Just North of Nowhere Read online

  JUST NORTH OF NOWHERE

  by

  Lawrence Santoro

  © 2007 Lawrence Santoro. All rights reserved.

  This book was first published by Annihilation Press in March, 2007

  This book is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in it are fictional and any resemblance to real people or incidents is unalloyed coincidence.

  ISBN: 0-9779049-1-1

  ISBN13: 978-0-9779049-1-4

  Cover art by Alan M. Clark

  www.alanmclark.com

  Author’s website: http://www.santororeads.com/Home.html

  Author’s blog: http://blufftoninthedriftless.blogspot.com/

  The following chapters of this book were previously published in somewhat different forms:

  God Screamed and Screamed, Then I Ate Him appeared in CTHULHU AND THE COEDS: KIDS AND SQUIDS, 2000. It was nominated for a Bram Stoker Award in Long Fiction by the Horror Writers Association

  The Hoor’s Revenge appeared in BLOOD AND DONUTS, 2001.

  ‘What Do You Know of the Land of Death?’ Clown Said One Night to the Haunted Boy appeared in FREAKS, GEEKS AND SIDESHOW FLOOZIES, 2002.

  All were published by Twilight Tales Books.

  Table of Contents

  A REQUEST

  A FEW WORDS ABOUT THIS EDITION

  Foreword: Some Words About THE DRIFTLESS

  1 CRISTOBEL RISING

  2 THE STREGA CRISTOBEL AND OLD RATTLER KEN

  3 DROOPY GUY

  4 BEST NOT GO WHERE STRANGE THINGS WANDER

  5 ENGINE WARM

  6 OCEAN BOY AND THE LOCAL ‘SHROOMS

  7 FRESH TRACKS IN LONG-GONE SNOW

  8 BETWEEN SEASONS

  9 LIGHTNING HARVEST

  10 INTERNIST

  11 THE NINTH GODDAMNED KID

  12 GOD SCREAMED AND SCREAMED, THEN I ATE HIM

  13 CHILDREN, INVISIBLE, WATCHING FROM THE GREAT DARKNESS

  14 FATTY BORGOS AND THE ETERNAL WISDOM OF BURMA-SHAVE

  15 THE HOOR’S REVENGE

  16 DANNY’S MUD

  17 THE EEPHUS PITCH AND HANGING HIGH FLY OF THE CONSOLIDATED CATBIRDS

  18 “WHAT DO YOU KNOW OF THE LAND OF DEATH?” CLOWN SAID ONE NIGHT TO THE HAUNTED BOY

  19 THE HEART OF MR. CLAY

  20 EINAR AND THAT PIECE OF CRAP HENRY J

  21 THE WORST DAMN MONSTER EVER

  22 LONG THOUGHTS

  23 BEDLAM AND SWATHE’S CHAOS MENAGERIE & GRAND GUIGNOL

  EXTRAVAGANZA

  24 ABSENT THE SCENT OF PIE

  25 WE ARE BECOME OUR RESTING PLACE

  26 AN END

  Afterword: YOU REALLY WANT TO KNOW WHERE IT CAME FROM?

  A REQUEST

  However you got it and for however long a time you keep it, this book is yours for now.

  Now do me one favor: when possible read it aloud. I know, Teach yelled when she saw you nibbling on the words in your first grade reader. Teachers hate seeing that. “Subvocalizer!” she probably muttered, branding you the mental equivalent of a mouth-breather.

  Forget it. Vocalize. First, it’ll slow you down. Brain-only readers play through too fast. They miss a lot. The PIFMA Foundation estimates that silent readers, on average, elide over from 12 to 18 percent of any given text. Such readers frequently miss the why of a thing or, minimally, fail to grasp the wonder of a word having congress with a mate. In gifted hands, the effect is called “poetry.” With my work? Well, you might have more fun being Bunch than learning about him secondhand.

  Take this from this at least: you get a different story from words you see versus those you speak and hear. Beastie things creep from words chewed upon and which tickle your ears as opposed to ones you intellectate from the page...

  What?

  I wrote, “intellectate.” Not a word, but you got it when you heard it. Said aloud and the meaning went ‘click.’ Right? Saying a story can be the difference between seeing a picture of stuffed sheep’s bladder or tucking into your first steamy haggis.

