Redneck Eldritch

by Nathan Shumate

  Time seemed to have jumped again, and suddenly JT was on her feet, dusting off her hands. “Sometimes people overthink things. Laurel wanted to get a team out here with a stone cutter to set up a new obex, but I was like, ‘there’s a stream out there—just send out a bag of concrete mix and a template.’” She walked to the wheelbarrow, pulling out a pocket knife. “Of course, you know how it is—you come up with an idea, and next thing you know everyone’s like, ‘Great idea, Jane Temperance, how soon can you get that done?’” She slit open the bag and dumped the contents into the wheelbarrow. She tipped in some of the water and began mixing with the shovel. After a few minutes and a little more water, she seemed to have it to a consistency she liked, and she began shoveling it into the frame that surrounded the broken rock.

  “That’s not doing anything,” Emmett said tightly as she smoothed it out. He couldn’t see the crack in the rock anymore, or the machine, but he could feel it running. It was okay. He could always crack the concrete later, and anyway the machine didn’t want to be seen.

  “Take it easy,” JT said. She picked up something from the ground, a piece of cardboard with pieces cut out to form what looked like nonsense characters. She held it up so the light shone through the cutout for a moment, frowning, then spun it around.

  Emmett felt a lurch in his stomach—he still couldn’t have said what the characters spelled out, but they suddenly created something unsettlingly close to meaning in his head. Whoever had made the template hadn’t bothered with the candle pictogram this time, Emmett noticed. “There we go,” JT said, and lowered the cardboard onto the wet concrete. She flexed her hand, wincing. “You mind doing this?” she asked. “Kinda jacked up my fingers wrestling with that thing.”

  “Doing what?” Emmett asked.

  “Just trace those characters into the concrete,” JT said, standing up and flexing her fingers again. “I don’t want it to get all shaky.”

  “Uh, okay,” Emmett said, and knelt in front of the template. He could feel the machine as soon as he touched the concrete, sending a vibration up through his arm. It was certainly running, he thought as he traced the first character, gears turning beneath him, cranking implacably along. The longer he was in contact with the concrete, hovering just above the engine, the clearer the picture of it in his mind. For a moment, he thought he was about to grasp the real purpose of the thing. He felt like he was falling and floating at the same time. Then the meaning of the characters in front of him started to worm their way into his head, pushing out the truth of the engine, blocking it with something even more horrible.

  He traced the final character and sat back with a gasp. He blinked, realizing that a pressure that had been building for days in his chest was suddenly gone. He looked down at the writing, complete and unbroken, unlike the carving it covered. His eyes watered, and he looked away, at the flagstone floor.

  “What does that say?” he said, wiping his finger off on his pantleg.

  “Fucked if I know,” JT replied from behind him. “Best you don’t think about it too hard.”

  Emmett stood and turned. JT was standing near the broken-off wall, holding her shotgun not exactly pointed at him, but not at the floor either. Her finger rested casually near the trigger guard. The finger didn’t seem to be bothering her anymore.

  “So,” Emmett said. “It’s safe now?”

  JT laughed. “Fuck, no. This ain’t ever going to be a comfortable place to live, no matter what’s on top of that hole. Christ knows who set this up in the first place. Someone set a ward over this, probably two, three hundred fucking years ago, and somewhere along the line we lost track of it. Next thing you know people are living here and going fucking nuts, passing along a few tricks that get more confused every generation. We didn’t even know about it until things went completely to hell and the Speakmans all died.” She shook her head. “Fucking disgrace.”

  “So that guy Laurel was trying to get this land back to keep an eye on things,” Emmett said.

  JT tapped the chamber of the shotgun. “Yeah. Who knows how long before they fuck it up again, but yeah.”

  Emmett tried to keep his gaze from dropping to JT’s trigger finger. “Why not just destroy it?”

  JT sighed. “Partly because it ain’t really there. That’s why it screws people up so bad. Because it’s impossible for it run here, but you can still feel it doing its thing. But also because some people want to use it.”

