Blue

In a lonely saloon on the 1888 western Kansas prairie, a man recounts an incredible tale from his childhood – one which has no clear beginning, and no definite end.

***Content Warning: This episode deals with themes of disease, disfiguration, decay, and familial loss, and contains explicit descriptions of physical violence and body horror. Listener discretion is advised.***

Transcript

[Darker Pastures Theme - Intro]

NARRATOR

Before we delve into today’s episode, a special thank you to the show’s most recent supporters: Austin, thank you so much for your sacrificial offering to the spreading shadows. May they forever turn their darkling hungers from your doorstep. And thank you very much to Nick Holton, who has wisely secured a sheltered pasture far from the paths of that which prowls the prairie night.

Genuinely, thank you. The show could not continue without your generous contributions and enthusiastic support.

NARRATOR

Episode 50: Blue.

[Short pause]

NARRATOR

Aeneas Brearley sits at the far end of the bar, slowly nursing a glass of cheap whiskey, his eyes darting every few seconds toward the saloon door. He is a slight man, whose lined and windbitten face is hard to assign a definite age – the general impression is that of a youth barely past twenty, and yet the haggardness of the features, especially around the eyes, suggests at least twice that many years, spent mostly in rough living.

The barkeep, a bald and heavyset man with a thick black moustache, eyes his sole patron with the same nervous mistrust, his stubby fingers itching to leave the glass he is reflexively cleaning and reach under the bar for the cut-down shotgun stowed there.

Aeneas suddenly picks up his glass and drains its remaining contents in one final gulp, and then, without taking his grey and almost colorless eyes from the door, begins to speak aloud as if continuing a conversation that was never begun. As he speaks, the barkeep’s hands still, though his eyes grow even more strained with disquiet.

[Short pause]

NARRATOR

In 1877, Aeneas was only ten years old. Up until that point, as far as he can remember, he had known only the usual hardships of life on the prairie. But in the spring of that year, both his father and his fifteen-year-old brother Cato were stricken with smallpox. By some small miracle, both Aeneas and his mother were spared, but this left all of the work of their little Kansas hog farm, not to mention caring for the sick men, in their hands.

After his father passed, Aeneas’s mother, in desperation, left the farm to fetch the nearest doctor, who was an old Union Army sawbones better at treating injury than illness, and better at removing limbs than saving them. Still, he was the only doctor for fifty miles around.

And so, after she saddled the horse and rode eastward, Aeneas was left alone in the little sod house with his ailing brother, while the freshly turned soil of their father’s shallow grave behind the house slowly settles.

That first afternoon alone was not so bad. Between taking care of his barely conscious brother inside, and seeing to the animals outside, Aeneas was too busy to ruminate on their solitude, their vulnerability, without any adult present. But when the day began to fade toward a purple twilight, and the last of the work aside from feeding himself and Cato was finished, his thoughts began to wander into darker spaces.

With the rising of the wind that accompanied nightfall came a dread that not all of the sounds without were indeed merely wind, and a mounting fear that the rattling wooden door would suddenly burst open with some unknowable invasion. And the more he thought about this as he labored over a pot of thin vegetable soup, the more he began to fear that his very imagining of this would make it come true, and yet he could not stop his mind from fixating on this terrible potentiality. And after he had fed Cato, spooning the soup patiently into his older brother’s mouth, cleaned up the kitchen, and settled into a makeshift bed of blankets on the floor before the warm woodstove, he still could not stop his ears from pricking with every rising keen of the wind, every shifting of the roof, could not stop waiting for the door to creak horridly in opening.

[Short pause]

NARRATOR

Another day passed, much the same as the first. During the day, Aeneas’s work, far too cumbersome for a boy his age to complete on his own, is only occasionally interrupted by his looking over the eastern prairie for any sign of his mother’s return, with or without the doctor. As the sun slowly sank westward, it felt like something dark and eyeless began to gnaw at the underside of his stomach, making him feel both queasy and tingly inside.

