I walked into my Grandfather’s study. We were surrounded by tall rows of dusty leather-bound books.
The one wall not hidden by the endless aisles of volumes had his AF NCO Professional Military Education Graduate Ribbon hung in a glass-encased frame.
He sat at his table draped with a red cloth. The sides of it hung near the floor.
A text was open in front of him. He was reading Beowulf.
My elder Andrew Loren was dressed in the usual apparel he always donned. His retirement uniform was comprised of faded beige suspenders, slacks, and a dark ruby shirt. He was tall, heavy set and his scarred face was bearded.
He smoked a pipe and stared at the plains through the wide window until he heard my footsteps infiltrate his place of meditation.
“Good to see you this morning Jake,” he said as he set the tobacco holder down and faced me. “We have not had much time together since you arrived two days ago. I hope you know I’m not avoiding you.”
“I didn’t,” I said.
“I’ve always wanted a grandson and you were a blessing when I heard news of you. I know you’re still dealing with everything that happened and I wanted to give you space.”
“Thanks. I needed it.”
“Since your Grandma passed away I’ve been self-isolating a bit,” he said as his eyes averted away from me. “This is something I shouldn’t do but can’t seem to combat against in recent times.”
He referred to the plane crash which took the lives of both my parents as they were coming back from the Philippines.
My father took after his and joined the military. As a result, he traveled everywhere and brought my Mom with him once I was old enough to be left alone.
The reality of their deaths was something I had managed to accept, at least enough to uproot my existence to go and be somewhere deemed safe by my living relatives. It still had not settled as a permanent part of my future let alone my present.
“I can tell you’re getting a little restless in here,” he said. “I’m sure you miss parts of the city and want to get away from the wide open flatlands in favor of something a little more lively. I don’t blame you. I know the more populated areas have a certain charm. You are free to use the two acres I own. They are yours as well as mine, since when I pass away it will become yours to keep in their entirety. Use them to run around on to get out some energy outside when the weather permits it. Admire nature.”
“Will do.”
“Nevertheless,” he said as he raised a hand to signal me to focus, “I have rules. Ones beyond not making noise after ten PM. I need you to refrain from doing two things. One, don’t go to the meadow or adjoining fields to the southeast of the property. Two, leave the neighbors who live next to the fields alone. The Scroggins family cannot do anything good for us.”
“Why not?”
“They are eccentric and will only cause you grief. Three, don’t leave the property in general but especially at night. You will get to go into town with me when we need groceries but if you sneak out past dark know that there are no street lights to guide you. You are not old enough to legally drive so it would be especially dangerous.”
“Why can’t I explore the outer parts?” I asked.
“Please don’t question my judgment,” he said as he tensed up. “It’s private property in the fields and you will be trespassing if you go there. Someone could shoot you on sight. The nearest hospital is twenty-five minutes away so unless someone was there to stop the bleeding it would be an early end for you.”
“There aren’t any gates,” I said. “Someone owns all that land and they haven’t built anything yet. It seems weird.”
“Everything is weird here,” he said as he gave the pipe another puff. “Yet as long as you do what I say you should be comfortable. The residents in these parts don’t like to be bothered any more than I do. Speaking of which I should get back to my reading.”
“Do you have a TV in this house?”
“No.”
“Wi-fi?”
“No. Don’t let me catch you with a cell phone.”
“What if you or I have an emergency and we need to call 911?”
“It’s called a landline, boy. I do not support such brain-rotting outlets as the ones you’ve described. You have two months left of summer before you have to go to a new school. I say enjoy it in any way you can. If you’re bored then the chimney in the foyer needs to be cleaned.”
He cracked open the classic story as I stared at him in shock.
“Get to it then,” he said as he glanced at me and returned his eyes to the page.
I walked out and shut the door behind me. I tried to hide my fury as I walked down the spiral staircase into the main living area.
I was in awe of the architecture of the place. I did not know how much money my Grandfather was worth but he had done well for himself.
Either his pension was great or he had some sort of windfall he never revealed the specifics of because the house was enormous despite not having any modern amenities. The chandeliers were covered in cobwebs but had been made of the finest emerald and silver.
I strolled down another vestibule and saw a painting of a monster I never encountered before in any media.
It was slender and slouched forward. The thing’s back had a spear-like object protruding from the rear of its neck. Its hands were talon-like and each one held a disk the color of the sun. The entire body was an ink blot of a slim figure and a face that gave a malevolent grin. Beneath were words scrawled so sloppily it almost resembled a Rorschach test. It spelled out OOMLAUKEN.
Something about the portrait nauseated me. My stomach grew sick as I stared at it.
