Paula Guran - The Mammoth Book of Cthulhu

“Already?” Clarence said. “Not three dozen words out of her and you’re already there?”

Will scowled as if he resented the interruption. Somewhere along the miles and years he’d picked up a fixation that he was going to meet the love of his life out here on the plains. Some Kansas farmgirl, all about family, whose commitment would be as certain and uncomplicated as the sunrise over the wheat. Did they even exist anymore, if they ever had?

“You don’t match. I’ve seen couples who match. They don’t look a thing like you and her.”

Will balled up a napkin in his fist. “Maybe I should handle this while you go back to the motel and take your anti-asshole pills.”

As they waited for their food, Paulette wanted to know all about them. If they were still from West Virginia, and what it was like there, and when she found out Will was now living in Boston, wanted to know what that was like, too. When she learned he was a cloud architect, she made a joke about castles in the sky, and Clarence could see him turn that much more into putty. She wanted to know what their parents were like, and when she learned they had a sister, wanted to know which of them Dina was more alike, and what came out of that was a surprise, because each of them had always assumed he was the one, a revelation that made Paulette laugh.

“I figure you’re safe,” she finally said, “because that ad of yours, that’s just not the kind of story someone would make up to draw somebody out on her own. So break ’em out, let’s see these pictures of yours.”

They laid out Will Senior’s portrait first.

“That version you had on Craigslist doesn’t do him justice,” she said. “Grandpa was kind of a hunk, wasn’t he?”

“And here’s the one we don’t know where it was taken,” Clarence said. “But it was the final shot on his camera. It was a twenty-four-shot roll of film, and the last eighteen were never even exposed.”

Paulette stared a long time, the way people always did. It slowed her down. She forgot her jittery habit of every few seconds pushing her sun-streaked hair back from her face, behind her ears.

“Well,” she said at last, “this looks about like what I would’ve imagined from those old stories Nana Ingrid would tell to scare me into minding her.”

Black and white in a thousand grainy shades of gray, the last photo on the roll of 35mm film in Willard’s Leica appeared to have been shot up a slight incline, a wide dirt path bordered by two ragged rows of stout sticks, as long as spears and nearly as straight. They’d either been branches or saplings, cut and stripped, then jammed into the earth like a loose palisade wall. In all their searching, the purpose of this remained a mystery. Beyond these sticks, and through them, in the middle distance, was a glimpse of what he assumed was a farmhouse, and a pair of trees in summer bloom.

But in the foreground, she stood. She stood on a ladder of shadows that the low sun of morning or evening threw from one row of sticks across to the other, something strange in her stance, as if she had to lean back from her own wide hips. She wore an apron around her middle, ill-fitting, refusing to lie smoothly, and a scarf around her head, knotted at her throat.

“Here’s the blow-up detail, just her,” Clarence said.

Now her true wrongness began to emerge. Her face was mostly shadowed, just enough visible to make you wish you could see either more, and know what she really was, or less, so you didn’t have to entertain doubts. The only features that caught the sidelight were a bulbous nose and a blocky chin that appeared to thrust forward from a lantern jaw. The rest was suggestion, and all the worse for it. Something about the way the features all fit together seemed . . . off. Like something carved from wood, and badly. The mouth looked grim and straight across, wider than wide. And given the scarf and direction of the sun, he could think of no reason her eyes should gleam with glints of light. Will Senior had been photographer enough to not bother using a flash outside like this, if he’d even possessed one.

Paulette was still shuffing from one print to the other. “Last shot on the roll, you said. What were the others?”

“Just landscapes. Nothing distinctive about them.

Paulette tapped the blow-up. “Well, Nana Ingrid used to say she wasn’t really a woman at all. Or maybe not anymore, or maybe she told it both ways. Just something that dressed like one. To hide. Stories like that, you believe them when you’re little. That’s why they work, you don’t want her to get you. Then you get a little older and you think it’s just talk.”

“What kind of stories?”

“Oh, you know, the usual threats. How if I didn’t behave, she was going to come steal me, cook me. Or throw me down her well. Which of course was bottomless. Or use my bones to make a nest for her vulture. Nana could be creative sometimes.”

“What did she call this woman?” Clarence asked. “She had to have a name.”

“Old Daisy. Never just plain Daisy. Usually Old Daisy. Sometimes Crazy Daisy, if she was going for a laugh.”

“Daisy? Seriously?”

“I know,” Paulette said, and tapped the detail photo again. “That’s the most undaisified woman I’ve ever seen.”

Will leaned toward her from across the table, and she mirrored him right back, as if the two of them were already excluding him. “How old was your grandmother when she first knew about Daisy?”

“She grew up around her. So, from the time she was a little bitty thing until she was close to my age.”

“What happened then?”

“She got hitched and moved a few miles away and squeezed out my mom.” Paulette swept the photos together and shoved them at Clarence. “Better put these up for safe keeping. We’re about to get nine kinds of messy here.”

He slipped them into their folder as the food arrived, beef ribs and pulled pork and slaw and onion rings made with jumbo Vidalias. A couple of bites in, he was willing to admit that, okay, Paulette knew her barbecue joints.

“How close did Ingrid live to her?” Will asked.

Paulette shrugged. “Down the road, is all she used to say.”

“How far does that mean?” Clarence said.

“I have no idea. You know country people. ‘Down the road a piece’ . . . that can mean just about anything.”

“But your grandmother saw her, right? These weren’t just stories to her, too?”

“Saw her all the time. Never up close, though. Nobody ever saw her up close. There’s some people, you know, they’re just not neighborly, so you let them be. Back then, I guess it was seen as more peculiar than it is now. Now it’s just a way of life all over. But even then, there had to be people like that, and I guess they didn’t push it. She did fine on her own, puttering around that old place.” Paulette grinned, recalling more. “That didn’t stop the area boys from trying to look. Nana Ingrid’s brother was one of them. They’d dare each other to sneak up close to Old Daisy’s property and try to get in a peek, and they’d get a good scare. Before they got too close, she’d spot them and screech at them and they’d scatter. In fact, that’s what some people thought that crazy singing she did was all about. To keep people away. Same as a rattlesnake shaking its tail.”

“A threat display.”

“And I guess it worked,” she said. “Have you got it? Can I hear it?”

She wiped her fingers with a Wet-Nap as they handed over the Walkman and the earphones. The tape was already cued up, and unlike many people, Paulette didn’t shut it down early. She hung in there until the end.

“I gotta say, that’s not what I was expecting,” she said while stripping away the headphones. “That doesn’t sound like a crazy person. It hardly sounds like a person at all.”