The Mammoth Book of Cthulhu

“As early as my boyhood and teenage years,” writes Brian Hodge, “before I’d even discovered H. P. Lovecraft, wide open spaces and rural ruins and desolate roads struck me as eerie locales, haunted by their pasts and potentially harboring newer menaces. Terrible things can unfold, slowly, where few human eyes are around to witness them, and landscapes have long memories.

“I come from farmers who plowed the earth, from miners who crawled inside it. I grew up a town kid, but when visiting grandparents, my playgrounds were fields and woodlands. My relationship to remote places has always been that of a heathen, allowing for the possibility of heathen gods.

“So, when I first read works such as ‘The Dunwich Horror’ and ‘The Colour Out of Space’ they had, despite their alien monstrosities, the kind of immediate familiarity that comes with seeing your worst suspicions confirmed.

“To me, ‘Lovecraftian’ is more than a stew of ingredients — start with these trappings, sprinkle in these settings, season with references to this deity or that grimoire — although you’ll find a few familiar flavors in ‘It’s All the Same Road In the End.’

“I also regard ‘Lovecraftian’ as a way of looking at the earth and the night skies that engulf it. It’s a sense of memory and process; a recognition of the vast antiquity of the soil underfoot and the waters that carve it. It’s a realization that the molecules in your body may have traveled billions of years to get here, and more may be on the way, in a myriad of forms, and that the ground they land on will, in time, yield to whatever proves best equipped to colonize or conquer it.

“And who’s to say the earliest emissaries aren’t already living at the end of a very long road.”

Brian Hodge is one of those people who always has to be making something. So far, he’s made ten novels, and is working on three more, as well as 120 shorter works and five full-length collections. Recent and forthcoming works include In the Negative Spaces and The Weight of the Dead, both standalone novellas; Worlds of Hurt, an omnibus edition of the first four works in his Misbegotten mythos; an updated edition of Dark Advent, his early post-apocalyptic epic; and his next collection, The Immaculate Void. Hodge lives in Colorado, where he also likes to make music and photographs; loves everything about organic gardening except the thieving squirrels; and trains in Krav Maga and kickboxing, which are useless against the squirrels.

It’s All the Same Road in the End

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?”

“You said it yourself,” Young Will told him. “It’s a scab thing.”

They were both named for dead men, grandfathers they’d never met. Men who had died when their parents were still youngsters. For all Clarence knew, it was the first thing their mother and father discovered they had in common.

The carrying on of someone’s name was apparently supposed to be an honor, and perhaps it was, but many were the times Clarence wondered if their parents had ever stopped to consider the obvious: the bigger the trophy, the heavier it was to lug around.

Clarence and Willard . . . neither quite felt like a twenty-first-century name.

As Clarence was the firstborn, Dad had gotten first crack at him, saddling him with the moniker of a man who’d succumbed in his thirties to the black lung he’d carried up out of a West Virginia coal mine. His end had come hard and early, but at least it was certain. There was no room for doubt in it, only sorrow and blame.

Six years later, with their sister Dina in between, it was Mom’s turn to christen her third child as if he were an avatar of the man who’d vanished around the time she’d been hitting puberty, and the recycled name an invitation for her father to return from whatever void had swallowed him.

The legacy of Willard Chambers was a more complicated thing for a namesake to live up to. He was restless, a roamer, but not without reason. Clarence was grown before he’d ever heard the term song-catcher, but that’s exactly what the man was.

The inability of Will Senior to carry a tune was matched only by his reverence for those who could. He had an appreciation of history, and must have known by then that he’d lived it himself. He’d come through the Second World War, three years in the Pacific, fighting toward Japan one fierce island at a time, and seeing close up the fragility of everything that lived and breathed.

Songs, too. Songs were living things and could be killed by far less than bullets and fire. All it took was for them to stop being heard. He was a city dweller who had served alongside Okie farmboys and gangly fellows from Appalachian hollers. They brought with them songs he’d never heard on the radio. Obsessed as they were with life and death and the acts that bridged the two — murders and drownings and love gone wrong — they may have appealed to him for their stark understanding that he might not see tomorrow either.

But he had. Three years in the Pacific, and he suffered no worse than a case of paddy foot.

