The Piper's Graveyard: A Small-Town Cult Horror Thriller Suspense

by Ben Farthing

Jackson shook his head. “Probably a trick.”

  A blurry vertical line ahead gradually gained definition. A support post in the center of the tunnel. As they approached, Cessy saw that the tunnel split.

  To the left, the tunnel sloped uphill and curved left, like the start of a spiral ramp to the surface.

  To the right, the tunnel took a jagged path downhill, steeper than the tunnel they stood in now. It turned sharply out of sight. The dirt floor wasn’t packed down, and looked prone to rockslides. The support beams were splintered.

  The Maple Table’s discussion drifted down from the left; the soft weeping up from the right.

  Cessy motioned to the haphazard path down. “Kate’s probably this way.”

  Jackson walked a few feet up to the left. He craned his slender neck, looking up around the curve. “I want to see their faces.”

  “We’re here to find my sister. Not revenge.” Plus, she needed him with her. She didn’t know what she would find, but she had no plan against it except a shotgun, and--failing that--using Jackson as a distraction.

  “You don’t know where Kate is,” Jackson said. “Could be she’s one of the people crying down there. But I told you, I think it’s a trick. I don’t think anybody’s crying anywhere.”

  “Your dad said a third of the population is missing. That’s nearly a thousand people. They’ve got to be somewhere.”

  Jackson shone his light down the right hand path. “Nowhere we can reach. They’re gone.”

  “Watch your mouth.” Fury filled Cessy. This meth head didn’t know what he was talking about.

  “It’s the truth. There ain’t no secret jail down here. Those people got taken somewhere we can’t get to, unless they take us, too.”

  “You don’t know that.”

  “You just got here yesterday. There’s a lot you ain’t seen yet.”

  Cessy looked down the tunnel. “If you think it’s impossible to save Kate, then why are you helping me?”

  “Kate didn’t get taken. She walked down here on her own.”

  Cessy took a breath. “That makes a difference?”

  “It could.” Jackson shrugged. “Think about it. Kate wanted to stop Lockler and the Maple Table. She walked in here four days ago. Which direction do you think she chose?”

  Cessy adjusted the shotgun. It was getting heavy. “She’d want to confront the radio hosts. It’d scare her shitless, even if this were a regular situation. But she’d do it anyways.”

  “And she knew as well as I do that all those tears down there probably aren’t real.”

  “How?” Cessy asked. “Have they tricked you before?”

  Jackson smirked. “You being serious? This whole thing had been a trick. ‘We’ll exterminate the vermin for you, no charge.’”

  Cessy nodded. “Valid point.” She felt their relationship start to shift. Jackson was more than a druggie flailing through an attempt to do good like his late wife. He’d been investigating this alongside Kate--and before Kate arrived. If years ago he’d avoided that first contact with meth, maybe today he’d have made a decent detective.

  She cut off the thought. She needed Jackson as fodder for the cannons that might come.

  Jackson started up the winding path. “What do you say we go ask those assholes if they’ve seen Kate?”

  “Lead the way.”

  They began the climb.

  43

  After five minutes of climbing, the wailing below them started to get to Cessy.

  The spiral tunnel had floors and walls of smooth dirt. Even the ceiling had been smooth at one point, before chunks of dirt fell here and there. The view ahead was always limited to fifteen feet, as the rising tunnel curved off to the left.

  The Maple Table’s cheery discussion was almost intelligible, despite bursts of static that made Jackson flinch and hurt Cessy’s ears. They were getting closer, and any moment now, Cessy would confront the people who’d attacked this town with unnatural force.

  But the wailing below demanded Cessy’s attention. From within her dust mask, the poorly lit visual world felt distant, like she was intruding on foreign space. But her ears were exposed. No filter between the sound waves and her perception of them.

  A chorus wept. Hundreds of voices. Wordless, but the emotion was clear: beyond anger, beyond fear, beyond asking for help, they mourned for their present state. The elderly were the loudest, with wavering voices, vocal chords worn down by the passage of time. They nearly drowned out the younger voices, the discomforting sobs of adulthood, the familiar but tragic cries of children.

