Brian Evenson
“Because we remember pain and the menace of death more vividly than pleasure…it has fallen to the lot of the darker and more maleficent side of cosmic mystery to figure chiefly in our popular supernatural folklore… [U]ncertainty and danger are always closely allied; thus making any kind of an unknown world a world of peril and evil possibilities.”
What I like about this particular Lovecraft quotation is the emphasis it places on uncertainty and the unknown, which for me is what I like most about his work: the way nothing really happens in “At the Mountains of Madness,” for instance, but he still manages to build up a genuine and haunting dread. The story below began with that, and with my memory of a trip my wife and I took through Nevada where small, strange things kept happening, things that didn’t really add up to much and that, for the most part, didn’t bother her, but slowly began to accumulate for me, making me feel like the world was off a little bit, a nagging in the back of my mind making me feel I’d entered into a Nevada that wasn’t on any sort of map. Living in Providence, Lovecraft’s town, where people generally seem to drive as if they’d just taken a painkiller and a shot of whiskey and where, even after ten years, I still find it all too easy to get lost, I’ve come to feel that some places are, for a lack of a better term, weird. This story tries to capture the particular and peculiar weirdness of the West.
I.
Bernt began to suspect the trip would turn strange when, on the outskirts of Reno, he entered a convenience store that had one of its six aisles completely dedicated to jerky. At the top were smoked-meat products he recognized, name brands he’d seen commercials for. In the middle was stuff that seemed local, with single-color printing, but still vacuum packed and carefully labeled. Along the bottom row, though, were chunks of dried and smoked meat in dirty plastic bags, held shut with twist ties, no labels on them at all. He wasn’t even certain what kind of meat they contained. He prodded one of the bags with the toe of his sneaker and then stared at it for a while. When he realized that the clerk was staring at him, he shook his head and went out.
I should have known then, he thought hours later. At that point he should have turned around and driven the half mile back into Reno and gone no further. But, he told himself, it was just one convenience store. And it wasn’t, he tried to convince himself, really even that strange. It just meant people in Reno liked jerky. So, instead, he shook his head and kept driving.
It was the first time he’d left California in a decade. His father had died, and he’d been informed of it too late to attend the funeral, but he was driving to Utah anyway, planning to be there for the settling of the estate, whatever was left of it. He was on his own. His girlfriend had intended to come along and then, at the last moment, came down sick. What it was neither of them were quite sure, but she couldn’t stand without getting dizzy. To get to the bathroom to vomit, she had to crawl. The illness had lasted three or four hours and then, just as suddenly as it had come, it was gone. But she had refused to get in the car after that. What if it came back? If it had been bad while she was motionless, she reasoned, how much worse would it be if she was driving? He had to admit she had a point.
“Do you even need to be there?” she had asked him. “Won’t they send you your share wherever you are?”
Technically, yes, that was true, but he didn’t trust his extended family. If he didn’t go, they’d find a way to keep him from what he deserved.
She shook her head tiredly. “And what exactly do you deserve?” she asked. Which was, he had to admit, a good question. “And didn’t your father tell you never to come back?”
He nodded. His father had. “But he doesn’t have any say,” he said. “He’s dead now.”
But in any case she had not come with him. And maybe, he thought now as he drove, his girlfriend’s illness — miles before Reno — was the first indication the trip would turn strange. But how could he have known? And now, well past Reno, already having gone so far, how could he bring himself to turn around?
♦
Back at the beginning, just past Reno, he drove, watching Highway 80 flirt with the Truckee River, draw close to it and then pull away again. Then he hit the scattering of houses called Fernley, and the river vanished too. For miles there was almost nothing there, just a ranch or two and bare dry ground. He watched a sagging barbed-wire fence skitter along the roadside, then, when that was gone, counted time by watching the metal markers that popped up every tenth of a mile. After a while those disappeared, too, leaving only the faded green mile markers, numbers etched in white on them. He watched them come, his mind drifting in between them, and watched them go.
He thought of his father as he had been when Bernt was young: a man who wouldn’t leave the house without ironing a crease in his jeans. His boots he made certain were brought to a high polish before he left, even if he was just going to the back acres, even if he knew they’d be dirty or dusty the moment he stepped off the porch. That was how he was. Bernt hated it. Hated him.
