Redneck Eldritch

by Nathan Shumate

  When I came to myself—when I could see the lamp wick flickering low and feel the oilcloth table covering beneath my forearms and hear Walter snorting in his sleep in the other room—four whole composition books were turned onto their fronts beside me, finished. I didn’t remember even finishing one and moving on to the next, but there they were. We didn’t have but a single clock in the house and that was out in the front room, past where Walter was asleep on the couch, so I didn’t know how long I had sat there straining my eyes at the old bastard’s penmanship, but my head throbbed with the effort and my buttocks told me, when I stood up, that I had sat in that wooden chair far too long.

  I replaced the books I had read in their spots in the stack and set them on top of the burlap sack on the kitchen table, blew out the lamp, and went back upstairs to bed.

  I lernd a new Word today, I smelld it and tasted it because it wasnt an ear hearin word, and it was so Good for me and delisios. And only after I lovd it, then I faond out that it was me, not my name but Me, all of me in the one word that coud go on forever in a saond that cant be made.

  I know that I dreamed from the time I settled back onto the pillow until the time that the roosters called my cottonish head to come and do my chores, but I only remember one dream distinctly:

  I was in, or above, the clouds, although I couldn’t see blue sky above me—just a greenish-grey haze that seemed so much higher than the sky ever was. Around me, to as far away as I could see, were clotted clouds, crawling on their own without any wind to push them.

  And the only thing I could see, aside from haze and clouds, was the old bastard, a black dot against the churning cotton.

  He walked toward me, and his gait was weird—I couldn’t figure out why his steps all looked awkward, until I realize that his legs were long stilts that reached down, down, down. I only realized this when I leaned to one side, or stepped, and discovered that my own legs were stilts too, so long that the earth down below was as unknown as the bottom of the ocean. Part of my own body had turned against me and trapped me up here, disconnected from soil and water, alone with nothing but the old bastard coming toward me with herky-jerky movements. Smiling.

  “Phineas,” he said, smiling as wide as the frog skulls on the string around his neck. “Glad you could be here.”

  “This is a dream,” I said, and my voice sounded like distant wind in my own ears.

  “Course it is!” he crowed as he got closer. “But that don’t mean it ain’t real. It’s as real as time, and distance, and all the things we’re at the center of.”

  He smiled wide, and his teeth were like little shards of mirror.

  “It’s as real,” he continued, “as a big black stone from out in between the stars—so black it’s almost like it was cut right out of the star-shadows—thrown here to pin something holy down in the earth. Now that’s real, boy. Compared to that, you’re a dream and I’m a dream and everything you ever known is a dream’s dream.”

  The green hazy light bounced from his glittering teeth.

  “Know what, Phineas?” he said as he finally got within arm’s length. “I mourned you, boy—but I don’t need you anymore. Not anymore.”

  And he shot out his arm and shoved my shoulder.

  Like a tall tall tree falling when you’ve sawed through its stump, I could feel myself slowly start tipping, and just as unstoppably as that tree, I fell further from him, slow at first like I was falling through water, then faster and faster, and I could hear myself screaming and the old bastard laughing as I pinwheeled back into the clouds, faster and faster, knowing just how impossibly far it was to the ground, how I could fall forever and ever before hitting, like the black stone that pinned a god deep into the earth—

  And then I woke up, with the rooster outside just starting to warm up his voice.

  Evry Lord seys the same thing come unto me and Forsakke all others and I will give you evrythin. Evry Lord seys it but not evry Lord can give it. Some Lords lie.

  I crawled out of my bed in the dark, feeling like a stranger in my own skin. My eyelids were gritty against tired eyeballs. I was so half-brained that put on my boots, went out, did the milking, and came back in before I noticed that Walter’s shoes, which had been right beside my boots last night, were gone from the boot rack. The stack of composition books on the kitchen table was gone too, along with the burlap sack.

  The sun was just beginning to glow behind the mountains when I walked out on the front porch and looked at where Walter’s car had been for two days. The sky was clear, though the air was still sodden with yesterday’s rain, and his tires had made deep furrows in the clinging mud as he’d backed his car and turned it around. I couldn’t remember him saying anything about needing to get an early start in the morning; I hadn’t imagined he would leave without saying goodbye, or getting some breakfast.

  As I stood there I heard the echoes of a distant motor from down the mountain, and for a second I thought that Walter was coming back from some errand. But as the noise got louder, I realized that it was too rough and worn-edged for Walter’s new sedan. I waited, and a few minutes later Roy Sadley’s narrow old truck sputtered and growled its way into view, on the road that passed my house and continued up the mountain.

  I put up my hand and stepped off the porch, and the truck slowed to a stop, chugging like a bulldog pulling at the leash. It’s wasn’t Roy Sadley’s boy Jude at the wheel, but Roy himself, chewing the end of his pipe.

  “Morning, Phineas,” he said once he got the window cranked down. “Say, it was good the way you and Walter treated your grandpap t’other day. I know there’s no love to be had, ’specially from you, but there’s things gotta be done. You’ll be back with a headstone sometime, right?”