At some point, home again, he’d learned of the Lomaxes — John the father and Alan the son — and realized he’d found a calling. These were men who traveled the country in search of songs whose roots lay deep in the earth of crops and graves: rural blues, cowboy ballads, folk tunes from plains and mountains, prison work songs, and anything else that was a jubilant or despairing cry from the heart of a marginalized life. Will Senior bought the same tape recorder that Alan Lomax was using at the time — a compact, battery-powered reel-to-reel called a Nagra — and took it on the road whenever he could. Which amounted to as much as four or five months out of the year.

For reasons that likely went back to wartime, Willard had taken a special interest in the region known during the Great Depression as the Dust Bowl . . . an arid wasteland whose great dark eye overlapped western Kansas and eastern Colorado, a slice of New Mexico, and the panhandles of Texas and Oklahoma. He had it in his head that songs from there were most vulnerable, since so many who would’ve sung them had been scattered by the same winds that carried away the topsoil, leaving them mostly in the care of those who’d been too sick or old to move. He saw it as a race against time.

From everything Clarence and Will had heard about him, Willard Chambers wasn’t a man you needed to worry about. He knew nearly everything there was to know about taking care of himself. His family just missed him, deeply, with the resentful ache that comes from being forced to share a man with an obsession, and counting the days until he and his ’59 Chevy would be home again.

His eighth run west became his last. Neither he nor the Chevy made it back, or were ever seen again.

At least his gear — the Nagra and a Leica camera from his war years — had found its way home eventually.

Even that had taken months.

They made it through five more towns north of Gilead, then it was the long ride south, back to the motel they’d been using for home base. Clarence took the wheel and Will took the map, looking over what tomorrow might bring. More of the same, that was obvious, only the route would change.

“One day,” Clarence said, “every town in the western half of this map is going to have a red dot next to it. Have you ever thought about what then?”

“For you and me, you mean?”

“For Mom. If she even makes it to then. Except she probably won’t.”

“You mean just lie to her? Tell her we found something even though we didn’t?”

“If it gives her some peace, finally, would that be so bad?”

“I see what you did there,” Will said. “The next square you advance to after that is, okay, now that we’ve established lying as an acceptable option, why not lie to her now and save ourselves all that future trouble.”

“I never said that.”

“It was coming. Don’t tell me it wasn’t,” Will said. “I keep telling you that you can bail any time you want. This doesn’t have to be a two-man project. It never did.”

Maybe not, but to Clarence it had always felt that way. No argument that he wasn’t superstitious was as persuasive as the conviction that as soon as he let Will do this on his own, their mom would mourn a vanished son, too.

It had begun when his brother was nineteen, a college sophomore who’d enjoyed just one year of Daytona Beach debauchery before deciding he’d rather spend spring break in Kansas. Mother’s Day was coming in a few weeks, and his idealistic kid brother could think of no better gift to give theirs than the answers she’d craved for decades.

Just like that, huh? Sure. Why not.

You didn’t let an earnestly headstrong nineteen-year-old do something like this on his own. No telling who he might run into, and his 4.0 grade average didn’t mean he couldn’t be stupid when smart mattered most. Elderly Klansmen and their ilk still protected killings half a century old, and there was an uneasy sense they weren’t dealing with anything quite so prosaic here.

That first year, Clarence had been counting on the enormity of the task to discourage him, and had never been so wrong about anything in his life. Spring breaks turned into career-era vacations, one year became six, and whatever happened to Will Senior remained as much a mystery as ever. And Clarence still couldn’t shake the feeling that, without him, his brother would meet his own bad end.

More than once, he thought of the man in the photo, the grandfather who was two decades younger than their father was now, and wanted to hear it from the man’s tobacco-seared lips: Would he even want this for them?

Go on, live your own lives and quit trying to reconstruct mine, he imagined Will Senior telling them. Have that kid you keep telling your wife you’ll get around to.

Just like that, huh?

What is it, son, you think you’ve got to wait until after you get me figured out before you do it? You think you’ll be doing the same thing to your kids that I did to mine by coming out here to the world’s breadbasket?

Something like that.

In that case, maybe you need to get clearer on your priorities.

Easy for you to say, old man. I’m the one you left cleaning up your fifty-year-old mess.

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.

