Searchers After Horror

by S. T. Joshi

  Wouldn’t they exchange their relative wealth and security just to sample what it was like? David thought again, and after lookingthrough the taxi’s window, he saw that writhing patch ofreeds, bathed in strange, new light.

  He thought he’d just seen something moving inside the grass. After telling the taxi driver to stop short of his home and then paying the fare, David recalled his wife sleepwalking the previous night and wondered whether she was suffering a similar episode. Once the vehicle had departed, he mounted the stile alongside the lane and then dropped into the field, his smart shoes sinking into mud. But he wasn’t concerned about that. It was nearly midnight and chilly with incipient winter. If Helen was out again in the dark, he’d have to get her back inside, where it was warm and secure.

  And childless, added another treacherous voice in his mind, but he ignored that and cut across the rain-sodden field to the reeds. Although the powerful moon shone down like some cosmic revelation, he saw nothing in the area but churned-up mud. He examined the ground in front of the reeds and noticed tiny scrapings, as if someone had taken a small object to the ground and carved these innumerable grooves. But who in their right mind would do that? And if they had, what instrument had they used? The markings looked deep yet narrow, each terminated by multiple spikes like untrimmed toenails. They led all the way back to his silent home.

  David had reached his back garden before he noticed the things that couldn’t be footprints die away. But that might be because his lawn was green and full, and not because whatever cosmic intruders had emerged from the reeds had turned back to their temporary habitat. He quickly crossed the garden to the rear door and tried its handle. It was locked. But on the path running around to the front of the house, he spotted more erratic shapes, countless scrapings of mud.

  If the things had come so far to enter the building, had they been beckoned to the main entrance by its only dweller?

  As well as prints on the path, there were moist, hip-high markings on the walls, as if whatever had shambled so erratically this way had used the cottage’s sides for support. Maybe malnutrition and hunger had rendered them all unsteady; perhaps they’d moved in such haste to receive more of the sustenance with which their newfound nurturer had tempted them here . . . But David shouldn’t dwell on such crazy ideas. It was his wife who’d had a breakdown, and he must be strong for her.

  The front door was unlocked. He entered immediately, seeing more muddy footprints and handprints—little more than blobs from narrow bones, surrounded by the delicate flecks of too many febrile toes and fingers—all over the hallway. Some ran towards the kitchen, and he quickly followed these. After switching on the light to overrule the property’s darkness, he noticed nothing untoward . . . except for several new paintings he could only assume Helen had executed while he’d been out with Kenny . . . and before the things she’d tried to elucidate had quietly come visiting.

  She’d used dark colours—blacks and greys and a vibrant red for their eyes. David wondered whether his wife, bereft of children and crushed by this truth, had attempted to lend them a human aspect: although their bodies were merely streaks of emaciated flesh and angular bone, their faces resembled those of people, with toothy mouths for devouring and oval slits for nostrils. But it was their eyes that captured most of David’s attention. He simply stood there, silent and transfixed, observing the pictures. The eyes were bright red and as large as fruit, like hellish beacons from another world.

  He dropped the paintings and rushed back into the hallway. In his peripheral vision, he saw kitchen cupboards open, each with little or no food inside. Perhaps the things had been allowed to eat, before receiving more intimate ministrations upstairs. The rest of the muddy prints—so sickeningly unnatural that none endorsed the human quality in Helen’s pictures—covered each riser and zigzagged below the banister. David advanced up the staircase, his heart hammering hard. After reaching the lightless landing, he listened carefully, thinking how cruel it was for the universe to deny him and his wife the ego-enhancing gift of children, while being happy to use them as surrogates for creatures who treated their kindness as a trigger in some nefarious campaign. He stepped up close to his and Helen’s closed bedroom door . . . and then heard noises coming from inside.

  “Let’s repeat again, everybody,” Helen said in a singsong voice usually reserved for communicating only with children. “La terra orbita intorno al sole.”

  Despite being spoken in Italian, this was easy enough for David: The earth orbits the sun.

  Then Helen added, “Nous descendons tous des singes.”

  He was able to make short work of this, too; his mind was now sharp and focused. In French, the comment had meant:

  We’re all descended from apes.

  And finally his wife said, “Unsere Köpfe sind durch das Unterbewusstsein regiert.”

  German this time, but he’d come across most of these words during his psychological studies: Our minds are governed by the subconscious.

  Christ, she was teaching the creatures about the three great scientific blows to human egocentrism. And what did that say about her state of mind? Had she now given up the desire for offspring of her own? David recalled thinking how self-absorbed his wife had always been. And was this turn against humanity and the need to tell the Others about it the darkest symptom of her illness?

  David was unable to speculate further because another noise had just emerged from the room. It sounded like a whisper of breeze-strewn reeds, all hisses and rasps and creaks. He heard other noises in there—harder sounds that resembled words: “Fhtagn . . . Yog . . . Sothoth . . .”—that failed to prevent a final notion from entering his faltering psyche: Teachers learn more from pupils than pupils ever learn from teachers.

