The Piper's Graveyard: A Small-Town Cult Horror Thriller Suspense

by Ben Farthing

  A steel machine blocked her path. A crooked saw blade pierced the center of an elongated tabletop. A hose dipped in and out of the tabletop like a snake frozen in ice. The machine looked five hundred pounds. How had Gordon hauled it up here?

  Behind her, Gordon shouted something, but the Maple Table drowned him out with their distorted cheery voices. The fog dulled all sound.

  Cessy squeezed past the stretched out table saw.

  Ahead, slabs of lumber were stacked next to the cardboard boxes. Cessy shined her light on them. A sliver of black coal ran the length of the top slab, disappearing past the reach of her flashlight. She walked further, searching for the other end of the slab. Ten seconds of walking. Twenty seconds, passing twisted hand tools strewn over the plywood floor, and still the slabs continued. Forty, fifty feet, and no end in sight.

  Gordon’s mill wasn’t that long. His attic shouldn’t be this long.

  Cessy pointed the flashlight beam deeper.

  Ahead, more of the same. Her light barely piercing the coal dust. The next lightbulb hanging from the center beam nothing but a faint glow. To either side, the detritus of an attic mixed with the stretched contents of a wood shop.

  If she kept walking, and the attic didn’t stop, what happened when she turned around? Would she find the door back down, or would the attic stretch on forever in both directions?

  “Gordon?” Cessy called.

  He answered.

  Cessy hurried towards his voice. She passed four lights, five, six. Slipped back past the twisted tablesaw.

  “Where are you?” She heard the burgeoning panic in her voice.

  “Right here.” He was farther than made any sense, like he’d gone to the opposite end of the attic.

  Cessy quickened her pace. Her shoes slapped on the plywood. The shotgun grew heavier.

  To her right, the attic opened up, branched out into a window nook.

  No possible way she’d missed that before.

  Cessy stepped over cardboard boxes and a misshapen drillpress to reach the window.

  It revealed the backyard: an uphill lawn ending in a stark wall of trees. A rutted mud path for four-wheelers into the tangled mess of low branches.

  The window glass was four-inch-tall panes that rotated perpendicular to the wall when a crank was turned. The crank was missing.

  Cessy felt a desperate need to get outside into the morning sunlight.

  She turned around.

  The coal fog formed a wall in front of her. She’d been so focused on the color of the tree-covered mountainside through the window that she hadn’t noticed she’d stepped out of the dust.

  Now, she inspected this fog from the outside. It wasn’t a stark wall, where the dust began, but the air went from empty to thick within a foot. It was thinner at the ceiling and floor, as if the thickest coal dust bored a tunnel through the center of the attic.

  Round, flowing, like what she’d seen in the corner of the basement when the hole had slid over her eye.

  Normally, Cessy dealt with fear by setting it aside and plowing forward. A flash of realization that if she let it simmer another moment, this time fear would be paralyzing.

  Cessy ran back into the coal fog.

  She followed the chain of lights. The attic flashed light to dark as she passed another three, four, five.

  The Maple Table’s voices snapped back to intelligible. “The compassion you feel for welfare queens isn’t the same compassion you feel for your own family.”

  Finally, after the eighth lightbulb she’d passed since stopping at the window, the bright white rectangle of the attic door appeared in the floor ahead.

  Gordon stood halfway down the ladder, only his head still in the attic. He twisted sideways, a crooked posture to avoid back spasms. “Where the hell’d you go? I can’t find the cables. Your sister must have took them. Stupid girl.”

  “Down,” ordered Cessy. The coal dust flowed past her. She was in a tube, a pipe, a snake’s gut, a worm.

  Gordon hobbled down the ladder.

  Cessy rushed down, slipping twice but catching herself before anything catastrophic.

  She folded the ladder and shoved the door closed. Springs creaked and popped. Dust sprinkled down.

  Cessy stuck her head in the shower. Black slurry filled the drain. She gargled and spit out gritty water.

  Gordon stood in the bathroom doorway. “Did you see something up there?”

  Cessy shook her head. “Tell me about these cables. What are they, why would Kate want them?”