“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.”

Clarence had always thought the same thing, but never liked to lead people to the conclusion. It was always more validating to see them arrive at it on their own.

“Maybe I’m just dense, but there’s one thing I’m not getting here,” she said. “If nobody ever saw your grandfather again, then how do you happen to have his last pictures and recordings?”

“The greed and kindness of strangers,” Will said.

“The camera was something he got while he was in the army. He epoxied a nameplate on it, so it wouldn’t be as easy for someone to steal,” Clarence said. “Three or four months after he went missing, our grandmother got a call from a pawn shop in Hays. The family had raised all the hell they could out here, her and our uncles . . . filing missing person reports, and they got it in some newspapers, and on the radio, a little TV. So the pawnbroker recognized the name when some vagrant brought in the camera and tape recorder in the same bag our grandfather used to carry them around. Oilskin, so it wouldn’t soak through if he got caught in the rain. The story the pawnbroker got out of him, once he got him past the bullshit about how they were his, was that he found the bag on a junk heap along the side of the road someplace west. By that time, he’d been carrying them around a couple weeks or more, until he could find someplace to sell them, so he couldn’t pin it down where he found them. Nobody got a chance to press him on it, because once he realized he wasn’t going to get any money for them, and maybe there was a murder investigation in it too, he was out the door and gone.”

Will cut in to finish as if he were feeling sidelined. “The pawnbroker wasn’t a big fan of the cops either, so he got in touch with our family directly. Said he’d get our grandfather’s things to them and let them decide what they wanted to do about that.”

“Decent of him,” she said. “What’d they do?”

“They had the film developed, had prints made, and copies of the tape. They sent them out to different departments. It didn’t help. Since there was no body and no car, I don’t think they were taking it seriously, once they understood that these trips of his weren’t anything new. I think they just figured he liked it that way and decided to stay gone. Start over somewhere else. He wouldn’t be the first.”

Paulette narrowed her eyes. “Wait a second. Nobody ever found his car, either?”

“No.”

“Doesn’t that seem weird to you that both him and his car vanish, but his camera and tape recorder get found?”

Will appeared mystified she would even ask. “That’s just what happened.”

“Yeah, but . . .” She pecked at the folder holding the photos. “Say Old Daisy is responsible. Somehow, some way. Somebody is, so let’s say it’s her. She gets rid of him. Obviously. She knows enough to get rid of his car, too. That’s pretty cunning. You can’t drop a car down a well. But then this bag of other things that could be tied to him, she’s so careless with it she just tosses it aside like it doesn’t matter? Even though she stood right there facing him as he took her picture? Does that make sense to you?”

Clarence stepped in, locking ranks. “Like he said. That’s how it happened.”

But Paulette was right. Sometimes it took an outsider to point out the obvious. It had never gnawed at him until now. He’d known the story since childhood. Had grown up taking every detail for granted without appreciating what some might actually imply.

“Daisy didn’t know what a camera was?” he mused. “She knew what cars were, she could see that, even if she didn’t drive one herself. But the camera and tape recorder . . . no. She didn’t know. In 1963, she didn’t know. How is that possible?”

“Like I said. She kept to herself and they were glad to let her do it.”

Clarence moved the decades around in his head like blocks. “How far back are we talking about with your grandmother, anyway? How old is she?”

Paulette did some quick calculating. “She’d be seventy-five, seventy-six now.”

“So if she grew up around Old Daisy, that’d be as far back as twenty years before our grandfather disappeared. Give or take. And she was old then?”

“That was the story. It sounded like she was one of those people who’d always been around, as far back as anyone could remember. But you know, some people, they look and act older than they really are, so that’s how it gets to seeming that way. And if you don’t see them up close . . .”

“Did you ever see her?”

“God no. I never wanted to. Nana Ingrid talked like she was still around, but this was at her married home, miles from where she grew up. She must’ve been making it up. She’d step out on the porch sometimes and stare down the dirt road like she was watching for the old hag, like she might spot her passing by and call her over if I didn’t behave. But that was just part of the threats. This was, what, thirty, forty years on from when she was living out there, so the woman had to be dead by then.”

Had to. Yes.

“It’s a hard old life, out like that.”

Had to. Unless a woman wasn’t what she was at all.