  “Sure,” I said. “Where are you off to?”

  Roy angled his chin so that his pipe pointed up the road. “Widow Laughton’s expecting some chickenwire,” he said. “Jude, well, he ain’t such a good hand at the wheel when the roads might be slick. And they are, I’ll tell you—slick as snot.”

  “I don’t doubt it,” I said. “Tell me, did you see Walter head back down your way this morning?”

  “Nossir,” Roy said. “You know can’t but one motorcar fit on this here road all the way back to my store, and I’ve been alone all the way up.”

  “I guess he could’ve gone earlier,” I said.

  “Not likely. I been up with the gout since, oh, probably three-ish. Definitely before four.” He rubbed his elbow meaningfully. “If he’d gone by, I’da seen it, or heard it. ’Sides,” he twitched his pipe to the other side of his mouth and used it to point out the open window to the road, “ain’t no tracks like that all the way down. Car tires don’t look like wagon wheels, you know.”

  He chuckled at my scowl as I looked at the road. “Don’t be frettin,’” he said. “Walter may be cityfolk now, but he can’t have forgotten the mountains altogether. It ain’t likely he’s gotten hisself lost. I gotta get along now afore I sink up to my axles.”

  He put the truck in gear before I remembered what his truck reminded me of. “Say, Roy,” I said, “the day Jude found the o— found my grandpap dead, what was he going up to deliver?”

  “I think it was a barrel of sauerkraut, and a new shovel and pickax,” he said, tapping his chin, his bad eye rolling thoughtfully. “Might not have been the sauerkraut, but definite ’bout the others. Be seeing you, now.”

  Roy rolled up the window and put the truck in gear, and I stepped back so I wouldn’t get sprayed by the gluey mud as he spun back into motion. I stayed there by the road, looking back down the mountain as the sound of Roy’s truck faded up it.

  There were tire tracks going down from my place. They were as clear as plowed furrows until the road rose and fell a few dozen yards on. But if Roy hadn’t seen any down toward his store—and he swore he’d have noticed the car go by, anyhow—then that meant that Walter had turned off this road somewhere not too far from here.

  Say, turned off onto the r
oad out toward the Wallow.

  My sole is swollowd up and I am forever being digested, hallaluia.

  I tracked through the house, called up the stairs to Beth that I wasn’t going to be around for breakfast, and went out the back door to saddle up the horse to ride. Long before the sun finally climbed up over the peaks around us, I was off down the road, letting the horse take her time feeling her way in the slick mud. On my way out of the barn, I had noticed that my pickax was gone.

  A blind man could have followed Walter’s tire ruts, and yes, they turned off toward the Wallow. I almost coulda swore the horse sighed when I nudged her up that track—the third time in as many days that she’d trudged out to Ostler Wallow, though at least this time she wasn’t pulling the cart.

  By the time the sun was throwing our shadows in front of us, I had seen several spots where the track hadn’t been wide enough for the car, and Walter had pushed his way through, breaking down bushes on the verge.

  Well before the Wallow, but a lot farther along than I would have guessed, I found the car itself. Where the track curled around a heap of rock, the tires had all slid sideways in the mud and ended up pinned between two hemlock trees, with the car’s own weight holding it snug where it was wedged. The car was empty, and the prints from his two shoes—now ruined far beyond cleaning, I guessed—led off toward the Wallow.

  The horse slowed to a stop right where we’d parked the cart on the last two days, even though she could have pushed further down into the Wallow. I just slipped off where she stopped and wrapped the reins around a small cedar. The sun hadn’t followed us into this valley, and yesterday’s rain had chilled everything down to the temperature of a root cellar.

  The walls of the valley around us and the boggy bottom of the Wallow soaked up sound, so it wasn’t until I was halfway across the soaked ford to the black rock, under the glare of the frogs, that I heard it: Tink. Tink. Tink. The sound of metal hitting stone and not doing much to it.

  Before I got all the way up onto the rock, the sound had stopped, and Walter came around the corner of the cabin from the door. His shirt was open, his glasses were off, and he was breathing hard through a smile. In his hand was my pickax.

  “Good, you’re here,” he said. “Let me show you.” He motioned me around the corner of the cabin, and I followed.

  The door of the cabin was open, and the rag rug—just about the only thing we had left when we had cleaned it out yesterday—was thrown back. There, under the rug, was a spot in the rock that looked like lead. When I stepped closer I saw what it really was: a spot where metal tools had hit against the rock over and over, not just this morning but for years and years. The tools had taken a beating; I thought of the broken bits in the outhouse pile over the edge of the rock, and the rusty spade-head with the split edge that the old bastard had used for his fireplace. Inside the cabin door was the burlap sack with the composition books, and in the back corner, where the bed had been, was an old but clean army blanket.

  “Where’d you get the blanket?” I asked.

  “I had it in the trunk,” Walter said. “Sometimes the heater doesn’t work.” He still smiled wide, almost proud. He hadn’t shaved since coming up earlier that week, and his blond whiskers looked like a teenager’s first effort to grow a beard. “But you’re missing what’s really important. Take a look.”

