Redneck Eldritch

by Nathan Shumate

  Billy Joe watched the black shape in the yard. It moved on four legs. It looked sort of like a dog. Therefore it must be a dog. He wanted a dog more than anything. He’d tried to keep Rosebud, but his daddy made him walk her all the way over the ridge back to Skipper’s house. The thing snuffling in the bushes outside had to be a dog, one without an owner. A dog who needed him as much as he needed it.

  The gathering twilight, along with Billy Joe’s bad eyesight, made it difficult to see the animal. The outline seemed to waver. Was that a long tail, with plenty of fluffy fur, or a whip-thin tail that coiled like a scorpion’s? Fluffy, Billy Joe decided.

  The beast outside yipped in surprise as its tail suddenly grew a thick coat of fluffy black fur. It whipped its head around to stare. The human inside had power—a simple power, true, but simple belief was the most dangerous kind. Hard to corrupt and hard to twist, simple belief made humans dangerous. The beast swung back towards the door, a growl rumbling low in its throat.

  Billy Joe pressed closer to the door. The latch creaked. He glanced over his shoulder, but Lucie Mae just slouched deeper in her chair, attention fixed on the quiz show. She’d never notice if he slipped out. He was, after all, almost eight years old. He even went to school and could read. He knew about dogs. And he wanted one more than he wanted anything. He reached for the latch.

  “Billy Joe, don’t you go wandering out into the dark. You might get eaten.” Lucie Mae’s voice snapped him to a stop.

  “I see Daddy’s truck a-comin’,” he lied. “I was just going out to meet him. Help him with chores.” The creature—dog, he told himself firmly—the dog’s ears pricked up. Big pointed ears, not floppy hound ears. More like a German Shepherd. He’d read about them. Big beautiful dogs with black and tan coats, fluffy tails, and pointed ears. They were loyal and helpful and wondrously good at biting people who made fun of you. Billy Joe would love to have a German Shepherd bite all the kids who taunted him because he couldn’t see very well. Wasn’t his fault he thought that that flock of pigeons was a spaceship.

  The beast yipped again. Its body was changing, reshaping itself into something new. This was not supposed to happen. It had manifested in its usual form, mostly, but the sacrifice had provided very limited power and the portal had closed before it had fully materialized, leaving it still partially fluid. But the human child should not have been able to reshape its form. It shook its head, pointed ears flapping. The fluffy tail wagged behind it.

  Billy Joe wriggled the latch on the door. Lucie Mae shouted answers in the form of a question at the TV. Billy Joe snapped the latch up, pushed the screen door wide, and darted out into the evening light.

  “Billy Joe, you get back here!” Lucie Mae’s voice followed him.

  Billy Joe kept going towards the black animal. His momma wouldn’t follow him, not for another twenty minutes until her show was over. Plenty of time for him to make friends with the stray dog and claim it as his. She couldn’t take it away from him if he’d already made it his friend. And if she tried, well, he’d just have to cry until she gave in.

  The black creature crouched, growling, as the boy approached.

  Billy Joe smiled. He could see the black and tan coat of a German Shepherd. “Nice dog. You’re a good boy, aren’t you?” He held out his hand, just like the books said. He squatted down, crouching as he got closer. He waddled like a mutant duck towards the beast. “You want to be my best friend, don’t you? We’ll have so much fun together. We’ll play fetch with sticks and go on long walks and chase rabbits. You’d like that, wouldn’t you?”

  The beast choked on a growl. He really would like to chase rabbits and fetch sticks. And romp in the fresh air.

  The creature shook its head. The boy had power, great power.

  “Here, boy. Come here. We’ll get you some nice tasty dinner. Maybe a bone you could chew. You can sleep in my room.” Billy Joe waddled closer, hand outstretched.

  The beast raised a red light in its eyes. Evil oozed from every pore, only to be stopped by the fur coat and wagging tail. He was a dog and the boy was his master and he loved his master. No. It shook its head. The Nameless One was its master. The beast had manifested in this world as a harbinger of chaos and madness that the Elder Gods would bring when they came. Their servant was here to open the gate.

  “Who’s a good boy?” Billy Joe rubbed the fur over the beast’s eyes. “You like that, don’t you?”