  A shrill, colicky cry demanded to be heard.

  Cessy stumbled. “Was that a baby?”

  Jackson turned around. He brought his flashlight to face Cessy, leaving the path ahead dark. Shadows returned to his own gaunt face. “I told you, it’s fake.”

  “You don’t know that for sure.”

  Jackson swallowed. Blinked slowly. “Calm down a second and listen.”

  The Maple Table continued their discussion, but Cessy heard only the weeping below. Now she heard mainly the single baby cry, the sound of an infant that’s been left to cry too long, months on end, and had ripped her vocal chords.

  “It sounds real.”

  Jackson shook his head. “Use your head. Down where the mine split, the Maple Table was practically yelling overtop of those fake crybabies. Now the crying’s louder.”

  “What are you saying?”

  “It’s fake!” Jackson threw his hands up. His light flashed down the mine behind them.

  Cessy stepped away from the business end of Jackson’s pistol. “Be careful with that.”

  Jackson pointed the pistol at the floor. “I’m telling you, they sensed the crying was working, so they cranked it up.”

  Cessy aimed her flashlight back down the way they’d came. “If it were aimed at me, wouldn’t they make me hear Kate’s voice?”

  “It’s not aimed at you.” Jackson stared at the floor.

  The infant’s sandpapery scream hit a crescendo over the chorus.

  “Olivia was eight months pregnant. Both me and her were colicky babies. Our baby girl probably would have been, too.”

  “I’m so sorry,” Cessy whispered.

  “I was ready. I bought Olivia a pair of them noise canceling headphones. We had the gripe water for our baby girl’s belly. Vitamin E drops to keep her throat from scarring.”

  Cessy’d never have kids. She’d met Pat so late in life that kids were a longshot anyways, and then their relationship had only lasted a few years. So she didn’t know how it felt to lose the hope of a child. But she did know how it felt to find new hope for life, then have it all ripped away.

  Jackson had lost everything.

  The academic Maple Table host spoke low and fast through the static. Cessy caught the words “karma” and “bring it on yourself.”

  Her feelings towards Jackson shifted. The kid’s own decision to sell drugs led directly to their parents thinking the town needed saving. And the emotionally abusive way he’d treated Kate as a teenager, well, life had a way of bringing about justice.

  Jackson wiped his mouth. The flashlight caught yellow and missing teeth. He was probably high right now.

  The nerve, using the deaths of his wife and unborn child--which he’d helped cause--to make everything about him.

  Maybe he had a point about the weeping being fake, but being right didn’t change the type of person he was.

  “Okay, I believe you,” Cessy said. “The crying is fake. Let’s go see what the Maple Table has to say about your family.”

  Jackson tilted his head in confusion at her angry tone, like a stray dog.

  “You first,” she ordered.

  They continued upward. Part of her mind recognized that she wasn’t even that harsh on bank robbers. But the situation had her rattled, and this was Jackson, who’d made her baby sister’s life hell. She was content with her anger.

  The Maple Table host’s word dripped through the s
tatic, “It’s a shame, but he made his own decisions.”

  She glanced once more behind her, towards the crying, and put aside the thought that the simplest explanation for why a sound was getting louder, was that its source was getting closer.

  44

  They walked another half hour.

  Cessy’s legs ached. Sweat lined the inside of her mask and made the air humid to breathe.

  The radio hosts’ voices mixed with the weeping masses, both interspersed with infant shrieks and static pops. Condensation dripped from rocks that bulged out of the dirt walls.

  “We should have reached the top of the mountain by now,” Cessy said.

  Jackson grunted a response.

  They rounded another bend.

  Pitch darkness gave way to dusky gray. Light stretched down from up the tunnel.

  Cessy and Jackson exchanged looks.

  Cessy adjusted herself so she held the flashlight with her left hand, and rested the barrel of the shotgun on her left wrist.

