Serenity

A young man, returning to his hometown for the first time since starting college, finds that it is not quite the community that he remembers – and that perhaps even his memories cannot be wholly trusted.

***Content Warning: Episode contains explicit discussion of depression and suicide. Listener discretion advised.***

Transcript

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[Darker Pastures theme fades in]

NARRATOR

Tradition is the glue that binds communities together, and for this reason, many hold it to be sacrosanct, inviolable. But when it is cleaved to with the unquestioning, iron certitude of dogma, it can become a heavy chain that binds and strangles, and drags us down into dark waters. In time, it can take on a life – and a will – all of its own.

[Darker Pastures theme continues]

NARRATOR

Episode Thirty-Three: Serenity.

(Sounds of wind in leaves)

NARRATOR

Dom Briddle downs his third Red Bull of the evening, blinking his eyes as if to shake loose the gathering weight of their lids. He half wishes that he never left campus – no matter how dull and lonely fall break might have been, with all of his friends doing other things, and with Zoe out of the picture. Even now he could be catching up on sleep, he thinks, although he knows that he would more likely be up until two in the morning, playing through Baldur’s Gate for the third time.

Impulse control has never been a particular strength of his, and it has been even worse since Zoe ended things. Getting up in time for class, doing homework, even leaving his dorm room to grab whatever half-hearted excuse for food is being served in the campus cafeteria – all of it has been a struggle.

And he knows that this is part of why he is driving home: to slip for a few days back into the role of the child, to let his mother dote on him and cook for him, to unshoulder his cares, even if only for one long weekend.

His mother was so obviously delighted when he called to ask if he could come home that, even if he wanted to change plans now, the guilt of disappointing her like that would not let him. He has not been home for over a year, spending his freshman holidays with Zoe or with friends, and working on campus over the summer.

What he has not told his parents is that he has stayed away from the little town of Ossa because he has never felt any pull to return. His childhood there was not especially unhappy, but with the slow transition into pubescence he had felt increasingly uncomfortable, both at school and at play. His lack of interest in football, hunting, underage drinking, or youth group – the only pastimes appropriate for a young man, in the eyes of the locals – had only increased his alienation.

And when he came to college, and met Zoe, and knew that her vibrant personality, rainbow hair, and outspoken views would never have a place in Ossa, he realized that it also held none for him, and never had. Like a hyperimmune response to its own cells, the town had rejected him – he was born a stranger to it, and would forever a stranger remain.

At least, that was true outside of the house he grew up in, and where his parents still reside. Unexpectedly, a surge of longing nostalgia for that old house of creaking timbers, of the healthily mingled smells of washing laundry, home cooking, of dryly aging wood and sheetrock, wells up within him, and he unconsciously presses his foot down a little harder on the gas pedal. He remembers the nights of wind whistling against the windowpanes, like an old and friendly ghost bidding him a gentle goodnight, and the relative solitude of the little acreage around the house, seeming more isolated by the encircling girdle of elm and blue spruce and black locust than it ever truly was, lying hardly a mile and a half from the outskirts of Ossa. And the quiet local cemetery, Serenity Hill, which lies almost perfectly halfway between the Briddle house and Ossa, shaded by ancient and carefully tended oaks and maples and lindens, had acted as yet another layer of insulation against the noisy, busy world.

The house and the acreage were like a small world unto itself, apart from the town and its people, apart from the dreary fields, dusty brown in the colder months and parched yellow in the summer heat, that surrounded them.

Dom is ready to sink once more into that quiet solitude, to let his mother feed him, to play chess with his father – and likely lose over and over again.

Outside, the chill October wind moans, low and long. A house, bedecked with orange and purple lights and electric jack-o’-lanterns in anticipation of the approaching holiday, flashes past, a brief light in all that wide, dark countryside.

[Brief pause]

NARRATOR

When he passes the sign welcoming him to Ossa, the digital clock on his dashboard display reads nineteen past ten. A feeling of malaise that has been settling around his stomach, which he at first put down to too much Red Bull and eyestrain from night driving, unfurls like ink drops blossoming in water.

A strange notion enters his head then, that he should simply turn his twelve-year-old Chevy Sonic around, or even just drive right on through town on the main highway, never stopping or making the turn toward his parents’ house. He scoffs at himself, rolls his head to work out the stiffness in his neck, and thinks that he desperately needs a real night of sleep.

He drives slowly through the suffused orange glow of the streetlights, hypervigilant for any lurking patrol cars. The local county number on his license plates will most likely protect him from any speed trap fundraising, but he remembers with great discomfort the time a state patrolman caught him doing twelve miles over when he came into town and made him prove repeatedly that he was not drunk, before finally letting him go with a ticket and what seemed to him then, as a sheltered high schooler with a paltry checking account balance, an excessively hefty fine.

There is no sign of patrol cars, local or state, to his relief. But what he does see as he casts his gaze over the houses and local businesses is that they all seem a little more decrepit than he remembers, and he wonders when this slow decay bespeaking neglect or poverty began. And yet, there is not a single detail he can isolate that marks a definitive change from the town as it lives in his memory, and he wonders if it has always looked like this, and it took leaving and returning to see it as it truly is.