  The beast closed his eyes and thumped his tail. He did like what the boy was doing. His body solidified into the form of a dog. The brain resisted. He was not a dog, not a friend and servant of the human child. He was a servant of the Elder Gods, bringer of destruction. But the scratching behind his ear felt so good. His back foot thumped in time to the scratching.

  Footsteps crunched down the gravel drive. “Billy Joe? What you got there?” Cletus called as he approached.

  “I found me a dog, Daddy. A German Shepherd.” Billy Joe kept scratching.

  The beast tried to growl, but it came out a whine. His tail thumped in the dirt. He rolled onto his back, exposing his belly to the boy with the magic hands who knew all the right places to scratch.

  Cletus stood over his boy, staring at the dog squirming in the dirt. “Well don’t that beat all. What’s a German Shepherd dog doing out here?”

  “I don’t think he has a home. Can I keep him?”

  Oh, yes, the beast wanted the boy to keep him. He wanted it so much. His tongue flicked out, licked the boy’s arm. Wait, no, this was all wrong.

  Billy Joe giggled. “He likes me! Did you see that? He licked me.”

  Cletus leaned closer, staring at the dog’s eyes. The red flickered deep within, then died. Cletus harrumphed deep in his throat. “Something ain’t quite right,” he muttered.

  Billy Joe rubbed the dog’s belly. The beast squirmed, unable to contain the joy of being accepted by the boy. His tongue lolled out of his mouth.

  “He’s a great dog, Daddy. I’ll name him Horace. That’s a great dog name, isn’t it?” Billy Joe’s smile spread over his face and spilled over. He turned the full power of it on his father. “I’m sure he’s all alone out here. Can I keep him? Please? I’ll take care of him real good.”

  Any objections or lingering doubts in Cletus’s mind were destroyed by the sheer force of Billy Joe’s happiness. “’Course you can keep him,” Cletus found himself saying. “Let’s get your momma. Skipper and Bobbie Lee invited us over to eat turkey with them tonight. Caught the bird in their garden today. Biggest turkey I ever saw, but it sure smelled good coming out of the oven.” He draped his arm over his son’s shoulder.

  “Hey, boy, Horace. Come on.” Billy Joe whistled, summoning the dog.

  The beast rolled over and bounded to his feet. His tail wagged furiously as he trotted behind the humans. He was Horace, the German Shepherd dog. He always was, and always had been, Horace. He had lived for this day when he would meet his master, Billy Joe. And he loved Billy Joe more than anything.

  ***

  The flies buzzed in tormented circles over the outhouse. The tiniest thread of darkness still leaked from the portal beneath the seat. The presence of the Nameless One filled the small building, though no physical manifestation protruded.

  The time was not yet. Both servants were gone, one to grace the top of a table, the other to lie beneath. The humans were too strong, the servants of the Elder Gods too weak.

  A breath of black mist stirred the pages of the ancient book as it lay beside the wooden seat. There would be other pawns, other sacrifices, other chances. Other offerings with perhaps more power. The location was not ideal, but one took what one was given. The presence withdrew to a barely felt chill while the flies buzzed over the seat. It could wait longer. It had waited centuries; what were a few more?

  The Elder Gods were nothing if not patient.

  THE PEOPLE OF THE OTHER BOOK

  Robert Masterson

  “The People of the Book” refers to those persons and prophets
represented in the three primary texts of the Judaeo-Christian-Muslim tradition: The Old Testament or Jewish Torah, what Christians call The New Testament, and the Koran of Islam. Of course, there are other, even older books which may not mention people at all…

  Pallas, Daniel. The Necronomicon Cults: A Study in Ecstatic, Organic and Manufactured Religion. Aziz: Three Lobed Press, 1986. 235. Print.

  But the idea that ideas themselves can be dangerous—that true wisdom comes from fervent faith, and that independent thought can lead you down a dangerous path—is an old one, and one that has sometimes led not to bibliophilia but bibliophobia, a fear that reading is perilous, particularly reading certain arcane and occult books.

  The Journal of Rutgers Library. “Forbidden Words: Taboo Texts in Popular Literature and Cinema” by Stephen Whitty 2014

  ***

  I couldn’t believe what the old man said. I wanted him to say it again.

  “Say’t agin,” I told him.

