Prairie Gothic

by J. M. Hayes

  Chairman Wynn held up a spiral notebook with unlikely bright-pink pages. That made it instantly recognizable, as did the florid script on its cover proclaiming it as the property of One of Two, aka Heather English.

  “What would our girls be doing at Mad Dog’s with Deputy Wynn?” Judy didn’t seem to know whether to be relieved or even more concerned by this revelation. The chairman proceeded to point them in the latter direction.

  “I naturally figured they’d go to Mad Dog’s from there, what with the weather and all. Sheriff, your brother’s place is a mess. Somebody went in there and knocked out his windows and kicked in his doors. Worse yet, they took a gun to that buffalo of his, and then they went back to where he’s got those wolves penned…”

  ***

  “You girls missed the best part.”

  Wynn Some wandered into the kitchen. Heather English stood with her back to the door her sister had opened a few moments before.

  “Where’s Heather?” Wynn asked.

  “Uhh, in the bathroom.” She hurried across the kitchen and took him by the arm. “Let’s give her some privacy. Didn’t I see The Little Mermaid in their tape collection?”

  Two listened as her coconspirator bought a little time. Maybe even enough.

  Her head cleared the level of the floor above. It was quiet up here now. No voice. Just the singing of the wind, and the creaking of old boards responding to its relentless pressure. Unless some of those creaks were footsteps…

  She wasn’t going to creep herself out. Not with a genuine mystery to solve. The stairs opened onto a thickly carpeted central hallway, a dusky place with heavy curtains over the windows at each end of the house. Three pairs of doors stood along a hall that stretched the length of the building. All were closed. More than that, she discovered as her eyes adjusted to the gloom. The three doors along the south wall had devices to lock them from the outside. That sent a chill up her spine. This felt like a scene out of one of those slaughter-the-teenagers movies.

  The first door had a hinged metal strap and a ring for a padlock, though there was no padlock on it. The center door had a modern keyed lock, as well as a dead bolt. The third and last was encaged behind a metal grill. It looked like something you might find in a zoo, not in a farmhouse in the heart of a Great Plains tamed of virtually every beast but the weather.

  “I don’t like this,” Two admitted to herself.

  Like it or not, she was an explorer by nature. She tried the first of the externally locked doors. There was a bedroom inside. It looked like a museum, like a place no one had been in for a long time.

  It was lit well enough. Curtains at windows looking south and west were drawn back, giving a view of swirling snow thick enough to argue against global warming. The room was feminine, lots of lace and frills. And there was a collection of Judy Garland pictures. One showed her on the yellow brick road in the company of Scarecrow, Lion, and Woodsman. Judy had sung “Over the Rainbow” in that film and forever tied the tune to Kansas. The room called out for further investigation but even Wynn would start to wonder if she supposedly spent half an hour in the bathroom. And who knew when Becky Hornbaker or her family would be back.

  The carpet absorbed the sound of her footsteps. It absorbed sounds from downstairs as well. If Heather and Wynn had fired up a second movie on the VCR, she couldn’t hear it. The second door was beside a banister that guarded the drop into the stairwell. She put her head to its cool wood surface and listened. With the sounds the storm continued to make, about all she could be sure of was that there wasn’t a party going on inside. She twisted the dead bolt. If the modern door handle was locked, her skill with a paper clip wasn’t going to do any good.

  The door swung open the moment she twisted the knob. This room was feminine as well, though not so elaborately decorated, nor so long abandoned as the first. A paper shade hung half way down from its roller, allowing plenty of light from the snow-filled front yard. The bed was unmade, as if it had only been abandoned a few hours ago. A conservative flannel nightie lay across a padded rocker as if someone had gotten up and left in a hurry. There was nothing personal about the room. Heather thought she’d have to sort through drawers and dig into the closet to find even a hint of the person who lived here. She didn’t have the time.

