Nightmare Magazine Issue 7

by Angela Slatter

  The Black Hills, or the Paha Sapa as the Lakota Sioux called them, had been Indian land for as far back as anyone could remember. But when the pioneers discovered gold, everything changed. General Custer had led the then-modern day crusade to wrest the land from the Indians. He’d been killed for his efforts, but that hadn’t stopped the irreversible flood of miners and pioneers, who set about taking what they could, killing whoever and whatever they wanted, and recreating their European heritage in microcosm wherever they settled. Part of this need was a desire to bring civilization to the savage lands. The other part was to have things recognizable when the night came and the land murmured promises of violence and retaliation. So they brought the old ways with them. Traditions practiced for a thousand years opened the doors to the secret realms, allowing legends to crawl, walk and fly through, in answer to the susurrations of terrified European immigrants in the land of buffalo, Eagle-feathered Sioux and thunderheads the size of castles. It was to these legends Dave now spoke, asking for help, asking for someone to stop his uncle from beating his aunt and touching him with long-lingering looks.

  And something had come. Tentative at first, then later with fervor, lured by the mica and their inherent need to please. He privately referred to this disparate population as the Mica People. The substance transfixed them. They could at once see through the mineral and observe their own reflections. They seemed incapable of treading this strange new land without it, so he built highways for them to tread upon. He created temporary homes for them to live in, easily destroyed by the softest breath, but breathtaking in their immaculately prismed-light construction. Finally he made a cloak for himself, crafted from duct tape and mica, one that caused them to kneel and genuflect before him. He glowed in the sun like a rare diamond-made boy. He’d become King of the Black Hills. They couldn’t take the Mica with them. It was only available to them here. So as King, Dave gifted them the land and everything upon it. Free to come and go as they pleased, they brought more of their kind until there were as many of the creatures as there was Mica. They frolicked. They held court. They told him stories of the Lost Ages. Then, one morning, he’d sent them to kill his uncle.

  He’d thought nothing of it.

  Eventually, as tourists made souvenirs of the mica carpeting the Black Hills, their population diminished. Finally there came a day when Mica was as rare as the gold beneath the ground and he saw them no more.

  Then part of him forgot about them.

  For a while.

  “I came around because I could use your help,” Lamont admitted, removing his hat.

  Dave stared hard at his former friend-turned-adversary as he waited for the punch line. When it never came, he answered, “Not much help to anyone nowadays.”

  “This I think you can help with. It’s about your uncle.”

  Dave blinked, and with each opening and closing of his eyes, he remembered the towering man who’d so terrified him. Fear gripped him, fear he’d thought forever banished in that long hot summer of the Mica People. Fear he’d kept hidden until it had become a cancer that had eaten away everything of worth.

  “Did you hear me?”

  “I heard. I just never thought I’d talk about him again.” He got up and paused for a moment, then went to the mini-fridge and grabbed a pitcher of water. He poured himself a glass and drank carefully, lest his stomach discover it wasn’t wine. When he was finished, he took his time replacing the pitcher, then returned to his seat. “So what about him?”

  “Remember old Mudo Jurgovich?”

  “He still around?” They used to make fun of the old Russian. Last time Dave had seen him he was panning for gold in Nemo. He said as much.

  “Some things never change,” Lamont admitted. “He has a placer mine this side of Hilly City. He was blasting the other day and found something. As odd as it sounds, he thinks it’s your uncle.”

  Dave let a five count go before he asked, “You know what happened to my uncle, right?”

  Lamont nodded. “I read the report.”

  “So why would he think that it involves my uncle?”

  “Money clip engraved with his name, for one.”

  “Could have been someone stole it.”

  “There’s more. Come on. I’ll tell you about it on the way.”

  It had amazed Dave that his aunt wouldn’t stop crying. She missed him, the man who’d slug her as quickly as he’d look at her. Dave didn’t dare tell her what he’d done, but he couldn’t help but ask her why she was so sad. He’d thought he’d helped her.