  “Ah set, ‘If yah want you some money so gotdamn bad, go get yah some.’ Go dig up some of that money in the basement if yah want money so gotdamn bad, gotdamn it,” he snapped. The old man snapped, barked, hollered, and yelled a lot. It was that or he was mute.

  “What money? Yah got money. Inna basement?” I couldn’t believe it or him.

  “Hell, yeah, Ah got money inna basement. Burred inna wall ahind one of them big ol’ clown pitchers. Been there fer years.”

  I just stared at the twisted up old fuck, an old man knot of wasted human life just too furious to do anything other than rage. And drink. And use drugs. My old man was quite a guy in quite a few ways, but money-stasher was a new one on me.

  “How much money we talkin’ about?” I asked.

  “Twelve fuckin’ thousan’ skins,” he answered. “Yah shit.”

  “Yah got $12,000 buried in the basement? What the fuck fer? Why the fuck yah do a stupid thing like that?”

  “So you and yer retard brother couldn’t never get yer greedy fuckin’ paws on it.”

  “Why yah telling me now?”

  The old man clamped his mouth shut, his face collapsing around his toothless hole.

  “Ah’m serious, old man. Why yah telling me only just now?”

  “Ah got muh reasons.”

  “Such as…? Ah mean, how long’ve yah been sittin’ on this stash of cash?”

  “Long ’nough,” the old man answered. “And Ah got me some reasons. That’s all yah need to know.”

  And, yeah, we found the money. Down in the basement in a hole in the wall behind the third picture we tried, the third choice out of all the clown paintings down there and it was right where the old man said it would be. Or, rather, what was left of it—a rotten, rat-shredded, moldy wad of slimy scraps and fiber. If you ever want to know what $12,000 looks like, do not ask me. All I can tell you about is what $12,000 looks like after my wet-brained, drug-addict old man hides it in a wet, dirty hole in our cellar’s wall and doesn’t tell anybody about it for ten or eleven years. That’s not all we found, of course, but finding those sludgy lumps of cash pudding was awfully disappointing.

  Mixed there among the clots of slimy black money were the bones of a child, the skeletonized remains of a little girl, a little girl around 12 or 13 years old, a little girl named Sharon Lebanon from my last class in my last year of school, a kind of cute girl who wore a TV-star cardigan sweater. There she was, yellow bones and ragged shreds of ragged skull hair and super-white teeth, some scraps of clothing, and that cardigan sweater with the sweater-belt tie.

  ***

  Tobias stood there for a moment looking at the money-slop and the rest of it; then he just bolted upstairs. I mean, he spun around and he was pounding up the steps and the next thing I heard was his heavy boots thumping across the floor above and the meat-sounding smack of his close-fisted blows to the old man.

  “Yah stupid, worthless piece a shit,” Tobias’s voice, though muffled, was clear and the space between each word was filled with the sound of another blow. “Yah… insane piece a… fuck… shit.”

  Stuff like that. I couldn’t hear much of anything from the old man, but that was not in any way unusual. I can’t remember the last full sentence I heard him speak aloud before tonight and I’d stopped reading his little notes years ago. They didn’t make sense anyway when I did read them. “Cancer dog at the back door,” I remember one of them said; “Claws and beaks are all you eat,” was another one. They were like fucked-up fortune-cookie fortunes or something, like those notes in those little cookies at that Ho Ho Palace those gooks made up in to town.

  ***

  There’s a story about the old man and a television like there’s a story branching off of everything other damn thing that ever happens. The old man was out, had been gone for a week, a not uncommon practice of his. He’d disappear for a day, a couple of days, a week, and once for almost three months. He’d come up home flush with money and bragging about his wise choices, he’d come home with a chain of catfish or a hindquarter of venison bragging about his woodcraft skills, he’d come home tattooed and puffed up on some kind of promotion he’d got because he was such a gotdamned good Book Keeper, he’d come up home busted up and broke and hungover like hell behind his eyes not bragging at all, he’d come up home with a woman or a couple of men bragging that his sons adored him and that what was ours was theirs but to keep their hands of his. The lesson there for young children such as ourselves was that nothing lasts, that everything can be changed or ruined or taken away instantly for any reason or no reason at all. People come and people go. Attachment to people or things or the things people gave us lead to dull heartache, to the kind of disappointment the old man sanctified, a repetitive chipping away at things like “affection” and “security” and “hope.” It was a kind of hollow understanding; a resignation to all foul things in the past, and all foul things in the present, and all foul things yet to come. Filth and disease wasn’t just a lack of hygiene or antibiotics. It was in The Book. It was the fatalism, the certainty of the nihilism that replaced all hope in The Book and in the supplicant’s heart. The father’s braggart’s ways and the money would both dry up. We’d eat fish and venison until it was gone and then we were on our own. Wounds would heal, the throbbing in his head would ratchet down to normal. The woman or the men would leave cursing him, in a flurry of violence, another loss to add to the losses already given up to The Book. And we, Tobias and me, we’d be right back where we always were no matter what he or we or anybody did.

