Redneck Eldritch

by Nathan Shumate

  “He died in ’63 or ’64,” Homer said, “but you never heard of him?”

  Emmett shook his head. “By the time I was coming around here, it was just the brothers.”

  “Huh,” Dan said. “Well, he was a smuggler. Gunrunner, I heard.”

  “He was more than a smuggler,” Homer said. “He was a Satanist, or some damn thing. Word was, you’d see lights out here at all hours.”

  “Yeah,” Dan said, “because he was smuggling shit.”

  “Lights,” Homer replied. “Not people coming and going.”

  “Because the people who’d be coming and going didn’t stop in town, you dumb—” Dan stopped at a loud clang. They all turned to see JT looking at them as she picked up another hunk of metal. She turned and threw it into the dumpster, then turned back to regard the three of them again.

  “You think you’re pretty fucking smart, don’t you?” Dan asked.

  “’Cause I’m tossing shit into a dumpster?” JT asked. “Yeah, I’m really exercising my brain power over here.”

  Dan took a few steps closer. “We’re just trying to talk.”

  JT picked up a few pieces of rebar. “So talk.” She turned her back on Dan and threw the rebar into the dumpster with a loud clang.

  Dan took a step toward JT, his fists clenched.

  “Dan,” Emmett said sharply. Dan turned slowly. “Maybe we all oughta get to work.”

  Dan showed his teeth. “Sure thing, boss.” He bent and grabbed an armload of rebar himself and dragged it toward the dumpster. Emmett began picking up scrap as well, keeping a wary eye on Dan as he worked. The atmosphere was even more tense than it had been the day before, but Dan managed to avoid coming to blows with JT, or even arguing with Homer as usual. JT seemed a lot more interested in working than talking. Maybe she just had a better work ethic, but maybe it was something else. Could that have been her last night, prowling around the farm? It seemed like she might have an idea about the Speakman boys’ money, anyway, if she knew about the smuggling rumor. Uncle Jake had never mentioned Ezra, but now it seemed likely he’d known about him. Funny that Emmett had never thought to ask why the Speakmans were supposed to have money socked away, but then he’d been a kid back then. He’d accepted things more easily. Things Jake told him, anyway.

  Between thinking about that and trying to keep an eye on JT, Emmett had grabbed one of the weird devices of cobbled-together junk before realizing what it was. It was an uneven pyramid made of different kinds of pipe this time, with two cogs suspended in the middle. They were meshed, looking ready to turn against each other if only there had been something to power the whole thing. The cogs used pieces of bone for axles, suspended from the pyramid frame with lengths of rusty chain. He noticed something about the bone as he carefully released the device.

  “Shit,” JT said with feeling behind him. He exchanged a glance with her and realized that she’d seen the same thing he had. The two bones weren’t from a cow, or pig, or even a cat. Emmett was pretty sure one was a radius and the other an ulna—two pieces of someone’s forearm.

  “What is it?” Homer asked, spitting out a stream of tobacco.

  “Nothing,” Emmett muttered. “Just creepy.” He thought back to the time he’d visited with Uncle Jake and they’d found Pace Speakman with the left sleeve of his filthy flannel shirt pinned up.

  “Jesus,” Jake had said. “What happened to you?”

  Pace mumbled something that might have been “nothing much”—you could generally only make out about every fourth word Pace said.

  “Thresher,” Amos had said loudly. “Goddamn thresher got him.”

  Jake had looked back and forth between the two brothers for a moment. “Well, Christ, you need to be more careful.”

  Both Amos and Pace had nodded in that agreeable way of theirs, and that had been that.

  Emmett shook his head. “C’mon. Let’s get that loose stuff—”

  His phone rang, making him jump. He gestured vaguely toward the dumpsters as he took a few steps away. The caller ID said it was Tony, his friend from the old department.

  “Got some information for you,” Tony said when he answered.

  “Yeah?” Emmett asked, turning away at a metallic clang from the dumpster.