“You say Ingrid’s still with you?” Clarence said.

“She’s in a home now. Good days and bad days. But yeah.”

“Could she tell you where Daisy’s place was? Exactly? And how to find it?”

Paulette hesitated before answering, like someone who hated to let people down but would do it anyway. “Look, I was glad to help if I could, if it didn’t take too long, but I’m not looking for a new project to take on. And that Wal-Mart produce aisle isn’t going to run itself.”

“We’ll pay,” Will blurted. “We’ll make it worth your time.”

Clarence wondered how obvious it would be if he kicked his brother under the table.

“‘Worth your time’ is like ‘down the road a piece,’” Paulette said. “There’s lots of wiggle room in what it means.”

Two days later, on the word of Paulette’s grandmother — on one of her good days, he hoped — they headed out into the prairie wastes again, deeper than they’d ever had reason enough to go. There had never been much point to going where people were so few and far between that the land hardly seemed lived in at all.

It had once, though. The rubble and residue lingered. Along roads that had crumbled mostly back to dirt, they passed the scattered, empty shells of lives long abandoned. Separated by minutes and miles, the remains of farmhouses and barns left for ruin seemed to sink into seas of prairie grass. The trees hung on, as tenacious loners or clustering into distant, ragged rows that betrayed the hidden vein of a creek.

“I think this might be it. Where Nana grew up,” Paulette said from the back seat. “Can we stop?”

She’d been guiding them from a hand-drawn map that took over from where the printed map left off.

Clarence nosed the car toward the side of the road, sniffing for where the driveway used to be, and found it — a weedy land bridge between stretches of clogged ditch. He didn’t go far past. Any debris could be in that grass. He killed the engine and they got out to stand in the simmering silence of the day as Paulette compared the place as it was now with a photo borrowed from an album at her parents’ home.

“Is this it?” Will asked, and he sounded so tender.

“I think. I don’t know. But it should be. It’s just hard to tell.”

Of course it was. The picture showed life. However hardscrabble, it was life: a troop of skinny children, boys in overalls and girls in plain dresses, clowning around a swing fashioned from two ropes and a slat of wood. That could be the same oak, right there, sixty-odd years bigger. The sun-blasted, two-story farmhouse looked as though it could be the corpse of the one behind the children. It seemed to be the same roof, even though half of it was now gone, exposing a framework of rotting rafters. Unseen in the photo was a windmill out back that must’ve pumped their well. It still stood, a rusted, skeletal tower as tall as the house and crowned with a giant fan. A few of its sixteen blades had fallen free, while the rest ignored the wind, the gears too corroded to turn.

He reconsidered. There was still plenty of life here. It was just nothing human.

“It would kill her to see the place like this,” Paulette said. “Literally kill her.”

Which could have been an act of mercy. Yesterday’s trip to the nursing home had left him with a new appreciation for living out like this until the end. It had to hasten things, a swifter demise than being warehoused in a stinking building devoted to death by increments, surrounded by people whose bodies and minds raced to see which could deteriorate faster, and the cruelest thing was having enough of a mind left to realize you were one of them. Out like this, fall and break a hip? He’d take three days of dehydration on the floor over years of the other.

Paulette had wandered ahead of them in a daze, as if time had slowed, exploring the trunk of the oak, the front of the house, pieces of the past hidden in the weeds.

“I came from here. I came from this,” she said, although whom she was speaking to wasn’t clear. “And I never bothered to come see. Thirty miles, and I didn’t even come out for a look.”

“Nice we can pay her for the privilege,” Clarence murmured, not because he begrudged her the opportunity, but because he knew it would get a rise out of Will.

“Shut up. Don’t you say anything more about that,” Will said. “Besides, we aren’t paying her for anything. I am.”

And he didn’t know why it rankled him so. Years ago they’d vowed to never pay for information. It could only encourage people to lie. For that matter, why did it rankle him so much that his brother was now bankrolling each year’s venture? Because he could afford to, that’s why. Right now, at least, cloud architecture was some of the best money in IT, and this was the way Will wanted to spend it, and the worst part of it was that Will pulled in six figures doing something he excelled at but didn’t even enjoy. All the money in the world couldn’t buy him what he seemed to want most: to live in a simpler time.