All the while, that feeling of creeping illness spreads, now in his chest as much as his stomach. It feels like someone has begun to pile rocks on his ribs, one by one, slowly but inescapably crushing the breath and the life out of him.

He passes through town and out the other side, past the little cemetery. And it strikes him that, as a child, he was rarely afraid of the graveyard, or even aware of the eerie suggestions that proximity to such a place would so likely evoke in an imaginative child.

It is only now, as he passes by the darkly shaded place, lit only by a waning gibbous moon, that he feels a mild shiver curdling along his spine.

And as the darkling trees loom large on his left, his mounting nausea reaches such a crescendo that he has to pull over, pop open his door, and lean out, sure he is about to vomit. Nothing comes up, and the cool night air feels good upon his skin, but with every moment that he sits there, he feels a little worse. It is deeper than mere nausea now; he cannot draw enough air into his lungs, his heart gallops, even his brain seems to pound.

He has the awful thought that something is calling to him, something out in the dark, unnamed and undefinable.

When he glances back at the clock display, he sees that nearly eighteen minutes have passed in what felt like less than three. Dom closes the door and shifts back into drive, puts his wheels back on the pavement, noticing as he does so that his hands are quivering slightly. The sickness racing through his body is that of the adrenaline rush, of frightened prey, he thinks unpleasantly.

And yet, it begins to abate as soon as the cemetery is behind him, and only continues to recede as he drives. At once his mind connects the two things, and almost as immediately, he dismisses the association as absurd, as the dreamlike fancy of a sleep-starved mind surrounded by a sea of night country.

Only a few minutes later, he is pulling into his parents’ driveway, and looking up at the two-story farmhouse in which he spent his formative years. Strange, he thinks, how the house can look at once so familiar and so unlike the home of his memory. And he notes that it, too, seems somehow ill-kept: the white paint chipped and peeling, the wood underneath weathered grey by decades of desiccating sun and wind, the roof a patchwork of missing and broken shingles. And yet, once more, he cannot say that any single detail of this house is distinctly, certainly different from the one in which he grew up.

As he sits there in the driver seat, gazing up at the house, he becomes aware of the dark silhouette of his father standing on the front porch, limned indistinctly by the faint yellow glow of the living room lamp through the window behind him. The small red glow of a cigarette cherry dangles before the shadow of his father’s face. And though it is obscured by the darkness, Dom knows that his father will be smiling widely, as he always does when Dom comes home.

And now a feeling of guilt surges within him that he has been so long away, that he has let distance grow between him and the parents who raised him well, and kindly, better than so many parents in the world do for their children.

With this new tangle of feelings, the fading sickness and the eldritch sight of the moonlit cemetery are pushed from his mind. He pops open the door and steps out onto the weed-choked yard. The little Blue Heeler cross, Roo, who has served as guard dog for seven years now, runs to meet him gleefully, still remembering Dom despite his long absence. Roo dances and leaps around him, teeth flashing in a doggy grin.

Hey there, kid, his father calls from the porch, the ruddy orb of the cherry bobbing in the dark as he speaks around his cigarette.

As Dom climbs up the stairs, his father rises and greets him with a hug, strong and heartfelt, and Dom breathes in the smell of flannel shirts weathered by sun and wind and work, of tobacco smoke and Old Spice, of working-glove leather and sweet prairie dust.

It is the smell of his father, familiar and comforting. Yet underneath it, he senses another note, sweet and cloying and faintly putrescent, like lilies that have begun to decay.

They pull away from each other, gently, and his father asks him how the drive home was, how school is going, how he’s doing, and Dom answers with vague half-truths and with little white lies that are barely even conscious. It is a routine that is older than either of the two men on that porch, the ritual exchange of words that are meant to open, but instead close.

Then, they go inside, both tired and longing for their beds. Dom’s mother lies asleep on the couch, plainly having drifted off while waiting for his arrival, and before he and his father go up to their respective rooms, Dom delicately spreads a blanket over her.

[Brief pause]

NARRATOR

When he dreams, it is of the silver-lit graveyard beneath the trees, only in the dream the oaks and lindens are grown to monstrous proportions, as though overnourished by what leaches into the quiet earth between their roots, and their branches twist into grotesquely spasmodic contortions.

And his dream-self, wandering without true volition under those gnarled and deathly boughs, finds the darkness beneath them deeper than any he has ever known. That darkness teems with something he cannot quite hear and cannot quite feel, but perceives with some other sense that has no name outside of dreams.

It is the song that draws him, a song sung by no earthly voice, but like moonlight and winter and loneliness and the smells of freshly turned soil and decaying wood all translated into sound.

Dom wakes to bright sunlight streaming in through the window of his old bedroom, warming his bare feet. From the kitchen below issue the sounds of clinking crockery and the smell of frying bacon, along with the occasional murmur of muted conversation between his parents. Sliding out of bed, he pulls a fresh shirt and pair of sweatpants over his boxers, and heads downstairs.

He finds the table laden with pancakes and bacon and freshly fried eggs, and he grins despite his best attempt to stifle it. This is exactly the kind of weekend for which he hoped. His mother emerges from the kitchen long enough to give him a good-morning hug and a peck on the cheek, then dips back in to fetch the last of the bacon and pancakes, and a little bit of orange juice, coffee, and milk.

