Paula Guran - The Mammoth Book of Cthulhu

“So nobody else is going to say it?” Will asked. “Okay: ‘I don’t think we’re in Kansas anymore.’”

But Kansas wasn’t any reference point here. For no reason he could defend, Clarence knew beyond a doubt that this grotesque effigy predated even the idea of Kansas. It predated the nation, maybe the continent, the mountains to the west and the great bisecting river to the east. For all he knew, it came from an epoch when the land was one mass, a single crucible of primal forces surrounded by one titanic sea, the globe like a turbulent eye staring back at the affront of creation.

Then how had it come to be here and now? Perhaps it was as simple as waiting out the eons, impervious to time, until it was unearthed in a field.

He sensed it all in the presence of this thing. The thoughts were in his head as if it had forced them. He couldn’t have been the first.

“We should leave,” he whispered.

“Guys? Check it out.”

Paulette was pointing at the rafters. With their eyes better accustomed to the shadows, they were ready to see what hid in plain sight when the statue was all they were prepared to notice. It was everywhere, on the rafters and the upright timbers bracing the earthen walls and beneath the dust on the steps, a single message repeated over years and decades: COME BACK. Etched into the wood with the points of knives and awls, a thousand utterances of the same plaintive incantation: COME BACK COME BACK COME BACK.

“That thing?” Will jabbed his finger at the statue. “Did she mean that thing? It was real, it was here?”

“I don’t think so.” Paulette cut an impatient glance at him as if she pitied him for his misunderstanding. “I bet she meant her people. Family, friends, neighbors. Her people. Her . . . world.”

Funny. He’d always considered her a loner, a freak who reveled in her isolation.

“Maybe Nana was right after all,” Paulette said. “Maybe it really wasn’t just Old Daisy out here once.”

Will stared at her. “She said there were more like her?”

Paulette nodded. “Nana said there used to be a whole passel of them. This would’ve been way back. Kept their heads down, hid their faces, wore sacks, some of them. Didn’t want to be seen, didn’t want to have anything to do with newer neighbors, didn’t want anyone else even coming close. People like that, they were like moonshiners used to be, and meth cooks now. You learned to steer clear if you didn’t want a load of buckshot coming your way.”

For the moment, Clarence quelled the urge to leave. “You didn’t say anything about this before.”

“Because it wasn’t something I grew up with, all right? Nana never said a thing about it when I was little and she was telling her stories to keep me in line. And she only said it the once. This was after they put her in the home.” Paulette sighed with exasperation. “It wasn’t a serious talk. We were laughing about it, how scared of Daisy she had me. I thought it was just some notion that got in her head after she started to get dotty enough to finally believe her own stories.”

“Maybe,” Clarence said, “she was dotty enough to finally let it slip.”

“If it was even true, they wouldn’t have been people she’d ever seen.

According to her, it was something she heard about from her own grandmother. So we’re talking waaay back. Civil War times, or not long after. There’s no way Old Daisy could’ve been around here since . . .”

She clammed up, not even wanting to say it. Maybe because she could no longer be certain of absolutes, and hated to lie.

Above him, behind him, and all around: COME BACK COME BACK COME BACK.

“Then what happened to the rest of them?”

“That’s probably a dirty old secret that died out with somebody a long time ago.” Paulette looked both solemn and sad. “What do you think? You come from West Virginia. If I’ve heard stories about what used to happen in your mountains there, then I know for sure you must have.”

There was that. Yes. People who trekked up into the hollows to nose around where they didn’t belong, and never came out again. Or one group taking such a dislike to another they decided they could no longer abide living side by side. The population had always been sparse out here, and he supposed there was a time when not a lot could come of rumor and a mass of unmarked graves.

Especially if the dead were . . . different.

And if there was a sole survivor, killers left them for all manner of reasons, by accident or as reminders or to soothe their consciences that what they’d done wasn’t actually genocide.

God damn. Will Senior had sensed it simply from listening once in the dark. It’s like some kind of lamentation. There’s sorrow in it. Sorrow and rage.

Young Will trudged across the cellar and slumped onto the steps, heedless of the dust, then shot a baleful look at the statue. “A lifespan like that? The way she looks in the photo? This thing did that to them?”

Clarence couldn’t bring himself to agree. Not out loud. Not to Will. Impressionable Young Will. “Do you hear yourself, what that sounds like?”

“Well, I’ve sure as shit spent my life hearing what she sounded like.” He turned his gaze on Clarence, no less spiteful. “That thing’s not natural, not one bit. There’s something coming through it. Don’t tell me you don’t feel it. I can see it in your face. You’re the worst liar I ever met.”

Clarence approached the stairs while Paulette watched as if she suddenly feared both of them blocking the only way out. Nobody could fight like brothers.

“Come on. Let’s go,” Clarence said, as gently as he could. “We’re not going to learn anything more here. We’ve already learned more than we ever wanted to.”

Will fixed him with a look that nailed his feet to the floor. “He’s not even dead. You realize that, don’t you? I’ll bet you anything he’s not. He could still be alive even without that thing’s influence. He’d be, what, around ninety? It’s no big deal to hit that anymore. All this time we’ve taken it for granted he would’ve come home if he could, but what if family didn’t mean as much to him as everyone assumed it did. We never even met him, you and I. But think about it. Doesn’t it sound like home just turned into a place for him to plan the next trip? And songcatching, maybe that was only the surface of what he was really out looking for.”

Clarence’s first impulse was to argue, until he realized he had nothing to wield. He’d bought it all on faith. He’d never considered this alternative. Not seriously. He’d swallowed the easier story to accept and let it dictate his life.

Maybe it was Willard Chambers all along who had made sure his car was never found, and that his Nagra and his camera were. If he didn’t need them anymore, maybe they’d prove more useful as circumstantial evidence of death.

“He loved Mom,” Clarence whispered. “He loved Grandma. He loved Aunt Jane and Uncle Terry. He did.”

“And then he found something that meant more.”

Will stood up, finally, as around them, the storm cellar grew thick with the weight of eons.

“I was named for a deserter. Mom hung that on me.” His face curled with the disgust of betrayal and a life of self-told lies. “He may have done his duty in war, but back home? He was a deserter.” Will nodded, confirming it to himself. “But there’s a side of me that can’t totally blame him for it.”

When he looked at the statue again, his anger was all but dissipated.

“It must’ve been worth it.”

He shouldered past, and when Clarence hooked a hand around his arm, Will whirled. Next thing Clarence knew, he was sprawling across the hard-packed earth with a dull, throbbing ache in his cheek, as somewhere out in the blur, Paulette gave a startled cry of warning that plunged into sorrow.