Paula Guran - The Mammoth Book of Cthulhu

Willard never had a comeback to that one. He never even tried.

As they drove, the sun sank low, lower, the plains and the gentle hills thickening with shadows that reached for their car from the west. Everywhere you looked, it was nothing but wheat and the road that ran through it like a path through a forest. He pointed to the last remnants of some lost homestead, an ancient barn whose bones had bent, the entire structure weathered to a silvery gray, sagging in on itself and leaning like a cripple as if to wait for the good strong breeze that would finally end its struggle.

“I keep thinking I’d like to come back here with a truck one day and tear one of these down,” he said. “For the wood.”

Back in his real life, he and his wife owned a frame shop. One of these wrecks could give birth to a lot of frames. It appealed, that whole life cycle thing about new life springing from decay.

“Rustic never goes out of style,” he said.

Will looked up from the map, reoriented to where they were and what he was talking about, and shook his head. “I think they should stay standing.”

“They’re barely standing as it is. That’s kind of the point.”

His brother went dreamy, pensive. “They’re like monuments to some other time. You just want to knock them down and rip them apart? For what, somebody’s wall?”

“Is there any reason wood rot and fungus should get first dibs?”

“You recognize the irony, I hope. You tear down a perfectly picturesque real barn to saw it apart and nail it around a picture of one. That’s always seemed like a special kind of hubris to me.”

“Also known as recycling,” Clarence said. “I thought you were big on that.”

Will grumbled and went back to the map, and Clarence took the exchange as one for his win column. His brother’s problem? It was as if the weight of his name had infected him with nostalgia for an era he’d never experienced and could never have tolerated. He didn’t have the stomach for it. Farms, at a glance, may have looked as if they were bursting with life, but ultimately they all led to something’s death.

And whatever rotted out here would rot alone.

It was the same the next day, and the day after that, and it was easy to imagine that Kansas was Purgatory in disguise. They’d actually died in a car crash in Missouri, and their sins would keep them on an endless road for decades of penance, except Will was going to move on a lot sooner than Clarence would.

Shortly after dusk, they returned for their final night in the latest motel they’d been using as home base. The strategy had emerged during their first trip. Rather than checking into a new place to sleep each night, they opted to settle for a few days at some central crossroads, from which they could branch out in any of several directions.

Sometimes you had to cling to whatever illusion of stability you could.

As Clarence showered off the August road sweat, Will got on the phone with their mother to tell her of the day’s journey — the places they’d stopped, the people they’d spoken to — and what tomorrow would bring. What made him the perfect son made him a perfectly terrible brother. It wasn’t just from out here that he called home every day. He called home 365 days a year. There was no keeping up with that. You’d think he would run out of new things to say, but he always found more.

He’s the daughter they always hoped I’d be, Dina had whispered in Clarence’s ear last Christmas, after just enough wine, and neither of them could stop snickering.

“Say hi to Mom,” Will ordered, and pushed the phone at him while he was still toweling off from the shower.

Clarence took it and dug to find a few topics that Will wouldn’t have covered already, and it was okay, it really was. He reminded himself there would come a day when he wouldn’t have this chance and would regret every awkward moment he’d been less than enthusiastic about taking the phone. Myelofibrosis, it was called; a bone-marrow defect. There was no coming back from it. She had two years left, if she was lucky, just long enough to trick himself into thinking it wasn’t really going to happen, that grieving was still decades in the future.

Then they swapped places, and while Will took his turn in the shower, Clarence cracked open his laptop to see if their latest ads had drawn any responses. Craigslist, local classifieds, weekly shoppers . . . for years they’d been sprinkling such outlets with some variation of the following:

Family seeking information on the disappearance of amateur musicologist Willard Chambers, of Charleston, West Virginia. Vanished somewhere in western Kansas in July 1963. He is believed to have gone missing while trying to locate an old woman who was at that time living alone in a remote area, and reputed to have a unique style of singing regarded as “unearthly.”

They would accompany it with his picture when they could. Sometimes they’d run the other one, too, the last photo of Will Senior’s life, but it was always too small and indistinct to reveal the details that, with a hardcopy print, made people stop and stare with a rising pall of dread. But at least it showed the oddities of the setting surrounding that strange, stark figure, and maybe that was all someone would need.

Responses? Mostly a lot of nothing. The little that did come in, he could weed through it quickly and flush it with impunity. They could always count on well-meaning people who wanted to help but didn’t know anything, and trolls eager to waste everyone’s time.

But then there was today. There was always the chance of something like today.

I’m not near old enough to have met your grandfather, so I can’t help you there. But when I was little, I’d go visit my Nana Ingrid and she used to scare me into obeying her with talk of an old lady she knew about when she was young. Everybody used to keep away and just let her be. The old lady, I mean. This would’ve been around a place called Biggsby. I don’t know if it’s even on the maps anymore, or if it ever was. The nearest place of any size at all is Ulysses, and that’s not much. I should know, that’s where I am.

What made me think of this is the singing part. Gran said they’d hear her singing sometimes, nights mostly. She used to know this type of song called a cattle call and said it was kinda like that, only she couldn’t imagine it bringing the cows in. She said a voice like that would be more like to scare them away.

There’s more, but I don’t know what’s important to you and what’s not, and I’m not much for long emails even to people I know. But I love to talk!

He dashed off a reply, then looked up Ulysses on the map and poked his head into the steam of the bathroom to tell Will that, come morning, they would be going south instead.

They met her at a barbecue place in Ulysses, her suggestion. It smelled of hickory smoke and fryer oil, and they got there first by twenty minutes because she was fifteen late. Clarence knew she was the one the moment she walked in. She wore boots with shorts, carried a handbag big enough to brain a horse, and moved with precisely the kind of energy he’d expect out of someone who says “But I love to talk!”

She sized them up instantly, too. “Hi, I’m Paulette,” she said. “Paulette, Johnetta, and Raylene . . . can you tell our dad had his heart set on boys instead of girls?” She slammed the handbag into one of the two vacant chairs at their table and herself in the other. “You’re buying, right?”

She shot up then and went for the counter to order for all of them, insisting she knew what was best, and best avoided. Paulette was both stocky and shapely, like a six-foot woman squashed down to a compact five-four, and Clarence eyed his brother as he watched her go. Not again.