Dom offers her a heartfelt thank-you as the three of them sit to their morning meal, which tastes better than anything he has eaten for months. The fields outside the dining room window somehow seem more vibrant than he has ever seen them, the sunlight more perfect, and he feels lighter and more energetic than he can remember having ever felt before.

Yes, he thinks, this is exactly what he needed.

(Serene music)

NARRATOR

The feeling dissipates somewhat, though, when after about forty minutes of after-breakfast conversation, his mother remarks on what beautiful weather it is, and follows it up with the suggestion that maybe they should all walk down to the cemetery later in the day. His father says that he has a little bit of work to do over the remainder the morning, putting up temporary fencing in a rented cornfield to run his small cattle herd on during the lean winter months, but that sounds like an excellent idea afterward.

He also subtly hints that the fence-building would go faster with an extra pair of hands. With mixed feelings, Dom reluctantly volunteers to help, then even more hesitantly asks what the occasion would be to go to the cemetery.

His parents exchange glances, as though taken aback by the question. After a prolonged and uncomfortable pause, his mother answers that they must pay their respects, of course, and reminds Dom that her father, his Grandpa Winfred, who was so good to him when he was a boy and watched him often, is buried there, as is Dom’s paternal grandmother, Grandma Orelia.

Dom feels a little chagrined by the reminder, as if he wouldn’t remember where his beloved grandparents were laid to rest, and swallows any further questions. Still, the explanation hardly satisfies him. It is not any special date, not anywhere close to Memorial Day, he thinks, and this is decidedly not how he envisioned spending his fall break.

And more unsettlingly, he feels something worrying at the corners of his mind, an incomplete and unwelcome memory swirling around his conscious thought the way a hungry wolf circles a wounded elk.

An hour later, as he and his father work in the field of broken, picked cornstalks, Dom driving the pickup while his father pounds the steel T-posts into the hard earth, the memory slowly surfaces from the dark depths of his mind. He remembers sitting in the cemetery for hours at a time, sometimes alone, sometimes with his parents, sometimes with the other children from school. And he remembers hating those hours, and yet feeling trapped there, by expectation and obligation, and by… something else.

A shudder runs down his neck, and it has nothing to do with the cool breeze of early autumn. And once more, tendrils of oily queasiness begin to writhe amongst his innards, to wrap themselves tightly around his heart and lungs.

When the work is done, and his father climbs back into the beaten Ford F-250, Dom unconsciously drums an irregular rhythm on the steering wheel, and tries to think of how to even formulate the question he wants to pose.

Instead of taking the direct approach, he asks instead when Serenity Hill came into being. His father frowns at the question, not in annoyance, but confusion, almost as though he feels he should know the answer but cannot quite seem to summon it up from the depths of his mind.

Mr. Briddle turns and stares down into the dashboard before him, and slowly says that it was there before Ossa, that some of the first white settlers in the area began using the little plot in the latter half of the 1800s. It became a much more organized, and more extensive, place of interment when the town was founded, of course, the official date of which was 1889.

When Serenity Hill became what it is now, Mr. Briddle murmurs slowly, he isn’t at all sure.

Dom asks what that means, became what it is now, but his father does not answer. The older man turns away and looks out the window, and Dom almost thinks that he is crying, even though he cannot be sure he remembers ever seeing his father weep, even at his own mother’s funeral four years prior.

Putting the pickup back into drive, he crawls back onto the sparsely graveled country road and drives to the house, the silence in the cab unbroken all the way.

[Brief pause]

NARRATOR

The three of them walk toward Serenity Hill after a late lunch, Dom feeling increasingly uncomfortable while his parents converse calmly about daily mundanities, as though this were a normal Saturday afternoon outing.

The meatloaf sandwich in Dom’s stomach begins to churn threateningly as they draw closer to the burial plots, but he cannot be sure whether that is a mere psychosomatic self-fulfillment of his expectation, or some actual effect the place seems to have on him.

While he wrestles internally with that question, another family appears on the road walking from the opposite direction, coming from town. It is a youngish couple that Dom thinks he recognizes but cannot quite place, and two small children, running circles around their slow, heedless parents in the tireless way that children do.

The children squeal and chatter and laugh, and Dom feels queasier.

An elderly couple, seeming far too withered and frail to have walked so far from town, are standing near the entrance when the Briddles reach it, the stooped, thin old man chivalrously struggling to swing open the gate for his wife. When he sees the new arrivals, he smiles at them gummily, pleading with his eyes for help. Dom and his father move to shift the gate, which swings open easily now under their touch, and the old man thanks them with sincere and old-fashioned courtesy.

It is only at this moment, taking a close look at the old man’s eyes for the first time, that Dom recognizes them as belonging to Mr. Cizek, his high school math teacher. But the face around them is far too old, bearing the weight of at least two more decades than Mr. Cizek’s, when Dom last saw him.

His father’s polite response to the old man’s gratitude, however, makes it clear that it is indeed the teacher in whose classroom he sat but a few years ago.

When they have moved away from the others, Dom asks his mother lowly if something has happened to Mr. Cizek, if he is well. She hesitates, emitting a soft exhalation of pained sympathy, and then replies that Mr. Cizek’s daughter, Angela passed shortly after Dom left for college, apparently from an extremely aggressive cancer. It devastated her parents, his mother confides, and they have come to visit her grave every day since, rain or shine.