He remembered his father lashing a pig’s hind legs together and running the rope over the pulley wheel screwed under the hayloft floor and winding the rope onto the hand crank. His father had made him take the crank and said, “You pull the bastard up and hold it and don’t pay no mind to how it struggles. I’ll get the throat slit, and then that’ll be the worst of it done. Your job’s nothing. You just keep hold to it until the fucker bleeds out.” Bernt had just nodded. His father said pull, and he had started cranking. There went the pig up, squealing and spinning and flailing. His father stood there beside it, motionless, knife out with his thumb just edged over the guard and touching the side of the blade, just waiting. And then, with one quick flick of his arm, he opened its throat from ear to ear. The pig still struggled, the blood gouting from the wound and thickening the dust. Bernt couldn’t understand how his father didn’t get blood on his boots or his pants, but he just didn’t.
It was always that way, every time he killed something. Never a drop of blood on him. Uncanny almost, it seemed to Bernt, and he had spent more than one sleepless night as a teenager wondering how that could be, why blood would shy from his father. The only possibilities he could come up with seemed so outlandish that he preferred to believe it was just luck.
♦
He shuddered. He watched the mile markers again — or tried to, but they simply weren’t there anymore. For a moment he thought he might have left the highway somehow, by accident. But no, he couldn’t see how he could have, and whatever road he was on had every appearance of a highway. Then he flicked past a sheared-off metal stub on the roadside and wondered if that wasn’t what had once been a marker, if someone had been systematically cutting them down. Bored kids, probably, with nothing to do.
He gauged the sun in the sky. It seemed just as high as it had been an hour before, not yet starting its descent. He checked the gas: between half and a quarter tank. He kept driving, wondering if he had enough gas to get to the next station. Sure he did. How far could it possibly be?
He opened the glove box to take out the map and have a look, but the map wasn’t there. Maybe he had had it out and it had slipped under the seat, but, if it had, it was deep enough under that he couldn’t find it, at least not while driving. No, he told himself, there would be a gas station soon. There had to be. He couldn’t be that far off of Elko. It was less than three hundred miles from Reno to Elko, and he’d filled up in Reno. And Winnemucca was somewhere in between the two. Had he passed that already without realizing it?
He had enough gas, he knew he had enough. He shouldn’t let his mind play tricks on him.
♦
His father had told him that if he was going to leave he should never come back.
Fine, Bernt had said. Wasn’t planning to come back anyway.
And then he had left.
Or wait, not that exactly. It had been so many years ago now that it was easier to think that that was how it had ended, but it hadn’t been quite so simple. He hadn’t said Fine. He hadn’t said Wasn’t planning to come back anyway. What he had said: “Why in hell would I want to come back?”
His father had smiled. “Thought you’d never ask,” he said. “Come along,” he said, and made for the door, waving to Bernt to follow him.
♦
Perhaps an hour later — maybe more, maybe less, it was hard for him to judge time driving alone — he called his girlfriend to tell her that she had been right, that he shouldn’t have come after all. He was hoping that maybe she would talk him into turning around, inheritance be damned.
But she didn’t answer. Or no, not that exactly: the call didn’t go through. It seemed like it was going through — he dialed the number, he heard it ring a few times, and then the call disconnected. His phone had no reception.
Well, what’s strange about that? a part of him wondered. He was out in the middle of nowhere: of course service was bound to be bad. He’d have to wait until he was near a town, and then he’d try her again.
All that sounded right, rational, correct. And yet another part of him couldn’t help but worry that something was wrong.
♦
The radio, too, faded in and out, the same station one moment seeming quite strong and the next little more than static, and then quite strong again. Not strange, a part of him again insisted. Must be the mountains, he told himself, the signal bouncing around in them. He told himself this even though it seemed to happen just as regularly when he was in open country as when he was skirting a mountain or when one had just hove into view.
There were moments, too, when there was nothing but static. When he turned the knob slowly but found nothing. When he could press the search button, and his tuner would go through the whole band from beginning to end without finding anything to settle on, and would start over again, and then again, and again, and again. It might go on for five minutes or even ten, and then suddenly it would stop on a frequency that, to him, still seemed to be nothing but static, but it stayed there. After a while he became convinced that there must be something beneath the static, a strange whispering, that surely would slowly resolve itself into voices. Though it never did, only stayed static.
♦
He checked his gas gauge. It read between a half and a quarter tank. Hadn’t it read that before? He tapped on it with his finger, softly at first and then harder and harder, but the reading didn’t change.
When he came to Winnemucca, he would stop for gas, just in case the gauge was broken. He probably didn’t need gas to make it to Elko, but he would stop anyway. He tapped the gauge again. Had he already passed Winnemucca? He felt like he should have, but surely he would have noticed?
