Her mother reached into her pocket for a lighter, re-ignited the candle in the jack-o-lantern. She stood and carefully set the pumpkin up on the broad porch railing beside their other jack-o-lantern and lit it, too.
At that, a car that Millie hadn’t even noticed that was parked on the street a few houses down turned on its lights, flashed them three times, and turned them off again.
“And there’s your ride.” Her mother knelt to reach for something under the porch swing. When she stood up, she was holding Millie’s old backpack—one she thought her mother had donated to Goodwill—and her violin case. “I packed essentials. Things Steve won’t notice being gone. And a little money. I’ll try to mail things from another town later.”
The gravity of the situation finally hit Millie full-force. She was going to leave, maybe forever, and she might never see her mother again. She started to tear up. “I have to go now?”
“Yes. I’m sorry.” Her mother set the luggage down and gave her a long hug. “Be good. A day won’t pass where I don’t think of you. I love you so much.”
Tears flowed down Millie’s cheeks in hot rivulets. “I love you, too.”
“Go.” Her mother helped her put on her backpack and gave her a gentle push.
Millie hurried across the lawns to the sedan. Someone inside flung the rear driver’s side door open.
A black girl in pigtails who looked a little younger than Millie beckoned her excitedly. “Get in!”
Millie handed her the violin case. The girl grabbed it and scooted over on the seat so Millie could get in and shut the door behind her.
“Oh, cool, I play violin, too!” The girl exclaimed. “We could do duets later! Can you fiddle? I’m taking fiddle lessons from Miz Greene next year when she gets back –”
“Lena.” The driver, a thirty-something woman with a short Afro haircut and hoop earrings, turned and gave the pigtailed girl a look. “What did I tell you?”
“Wash my hands?”
The woman rolled her eyes. “Context.”
Lena brightened. “Oh. Right. Introduce myself first?”
“Yes.”
The grinning girl turned back to Millie and stuck out her hand. “Hi, I’m Lena, and this is my mom Bess. Cousin Penny sent us to get you away from this terrible place. Cultists suck.”
Millie shook her offered hand, feeling a bit like she’d fallen down a rabbit hole and this cheerful child was standing in for the Mad Hatter. “Hi. Good to meet you.”
“Perfect!” Lena’s mother started the car and pulled away from the curb. “As she says, I’m Bess. I’m Penny’s investigative partner. She sends her regrets that she couldn’t come get you herself, but she’s got a distance vision problem that limits her driving. You’ll meet her probably day after tomorrow. It’s a really long drive to Fensmere, so I was thinking we could stop outside Harrisburg and get a hotel room. Your mom told Penny you love Halloween, and there are some good neighborhoods in the suburbs where I can take the two of you trick-or-treating. You up for that, Millie?”
Lena started excitedly whispering, “Say yes, say yes, say yes!”
“Sweet pea, don’t pester her,” Bess said. “She’s been through a whole lot tonight. She might rather sleep, and we’re not going to leave her by herself,”
“I’d like that,” Millie said. “But my pirate costume is all gross, and I lost my wig and my sword besides.”
“It’s okay! I brought a whole suitcase full of costumes, just in case!” Lena replied.
“But on that note,” Bess said, “once we’re out of cult territory, I’ll find a truck stop where you can get a shower and change into fresh clothes if you like. Folks gonna think we tried to drown you if I drive around with you like this.”
“I’d definitely like that,” Millie said.
“Consider it done,” said Bess.
Millie looked out the window just in time to see the “Welcome to Marsh Landing!” sign flash past and felt a wash of relief and sadness at the realization that she might never see it ever again.
Lena nudged her. “Hey. You know what today is? Besides it being Wednesday and Halloween, I mean.”
Millie shook her head.
“It’s the first day of the rest of your life!” Lena grinned excitedly.
Millie couldn’t help but smile back. “Yeah, it sure is.”
Hell Among the Yearlings
Chet Williamson
It wasn’t scary at all. Michael was playing it well enough, that wasn’t the problem. Michael Wilkins always played great. It was just that everyone had heard the tune too many times. “Jerusalem Ridge” was one of those rare minor-key tunes that were in most fiddlers’ repertoires. It was bouncy and moved along nicely, and made a nice variation, since the vast majority of fiddle tunes were written in upbeat major keys. But scary? No. Elmer would show them scary.
He glanced around to see the effect the tune was having on the crowd. Daisy Kreider, who was accompanying on her guitar, was smiling and watching Michael intently, the way she always did when she backed up another musician. That was one more thing he loved about Daisy, as though her looks and personality weren’t enough.
Michael played on, having left the melody for the improvisation at which he excelled. With the crowd’s attention fixed on Michael, Elmer used the moment to hold his own fiddle to his left ear and quietly check to see if the alternate tuning had held. It had, and he put the fiddle back on his lap on top of the dry, aged sheets of music he’d been studying, and listened to Michael finish his tune. Let him have his moment of glory. Elmer was going to cook him and serve him on cornbread. Elmer’s music was going to be scary as hell.