He reheated what soup remained that night, which was hardly enough to feed both him and his brother. After he’d taken a few spoonfuls, just enough to warm his belly and quell the pangs of emptiness, he moved across the room to once more dole the rest to Cato. Only when he stood over his brother’s bed did he note that the flattened pustules on Cato’s skin had turned a strange bluish-grey color, and that there was no perceptible movement of his chest. His hands went suddenly numb, and the pot fell to clatter dully on the earthen floor, its watery contents spilling and slowly seeping into the hardpacked soil.

At this sudden noise, Cato’s eyes flickered open weakly, and he gazed up at his young caretaker with no sign of recognition. A brief frown of confusion flitted across his rash-marred features, but this lasted only a matter of seconds, and then his face slowly relaxed as his eyes drifted closed once more.

Only slightly relieved by this brief sign of life, Aeneas leaned forward to listen closely to his brother’s breathing, which was very slow and very shallow, and accompanied by a faint wet wheezing. As he listened, he noticed that Cato’s belly bulged beneath the blankets, and his young mind could not make sense of this given how little he and his brother had eaten over the past two days.

Cleaning up the soup and the pot as best he was able, Aeneas tried again to feed Cato the last crust of the bread his mother had baked before she left. A few delicate patches of bluish-green had begun to appear at the edges, but it was the last of the readily available food left in the house, and their mother had told Aeneas to be sure to feed his brother well in her absence.

Cato took only two bites of the bread, chewing and swallowing it very slowly and with great difficulty, and had then refused to take anything but cool water to drink. Even on this, he choked and spluttered feebly, and after Cato sank back into his unrestful slumber, Aeneas retreated to his corner by the stove and began to cry quietly. Feelings of helplessness at last overwhelmed him, and he wondered how much longer he must endure before his mother would return, afraid that each hour would bring his brother’s death through some unknown failing on Aeneas’s part.

He took a few mouthfuls of the molding bread afterward, before settling in to sleep. Sleep did not come readily, however, as the wind continued to shrill and whine around the house, with even more fury than the previous night.

Then the door burst suddenly open, and a wind more appropriate for a December night than one in April ripped and swirled throughout the little soddy, howling like a dozen great wolves driven mad with hunger and rage. With this wind came a potent stench, the likes of which Aeneas had never encountered before, but which made him think of a broad black lake filled with innumerable festering animal carcasses. The wind’s fury seemed to focus around the bed, pawing wildly at the blankets piled there. Cato’s limp form began to judder and convulse savagely, as Aeneas once saw an injured horse do after it was shot, only this lasted for many long minutes.

Then, as suddenly as it came, the wind fell completely still, and so too did Cato. Aeneas waited for a long time, his heart pounding, making his wrists and his throat throb almost painfully with a thunderous pulse.

At last, he began to move toward the disheveled bed and the haphazardly sprawled body upon it. Cato’s pose was so unnatural, so awkward, that Aeneas felt a mounting certainty that the very worst had happened. When he reached the bedside, he again leaned downward, this time actually placing his ear on Cato’s chest. He could discern absolutely no heartbeat, no stirring of the lungs, through the thin fabric of Cato’s long johns. The flesh beneath seemed appallingly cool.

Even so, the body began to stir under his touch. Clumsily but with a strange, slow strength, Cato pushed him away, and began very slowly to sit up in the bed. Utterly expressionless, he cast a dull gaze around the house interior, his eyes glinting very faintly in the dim radiant light of the smoldering stove fire.

Hesitantly, Aeneas breathed his brother’s name, more a question than a form of address. Cato did not respond, seeming as if he has either not heard or not registered any meaning in the syllables.

Rising and moving still with that complete lack of coordination, Cato stumbled toward the stove, seeming fascinated by the ruddy glow of the embers. Aeneas reached out to hold him for just an instant, disturbed by his brother’s perfect wordlessness. With that same deliberate strength he showed moments before, Cato wrested his arm free from Aeneas’s light grasp, and Aeneas saw clearly then that the rash must have broken open under Cato’s undergarments, as dark stains were slowly spreading over patches of his sleeves and around his neck. A small trickle of blood was even dribbling out of the left side of his mouth and running down his chin.

Cato, Aeneas repeated, trying to reassert some measure of rationality to the situation. Please, come back to bed.