♦
He watched his father check the crease of his trouser leg. He watched him stop on the porch and raise first one boot and then the other to the rail, quickly buffing them with the yellow-orange cloth draped there, and then he stepped off and went down the path leading out to the road.
Bernt followed.
“This here is all mine,” his father was saying, gesturing around him. “This, all of this, belongs to me.”
But of course Bernt knew this. His father had been saying shit like that ever since Bernt was a child. It was not news to him. When his father turned to see how Bernt was taking it and saw his son’s face, his lips curled into a sneer.
“What in hell do you know about it?” he asked Bernt.
“What?” asked Bernt, surprised. “I know you own the land. I already knew that.”
“Land,” said his father, and spat. “Shit, that’s the least of it,” he said. “I own anything that comes here, plant or animal or man, including you. If you leave, it’s because I let you. And if I let you, you sure as shit ain’t coming back unless I say.”
Almost before Bernt knew it, his father’s hand flashed out and took his wrist in a tight, crushing grip. Bernt tried to pull away, but his father was all sinew. He nodded once, his mouth a straight, inexpressive line, and then he cut off the path, toward the storm cellar, dragging Bernt along with him.
♦
No, he should have reached a town by now. Something was wrong. The sun was still high. It shouldn’t still have been high. It didn’t make sense. The gas gauge was either broken or for some reason he wasn’t running out of gas. He tried again to call his girlfriend, and, this time, even though his phone didn’t have any bars, the call went through. He heard it ring twice, and then she picked up and said Hello, her voice oddly low and almost unrecognizable — probably because she was sick, he told himself later. He said, “Sweetheart, it’s me,” and then the call disconnected. He couldn’t get it to reconnect when he called again.
♦
His father took Bernt across the yard, pulling hard enough on his arm that it was difficult for Bernt to keep his balance. Once he stumbled and nearly fell, and his father just kept pulling him forward, and he had to struggle to stay upright. He got the impression from his father that it didn’t matter to him if Bernt stayed upright or not.
They went past the barn and around to the back of it, to where the storm cellar was, a single wooden door set flat into the ground and kept closed with a padlock. Bernt had always known it was there, but he had never been inside. His father let go of his arm and thrust a key out at him. “Go on,” he said to Bernt. “Go and look.”
II.
Just when he started to panic, he came to a town. He didn’t catch the town’s name: perhaps the sign for it had been vandalized, like the mile markers. He came over a rise and around a bend, and suddenly saw the exit sign and the scattering of buildings below, windows shimmering in the sun. He had to brake and slide over a lane quickly, and even then he hit the rattle strip and came just shy of striking the warning cones before the concrete divider. But then he was on the ramp and going down, under the bridge and into town.
He drove in to the first gas station he saw. He stopped at the pumps and turned off the car and clambered out, only then realizing that the place was abandoned and empty, the pumps covered with grime, the rubber hoses old and cracked. He got back into the car and turned it on again, then drove through the streets of the town looking for another station. But there didn’t seem to be one.
♦
What had he seen in the storm cellar? He still wasn’t quite sure. He unlocked it and went down, his father standing with his arms crossed up top. It smelled of dust inside, and of something else — something that made him taste metal in his mouth when he breathed the air. It made his throat hurt.
He went down the rickety wooden steps until he came to a packed earth floor. There was just enough room to stand upright. Even with the door open, it took a while for his eyes to adjust, and once they had adjusted, he didn’t see much. The floor was stained in places, darker in some places than others — unless that was some natural property of the earth itself. He didn’t think it was. There was, in the back, deeper in the hole, a series of racks, and there was something hanging on them. He hesitated and from up above heard his father say, “Go on,” his voice cold and hard. He groped his way forward, but, because of the way his own body blocked the light, it wasn’t until he was a foot or two away that he realized that what he was seeing were strips of drying meat. Hundreds of them, sliced thin and sometimes twisted up on themselves, and with nothing really to tell him what sort of animal they had come from. Though it was a large animal, he was sure of that.
His mouth grew dry, and he found himself staring, his eyes flicking from one strip to the next and back again. He almost called out to his father to ask him where the dried meat had come from, but something stopped him. In his head, he imagined his father answering the question by simply reaching down and swinging the door shut and leaving him in darkness. The feeling was so palpable that for a moment he wondered if he wasn’t in darkness after all, if he wasn’t simply imagining what he thought he was seeing.
He forced himself to turn around very slowly, as if nothing was wrong, and climb up the stairs. His father watched him come, but made no move to reach out and help him as he scrambled out of the shelter.
“You seen it?” asked his father.