Despite himself, Dom glances back over his shoulder at the Cizeks. They stand before a pale pink marble plaque, gazing down at the earth and seeming to whisper, or perhaps to pray.

A few moments later, he and his parents are standing over his Grandpa Winfred’s grave, gazing at the grey and somber headstone. It is such an ugly thing, Dom thinks, such a poor way to mark the repose of a beloved soul, the end of a vibrant existence. He calls to mind, as best he can, the way his grandfather would smile at him when he visited, how he would always greet him at the door of his little house that smelled of cigar smoke and frying eggs and bacon with the same words: Hello, Dommy!

A hint of warm moisture washes his eyes, and he blinks it away. He tries to imagine that rough but kindly face, that once-hale body, resting peacefully beneath the heavy earth, but something unpleasant happens when he does. The face, so dear and wholesome in life, is changed, and not at all restful. The eyes are open, covered with a milky film of pale, putrescent blue, and yet somehow aware and eager, and looking up somehow through the intervening feet of earth at him. The mouth is slightly parted in a rictus of ravenous, feral want, and the whole face is mutated by a vampiric strain of utmost wickedness and cruelty.

Stupid, Dom tells himself, all stupid. His grandfather is likely nothing more than bones and earth now, having insisted on a natural burial in a simple pine coffin.

Yet the image, so viscerally clear and so vilely blasphemous, remains in his mind.

His parents lower themselves, somewhat awkwardly in their middle age, to sit upon the earth. Not knowing what else to do, Dom sits with them. What was earlier a subtle turning of his stomach is now a shock of toxic panic straining his heart, worming through his blood vessels. The memories of sitting in this place as a child, so unaccountably vague in his conscious mind, are clearer to his autonomic nervous system, and it tells him to flee, to run now and get far, far away.

And yet, now as then, he sits and waits, weighed down by the expectation of his parents, and that of Ossa. With each moment, the terror that stiffens his muscles and aches in his chest rises, but so too does the feeling of helplessness, and he cannot help but think that this is how a rabbit must feel, under the coyote’s gaze, in that frozen instant before blind flight.

(Unsettling music)

[Brief pause]

NARRATOR

When they finally leave the cemetery, Dom finds that the sun is still shining outside the shade of Serenity Hill, and is mildly surprised. It feels like they spent at least five hours lingering over the graves, Winfred’s and Orelia’s, and his Uncle Max’s, who hung himself in his garage with a blue heavy-duty extension cord when Dom was eleven. Then they visited the markers of more distant relatives, and finally those of people he never even knew, except through the words of his parents.

And through it all, not a single breath was spared to unnecessary conversation. An appalling gloom seems to hang over Serenity, Dom thinks, not only physical, but a sour murkiness that smothers the very soul.

As they step out into the sunlight, a robin’s-egg blue ’66 Ford Ranger rumbles past slowly, then turns off onto an unpaved access road, barely more than twin ruts in the prairie grass, that wends around to the north of the cemetery. Two men sit in the pickup bed, one of them with a pump shotgun resting on his knees.

Dom watches them disappear behind the cemetery’s walls of greenery, disbelieving his eyes. When they are gone, he turns and asks his father, a little more shrilly than he would like, what the hell that was about.

The watch, his father answers calmly, as though that is self-explanatory.

Dom closes his eyes and shakes his head, feeling suddenly exhausted, and turns the answer back around as a question.

Yes, his father purses his lips in mild irritation, the Serenity Hill watch. They’ve been around for years, he says, and Dom must have seen them before. The community put it together after the second vandalism incident in the cemetery, back in 1994.

Vandalism? Dom exhales incredulously. But even as he does so, he recalls vaguely something about a few headstones being damaged, even a grave or two partially excavated, some years prior. But that was over a decade later, he thinks, when he was still in high school.

Someone tried to set fire to the place, his father nods, his expression dark.

Dom looks back at the trees, and tries to imagine them aflame. Somehow, he cannot quite bring the image to mind, as though it is somehow beyond all possibility. The trees seem too dark, too richly nourished, too sordidly and immutably real, to burn.

And he says nothing of this to his parents, but as they walk back toward their house, Dom thinks that he can almost understand why someone might want to destroy that silent, secretive graveyard.

(Sound of low, moaning wind; eerie music)

[Long pause]

NARRATOR

Dom cannot sleep that night, but tosses under his bedsheets, sweating with more than just the unseasonable warmth. His mind keeps returning to Serenity Hill, to the stark and sudden image that had unfolded in his brain of his grandfather, changed and terrible, looking up at him hungrily from below, only now he imagines that every one of those gravestones marks a similarly transformed body, devoid of its former humanity. He thinks, too, of the revelations of the day, of the primitive and probably extralegal security force that patrols a lonely cemetery in a sparsely populated rural county, of the prior attempts at destruction of that same cemetery. The second such attempt, his father said, was in 1994, and Dom believes he vaguely recalls a third in his lifetime, but he wonders at the timing of the first, and at the unknown details and motives behind all three.