  “Took a while to find anything about the Quinn woman—it was a long time ago. But you said ‘JT’, and there’s a record for a ‘Jane Temperance Quinn’ who lived where you are, and served a stretch in New Albion.”

  “What for?”

  “Aggravated assault. Beat some guy half to death with a length of pipe when she was eighteen.”

  Emmett looked up to see JT tipping a tractor rim into a wheelbarrow. “That so?”

  “Yep. Now, the Speakman brothers, lots about them now, of course, but I went back a few years before the murders. Found a report with the sheriff. Seems they got called out for a disturbance. Someone from the historical society that had come by to check out their silo.”

  “Their what?”

  “Their silo. They were putting together some kinda calendar of old grain silos in the county—don’t ask me why anyone would buy something like that. Sounds like the Speakman boys objected.”

  Emmett turned again to look at the old silo next to the barn. It was one of the concrete stave models that you saw all over the place—curved plates of concrete bound by rings of steel so it wouldn’t bulge out from the weight of silage, all capped by a rusty metal dome. It was picturesque, in a way, Emmett supposed—the vines climbing up the side were all dead now but maybe in the summer they would have added some color.

  A memory struck him. Uriah saying, “Don’t go near the silos, boy. Silos is terrible dangerous things.” He hadn’t thought much of it at the time, because of course, grain silos were dangerous. You heard stories all the time about someone being sucked into the grain and crushed, or passing out from the lack of oxygen in them, or a fire exploding from the grain dust if there was oxygen. But the grain silo had never been part of his searching, had it? He’d been focused on all the weird junk, not a silo that was like fifty others within a few miles.

  “Emmett?”

  Emmett blinked, and focused on the phone again. “Yeah?”

  “That help you?”

  “Yeah. Yeah, I think it does. Thanks.” He thumbed off the phone and followed the others as they headed back toward the dumpsters. “Let’s toss this in and knock off for the day,” he said.

  Dan looked up at the sun. “Already? It’s early yet.”

  Emmett nodded. “Have some errands to run. Anyway, it’s Friday. You guys probably have something you’d rather be doing.”

  “Well, hell, you don’t need to be here,” Dan said. “We can manage without you.”

  Emmett shook his head. “No. No, we’ll just get this stuff, then pick it up Monday.”

  Dan shrugged. “Okay, boss.”

  ***

  Emmett stood on the front porch watching everyone drive off. He could see JT staring at him from where she sat in the bed of the truck until it finally dipped out of sight. The cold of the day was starting to sink in, but he didn’t bother going back inside, instead heading for the silo.

  It looked like half the silos in the county—the ones that weren’t blue-painted Harvestores, anyway. Maybe a little shorter than most, but nothing strange about it. Emmett had only a vague idea of how silos worked, but he knew they had a series of doors running up the side to allow access to just above the level of silage, no matter how high it was piled inside. The doors were on the far side of the silo from the barn, all but the lowest protected by a semi-cylindrical cowling that ran up the silo.

  Before he tried the door, Emmett made a circuit around the silo, looking for anything odd. He couldn’t see anything, and it seemed like a high-traffic area to hide something. Would it make sense to hide something inside the silo? Maybe, as long as you didn’t need it in the winter, when it would be buried under tons of silage.

  He returned to the door, a wooden portal a few feet s
quare held shut by two metal levers. He could see the whole series of doors running up the side of the silo when he poked his head under the cowling. The rings of metal bands holding the structure together doubled as ladder rungs, apparently, but not ones Emmett wanted to climb. He grabbed the lever on the lowest door and pulled. At first, it didn’t want to give, but after a minute of tugging, rocking his weight back and forth, Emmett got the hinge to move with a rusty squeal.

  The hatch swung into the silo easily, and Emmett could see a mostly bare concrete floor, dusted here and there with silage. He wondered how long it had been since the Speakmans had actually added fresh grain to the silo. The only light was what washed in through the door and through a few holes in the metal dome high above. He jogged back to the house for a flashlight, feeling a growing excitement.