Cato continued shuffling toward the woodstove, unresponsive. When he reached it, he grasped fumblingly at the heavy iron door, seeming not to feel any of its heat even as an unpleasant smell of burnt hair and flesh tinged the air. Wrenching the door open, Cato began to reach inward with a clawed hand, trying to grasp the glowing embers within. Crying out in wordless horror, Aeneas ran toward him, trying with all of his meager weight to pull his elder brother away from his insistent self-injury, but once more Cato shrugged him off without making a single sound.

It was at that moment that their mother cried out from the doorway, and she and the doctor rushed in to take hold of Cato, finally managing between the three of them to carry Cato back to the bed.

As the doctor began to inspect Cato, their mother berated Aeneas for letting the sick boy hurt himself so foolishly. And yet, all Aeneas could feel at that moment was relief at her return.

[Long pause]

NARRATOR

That relief, however, would soon sour. The doctor, after listening at Cato’s chest for a long while, furrowed his brow in alarm. As he felt for the boy’s pulse, then unbuttoned the long johns to inspect his torso beneath, his frown only deepened. He looked at the burned hand, which was curled and blackened, and then took a candle to peer closely into the boy’s eyes, waving the small flame slowly to and fro before them.

Aeneas’s mother left off scolding him then to ask the doctor how her older son was faring. The doctor did not answer at once, but sat with his back to her, staring down at Cato with a look of profound disquiet. Then, slowly, he rose, and said that there was nothing for him to do here.

The illness, he said, had drawn to its conclusion.

Mrs. Brearley’s voice brightened then, and she thanked the doctor profusely. The doctor shook his head, but strangely refusing to look at the woman, his gaze transfixed on the pox-ridden boy. Cato seemed to have forgotten about the fire that had so fascinated him under the doctor’s ministrations, and now simply lay there, staring up blankly at the ceiling.

Too late to be of any help, the doctor said thickly.

He began to move slowly toward the door, now fumbling for words, finally sputtering out that he had many miles to ride to minister to his next patient. The freshly widowed woman told him to at least stay for a bit to eat and a few hours of sleep, but the doctor insisted that he could not spare even a single moment more.

As he reached the door, Mrs. Brearley arrested him with the question of what treatment he suggested as Cato convalesced. For the first time since entering the house, the doctor looked toward her, and said that no treatment at all was necessary for the boy’s sake, but he did suggest that Cato be removed from the household and placed in the full care of devoted and learned experts, for the health of Mrs. Brearley and young Aeneas.

There was a very good place back east, he said, in a place called Battle Creek, Michigan. Very modern, and more able to help the boy than any prairie doctor, or any hardworking pioneer family could afford.

Mrs. Brearley’s joy instantly evaporated at this pronouncement, and she struggled to find a response. The doctor looked hurriedly away, and told her once more, very firmly, that she must send the boy away for, as he curiously put it, the sake of the living.

Then he slipped out the door, and moments later, he could be heard mounting his horse and riding eastward, his horse’s hoofbeats gradually fading into the quiet of the now calm prairie night.

Mrs. Brearley stood looking at the empty, open doorway for a few seconds, seeming completely baffled. Then she strode toward it and closed the door with far more force than necessary.

When she turned back toward the interior, Aeneas could see the streams of tears on her cheeks glistening in the candlelight. They were not tears of sorrow, he realized even then, not precisely – they were tears of utter and helpless bewilderment.

[Short pause]

NARRATOR

The days that followed were harder still. The changes in Cato became more and more pronounced. The burned hand refused to heal, instead first desiccating, and then slowly disintegrating. Not once did Cato again show any interest in eating, or any sign of sleeping, only often falling into a state of inactive stupor when his interest was not piqued by some external source. What would exercise this effect on him made little sense to Aeneas – aside from open flame, small songbirds flitting outside the windows or the young rabbits racing across the yard would capture his attention, but the raucous choir of the pigs in their pen, and the horse and milk cow in the small barn, went wholly unheeded.

When his mother put Aeneas on the horse and sent him to the surrounding farms for help with working the small field which provided much of the fodder for the swine, he found that many of the neighbors would greet him cordially enough, but all of them had some reason that they could not leave their work, could not visit the Brearley house. When he returned home late that evening, his mother muttered darkly about the doctor and his loose tongue, and did not once again make any mention of their neighbors.

