Doyce Testerman

“…it wasn’t your imagination. The plains are thick with goblins, especially along those dark gullys and river bottoms where no man has travelled in a thousand years. The natives learned to avoid the areas and the white settlers soon after. There are goblins and ogres all along there. No trolls though, no trolls…”
— transcipt of a raving madman in Watertown, SD
I don’t know how long I sat on the deck. The moon wasn’t bright, and the lights were off in the house by the time I finally took notice of my surroundings again. I pushed myself to my feet and massaged the small of my, which was complaining about sixteen hours in a car. I hadn’t slept since the night before last.
Somewhere during this musing, I realized I wasn’t alone. I’m not sure what gave me the hint, but when I turned the direction my intuition pointed, there was a shadow where there shouldn’t have been in the treeline next to the house.
“Who’s there?” I said, glancing around the deck for some sort of weapon. Nothing. Would have been nice if there’d been a big meat fork next to the grill at least.
The voice that spoke was gutteral in a way that made me realize I’d never truly understood the word. “We’re not your enemy, Sean.” The large not-supposed-to-be shadow split into two: one shorter than me and one… still much larger. The shorter one spoke again. “We’re after the same things that took your father.”
“Things?”
“Dirt-eaters.” He sounded hungry when he said it. He sounded like he was smiling.

They’d rearranged the ropes so that they had easy access.
That was necessary; the needles weren’t very long, after all.
He’d tried keeping track of how many they’d driven into him but he lost count when they moved past his arms and shoulders and into the area between his collarbone and neck. It had all been very quiet, though; the things seemed to be very serious about what they were going and aside from sucking his breath in past his teeth, he wasn’t making any noise.
Damned if he’d make any noise.
Eventually the sky was dark and they were done with the needles. He couldn’t look down properly but he didn’t think they’d missed too many places. He looked up to see the taller thing standing in front of him. Its eyes were glinting sharply and its lips were pulled back just about to its rear molars in a rictus grin.
“Good. Ver’ good,” it murmured almost to itself, then turned away. “MUD!”
The hell?
He had time to puzzle it over. Several of the scrawnier creatures shuffled forward and began to wrestle the foul-smelling cauldron off the fire, dragging it through the dirt towards him.
When they started packing the hot, stinking mess onto his body, using the pins as a sort of anchor to prevent it all from sliding off, Steven still didn’t make a sound.
But it was much harder this time.

It was starting to get dark.
It was starting to get dark and there was still nothing that made sense in any of this.
Everything is so strange. Yeah.
My family were not the sort of people who ended up interviewed on alien abductions in the Daily Sun, next to a picture of Elvis filling up his car in Tupulo, Missouri; yet here I was, sitting on the back deck mulling over… what?
Muddy, barefoot footprints all around the back door. Drag marks out to the shelterbelt behind the house that vanish with no trail. Smears on the windows that look like finger marks but that don’t have any prints. This is the kind of crap I used to think up.
Mom slid open the patio door and stepped into the gloom. “You want anything to eat, bud?”
I shook my head. “Why’d you call me out here, Mom? I mean, I’m glad to be here and help you out, but what…” I let it go and shook my head again, slouching back into the deck chair. It was quiet for several minutes except for the sound of absent-minded bug swatting.
“I thought–” she started, then stopped. “I thought you might be… that you might know something.”
“About this?”
“Something that might help.”
I didn’t say anything to that. Eventually, she went back inside.

He’d tried to get loose when they opened the cage doors but they were strong and there were lots of them. They pulled him to a stunted, leafless tree that stood in the center of the camp and tied him too it. The rope they used was never intended for this purpose; over an inch thick with harsh bristles jutting from the coarse weave like thorns, it chafed his skin even when he didn’t move. They wrapped him in a coil from shoulders to knees, leaving him with his back pressed to the surface of the dead tree. The knots required by the thickness of the rope were twice the size of his fist.
Two of the… things, walked up to him after he was secured. Their noses were about three inches too long, same as the chins, and what skin he could see where mud had flaked away was the same color as the sky. Their eyes were the black of used forty-weight oil.
Not human. Sean would know what to call them, probably; he sure as hell didn’t. He might hope he was dreaming, but he knew himself well enough to know he’d never come up with something like this.
The taller one (a little more than four feet tall, and not quite as bowlegged) spoke, phlegm rattling in the back of his throat like the sound of a kid’s straw that’s hit the bottom of a chocolate malt. “You the man Steven. You ours now.” The second one sniggered, and Steve was sure he saw the first one twitch in annoyance.
“I’m not a damn thing to you. Let me go and I’ll be on my way.”
The rest of the crowd around him murmured when the first one nodded, acting as though he’d expected that answer.
“Good. Fight is good.” He gestured to the second one, who stepped forward and unfolded a cloth on which he laid out the first bright or clean things Steven had seen since he’d woken up.