***
He found it in the attic, in a battered cardboard box full of music that his mother had gotten from an old violinist just before his death. He’d remembered the box when he was thinking about where he might find a new tune with eerie qualities for the contest. To his disappointment, the box was filled with formal violin exercises, classical sonatas, and dozens of Victorian era solos with piano accompaniment.
Still, he dug to the bottom, hoping to find a collection of folk tunes or Appalachian ballads, something previously unheard by the other kids and the judges. All the way at the bottom of the box, underneath a small pile of chipped and brittle Bach sonatas and partitas, was an even more time-ravaged piece of music. The paper, if paper it was, was cracked and yellow, torn in many places, and he saw immediately that the music was written by hand in black ink, as were the somewhat uneven staff lines. There was no title, nor was there a name of any composer, but what he found of immediate interest was that at the top left of the first of the two pages were four capital letters separated by vertical lines, reading “F|E|A|R.”
***
When Michael Wilkins played the final bars of “Jerusalem Ridge,” he put everything he had into it, ending with an improvised cadenza that made his bow a blur and caused the strings to howl. The audience, in turn, howled their approval, clapping and cheering as Michael took a small bow and nodded to Daisy in recognition. From the way she smiled back at him, he knew she’d been mightily impressed with his performance.
More so than Elmer Zook, that was for sure. That big old farm boy was clapping hard enough, but the smile on his face said to Michael, I’m gonna get you now, town boy.
There it was, wasn’t it? Farm Boy and Town Boy. When it came to bluegrass music, street cred didn’t matter. What mattered was cowshit cred. It mattered to Ken Groff anyway. A former tractor jockey himself, Ken always seemed to favor the hicks, the ones who had old-time music, not only in their blood, but also symbolized in brown on the bottoms of their boots. And as head of the Smoketown Bluegrass School, Ken had his favorites, of which Elmer Zook was number one.
Michael had to admit that Elmer was a helluva natural musician. The kid had chops. His sight reading was impeccable, and he could spend a min
ute reading a new tune on paper, and then play it from memory. On top of that, his technique was impressive and his ear was sharp, and he could recreate old Kenny Baker solos note for note.
His sole failing was creativity. Michael left him in the shade as an improviser, but Ken Groff wasn’t bothered by it. Ken’s instruments were banjo and guitar, so he was easy to impress when it came to fiddle.
Now Ken stood up, still applauding, and faced the small audience of about two dozen people – students, parents, and a few friends. “All right, let’s hear it for Michael and ‘Jerusalem Ridge!’ Really good! But the question is, was it scary? Remember, this is the night of the Halloween jam, and we’re lookin’ for the scariest fiddle tune ever heard! So far we’ve heard ‘The Devil Went Down To Georgia,’ ‘Little Sadie,’ and now ‘Jerusalem Ridge.’ Those raise a few goosebumps?”
Most in the audience chuckled, and there were a few shouted out yeahs and nos. Michael had put his fiddle back in its case, and now sat next to Daisy in the second row. “You playing for Elmer?” he whispered.
She shook her head. “He’s playing alone,” she whispered back.
Michael looked at her closely, trying to figure out whether she was pleased or displeased about not playing with Elmer. Their rivalry over Daisy was an established fact at the bluegrass school, though neither had yet gotten up enough nerve to ask her out. Ken alluded to it now and then, sometimes subtly, sometimes less so. One of his more blatant comments, offered when Michael and Elmer collided trying to open a door for Daisy, was that the two boys should do a duet on “Hell Among the Yearlings.” Both Ken and Frank Withers, the fiddle and mandolin teacher, laughed hard at that one.
When Michael looked up the title on Google, he found that, besides being the name of a Gillian Welch album, it was a fiddle tune he hadn’t been aware of, and that the title referred to young, rambunctious cattle. He wasn’t flattered.
“All right now!” Ken said. “Our next fiddler is our old buddy, Elmer Zook! What are you going to play for us, Elmer?”
“It doesn’t have a title,” Elmer said softly, as he stood up, tucked some sheets of music into his case, and closed it.
“Well, you gotta call it something,” said Ken.
“I, uh… I guess just ‘Halloween Tune,’ maybe?”
“Okay then, ‘Halloween Tune’ it is. Is it scary?”
***
It was awful. He had taken the music down to his room, closed the door behind him, and tried to play the handwritten notes, but they made no sense. He figured that a piece of music entitled “FEAR” would sound weird, but he didn’t think it would be altogether crazy, like this was. If a tune ever sounded like pure cacophony, this was it.
He sat down on his bed and looked closely at the brittle old sheets of music. There were no other notes, no name of any composer, just the four letters, separated by lines, at the top of the page:
F|E|A|R
Then it occurred to him that the lines themselves might have some significance. Instead of the letters indicating the title, maybe the lines meant the letters were something more than just letters in a name.
A tuning.
Guitarists used alternate tunings all the time, tuning their strings up or down to create an entirely different tonal sound. He’d never heard of anyone doing it on a fiddle, but that didn’t mean it wasn’t possible.
He picked up his fiddle and looked at the letters, “FEAR,” again. Then he tuned his G string down a full tone to F, his D string up a tone to E, and left his A string as it was. But what, he wondered, was the R? Notes on the scale went from A through G – there was no note R.