  The light grew brighter as they ascended. Reason said the light must be coming from ahead, but it seemed to glow in place, independent of any source.

  The dirt floor leveled out, rounded another bend.

  The tunnel opened into a cavern.

  A living room scene from a sitcom. A couch and a love seat atop a rug. But under and around that rug was dirt instead of wood floors. Beyond the furniture, instead of a background of windows and a staircase, blackness.

  There was no lamp to give reason for the light.

  Three people sat in the living room.

  On the couch sat a round older man with reading glasses perched on his nose. He leaned back, just enough to be relaxed without being too casual.

  Next to him, a slender man around Cessy’s age. He wore a blue dress shirt and yellow patterned bowtie. He lifted his chin like he’d had a thought he was sure would impress everyone around.

  On the loveseat, a respectable distance from the men, sat a blonde woman in her thirties. Her stiff eyes and lips had seen the beautifying needle of an aesthetician. She wore a magenta dress that stopped at her knees.

  The hosts of the Maple Table faced the tunnel like they’d been expecting Cessy and Jackson, but they didn’t stop their friendly chatter.

  The friendly grandpa was midsentence. “...and the mountains. I love my neighbors, I love seeing their grandkids come visit, and I’d hate to see anything happen to them.”

  The professor took the thought and ran with it. “With crime rates on the rise, and urban sprawl bringing rap music into the heartland of America, you’re right to be worried. The facts don’t lie.”

  The blonde woman added smiling cheer. “I know I’m grateful for the men and women who defend my home.”

  Grandpa opened his mouth to respond. A burst of static erupted.

  Cessy clutched at one ear with the hand holding the flashlight, and jammed her other ear against her shoulder. Sharp pain from her eardrums.

  The static reverberated through the cavern, outside the modest light of the Maple Table’s living room.

  Jackson clenched his jaw at the noise. Aimed his pistol at Grandpa’s chest.

  “No!” cried Cessy.

  The static stopped, and Grandpa kept right on declaring his love for Hamlin.

  “These fuckers killed my family!” Jackson growled.

  The hosts didn’t react to the pistol. They stared at the entrance to the tunnel, continued their masturbatory discussion.

  Cessy lunged for Jackson. “We need them.”

  Jackson pulled the trigger.

  45

  The pistol’s flash lit up the cavern surrounding the living room furniture, but in the brief moment before it blinded Cessy, she caught a glimpse of roiling walls, like a mass of prehistoric anacondas.

  Then her vision flashed white, the gunpowder flare an order of magnitude brighter than their flashlights, or the sourceless glow of the Maple Table.

  Jackson cursed. “No way.”

  Cessy’s hearing was muffled from the static and then the gunshot. Her vision blurred back to clarity.

  She shined her light into the darkness, but it didn’t reach the cavern walls to confirm what she’d seen.

  The Maple Table kept talking.

  A bullet hole through Grandpa’s shirt, a puncture into his chest. Flesh ripped open, but no blood. The spent round was barely visible, two inches deep in his chest. No effect on his speech. No sign he’d noticed at all.

  Jackson’s eyes were wide and wild. He paced in front of the radio hosts, who continued to ignore him. “They’re not real people.”

  Cessy looked behind her. Shined her light down the tunnel, then up above it. The tunnel opened wide like a funnel--how had she not noticed that before? Her light didn’t reach the cavern walls anywhere.

  She stepped closer to the Maple Table. Their unnatural light was better than darkness.

  Jackson walked up and shoved Grandpa. He only succeeded in pushing himself backwards. He tried again with the Professor, and the token female. They neither budged nor reacted to him.

  “Did you see the walls?” Cessy asked.

  Jackson was too distracted. He slapped the woman. Her vapid endorsement of small town values didn’t falter.

  Jackson looked back at Cessy, fear in his expression. “They’re not real people. What is this?”

  “If Kate’s not here, and they won’t respond to us, then we need to keep searching.” Cessy made sure she had a shell chambered. Kate might be somewhere in this cavern.