“I’m sorry,” Clarence said. “I just want to get this done.”

“I know.”

“Except I don’t know what done is supposed to look like. Even if we find that old hag’s house and it’s still standing, we’re not going to walk in and find a skeleton at the table wearing Grandpa’s army dog tags. It’s never going to be that neat and clean.”

At their feet was a decayed shard of post snarled in a rusty length of galvanized fencing that twisted through the grasses and weeds like a wire snakeskin. Will stared at it, seeming to ponder how he might straighten it out, make it all better.

“I know,” he said again.

“I won’t ask you to promise today, but when we find it, at least start thinking that maybe it should be the end of the line.” He put a hand on his brother’s shoulder. “We’ll find the place in the picture. We found out who the woman was. We got a name, and there might be some old records where we can find out a little more. That’s a lot. Maybe it should be enough to get to the last place Grandpa got to, and admit that the two of them are the only ones who know what happened next, and we just can’t know. But we got here. We closed that circle. Can you live with that?”

Will thought a moment, then nodded. “I guess I’ll have to. I just hope it’ll be enough for Mom.”

“Come on, slackers, let’s go!” Paulette called over to them from the car. He hadn’t even seen her return to it. “We haven’t got all day!”

Under the vast and cloudless prairie sky, they prowled roads no one seemed to travel anymore. He recalled that the area had once been called Biggsby, and had been so inconsequential as to not even merit inclusion on modern maps. By now there was no indication this place had ever deserved being thought of as a town. Biggsby — it was the name of a hostile field sprawling between horizons, a forgotten savannah where animals burrowed and mated and devoured each other undisturbed.

Paulette’s map seemed not quite right, maybe a casualty of faulty recollections: a curve in the road that shouldn’t have been there, an expected crossroad that wasn’t. They tracked and backtracked, futilely hoping to find things waiting just as they were in a photo shot fifty years ago. If only it could be as certain as spotting that inexplicable gauntlet of branches from Will Senior’s last photo.

Even Nana Ingrid, who remembered it firsthand, hadn’t had an explanation for that.

“She kept it in good repair, whatever it was for,” Ingrid said from her wheelchair. “We used to call it her cattle chute. Even though she didn’t raise no cattle.”

They stopped to explore a series of ruined farmhouses that seemed like possible candidates, each little different from the others, all sagging roofs and disintegrating walls, collapsed chimneys and wood eaten to sponges and splinters by the onslaught of the seasons.

“Even if she did, you wouldn’t want to bring the cattle straight to your door.”

They found sofas reduced to shapeless masses erupting with rusty springs, and boxy old televisions whose tubes had shattered, and it was these castoffs that made him think no, none of these were the place, because as old and neglected as these features were, they were still too modern.

“What about there?” Will said, back on the hunt and pointing at a spot they’d passed twice already.

It was the gentle slope of the land that first made Clarence suspect they’d found it at last. The place was farther off the road than anywhere else they’d tried, and if these were the same trees in the background of Willard’s photo, then they were willows with another fifty years of growth behind them, nearly sweeping the ground now to screen the house from sight from the road.

House? What they found was a slumping hovel, a single-story dwelling made of both durable stone and vulnerable timber. It seemed far older than the other ruins they’d inspected, something a pioneer might have built as a first outpost for taming a wild frontier. Behind the willows that bowed and bobbed in the wind, it sat in the midst of an immense stillness pregnant with the whispers of rustling leaves and insects whose chirring in the weeds sounded as sharp as a drill.

It felt right. This was the place. It felt right because something about it felt deeply wrong. This was a place poisoned by time.

And now that they knew, Young Will went back to the car, parked along the side of the road, to retrieve Will Senior’s heirloom camera. The vintage Leica still worked. They’d been built to last decades, to survive wars. He brought it with him every year, but until this moment, Clarence had always assumed it was some sort of totem, the only physical connection he could have to the man whose name he’d been born to carry. He’d never mentioned an intention to actually use it.

His brother stationed himself down below, camera at his eye as he framed up the incline, until he was satisfied he’d found the vantage point from which Willard had shot his final photo. He then pointed at a spot on the ground that had once been striped by a ladder of shadows.

“Stand there,” he told Paulette.

“What for?” She didn’t sound happy about it.