  Second, for me writing is a physical act. Watch me at a café, on the ‘L,’ at home. I talk as I type, I wave my arms, shout, squint, growl, laugh, shiver.

  And third, I’m an old theater head, so there’s nothing I like more than getting naked in front of friends and other strangers and leaping about, participles dangling. For years I’ve been part of a gather of Chicago-based writers called Twilight Tales. In addition to running workshops, hosting conventions, publishing – online and on paper – Twilight Tales holds a weekly public forum at which, from time to time, one might be invited to read, given fifty public minutes to test fly a new story or to try to sell something just out.

  Bluffton became a means toward turning those 50-minute tricks a couple times a year or to get me up at the monthly open mike.

  So there! Bluffton: born in breath and need. Every word’s been spoken aloud hundreds of times. Do not let them dissolve gently into that moist gray stillness behind your eyes. Let your tongue dance with your lips and teeth, bring forth spit and breath and the words to bang against your ears. Now go, read and taste Bluffton. Is it just gray gut and ground suet or is it the “…great chieftain o’ the puddin-race”?

  Let me know. I’m easy to find. I’m right over there typing and mumbling.

  Lawrence Santoro

  December 2006

  A FEW WORDS ABOUT THIS EDITION

  First, thank you for buying the e-book version of JUST NORTH OF NOWHERE.

  With some significant exceptions, what you have on your screen is very like the ink-on-paper edition published in 2007 by Annihilation Press. This edition, however, corrects errors that made it onto the page in the rush to get JUST NORTH OF NOWHERE out of the shop and onto the shelves in time for the World Horror Convention in Toronto. My fault. I apologize.

  This version adds material left out of edition one. First: I’ve actually finished the chapter entitled “Danny’s Mud.” Yes, parts of it were left out. How did that happen? I sent the wrong version of the chapter to the publisher. Then I missed the omissions when I was reading the galleys. My proofreader did ask, “Larry, is that chapter complete?”

  “Yes, yes,” I said and went on to something else.

  It wasn’t, Marty.

  Now it is.

  Also: three chapters cut from the original book are back. Two of them, “The Heart of Mr. Clay” and “We Are Become Our Resting Place” link “Danny’s Mud” with “Engine Warm.” Together they form a complete story arc.

  I cut them for two reasons. One, they would have added enough pages to make JUST NORTH… a more expensive book. Two, “We Are Become Our Resting Place” felt bit precious. I’ve toned that down. I’m still not entirely convinced it belongs here but I like the arc. So, let me know.

  The chapter called “Fatty Borgos and the Eternal Wisdom of Burma-Shave” was also cut for space. It doesn’t advance the overall arc of the book but I always liked it as just a chilly tale of a creepy guy. And maybe it is a ghost story. I hope you like it too.

  Prepping this edition gave me an excuse to return to Bluffton. I’ve missed it. I’ve been to lots of other places since I put this book to bed, but I’ve always had a fondness for the town and people. Part of that fondness may have been recollections of the friends and times I gathered at the Twilight Tales readings at the Red Lion Pub. Alas, both Twilight Tales and the Red Lion are no more. I miss them both. They belong to an exciting and richly productive period of my life. Still, my fondness for the town and people of Bluffton remains a thing apart from nostalgia. Very simply, when I put the book down, I miss the place. I’ve heard similar comments from friends. Readers have told me that Bluffton has stayed with them, that it pops into memory, that they miss it.
/>   I’m pleased. I’ve always thought that I may go back again, look into more dark corners of the place. When I do, I hope you’ll come with me.

  Lawrence Santoro

  May, 2011

  SOME WORDS ABOUT THE DRIFTLESS

  Some really small towns are Siren and Flasher. Crampback, Bumhip and Wetwhistle are others. Those places are to the west. Eastward, you've got Hog Wallow, Smokey’s Hole, Blue Ball, Ong’s Hat.

  A half-mile outside Bluffton there's Engine Warm. Now Engine Warm’s just a notion: no people – except maybe one, and that depends on what you mean by ‘people’ anyway. Compared to Engine Warm, Bluffton’s not in the same game for small but it’s not much.

