Redneck Eldritch

by Nathan Shumate

  He ought to get in the car and just drive north. A couple hours’ driving would get him to the highway, and from there it would be sunshine, breeze through the window, and cold Coca-Colas all the way back to Miskatonic.

  He would do that.

  He’d miss out on the words to the song Earl had identified as the song as old as the hills and the call. Would that be such a steep price to pay?

  Instead, without quite ever making a decision to the effect, he climbed into his car, started it, and headed back up the mountain.

  ***

  As he negotiated the steep switchbacks and narrow gullies that had nearly thrown him the night before, John remembered his first encounter with Dr. Bender and the man’s project.

  “You’re not a musicologist?” John had asked.

  “No, but you are.” Dr. Enoch Bender had a shock of white hair like a duster, and when he moved or gestured he seemed to leave a cloud of chalk behind. “Or you will be.”

  “Well, I don’t understand what it is exactly you’re looking for. Just old songs?”

  “Yes, exactly. And you can have all the publications.”

  That was music to John’s ears, though he never would have been so low brow as to speak the pun out loud. “I get the credit? This is not how it usually works. Graduate students usually do all the work and get none of the credit. That’s the deal. Indentured servitude, in exchange for a doctorate.”

  “I’m generous.” Dr. Bender grinned, flashing very large teeth, deeply stained by coffee.

  So much the better. If all the publications were to be his, John Hanks could launch his own professorial career with a bang. He could be the new James Francis Child, the musical James George Frazer of Appalachia.

  “But… what is your interest, then?” It seemed too good to be true: his travel expenses would be paid by this small university, and then he could go back to Harvard with all—or maybe most—of what he had collected and make his career with it. “What exactly are you looking for?”

  “The oldest songs. The strangest songs. Songs of doom and ceremony.” Dr. Bender’s smile disappeared. “Songs of summoning. I don’t want to publish them, you see. I just want to know them.”

  ***

  John stopped briefly at Earl’s dog trot out of a sense of obligation, but knocking on the doors of both halves of the cabin produced no response. Earl farmed, he had said, so he must be already up and in his fields.

  The road that continued up beyond Earl’s cabin was barely worthy of the name. Sometimes it was a track scarcely wide enough for a mule, let alone the Ford. He remembered Dr. Bender laughing as he’d handed over the keys: “Eight hundred fifty dollars, they tell me!”

  “Well, maybe you’d prefer that I take another car,” John had said. “That’s a lot of money.”

  “However little I care about money,” Dr. Bender had confided, “I care about cars even less. I don’t know how to drive.”

  John stomped the accelerator pedal on the Ford, pushing it forward with increased strength as the path became more narrow. Saplings, bushes, and low-hanging branches fell to one side and the other or were torn out by the root as Dr. Bender’s car charged through.

  Then the mist.

  Odd, to have so much mist on such a warm day, in late summer, at such high elevations. The mist was cold, too; it reminded John of British mist in the clammy way it crept in through the windows of the car and climbed inside his shirt.

  He pulled up over the lip of a long slope and saw the cabin.

  Braking, he pulled up in front of it. This was no Appalachian dog trot, it was something older and less comfortable, and John Hanks barely recognized it for a cabin at all. Slates had been piled up to make four walls, and there must be some kind of a roof substructure, a lattice of limbs or boards maybe, because the roof as he could make it out was a pile of turves. The cabin looked like the kind of thing you might find in some remote abandoned glen in old Europe, not within a hundred miles of Nashville. He wouldn’t have been surprised to see a goat munching the grass growing on the roof.

  But there was no goat.

  Indeed, stepping out of the car, John noticed that he could see no animals at all. Not a chipmunk, not a bird, nothing.

  “Mr. Hodder!” he called out.

  Silence.

  “Hodder!”

  Still nothing.