Although I had not been at the estate long I knew my Grandfather’s tastes when it came to collecting things. He enjoyed souvenirs, antiques, watches, old weaponry, and books. Yet this painting seemed so out of place as to be unusual within the setting.
I went to touch the surface. It appeared to have been illustrated on Baltic birch plywood or so I guessed based on my limited knowledge of artistry.
My fingertips touched the creature and I recoiled my hand.
I repositioned the painting so I would see nothing but the frame. I would make multiple trips past it. I did not wish to have it unsettle me every time.
*
After I had finished my chores I went upstairs to take a bath. My clothes gave off a stench of smoke. Dirt and creosote caked me from head to toe and took almost an hour to scrub off from my skin but once I did I felt better.
I decided to take a walk outside to clear my head. My arms were sore from the labor and I reasoned a good stroll could help reset my body.
I passed my Grandfather’s study. He was asleep in a rocking chair next to the window. The snoring was loud enough to disassemble the foundation of the roof.
I went to the main doorway on the first level and headed out onto the porch. I did not lock the door behind me since there was hardly any kind of intruder threat since the nearest building outside of our abode was a seemingly infinite amount of miles away.
The railings had mini statuettes of F-80 Shooting Star airplanes on both sides of it at the top of the steps.
I traversed them and went out onto his acreage.
I treated the exterior of the property like a private gymnasium and did a few laps. A sweat built up and it was going to be irritating to get into the tub for the second time that day but I hoped it would help me sleep faster when it was nighttime.
I stopped and stared at the hills beyond.
The first thing I noticed was how they appeared more like rocky peaks in a space documentary than natural grassy hillocks.
The second was a tree which sat on top of a mound.
I approached it because I saw something in its branches. My mind considered how maybe it was a cat or some sort of creature that needed help.
Once I was closer to the silhouette it spoke to me.
It was the voice of a girl.
“Would you like an apple?”
The floral and spice-like aroma wafted down to where I stood.
It was an apple tree and a female my age or only a little older sat there. She chewed around the core and gazed at me like the Cheshire Cat.
“Not today,” I said.
“Who are you?”
“Jake Loren,” I said.
She leaned over the edge and allowed herself to fall. For a second I thought the plummet would hurt her but she landed nimbly and extended her arm out for a handshake.
“I’ve heard about you,” she said as I gripped her hand and we shook. “I’m Amelia Scroggins but you can call me Amy.”
“Nice to meet you. I’ve heard about you too.”
“Nobody’s family is perfect,” she said as she turned around and grabbed a green backpack at the base of the tree. She slung it over her shoulder. Her self-awareness of her bloodline’s reputation within our minuscule community caught me off-guard.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I didn’t mean to comment on your parents or anything. I’ve heard they’re crazy but that doesn’t matter.”
“I’ve heard yours are dead,” she said with a smile.
I had to take a few steps back.
“I make fun of people a lot,” she said. “It’s not personal.”
“No problem,” I said. “If you were a boy though I might’ve hit you.”
“Ooh,” she said with sarcasm as she faced her hands outward in mock surrender. “Big tough guy. Don’t let me mess with you. I have brothers so there’s nothing you can do to scare me.”
“It wasn’t the nicest thing to say.”
She bowed her head and stared at the sun as it fell.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “You can guess that I don’t have many social skills. I’m home-schooled and don’t get out much.”
“Apology accepted,” I said.
A part of me underwent a sensation of guilt for even prying an admission of regret from her but her statement was so provocative I felt the need to confront it in some way.
“Glad we got that settled,” she said.
“Yeah. Have you always lived here?”
“Born and raised. How about you?”
“I’m from Southern California.”
“LA?”
“No,” I said. “Corona.”
“Can’t say I’ve heard of it.”
“That’s okay. Not many have. You’re not missing out on much.”
“Speaking of not knowing a place,” she said, “I’ve always wanted to visit the fields behind your house.”
She pointed over my shoulder to the southeast.
“I was told not to go there.”
“There’s less of a chance of us getting found out if we stay by each other’s side,” she said. “My family wouldn’t approve of me wandering into a place I’ve never been before with somebody my age who just got here. No one has to know.”
Her eyes twinkled with an adrenaline rush in the face of the unknown.
I turned around and gazed at the expanse of yellow and faded grass. An unexplored expanse of what could have been nothing but dirt or something more.
“You have to already be tired of going around in the same circle,” she said.
“You watched me working out?”
“Don’t flatter yourself. In case you haven’t noticed there isn’t a whole lot to do out here. How about we take a hike there together? My folks aren’t expecting me back for another hour ‘till dinner.”