  You could say Bluffton gets started at about Engine Warm. You wouldn’t be too wrong, but that’s just land out there: bluffs and first growth forest going back to before the Swedes and Norwegians got connived into coming to America. It’s deep woods, hardwood and Douglas fir, deadfalls moldering into morel patches and chokecherry grown full to wild and woody trees, it’s goldenrod and creepers and critters of all sorts and the steady gargle of the Rolling River and the stench of mud flats along the banks.

  So, okay: Bluffton really starts where the bridge crosses the Rolling at Papoose Creek but even that’s a stretch. Just past there, the sign says BLUFFTON – Pop. 671. That’s an exaggeration, but it’s right every now and then. So, while Bluffton’s been going for a pretty good piece, what people would recognize as the town doesn’t get going until the sign.

  You don’t go to Bluffton unless you need to. Put another way: you don't get there, unless you're looking and, looking, half the time you can’t find it. Times are you don’t even know you’re looking. More about that later. You’ll see.

  It’s a pretty sweet place. Small towns set below rocky bluffs by small quick rivers nested among serious and stately trees generally are pretty sweet.

  The country around is called the Driftless. Now, “Driftless” sounds like something a town layabout might be: pokey, pointless, useless, feckless, but no, those are other qualities. What the Driftless is, is a place where the glaciers didn’t go, last ice age.

  Picture this: here comes most of the ice there is north of the equator; it’s grinding down out of the North Pole covering what’ll be Canada, flattening what’ll be the US of A’s Midwest in twenty thousand years or so. See?

  So, twenty-one thousand years later, you’re driving a lonely stretch of Interstate, middle of the night, and a barn fire on the horizon, half a county away, looks like your own personal Armageddon looming out there, ready to snatch you to the Hereafter.

  See? What the glaciers made was miles of lonely nowhere.

  Those glaciers didn’t happen in Bluffton. Something split them. Look it up. Scientists call it the “Driftless Zone.” Some quality of geology, God, physics, old magic or whatever made a whole half-world of miles-thick ice decide to go around instead of overtop the area that was going to become Bluffton someday. Ask folks that know.

  Today, the Driftless is cliffs, hills, and what looks like miniature mountain peaks. It’s ancient soils and plants seen only in books, or remembered by college people and other such individuals. Dark trees rise heavy and green from jagged hills. Animals, gone forever elsewhere, teem here. There are caves, sinkholes, limestone jut-ridges, and mineral lodes. Rivers in the Driftless cut deep defiles; leave bluffs. Thus: Bluffton.

  Go look it up.

  Sunrise comes grudging down in the bluffs. On the rolling lands above, dawn scoots across the land like/that! Good for early risers – the Amish and others do some pretty good dairy farming up there.

  Where somebody’s grown a town along a river’s deep cut, it takes a little more of the day for morning to slip down and light it up. When it comes, though, everything's like it should be: warm in summer and properly lazy and shiftless.

  Shiftless – that’s the word for town layabouts, not Driftless!

  So sunrise might take a little getting there but night’s pretty quick. One minute it's day, then it’s not. Above, the Dreibelbieses and Aufderheidens are still plowing. Same time, down the bluffs, town people are lit up for night.

  Winters now, Winter mornings, the sky’s the color of outer space; a deep breath draws stardust to the blood and frost shards go for the heart.

  Getting back to getting there: Bluffton’s a small target. Drivers from Chicago miss it. Same for those from Minneapolis. People sometimes get there going somewhere else. An almost-empty gas tank gets you there; a bum strut, or thinking you’re lost and pulling off the highway for your way, that puts you there too. Sometimes a whim takes the wheel, a lonely moment, a small crisis, middle of the driving night, and there you go: you’re suddenly off the County road – it’s County H to Bluffton – and heading downhill past the stockyards toward Commonwealth.

  When you arrive, you’re looking, you think, “hey, this is okay,” and wonder why more people haven’t come.

  They did. They do. They arrived, like you, they stayed a bit then left. See? Nothing keeps most people. And winters are a bear!

  Chapter 1

  CRISTOBEL RISING

  Looking back, the death of her old red cat started her. Understand: this was a dozen years before Cristobel actually did anything, before she was Cristobel for that matter. She was already well-versed in the Craft when that tired old cat, Creature by name and by then only skinned bone and white fur tufting from a ratty red coat, scooted out the door. He never came back. Died, presumably, out somewhere by itself. Cats did that.

