Redneck Eldritch

by Nathan Shumate

  “Except it wasn’t no ram. I don’t know what the hell it was—still don’t.”

  This wasn’t the story that Larry was expecting, and in spite of the fact that he believed the man across the table from him was a murderer, he found himself intrigued by what Tommy was saying. Here was a taxidermist, after all—young, but experienced nonetheless. He’d probably seen everything that had flown, swam, walked, galloped or wiggled across south Louisiana.

  “What did it look like?” Larry asked after Tommy failed to speak.

  “It looked like a squid-thing. I mean, it had a squid head, but it had limbs almost like arms and legs.”

  “So, human?” Larry reached into his breast pocket and withdrew a small writing pad and a pen that hooked to the spiral binding. He wrote the word squid, then crossed it out and wrote meth lab? He made sure Tommy couldn’t see what he had written.

  “Almost—kind of like a baby, but more grey, like the primer color on my dad’s Jeep—imagine what you’d get if you crossed a person and a fish, but with… you know, arms and legs.”

  A knock on the door made Tommy jump. The door opened and Stephens came in with a Diet Coke and two Advils. “Here you go,” Stephens said and put them on the table, keeping his eyes off Tommy.

  Larry looked at Tommy. Something had changed in the past few minutes. A small crack appeared in the hard shell of hate he had for the taxidermist.

  “Hey,” Larry said to Tommy. “Ah, you need anything?”

  “No, no. I’m good.”

  Larry nodded to Stevens and the officer left, closing the door behind him.

  “So, you found a squid-human thing,” Larry said as he popped the pills and took a drink. “Then what did you do?”

  “I took it in the shop and cut it open.”

  “You did what?” Larry said, stopping the second Advil halfway down his gullet.

  “Yeah, I thought maybe Dave changed his mind and wanted this thing stuffed instead of a ram. So I skinned it, threw the innards in the trash and built the form. I had never built anything like it. It wasn’t like any animal I’ve ever seen. The hide was like rubber, all slimy and tough. I was going to tell Dave—or whoever dropped it off—that I was going to charge him extra, just for the pain-in-the-ass project he’d given me.”

  “This animal, you don’t know who sent it? Was there a note or anything?” Larry asked.

  “No, but that’s not unusual. Everyone knows that they can drop off a raccoon or boar and I’ll get working on it. They usually stop by that day or the next and let me know it was them that dropped it off.” Larry remembered seeing the drop-off box just outside Tommy’s taxidermy shop, even remembered opening the hatch and looking inside.

  “We didn’t see any squid-thing in your shop. What happened to it?”

  Tommy stared at Larry and bit his bottom lip. He then began to nervously tap his fingers on the table.

  “Stay with me, Tommy,” Larry said. His knee throbbed, and his head was beginning to pound. The Coke and Advils felt like they were just sitting in his stomach, wondering which way to go. “You good to continue?”

  Tommy nodded.

  “I got done with it around four or five o’clock yesterday. I didn’t want to go nowhere in case Dave or whoever came by to pay up. Since I was going to be there, I started working on a swan for Todd Cummings that I’d been putting off.

  “I was a couple of hours into that when I must have dozed off. It was dark outside when I woke up. That’s when I heard something. It sounded like someone rummaging around in my scrap pile near the truck. I went and retrieved my 30-06 and that’s when they came in, all three of them.”

  Larry jotted notes as Tommy spoke, but he stopped and looked at Tommy. Larry saw a look of pure terror on the man’s face. It was so pitiful it almost made Larry forget what he had seen earlier in Tommy’s shop. Almost.

  “Tommy, who came in?”

  “Huh?”

  “Tommy!” Larry snapped his fingers. “Who was it that came into your shop?”

  Tommy stared straight ahead as if he watching a vision only he could see.

  “There were three of them,” Tommy whispered.

  Tommy’s eye twitched.

  “Did you recognize any of them?” Larry waited to write down either a name or the word unknown.

  Tommy locked eyes with the detective and beads of sweat began rolling down his unshaven face. “Wasn’t anything to recognize.”