  The third door drew and frightened her. Cages were meant to keep something in…or out. The door to this cage appeared homemade. It looked like someone had taken pieces of rebar and cut and welded them into shape, then housed them in a metal frame that ran a few inches on either side of the wooden door behind. It looked solid enough, but what about the windows within, what about the walls and floor and ceiling? If a solid wooden door wasn’t enough, how could glass and wood and plaster be trusted?

  Heather couldn’t decide whether she was relieved or disappointed to discover that the metal door was firmly secured. The gaps between the bars, however, were large enough for her to reach through. She tried the handle to the regular door within and it turned. She pushed gently. The knob was ripped from her fingers. She backpedaled across the hall as something threw itself against the iron grate and taloned claws raked her wrist.

  And then she was running, bolting for the other end of the hall and the staircase and the safety of a sister and a deputy. She was almost down the stairs before she realized the thing hadn’t followed her.

  She managed to stop her headlong flight and look back. No terrible beast trailed her down that dusky hall, only a soft voice she could barely hear.

  “The only thing we have to fear is fear itself.”

  ***

  “Raise your right hand.”

  Chairman Wynn did. So did Judy.

  “Do you swear to uphold the laws of the United States, the state of Kansas, and Benteen County?”

  “I do,” they chorused.

  “Consider yourselves deputized. Mrs. Kraus, we got any extra badges?”

  “Badges,” Judy whispered. “We don’t need no stinkin’ badges.” The sheriff thought she was maybe a little hysterical. He still wanted to deposit her at home with a spare radio, but there would be no keeping her from joining a search for the Heathers now, not after what Chairman Wynn had told them.

  “Badges? On our budget?” Mrs. Kraus took advantage of the situation to do a little lobbying.

  The sheriff pulled out a key chain and unlocked his bottom desk drawer. There were a pair of old revolvers in there in holsters designed to clip onto a belt. He offered one to the chairman.

  Chairman Wynn shook his head and opened his jacket. “I’ve already got something a little more modern.”

  The sheriff decided this wasn’t the time to discuss illegally concealed weapons. “Judy?” he asked.

  “I’ll pass,” she said.

  “You hear from anybody who knows anything,” the sheriff ordered Mrs. Kraus, “let us know. We’ll check in every ten minutes. If you lose track of us, call the state troopers, soon as you get a phone line or a cell back up. Tell them we got two dead bodies so far. You don’t have to mention they died of natural causes. Suggest they start rounding up Hornbakers and asking questions till they find our kids. Got it?”

  Mrs. Kraus nodded, head snapping with the precision of a military salute. The only Hornbaker in the vicinity had slunk back with Bontrager and their followers to the Board of Supervisors’ offices. To lick their wounds, the sheriff thought, or maybe plot an alternate strategy.

  “Lock yourself in here after we’re gone, Mrs. Kraus. Just in case. Don’t let anybody in you aren’t sure of. Use the Glock if you have to, only fire a warning shot first. All right?”

  Her head snapped again. The sheriff hoped no one did anything foolish while he was gone.

  “We’re taking your Cadillac, Mr. Wynn. We need your four-wheel drive. I don’t think my truck will make it through these drifts. We’ll go by the house first. Drop a radio on the off chance the girls show up. Then go to the squad car and Mad Dog’s.”

  “No problem.”

  “And you
’ve no idea where Mad Dog went?” the sheriff asked, turning to Mrs. Kraus again.

  “No sir.” She’d turned into a crisp model of precise efficiency in the crisis. “He was asking about Tommie and Becky, the family’s history. When they came back to Benteen County. When they stopped being close to each other and whether I remembered anything about it. We just got to when Zeke arrived and the time that truck blew up when Supervisor Bontrager came in and Mad Dog slipped out.”

  “I remember that truck,” Chairman Wynn said. “Lord, what was that, early seventies? I was with the volunteer fire department then. Wasn’t hardly a thing left by the time we got organized and drove out there. Pieces of it all over that pasture. ”

  “The crater was already filling with spring water before we left. Wasn’t a day later that Tommie Irons was out there grading up a dam and turning the thing into a pond. I went back out with the fire chief the next day. Remember seeing Tommie blade pieces of that truck right into the walls of his dam. Told me he was building a burial mound.”

