Redneck Eldritch

by Nathan Shumate

  “Look here,” Jody said. “Keep your money. I have a better proposition. You guys obviously want to see Lake Town, but that car of yours is never going to make it down there. Even if you manage to not get stuck on the road, you’ve still got a half-mile of muddy lake bed to get across. The lake is dried up, but it ain’t dry. How about you follow me? There’s a turnout another hundred and fifty yards down the road. You can park there, then hop back in with me. I’ll give you a ride down there and give you a tour of Lake Town.”

  “In exchange for what, if not the twenty dollars?”

  “Depends. You got tenure at the university?”

  “Of course. I’m very well-established in anthropology, really.”

  “I’m sure you are, Professor, but it’s not like you’re at Berkeley or Stanford. We’re talking University of the Bay. Don’t get me wrong. U Bay is good enough for me, and Berkeley and Stanford aren’t easy schools to transfer into anyway. Consider the ride and the tour an audition of sorts. If I do good, you help me get into your program at U Bay.”

  Professor Hallward stared back at her wide-eyed, a coy smirk painting his face. “Well, you are a delightful surprise, aren’t you?”

  Steve stepped in. “No offense, but that doesn’t seem fair. Sure, you have a big-ass truck, but LoreMiner is the one who put this place on our radar with his photos and research. If Professor H. were going to help anyone, it’d be him, not you. No offense.”

  Jody suppressed the urge to punch Steve in the face, keeping her attention on the professor instead. “Look, you don’t have to make any promises right now. Let me take you down there, and if you’re impressed with what I have to show you at Lake Town, then you do me a solid and help me get out of this town. Either way, I’ll get you in and out safely. No hard feelings.”

  “Deal.” The professor stuck out his hand to shake on it.

  “But what about LoreMiner?” Steve protested.

  “Grad students,” the Professor said, winking at Jody. “Don’t be a dunce, Steve. Our guide here is LoreMiner.”

  “But she’s a…” He cut himself short.

  “A girl?” Jody finished for him.

  Steve’s face turned red. “Shit, sorry.”

  “Feel stupid?” Jody asked him.

  “Yep.”

  “Good, now let’s go.”

  ***

  Oxbow Lake was a quagmire of mud crisscrossed with 4x4 tire tracks. A narrow creek running through the center of the muck and a piss-yellow pond at the base of the earthen dam was all that was left of the lake itself. Far in the distance, beyond the neck of Oxbow Valley to the east, were the Sierra Nevada Mountains, blue and hazy with no hint of snow on the peaks.

  Jody locked the hubs on the front wheels of her K5 and traversed into the muck, sticking to the tracks where other 4x4s had gone before, weaving in and out of the debris pockmarking the exposed lake bed: tires, tin buckets, beer cans, plastic water bottles, and even an old Studebaker rusted to the same brown color as the mud.

  “It was a couple of fishermen who first saw the tops of buildings poking out of the water at the beginning of summer,” Jody said, as the straight lines of the town before them came into focus against the rolling backdrop of the lake bed. “By August, the lake was dry enough to expose the whole town. I used my waders and got in to take the pictures you saw online when there was two feet of standing water, so most everything was still untouched.”

  “I didn’t actually see your pictures,” the professor admitted, “but Steve assures me they’re quite good. He also says you gave a preliminary date to the town?”

  “Well, the town definitely dates back to around 1870, when prospectors found placer deposits with a lot of gold along this creek. It was a bit of a haul from Georgebrook back then, I guess, so they built a town here in the valley alongside the creek. The town was actually called Growlersburg. The mysterious part is when the dam was built and why.”

  The town was in full view now, a ghost town in the mud comprised of fourteen buildings, seven to either side of what had once been Main Street Growlersburg. The buildings were all wood planked one-story affairs with square-topped facades, but with steep pitched roofs behind the facades to handle winter snow. Two more of the smaller buildings had been knocked over since the last time Jody had been out there, and someone had stolen the wheels off the stage coach in front of the saloon. At least the saloon itself and the church looked to have been largely untouched.