  Cris already knew she was filled by magic. For one thing, her hair: Mahogany brown from birth, it suddenly sprouted a white streak above her right eye. The streak spread over her crown and flowed down her back. “The Lightning Kiss,” Nonna called it.

  That was one thing.

  Her Nonna knew Cris had the Craft; said as much when Chris was a child, before the hair and long before Creature fled. That was the other thing: Nonna Chiaravino, tall, thin, angles everywhere, had the gift and gifts are bound to show up somewhere else.

  Cris trusted this assessment. She was small. She trusted tall people.

  Years went. Not too many. Cris was no longer so small and Nonna… Nonna had begun to be smaller. Shorter, narrower, and she curved, now, was not so angular.

  Then. . .

  Well, the way it went was this: one day, after cutting the pasta with the guitar she’d brought from the old country, Nonna lay down on the mohair sofa. A nap before supper. By now she was small—if she hadn’t actually passed Cris, rising, she was very nearly her size. Dwindling black-clad Nonna put a damp hanky across her face—the evening was hot—and when Cris came to nudge her for dinner the old lady gasped awake—too suddenly, maybe. From behind the veil, the old lady sucked a screech, half sat up and without removing the hanky breathed a revelation into Cris's six-year face: “One day,” she said, her voice full of phlegm, “there will be a wind in your life, child. And that wind, ah, will move you! You resist, but it takes you! Fly with it! Fly, child when the wind comes. You have the Craft in you. The wind gives you the way.”

  Then the old lady died. She ended squeezing Cris's hands, each squeeze held longer, gripped looser and, finally, not gripped at all.

  Cris wasn’t allowed to go to the viewing or the funeral. She did see the box Nonna was to be buried in, though. No bigger than a boot box.

  She must have been wrong.

  Years went by.

  Cris grew. She read the ways of the strega – which is what people called her Nonna in whispers.

  Cris learned that, yes, she probably was filled with magic – the Craft.

  She worked on the profession of her faith.

  Faith?

  Yes! To become strega was to embrace belief no less vigorous than any other orthodoxy! Strega lived in the deepest places of the world, moved in realities as chilly as commerce and as fulsome as science. Strega held strengths that could sooth the future and enflame joy as easily as it could dissuade history or tea
ch fright.

  Cris followed the Way and had done remarkable things. She had achieved!

  And she really loved that damn red cat! Everyone else had problems with Creature. She loved him—loved him!

  When Creature became sick, she compounded cures. The animal grew sicker.

  Then he got better and Cristobel—she called herself Cristobel by then—Cristobel held her head high, an eyebrow arched. For days she looked down her long nose at everything.

  Then Creature began to crap an awful leaky brown stuff. He passed water from everywhere. He crept at the edge of rooms, embarrassed for himself.

  Reluctantly, and too late, she took him to the vet. It had always been too late, the vet said. The cat’s end was an inevitability; walking dead, his kidneys had failed, failed completely.

  The cat, finally. . .

  Well, Chris was to have kept him in the house, at home, under the protection of medicine and regimens.

  Creature slipped out. Disappeared. Cats do that. That was it.

  She debated. Then she acted; worked a rising spell, a resurrection.

  Worse than she feared, worse than Creature’s return with the stench of deep death on stiffly motile flesh, worse than his presence shadowed by preternatural wisdom or glimmering dark urges born from a cat's view of the Great Forever, worse than all she had considered, Creature never returned at all. The resurrection had failed. She’d failed completely.

  She gave it time. For a month, she fully expected the animal to appear at the door in the night. Half dreaded, always expected. No question.

  One day she didn't expect. That morning, she realized the powers had been accidents, the Craft, just recipes and coincidence. Woman's work for gosh sakes! She got on with life. She resisted the Strega part of her—she was young—she got a job and got on with it.

  She married.

  Twelve years later she knew a lot more. She hadn't practiced the faith, not since Creature and her failure, but she’d read. A hobby. An affectation. A chuckle, she thought. She spoke the makings and pronounced the words and smiled as she made dinner for her husband!