  “I loved him so much.”

  “But he hit you.”

  “No he didn’t. Why would you think that?”

  It was obvious from her bruises. Sometimes Dave would catch his uncle staring at his aunt and he could see the guilt in his eyes.

  But as he got older he learned a new truth.

  One that was far different from reality.

  “Maybe he’s coming back,” he’d offered, knowing the value of the empty words before he even said them.

  “Do you think? It’s been three weeks.”

  “Sure. He might have just needed a vacation. Something long. Something alone.” He’d said it with such authority, as if a nine-year-old was so smart. Then she’d cupped his cheek, called him a good nephew, and asked him to bring her an iced tea.

  She’d stopped crying after that. Mostly. Sometimes he’d see her hunched over her flowers in the garden, her shoulders quivering as if the constant wind was able to move them as easily as it did the grass. Or late at night, coming from her room at the end of the hall, mostly muffled by the door, a sound so low that it could have been mistaken for the canned laughter of Johnny Carson if Dave hadn’t known better.

  Then eventually his aunt didn’t cry about it ever again. Especially when it came out that Evelyn, her old hair dresser in Rapid City, had been seeing his uncle on the side. Sometimes they’d met in Hill City. Sometimes they rendezvoused in the alley behind the beauty parlor. While his aunt Hazel kept her head inside the dome of the dryer, Evelyn kept her head between his uncle Horace’s legs.

  And with that image dialed up whenever he thought of his uncle, Dave discovered he didn’t feel so guilty about his disappearance. Especially when he discovered that the bruising hadn’t stopped. In fact, it was becoming worse.

  “How is this possible?” Dave asked.

  He stood inside a small cavern. No longer than a 1978 Chevrolet Impala and no wider than a body length, there was only a single entrance and exit to the cavern—the one created by Mudo’s blasting. The one they’d just crawled through.

  “How’d it get in here?” Dave stared at the mummified body in the front seat of the perfectly preserved car. He wanted a drink.

  “Damned if I know. Checked the walls. It’s solid granite all the way around. Only way in is that hole Mudo blasted following the quartz trail. But instead of gold, he found this. Ain’t that right, Mudo?”

  The wizened old mountain man stepped into the lantern light. He wore a baseball cap with the word Homestake across the front, a pair of jeans so threadbare they were almost white, an American Legion t-shirt, and cowboy boots. He had a Hockey player’s nose. “I get a finder’s fee on the Impala.”

  “I bet Dave would let you have it. Ain’t that right, Dave?”

  “Sure. Keep it.”

  “Don’t know how I’m gonna get it out of there.”

  “Piece by piece, I imagine. But let us remove the body first, okay? Strange as it may seem, this is a murder scene.”

  Dave ran his hand over his face. Although he didn’t know how this had happened, he had no doubt who’d done it. The Mica People. His Mica People. Personal thumb-sized ninja assassins launched to do murder by order of a nine-year-old boy.

  “So what brought you back?” Lamont asked. He dredged a French fry through a sea of ketchup and ate it.

  “Needed some time.” Dave stared at his own burger and fries. Although he was hungry, the smell of the grease from the fries
and the fat from the meat curdled his stomach.

  “I heard about Amy.”

  Dave looked up from his food at Lamont, searching for any hidden meaning. But he didn’t see one. “They thought I did it for a while.”

  There was no question who they was. “Did they have any evidence?”

  “Not really. Circumstantial, they said.”

  “Even the best of us can get a little too eager. That’s why I believe it’s always best to work from fact rather than opinion.”

  If Lamont wanted the facts, Dave could sure provide them.

  The fact was that the love of his life became the hate of his life. Somewhere between the roaring twenties when they drank and ate and fucked in every corner of America and their tired thirties, the spark that had burned so bright dimmed and finally died.