  Larry lifted his pen. “Say again?”

  “I mean, there was nothing to recognize. They weren’t human.”

  “Not human?” Larry circled the meth lab? comment.

  “Chief Delafontaine. I’m telling you I stood in my shop and saw three things come inside and they weren’t human.”

  “Well, what the hell were they?” Larry felt pressure in his temples as the blood pumped in his veins just below the skin.

  “I swear to God, I don’t know,” Tommy said.

  “What did they look like?”

  “They were all over seven feet tall. They had huge squid heads, like the thing I cut up, but huge!” Larry saw Tommy’s eyes shifted rapidly back and forth. “They were all over seven feet tall…”

  “You said that already,” Larry interrupted.

  “Yes, I did. I did. They walked on two legs, like people. Their torsos and arms were like humans, too, but those heads and their eyes… I am going to have nightmares for the rest of my life about their eyes.”

  And how long will that be? Larry wondered. “Okay,” he said. “So, these tall squid-headed things came in. Do you think you can describe them to Frank when we’re done so he can draw them?”

  “Oh yeah. No problem. And I can describe the little one, too.”

  Larry had forgotten about that one. “Good. We’ll have you talk to Frank in a bit.” Questions swirled inside Larry’s head. Nothing made sense. He needed more answers. “How were these three things dressed? I mean, were they clothed like people too?”

  “No—they were naked, as all nat-ur-al as God made them. If God did make them.”

  “What did you do when they came in?”

  “I just stood there, gun hanging down. I was scared shitless—I couldn’t move. They came in and walked straight to the squid-thing that I had stuffed. That’s when I thought it must have been a baby of one of those big creatures. That made me sick to think that I had carved up and prepared a baby one of those things.” Tommy dropped his head.

  “Then what happened?” Larry asked. Tommy sounded sincere. He sounded like he was saying exactly what he remembered happening. But there was no way this actually happened. There were no such things as giant squid-men roaming around Atwood County, Louisiana.

  “They all walked over to it and kept looking at each other. It was like I wasn’t even in the room, thank God.”

  “Did they say anything?”

  Tommy gave Larry a puzzled look.

  “I mean, did they make any noise?”

  “Nothing—they didn’t talk at all. They made no sound. They just kept looking at each other, like they were communicating, but without words. ”

  “So… didn’t say anything,” Larry said and wrote the same on his pad. “Then what happened?”

  “They stood together, looking at each other for a couple of minutes. Then one picked up the baby squid-thing and put it under his arm, and he and another one of them left. The last one walked over to me. It came right up and stopped a few inches from me.”

  Tommy’s hand began to shake again, followed by his other hand. Soon Tommy’s whole body begin to twitch.

  “Tommy.” Larry raised his voice. “Son—snap out of it!”

  Tommy stared straight ahead, but didn’t stop shaking.

  “Tommy!” Larry roared and slammed his fist on the table, breaking the trance in Tommy’s eyes.

  “Yeah?” Tommy said, his voice weak.

  “Tommy—I need you to tell me what happened next.”

  After a moment, Tommy spoke. “This thing sto
od and looked down on me. The tentacle things on its head began to shake, like what a rattler does when you get close—except no rattles. And the smell—oh! It smelled godawful! Like it had been dead for weeks! That baby thing didn’t smell unusual at all, just a little fishy like you’d imagine—not like this thing.”

  Larry watched Tommy as he spoke, head pounding, and wondered what had happened to his bullshit alarm. After twenty years of interrogating suspects, his gut was honed to detect falsehood when he heard it—usually. He’d been with Tommy for twenty minutes and any moment he expected his gut to sound the BS alarm. But the moment for catching Tommy in a lie never came. There was no way Tommy was telling the truth, but Larry was damn sure the man across the table from him wasn’t lying all the same.

  “Did it touch you?”

  “No, no. It just stood there looking at me. And those eyes. They were black and yellow, like a catfish, but big. Lord help me, they were big. All I could do was stand there. It was like its eyes paralyzed me so I couldn’t move. You know, like a trance or something. I couldn’t see its mouth under those squid tentacles but I imagine, if it wanted to, it could have opened wide and ripped my head clean off.”