When Cato began to display increasingly overt violent tendencies anytime his inexplicable desires were thwarted, Mrs. Brearley took to shutting him in the pantry, which was now almost completely bare. This made containing Cato easier, but it seemed to only worsen his mother’s growing despair. Some days, she would not even rise from bed, would not answer Aeneas when he tried to speak with her. Even when she did, she would do little but wander listlessly around the house or the yard, hardly providing any help with the farmwork that only continued to outpace Aeneas’s limited capabilities.

And at night, they both had to endure the near-constant sounds of Cato clawing and bumping within the pantry. Privately, Aeneas wondered in those dark and restless hours how the rudimentary door, and the chair propping it closed, have managed to hold him so long, given the prodigious and sometimes self-destructive strength Cato has displayed since the change overtook him.

[Short pause]

NARRATOR

On the fifth day after Cato’s imprisonment began, the pantry door finally opened.

It happened in the grey of the dawn, just before the sun rose. Aeneas woke to the ominous groaning and then the cataclysmic crack of overstressed timber, and knew at once what it meant.

The shambling form of Cato, featureless in the dark, lumbered into his field of vision. He moved with even greater awkwardness than before, groping as though he has lost his sight.

Behind him, Mrs. Brearley rose from her bed. There was the sound of a scratch and flare sound of a struck lucifer match, and then a slight blossoming of flame as she lit a bedside candle and held it aloft.

A faint choking sound caught in Mrs. Brearley throat as her eyes fell upon what had become of her eldest son. Cato, whose face had taken on an almost purplish cast and whose long johns were now darkly stained with unmentionable leakages, turned milky blue eyes toward the sound of her movement, eyes which seemed only barely to perceive the small point of flame. As he began to stumble toward her, Aeneas caught the first wave of the nauseously rancid scent rolling off of what was once his brother, a smell like mounds of raw pork left a week too long in a dank cellar.

No, darling, was all Mrs. Brearley has time to say, before Cato was upon her, trying to take the lit candle from her hand. Then she was too busy trying to keep the flame away from his grasping fingers, truly a struggle for her since even at fifteen, Cato was already a few inches taller than her.

Aeneas ran forward to try and help her, wrapping his arms around Cato’s waist and trying with all his meager might to pull his brother away from her. With his face pressed into the small of the larger boy’s back, the putrid fetor filled Aeneas’s nostrils, and the sheer revulsion physically sickened him. Try as he might, he could not shift Cato’s mass, just as he felt the bile rising up his gorge, Cato kicked him away, hard.

Aeneas fell to the floor, starbursts swirling in his vision, and he struggled not to vomit. When next he became aware of his surroundings again, both Cato and Mrs. Brearley were on the floor as well, the son throttling his mother with those horrifically powerful but senseless hands.

The toppled candle beside them guttered and faded in concert with Mrs. Brearley’s frantic struggles. Pulling himself to his feet, Aeneas moved toward the gun rack formed from old antlers on the wall, reaching for the double-barreled shotgun there, the one which his father always forbade him so sternly from touching. It was too high for him to reach, and tears of frustrated desperation clouded his vision as he seized the overturned chair that once barred the pantry door and dragged it toward the wall.

Mrs. Brearley had long since stilled by the time that Cato let go of her crushed throat. The boy then simply paused there, crouched over the body of his mother, seemingly unaware of his outburst and forgetting the fascination that had prompted it.

It was to this sight that Aeneas, taking at last the shotgun down into hands barely capable of supporting its length and bulk, turned, still standing on the creaking wooden chair. His eyes grew wide in the darkness as he tried to absorb every detail of the benighted house, as he tried to convince himself that the image that lay before him was a phantasm of the dark.

Mama? he breathed, his voice coming out small and choked.

Neither of the figures on the floor offered any response, any sign they’d heard him. Again, Aeneas called to her, louder this time. As the silence stretched wide, he sank down into the chair, sobbing. The shotgun fell, forgotten, from his overburdened hands, and when as it struck the floor, one of the barrels discharged into the wall with an ear-shattering blast.