  Emmett was about to ask how someone could use the machine, but he was pretty sure knowing more about what was going on was a bad idea. “Sorry about before,” he said instead. “The… silo. There’s been someone hanging around here the last few nights. Dan, I guess. Or that… thing. I thought it was you. Didn’t know you, and I did some checking up, heard about your record.”

  JT nodded slowly. “That was when I tried to get away from… all this.” She took her left hand off the stock of the shotgun to hold it up, displaying the tattoos. Or one of them, anyway. “It didn’t work out.”

  “It can be hard to get free,” Emmett said. “I thought there was money here, but I don’t need money, not that bad. I wanted it because Jake wanted it. It can start to seem like you want things that other people tell you to want, after a while.”

  “Yeah,” JT said after a few seconds. She lifted the shotgun so the barrel pointed to the sky. “Yeah, you oughta tell Laurel you decided to sell this place after all, and you oughta do it over the phone from back in Jersey or wherever.” She looked around. “Laurel’s got people who are real good at making dead bodies disappear, and they’re gonna have some work to do. Once they get on a roll, they’re like to reduce a few variables and simplify things so they can just clean up another dead body or two and not worry about what leftover people who are still alive might get up to.” She leaned the shotgun against the wall, then began tossing tools into the wheelbarrow. “Tell him you ain’t even been here for a few days—you just hired us and went home. Hell, tell him that asshole Dan stopped returning your calls, and you figure it ain’t worth the trouble if he’s just going to not show up.”

  “You’ll back that up?”

  JT looked him in the eye for a moment. “Laurel’s got his way of doing things, and I got mine. You took a shot at that fucker back there when I needed a distraction.”

  Emmett let out a breath. “Okay. Yeah.”

  “I’ll stick around, clean up the rest of this stuff.”

  “Thanks.”

  “But, you know, it’s Saturday.”

  Emmett blinked. “Yeah.”

  JT nodded. “Yeah, so I was wondering if you could pay me time and half for all this. Especially since you don’t need to pay Dan and Homer now.”

  Emmett stared at her for a moment. “Uh, sure,” he said at last. He reached back and found that he still had his wallet. He started trying to do the math, count out the right amount, then gave up and just shoved most of the bills he had at JT.

  She tucked the money into her pocket and picked up the arms of the wheelbarrow. “Thanks,” she said. “Laurel, he’ll tell me just to be satisfied with saving the world, but that shit don’t pay the bills, you know?”

  Emmett nodded absently, and followed her as she turned and headed back toward the house.

  SLICKER

  Robert J Defendi

  Carlin Reese had two broken yolks, one headache, and zero bars on his phone. He winced as he mopped up the last of the eggs with a bit of toast and tried to be as subtle as possible as he took in the other patrons of the diner. They all stared into their meals, pushing food around as if ignoring him. At least three glistened with clammy sweat, even in the air conditioning, their skin the texture of freshly washed squid. Something was wrong here. Carlin tasted something bitter on his tongue and realized, unexpectedly, that it was fear.

  “Enjoy your meal?” The waitress was a middle-aged woman whose face was a memory of beauty supported by load-bearing makeup. She smiled in exhaustion, the basecoat cracking under the strain of being polite
to a New Yorker, like fractures in drying mud.

  Carlin cleared his throat and ignored the furtive stares of the other diners. For some reason, he was acutely aware that there were seven of them and one of him.

  He looked the woman in the eye. “So the Lone Ranger and Tonto are standing on a mountain,” Carlin said, checking his phone one last time for a signal, finding none, then pulling out his wallet. He didn’t see a phone-pay scanner anyway. “The Lone Ranger looks north and says, ‘Tonto, what’s that to the north of us?’ ‘Five thousand Indians,’ Tonto says.”

  Carlin started to pull out a credit card, but he didn’t see a card reader either. He pulled out a hundred-dollar-bill instead, flopping it down. “So the Lone Ranger looks to the west and says, ‘What’s that to the west of us?’ ‘Five thousand Indians,’ Tonto says. ‘What’s that to the east of us?’ ‘Five thousand Indians.”

