Paula Guran - The Mammoth Book of Cthulhu

The roads all looked the same again, along with the dried-up little towns they led to. They’d all looked the same again for the last couple of years, the way they had at the beginning.

Funny thing — there was a stretch in the middle when they hadn’t. Two or three years when Clarence and Young Will’s eyes had grown keen enough to pick up on the subtle differences that, say, set Slokum apart from Brownsville. Here, the peculiarities of a water tower, with the look of an alien tripod; there, the way a string of six low hills undulated across the horizon like the humps of a primordial serpent.

But now they’d let the distinctions slip away. From place to place, it wasn’t that different after all. They’d seen it all before and forgotten where. Everything was the same again.

This was how things hid in open daylight, beneath the vast skies, out here in the plains of western Kansas. There was no need for mountain hollows or fern-thick forests or secret caves tucked into seaside coves. The things that wanted to stay hidden would camouflage themselves as one more piece of the monotony and endless repetition.

The worst thing Clarence could think of was that he and his brother were now a part of it too. That the land was digesting them so slowly they didn’t even realize it.

Five days into this trip, the latest of many, all the Brothers Pine had to show for it was another gallon of gas traded for another dusty roadside hamlet that, until this moment, was just a name along a blue line on the most detailed map they’d been able to buy. Gilead, this time. Sometimes there wasn’t even enough town to land on the map.

Another stop, another chance for the truth. More or less, it always went this way:

They started with a feed-and-seed store a block away from a grain elevator. From the moment they stepped in, they drew looks from the old man on one side of the counter and the farmer on the other. No hostility, just curiosity, and why not — both men probably knew every face within ten or twenty miles. But the pair of brothers was a disruption, their arrival like the stroke of a bell that made the farmer aware of time again, and all he had left to do in the day. He made his goodbye and his exit, out to an old workhorse of a pickup truck with a bed full of fifty-pound bags.

“Help you?” Already the old seed man sounded puzzled. They often sounded puzzled.

Small talk first. Sure is hot today. Sure is. Looks like you could use some rain. Sure could. Could always use more rain.

It was better when they were old. The elders were the ones with the longest memories, and a need to hang onto the stories of the things that had happened around them, especially the things that shouldn’t have. They remembered events that younger people — Clarence and Young Will’s peers, especially — never knew, or never had time for.

Even Will Senior had known that, way back when.

“This may seem like a funny question,” Young Will said. He was the one feeling talkative today. Just as well. He had the friendlier face, oval and open and guileless, and the taller stature that commanded attention. He looked as if he should still be in college, shooting hoops and resolute about never breaking the rules. “But have you ever heard anything about a man named Willard Chambers? This would go back quite a few years.”

Then he produced the picture, the first one, black and white in a thousand grainy shades of gray. It had a vintage look, a vintage feel, showing a square-faced, wavy haired man who cracked a grin both impish and wise as he gestured with a cigarette pinched between his thumb and forefinger. Did men in the prime of their lives even look like this anymore? Clarence had never seen one.

The old man dipped into memory’s well and came up empty. “Can’t say any of it rings a bell. Should it? What did he do?”

“He disappeared.”

“Sorry to hear that.” The old man’s sympathy was genuine and matter-of-fact. You didn’t get to be this old without a long acquaintance with loss. “When?”

“A little over fifty years ago.”

“Mercy. That is a spell.” From behind black-framed glasses sturdy enough to take a punch, the old man peered at the photo again, maybe looking for something familiar. “Did he come from around here? Have kin around here?”

“No sir, he didn’t.”

He took one more look at the photo, then gave them a fresh appraisal, seeing the connection in Clarence, maybe. He had inherited the square features, if not the freewheeling demeanor. He had the knitted eyebrows of a born worrier.

“Are you kin to him?”

“He was our grandfather,” Clarence said.

The old man seemed to understand their need without having to know anything more. “A thing like that never does scab over, does it?”

Next came the second photo, along with a grainy enlargement of just its subject. “I know there’s not much to go on with these, but is there anything here that looks familiar? The place, or who this might’ve been?”

This time the old man took the photos for himself. People did that a lot. They seemed unable to leave them on a counter. They had to pick them up, had to stare as if to prove to themselves they were real. Not that there was anything, on first inspection, that appeared false, or even out of the ordinary. Perception demanded time. People noticed the wrongness of it in subtle ways they couldn’t identify, as if something fifty years behind this moment had left hidden hooks in the image, to hold their attention until they truly saw , and then forced their hand to thrust the photos back.

“No,” the old man said. “But wherever this is, I think if I’d come across it once, I would’ve known to make sure I never went back.”

Will nodded and slipped the photos into their folder again, the way he’d been conceding defeat for years.

“Did she have something to do with him disappearing?” the man asked. “That is a woman there, isn’t it?”

No matter how many times they’d heard the question, there was still no easy answer.

“As far as we know,” Will said, and left it at that.

Clarence stepped forward. “One last thing. Could we trouble you to listen to a recording? If you’ve ever heard anything like this, or about something like it?”

The old fellow was game, and slipped on the compact pair of foam-padded earphones Clarence gave him. They were downstream of an old Walkman cassette player, a clunky and outmoded thing to be toting around these days. But Will Senior had lived as an analog man in an analog world, and had made the original recording onto tape. For no reason Clarence could prove, it would’ve seemed wrong to digitize it for convenience; reducing it to a file would erase some ineffable quality in it that might be preserved by dubbing it to a newer tape.

He pressed PLAY.

The seed man listened privately in the baked stillness of the day, nothing but the chirring of insects outside and the chirping of birds that would eat them if they could. As went the photos, so went the tape, a slow-burn reaction that creased the old man’s face with gradual repulsion. The recording went for a little over three minutes, but he had the earphones stripped away in two.

Clarence pressed STOP.

“Is that supposed to be a song?” the old man asked.

“I guess so. We don’t know what else to call it.”

“Call it quits, why don’t you? Sounds like that aren’t supposed to come out of folks’ throats. No sir.” The old man reached up to rub the back of his neck, bristly with gray stubble and as creased as a tortoise’s skin. “The closest thing I ever heard to it . . . I come from a long line of Swedes. The women used to have a cattle call song they brung over. You don’t hear it anymore. It was an eerie-sounding thing, if you heard it at some distance. But you could still tell it was a woman’s voice. But what you’ve got there . . .” He shook his head, then regarded them with an uneasy fusion of suspicion and worry. “You seem like nice boys. Why would you want to go looking for anything to do with that?”