  Stooping to pass beneath a twisted lintel, John peered inside the cabin. It consisted of a single room, with a fireplace and chimney, a pile of wool blankets on a stone bench beside it, and a few shelves carrying necessities. There were books, as Earl had suggested there would be, but John’s heart fell as he looked at them: Anatomy: Descriptive and Surgical, Corpus Areopagiticum, La Cena de le Ceneri.

  Nothing that suggested it might contain song lyrics. Other than the anatomy book, the titles in fact suggested nothing to John. Latin and Italian? he guessed. Out of place in these hills.

  He walked around the cabin. Hodder’s home stood in the center of a small clearing, and the trees surrounding it were stunted, gnarled things. Maybe blighted by the altitude, John thought, but the trees didn’t look as if they were blighted by any external force at all. They looked—John dared to think it—as old as the hills. They looked natural, indigenous, and twisted by their very nature.

  They looked malevolent.

  At the far end of the clearing from the cabin was a pile of stones. Twelve stones, rounded and rough, but piled together, and the topmost stone was flat and provided a table-like surface. The entire thing was stained dark, or at least the cracks and indentations in the stones were dark.

  Maybe lichen, John thought.

  Sitting in the center, on top of the mass of stone, was the skull of a bird.

  He realized he was humming the droning sound of Earl’s melody from the day before.

  Like a didgeridoo, he thought. A drone, with yelping accents here and there to provide variety. Only the yelping cries punctuating the tune in his memory did more than just relieve monotony. There was information in them.

  A summons.

  He heard a cry overhead, and looked up just in time to see a bird appear from the mist, pass overhead, and disappear again.

  “Hodder!” he called, one last time, and turned back to the car.

  A man stood before him. Short, completely bald. Eyebrows thick as caterpillars and unnaturally wide nostrils.

  “Yaas?” asked the short man.

  There was something off in his accent. Not non-Appalachian, exactly, but pre-Appalachian. His accent sounded like the ur-Scotch-Anglo-Irish whine from which all redneck accents might have descended in the hundreds of years of the borderers’ wandering in the Americas.

  “Oh.” John Hanks stepped back. He took a moment to organize his thoughts, which seemed to have fled with the passing bird. “Earl sent me.”

  “Don’t know an Earl. Not a livin’ one.”

  “He, ah, he lives down the mountain from you.”

  Hodder raised his eyebrows briefly but said nothing.

  “Anyway, my name’s Dr. Hanks. John Hanks.” A lie. Anyway, a stretched truth. But the little man’s stare made John feel the need to reinforce his own gravitas.

  “Ain’t sick.”

  “I’m not a medical doctor. I’m a musicologist, I collect songs. I’m a doctor of music.”

  “Looking for sick music, are ye?” There went Hodder’s eyebrows again. John almost laughed at what must surely have been meant as a joke, except that he felt that on some level Hodder was speaking a simple truth.

  Simple, and maybe horrible.

  “You might say so. I heard a piece of music from Earl, and he told me you might know the words.”

  “I ain’t a musician.”

  “He said you’d know this one. He said you’d know the words to the call.”

  “Did he?”

  Moisture trickled down between John’s shoulder blades. He couldn’t tell if it was sweat, or the mist condensing on his body. “I’m paying a nickel. A nickel a song
.”

  “Nickel’s a damned small price to pay for somethin’ sacred.”

  John found himself nodding. “Yes, yes indeed. And that’s just how I’d treat your words, Mr. Hodder. Sacred. The university wants to collect them because they’re important, and we think other people ought to be able to learn them.” John had had this conversation with a hundred other informants, each reluctant to part with the special song grandpappy taught him, regardless of how tiny a variant the song might be on The Jew’s Daughter.

  Only usually a nickel was enough to bring a smile to their wrinkled, tiny faces.

  Hodder still wasn’t smiling.

  The mountain man looked John Hanks up and down, and eventually nodded.

  “I kin help ye,” he finally said. “In the right time an’ place.”

  “Very good.” John stepped towards the car. “If you’ll just step over here with me to the recording device. Would you mind speaking the words into a microphone? Or singing them would be even better, that would let us capture the melody.”