He hesitated a moment, wondering what exactly his father had meant for him to see — whether it was the strips of meat or perhaps something else, something behind the racks, even deeper in. But almost immediately decided that it was safer to simply agree.
“I saw it,” he said.
His father nodded. “Good,” he said. “Then you understand why you have to stay.”
Bernt made a noncommittal gesture that his father took as a yes. His father clapped him on the shoulder and then began walking.
Why his father felt he understood, what his father thought he’d seen, what he’d thought the storm cellar had done to him, Bernt couldn’t exactly say. Indeed, he would never be sure, and ultimately felt it might be better not to know. He went after his father back to the house and retreated to his room. From there, it was a simple matter to wait until dark and then pack a few things, climb out the window, and leave for good. He had never been back.
♦
After a while he gave up looking: the gas gauge read between a half and a quarter full still; probably he had enough to make it into Elko.
He parked in front of a diner on Main Street and went in. It was crowded inside, all the tables full. He sat at the counter. Even then, it took a while for the waitress to get around to him. When she finally did, he asked her about a gas station, felt it was par for the course when she told him there wasn’t one. Used to be one, she said, but gas here cost too much. Nobody used it, not with Elko nearby. No, the nearest one was up the road at Elko.
“How far away is that?” he asked.
The question seemed to puzzle her somehow. “Not far,” she said.
He asked what she suggested, and she recommended the soup of the day, which he ordered without thinking to ask what it was exactly. When it came it was surprisingly good, a rich orange broth scented with saffron and with strings of meat spread all through it. Pork, probably. It made his mouth water to eat it. It seemed a sign to him that his trip was finally becoming less strange, or at least strange in a way that was good rather than bad. When he finished he used the edge of his thumb to scour the sides of the bowl clean.
He sat there, far from eager to get back on the road. At the end, the waitress brought him a cup of coffee with cream without his asking for it, and before he could tell her he didn’t drink coffee she was gone again, off to another customer. He let it sit there for a while and then, for lack of anything better to do, took a sip. It was rich and mellow, different from coffee as he remembered it, and, before he knew it, he had finished the whole cup.
It’s okay, he told himself, and found he more or less believed it. The strange part of the trip is over. Everything will be all right from here on out.
♦
He had written twice to his father from California. The first time was maybe a year after he’d arrived. He’d wanted for his father to know that he was all right, that he’d landed on his feet. He’d also wanted to gloat a little. Perhaps, too, he had still been curious. What exactly was it that you thought showing me the storm cellar would do? What was it in there that you thought would keep me?
For a month, maybe two, he had waited for a reply. But his father had never answered the letter. The only way he knew for certain his father had received it was because when his father died his aunt had written to let him know, saying that they’d finally gotten his address off a letter he’d written his father.
The second letter, years later, had been more measured, calmer. It was, as much as he could bring it to be, an attempt at reconciliation. It had come back to him unopened, Return to Sender written across it in his father’s careful block writing.
♦
Everything will be all right, he was still telling himself when he got up from the stool and made his way to the bathroom. He peed and flushed, then stretched. While he was washing his hands, he noticed the mirror.
Or mirrors, rather. There were two of them, one suspended over the other, a larger one with a small one screwed in over it so that the larger one looked almost like a frame around it.
He looked at himself in it, his haggard face, but his eyes kept slipping to where one mirror ended and the other began. Was it meant to be that way? Some sort of design scheme? Was the center of the larger mirror cracked or foxed, and the small mirror had been hung to cover that? Was there some kind of hole that the second mirror was hiding?
He reached out and grabbed the edges of the top mirror. It was affixed in each of its four corners by a screw that went through the corner of the mirror and then through a thin block of wood and then through the mirror behind it. He could just get the tips of his finger in the space left between the mirrors. He tugged, but it was bolted firmly in place.
When he let go, the tips of his fingers were black with dust. He washed his hands again, more slowly this time. His face, when he looked up this time, looked just as haggard. He turned off the taps, dried his hands, and left the bathroom.
♦
A moment later he was back in. He had the penlight on his keychain out and was shining it at the gap between the top mirror and the bottom one. He pressed his eye close, but no matter where he looked, no matter where he shone the light, the mirror behind it looked whole and complete.
III.
At first, he lied to his girlfriend, claiming he had gone to Utah and to his father’s ranch for the reading of the will, but had received nothing. But then, when the box came, he finally came clean. It was an old box, starting to collapse, and smelled dank. It was very heavy. The words “Bernt’s Pittance” were written on the side of it in his father’s careful hand.