  “Here it is, or at least what’s left of it.” Jody came to a stop and they all hopped out. Steve immediately had his camera to his face, scrambling around to snap pictures.

  “Careful,” Jody hollered after him. “Everything is covered in a couple of inches of silt. It’s slicker than shit.”

  The professor walked into the town at a statelier pace, trekking poles out to steady himself. Jody strolled at his side down main street between the buildings. She wished she had some rubber boots, but there was nothing for it now. Her sneakers and scrub pants would be stained forever.

  “It’s in amazing shape,” the professor remarked. “The water must have been deep enough that oxygen levels were too low to allow decomposition. It’s almost as if we stepped into a time machine and entered Growlersburg the moment before it was buried beneath a lake in the 1940s.”

  “The ’40s?” Jody asked.

  The professor shrugged. “Just guessing. This is not as uncommon as you might think. During the Depression, the Civilian Conservation Corps was building roads, bridges, and dams all over the country. Probably what happened here. Gold was long dried up and the richer town of Georgebrook needed a steady water supply, which meant they needed a reservoir.”

  “I don’t think so. I looked in all the buildings and there were no artifacts from that time period. It’s nothing more than a primitive mining town. I think it was drowned before the turn of the century.”

  “Perhaps it was abandoned long before it was flooded then.”

  “Possible,” Jody admitted. “Still, I don’t think so. The buildings wouldn’t be in such good shape if they had been abandoned for decades before the valley was flooded. On top of that, the reservoir has never been used for drinking water or irrigation. It’s just a big fishing hole. I did a bunch of research, but I couldn’t find much. It’s like people purposely chose not to write about it. All I could find were offhand references to the town and the Oxbow Mine in newspaper archives. Around 1898, any mention to the town disappears in the papers and you start to see references to Oxbow Lake instead. I don’t know what to make of it.”

  “Haunted,” someone said behind them.

  Jody yelped and spun around to find it was only Steve.

  “Sorry,” he said sheepishly. “Didn’t mean to sneak up on you.” The professor seemed unperturbed. He stepped through the dilapidated doorway into the saloon. Jody and Steve followed behind him. Enough of the roof boards were gone to let in a few beams of sunlight, but it was still dark and dank inside.

  “Shit, I didn’t even hear you come up behind us,” Jody whispered to Steve, embarrassed to have been startled so easily. “You’re like a…” She caught herself.

  “A ninja?” Steve finished for her. He winked. “Thank you, but I’m of Chinese descent, not Japanese.”

  Jody had to laugh. “I guess we’re even now. Sorry. Were you just joking about the haunted thing?”

  Steve paused to take a picture, and his flash lit up the entire bar. Even covered in a layer of black silt, the bar top was amazing, a full thirty feet long, like something out of the Old West. Jody shook her head in disgust, though, when she saw that all the liquor bottles and glassware had been destroyed. Even the bar-back shelves had been smashed to hang akimbo from the wall.

  “I’m sorry, the local dispshits have been in here looting and thrashing the place,” she said. “That was all intact when I first came in here.”

  “The ugly underbelly of human civilization,” Steve said. “Ignorant people always destroy what they should appreciate.
”

  “A bit of a broad generalization, but true in this case,” the professor said. “You were saying something about the town being haunted, I believe?”

  Jody hadn’t thought the professor was paying attention, but there seemed to be more to him than she initially surmised.

  “Yeah, after seeing Jody’s Tumblr posts, I did a little research of my own at the university library,” Steve said. “Like she said, there’s not much out there, but I found a reference to the Oxbow Mine in a book about murderers and ghosts during the Gold Rush era. It was hardly more than a footnote, but there were rumors at least that some prospectors disappeared into the Oxbow Mine, presumed dead, only to show up a few months later to start killing people. The book tentatively dated the events to right before the turn of the century. Same decade Jody came up with.”

  “Interesting,” the professor said, and he led the way out of the saloon back into the sunlight. It was near noon now, and the sun glared overhead in the clear autumn sky. Jody was a sweaty mess beneath her scrubs, not to mention muddy as hell.