“For scale.”

She complied, but seemed to find the act physically repugnant, as if Daisy had left behind contaminants that would infect anyone who stood where she had. Good luck. If she’d lived here as long as legend suggested, there couldn’t be a square inch of earth her gnarled feet hadn’t cursed.

Clarence was more captivated by the thought of where Will Senior had hidden away, probably the night before, to make his recording. He’d gotten close, perhaps within twenty yards. There was a hint of distance in the sound, but not much; for comparison, they had the voice of Willard himself, the parts they never played for anyone else.

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.

“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.

When his vision cleared, he saw Will gripping the statue with splayed hands, tense as a cable but motionless, until his head tipped slowly, ecstatically, back and he made a reedy sound that seemed to come from a much older man. His bladder let go in a spreading dark stain.

Though sunk in the earth and surrounded by walls, the statue had brought its own climate. Clarence felt it deeper than skin, a gust of particles and waves, the solar wind from a black sun. Outside was August, but down here was a numbing gust of absolute zero, the point where every molecule froze, everything but thought, and the invitation beckoned: Come . . . join with it . . . step outside the boundaries of time. It only burns for a little while.

His instinct, still, was to intercede, the way he’d always done. It was what big brothers did, pulling their little brothers out of traffic when they stepped off the curb, and out of the deep water when they fell in over their head. Maybe he could do it without harm, and Will was not yet a conduit for whatever was coming through that timeless chunk of shrapnel from the cataclysm that birthed the worst among gods.

And maybe he couldn’t. But it had always been expected of him to try.

Then Paulette was at his side, clutching his wrist, levering his arm down again. He’d never have dreamed he could let her do it so easily. He knew she was going to join Will before she seemed to realize it herself. As their eyes met, and from a place beyond words she urged him to let his brother go, he saw the conflict play itself out, then the resolution: that she preferred the vast unknown to a life she didn’t want to go back to, as long as she didn’t have to do it alone.

For all he knew, Will had even been counting on it.

They stayed down in the cellar a long time, long after Clarence had made it up the steps. He sat with his back to the hole some twenty paces away and shivered in the August sun. He didn’t want to look. He didn’t want to listen. Yet he didn’t want to drive away without knowing what, exactly, he would be driving away from. If there was a chance, the slightest chance, he still had a brother he recognized.

And when their shadows fell across him, long and distorted, he had time to wonder if he hadn’t made the last mistake of his life.

It didn’t seem particularly lucky that there would be time for many more.

“I don’t think I’ll be going home for a while,” Will said. “You probably guessed that already.”

He knew their names. Will. Paulette. He knew their faces. He knew their clothes and the sound of their voices and the smell of them after a long, hot day. He just didn’t know who they were. To see them now was like looking with one eye off-center. The halves of the image didn’t quite line up.

“What am I supposed to tell Mom?” he asked.

“You can tell her whatever it takes. I haven’t lived at home home for years. How different will it be?”

“Except for the part where you call every day.”

“I could still check in from time to time.” He looked down at the dirt with a murky little smile, as if it had whispered a joke. “It won’t matter that long, anyway.”

This from a son who could barely be coaxed into admitting his mother had two years, at best, to live.

Then Will held out the camera, the well-traveled Leica that had led them here, full circle after half a century. Its last shot from earlier, around front — Clarence didn’t know if he could ever bring himself to get it developed. Until Will took him by surprise, so he would have no choice.

“Go on, shoot one more. Both of us,” he said. “Show Mom I’m okay. Show her that we’re happy.”

Clarence steadied himself and shot it, the camera alien in his hand, like someone else’s heart. It had passed to him, but it wasn’t his. It would never be his. Behind them, these imposters in familiar skins, the hovel sat as it always had, slumping into itself year by year, as patient as decay, and the land stretched empty for miles.

“Here,” Clarence said. “You’re staying . . . here.”

To Paulette, nothing seemed more natural. “It’s got everything we need.”

And that was that. They turned their backs on him, returning to the cellar, and the last he saw of Young Will was his arm, reaching up from below to swing the rotting wooden door closed again. As Clarence remembered the other day, not without shame, telling Will that he and Paulette didn’t match.

They would. One day, they would.