  “In the right time an’ place,” Hodder repeated himself. “Which ain’t here nor now.”

  He turned and walked into the mist. Within three steps he had disappeared.

  “Nuts,” John muttered.

  ***

  What kind of name was Bender, anyway?

  Enoch was a biblical name, John had gone to enough Sunday School as a boy to know that. Old Testament, wasn’t he the one who walked with God and disappeared? Lived to be old, but not as old as Methuselah and Adam and some of the others. A mere three-hundred-something years, John remembered.

  But John had known his share of Jews at Harvard and quite a few more growing up in Brooklyn, and Enoch wasn’t a very Jewish-sounding name. Moshe and Reuben and Judah and Shimon and… so on.

  Enoch felt like a Puritan’s name.

  Bender? John had no idea.

  Maybe it was one of those old English occupational names, like Smith, Taylor, Butler. Maybe it meant someone who bent things.

  ***

  The car started on the third try, and John backed it around with a three-point turn that brought his bumper under the lintel of Hodder’s front door. Keeping his feet hovering over the brake, he put the car into gear and eased back over the lip at the edge of the clearing.

  To his surprise, after a small initial dip, the road climbed again.

  This was wrong. He distinctly remembered driving up to the clearing. Maybe, he thought, his memory was tricking him, and at the end of a drive that was mostly ascent he had descended the last minute into Hodder’s clearing. He stuck with the road.

  But no, the road definitely climbed.

  And it was too narrow to turn around.

  “Wrong road,” he muttered to himself.

  He’d imagined, without voicing the hope, that speaking out loud would dispel the tight feeling in his chest. It didn’t.

  Ten minutes later he found a shelf of dirt and gravel. What he intended as another three-point turn became a seven-point turn as he rocked back and forth a few feet at a time before finally managing to rotate the car one-hundred eighty degrees. He kept his eyes firmly on the shelf the entire time, and resolutely looked away from the trees.

  The trees, which stared at him with gaping sockets and open mouths.

  “They don’t warn you about this when you say you want to get a Ph.D.” Putting the 1937 Ford into gear again, John drove back the way he came.

  Inexplicably, the road continued up the mountain.

  “Nuts.” John put the Ford into neutral and pulled the hand brake. “Damn.”

  The fog felt like fingers under his shirt. He wanted to roll up the windows, but he knew if he did the windows would fog and then he would be blind.

  As annoying as it was to worry that he was lost on the mountain, it would be much worse to drive off the mountain’s edge.

  “Okay.” John tapped the steering wheel and breathed deeply. “Get hold of yourself, Hanks. You’re just a little lost.” He tapped his foot, too. “But you’re on a road, and roads go somewhere. So just drive. Drive forward. You’ll probably find Hodder’s cabin. Or the highway. Or Earl’s dog trot. Or anything.

  “What’s the worst that could happen?”

  Still tapping his fingers and his foot, he drove.

  The road climbed, and John thought the tire tracks he saw looked fresh. It might mean he was backtracking, of course, but still the sight heartened him. At least he was on the same road he had already traveled.

  He began to hum, low and tuneless.

  From time to time, when he felt the rhythm dictated it, he whistled a note or two of accompaniment.

  Then the Ford climbed over a lip of earth and he was in a meadow. Before him, and slightly to the left, stood a waist-high pile of stones that looked familiar.

  John set the brake and breathed a sigh of relief.

  In that moment, he recognized the tune he was humming, the rhythms he was tapping out, the bird-like trills of ornament.

  He wished he had never asked Earl for that last song.

  Climbing out of the car, he approached the pile of stone. There they were again: the lichen in the cracks—but was it lichen, after all?—the flat stone on top, the bird skull.

  “Right. So I got turned around, but I’m back.” John looked about him. “Only I seem to have come up to the clearing by a different road this time.”

  He spoke out loud to reassure himself.

  It failed.

  “Hodder!” he cried.