Steve really didn’t want to wake all the way up, because sometimes you know things aren’t going to be good when you open your eyes.
On the other hand, better to see the trouble coming than get hit by it. He shook his eyes into focus and looked around.
Didn’t make any sense. He shook his head again and squinted. The sky was the color of an old bruise; solid cloud-cover in dusty greys and purples hung overhead from one end of the sky to the other, but that wasn’t really the problem — in fifty years you can see some pretty odd weather, after all. The sky just make Sam think tornado warning.
No, the problem was that he was looking at the battered sky through the bars of a wooden cage. Worse, the cage was in the middle of some kind of camp. There was a fire burning a few feet away, cooking something that smelled like rotten corn silage, and there were about a dozen little buildings around him that looked like they were made out of sod.
The people walking around, even the two that were looking at him in the cage, were short little wiry bastards with dried mud caked all over their skin.
They didn’t look like right at all.

I’d been lying to myself when I said that nothing ever changed back at home; there were always fewer houses. Farming was a dying profession — a sucker’s game with all the odds against the players — every time I drove into familiar territory, the wide open plains seemed wider, flatter… having less and less to do with people.
The road was mostly straight at the moment, rolling over gradual hills in what could often be an infuriating exchange Passing and No Passing zones. It would start to wind soon. I knew this area, still able to recite the mileage between every major and minor landmark for a hundred miles in any given direction, even landmarks that didn’t exist anymore, such as the old country school house that had apparently been torn down since my last visit and whose absence nearly made me miss my turn onto Vayland Road.
After a few miles, the curves began.
The farmland my family owned was on the high side of the county, raised above the lower, eastern half by a ridge of hills that Vayland Road crept along the top of, curling around cuts that were somewhere between narrow valleys and broad ravines, filled with thickets and brush that by local wisdom wouldn’t even let a breeze through without a couple of good scratches. There were barbed-wire fences on both sides of the road, although in twenty years I don’t think I’d once seen any livestock on the other side of them.
I’d grown up riding in cars along this stretch of highway, then driving myself, then driving away. The blacktop led right past the farm’s driveway.
Mom was out on the front step before I got out of the car. No one else was there.

Churkk scowled.
“I like night, Churkk. Don’ like day. Don’ like heat or light or pantin’ or th’ way groud puffs up dust atcha when ya run.”
Churkk’s scowl deepened. He liked the night as well, but it irritated him to agree with the creature skulking alongside him.
“Night is cool. Night is good. Wraps us up and lets us come out of the cracks and up to see things. What I think is the best is –”
“Jek.”
“Yeh?”
“Shut it.”
Jek did, looking suitably cowed. He still walked alongside, however, and Churkk swore even Jak’s feet slapped on the ground different than everyone else’s. Everything about Jek was annoying.
The light from a house poked through the trees at them and rather than turning to go around it, Churkk took them in closer without explaining. Slowly, they crept up to the corner of the building, then along a wall to the lit window.
Jek started to whisper a question, but stopped short when Churkk smacked him in the middle of his forehead without even looking back.
Inside, Churkk could see a people-room with things to sit on. The Woman sat on one, but didn’t see his long, mud-caked face at the window or the light glinting off his beady eyes, because she was crying — great, shaking sobs that shook her bent shoulders and moved her whole chair.
Churkk watched this for some time. Eventually, his companion forgotten, he smiled.

I could hear the city around me as I headed for my car, but the sound was muted thing, something you could relax into while you did your business, not the raucous interuption it’s usually assumed to be by people who don’t know any better. For the last dozen years, it had become the sound that told me life was still going on around me. The sun was going down as I made it onto open highway out of town, the glow of it changing the black of the highway into the faded near-white yellow of an old cotton sundress. I spent an hour squinting into the indirect glare, another squinting through the dusk, and finally started to relax into the zen non-thought of night driving.
My mind wandered, carefully avoiding the tar-pit surrounding the reason for this drive. None of that made any sense, and it wasn’t going to make any more sense with eight hours of poking at a uselessly small pile of information. There were, at any rate, other things I could think about.
In one sense, I didn’t know exactly what to expect when I got home; it had been eighteen months since my last visit and a year had gone by before that. In another sense I knew exactly what to expect because nothing ever seemed to change in a place you’d lived for twenty years — not the things that you remembered as important at any rate.
The important things that I remembered didn’t involve words like “we can’t find your dad” and “everything’s so strange”. That was the thought that came back to check up on me after every few mile markers.