  The fact was that they had an amicable divorce, mainly because he hadn’t had the energy to even lift a finger when she walked away with the house and most of the bank account.

  The fact was that she’d hooked up with a twenty-five-year-old Salvadoran who’d run his Corvette into the back of a parked semi-truck doing eighty miles an hour, decapitating them and rendering their bodies all but unrecognizable.

  The fact was that the police had found a tool bag in the trunk of his Caprice with wire cutters and enough evidence that it could have been argued in a court of law that he’d done something to the car.

  The fact was that he’d thought about it, that he’d actually bought the parts to do it, but he’d been too lazy and too scared to actually go through with it.

  The fact was that he was a nine-year-old kid stuck in a thirty-something body.

  “It just didn’t work out is all.”

  “You seemed to be so in love,” Lamont persisted. “God knows I did enough to try and steal her away, but she wouldn’t have it. What happened to you two?”

  “She got over me.”

  Identifying the body had taken him farther back in time than he’d ever wanted to go. But now as he stood staring at the field of broken glass, he couldn’t help but compare it to the mica that had laced the ground when he was a child. Now he could hardly find evidence of the mineral outside of a roadside shop. With it gone, so was the magic of his youth. So were the avenues for the creatures of the Old World.

  He poured himself a glass of wine and realized that he’d probably been trying to recreate the mica. After all, wasn’t that the reason he’d returned to the spot of his first crime—his murder, as it turned out? Wasn’t that why he’d come back to his aunt’s old home? Although he’d been here two weeks, he’d never once set foot inside. It was just too hard.

  When President Calvin Coolidge established the summer white house in South Dakota, and ultimately designated the area Custer State Park, much of it was comprised from land owned by Dave’s family. Using Eminent Domain as the reason to seize it, they allowed the family to live in the homestead for as long as his aunt lived. Upon her death, the homestead would become government-owned. That he was there was testament to her longevity. She had a room in an assisted living center in Belle Fourche. He’d visit her if he had the courage, but whenever he did she begged him for help.

  “Can’t you get me one bottle? I promise they’ll never know.”

  He always said no. At the age of nine he’d never known about her alcoholism. The iced teas she made were vodka-based. She’d drink them throughout the day, then switch to tomato juice and vodka after sunset. When he was younger he used to go to bed so early that he’d never seen her stumbling around her home, bouncing off things, sometimes falling to the floor. But the older he got the more he saw, until there came a time when it was indisputable that her husband had never really beaten her.

  Dave emptied the wine bottle and threw it high into the air. It came back to Earth in a shattering climax. He whispered for the Mica People to come as he drank what remained in his glass. When he was fairly certain they weren’t coming, he got out of his lawn chair, got another bottle from his stash, opened it, and returned to his vigil. The sun was just beginning to set and it turned the field to a glistening orange.

  After his ex-wife’s funeral, he’d sold everything, bought the RV, and driven it across America. He found himself in Napa Valley, where he bought bottle after bottle of each estate’s best wine, until his insurance money dwindled to gas money. Now armed with the best grape California had to offer, he sought to find himself, becoming more and more eager as the stack of cases shrank toward the floor.

  Lamont found him the next morning passed out drunk in his chair, urine dripping from his shorts, the half-empty bottle of Rubicon clutched precariously in his left hand.

  “You’ve got to get over it.”

  Dave sat up. Even amidst his misery, he was mortified that he’d lost control of his bladder. He stood unsteadily and held out the bottle, which Lamont took from him. Then Dave stripped and staggered to the pond. The chill hit him as he entered. When he was chest deep in the water, the first sob broke free with such force he screamed. Then it took him over. When the sobs finally evolved into uncontrollable shivers, he staggered from the water and walked, dripping, into the RV. He was just slipping on his least dirty pair of jeans when Lamont entered.

  “I’ve seen this brand in the store. Costs about thirty bucks a bottle,” he said, placing the wine on one of the cluttered counters.

  “Try a hundred and thirty. That was their best year for Malbec.”