  “Well, I-”

  “Not in here. Outside.” She needed sunlight. Air that wasn’t tainted by dust, or moving with purpose.

  35

  The morning sunlight cast a shrinking shadow over the grassy clearing around Gordon’s house. It warmed Cessy’s damp clothes.

  Cessy sat on the grass, uphill from the sawmill and kilns. She was enjoying the sun-warmed grass beneath her hands, and the soft noises of the wind and distant birdsong, grateful that the disconcerting discussions of the Maple Table hadn’t followed them outside.

  In front of her, the two kilns were closed tight. They looked like steel shipping containers, with motors humming on top.

  Gordon lay on his back, avoiding his back pain.

  Cessy had already circled the house. The attic windows mirrored the blue sky.

  Gordon tried to sit up, groaned, laid back down.

  The cloudless morning brightened the town below. Now that Cessy knew to look for them, she could spot several of the houses destroyed by sinkholes.

  Cessy scratched at her side. Kate was somewhere in this valley. She couldn’t sit and stew over the impossible attic she’d just escaped. “Tell me why Kate would have broke into your house.”

  Gordon propped himself up on his elbows. He exhaled, rattling his beard and bouncing his belly. “I’ll give you ten thousand dollars to drive me out of this town right now. However you got in, drive me right that way out.”

  “Why would Kate steal some old cable?”

  “At least tell me the way out. I’ll drive myself. How much will it take? Twenty-thousand?”

  She didn’t know if Gordon would be a risk to Valerie, so she couldn’t risk sending him past her.

  “The sooner we find Kate, the sooner I’ll help you leave.”

  “Let’s go to the diner. I could use some breakfast.”

  “No.” But Cessy’s stomach grumbled, too.

  “I’m trying to protect you. The more you know, the less likely they’ll let you leave.”

  Cessy found herself talking to the millionaire like a kid she’d picked up for shoplifting. “You got something stuck in your ears? I’ve told you: I’m not trying to leave.”

  “I don’t know what I can do for my friend’s baby daughter. But I can at least try to convince his firstborn that she needs to leave.”

  “Don’t be a coward.”

  Gordon faced her, sneered, then winced and fell back flat to the ground.

  “No shame in being afraid of what’s going on here. But you’re begging me to help you abandon this mess you helped cause. Whatever deal you’ve made with Lockler and the Maple Table, now you want out. And you know what? That’s fine with me. That’s exactly what I’m offering you, but not before you help me.”

  “What use am I? I can barely walk.”

  “Start talking,” Cessy repeated. “Why was Kate looking for cables? Where do you think she went next?” Assuming she’d ever found her way out of the impossible attic.

  Gordon sighed. “She was looking for cables, but she didn’t know for sure that’s what I had.”

  “The next words out of your mouth better make sense.”

  Gordon shook his head. “I told you Sheriff Miller, your folks, and the Watkins--they cut me off. At least, they wouldn’t talk to me about Lockler and the Maple Table no more. Even though those nut jobs killed my boy.” Anger mixed in with the terror in his voice.

  “Once I found the collapsed house, and saw the bl
ood, my own blood boiled. I told you your daddy stopped me from killing myself. I don’t mean he sat with me while I cried; I mean he held me at gunpoint so I wouldn’t go after Lockler.”

  “You know where they are?”

  Gordon continued on, staring at the empty sky. “What he really did, was stop me from going after them a second time. I tried once right away. I didn’t know where to look. All I knew was that my house had more dark happenings, so maybe they were broadcasting from close to my house.”

  “Did you find them?”

  He shook his head. “I hiked up Goat’s Jaunt first. Nothing but a mountain. Then I crossed the ridge towards Black Gold Peak. Lockler screamed at me the whole way. Like he was sitting in the trees, except his voice was still full of static, and I never did spot him.”

  Cessy thought of her own hike up to Maul Rock, with the cult radio host preaching anger from the forest.

  “I found something, though. Right at the low point in the ridge between the two mountains. A junction box for ethernet cables, right at the bottom of a buckthorn tree. You know those things are invasive?”