Although I had nothing in common with my Grandfather and despite how he tended to be a workhorse, I still respected him and did not want to get kicked out for breaking a rule I found to be a dumb one to begin with. He could put me up for adoption or send me to some sort of juvenile offenders group under the pretense of drug use or drinking. That may sound like an extreme measure but my Grandfather did not tolerate the nonsense of someone not listening to him.
I could feel Amy’s eyes on me.
She was waiting for me to say yes or no. While I did not owe her anything I still wanted to get to know her better.
“Let’s see what’s out there,” I said.
We walked in the direction of whatever was behind my Grandfather’s manor.
*
Both properties disappeared behind us in little time. It reminded me of accounts of people who survived drownings. How the beach land dissipated once the undertow swept them away faster than they could swim to a harbor. The sheer terror they must have undergone in their moments at sea as they saw civilization become a mere speck the more they drifted into oblivion.
I was unsure of where the comparison born from dread originated in my mind.
While every fiber of my being told me this was not a good idea I did not want to stop either.
As my Grandfather loved to point out I was from a highly industrialized and urban part of the country. To see so much emptiness before me was alien.
The sunset vanished and blackness cloaked everything around us. The place had impenetrable white noise. It was a surrounding enveloped in the chirp of crickets and other varieties of insects whose calls I did not know.
“We should go back,” I said.
She stopped and turned around to look at me.
“Please,” I said. “We don’t even have flashlights or phones…or do you?”
Amy looked at the ground as though she was embarrassed.
“Dad told me he would get me a plan next year,” she said. “I need to improve my grades first.”
I nodded. She saw this as an admission to have shame over. Meanwhile, mine had been confiscated and there was nothing I could do about it.
We kept walking and we came across what I thought were jutting rocks from the ground.
I could not believe where we were once I was able to inspect them closer.
In front of us was a desiccated stone temple. Chunks of its walls were scattered everywhere.
The mouth of the building was wide along with the steps which led to it. Old dried-out rivulets circled the place, moats which had long been emptied by the heat of time.
“Should we go in?” Amy asked.
I did not wish to but nothing was stopping us. No barriers or any kind of security blockades.
We decided to enter.
In the center was the shape of a stone moon. Ancient devices like clocks were also visible on various platforms and they struck me as odd. They did not tick and none of them could have electricity but there was a strange glow to each of them which indicated some kind of life.
Some were the same size as me and they hung on the remnants of what had to have been pillars in a period long ago. Others were miniature-sized enough to have been worn on the wrist although their outsides were crumbled to the point where a single touch could have caused it to deteriorate and get blown away if caught by a wind current.
“You can come into my house,” I said to her in desperation to get out of there. “There’s not much to do but we’ve got fresh iced tea in the fridge. We might have popcorn in the cupboards.”
She took a few steps closer to me. Her hands raised and for a second I thought she was going to clutch my face. Not in an affectionate way which would indicate adoration but the opposite of that, a complete display of frustration.
“I see things out here from my window at night,” she said as her fingers brushed my chin.
Her voice was low enough to be a whisper.
I questioned who she suspected could have been an eavesdropper in such an isolated location.
“W-what kind of things?”
“You wouldn’t believe me,” she said. “That’s why I asked you to tag along with me. If I have a second person as a witness to verify that what I’m seeing aren’t hallucinations then that would me prove I’m not crazy.”
“I don’t think that,” I said. “Us being out here is kind of pointless. There’s nothing but soil and bugs. Let’s go back home.”
“It’s not about your opinion of me,” Amy said as she folded her arms. “It’s something I have to do for my mental health. Have you ever heard the term ‘funny farm’?”
I shook my head.
“It’s another way to refer to an insane asylum. There’s one located seventy-five miles from here. They don’t label it using those words anymore but that doesn’t change what it is. They sent my sister there eighteen months ago and I haven’t seen her since. She was a little sick but she’s not a bad person.”
Her eyes welled with tears and I felt helpless at not being able to make her feel better immediately.
“I don’t want us to get hurt,” I said. “We might be on someone else’s land right now. They could kill us legally. Let’s go.”
I turned around to try and lead her back in the direction we came.
My foot hit something and I stumbled.
I turned around and saw what the trip hazard was.
It was a scarecrow with its straw innards ripped out. Its face was smudged with grime and its arms were spindly.
A trail of hay led from the effigy-like bust into a nearby meadow visible past a stone archway. The path was strewn with bronze-colored foliage. I did not know until that moment how we were in fact on a prominence, and the sight of the new landscape was on a downward slope.
“We have to see what’s there,” she said. “Something is burning.”