After midnight, tired of choosing between staring at the ceiling or burying his face restlessly into his pillow, Dom rises and moves downstairs, careful not to rouse his parents. Switching on the reading lamp in the living room, he pores over the bookshelves on the interior wall, without really even knowing what he hopes to find. The lower shelves are filled with a dated World Encyclopedia set and old school yearbooks from his parents’ youths, so he focuses instead on the upper shelves.

He pulls a few books of his grandmother’s down from the shelves, most of them on regional and local history, and skims through them distractedly. None of them seem particularly helpful, and he yawns and blinks blearily, feeling stupid now for giving up on sleep in favor of this fool’s errand.

He is overreacting, Dom tells himself. He must be. Just a bit of overactive imagination, and a few local oddities, which all communities have, big or small – there is nothing more to it than that. Resolving to go to bed and finally get some rest, he begins to put away the books when a new title catches his eye: a small octavo volume, seeming a trifle worn and perhaps not of the highest quality originally, the cover bound in dull brown buckram. On a panel of faded crimson paper attached to the spine, he reads the cramped title, detailed in tiny gold letters: Strange Happenings in the American West, by Ilie Gantz.

After a moment’s consideration, he extracts the book, opens it gingerly in mindfulness of its age and wear, and begins reading. Soon, all thoughts of returning to bed are banished from his mind.

[Short pause]

NARRATOR

When his mother descends, hours later, and finds him perched cross-legged on his father’s favorite easy chair, rereading the little volume in his hands, she asks if he is alright. Dom looks up at her, heedless of his pale face and of the shadows under his eyes. Yes, he says absently, he is fine, and then he goes back to reading. She offers to make breakfast, fried eggs and sausage and toast, but he doesn’t seem to hear her.

They gather in lonely places, he reads, and if left unchecked, will fester there like untreated wounds. All that was true of them in life is lost; they are utterly changed, and beyond all human understanding, but they hunger awfully for the vital energy that they no longer possess.

Slowly, Dom asks his mother when Serenity Hill was first defaced. She does not answer at once, but seems perturbed by the question, standing stiff and still as a wary doe. Softly, and with a bit of a bite in her words, she says that it was a long time ago, back before he was born.

When, Dom asks again.

Her lips become pinched and pale, and she says tersely that it was ’78 or ’79, she can’t remember for sure.

Undaunted, he asks if they ever found out who did it, or why.

Just high school kids, being young and stupid, she replies, and he knows from her tone that it is not the truth, but he also knows he will get nothing more from her. She asks him why he is fixated on such morbid things, and unable to check himself, he laughs aloud, and says that they just spent yesterday afternoon in a place filled with the dead, that he doesn’t think this can be more morbid than that.

His mother turns away and moves toward the kitchen, moving stiffly and pointedly not looking in his direction. The sounds of a pan being set upon the stovetop and the burner turned on are the only response he receives. All the sarcastic mirth of the previous few moments evaporates, and sitting alone in the living room, the old book still resting in his lap, Dom begins to weep silently, tears streaming down his cheeks while he sits and stares dully at the abstracted floral patterns on the carpet.

[Short pause]

NARRATOR

After an uncomfortably silent breakfast, Dom leaves the house, careful to bring his phone with him, and wanders out into the pastures where his father’s herd grazes during the warm months of the year. He moves toward the little hill a quarter mile from the near edge of the pastureland, ascending its gentle slope and relishing the solitude, and the sensation of the cool breeze, smelling of sweetly slumbrous, autumnal prairie grass, against his skin.

At the summit, he takes out his phone and prays that he will get a signal. The reception meter gives him one blinking bar, then two, and he tries to pull up the internet. It loads with agonizing slowness, but then the Google search page takes shape on his screen.

He types in the words 1978 serenity hill ossa nebraska, and waits for the results to load. This takes almost three times as long, and the first results that pop up do not fill him with hope. He has to scroll past two sites dubiously offering local yearbook results, numerous obituaries, an ad for a horse trailer, and a few recent Ossa Courier articles about the high school football team’s short-lived days of regional glory. But after all that, he finally finds something: an archived page from the Omaha World-Herald about Serenity Hill, dated October 29, 1978. But when he tries to pull it up, the site demands a subscriber login. Swearing, he jams his phone into his jeans pocket and turns to head back to the house, but the thought of sitting again with his suddenly cold and quiet parents, while the rising westerly wind whispers and mutters against the windowpanes, makes him pause. He pulls his phone out once more, and tries to pull up the article again. What he took to be a demand for a login is only a request for cookies, and he accepts it. The article, looking like a simple photocopy or maybe a digitally scanned microfiche, tells of the events of the preceding Friday night, October 27th, when four bodies were exhumed in the early morning hours, then decapitated and partially burned. Two names were mentioned as being detained by the local police force for questioning, Logan Hitchens and Ava Poulsen, apparently both high school juniors and sweethearts.

The brief article ends without further details. He tries searching for the full names of the mentioned Logan and Ava, but nothing new comes up, with the larger and distantly published World-Herald having apparently lost interest after the initial report of the bizarre crime, and the local Courier not having bothered to index its pre-2001 archive.

After a bit more fruitless searching, he turns and walks back the way he came. Three cows, Red Angus-Hereford crosses with the docile and friendly temperament his father has so carefully bred into his herd over the years, come to investigate his presence, and he lets them sniff his outstretched hand, and give it an appraising lick with their rough, huge tongues. Dom thinks how much easier such creatures, guileless even when following their most violent and destructive impulses, are to understand than humans, and looks toward the home of his childhood, wondering what secrets, what buried memories are housed within its aging walls.