  “It wouldn’t be the first time a town was abandoned due to a heinous crime or even superstition,” the professor continued. “I’ll need to examine a few more rooms to ascertain that the town indeed dates back to the Gold Rush, but even if not, I think it’s a worthy site for investigation. I’m not much for field work these days but, Steve, if it’s an expedition you’d like to lead, it would be perfect for you and some of the other grad students. Maybe some of the advanced undergrads.”

  The professor stopped at one of the smaller shacks, what looked to be a home, and tugged on the door. It opened with a squeal of water-bloated lumber and rusted hinges and he stepped inside. Before Jody could step in after him, the professor came sprawling back out the doorway to land on his back in the mud.

  “The fuck are you?” a man bellowed, stomping out of the shack after the professor, fists clenched.

  Jody gasped in surprise and jumped forward to stop the man raging before her. “Brad Boy! Hey, it’s me, Jody.”

  Brad Boy came to a halt, but just barely. He was tall and lanky, with a feculent beard, ratty jeans, and no shoes. Worst of all, he smelled like an outhouse. His neck cords were taut and his jaw moved like he was chewing a piece of gristly steak.

  “Jody, Jody?” His eyes were rimmed with red and he could barely focus on her face as she held him at bay.

  “Yeah, Jody. Remember, we went to high school together? You’re a few years older, but you dated a couple of my friends.”

  “Jody, Jody.” His eyes darted back down to the professor and then at Steve, standing behind Jody.

  “Yeah, easy. They’re okay, they’re with me. We’re just checking out Lake Town. We didn’t realize you were in there.”

  “My house.”

  “Okay, sure. We won’t go in there. We’ll get out of here, in fact.”

  He blinked, once, twice, three times, and then came to. Sort of. His eyes focused on Jody’s face and he quit gritting his teeth, but she could tell he was still whacked out of his skull. “No, stay,” he said. “Bonfire tonight. All gotta be here. Stay. I will find Preacher Wilson.”

  He spun on his heel, then sprinted off through the mud, down the muddy tract between the shack and the adjacent building, up the hillside towards the tree line.

  Jody reached down to help the professor up. “Sorry about that. One of the local meth-heads.”

  “Fucking inbred redneck,” Steve muttered.

  “I think the preferred terminology around here is ‘white trash.’ I wouldn’t let Brad Boy hear you say either one, though. He’s known to tote around a .38 in the back of them Levis.”

  “Charming fellow,” the professor said, scraping the muck from his hands and rear. “I’m beginning to have second thoughts about sponsoring a survey here. Who exactly owns this land, anyway? It’s not Brad Boy or this Preacher Wilson, is it?”

  “Nah, Preacher Wilson is just the local pastor. He tries to save these meth-heads with the Bible, but more often than not, they just turn into meth-head Jesus freaks. On paper, this land is all managed by BLM. That’s who I was hoping you guys were when I first saw you. I called the sheriff about the looting when I first realized it was going on, but they said they don’t have jurisdiction, so all I could do was leave a bunch of messages with the BLM. I’ve never heard back from anyone.”

  Professor Hallward frowned. “I’ll have to look into it and discuss the survey proposition with the university administration. Right now, I’m inclined to get out of here before Brad Boy comes back.”

  “Not yet,” Steve pleaded. “Let’s at least look inside the church before we leave. I want to get some photos. It’ll help make our case if we can provide visual evidence of an intact building with cultural significance.”

  “Fine,” the professor relented, “but let’s make it quick.”

  “This way,” Jody said, glad that Brad Boy hadn’t ruined everything. “The church is the easternmost building now, but in all likelihood there was a whole city of tents and temporary buildings at one point, lining the creek up toward the Oxbow Mine. Most of the prospectors wouldn’t have had the money or time to build something permanent.”

  “Makes sense,” Steve said, but the professor seemed not to hear Jody’s words. He was staring at the church.

  It was modest by modern standards, single-storied and made of rough-hewn wooden boards. The only things that distinguished it from the other building in town was the fact that it was longer and had an iron crucifix at the apex of the roof.