  Red light spilled from the gap under the door. There was a sound of febrile limbs scuttling around the mistress of language. Then, as that whispering grew stronger and began speaking weird truths in an alien tongue, David leaned forward and opened the door.

  And stepping inside the writhing room, he didn’t know which role he was about to play: teacher, therapist, or father.

  Crawldaddies

  Steven Rasnic Tem

  Thirty years after his mother had taken him out of Rayburn Twist Josh discovered that getting back in hadn’t gotten any easier. If anything it was more difficult now that the new highway bypassed that forgotten little appendage of the state boundaries. With but a small population to answer to and no businesses to speak of, the state of Virginia had apparently decided to stop maintaining the two remaining access roads. One was taken out by a slide impossible to repair—half a mountain collapsed into a dying lake and no place to adequately support a bridge. The other was mostly gravel and clay with occasional craquelure patches of ancient asphalt.

  You might be able to travel it on horseback, but, not having a horse, Josh was making the journey up from the highway on foot carrying a loaded backpack. Arlene had dropped him off at a wide spot in the road.

  “What if you get hurt? Do you really think they’ll have doctors up there?”

  “I’ve got first aid supplies, and I’ll be careful. People are always getting hurt; I imagine the locals have ways to take care of them. Even if it’s just a mountain witch-woman with some nursing skills. At least I’ve had all my shots.” He tried to grin, but it didn’t help. Arlene was mad, and scared. Josh had made sure his affairs were in order, his life insurance substantial and paid up. But that was not the sort of thing to bring up now.

  “You think the locals would lift a finger to help you? A stranger? An outsider?”

  “I was born there, honey.”

  “You left when you were five.”

  “Well, I’ll make sure they know I’m family right away. It’ll help.”

  She gave him that familiar look that said I love you, but right now it’s more like I’m saddled with you. He kissed her and said,“Tell Trace I love him, every day I’m gon
e.”

  He knew it wouldn’t help things to say more, so he opened the door of the old station wagon and stepped out onto the gravel curb. The whole car rattled when he slammed it shut. When she got home she’d find money in an envelope and a note telling her to get the car fixed up, or buy a new one if she preferred. A woman by herself with a toddler needed a reliable car.

  Josh knew she might take the cash and the note as some kind of goodbye, a confirmation of her fear that he had no intention of returning. He did intend to return, after finding out all he needed to know—he just wanted to make sure they were taken care of just in case. But nothing he could do or say would ever reassure her. That had always been one of the truths of their marriage.

  Another truth was that whatever it was in him that repelled other women—some untraceable scent, some hormone vaguely sensed, some hidden anatomy or geometry or psychology— somehow attracted her. He’d never been entirely sure if that was a good thing for either of them.

  Descending the embankment from the highway to the traces of old road below was made easier by a well-used series of makeshift steps dug out of the ground and lined with flat stones. Clearly some of the locals had jobs or family somewhere off the mountain.

  Trees shielded much of the way from whomever might happen to gaze down from the road. Josh soon found himself by a small creek that ran alongside the old broken road as it wound its way higher up into the hollow between two steep ridges. Compulsively he kept looking down into the water, but had no idea what he might be searching for.

  Small creatures scuttled along the bottom of the stream where it curved slightly, partly sheltered by the bank. “Crawldaddies,” he whispered.

  Nothing he had seen until that moment had triggered any memories. He’d only been five, after all, his world restricted to patches of bright color, lines of dramatic movement, the occasional mostly forgotten game or song, the stronger flavors of food, the scents of the adults who carried him. But “crawldaddies,” the word evoking both a strange delight and a stranger terror, echoed clearly through the years.

  Until her death the previous year his mother had still talked about how that had been his “baby word” for crawdads, the name these mountain people used for crayfish, those smaller relatives of the lobster who lived in the fresh running waters that didn’t freeze to the bottom. His mother thought they were disgusting because they didn’t care whether the plants and small animals they ate were alive or dead. Now he thought of them as dark and ugly but good with lemon juice.

  Before she died they’d talked about his need to come here, to know what he’d come from. Her own memories were failing her, and she’d never been much help filling in the details of his distant past, “we all best just move on” being her standard answer. But even through the fuzziness it was obvious the idea made her anxious; she thought the whole notion was bad business. “Why’d you want to go there?” she asked from her bed, pushing her head up to look directly at him, even though it was an obvious strain. “Nothing to see there, ‘specially now. We left all that to find something worth seeing.”

  “It’s where Dad grew up, and I hardly know a thing about him. Even looking at his picture I can’t really remember him. And frankly, Mom, you haven’t been much help over the years.”

  “Not much to tell,” she rasped. “He grew up there, and he stayed there. That place is pretty much all he was. I wanted better for you.” She started crying.

  “I’m sorry, Mom. I know you did the right thing for us. I have a life—I’m not sure what I would have had there.”

  “If you go.” She lay back down with a deep sigh. “It’s your daddy’s hometown, but you won’t be seeing him there. You’ll want to feel some—disappointment—over that, but don’t allow yourself to give in to it. He’d only make a mess of things. Believe me.”

  “You mean he’s still alive?”

  She blinked, shrugged. It was the last time they talked.