[Short pause]

NARRATOR

His parents seem to have forgotten whatever resentment his questioning aroused in them when he reenters the house, his father looking up from reading the last issue of the weekly Ossa Courier and greeting him with a smile. From the laundry room, Mrs. Briddle asks him if he will help her fold the last batch of towels from the dryer. A little surprised by this change and unsure whether it is a relief or yet another concerning bit of weirdness, he agrees and moves toward the laundry room, his eyes passing over the bookshelves once more as he does so. Halfway there, he pauses midstride, seeing the yearbooks again and noticing that one is marked with the year 1978.

It cannot be his either of his parents’, he realizes, since they both graduated in the eighties. And his mind goes back to his Uncle Max, who he never got the chance to truly know well and whose face is a bit hazy in his recollection, but whom he remembers as smelling always of sawdust and coffee. He was a carpenter, and did occasional odd jobs on top of that, as far as Dom understands.

He continues into the laundry room and folds towels silently in concert with his mother for a while, wrapped in his thoughts. Uncertain as to whether he should ask and possibly disturb the recently restored peace in the household, he finally musters the nerve to ask her where some of the older high school yearbooks on the shelves came from. Rather than the icy frustration or even anger he feared, her face falls with old sorrow, and she says that they belonged to her oldest brother, his Uncle Max.

The confirmation of his guess brings him little satisfaction, and he wonders if he will have to wait until his parents have gone to bed again to look through them, still wary of upsetting them further. But as soon as they have finished putting away the freshly laundered bath towels, his mother pulls them from the shelves and asks him if he would like to look at them together.

He nods, and they move into the dining room and sit, paging through the yearbooks together as she tells him about the brother she lost. He loved to fish, she says, and to go to Colorado to camp in the mountains. Max was bad with money, unlucky in his sporadic love life, generous, creative, eternally curious, and a naturally gifted amateur comedian, but prone to episodes of paralyzing depression and occasional alcoholic binges.

And somehow, despite knowing that, she says tearfully, she never realized how bad things had truly been for him until he couldn’t take it anymore, and did what he did.

Dom reaches out and hugs her, forgetting now all of the confusion and hurt he felt earlier at her odd emotional stonewalling, and she cries into his shoulder for a few moments and says that she misses him, that she wishes she had just seen what was going on with Max and told him that things wouldn’t always be so hard, or maybe just listened to the hurt that he kept within him and felt he couldn’t share with anyone.

Gently, Dom tells her that it’s not her fault. She makes no reply. They sit there that way for a long moment, until her tears abate and she pulls away, eyes slightly pink and puffy. She sniffs, and rises to fetch a tissue. While she is gone, Dom looks down at the open yearbook, the 1978 one he hoped to investigate, which was the year Max graduated. He turns a few pages, looking at the messages from his classmates, and finds the one by Logan Hitchens’ portrait.

Stay strong, Max! They won’t have their claws in us forever! Your friend, Logan.

His eyes linger on the scrawled, slightly messy handwriting from a boy two grades behind the intended recipient, and wonders. To anyone else, it would seem a slightly rebellious but harmless message, even one of youthful hope and verve, but to him it reads very differently. And he wonders how Max read it, years ago, and if maybe the blue extension cord was the only solution he could find when those words proved untrue.

His mother returns, and follows his gaze down to the page with Logan’s message.

Poor Logan, she murmurs, and says that he was always a troubled boy, but that he and Max were always good friends, despite their age difference, two years seeming so much greater a gap when a person is young.

Hesitantly, Dom asks what became of Logan.

He was sent to the psychiatric unit of the Hastings Regional Center before he even finished high school, she answers. What became of him after that, she doesn’t know, but she thinks she heard somewhere that he died very young.

After a few moments, she gently closes the yearbook, and says that it’s time they started thinking about supper. He nods and offers to clear the table, and while she starts to make a beef stew in the kitchen, he puts away all of the yearbooks except the one from 1978. Instead, he sneaks that one into the bathroom, and paws through the pages, looking for another name. In the sophomores section, a few rows down from Logan, he finds Ava Poulsen’s picture. It too bears a smaller, neater message beside her signature.

Free soon!! it reads, with two exclamation points.

(Eerie, sad music)

[Short pause]

NARRATOR

After dinner, he tells his parents that he is going to drive to town and meet with some old friends from school at the little movie theater. They seem a trifle surprised, but offer no objection and even wish him a good time, so he feels more than a little guilty at lying to them as he walks out to his car.

Sitting behind the wheel for a moment, he pulls out his phone, hoping once again for a signal despite not usually being able to get one near the house. Miraculously, he has a full three bars. He pulls up the internet and searches the name Ava Poulsen, narrowing down the results by adding Ossa.

A few variations of the name appear, and he scrolls past them. Then comes the ancestry.com result, sparse, but giving him all he needs: born June 1960 in Ossa, Nebraska to Joseph Poulsen and Ellen Coen, died November 1978.

He turns the motor over and rolls down the long driveway, pulls out onto the main road.