  “How long did it just stand there?”

  “I don’t know, man. Maybe five minutes, or fifteen, even though it only felt like a few seconds. I think it could read my mind. I really do. And its arms were huge; it could have killed me right then and there. I doubt my gun would have left a scratch on that tough grey skin. I knew how tough it was, even on the baby one.”

  Tommy paused again, slumped forward with his forearms on the table. He looked physically and emotionally exhausted. “You, ah…” Larry said. “You need to take a break?”

  “No way—I want to get this off my chest. Then maybe I can forget this nightmare ever happened.”

  Good luck, Larry thought. “Okay, then. Go on.”

  “Like I said, we were just standing there. Then I saw the two other things come walking back into the shop, but this time they were carrying… they had with them…”

  Larry knew what Tommy was going to say. And he knew why the taxidermist couldn’t finish his sentence. Tommy began to cry.

  “They carried in…” Tears fell freely from Tommy’s eyes. They landed silently on the table’s black linoleum.

  “Son, I saw it too. I was there. Just say it.”

  “They were carrying Ross Phillip’s three-year old son, Jack. Except… Jack…” He stopped talking and closed his eyes tight, but the tears continued to slide down his cheeks.

  “Tommy,” Larry said in as kind a voice as he could muster. An hour before he’d wanted to kill Tommy himself after he’d seen what was in the taxidermy shop. Now, things had changed. “You can stop…”

  “The boy was naked. Jack was naked and sliced up the center and stitched together using, I don’t know—it looked like twine or something. And his eyes… oh God! His eyes were gone. There was nothing, but…”

  Tommy began to cry harder. His shoulders rose and fell with each sob.

  “They just dropped the boy on the table where I had had that squid-baby. They just dropped him. The big monster looked over at Jack, then back at me, and then it walked away. All three of them—they left. I broke down after that, just knelt on the floor and cried. After a bit, I called Laura in your office. God, Chief, I know this sounds crazy, but there’s no way in hell I would have done anything to that kid—no way. So, you can throw my ass in jail or even kill me if you don’t believe me. I wouldn’t mind. Really, I wouldn’t.”

  Tommy bowed his head. Larry picked up the small notebook, slid the Bic pen back into its spiral cocoon and put them both back in his breast pocket.

  “Tommy, we’re going to have you go talk to Frank, and then I’d like you to meet with Dr. Farnsworth. He works with people who have seen… things. I’ll give him a call and you and him can talk things over. How’s that sound?”

  “Good, I guess. That sounds good,” Tommy said wiping tears away with the back of his hand.

  “All right. You know we’ve got a lot to check out with this and I’ve got to give Ross Phillips a call so you just sit tight and Detective Stephens will take care of things from here on out, okay?” Tommy just nodded.

  Chief Delafontaine rose. The cheap chair screeched as the metal feet scraped on the cement floor. He nodded to the one-way mirror. A click echoed in the room as the locking mechanism tripped, allowing him to leave. Miraculously, the man felt no pain in his left knee.

  THE GEARS TURN BELOW

  SM Williams

  Emmett Parson came to the house looking for treasure, and almost as soon as he walked through the door, he kicked over a soup can full of old tobacco juice. It didn’t help the appearance of the room, especially since there had been a layer of mold on top of the liquid, but it didn’t hurt much either. Most of the juice had immediately run under an old gas tank from a tractor that had been cut in half by a torch, and it would soon blend in with all the other stains—oil, ground-in manure, other unidentifiable things—on the floor of what Emmett supposed would be called the living room.

  Emmett edged his way between a pile of truck springs and a teetering stack of cogs toward a couch and an old easy chair, both stained and sprouting stuffing from dozens of holes. There was a gap between the two pieces of furniture, leaving a spot on the floor that was clear and almost clean. It was situated for the best view of the old TV that sat atop a milk crate, and from his visits as a kid, Emmett recalled it as Uriah’s chair. He shook his head. It had never been a tidy place, but he didn’t remember it being this bad. It looked like the state troopers had pushed some of the junk aside to form a lane so they could haul Orson through from the bedroom, and Emmett couldn’t imagine why they’d left the can of tobacco spit next to the front door.