Cato lurched to his feet with the first utterance he’d made since the night of the howling winds and the doctor’s belated arrival, a sort of prolonged, rattling, semiliquid hiss. Apparently bewildered by the accidental shot, he staggered toward the door, striking and tearing at it until it swung open. Then he was running out into the prairie, brightly lit by the new moon, his heavy and uneven footfalls fading into the gentle whisper of the breeze-stirred grass.

For a long time, Aeneas did not stir from the chair. When he did, it was to descend to the floor and crawl to his mother’s side, gently shaking her as if to rouse her from a slumber. Again and again he called to her, though from the thin illumination spilling through the open door, he could see the terrible dark contusions and long fingernail gouges on her neck, could see that her heavily bloodshot eyes stared sightlessly at the ceiling, her face locked in an expression that was as full of confusion and sorrow as it was of terror.

Later, he would not be able to say how long he remained there, trying hopelessly to bring his mother back from the death that settled into her cooling flesh, or how long after he finally buried here he had lain on the powdery, freshly turned dust of her crudely dug grave, watering it with silent, intermittent tears. Nor would he know if it was the following day, or several after, when he found his brother in the yard, intently tearing apart one of the chickens as though looking for some hidden treasure inside of it.

Aeneas left him that way, part hoping Cato would be gone when he returned with the loaded shotgun, but he was not. Cato looked up at him with those milky blue eyes, innocent as a newborn kitten’s, and registered nothing at all on those drooping, grey, pox-scarred features, nothing except perhaps mild interest. His expression changed not at all when Aeneas asked him what he was now, and why he killed their mother.

As Aeneas laboriously raised and aimed the twin barrels, he thought he saw a single tear form at the corner of Cato’s left eye, until it fell writhing to the new spring grass. It was a maggot, he saw then, and in a flash of understanding too advanced for his years, he knew that Cato had been dead the night the door blew open and that strange wind invaded the house, knew that the doctor had had recognized this too, and that whatever now animated Cato’s putrefying husk, it would never again be the brother he’d known.

His fingers squeezed both triggers, summoning thunderous ruin.

[Short pause]

NARRATOR

The bartender swallows hard. He realizes he has been holding the glass and dishcloth in motionless hands for what must have been almost half an hour now, and he glances around the saloon, worried that he might’ve missed a new customer in his engrossment. The room is just as deserted as it was when the stranger began his strange and hideous story.

That’s quite the yarn, the bartender says, swallowing again. His throat is so thick that he feels compelled to partake of his own wares, and he sets down the long-since cleaned glass and pours a generous three fingers of whiskey into it, throws it back.

Aeneas Brearley stares at the darkly polished oak of the bar top, his own glass dry now, and makes no reply.

Clearing his throat, the bartender asks what became of Cato, more because he finds Aeneas’s silence still more unbearable than his hoarsely related tale, than from any true desire to know its epilogue. The poor man, he thinks, belongs in a sanatorium, just like the doctor in his mad tale suggested for the older brother.

Two things happen then which make the portly bartender very afraid. Aeneas makes a low, rhythmic clacking sound in his throat which it takes the barkeep several seconds to recognize as laughter, made all the more difficult by the fact that Aeneas’s expression is one of utter despair and mortal fear. And through this hellish laughter, the haggard man, whom the barkeep is now sure can hardly be old enough to shave regularly, says that he was a fool to think that a shotgun could put down something that could wear his brother like a Sunday suit.

And just as the barkeep absorbs his meaning, the saloon doors sing on their hinges, wafting an unutterable charnel stench toward them. The barkeep drops his glass, which shatters loudly on the floor, as he gazes into the bluish leather of the desiccated, eyeless face his newest customer wears.

(Bleak music)

[Darker Pastures Theme - Outro]

NARRATOR

If you enjoyed today’s story, please rate, review, and share. If you’re feeling particularly generous, you can support the show on our Patreon page or at darkerpastures.buzzsprout.com, and unlock special subscriber-only content. Thank you for listening. We’ll meet again… in darker pastures.

[Darker Pastures Theme - Outro - Continues]