  So Josh knew next to nothing else about the place. What research he’d done in books and on the Internet told him nothing about the people, but a little of the local geology. As in much of the region, beneath a few feet of rich earth was a recurring sequence of beds including coal, sandstone, shale and clay, and marine limestone. In many spots the limestone directly underlay the coal. The deep-shaft coal mine, Clyburn, just on the other side of the ridge, had given out early when the difficult landscape had made it too expensive to mine further. The remains of a couple of the old coke ovens were apparently still there, the tipple, the ruins of the company store with advertising still hanging on part of a free-standing wall. Some hiker had posted photos on the Internet.

  Then there was some information about the uniqueness of “the twist” itself. A diagram showed how several lines of strata had been pushed up and turned into something resembling the warped corner of a tissue, the folds turning and growing tighter as they entered the twist. Reference was made to the huge volcanic forces required to create such a phenomenon, and its inherent instability. Mountain streams had percolated through the porous limestone layer, creating a random series of caverns and tunnels. Even though the whole thing was encased in millennia of dirt and rock debris, the nature of the twist was still evident in aerial photographs.

  In the midst of all that lay Rayburn Twist where Josh was born and his father had lived, and perhaps still did.

  As Josh got farther up the old mountain road he found fragments of old houses deserted and torn down, pieces of wall left standing or blown apart by growing trees.

  So far he’d seen no attempts to preserve anything. Halfway up the mountain he stopped to rest at an abandoned house by what had become no more than a path with occasional asphalt flagstones. He sat in the doorless doorway for benefit of the shade, but not trusting the roof enough to venture in farther. He ate an orange and a protein bar, washing it down with a bottle of water. He liked oranges and wondered if he’d be able to buy any in the Twist. Probably no bottled water, but he’d keep the empty bottle and borrow someone’s tap, and pray that he didn’t poison himself. More protein bars were unlikely—he’d try to stretch the supply he had.

  Before he left he did a quick check inside. One large room and a small bathroom—that was it. He watched his step. He could see the bare dirt cellar through gaping holes in the floor, and he kept looking up to make sure insects, snakes, or roof beams weren’t about to fall on him. The little house had been stripped—no cabinets or fixtures, no doors, no pipes, and all the copper wiring yanked out. There was a small rusted child’s wagon twisted up in the middle of the floor. It looked as if it had been run over a few dozen times.

  At first the long dark streaks looked like tire marks, as if a motorcycle had driven around the walls as in a circus act. But by the time he’d left he’d decided they were some combination of scraping and rubbing, almost as if something large had been trapped here, or a group of such things, and had struggled to get out again.

  Now and again the creek wandered back into view. Dark came early to these shadowed ridges, and he had no desire to travel the path at night. But there was something so compelling about the proximity of the stream that he just couldn’t keep himself away, and he wandered off the path again.

  The stream here ran narrow, constricted by the large rocks on either side, but it ran deep. Moss and plants and layers of dead specimens of each caked the banks. Beneath all that was leaf mold several inches thick. He looked down into the clear waters. But not completely clear. Here and there a trail of fog, or light smoke, marbled the stream. Still, he could see most of the bottom, and the scuttling creatures there, so like rough bark or broken rock suddenly given legs. He went down on his knees and then to his side to get a better view. The crawdads ignored him, going about their business.

  The water smelled vaguely of metal, or maybe some chemical. But deeper than that—and it surprised him that he could actually perceive layers of smell—was something old and long dead, bathed in the
waters. So much for trusting the water supply. But Josh didn’t think it was dangerous. Just different, perhaps, from what he was used to.

  His eyes kept straying back to the crawdads. They were certainly ugly brutes, festooned with an unsortable battery of legs, and pincers, and miscellaneous appendages whose purposes he could not begin to fathom. He used to draw them when he was a kid, using crayon and pencil stubs or whatever he could get his chubby little hands on. It disturbed his mom, who didn’t understand how he could have remembered them so clearly, and who thought they were horrendous looking (which is what he liked most about them—they were bold, they had presence, they were scary).

  But what seemed to disturb his mother most was how he drew the crawdads. Instead of segmented legs and pincers he gave them a forearm, biceps, elbow, and shoulder. Human arms, big, inflated arms for the pincers, little ones for the antennae. He’d bend the arms in ways human arms weren’t normally bent. Sometimes he would add little tattoos to the arms: an anchor, a boat with sails. He would paint the crawdads different colors: forest green, pale yellow, blood red. And when his researches taught him all about swimmerets, those small appendages along the edges of the thorax, he drew those like long, wiggling fingers.

  Crawdads liked it dark, cool, and isolated during the day. Josh had understood that very well. Sometimes he’d lie under his bed all afternoon and wouldn’t come out even when his mother called him. Sometimes he would sneak out of his room during the middle of the night and steal a piece of cake out of the fridge or a banana off the counter. Sometimes he’d even take something that tasted bad, like a piece of raw fish or a spoiled dish of vegetables he discovered at the back of the fridge, because crawdads couldn’t always be picky—they ate what they found. He’d tear the food into tiny little pieces with his fingers and stuff it into his mouth.