early, but at least it was certain. There was no room for doubt in it, only sorrow and blame.

  Six years later, with their sister Dina in between, it was Mom’s turn to christen her third child as if he were an avatar of the man who’d vanished around the time she’d been hitting puberty, and the recycled name an invitation for her father to return from whatever void had swallowed him.

  The legacy of Willard Chambers was a more complicated thing for a namesake to live up to. He was restless, a roamer, but not without reason. Clarence was grown before he’d ever heard the term song-catcher, but that’s exactly what the man was.

  The inability of Will Senior to carry a tune was matched only by his reverence for those who could. He had an appreciation of history, and must have known by then that he’d lived it himself. He’d come through the Second World War, three years in the Pacific, fighting toward Japan one fierce island at a time, and seeing close up the fragility of everything that lived and breathed.

  Songs, too. Songs were living things and could be killed by far less than bullets and fire. All it took was for them to stop being heard. He was a city dweller who had served alongside Okie farmboys and gangly fellows from Appalachian hollers. They brought with them songs he’d never heard on the radio. Obsessed as they were with life and death and the acts that bridged the two – murders and drownings and love gone wrong – they may have appealed to him for their stark understanding that he might not see tomorrow either.

  But he had. Three years in the Pacific, and he suffered no worse than a case of paddy foot.

  At some point, home again, he’d learned of the Lomaxes – John the father and Alan the son – and realized he’d found a calling. These were men who traveled the country in search of songs whose roots lay deep in the earth of crops and graves: rural blues, cowboy ballads, folk tunes from plains and mountains, prison work songs, and anything else that was a jubilant or despairing cry from the heart of a marginalized life. Will Senior bought the same tape recorder that Alan Lomax was using at the time – a compact, battery-powered reel-to-reel called a Nagra – and took it on the road whenever he could. Which amounted to as much as four or five months out of the year.

  For reasons that likely went back to wartime, Willard had taken a special interest in the region known during the Great Depression as the Dust Bowl . . . an arid wasteland whose great dark eye overlapped western Kansas and eastern Colorado, a slice of New Mexico, and the panhandles of Texas and Oklahoma. He had it in his head that songs fr
om there were most vulnerable, since so many who would’ve sung them had been scattered by the same winds that carried away the topsoil, leaving them mostly in the care of those who’d been too sick or old to move. He saw it as a race against time.

  From everything Clarence and Will had heard about him, Willard Chambers wasn’t a man you needed to worry about. He knew nearly everything there was to know about taking care of himself. His family just missed him, deeply, with the resentful ache that comes from being forced to share a man with an obsession, and counting the days until he and his ’59 Chevy would be home again.

  His eighth run west became his last. Neither he nor the Chevy made it back, or were ever seen again.

  At least his gear – the Nagra and a Leica camera from his war years – had found its way home eventually.

  Even that had taken months.

  They made it through five more towns north of Gilead, then it was the long ride south, back to the motel they’d been using for home base. Clarence took the wheel and Will took the map, looking over what tomorrow might bring. More of the same, that was obvious, only the route would change.

  “One day,” Clarence said, “every town in the western half of this map is going to have a red dot next to it. Have you ever thought about what then?”

  “For you and me, you mean?”

  “For Mom. If she even makes it to then. Except she probably won’t.”

  “You mean just lie to her? Tell her we found something even though we didn’t?”

  “If it gives her some peace, finally, would that be so bad?”

  “I see what you did there,” Will said. “The next square you advance to after that is, okay, now that we’ve established lying as an acceptable option, why not lie to her now and save ourselves all that future trouble.”

  “I never said that.”

  “It was coming. Don’t tell me it wasn’t,” Will said. “I keep telling you that you can bail any time you want. This doesn’t have to be a two-man project. It never did.”

  Maybe not, but to Clarence it had always felt that way. No argument that he wasn’t superstitious was as persuasive as the conviction that as soon as he let Will do this on his own, their mom would mourn a vanished son, too.

  It had begun when his brother was nineteen, a college sophomore who’d enjoyed just one year of Daytona Beach debauchery before deciding he’d rather spend spring break in Kansas. Mother’s Day was coming in a few weeks, and his idealistic kid brother could think of no better gift to give theirs than the answers she’d craved for decades.

  Just like that, huh? Sure. Why not.

  You didn’t let an earnestly headstrong nineteen-year-old do something like this on his own. No telling who he might run into, and his 4.0 grade average didn’t mean he couldn’t be stupid when smart mattered most. Elderly Klansmen and their ilk still protected killings half a century old, and there was an uneasy sense they weren’t dealing with anything quite so prosaic here.

  That first year, Clarence had been counting on the enormity of the task to discourage him, and had never been so wrong about anything in his life. Spring breaks turned into career-era vacations, one year became six, and whatever happened to Will Senior remained as much a mystery as ever. And Clarence still couldn’t shake the feeling that, without him, his brother would meet his own bad end.

  More than once, he thought of the man in the photo, the grandfather who was two decades younger than their father was now, and wanted to hear it from the man’s tobacco-seared lips: Would he even want this for them?

  Go on, live your own lives and quit trying to reconstruct mine, he imagined Will Senior telling them. Have that kid you keep telling your wife you’ll get around to.

  Just like that, huh?