They gather and fester like a wound, Dom recalls piecemeal, as he drives toward Serenity Hill. They are utterly changed, and hunger awfully for vital energy.

At first, he thought the strange old book perhaps referred to the familiar vampire legendry, but now he believes it is not something so easily defined, nor so predominantly corporeal. He has thought much of those half-remembered childhood hours, sitting above the graves in silence, in what he thinks he remembers being called contemplation.

What lives below, he thinks, is not his Grandpa Winfred, or Grandma Orelia, or Uncle Max. It is not anyone who was interred there – they are dead, gone forever beyond the reach of the living. But something has grown from the ruins of what they were, some spiritual putrescence perhaps, some gestalt mingling of their dead nervous systems’ residual psychic energies or maybe a potent carrion-feeding, parasitic entity beyond the pale of contemporary science, or something even less comprehensible to his limited primate brain. Dom cannot say what it is, but he is certain that something lives without life in the darkly shaded confines of Serenity Hill, and that its subtle tendrils stretch ever outward, to his parents’ house, into the heart of Ossa, wrapping themselves around and through the minds of the inhabitants the way tree roots invade old water lines.

Yes, he thinks, they all serve it. The watch, the worship, the feeding of the dead with the lifeforce of the young and the vital. The premature aging, the despair that drove his uncle to suicide, the desperate, intuited half-understandings that over the decades led to three different attempts to destroy the cemetery.

Not for the first time, doubt flashes through his thoughts. He has not been okay, he realizes, or perhaps he realized it long ago but only now admits it to himself. He has been languishing in despair and pain and confusion ever since things ended with Zoe, who had been his true anchor since leaving what seemed to be the safe, familiar world where he spent his formative years – safe and familiar, that is, if his suspicions are indeed groundless. And maybe he is flinging himself recklessly into pure fantasy to give his impoverished existence renewed meaning and purpose, or perhaps the rain of his grief has watered a seed of disordered thought, lying years dormant in his genome, and impelled it to finally germinate.

But then he thinks of his Uncle Max, of the plan that may have been hatched during his final spring semester of 1978, but that was for some reason not carried out until the fall of that year, by a couple of younger friends who seem to have acted without him. He thinks of the ruin that followed of those three lives, and that robbed him of the chance to ever truly get to know his uncle, who seems so exuberant in his mother’s memory. He thinks too of that local custom, so peculiar and seemingly unique to Ossa, of visiting the dead with such morbid frequency, of forcing even children to spend hours in macabre contemplation.

And the illness that came upon him so suddenly, he thinks, came before anything else, before any notions of eldritch hauntings in old graveyards: a first warning from his body’s subtle defenses, telling him of a danger he could not see nor even fully remember, despite having known it before.

No, he reassures himself aloud, he is not imagining this.

Despite the gathering gloom of falling night, he turns off his headlights as the trees of Serenity Hill loom closer, casting his gaze about for any sign of the cemetery watch. He finds none, but he is careful to pull well off the main road and park in a low hollow where his little car should sit reasonably unobtrusively, just in case.

Then, he fetches the tools he loaded surreptitiously from his parents’ garage and into the trunk earlier that afternoon: a spade, a sledgehammer that, judging from the cobwebs on its rusting metal head, has not seen use for some time, and a red, plastic five-gallon gas canister, mostly full. He checks to make sure the little matchbox he pilfered from the kitchen still rests in his pocket, and begins to carry his burden toward the burial grounds.

As he walks, careful not to trip in the uneven prairie sod, a fresh wind rises and rips at his clothing with sudden violence. It smells sweet and yet somehow cloyingly unpleasant, like funeral lilies left too long in their vases. The sudden wind’s fury seems to mount with each step forward he takes.

Most perturbingly, it seems to be coming from directly in front of him, from the dense oaks and maples and lindens, which themselves seem hardly touched by the air current while he, on their leeward side, is ravaged by it.

You will die here tonight, the words flow darkly through his mind, as though written there by some other will. You will die here tonight.

Still, he walks.

The low rumble of an ancient pickup engine flowers in the darkness to his left, and he turns to see weak headlights moving toward him along the main road, from the other side of the cemetery. Dom throws himself down onto the grass, hoping that whoever is in the pickup will not turn off onto the access road between him and the cemetery, and that if they do, they will not look too closely in his direction.

The engine’s growl becomes a roaring idle, and then is suddenly silenced. He hears the doors open, then more loudly, hears them shut again, and soft calls back and forth between the men who emerge.

Dom swears softly to himself, and looks up, peering into the darkness. Two flashlight beams sweep wildly over the prairie, moving ever closer to his pitiful hiding place. One of the men stops then and shouts to his companion, and Dom can make out the words car and here.

Swearing again, he pulls himself to his feet and begins to run toward the cover of the trees, hoping desperately that the watchmen will be too distracted by their new discovery to notice him, to hear the faint clanking of the tools on his shoulder or the sloshing of the gasoline in its container. The pulse pounding in his ears, and the wind that threatens to steal his very breath away, drown out both to his own hearing.

He reaches the fence, and dares one glance back. The flashlight beams are still some distance away, and seem to be directed elsewhere, but he does not give them further scrutiny. Climbing over the low white fence, he sinks into the shade of the trees, and that sickly sweet smell grows stronger.