  Lamont looked closer at the remaining cases of wine. “They all like this?”

  “Some better. Some worse. But yeah.”

  “Must have cost a fortune.”

  “It did.”

  Lamont seemed to be about to say something, then turned and headed out the door. “I’ll be waiting outside.”

  Dave finished getting dressed. He took his vitamins, forced himself to eat a banana, then drank a glass of water. When that stayed down, he drank another.

  He had to get his shit together. He’d come to Custer to figure things out, but he was so deep in the grape that he could barely think. Part of him wanted it that way. Thinking meant remembering, not only what he’d done, but what he’d lost. Glancing around at the calendars all marking the same day, he knew he wouldn’t have enough wine to make it there. Was that how it should be? Was he fated to embrace the end sober?

  He grabbed a magazine and flipped through it. The cover had talked about celebrity divorces and, in some crazy spark of desperation, he’d thought it might have hidden some secret truth. But the tabloid’s promises were hollow, providing nothing more than a gallery of unhappy millionaires whose empty misery would be too soon replaced by lust and greed and envy—Hollywooderati playing hide the salami as therapy for a life too well lived.

  He threw the magazine across the cabin. It landed face down on the floor, the pages splayed like the wings of a bird about to spring back.

  He combed his blond hair with his fingers. Rubbing his hands over his face, he felt two days' growth. He could take the time to cut it, or he could let it grow another day or two. He decided to let it grow.

  He found Lamont waiting for him outside.

  “What is it? Why don’t you leave me alone?”

  “It’s Mudo. He disappeared.”

  Dave couldn’t help the look of shock that played across his face. Last night he’d cursed the Paha Sapa and in a strangled diatribe had prayed that the old Russian wouldn’t find out what he’d done. In the light of day he knew that the old man never could have known about any of it, unless he could divine the idea of a child who could command a battalion of Mica creatures capable of orchestrating the disappearance—and recent reappearance—of his uncle.

  “What do you know about it?”

  “Nu—nothing,” Dave sputtered. He swallowed. “Are you sure he’s missing and not just laying up somewhere drunk?”

  “Mudo stopped drinking ten years ago.”

  “Listen, I really don’t—” Dave took a deep breath to calm himself. “Why are you coming t
o me with this?”

  “I was hoping that you could bring me some insight. Your uncle. Mudo. Your parents.”

  A hole the size of the Badlands opened in Dave’s chest. “What’s my parents got to do with anything?”

  “Nothing, I’m sure. It’s just that you’re the only one I know who has known people who disappeared. I was just . . .” Lamont stared blankly at Dave for a long moment, then turned to look out over the field. “I don’t know what I wanted. Do you remember those kids that went missing when we were in junior high school?”

  Dave remembered. Fourteen of them over three years. Unlike most everyone else, he hadn’t cared so much that they’d disappeared. They were the ones who’d rained down their animosity upon him. They’d made him feel low and little. They’d abused him with stories of his missing parents, pretending that they’d decided to leave their broken child whom they no longer wanted. They’d hated him and he’d hated them back. Then they were gone.

  “You knew them too,” Dave said.

  “What?”

  “The kids who disappeared. You knew them too. You said I was the only one who knew someone who disappeared.”

  “There is that,” Lamont said slowly. “Sorry to bring up your parents.” A while later, Lamont finally left him alone and drove away.

  Dave had been visiting his aunt and uncle that summer because his parents had been having issues. Custer was a place where his mother had grown up, and she felt that the western hills and the Great Plains would be a blessed change for the little boy from New Jersey. They were supposed to have come for him in August, but they never made it. When Dave had turned eighteen, he’d used part of his inheritance to hire a private investigator. His parents had been traced to Nebraska. Somewhere near Chadron they’d disappeared. The authorities knew they’d made it that far because his father had gotten a speeding ticket there. But then nothing, as if a divine hand had come to pluck them from the Earth.