  Carlin scanned down the counter, across a shifting ocean of flannel and bad hygiene. The men glanced back at him with flat glares, then at the waitress as if they wanted her to leave, then down at their meals. They looked for all the world like a group of men preparing to do something drastic. Either waiting for the last witness to leave or for a signal of some kind. He scanned the group to find the leader. “He finally looks south and says, ‘What’s that to the south of us?’ ‘Five. Thousand. Indians.’ The Lone Ranger looks around, the panic just starting to sink in and says, ‘It looks like we’re surrounded. What are we going to do?’” Carlin cleared his throat. “And Tonto looks at him and says, ‘What do you mean “we,” white man?’”

  Carlin paused for the laugh, but none came. One of the men farther down the counter whispered, “That was kinda racist.”

  Meanwhile the aging waitress just said, “I can’t change a hundred.”

  The hell she couldn’t change a hundred. She’d taken in more than a hundred while he was eating. Still, best just to get the hell out of Dodge.

  The glares radiated down the counter and he wondered distantly if any of them had ever eaten a city boy on one of those big hick farms they probably had. He needed to get back in his car and back on the road. Next time he got hungry on the road through Oklahoma, instead of stopping he’d eat his coat.

  And as he considered the men, the whole image seemed to flash. One moment he looked down the counter, the diner exactly as it should be, the next he was a few stools down, and while the same people were there, they stood in different positions and wore different clothes.

  Everything flashed back. Carlin grabbed the counter to steady himself and shook he head. A wave of fear washed over him, so powerful it seemed to resonate through the room. His headache pounded, blinding. He needed to get air. He squinted his eyes. What the hell had just happened?

  “Keep the change.” He gathered his Armani wool-cashmere coat and started for the door. One of the men started to move, but another put out an arm to stop him. That was the leader.

  “Why you tell that joke?” the leader asked. He was stocky with dark hair well-groomed and moussed, in flannels so sharp they had an actual crease. Carlin blinked at him. He and this man were like night and day in size and breeding, but the hick’s hair was almost identical to Carlin’s own.

  His eyes scanned the rest of the yokels and landed back on the waitress. “I have no earthly idea.”

  He pushed out the door and into the parking lot of the Ozark diner. Green trees crowded the winding mountain road on either side, the parking lot and diner cut out of the living wilderness. A cool breeze took the grill stink out of his nostrils as he moved to his Cadillac Escalade Hybrid. He opened the back door and hung his coat on the hanger he kept there, then moved to the driver’s, tapping the voice assist on his headset. Lexi beeped.

  “Lexi,” he said, the words conveyed to the phone in his pocket via the magic of Bluetooth. “Take me to civilization.”

  “The nearest town is 430 feet away,” the digital assistant said in his ear. “Pull out onto State Road—”

  “No,” he said. “Real civilization. This place is a shit hole.”

  “I’m afraid I can’t help you with that,” Lexi said. Stupid phone app.

  “How far to St. Louis?”

  “Three hundred and fifty-two miles.”

  He slid into the driver’s seat and said, “Take me there.”

  The instructions played over the headset, and he tried to start the Escalade, but nothing happened. He tried again. Still nothing. Completely dead. He pulled out the phone. Lexi processed the navigation app on the screen, but he still had no bars.

  “Dammit,” he said, staring back at the diner. “Dammit!”

  ***

  It took ten minutes for Carlin to work up the energy to open the door to the Escalade, and by then his headache had somehow gotten even worse. He didn’t want to walk back into that place, but he really didn’t have a choice.

  He spent about five more minutes doing the ritual “no signal” dance, trying to find a location where the phone could contact a tower, but no matter how high he stretched or how he hopped, the phone didn’t so much as ping. Lexi must be working off the new internal cache instead of the central Lexi servers. If he wanted to make a call, he’d have to find a land line.

