Paula Guran - The Mammoth Book of Cthulhu

He pondered the ground he stood on. From here. Maybe the old man had hunkered low and listened to what he should never have heard and sealed his fate from right here.

They moved on, toward the remains of the house, finally ready to touch it. It was a shelter no longer, the outside world having invaded long ago, through the glassless windows and crumbling walls and the entrances whose doors had fallen off their hinges. Where the roof had drooped inward, it was open to the sun and moon alike. Weeds grew in every crack, and generations of predators had denned in the corners to gnaw the bones of their prey.

Yet even in its disintegration, traces of the life once lived here lingered: a chipped mug, a blue enamel coffee percolator, a salvageable spindle-back chair and the table it accompanied. A row of large cans, rusted almost to lace, remained on a cupboard shelf. In an alcove that might have been a closet sat a battered washtub whose accumulated filth couldn’t quite hide the suggestion of ancient stains.

Gutbucket — the word came to him before he knew why, then he remembered it from his own digging into Willard’s obsessions, as a folk term for a cheap upright bass made from a washtub.

He kept coming back to that improbable row of cans.

“Did she ever die, that anyone knew of?” Clarence asked.

“You got me,” Paulette said. “If she did, Nana never heard about it.”

“Wouldn’t it have been news if she had?” He squatted in front of a block of iron, half hidden by weeds and tumbled rafters, and realized it was a wood-fired stove. “She kept to herself, okay, but one day, someone’s got to realize nobody’s seen her out for a year. Somebody’s going to check eventually. They wouldn’t let her rot in here forever.”

“Maybe she just walked away,” Will said.

“To go where? Where do you go from here?”

“You’d have to ask her,” Paulette said, quieter now. “Maybe that’s why Nana was always looking for her on the road.”

They made their way around back, where the land rolled away into fields of nothing. A minute’s walk in one direction led to a heap of fungus-eaten wood, the collapsed shell of an outhouse. It made his stomach roll to speculate what might turn up if they started scraping through the dried-out layers down in the trench. A minute’s walk in another led to her well, the bucket and rope long gone, but the mortared stone wall around it remained intact. It was too dark down the well’s gullet to see. He pried a rock from the grassy soil and lobbed it in, and seconds later heard a splat of thickest mud.

“How stupid are we, we didn’t even bring a flashlight?” he said.

But there would be nothing to see, would there? He doubted she would poison her own well with a corpse. This was someone, something, resourceful enough to make a Chevrolet vanish, so surely she had better options for her dead. And it occurred to him that while he still thought of her as female, at some point he had ceased thinking of her as a woman.

“Clarence. Get over here.”

He hadn’t realized that Will and Paulette had drifted back to the house, where they both stood peering at the foundation.

He must have listened to the full recording a thousand times throughout his life.

It begins with the sound of clunks and fumbling, and spread atop the creamy hiss of tape is an ambience of crickets and tree frogs. If fireflies could make a sound, he imagined it would’ve captured them too.

“There we go. Missed it. Shoot. Not used to doing this in the dark.” Willard’s voice is close and hushed, the voice of a man hugging the ground. “Welp . . . if she’s gonna do it again, she better do it while the batteries are still good.” His disappointment is palpable. “Now that I’ve heard it, I don’t know what to make of it. Nothing about it seems to point to any tradition I ever heard. That just might be my own gaps.” He falls silent, musing as the night fills in around him. “The feeling I get from it . . . it . . . it’s like some kind of lamentation. There’s sorrow in it. Sorrow and rage.” Then a miniscule break in the sound as Willard pauses the tape. When it resumes after an indeterminate recess, his whisper is taut with excitement. “Here she goes again.”

He lets Old Daisy have the next three minutes to herself. Only once does he interject, not meaning to, but unable to halt the shaky sound of a sharply drawn breath as her voice peaks to a terrible warbling crescendo that could strip the trees of their leaves and claw scars across the cold white face of the moon.

Until the night is still again, and even the crickets and frogs seem cowed.

“Jesus, Mary, and Joseph,” he whispers. “That poor woman. That poor soul. How does . . . is she deformed, is that how . . . ?”

He lets the tape roll awhile longer, with nothing more to add that the infinite night can’t say better, and with a greater sense of awe.

Along the house’s foundation Will had cleared some of the rampant weeds and dirt and build-up of wind-tossed leaves, and still it wanted to not be seen: a rough-hewn door into the earth.

“Storm cellar. Where we’re standing right now is smack dead center in the middle of Tornado Alley,” Paulette said. “You ever see The Wizard of Oz ? It’s not like that.”

They cleared away more, untangling the weeds from a heavy chain that held the entrance closed, lashed across the door in a sideways “V” whose point was threaded through a lock nearly the size of his fist, rusted but still sound. Even if they found a key, he doubted it would turn. The chain’s ends were anchored into the door’s hinge plates, and here was the weak spot. The wood along the edges had rotted enough that they were able to tug on the chain to rip up the hinge plates, bolts and all. They heaved the door open, opposite the way it was meant to swing, and the storm cellar exhaled a musty sigh of roots and earth, like the smell of a waiting grave.

“Watch those steps,” Will warned him. “They may not be any sturdier.”

But they held, a dozen of them sloping down to a floor of dry, hard-packed earth and walls so coarsely cut they looked like adobe.

With the door open, enough light spilled down inside for them to see. They barely had room to stand beneath the crude rafters, black with creosote, that kept the hovel above and the tons of soil between from falling through.

He wished it had all failed long ago. He wished they’d never found this place.

“Jesus, Mary, and Joseph,” his brother whispered. One trepidatious step at a time, Will moved to where it dwelled along one wall — did it sit? or did it stand? — and when he was close, began to reach.

“Maybe you ought not touch it,” Paulette said.

He stilled his hand. “Why not?”

“Because I wouldn’t.”

Again: “Why not?”

“Maybe I’ve just got more sense than that, I don’t know.”

Clarence was with her on this one. And Will withdrew his hand.

That it was some sort of sculpture was obvious, yet he couldn’t even tell what it was made of, much less what it was meant to represent. It was as tall as he was, with features and symmetry, but far more bulky. To look at it was to understand it had to have come from someplace, been worked by sentient hands, and realize he could never know enough about the world and its shadowed quarters to fathom who or where or why.

Was it metal? Stone? It appeared to be a mixture of both, marbled into each other under the temperatures of a blast furnace. Aspects of it glinted in the light that the rest seemed to swallow.

“A meteorite, maybe?” Will said. “That’s my guess.”

As sculpture, it was pitted and rough, but that it had been shaped at all seemed miraculous. It must have been incomprehensibly hard to work with. Its weight had to be immense. It was contradictory, various parts suggesting man and animal, mammal and mollusk, demon and dragon, a creature fit to dominate anywhere, be it ocean, land, or sky. It was a nightmare rising from a slag heap left over from the formation of the galaxy.