  “Where did the cables go?”

  “I dug around it, with just my hands. Thats where I got this.” Gordon held up his hand to display a split fingernail. “I found two wires. One headed up Black Gold Peak. The other down into Hamlin.”

  Cessy looked down at the town. “Did they install speakers? Why is there wire?”

  Gordon shrugged. “Whatever black magic Lockler uses, he don’t need speakers for us to hear him. Maybe the wire’s just part of magic spell. Maybe it’s a byproduct, like he does a spell that makes us hear him like a radio broadcast, and a side effect is that wires get spit out.”

  Cessy had now seen impossible things, but that didn’t mean everything had a supernatural explanation. “How are you sure it’s not just a hardwired broadcast station?”

  Cessy looked up at Black Gold Peak. It had to be the same wire she’d tripped over. Did it go all the way up to the peak? Was Valerie tapping into it? Was Valerie involved? Or did the cable have a lower destination? Inside the mountain, perhaps.

  “I yanked it free, and Lockler didn’t stop yelling. He got louder. He told me that I would have been grandpa, but I didn’t raise my boy right and even baby rats was still vermin. Then something jumped out at me.” Gordon squeezed his eyes shut and shuddered. “I don’t know what it was. Big mouth. Bigger inside. Some kinda black magic monster, I guess.”

  “How’d you get away?”

  “I don’t remember. One second, there was flat teeth closing down on me from all around, I was thinking about how terrible I was for condemning my own son, and the next I was running and falling down the hill. I still had that bunch of wire tight in my fist. I meant to toss it in the river, but I got scared that might insult Lockler, so I tossed it in my attic, and didn’t think about it since.”

  “You told Kate you had that wire?”

  “No. By the time she came around, I was done. Every time I close my eyes, I see those teeth, and the space behind them. I want out of here. This isn’t a Hatfield and McCoy situation where I can shoot the man who killed my boy. I’ve been hunkering down, or staying close to folks who I know are still in Lockler’s good graces. I didn’t tell Kate nothing.”

  “But you think she’s the one who went into your attic and stole the cable?”

  “You said someone told you Kate came up a few days ago. Who was that?”

  “Nobody who wants their name known. That’s the only reason? You didn’t tell anybody else you had that cable?”

  “I called John Watkins the night I took the cable. I didn’t tell him specifics--I was still panicking and barely could get two words together. I told him I took something from the mountain and shut it up in my attic. When he asked me about it the next day, I kept my mouth shut. One night of seeing the those teeth was enough.”

  “You sent Kate to John Watkins.”

  “That’s right, I did.”

  “John could have told Kate that you had something of Lockler’s. She would have thought it was a clue to finding him and the Maple Table.”

  “John wouldn’t have said nothing.”

  “You said he was one of the ones who needed the Maple Table to convince him.”

  “Still.” Gordon looked doubtful.

  “And that cable was gone. Kate took it.”

  “Could be.”

  “Where to?”

  “If she was smart, she went right over the mountain and out of town.”

  “If she wasn’t?”

  “Then she’d probably try to find where I ripped it from, and follow it that way. But I was in the middle of the woods. She’d have never found it.”

  Unless the buried cable had passed under a hiking trail, and been torn above ground by a falling tree’s roots.

  Cessy pieced together what had likely happened. In Kate’s investigation, or maybe as a break from them, she’d hiked the trails and come across the cable. A curiosity.

  Then she heard from John Watkins that Gordon Wilder had stolen something from Lockler and the Maple Table, and was storing it in his attic. Kate broke in, found the wires, and remembered the buried wire up the side of Black Gold Peak. She returned to follow the wire, and then...

  Cessy didn’t know.

  But it was the best lead since she’d thought Jackson was dead.

  “I know where to look next,” she said.

  “I told you everything I know. You have to get me out of here.”

  “As soon as I find Kate.”

  They would have gone through the same argument again, but they were interrupted by a thump from inside Gordon’s kiln.

  36

  Cessy and Gordon sat in the morning sunlight, staring at the two kilns.

  The thump had come from the kiln to the left, the one that had been closed yesterday.