  The silo was eerie, once he’d clambered inside. There was a smell of mold underlying the vegetative scent of old grain, and any shuffling sounds he made echoed up and down the space. He scanned the floor first, seeing nothing but bare concrete. The concrete continued up the walls, staves fitted together almost seamlessly, nothing but the odd piece of silage caught here and there to see. The only thing that really broke the smooth surface was the series of hatches running up one side.

  Emmett ran the beam of the flashlight slowly along the hatches, seeing nothing unusual. After ten minutes, he dropped the beam and stood, thinking. There was nothing here. No hiding spot on the floor, no bundles lashed to the inside walls near one of the higher hatches. Unless the Speakman boys had sealed something under the concrete floor, there was nothing hidden in the silo.

  He crawled out of the door and replaced the door, lost in thought. It had been a longshot, he supposed. Just because the Speakmans had gotten into some trouble because of the silo didn’t mean anything. They’d been crazy, after all. He wouldn’t have been surprised to find that they’d gotten into all kinds of trouble with the law, except that he’d have heard about it through Uncle Jake. Uncle Jake had always kept close tabs on what was happening with the sheriff. It was how he knew who in the county needed some correcting that the authorities weren’t up to delivering—drunk drivers, wife beaters, troublemakers. And it was how he’d known Anna Whittington was going to be a problem.

  Emmett shook his head as he walked away from the silo. He didn’t like thinking about Anna Wittington. The point was, if the Speakman boys had been causing all sorts of trouble back in the day, Uncle Jake would have known, and he’d have put a stop to it. He couldn’t even remember Uncle Jake bringing the incident up, or talking about silos, except for the time he’d…

  Emmett stumbled to a stop, halfway to the house, then turned slowly and looked down across the cow pasture sloping away from the road. Except for the time he’d been picking on Pace about all the grain storage the brothers had for a couple skinny cows, and Pace had gotten so upset he’d had one of his fits. They’d ended up leaving early, Uncle Jake even more pissed than usual—he didn’t like displays of weakness.

  But that wasn’t the important thing. Don’t go near the silos, boy. Silos is terrible dangerous things. That’s what Uriah had said. Silos, plural. And he hadn’t been talking about silos in general—he’d been talking about the two silos they had on the farm, the two silos Uncle Jake had thought would together hold more grain than they’d need.

  Emmett stared across the pasture, scanning it slowly. Now that he was looking carefully, he could see some tall irregular hummocks here and there amongst the stones and shrubs dotting the dead grass. He had an idea they were more of the devices they’d been finding as they cleaned up, covered in dead grass. Which was odd, but not what he was looking for. He could see it in his mind’s eye, though. Not a silo like the one near the barn, but a stone structure even older—squat, surrounded by vegetation, and looking like it had been there for a million years. Too far away from the barn to be really practical for grain storage, but the kind of silo that someone putting together a calendar of rustic photos would fall all over themselves to get a picture of.

  There. A clump of taller shrubs near the stream that ran across the pasture. He couldn’t see the old silo, but he was sure that’s where it had been, years ago. He strode back past the newer silo and the barn, toward the pasture. There was a spot where the three strands of rusty barbed wire fence had been forced down, yanking posts on either side out of plumb and making a handy gap to walk through. It wasn’t like the rest of the fence he could see was standing straight and neat, of course—there were plenty of other places where the posts leaned drunkenly.

  Emmett tried to think back to when the fence line had actually needed to contain cows, but he couldn’t recall exactly on which visit he’d gone from seeing a few of them to none. There was a sort of trail cutting across the gap, a worn path in the dead grass, and he glanced back to see that it led toward one of the devices near the barn. In the other direction, the path ran almost parallel to the fence, curving slowly into the pasture toward one of the little hummocks he’d seen earlier, off to his left.

  He ignored the trail, heading straight for the stream and clump of shrubs off in the distance. He lost sight of the shrubs once or twice as he dropped into dips in the landscape, but now that he had an idea where he was going and it wasn’t hard to stay on track.

