The Mammoth Book of Cthulhu: New Lovecraftian Fiction

by Paula Guran

  “I came from here. I came from this,” she said, although whom she was speaking to wasn’t clear. “And I never bothered to come see. Thirty miles, and I didn’t even come out for a look.”

  “Nice we can pay her for the privilege,” Clarence murmured, not because he begrudged her the opportunity, but because he knew it would get a rise out of Will.

  “Shut up. Don’t you say anything more about that,” Will said. “Besides, we aren’t paying her for anything. I am.”

  And he didn’t know why it rankled him so. Years ago they’d vowed to never pay for information. It could only encourage people to lie. For that matter, why did it rankle him so much that his brother was now bankrolling each year’s venture? Because he could afford to, that’s why. Right now, at least, cloud architecture was some of the best money in IT, and this was the way Will wanted to spend it, and the worst part of it was that Will pulled in six figures doing something he excelled at but didn’t even enjoy. All the money in the world couldn’t buy him what he seemed to want most: to live in a simpler time.

  “I’m sorry,” Clarence said. “I just want to get this done.”

  “I know.”

  “Except I don’t know what done is supposed to look like. Even if we find that old hag’s house and it’s still standing, we’re not going to walk in and find a skeleton at the table wearing Grandpa’s army dog tags. It’s never going to be that neat and clean.”

  At their feet was a decayed shard of post snarled in a rusty length of galvanized fencing that twisted through the grasses and weeds like a wire snakeskin. Will stared at it, seeming to ponder how he might straighten it out, make it all better.

  “I know,” he said again.

  “I won’t ask you to promise today, but when we find it, at least start thinking that maybe it should be the end of the line.” He put a hand on his brother’s shoulder. “We’ll find the place in the picture. We found out who the woman was. We got a name, and there might be some old records where we can find out a little more. That’s a lot. Maybe it should be enough to get to the last place Grandpa got to, and admit that the two of them are the only ones who know what happened next, and we just can’t know. But we got here. We closed that circle. Can you live with that?”

  Will thought a moment, then nodded. “I guess I’ll have to. I just hope it’ll be enough for Mom.”

  “Come on, slackers, let’s go!” Paulette called over to them from the car. He hadn’t even seen her return to it. “We haven’t got all day!”

  Under the vast and cloudless prairie sky, they prowled roads no one seemed to travel anymore. He recalled that the area had once been called Biggsby, and had been so inconsequential as to not even merit inclusion on modern maps. By now there was no indication this place had ever deserved being thought of as a town. Biggsby – it was the name of a hostile field sprawling between horizons, a forgotten savannah where animals burrowed and mated and devoured each other undisturbed.

  Paulette’s map seemed not quite right, maybe a casualty of faulty recollections: a curve in the road that shouldn’t have been there, an expected crossroad that wasn’t. They tracked and backtracked, futilely hoping to find things waiting just as they were in a photo shot fifty years ago. If only it could be as certain as spotting that inexplicable gauntlet of branches from Will Senior’s last photo.

  Even Nana Ingrid, who remembered it firsthand, hadn’t had an explanation for that.

  “She kept it in good repair, whatever it was for,” Ingrid said from her wheelchair. “We used to call it her cattle chute. Even though she didn’t raise no cattle.”

  They stopped to explore a series of ruined farmhouses that seemed like possible candidates, each little different from the others, all sagging roofs and disintegrating walls, collapsed chimneys and wood eaten to sponges and splinters by the onslaught of the seasons.

  “Even if she did, you wouldn’t want to bring the cattle straight to your door.”

  They found sofas reduced to shapeless masses erupting with rusty springs, and boxy old televisions whose tubes had shattered, and it was these castoffs that made him think no, none of these were the place, because as old and neglected as these features were, they were still too modern.

  “What about there?” Will said, back on the hunt and pointing at a spot they’d passed twice already.