  “What’s in there?” Cessy asked.

  “Black walnut slabs.” Gordon climbed to his feet. He winced at the pain in his back. “One of them must have fallen.”

  Cessy gripped the shotgun. “Let’s take a look.”

  Gordon shook his head. “The wood will check. Crack, I mean. Can’t adjust the temperature that quickly.”

  Inside the kiln, something strained and creaked.

  “You got someone locked in there?”

  Gordon scoffed. “That’d be like death by toaster oven. I ain’t the sort of man who could do that.”

  “You prefer death by sinkhole.” Cessy stood up and aimed the shotgun and Gordon’s chest. “Open it.”

  “Sure, whatever you say. It’s two-thousand dollars’ worth of lumber, but if fifty-thousand isn’t enough for you drive me out of here, I don’t guess you care about a few boards.”

  He hobbled over to the kiln. Cessy followed.

  A bar and latch held the door shut. Atop the container, the motor chugged along.

  Gordon unlatched the door. “This is some beautiful lumber you’re destroying.”

  “You’ll get over it.” Cessy circled around behind him to get a view over his shoulder.

  The hinges on the steel door let out a baritone squeal as the door swung open. Even six feet back, Cessy felt a wave of dry heat escape from the kiln.

  Gordon sucked in a breath, stepped back. “What in the gotdamn hell.”

  Cessy stepped wide to see past him.

  Morning sunlight poured into the green steel container. Slabs of dark brown wood were stacked down the center of the structure.

  Something pale was piled in the corner, like rubbery laundry.

  “What did you put in here?” Cessy switched on the flashlight.

  Gordon stepped back. “Nothing but this walnut.”

  It looked like a dead animal, folded over on itself a dozen times.

  For an irrational moment, Cessy thought it was Kate’s body. But the mass was too small for that.

  “Did something crawl in here and get all the moisture sucked out of it?”

  “Must have,�
�� said Gordon, “except that’s impossible. This thing’d be beeping up a storm if there was a hole big enough for something to crawl through.”

  “Go in and get it,” Cessy ordered. She didn’t trust Gordon enough to go in herself and risk him locking her in.

  He looked at the shotgun, then limped inside. He squeezed between the lumber and the edge of the kiln. As he blocked her flashlight’s path to the mass in the corner, shadow burst back to life. A million tiny bits of it swarmed together.

  Cessy blinked. Waved her flashlight. The shadows danced, following the expected laws of physics. “Come on back out.”

  Gordon leaned down. “I’m only in here so you don’t shoot me.”

  “And now I’m telling you to come back out.”

  He picked up the folded mass. “It’s wet. Nothing in here should be wet.” It flopped and stretched out like a heavy blanket, extending from his hand to the floor. “Stinks.”

  He stepped from the light of Cessy’s flashlight into the sunlight that reached inside the kiln.

  It was a pinkish cream color. It caught on the lumber and stretched until Gordon pulled it free.

  A splotch of orange.

  “Hold on,” said Cessy. “Let me see that spot.”

  Gordon adjusted his grip to hold up what she’d seen.

  An inked portrait of a book with an orange cover.

  A tattoo. Cessy had seen it recently.

  “Gotdamn,” realized Gordon. “This is somebody’s skin.” He dropped it on the stack of lumber.

  “Valerie,” Cessy whispered. In the shed atop Black Gold Peak, Valerie had leaned over to offer Cessy a water bottle, revealing a wrist tattoo of a book with an orange cover.

  Cessy’s gut went queasy.

  She dropped the flashlight, held the shotgun with two hands to aim it at Gordon. She pumped it once, ejecting a live shell to chamber a new one. A waste of ammunition, but sometimes the intimidation factor was worth it. “Hands where I can see them.”

  Gordon showed his palms. His head still tilted to the side, avoiding back pain. His beard drooped halfway between the angle of his chin and the ground at his feet. “You don’t think I did this?”

  Sometime in the last 36 hours, Gordon had killed and skinned Valerie. He must have seen Cessy drive down the mountain, and found Valerie when he went up to check on the path.