The darkness under the trees is almost absolute, and he feels his way forward slowly, testing each step before committing. After a few paces, he bumps into a low grave marker, and stops. Now that he is here, he realizes that whatever plan he thought he had was embryonic at best, and that he has no notion of how to kill something that seems to have no true body. Disinterment, desecration, and incineration have all been attempted already, and failed, and suddenly the gear that he has brought, what mere minutes ago felt like weapons against evil, seem utterly insufficient, useless weight in his hands.

And as these thoughts are running through his head, the cries of the watchmen sound, much closer now. Panicking, he begins to run blindly through the cemetery, away from the voices. His foot brushes the edge of a blockish marker, and then he is falling, and stars and whorls of multicolored lights dance briefly across the curtain of black in his eyes, and then he knows nothing more.

[Short pause]

NARRATOR

When Dom is once more aware of himself, he finds that it is no longer fully dark. The faintest grey-blue light leaks down through the canopy of the overhanging trees, filtering through the leaves that are just now starting to turn toward gold and red and brown.

It must be dawn, or just after, he guesses. And shortly after having that thought, he becomes aware of an awful, throbbing pain in his skull, and a taste like cold pig iron in his mouth. He cannot seem to make his eyes focus, as if he has been awake for three days straight.

It takes him a few more moments to realize he is lying on something soft, and that he is not alone.

His father’s voice falls down softly from above him, from a face that is only a smear in his impaired vision, and says that he should not have done what he did. There is such boundless, hopeless sorrow in the voice, that Dom thinks he might cry. Maybe he is already, but his sight and brain are so addled, he cannot be sure.

His mother’s voice follows, telling him that they are so, so sorry, that they would change things, if they could.

Dom tries to tell them that they can change things, but his mouth isn’t working properly, and all that comes out is a strangled garble. Then he tries to rise out of whatever he is lying in, but he cannot feel his arms or legs, and is not sure if they are even obeying his commands. He remembers falling, and realizes that he must have cracked his skull on something, maybe one of the stone plaques, and cracked it quite badly.

Or maybe, he considers, one of the watchmen did this to me, and imagines the butt of a rifle jammed hard into the back of his head as he struggled to rise.

He turns his head painfully to one side, and though his sight remains blurry, he thinks that he might be lying in a coffin.

You will die here, he thinks.

A voice, which transports him momentarily back to grade school hours of dodgeball and jumping jacks and running laps, a kindly and authoritative voice, aged but not weakened, says that they have no choice, and that the dead must be properly honored.

Yes, the voice continues after a moment’s pause, they must be loved, and must be fed.

An indistinct figure looms over Dom, and the voice is a little clearer now as it says that sometimes, the dreams and the wants of the young and the hopeful must be sacrificed for the good of the greater whole, and that there is no future without the past. The old bones, he intones now, must be watered with the blood of children, so that the tree of life might forever blossom.

Stop, Dom manages to say, the word coming out awkward and muddled, but still coming out.

Sleep well, the man above him says, and then the dim light and the silhouettes illumined thereby is blotted out, and there is a vague sense of motion, and the sound of small impacts, fading slowly as though receding into the distance.

Dom wonders if Logan ever really went to Hastings, or if he and Ava were buried alive just as he is now, and if they were laid to unrest side by side, or even in the same casket. He wonders if their graves were marked in any way, or if his will be, and if watching his friends lowered into the earth was another reason for Max’s final attempt at escape.

The darkness around him seems somehow alive, curdling and teeming with speechless malignity. Dom finds himself hoping that his untreated brain injury will claim him before suffocation or thirst do. For a moment, he considers screaming, but even if he could summon up his voice, who would hear him, and who would be swayed by it?

So many questions swirl in his mind, and he closes his eyes as though to blot them out.

Will Zoe miss him, or the handful of friends he’s made during his two years on campus? Or will they simply think he has transferred, or dropped out, and churlishly not offered even a parting word, and forget about him by year’s end? Or, perhaps, will they not even notice his absence at all?

I will die here, he says aloud, and laughs a little hysterically. I will die as a living sacrifice to the dead, and to what was born of the dead.

Silence is his only answer.

Some time later, perhaps a few minutes or perhaps a few hours, he says, Another failure.

But no, he thinks, maybe not quite. There are only so many times that young people can unaccountably go missing, especially in this age of high-speed information, before someone beyond the thing’s reach notices. And even here, its hold is not absolute: four times now has it been openly defied, and surely it will be again.

Perhaps the fifth, or the sixth, will finally break the town and its children free from the bondage that has so long lain over Ossa and the surrounding countryside. A strange sense of calm settles over him then, perhaps the settling of his bleeding and oxygen-starved brain into a final sleep, and he folds his hand upon his chest and waits for whatever is to come.

Someday, Dom says, smiling into the dark.

[Darker Pastures theme fades in]

NARRATOR

If you enjoyed today’s story, please help spread our darkling prairie range to wider horizons by rating or reviewing wherever you listen, and by sharing with family, friends, and co-workers. If you’re feeling very generous, you can also support the show directly at darkerpastures.buzzsprout.com or at Patreon. Who knows, perhaps someday not so distant, such wicked sowing may yield a grim harvest?

Thank you for listening. We’ll meet again… in darker pastures.

[Darker Pastures theme continues]