  He slid out of the SUV, but left his coat in the back. It was a cool autumn day, and the altitude left the air uncomfortably chilly, but it wasn’t truly cold. He strode back to the diner, cringing at what the loose asphalt must be doing to the soles of his patent-leather shoes.

  He pushed through the door and into a solid wall of disdain. The low hum of conversation ceased the moment he broke the threshold and all the flannel jockeys turned to look at him. The stocky leader in the freshly pressed flannel stood next to a gangly blond man who looked like Alan Tudyk with about ten grand less in lifetime dental care.

  Their eyes fell on him, flat and emotionless, the way that creepy kid in the fourth grade had looked at bugs. It was like stepping into seven twin beams of… no, not hate… animal indifference.

  And another flash. This time the faces of all the patrons were missing. In their place glistening, bloody muscle. The gangly one’s intestines spilled out onto the floor and the well-groomed one knelt nearby, forming them into strange symbols.

  Everything flashed back and Carlin gasped. His headache gnawed at the back of his eyes, scratched the inside of his skull. His heart pounded in his chest and he aborted his move for the counter, instead turning and riding a wave of fear in the direction of the rest room, the gazes burning his skin.

  Light gleamed off the metal bands that surrounded the edges of the counter and tables as he moved under the ponderous judgment of the uneducated. He needed to get out. Out.

  He pushed into the hall at the back of the diner and through the door into the rest room, then pressed his back against the door and gulped air.

  Jesus Christ, what was going on? Was the headache making him see things? Was he having a psychotic break? It had to be fear, but while only one of them had seen the business end of a washing machine, they were just people. They weren’t monsters. All that staring had just spooked him. His mind was playing tricks.

  But then he remembered them all pretending not to stare, their expressions minuets of gathering hate. The image of the one man moving to head him off at the door before the leader had stopped him. Then, with that clarity that comes from hindsight, he realized what had really scared him.

  None of them had eaten their meals.

  Seven men, all ordering lunch, and then playing with their food as they watched him out of the corners of their eyes. His head pounded and his stomach plummeted. Still, why go through all of that and then just let him leave?

  Unless somehow they knew his Escalade wouldn’t start.

  All right, Carlin. Get a hold of yourself. This is a diner in broad daylight. Just walk out there and demand to use their phone. They aren’t going to just jump you en masse. Are they?

  He eased the door open.

  “It’s a Grand Old One,” one o
f them was saying in a soft drawl. Great, they were Republicans too. “We don’t have a choice. We ran out of options days ago. You heard as well as I did. The stars are right. Now.”

  Carlin stopped, the door cracked. The men sounded just a few paces away.

  “I know, I know, I know. Are you sure you’re ready?”

  Oh God, it was some sort of homo-hick-rape party after all. He knew it. All these backwoods yokels were the same. He needed a way out of this. His headache throbbed. The fear was so powerful it seemed to batter him from all directions.

  “I’m ready. You’re sure that SUV won’t start?”

  “I cut all three positive twelve-volt cables. I do this for a living.”

  No wonder he hadn’t seen the blond one when he’d been eating. The man must have sabotaged Carlin’s vehicle and ducked around the building when he’d left.

  “Yeah, yeah. I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to challenge your professionalism.” They used big words. Probably overcompensating for a sub-standard education.

  “We just need his entrails,” one of them said. “Quick, quick, like a bunny.”

  Carlin stumbled back away from the door. He slapped into the hard tile of the opposite wall. Entrails. Entrails? Oh God, oh God, oh God.

  He squeezed his eyes closed. He couldn’t breathe. Entrails. They weren’t going to rape him. They intended to kill him. This was some sick, backwoods voodoo or something. Ozark magic. Superstitious nonsense, but that wouldn’t keep him alive as his bowels spilled out onto the tile. He had to think.

  All right. They would come through the door fast and hard. It wasn’t that long ago he’d rowed crew in college, and while it pained him that they wouldn’t put him in a skill position, they’d let him man the center because he’d been big.