I reached out my hand and touched the guts of the scarecrow. It was hot to the touch but there was no smoke or fire.
“It’s like someone put this thing in a giant microwave,” I said.
All I wanted to do was go back to the estate and sleep. The earlier workouts had exhausted my body and the place was beginning to scare me.
I also could not ethically bring myself to leave her alone, to abandon a girl for my well-being. I also wanted to know what was in the meadow. Would it be more scarecrows? A different property? Maybe if someone was home we could ask for help or a ride back since returning on foot was starting to feel more daunting.
I walked ahead of her first towards the place and she followed.
*
The air around us grew colder. Plant life flourished in the section we made our way across.
Fescue and ryegrass brushed at our ankles. A jackrabbit scurried by us and Amy put her finger to her lips to try and keep me quiet.
I was confused as to why she would want that until I looked in the direction she was staring.
A pronghorn antelope was a hundred feet away. It chewed on shrubs and was not disturbed by our presence due to how quiet and silent we were.
That was when I saw something to my left. An object seemed to discolor everything else as though it had a plutonium-like effect where an ethereal glow filled the space.
I turned and have never felt more terror.
A creature that resembled the one I had seen in the painting stood even closer to us than the antelope.
The antelope sprinted away when we shifted our attention to the aberration.
There were a few key differences between the oil painting I had seen and what was in front of us, namely the fact that this thing had a face that was that of an ape. The body was blanketed in a mist which gave an irradiance comparable to the bright blueness of a nuclear reactor. On its hands were gold plates. For a second I wondered if this was an oversized cymbal-banging monkey toy. Even so, I pondered why anyone on earth would want one, let alone place it in such a region.
It stood on a monolithic stone slab built into the earth. Around the edges of the rocky stump was the earth that had been disturbed as though someone had scraped and dug into every square inch.
The thing did not move at first. An electrifying cobalt haze encircled it.
“What is that thing?” Amy said.
I did not have an answer and was not going to give a guess despite how I wanted to seem confident in front of her.
That was when the creature raised its arms and banged the two discs together.
My ears rang as it moved towards us.
I grabbed her hand and we moved away.
We took a few slow and cautious steps backward at first before we moved with as much speed and ferocity as we could to get away from it.
I was out of breath before we even turned around to make sure we were a decent distance from it. It was nowhere to be found.
* We stood on my porch as I paced back and forth.
“What the hell did we see?”
“I’ve no idea,” I said. “Is that what you were talking about when you described what you thought were hallucinations?”
“Yes,” she said, “but I’ve never been so close to it or seen it so clearly.”
I paused and did not know how to respond. A part of me was upset at her not giving a greater or more specific warning as to what we were getting ourselves into. I yearned to know how she was under the impression I could protect her from something twenty times my size but refrained.
“I’m parched,” she said. “Is the offering of iced tea still on the table?”
I unlocked the door and we went inside.
Grandfather sat wide awake on a couch in the foyer.
Beside him were two adults I had never seen before.
“Mom?” Amy said as she looked at them. “Dad?”
The adults were silent as we let the door close on its own behind us.
“What lies out there is not natural,” my Grandfather said as he put his face in his hands. “It is cursed land. Made by escapees from an old and closed-down asylum. Rumor has it was run by people who practiced black magic. I never believed in that sort of thing until I lived here long enough. I guess the owner of the psychiatric ward was a big collector of Jolly Chimps. You two are probably too young to even get the reference but it was a weird children’s toy that sang, sort of like Tickle-me-Elmo, if you remember those. He was an eccentric person and he created something that should have never been brought into existence. Those who dare trespass on that field I told you not to go near and allow an evil thing to come out from the depths. It’s something he conjured that will not die.”
“One of us must be sacrificed to it so it does not destroy everyone here gradually over time with consistent bouts of insanity,” Amy’s Dad said as he peered at her. “It manifests the way a neurological disease does and it’s written off as nothing more by doctors. However, we know where it stems from. You should have never awakened it.”
“I will give myself,” my Grandfather said.
I felt dizzy and sick.
“What?” I asked.
“I’m the oldest one here. It won’t accept anyone to feast on who isn’t from here. I am the most logical choice. All I ask is you never trespass there again.”
He grabbed a shovel and headed out.
My legs shook. The very sight of the thing was unsettling enough but something about our loved one’s expressing disconsolation over it left me way more bereft and terrified.
They were supposed to have solutions and not abject hopelessness.
“We’ve thought deeply about which one of us should give ourselves over to it,” my Grandfather said. “I’m the oldest one here. It will be me. I will be its sacrifice. Listen to my warning from now on though and never go back.”
He stood and walked through the doorway.
He vanished into the night.