  “You don’t understand. I’ve been wrong about Lockler and the Maple Table. I thought they were occultists, playing with dark shit. Your sister thought they were like Jonestone, but with hallucinogens. We were wrong. Look at them.” Jackson smacked the professor on the head. “They’re not in charge. They’re not causing all this. Something else killed Olivia. They’re an instrument, like a flute or a pipe. Playing the music that Hamlin wants to hear.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?” Cessy looked at the three adults on the couches. They ignored the bloodless bullet hole in Grandpa’s chest to discuss the downfall of society, which was broadcast across Hamlin without the benefit of broadcast equipment, except for buried wires.

  “I don’t know,” Jackson said. “I thought they were the ones causing everything. The darkness and the holes and the people going crazy all started after the radio broadcasts. But one conversation we had, Kate said maybe we had it backwards.”

  Cessy touched the Professor’s forehead. Cool to the touch, but still flesh. “She called them instruments?”

  Jackson nodded.

  “Who’s doing the playing?” Cessy stepped past the couches, to the edge of the darkness.

  “I don’t know. I thought these people were witches or something. Driving us crazy and sending shadows and living holes to kill us or take us.”

  “Cult leaders who’d actually tapped into a source of power.”

  “But it’s obviously not that.”

  “We still haven’t found Lockler.”

  Jackson checked his watch. “Lockler doesn’t broadcast for another twenty minutes. I bet if we stand here long enough, the Maple Table will disappear, and Lockler will show up.”

  “That doesn’t make any sense.”

  “What about this makes sense? Do you see any radio equipment? Any microphones?”

  Cessy kicked at the dirt, looking for the wires that she’d seen running into the mine. It was too packed down.

  “I thought Kate was coming here to reason with them, or break their equipment, or something. When you were going to follow her, I figured I’d tag along and end them for good. But they’re not in charge.” Jackson yelled louder, losing his grip on control. “Who’s in charge? Who killed my Olivia?”

  “I don’t know, but Kate’s still--”

  “Kate’s dead too! Do you see her anywhere?”

  Cessy drove the butt of the shotgun into Jackson’s gut. He crumpled. Gasping for breath calm
ed him down.

  “I don’t know what’s going on.” Cessy spoke over the Maple Table. “I don’t have any ideas about fixing Hamlin. I guess you did, but now that you’re as confused as I am, maybe it’s time to get on board with me. We’re finding Kate, and then we’re getting the hell out of this shithole town.”

  “What about everyone else?” Jackson wheezed.

  “They chose to stay here.” She thought of Dad, genuinely happy to find her in the driveway yesterday morning. “Some of them were even complicit in... whatever this is.”

  Jackson inhaled. Exhaled. “You’ll drive me out of here?”

  “Help me find Kate.”

  He nodded.

  “We’ll go back down the other tunnel,” Cessy said, “after we search this cavern.”

  “You know we might find a corpse, right?”

  Cessy thought of finding Jackson’s messages in Kate’s voicemail. If Kate was dead, it was Jackson’s fault.

  Another burst of static. They covered their ears and waited for it to pass.

  Cessy stretched her jaw to try and ease the pain in her ears. The mask restricted her movement. “Come on. Don’t get too close to the walls.”

  She led the way into the darkness.

  46

  Cessy’s flashlight beam reached forty feet into the darkness of the caverns. Close to her, it revealed full colors, which in the cavern, were only the browns and grays of the dirt. At the far end of its reach, everything dulled to dusky colors and blurred together.

  In a room this large, Cessy expected an echo. But her footsteps were a dull staccato.

  The Maple Table talked behind them, in the opposite direction. Their voices were softer than before. Intermittent static didn’t claw at their eardrums from over here.

  Jackson walked to Cessy’s left. His flashlight beam jerked around the cavern. His breathing was heavy. “You’re right.”

  “About what?”

  “We should get out of Hamlin. I’d kept thinking these voices on the radio, I could show up, pull the trigger a couple times, and put an end to everything. That ain’t gonna work. So we should go.”