On the drive back to the motel, solitary and endless, the pain worse than if a piece of him had been amputated and burned before his eyes, he passed the same dead barns and farmhouse ruins but saw them differently now. Had that really been him, last week, talking of breaking one down for the wood?

It was inconceivable now. No telling what such a place might hold. They only looked dead from the road.

Maybe she just walked away.

To go where? Where do you go from here?

She had her pick, didn’t she? There were so many, all waiting like carcasses for the flies to come and settle and breed.

His eyes started to play tricks, imagining he caught a glimpse of her in this one, that one, and the next. Peering out at him from between fungus-eaten boards, and then there were worse tricks to come, as he divined it wasn’t just her. No, she had a companion, a man the likes of which they didn’t make anymore. A changed man who wouldn’t even know his own grandson if he watched him drive by.

Because there were so many more lasting things worth knowing.

The phone calls started three weeks later.

But the first came at nearly four o’clock in the morning, so Clarence missed it, and it went to voicemail.

I was right. He’s out here. Somewhere. I can feel him. I can feel him passing by in the night. It’s happened twice. Sure as god made little green apples. But I don’t think he wants to be found. Maybe it’s because I’m not worthy of finding him yet. You think so? Hello? Are you there?

After that, Clarence got a new phone for everyday use, and let the earlier one go straight to voice mail. Permanently. He wanted the connection. He just couldn’t hold up his side of the conversation.

If you were dreaming the dreams of a mountain under the sea, how could you tell anyone what they were so it would all make sense? That’s what this is like.

He went to Boston, where he shut down as much of Will’s life as he could, and took over the phone bill, so the conduit would remain open. How Will was keeping a charge in the phone was anyone’s guess.

We’re getting closer. I can feel him. He’s a mighty thing. I wonder if he’ll be proud or angry. Paulette says hello. I think that’s what she meant.

The months passed, and the calls came in when they came, infrequent and random, no pattern to it, other than the way every time he thought Will had finally stopped, surely by now he’d stopped, another message was waiting a day or two later.

I was wrong. This isn’t what I thought it was going to be. I just don’t know if it’s better or worse. It’s . . . it’s the knowing that changes you. Like a download of information wakes up something that was always inside. I never could buy it that what they call junk DNA is just junk. Are you even there anymore? Why don’t you ever answer?

And it was Will’s voice — he would recognize it anywhere — yet something was different about it each time. It was more than how each call sounded a bit farther away, fighting past a little more static and noise than the previous time. It was in the resonance of his throat, and the tones it produced.

Mom’s gone. Isn’t she. I don’t know how I know that, I just do. Don’t be sorry for her. She’s lucky. She’s beyond what’s coming. You should be too. I shouldn’t be telling you this. You should kill yourself, though. Rochelle first, then yourself. You should be okay then. I know you, you won’t want to do it because she’s pregnant, but you’ll be glad you did. That day will come. If you can’t trust your baby brother, who can you trust?

A thousand times a day, he thought of cutting the connection. But never could.

I shouldn’t tell you this. When they come, they’ll look like meteors. But that won’t be what they are at all. When the sky changes color, it’ll be too late. Nothing will make any difference then. They’ll already have you. That’s when you’ll wish you’d listened to me. Don’t ask what color, I can’t really describe it. But out here, I’ve seen the kind of green the sky turns before a tornado. That’s a start.

We’re really getting close now. I wonder if Daisy will let me call her “Mother.”

And when it had gone nearly a year between calls, and so much had changed, and Clarence was a father now, with a father’s fears, he knew better than to think the calls were done. They would never be done. Even when they no longer conveyed any words he could understand.

Since coming home from Kansas for the last time, alone, he hadn’t listened to his grandfather’s tape any more, the longest in his life he’d let it idle. There was no more to learn from it. He would rather forget.

But there was no forgetting such a song. He knew it, still, the moment he heard it begin, coming through miles and static and time. He would always know it.

Yet now there was a difference. He could no longer hear the lamentation in it. Just the rage. It was a song of endings and rebirths, a song for green skies and streaks like blue-white fire among the clouds. A song he would never be fit to join and sing.

And, finally, it was coming from more than one throat.

He counted two the first time.

He counted four the next.

In the end, he counted a choir of multitudes.