  What is it, son, you think you’ve got to wait until after you get me figured out before you do it? You think you’ll be doing the same thing to your kids that I did to mine by coming out here to the world’s breadbasket?

  Something like that.

  In that case, maybe you need to get clearer on your priorities.

  Easy for you to say, old man. I’m the one you left cleaning up your fifty-year-old mess.

  Willard never had a comeback to that one. He never even tried.

  As they drove, the sun sank low, lower, the plains and the gentle hills thickening with shadows that reached for their car from the west. Everywhere you looked, it was nothing but wheat and the road that ran through it like a path through a forest. He pointed to the last remnants of some lost homestead, an ancient barn whose bones had bent, the entire structure weathered to a silvery gray, sagging in on itself and leaning like a cripple as if to wait for the good strong breeze that would finally end its struggle.

  “I keep thinking I’d like to come back here with a truck one day and tear one of these down,” he said. “For the wood.”

  Back in his real life, he and his wife owned a frame shop. One of these wrecks could give birth to a lot of frames. It appealed, that whole life cycle thing about new life springing from decay.

  “Rustic never goes out of style,” he said.

  Will looked up from the map, reoriented to where they were and what he was talking about, and shook his head. “I think they should stay standing.”

  “They’re barely standing as it is. That’s kind of the point.”

  His brother went dreamy, pensive. “They’re like monuments to some other time. You just want to knock them down and rip them apart? For what, somebody’s wall?”

  “Is there any reason wood rot and fungus should get first dibs?”

  “You recognize the irony, I hope. You tear down a perfectly picturesque real barn to saw it apart and nail it around a picture of one. That’s always seemed like a special kind of hubris to me.”

  “Also known as recycling,” Clarence said. “I thought you were big on that.”

  Will grumbled and went back to the map, and Clarence took the exchange as one for his win column. His brother’s problem? It was as if the weight of his name had infected him with nostalgia for an era he’d never experienced and could never have tolerated. He didn’t have the stomach for it. Farms, at a glance, may have looked as if they were bursting with life, but ultimately they all led to something’s death.

  And whatever rotted out here would rot alone.

  It was the same the next day, and the day after that, and it was easy to imagine that Kansas was Purgatory in disguise. They’d actually died in a car crash in Missouri, and their sins would keep them on an endless road for decades of penance, except Will was going to move on a lot sooner than Clarence would.

  Shortly after dusk, they returned for their final night in the latest motel they’d been using as home base. The strategy had emerged during their first trip. Rather than checking into a new place to sleep each night, they opted to settle for a few days at some central crossroads, from which they could branch out in any of several directions.

  Sometimes you had to cling to whatever illusion of stability you could.

  As Clarence showered off the August road sweat, Will got on the phone with their mother to tell her of the day’s journey – the places they’d stopped, the people they’d spoken to – and what tomorrow would bring. What made him the perfect son made him a perfectly terrible brother. It wasn’t just from out here that he called home every day. He called home 365 days a year. There was no keeping up with that. You’d think he would run out of new things to say, but he always found more.

  He’s the daughter they always hoped I’d be, Dina had whispered in Clarence’s ear last Christmas, after just enough wine, and neither of them could stop snickering.

  “Say hi to Mom,” Will ordered, and pushed the phone at him while he was still toweling off from the shower.

  Clarence took it and dug to find a few topics that Will wouldn’t have covered already, and it was okay, it really was. He reminded himself there would come a day when he wouldn’t have this chance and would regret every awkward moment he’d been less than enthusiasti
c about taking the phone. Myelofibrosis, it was called; a bone-marrow defect. There was no coming back from it. She had two years left, if she was lucky, just long enough to trick himself into thinking it wasn’t really going to happen, that grieving was still decades in the future.

  Then they swapped places, and while Will took his turn in the shower, Clarence cracked open his laptop to see if their latest ads had drawn any responses. Craigslist, local classifieds, weekly shoppers . . . for years they’d been sprinkling such outlets with some variation of the following:

  Family seeking information on the disappearance of amateur musicologist Willard Chambers, of Charleston, West Virginia. Vanished somewhere in western Kansas in July 1963. He is believed to have gone missing while trying to locate an old woman who was at that time living alone in a remote area, and reputed to have a unique style of singing regarded as “unearthly.”

  They would accompany it with his picture when they could. Sometimes they’d run the other one, too, the last photo of Will Senior’s life, but it was always too small and indistinct to reveal the details that, with a hardcopy print, made people stop and stare with a rising pall of dread. But at least it showed the oddities of the setting surrounding that strange, stark figure, and maybe that was all someone would need.

  Responses? Mostly a lot of nothing. The little that did come in, he could weed through it quickly and flush it with impunity. They could always count on well-meaning people who wanted to help but didn’t know anything, and trolls eager to waste everyone’s time.

  But then there was today. There was always the chance of something like today.

  I’m not near old enough to have met your grandfather, so I can’t help you there. But when I was little, I’d go visit my Nana Ingrid and she used to scare me into obeying her with talk of an old lady she knew about when she was young. Everybody used to keep away and just let her be. The old lady, I mean. This would’ve been around a place called Biggsby. I don’t know if it’s even on the maps anymore, or if it ever was. The nearest place of any size at all is Ulysses, and that’s not much. I should know, that’s where I am.