  The smell in the main room was bad, but it was worse in the bedroom. None of the Speakman boys had ever bathed enough to make a secret of the fact that they worked on a farm, and when you put four of them together, sharing a bedroom—hell, sharing a bed—things got unpleasant. The mattress was stripped of its bedclothes, probably by the state police, Emmett figured, since it wasn’t like the Speakmans to bother changing sheets. The saggy mattress was full of stains and scorch marks from cigarette ash. It was a wonder the boys hadn’t all burned up in a fire before dying for other reasons. Emmett had brought a sleeping bag just in case he wanted to stay and keep an eye on things, but there was no way in hell he was staying in the bedroom. Even driving back to a town big enough for a hotel was losing its appeal. The idea that he was going to find what he was looking for here suddenly seemed ridiculous. He could make it all the way back to Newark before it got too late. Get some dinner at Top’s and forget this whole thing. Try to put Uncle Jake’s obsession behind him.

  The bedroom was only slightly less cluttered than the front room, though the clutter had been kicked around by everyone going in and out. There was something odd about it, though, Emmett noticed just as he was about to head for fresh air.

  The scraps and leftover parts and twists of rusty wire in the bedroom weren’t piled, semi-organized here. They were formed into… things. Things like sculptures, or maybe devices, though what the devices could have been made to do, Emmett couldn’t say. He picked one of them up, and turned it over in his hands. It was a thick rusty washer arranged against a large drill bit so that it would slide up the spiral of the bit, hauling a piece of wire that was in turn attached to a cog meshed with other cogs. He spun it for a moment, watching the cogs turn. It was clever, if pointless, and when he looked up, he noticed dozens of other pointless machines around the room crafted from scrap and junk. Some were versions of the same twirling object he held, others had their own mysterious purposes. He had a vision of the four brothers sitting up in the bed over long winter nights, manufacturing the little devices by the light of the single dingy lamp in the room. Or they might have made them in the other room, pulling the parts they needed from the piles, then brought them here to wher
e they slept.

  The sound of an engine outside made Emmett realize he’d been standing in the foul-smelling room for a long time, staring at the little creations. He picked his way back through the mess and onto the sagging front porch in the cool upstate New York autumn.

  It took a moment for Emmett to see the black Mercedes in the driveway. Like Emmett, whoever had driven it in had needed to weave through tractors and other farm vehicles slowly rusting in place—some so old they seemed to be melting into the dead grass—as well as piles of rusty angle iron, jumbles of frayed cable, and sprawls of oil tanks and axles. The junk started in the front yard and continued out through the forty yards or so between the house and barn out back.

  At least some of the junk had been there when he was a kid. Uncle Jake had always sent him out to mess around in the maze of stuff when they visited. Of course, Jake had always had his own motivation for sending Emmett out to explore. He’d go in and talk to the brothers, plead with them, cajole them with a bottle of Old Crow. And when he came away empty-handed and drove them home, knuckles white on the wheel of his truck, he’d quiz Emmett about what he’d seen, what he’d found. “You’re my right hand, Emmett,” he’d say, “I’m counting on you.” But he had never found what Jake was looking for.

  Emmett realized that the door of the Mercedes had opened in well-oiled silence and a thin, balding man was standing near it, looking up at him.

  He was wearing a thick wool sweater with a fleece vest over it. “Hello,” he said cheerfully.

  “Can I do something for you?” Emmett asked.

  “Mr. Parson?” the man asked. Emmett nodded. “My name is Laurel, Justus Laurel. I represent parties interested in buying this farm.”

  Emmett eyed him for a few moments. “You’re the one who made an offer last week.”

  Laurel inclined his head. “For the parties I represent, yes.”

  Emmett turned slowly, taking in the farm. “You offered three grand an acre for this.” Laurel nodded again as he turned back. “Why?” Emmett asked.