He left the box sitting on the table for a day and a half. The evening of the second day, they were both sitting in bed, both reading, when she asked him when he was going to open it. He had put the book down on his chest and had begun to talk. She had let him, had interrupted only once, and when he was done she had curled up beside him one hand touching his shoulder softly, and said nothing. That had surprised him — he thought she might be angry that he had lied to her. But if she was angry, she kept it to herself.
Of course, he told her, nothing was really going on, it was just my imagination. It was just an ordinary trip. I was just noticing the things that under normal circumstances I wouldn’t notice. But as he told the story, moved bit by bit across the landscape between Reno and the small town whose name he had never quite figured out, it was all he could do not to panic again. He didn’t believe it had been a normal trip. He believed it was anything but. And he believed that, somehow, his father was to blame.
The hardest part was explaining why seeing that, seeing the one mirror placed atop the other mirror, had been the thing that had turned him around and made him drive back to Reno, made him stop and rent a hotel room and drink himself nearly blind until he ran out of liquor and sobered up enough to realize enough time had elapsed to give his girlfriend the impression that he had gone to Utah. There hadn’t, he had to admit, been anything really wrong with the mirrors — but that, somehow, had been exactly what was wrong with them.
That had been the one time she had interrupted him. “Was it like what you saw in the storm cellar?” she asked.
But what had he seen in the storm cellar? He still didn’t know, and never would. Was that like the mirrors? No, that had been a hole in the ground containing curing strips of dried meat. How could twinned mirrors be like a hole in the ground and strips of meat? No, the only thing they had in common was that he felt like he couldn’t quite understand what either one was telling him. That he felt he was missing something.
He left the café, climbed into the car, and drove. His intention at first, despite the way he was feeling, was to keep driving, to continue on to Utah, to see the trip through. But as he took a left out of the parking lot and headed down Main Street, he felt like he was being stretched between the mirror and wherever he was going now. That a part of him was caught in the mirror, and the link between that and the rest of him was growing thinner and thinner.
♦
And so instead of getting back on the highway, he circled back to the café. He took the tire iron out of the kit nestled beside the spare tire and walked into the café and straight into the bathroom. He gave the top mirror a few careful taps with the tire iron and broke out each of the four corners, and then lifted it down and set it flat on the floor. The mirror beneath was complete and whole. This mirror he simply broke to bits, just to make sure there wasn’t something behind it. There wasn’t. Only blank wall. So he broke the first mirror as well. And then he left just as quickly as he had come, the waitress staring at him open mouthed and the burly cook hustling out of the building and after him, cursing, just as he turned the key to his car and drove away.
Even then, he might have kept going, might have kept on to Utah, he told his girlfriend. But the trip — all of it, not just that last moment of finding himself doing something he’d never thought he’d do — seemed to him a warning. It was a mistake, he felt, to go on. So, he turned around.
And indeed, almost before he knew it, he was back in Reno, the car all but out of gas. He found a gas station, then found a hotel and settled down for a few drunken days to wait. Both because he was ashamed that he hadn’t gone all the way to Utah and because, to be frank, now that he was back in a place that seemed fully real to him, he was afraid to get in the car again.
♦
But then at last, head aching from a hangover, he had climbed into the car and driven. A moment later he had crossed over the state line. He wound up into the mountains, went past Truckee, skirting Donner Lake, through Emigrant Gap, and then slowly down out of the mountains and into more and more populated areas, ever closer and closer to home. By the time he had pulled into their driveway, it almost seemed like he had made too much of it, that he just wanted an excuse not to go to Utah after all.
The more he talked, the more he tried both to explain to his girlfriend how he felt and to dismiss it, to relegate it to the past, the more another part of him felt the event gather and harden in his mind, like a bolus or a tumor, both part of him and separate from him at once. He did not know if speaking made it better or made it worse.
♦
When he was done, he lay there silent. Her girlfriend was beside him, and soon her breathing had changed, and he could tell she was asleep. He was, more or less, alone.
There was the box still to deal with, he knew. He knew, too, that he would not open it. He did not want whatever was inside it. In his head he planned how to get rid of it. Just throwing it away did not seem like enough.
Careful not to wake her, he got up. He slipped into his jeans and found his car keys. He put on his socks and a shirt, and at the door he slipped on his shoes.
No, he needed to get it as far from him as he could. He would take it back to Utah, back to where it came from.
♦
Or maybe not, he thought a few hours later, well into the drive and recognizing nothing as familiar, completely unsure where he was. Maybe not as far as Utah, but certainly somewhere past Reno. That would have to be far enough.