  “Burial mound?” The sheriff swung on the new and improved version of Deputy Wynn. “He called it a burial mound?”

  Wynn Senior rubbed his chin and nodded his head. “Yeah. That’s what he called it.”

  “We’ve still got to check out the black and white and take a closer look at Mad Dog’s,” the sheriff said, “but now I know where we’re going after that.”

  ***

  “Do not forsake me, oh my darling.”

  The figure was hard to make out. There was no light in the room with the barred door. Two of Two thought it was human, sort of, with long, scraggly-gray hair that hung over its face. Scrawny arms clasped a shaggy blanket about shoulders as thin as its voice.

  Heather went cautiously back down the hall. It was frightening, but hardly terrifying. She stopped a few paces shy of the door and listened as it babbled softly into its hands. It was hard to hear and harder to understand, but she didn’t let its whispers draw her back within reach, not with that line of fresh scratches running across her wrist.

  Still, she was close enough to make out a little. “We have to distrust each other. It’s our only defense against betrayal.”

  The figure blocked most of her view of the room behind, but what she could see answered her questions about the practicality of a barred door in a normal room. Bars continued on the other side covering every inch of floor. A matching web hung well short of the ceiling. There wasn’t even the outline of windows in there. They had been more than just boarded up, she assumed.

  “Who are you?” she asked. Heather couldn’t even tell what gender the prisoner was.

  It raised its face just enough to peer over clutched hands. Pale, bloodshot eyes looked her up and down.

  “I’m nobody! Who are you? Are you nobody, too? Then there’s a pair of us—don’t tell! They’d banish us, you know.”

  The eyes darted down the hall, then flashed back to Heather. There was nothing dull in the way they appraised her. “Childe Roland to the dark tower came—” it whispered again. “Easy is the descent to Hell; night and day the gates stand open; but to reclimb the slope, and escape to the outer air, this indeed is a task.”

  “Are you asking for help?” Heather wondered aloud. She was sure she couldn’t break through those bars or open the lock without a key. “I suppose I could try.”

  She would tell Englishman. He was the sheriff. He’d know what to do. “But who are you? Why are you a prisoner?”

  “Self is the only prison that can ever bind the soul,” it said, then giggled softly. “So little time, so little to do.”

  “Do you know where the key is?”

  “A zealous Lock-Smith Dyed of late, and did arrive at heaven’s gate, he stood without and would not knock, because he meant to pick the lock.”

  Heather was getting frustrated. “I can’t help if you keep spouting nonsense. I’ll just have to leave you to your fate.”

  “I am the master of my fate; I am the captain of my soul.”

  Some of this sounded familiar, literary quotes, she thought, and snatches of songs. Heather grabbed one out of thin air and tossed it back. “Friends, Romans, countrymen, lend me your ears; I come to bury Caesar, not to praise him.”

  The figure smiled. “The reports of my death are greatly exaggerated.”

  “You’ve switched,” she said. “Yours was Mark Twain. Mine was Mark Anthony.”

  The smile faded, became a grimace, perhaps a cringe. “By the pricking of my thumbs, something wicked this way comes.” The figure melted back into the darkness and the door swung gently shut.

  Heather turned and found herself face to face with hulking Levi Hornbaker. “Shit,” he said. “Now I suppose we’ll have to kill you all.”

  ***

  They took the skull into the mortuary room where there was good lighting, as well as access to a number of magnifying devices.

  “Where’d you get this one?” Doc put it on the stainless-steel table where he’d earlier conducted an autopsy on the dead baby from the Sunshine Towers.

  “I don’t think I can tell you yet, Doc. I’m sure it’s Cheyenne, but I need you to tell me more—when it died, and how—before I decide whether anyone should know where it came from.”