  Jody pushed her way through the double doors and came to a halt as the others walked in behind her.

  “What the—?”

  Piled high at the center of the pulpit was a heap of—for lack of a better term—treasure. Jody didn’t know how else to describe it. There were vases and bowls, coins and medallions, and even what looked like nuggets of gold. The hair at the back of Jody’s neck stood on end.

  “That stuff wasn’t there last time I was in here. I thought the looters were just stealing stuff. Why would they bring anything here?”

  They walked warily past the moldering pews toward the pulpit, even Steve, who had been running around like a little kid the whole time.

  “Take a photo before we touch anything,” the professor said.

  Steve did as he was told and they all moved in closer. Jody stopped several feet away and let the other two examine the treasure. Something wasn’t right. It reminded her of something… a déjà vu moment just beyond the reach of her memory. A wash of senseless fear. She couldn’t remember when she had experienced it before, but she felt it now.

  “My God, this can’t be,” the professor said, holding up a gold coin to examine it closer in the dim light.

  “What?” Steve asked and he zoomed in to snap a shot.

  “I’ve seen this pictograph before, but it was on the wall of a cave in Africa where Holocene-era humans once resided. We’re talking over ten thousand years ago. It makes no sense for it to be here, on a coin crafted in the late nineteenth century.”

  “You’re sure it’s the same pictograph?”

  “It’s unmistakable. The ten-armed serpent. The arms are all bent at right angles along the perimeter of the pictograph so they touch one another, and they’re connected in the center by a spiral-like eye.”

  The professor grabbed another coin from the pile on the pulpit, and another, and then a wooden bowl, which he flipped over to examine. “All of it has the symbol, in one variation or another. How is this possible?” His voice was little more than a whisper. After a moment he stood, the first coin still gripped in one hand. He turned to face Jody.

  “The mine. Where is it? Does it still exist?”

  “Yeah, I guess so. It’s at the opposite end of the lake from the dam, not far from here. Why?”

  “Take me there.” The professor was already striding back the way they had come. Jody and Steve followed in his wake, out of the church and through Lake Town toward Jody�
��s Blazer.

  “Whoa, whoa,” Jody said. “Five minutes ago, you wanted to get the hell out of here. Ten minutes ago, you weren’t even interested in any of this. Now you want to go look at the mine?”

  “That’s right. I must see it.”

  “But it’s barricaded off with barb wire, and even if you get past the barb wire, it’s just a vertical shaft filled with water.”

  “It was filled with water,” the professor corrected her. “If the lake is empty, so too is the mine.”

  “Okay, sure, but what does the mine have to do with anything?”

  They had reached Jody’s Blazer and the professor was already climbing up into the passenger seat, heedless of the mud that covered his backside.

  “Goddammit, what did I get myself into?” Jody muttered to herself as she pulled herself into the driver seat.

  “I need to see the mine,” the professor said when they were all in. “There must be the same pictographs on the walls. If so, I don’t know what that means. It could be that everything we know about early human migration is wrong.”

  “I don’t know, it seems a bit tenuous,” Jody said.

  The professor slammed his fist down on the dashboard. “Do you want my help getting into my program or not? Take me to that goddamn mine!”

  Both Jody and Steve stared at him in shocked silence. After a moment, he let out a sigh and shook his head. “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to yell at you. I am going to that mine, though. You either take me there or I’ll walk and find it myself.”

  Jody regarded him for a moment. He seemed himself again, but he was still gripping the coin from the church in one hand, rubbing it absently with his fingers. Her gut told her to let the guy run off on his own if he wanted, but she’d promised she’d get him in and out of Lake Town safely. Brad Boy was out there somewhere, probably with his .38, and then there was that party tonight that both Brad Boy and Ted had told her about. Spider Camp wasn’t too far off from the east end of the lake, where the mine entrance was. It was still several hours until dark, but who knew if the local meth-heads weren’t milling about already? If the professor went wandering around alone in his pink polo and khaki shorts, he was bound to run into trouble.