But as he looked closer at the handwritten R, he saw that the looped upper part was larger than the straight lines that made up the bottom half, and he realized that if he ignored those lines he had a letter D. So was the composer making a wise-ass joke of some kind? Giving the piece a title while slightly hiding the proper tuning?
He tuned the highest string, the E, down a full step to D, then picked up his bow and drew it over the four strings. The D-E-F, three notes side-by-side, made for a strange dissonance, but one that brought a twisted smile to his face. Then he stood up, put the music back on the stand, and played the first few notes, fingering on the altered strings exactly as he would have on the standard tuning.
It took only a few notes for him to know that this one was scary.
***
“Is it?” Ken asked again.
Elmer Zook gave a little shrug. “Yeah. I think so anyway.”
“Well, we’ll be the judge of that,” Ken said with a laugh as he went to sit down. “Take it away, Elmer!”
Elmer raised his fiddle to his chin, then flexed his bowing arm twice. He took a deep breath, and let the bow rest on the retuned strings. In his mind he saw the black, handwritten notes on the brittle old paper, and he began to play.
When the first notes tore into the fabric of the air, a change came over the attitudes of the listeners. The slouchers began to straighten up, and the heads of those already sitting straight began to lift like hounds on scent. Their gazes, initially fixed on Elmer, slowly rose until they were focused on something just above his head, something that wavered in the suddenly thick air of the room, shimmered in strands of red and gold and silver and black, and, as one phrase led to the next, the black began to predominate, subsuming the other, brighter colors, and finally taking even the deep, dark red into it, like blood turning black in starlight.
***
The boy continued to play in the privacy of his bedroom, in the solitude of the empty house. This will work, he thought. This will be perfect. Damn, but it was weird. It was beyond just minor key, though it had that quality to it. There were scoops and leaps and jagged staccato passages that were enormously challenging, yet he was somehow able to negotiate the demanding maze of notes. His sudden ability surprised him. He knew he was good, but he hadn’t realized he was this good.
But as the torrent of tones surged out of his violin, he saw on the page a flashing, shimmering light, and he thought, oh no, not again. He’d been troubled with ocular migraines since eighth grade, painless but bothersome neurological illusions in both eyes at once, visions of a jagged-edged oval, as though something in his brain had shattered a glass sheet spread across his vision and shards glimmered across the landscape of his sight. It was annoying, but always went away within a half hour.
However, he soon realized that this ocular migraine was different from the dozens he’d had before. The area around the torn edges, showing the real world he had always continued to see during even the worst of these events, was changing, was becoming filled with bizarre colors merging with a lack of color, and the jagged oval at the center of his vision was different too. Never before had anything begun to come through it.
***
Elmer played on, as if unable to stop. His eyes seemed to have rolled up so that the pupils were hidden behind his eyelids, showing only the whites, but his right arm continued to saw at the strings, and his left held the fiddle under his chin, while his fingers raced and spasmed on the black fingerboard.
Except for the shrieking fiddle, the only sounds heard in the room were soft moans, whimpers, and deep, ragged sighs. Nearly everyone was looking into the space in the air above Elmer’s head. Nearly everyone was seeing the same thing there, but each saw something different as well, something meaningful to him or her alone, something terrifying, something heartbreaking, something fearsome.
Midge Butler saw her father looming over her late at night.
Perry Crawford saw his mother on the bathroom floor, her head half gone, her pink .45 caliber handgun still clenched in her fist.
Eight-year-old Tim Keebler held his cat Pluff in his arms, panicked as to why she wasn’t moving, why her hind legs just hung there as if there were no bones in them.
Abe Peters shivered over an open grave deep in
his cornfield, a shovel in his hands, the body of his wife Esther at his feet, her neck twisted so that she was looking over her right shoulder, up at the stars.
And Esther Peters saw her best meat knife sliding in and out of her husband’s stomach, just below his breastbone, over and over, her hand with her late mother’s signet ring, the only piece of jewelry she owned, holding it with white knuckles. And she heard him grunt with every shove, and heard her own terrified breaths whistling in and out of her tight throat.
Everyone who heard saw something, events real, events imagined, things that still might be and things that never would. They saw these terrors in the space in the air over Elmer Zook’s head, that space to which the music rose and then spread out over them all like a dark blanket of sound. They sobbed and trembled and wailed at what they heard and what they saw, and the boy continued to play. It was not music. It was not a tune. It was a surge of sound that gave them all a glimpse of a world they had not imagined, a world where fear and terror ruled, where there was no light nor joy nor love, only loss and pain and savagery, and they could do nothing to make it stop.
Ken Groff tried. He was the closest to Elmer, and he pushed himself to his feet, where he wavered for a moment before a flood of repeated, falling triplets drove him to his knees, and he grabbed his head in his hands and wept. And Elmer played on.
***
The boy played on, all alone, in his bedroom. He wanted to stop, but he couldn’t. Even as more and more of those unformed, shapeless creatures undulated through the gap that had been torn in his vision, he knew he had to stop. He was beginning to have thoughts, bad ones, far worse than even the darkest fantasies he’d ever imagined in the blackness of midnight.
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