  “Cheyenne? What? Did you divine that somehow? Give me a break, Mad Dog, I’m a coroner, not a witch doctor.”

  “But there are things you can tell, aren’t there?” Mad Dog pleaded. “I mean like, is it ancient? Could it have been in the ground a century or more? And maybe how it died? Was it natural? Hell, Doc, I’m just trying to figure out whether this is Englishman’s business. If it isn’t, he’s got his hands full already. If it is, well, here’s one more thing I gotta dump on him.”

  Doc chewed his lip. Mad Dog was an eminently reasonable human being, only sometimes you had to figure out his starting point and follow the path his mental processes had taken. Then you could debate him logically. Sometimes you could get a healthy dialog flowing, occasionally even persuade him to re-examine the point he was trying to defend and maybe modify it. Sometimes he forced the same of you.

  “Look, Mad Dog,” Doc said, leveling a finger at the big man in the filthy snowsuit. “Everyone in the county knows you went off to dispose of Tommie Irons in some appropriately Native American fashion this morning. Now, you’re back here with somebody else’s bones. It’s not hard to work out that you don’t want to tell me where you got these because it’s where you left Tommie and you don’t want him disturbed. Right?”

  “Sort of,” Mad Dog hedged.

  “So let’s leave out the specific part of where, and move to the general. Tell me that and maybe I can answer some of those questions of yours. Did you find this in the ground?”

  Mad Dog shuffled his feet. “Not exactly, though it probably eroded out of what looked like a grave.”

  “And this wasn’t out at Southlawn or some other organized cemetery? Some place you might expect to find human remains?”

  “No.”

  “What makes you think it’s Cheyenne?”

  “I can just tell. I could tell the minute I touched her.”

  “Her?”

  Mad Dog shook his head. “Now that surprised me. I didn’t know she was a girl until just this minute.”

  Doc chewed his lip some more. He wasn’t sure he had the energy for a theological exchange with Mad Dog based in Cheyenne shamanism. Most locals thought Mad Dog’s career as Benteen County’s only born-again Cheyenne shaman was a phase. Doc wasn’t a local and didn’t agree. He’d only lived in the county some twenty-odd years. That made him an outsider. Mad Dog had had to work all his life to achieve outsider status. He was native to the county, but he’d spent significant portions of his life here as a hippie, an atheist, a Buddhist, and even a Rastafarian. That had been after his Black Power days and shortly before his Chicano period. Oh, folks knew, Mad Dog had always been Cheyenne, and proud of it, but until a few years ago, Mad Dog hadn’t understood what that meant.


  The mother he and Englishman shared had claimed to be half Cheyenne, but she hadn’t practiced the culture. There was nobody in the county to practice it with, so it wasn’t until Mad Dog started researching his heritage that he learned enough to latch onto. And he’d latched on hard, especially when his first vision quest corresponded with a murder. Mad Dog had convinced himself he was a natural shaman, and the murder was his fault because he’d somehow released ancient evil spirits. When he managed to land square in the middle of the action that did in a pair of lunatic killers, it further established his bona fides. At least in his own mind.

  It made Doc uncomfortable to think about it, but he had to admit Mad Dog’s interpretation of those events made more sense than his own—that it was all a series of incredible coincidences. Still, he wasn’t going to get into a philosophical debate with Mad Dog now.

  “Well,” Doc allowed. “You may be right. This may be a girl. But I can’t tell you that, not at this age. Sex characteristics in the skeletons of infants are virtually non-existent.” He reached up and turned on the light over the worktable, picked out a magnifying glass and bent to give the little skull a closer look. “You could even be right about this being an Indian,” he continued, more surprised than he let on. “Skull shape’s right. That wouldn’t mean much, since a baby’s skull can be badly deformed after passing through the birth canal. But I don’t think this one did that. And look at this incisor. It wouldn’t have erupted through a gum yet, but it’s got that classic shovel shape and that makes this kid most likely either American Indian or Asian.”