  It was the gentle slope of the land that first made Clarence suspect they’d found it at last. The place was farther off the road than anywhere else they’d tried, and if these were the same trees in the background of Willard’s photo, then they were willows with another fifty years of growth behind them, nearly sweeping the ground now to screen the house from sight from the road.

  House? What they found was a slumping hovel, a single-story dwelling made of both durable stone and vulnerable timber. It seemed far older than the other ruins they’d inspected, something a pioneer might have built as a first outpost for taming a wild frontier. Behind the willows that bowed and bobbed in the wind, it sat in the midst of an immense stillness pregnant with the whispers of rustling leaves and insects whose chirring in the weeds sounded as sharp as a drill.

  It felt right. This was the place. It felt right because something about it felt deeply wrong. This was a place poisoned by time.

  And now that they knew, Young Will went back to the car, parked along the side of the road, to retrieve Will Senior’s heirloom camera. The vintage Leica still worked. They’d been built to last decades, to survive wars. He brought it with him every year, but until this moment, Clarence had always assumed it was some sort of totem, the only physical connection he could have to the man whose name he’d been born to carry. He’d never mentioned an intention to actually use it.

  His brother stationed himself down below, camera at his eye as he framed up the incline, until he was satisfied he’d found the vantage point from which Willard had shot his final photo. He then pointed at a spot on the ground that had once been striped by a ladder of shadows.

  “Stand there,” he told Paulette.

  “What for?” She didn’t sound happy about it.

  “For scale.”

  She complied, but seemed to find the act physically repugnant, as if Daisy had left behind contaminants that would infect anyone who stood where she had. Good luck. If she’d lived here as long as legend suggested, there couldn’t be a square inch of earth her gnarled feet hadn’t cursed.

  Clarence was more captivated by the thought of where Will Senior had hidden away, probably the night before, to make his recording. He’d gotten close, perhaps within twenty yards. There was a hint of distance in the sound, but not much; for comparison, they had the voice of Willard himself, the parts they never played for anyone else.

  He pondered the ground he stood on. From here. Maybe the old man had hunkered low and listened to what he should never have heard and sealed his fate from right here.

  They moved on, toward the remains of the house, finally ready to touch it. It was a shelter no longer, the outside world having invaded long ago, through the glassless windows and crumbling walls and the entrances whose doors had fallen off their hinges. Where the roof had drooped inward, it was open to the sun and moon alike. Weeds grew in every crack, and generations of predators had denned in the corners to gnaw the bones of their prey.

  Yet even in its disintegration, traces of the life once lived here lingered: a chipped mug, a blue enamel coffee percolator, a salvageable spindle-back chair and the table it accompanied. A row of large cans, rusted almost to lace, remained on a cupboard shelf. In an alcove that might have been a closet sat a battered washtub whose accumulated filth couldn’t quite hide the suggestion of ancient stains.

  Gutbucket – the word came to him before he knew why, then he remembered it from his own digging into Willard’s obsessions, as a folk term for a cheap upright bass made from a washtub.

  He kept coming back to that improbable row of cans.

  “Did she ever die, that anyone knew of?” Clarence asked.

&n
bsp; “You got me,” Paulette said. “If she did, Nana never heard about it.”

  “Wouldn’t it have been news if she had?” He squatted in front of a block of iron, half hidden by weeds and tumbled rafters, and realized it was a wood-fired stove. “She kept to herself, okay, but one day, someone’s got to realize nobody’s seen her out for a year. Somebody’s going to check eventually. They wouldn’t let her rot in here forever.”

  “Maybe she just walked away,” Will said.

  “To go where? Where do you go from here?”

  “You’d have to ask her,” Paulette said, quieter now. “Maybe that’s why Nana was always looking for her on the road.”

  They made their way around back, where the land rolled away into fields of nothing. A minute’s walk in one direction led to a heap of fungus-eaten wood, the collapsed shell of an outhouse. It made his stomach roll to speculate what might turn up if they started scraping through the dried-out layers down in the trench. A minute’s walk in another led to her well, the bucket and rope long gone, but the mortared stone wall around it remained intact. It was too dark down the well’s gullet to see. He pried a rock from the grassy soil and lobbed it in, and seconds later heard a splat of thickest mud.