  The whole structure had collapsed—that was why he hadn’t noticed it. As he got near, he could see that what was left of the walls stood no more than four feet tall, and was hidden by shrubs. It hadn’t fallen long ago, judging from the lack of grass growing over the rubble. What mortar there was between the rocks was dry and crumbling, and it was a wonder it stayed up as long as it had. Not that it had been very tall to begin with, though now that he was close he could see that it had been a good twenty feet in diameter. He glanced back toward the barn. It really was too far from everything to be much use for storing grain. He was out in the middle of the pasture, and he could look down the slope a quarter of a mile to where the Speakmans’ hay field started. He could see a few more of the devices the Speakmans had built down there, he thought, on either side of the divide between field and pasture.

  He started around the outside of the structure, then paused. He could swear he felt a faint vibration, in his gut more than his feet. He cocked his head, and thought he heard a faint grinding or scraping, almost beyond his range of hearing. He shook his head and continued forward. There was a gap in what remained of the crumbling wall, perhaps where a door had been. A doorway that tall didn’t belong in a stone silo, but Emmett no longer thought he was dealing with a silo.

  Most of the silo had fallen to the outside, leaving the flagstone-paved area inside mainly clear. One of the stones in the center of the floor was different, though.

  It was a lighter color than the rest of the flagtones or any of the stones that had been part of the structure’s walls, for one thing, and it was polished and smooth, as if it had avoided hundreds of years of weathering. It was big, three or four feet across, and cracked deeply down the middle, revealing blackness underneath it. There was faint, weathered writing carved in it.

  He crouched and ran a hand over the rock. The writing wasn’t English, or anything he recognized, and for a moment his attention was drawn to a more understandable carving on one side—an image of a candle. It was the only pictogram there, and he returned his attention to the writing.

  While he couldn’t read it, after a while he felt like an understanding of the text was working its way into his head, despite the crack in the rock that had separated the writing into two pieces, and destroyed a few characters.

  The sound of an engine jerked his attention away from the writing and he looked up, experiencing a moment of disorientation. The light had changed, and dusk was well under way. How had that happened? He blinked, looking toward the sound that had caught his attention.

  He couldn’t see much of the road from where he was behind the wall and the shrubbery, but it sounded like a car or truck that could use some tuning. No one ever went by the f
arm by accident, since the road dead-ended a few hundred yards on, but maybe it was someone who’d gotten lost, or someone indulging idle curiosity. Or maybe it was a sheriff’s deputy. He frowned. Or JT, come back to nose around. After another moment, the sound of the engine dwindled, and Emmett knelt for a closer look at the rock and what was underneath it.

  It was hard to make anything out in the deep shadow beneath the narrow crack, but gradually he realized he was looking at the teeth of a cog. Most of the cog was out of view, and it just didn’t make sense for a cog to be there, underground, so it took a while to comprehend what he was seeing. But gradually, he became certain of what it was. A cog, and below it what he thought was a piston. The piston disappeared into the gloom of the well, or cavern, or whatever it was. He couldn’t make out how the two were related, but they looked like they’d meet up just under where the rock, with its inscription, blocked his view. He could barely see any of it, really, especially in the fading light, but he had the sense of a machine that extended far below where he crouched, and to either side under the silo, then out into the pasture. He wasn’t sure how he knew it, but he was suddenly sure that the engine was immense. As he watched, the cog turned. Or he thought it did—the light was too witchy to be sure, really. Probably it hadn’t. He was just imagining it.

  He grabbed the edge of the crack and tugged, but it didn’t move at all—it was sunk into the floor around the outside edge, meeting the flagstones smoothly. More, he had a sudden feeling that he shouldn’t try to move the rock if he could, that… something didn’t want him to. He sat heavily next to the carved rock, and rubbed a hand over his head.

  The whole cleanup, bringing in Dan and everyone else, had been pointless. That was his first thought. What he’d been looking for wasn’t concealed in all the junk in and around the house. It was right here, by itself out in the pasture. This was the secret the Speakman boys had been concealing. And it wasn’t money. That was his second thought. He should have just sold the land as soon as he inherited it, and walked away with whatever he got.