  Faintly, he thought he heard his own voice echo back to him. No sign of Hodder.

  The cabin must only be a few steps away. He walked into the fog, looking for it.

  “Hodder!”

  No answer, and no sign of the cabin.

  “Damn,” John said again, and then he kept saying it, under his breath and once per step. He reached the edge of the clearing and followed it several paces in one direction, and then back several paces the other way.

  No cabin.

  No Hodder.

  “Hodder!”

  Overhead, the piercing cry of a bird.

  John’s breathing came fast and painful. He stopped walking to try to get control of his heart, which raced to match his breath.

  The fog would pass. Hodder would return. He just needed a place to sit down and wait.

  The car.

  Looking down, John saw his own tracks in the grass, a darker streak where his feet had shaken the silver dew from the tall green stalks. Breathing easier, he turned and followed his trail back.

  He had the oddest sensation that his legs were long wooden dowels, pinned together only loosely at the knees. He shook his head to clear the nonsensical thought, then pawed at his own eyes and ears to smudge away the persistent itch.

  There was the altar, and the bird’s skull. And there his path stopped.

  There was no sign of John’s car.

  He was beyond cursing, beyond the power of speech. His heart raced so fast he feared he’d die of cardiac failure then and there. He tried to tell himself that he’d sit and wait for Hodder to come back, but the only sound he could make was a droning hum, marked by sharp whistles.

  He was too old to whimper, so John Hanks bit his lower lip until it bled. Tasting the tang of iron on his tongue, he sat and leaned against the one landmark that remained to him, the rough stone altar, to wait out the fog.

  ***

  John woke up.

  He leaned against a massive trestle table and two men stood before him. They wore masks, outsized and shield-shaped, only the masks seemed to be made of flesh.

  They were mobile, had expressions.

  The man standing nearer John leaned in. His mask, lips thin and pulled as wide as possible, eyes bugging, hair a white shock that shed a cloud of chalk as he moved, looked like a mask of Dr. Enoch Bender’s face.

  As interpreted by some Polynesian tribe.

  Using living flesh as a medium.

  John blinked and looked away, his ey
es stinging.

  “The words, Dr. Hanks.”

  “What words?”

  The second man, standing behind Masked Bender, also looked familiar. Blinking to look through tears, John thought his mask looked like the face of Earl. The banjo player, the man who had sent John on this wild goose chase around the mountain.

  “The words to the song as old as the hills,” said Masked Earl. “The call.”

  “Well, you know them, don’t you?” John challenged Earl. He felt groggy, and had to fight to keep his chin off his own sternum.

  “I don’t. I en’t ever heard ’em. You gotta hear ’em from Hodder.”

  “The right time and place,” John said drowsily. “Only then he disappeared.”

  “Well, can you sing us the melody, at least?” asked Masked Bender.

  “Sssssure.” The soft hiss of his own speech almost put John to sleep, but he shook himself and focused.

  Tapped his fingers on the stone floor under his thighs.

  Tapped his foot in a second rhythm.

  Started to hum.

  ***

  John woke up.

  The sky above him was the color of slate.

  The fog was gone.

  His back and neck hurt from lying against a hard surface. John turned to look about him and saw that he’d been sleeping against a rough stone altar, a pile of uncut stone with a bird’s skull on top.

  It looked familiar. He remembered sitting down next to an altar like this, although the memory was faded and seemed quite old.

  And the altar was now red and slick with… blood?

  John checked himself all over. He wasn’t bleeding, and his breath came in big, cold gulps of relief.

  He distinctly saw the limits of the clearing he was in. There was no car and there was no cabin. There were only the encircling trees and the rocky path climbing up.

  John took the path.

  He sang to pass the time, or he tried to. Whether he started with Fatal Flower Garden, The Parson and the Clerk, or one of the Robin Hood ballads, he always ended humming the same tune.

  He squeezed his shoulders together to avoid being touched by the trees. At each step and on both sides, they seemed to loom closer.