  “How stupid are we, we didn’t even bring a flashlight?” he said.

  But there would be nothing to see, would there? He doubted she would poison her own well with a corpse. This was someone, something, resourceful enough to make a Chevrolet vanish, so surely she had better options for her dead. And it occurred to him that while he still thought of her as female, at some point he had ceased thinking of her as a woman.

  “Clarence. Get over here.”

  He hadn’t realized that Will and Paulette had drifted back to the house, where they both stood peering at the foundation.

  He must have listened to the full recording a thousand times throughout his life.

  It begins with the sound of clunks and fumbling, and spread atop the creamy hiss of tape is an ambience of crickets and tree frogs. If fireflies could make a sound, he imagined it would’ve captured them too.

  “There we go. Missed it. Shoot. Not used to doing this in the dark.” Willard’s voice is close and hushed, the voice of a man hugging the ground. “Welp . . . if she’s gonna do it again, she better do it while the batteries are still good.” His disappointment is palpable. “Now that I’ve heard it, I don’t know what to make of it. Nothing about it seems to point to any tradition I ever heard. That just might be my own gaps.” He falls silent, musing as the night fills in around him. “The feeling I get from it . . . it . . . it’s like some kind of lamentation. There’s sorrow in it. Sorrow and rage.” Then a miniscule break in the sound as Willard pauses the tape. When it resumes after an indeterminate recess, his whisper is taut with excitement. “Here she goes again.”

  He lets Old Daisy have the next three minutes to herself. Only once does he interject, not meaning to, but unable to halt the shaky sound of a sharply drawn breath as her voice peaks to a terrible warbling crescendo that could strip the trees of their leaves and claw scars across the cold white face of the moon.

  Until the night is still again, and even the crickets and frogs seem cowed.

  “Jesus, Mary, and Joseph,” he whispers. “That poor woman. That poor soul. How does . . . is she deformed, is that how . . . ?”

  He lets the tape roll awhile longer, with nothing more to add that the infinite night can’t say better, and with a greater sense of awe.

  Along the house’s foundation Will had cleared some of the rampant weeds and dirt and build-up of wind-tossed leaves, and still it wanted to not be seen: a rough-hewn door into the earth.

  “Storm cellar. Where we’re standing right now is smack dead center in the middle of Tornado Alley,” Paulette said. “You ever see The Wizard of Oz? It’s not like that.”

  They cleared away more, untangling the weeds from a heavy chain that held the entrance closed, lashed across the door in a sideways “V” whose point was threaded through a lock nearly the size of his fist, rusted but still sound. Even if they found a key, he doubted it would turn. The chain’s ends were anchored into the door’s hinge plates, and here was the weak spot. The wood along the edges had rotted enough that they were able to tug on the chain to rip up the hinge plates, bolts and all. They heaved the door open, opposite the way it was meant to swing, and the storm cellar exhaled a musty sigh of roots and earth, like the smell of a waiting grave.

  “Watch those steps,” Will warned him. “They may not be any sturdier.”

  But they held, a dozen of them sloping down to a floor of dry, hard-packed earth and walls so coarsely cut they looked like adobe.

  With the door open, enough light spilled down inside for them to see. They barely had room to stand beneath the crude rafters, black with creosote, that kept the hovel above and the tons of soil between from falling through.

  He wished it had all failed long ago. He wished they’d never found this place.

  “Jesus, Mary, and Joseph,” his brother whispered. One trepidatious step at a time, Will moved to where it dwelled along one wall – did it sit? or did it stand? – and when he was close, began to reach.

  “Maybe you ought not touch it,” Paulette said.

  He stilled his hand. “Why not?”

  “Because I wouldn’t.”

  Again: “Why not?”

  “Maybe I’ve just got more sense than that, I don’t know.”

  Clarence was with her on this one. And Will withdrew his hand.