  ***

  One time, he came back grunting and puffing up the trace with the weight of a television set balanced on his shoulder. He said it was like radio with pictures, but since it had been a while since we’d had any radio except the radio the old man had jiggered to receive WCOB, “All the Hits From the Golden Age of Country” and that meant Hank Snow and George Jones and Patsy Cline and on and on, and one other station, all static and radio screaming that was also whispers of numbers, endless chains of numbers, or chanting or flute music and chanting, and none of it meant much to us. The old man would hunker over that radio set for hours sometimes and listen to that cryptic broadcast, listening and waiting, waiting and anxious.

  I don’t think it was our first TV, but it was our last TV. He improvised an old car battery to run the thing and turned it on. After that long warm-up period television sets used to make us endure as vacuum tubes (whatever they were) “warmed up,” snow appeared, beautiful, shimmering, electronic snow. He twisted knobs and he angled what he called its “rabbit ears” and the snow kept falling with a cool, blue hiss.

  “Gotdamnit to hell,” he kept saying. “The man to the store’d said it work up here, that there were nuff TV signals going around to give everone a pitcher.”

  Tobias and I just watched from the corner of the room, the room for living, the living room, and thought the snow was the point. We didn’t know about any pictures. I watched the faces in the TV snow emerge, each face an apparition with a story to tel
l, even if it just was one long, sustained TV snow-dampened howl of misery, pain, and regret. Other faces intoned TV snow pronouncements, statements, testimony, reports from Hell. The old man fussed and fumed and kicked and hollered, but miraculous, haunted snow was all he got. He fiddled with some of our aluminum foil and TV dinner trays and electrical tape, but he never got a picture. I wonder what we would have seen had he succeeded in pulling in whatever signal he searched.

  Then, in his great obstinacy, he dragged his dump-pile Laz-E-Boy recliner directly in front of the TV and sat to watch the snow. And that was the last time I saw him outside the living room and standing up. Sometimes, he’d laugh like the machine was telling funny jokes. Sometimes, he’d lean forward with his elbows on his knees, pushing his face closer to the screen as if the snow people had become important and worth a more fuller attention. He spent the next 5 years in front of that television snow and, when the snow stopped, he spent another 3 listening to the cold hiss of the thing, messages still embedded in the its whispered hissing, and, when the hissing finally stopped, he spent the rest of his pitiful life staring at his own reflection in the curved glass screen, still laughing, still leaning forward, still occasionally calling Tobias or me or both of us in to see what he was seeing, but we didn’t want to watch him watch himself in the brown-grey glass pointing at himself saying, “See? Ain’t that the funniest thing?” or “See? Can you believe that?” or “See what them fools is doing? That ain’t in The Book and, when the stars is right, they’s gonna pay for their foolish ways,” and we even thought we could never could see or hear the things he said he saw and heard, and we always said we did. We talked about it, Tobias and I, and we saw stuff in the TV, too, but we didn’t see what each other saw and we never saw what the old man said he saw. And heard. He didn’t even get up to use the outhouse except for shitting. Piss wasn’t a good enough reason to leave his Laz-E-Boy, and piss dried up eventually. We had to go out to buy his meth and give it to him, we had to go out and find the cloudy moonshine he loved, but as far as I know, he never left the chair again. We took the plastic jugs of piss to exchange for plastic jugs of the opaque moonshine he drank like milk. Sometimes we would get mixed up as to which jug was supposed to hold what, a little snickering rebellion or revenge.