  He pointed back to the spot on the rock where dozens of tools over the decades had beaten themselves out of shape. I crouched closer, and as he stepped out of the light, I saw it.

  A crack.

  It wasn’t much, just a hairline that wasn’t even as long as my hand. A crack that thin in a clay bowl wouldn’t leak any. It didn’t mean anything. Except it did.

  When I stood back up, Walter was chewing on a mouthful of white mushrooms.

  “Thanks for the loan of your pickax,” he said around the mushy white bits.

  “You need to go home,” I said. “Back to Clara and Walter Junior and Velma.”

  He shook his head without concern.

  “I am home,” he said. “This is home. I never knew it, but it’s always been here. We could have worked together, he and I, but…” He looked around at the sides of Ostler Wallow, crowding over us wet and green, in this place he had called God’s own country. “All my life, I’ve been waiting for something to worship. It’s like I was made to be worshiping. Now, here, is the thing that needs my worship like I need to worship it.”

  I looked down at the crack. Forty years, maybe, of hard work and hard worship. Plus however much time the old bastard’s pap, and his pap, and his pap had put into this. All for this single crack that you couldn’t even see if the light wasn’t right.

  Ten thowsand thowsand years.

  “’Scuse me,” Walter said, stepping into my space and edging my aside. “Gotta get back to work.”

  I didn’t argue with the man holding a pickax. He could stand just outside the doorway and swing the pickax down at the rock. Tink. He could do that in rain or shine, even when there was snow on the ground—just clear himself a spot, and he could work on the spot that was protected just inside the cabin. Tink.

  Out in the boggy land surrounding the black rock, the white frogs were all watching. Tink. Maybe they needed to worship something, too. Maybe they needed to worship whatever worshiped whatever was underneath the rock. Tink.

  “What should I tell Clara?” I asked.

  Walter shrugged while swinging the pickax, an impressive accomplishment. “Doesn’t much matter,” he said. Tink. “She won’t come up here after me, not with her health.” Tink. “At least I didn’t have to clear her out of the way, like Grandpap.”

  I left him then. It was either leave him, or hit him. I just walked away, down off the black rock, across the soggy land, back to my horse, and out of Ostler Wallow.

  NIGHTMARE FUEL

  David Dunwoody

  Sheriff Betty parked on the shoulder of Creek Road—well, “shoulder” was a generous description, given that her cruiser was practically in the woods, and that she had to force back knee-high overgrowth just to get her door open. Most of these back roads were only roads in the sense that they were slightly wider than walking trails. That made this little phenomenon with which she presently faced even more puzzling, the one she was eyeballing in her headlights as she kicked her way through tangled grass.

  She’d come upon another derelict. This one was a four-door sedan that looked like it might be a couple of decades old—she wasn’t certain of the make or model at first glance, and walking around the abandoned vehicle didn’t offer any answers. The paint may have been cream-colored in a past life; now it looked like the skin of a bloated corpse, mottled and sickly. The sheriff aimed her flashlight through the driver’s side windows. The interior was brown leather—there might have been a small stain in the driver’s seat, she couldn’t be sure. Doc Spence kept telling Betty she needed a prescription for her eyes, reading glasses at the very least, but she hadn’t budged in her refusal. A woman cop took enough crap as it was, no matter who her daddy had been. She didn’t need bifocals compounding the issue.

  The sedan’s plates were a mystery unto themselves. There was no indication as to what state they were from. No registration stickers either—the sheriff could only assume that they were fakes, and bad ones at that. No wonder the car had been ditched out here just south of Timbuktu. Whoever had been using—or misusing—this rolling eyesore must have finally figured out that the vehicle was a little too distinctive in its absurdity.

  Betty knelt and leaned in to get a good read on the plates. The block lettering said NV-GO. Or maybe that last one was a zero, not an O. She scowled and grabbed the radio mic clipped to her shoulder. “Dispatch, wanna put me through to Jared or Abel? Got another ghost car.”

  She recited the car’s limited description, along with the plates—November Victor Golf Oscar, or maybe Zero on that last one—but she didn’t expect the dispatcher’s computer to get any hits off that, and she was right. Meanwhile,
she imagined, Jared over at the salvage yard was being awakened by a middle-of-the-night phone call. A few moments later he was on his CB and being patched through to the sheriff.

  “Where you at, Betty?”

  “Creek Road. It’s an odd looker if I’ve ever seen one. Not sure what else to tell you.”

  “You said Creek Road?” Unintelligible muttering followed. Betty needn’t be able to make out the words to know they were colorful. Then Jared grunted, “I’ll see if I can get the truck out there. Creek Road. Damn.”

  While she was waiting, Betty tried the doors. All stuck fast. Trunk too. The locks themselves were weird. She’d never seen these yawning triangular keyholes. Betty went to take a good look at that possible stain on the driver’s seat. It was there, all right, but it didn’t scream “blood” any more than it did “coffee” or “beaver fever.” That last one was the nasty byproduct of drinking creek water, and it in and of itself may have justified abandoning a befouled vehicle.