  That it was some sort of sculpture was obvious, yet he couldn’t even tell what it was made of, much less what it was meant to represent. It was as tall as he was, with features and symmetry, but far more bulky. To look at it was to understand it had to have come from someplace, been worked by sentient hands, and realize he could never know enough about the world and its shadowed quarters to fathom who or where or why.

  Was it metal? Stone? It appeared to be a mixture of both, marbled into each other under the temperatures of a blast furnace. Aspects of it glinted in the light that the rest seemed to swallow.

  “A meteorite, maybe?” Will said. “That’s my guess.”

  As sculpture, it was pitted and rough, but that it had been shaped at all seemed miraculous. It must have been incomprehensibly hard to work with. Its weight had to be immense. It was contradictory, various parts suggesting man and animal, mammal and mollusk, demon and dragon, a creature fit to dominate anywhere, be it ocean, land, or sky. It was a nightmare rising from a slag heap left over from the formation of the galaxy.

  “So nobody else is going to say it?” Will asked. “Okay: ‘I don’t think we’re in Kansas anymore.’”

  But Kansas wasn’t any reference point here. For no reason he could defend, Clarence knew beyond a doubt that this grotesque effigy predated even the idea of Kansas. It predated the nation, maybe the continent, the mountains to the west and the great bisecting river to the east. For all he knew, it came from an epoch when the land was one mass, a single crucible of primal forces surrounded by one titanic sea, the globe like a turbulent eye staring back at the affront of creation.

  Then how had it come to be here and now? Perhaps it was as simple as waiting out the eons, impervious to time, until it was unearthed in a field.

  He sensed it all in the presence of this thing. The thoughts were in his head as if it had forced them. He couldn’t have been the first.

  “We should leave,” he whispered.

  “Guys? Check it out.”

  Paulette was pointing at the rafters. With their eyes better accustomed to the shadows, they were ready to see what hid in plain sight when the statue was all they were prepared to notice. It was everywhere, on the rafters and the upright timbers bracing the earthen walls and beneath the dust on the steps, a single message repeated over years and decades: COME BACK. Etched into the wood with the points of knives and awls, a thousand utterances of the same plaintive incantation: COME BACK COME BACK COME BACK.


  “That thing?” Will jabbed his finger at the statue. “Did she mean that thing? It was real, it was here?”

  “I don’t think so.” Paulette cut an impatient glance at him as if she pitied him for his misunderstanding. “I bet she meant her people. Family, friends, neighbors. Her people. Her . . . world.”

  Funny. He’d always considered her a loner, a freak who reveled in her isolation.

  “Maybe Nana was right after all,” Paulette said. “Maybe it really wasn’t just Old Daisy out here once.”

  Will stared at her. “She said there were more like her?”

  Paulette nodded. “Nana said there used to be a whole passel of them. This would’ve been way back. Kept their heads down, hid their faces, wore sacks, some of them. Didn’t want to be seen, didn’t want to have anything to do with newer neighbors, didn’t want anyone else even coming close. People like that, they were like moonshiners used to be, and meth cooks now. You learned to steer clear if you didn’t want a load of buckshot coming your way.”

  For the moment, Clarence quelled the urge to leave. “You didn’t say anything about this before.”

  “Because it wasn’t something I grew up with, all right? Nana never said a thing about it when I was little and she was telling her stories to keep me in line. And she only said it the once. This was after they put her in the home.” Paulette sighed with exasperation. “It wasn’t a serious talk. We were laughing about it, how scared of Daisy she had me. I thought it was just some notion that got in her head after she started to get dotty enough to finally believe her own stories.”

  “Maybe,” Clarence said, “she was dotty enough to finally let it slip.”

  “If it was even true, they wouldn’t have been people she’d ever seen.

  According to her, it was something she heard about from her own grandmother. So we’re talking waaay back. Civil War times, or not long after. There’s no way Old Daisy could’ve been around here since . . .”

  She clammed up, not even wanting to say it. Maybe because she could no longer be certain of absolutes, and hated to lie.