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Sometimes retirement for celestial and occult entities means a quaint cottage with heated floors and built-in bookcases and afternoon tea taken in the flourishing garden while the smell of the sea wafts over on the breeze. This is not that kind of retirement.
***
Mr. Derendorf shades his eyes with his hand, looking for a dust cloud on the flat expanse of the horizon to signify an approaching vehicle. He checks his watch. The man he’s meeting is nearly half an hour late. [1]
Mr. Derendorf shakes his head. “Fucking Zillow people.” His stomach lurches and he clutches at with a groan, wishing he hadn’t stopped for breakfast at Taco Hut Blast and wishing even more that the plumbing at this listing was even nearly as functional as the ad online claimed.[2]
Of course this kind of …unique…property got a lot of phone calls and appointments but mostly the attention was from people thrilled by the absurd, with no real intention of buying. It has been on the market for over a year now with no sign of moving. Derendorf checks his watch again, and turns back to the truck, a full cab Ford 450 with surround sound, a sunroof, an engine that exceeds the collective horsepower of every livestock barn within a 50 mile radius, and the carbon footprint of a small European nation. He is contemplating a rather urgent applied math problem,[3] when all of a sudden the man is just there.
“Hi,” Derendorf says, “I ah didn’t see you drive up. You must be mister—“
“HASTURRRR” the man says, voice dripping like a slab of bloody meat, reverberating with the whine of a swarm of locusts intent on eating not just the crops but also the flesh off the bones of anyone foolish enough to be outside. The outline of his body wavers in the hot sun, and it seems as though he is somehow oozing, transforming, long fingers dripping dark into the soil, shoulders rising, creeping upwards to blot out the sun itself…
Derendorf blinks and it’s just a man standing in front of him in a shabby overcoat that looks—and smells— like it hasn’t been washed in a decade. Wow I really should not have eaten that rancho gordo CHOW supreme burrito, he thinks.
***
Old habits die hard. Harder, it turns out, than Ligur who gave up the ghost quite easily to less than a quart of holy water. Although “gave up” is itself a bit of a misnomer. Faced with the prospect of mortal annihilation, his ghost followed homing instincts to the place in this earthly realm that most closely approximates Hell below. Unfortunately for Mr. Derendorf, it turns out that this place is Kansas.
***
“And here you’ll see the entrance to the old command office,” the human says, sweating profusely as he opens the door of an unobtrusive concrete building to reveal stairs descending steeply into blackness. “The missile silo is a few hundred yards over there.” The man points into the distance, revealing a rapidly growing pit stain. “The missile was removed years ago and the complex has been empty since. It’s a bit of a fixer upper…but you could have a unique business opportunity…” the man’s eyes briefly roll back in his head, the whites of them flashing, but like a true capitalist, he soldiers on. Honestly, Hastur is impressed. “You could even do an Airbnb or a bed and breakfast. The property is being sold as is which means you waive….the right to…oh no…” he clutches at his stomach doubling over. Hastur ignores him and peers down the stairs into the earth.
Ligur? He thinks, tentative. Something deep in the darkness below thinks back. Hope crawls up his spine, leaves an unfamiliar fizzy taste in his mouth, makes him sneeze.
“I’m so, so sorry,” the human is saying. “My breakfast is really not agreeing with me—“
“I’ll take it.” Hastur says, still staring down at that darkened stairway, still reaching out for the thing that had reached back.
“You will? Really? You don’t want me to vehemently deny the series of brutal murders that took place here in the 1990s and then sell you on the growth potential in the abandoned military-industrial market share, which, incidentally is valued at over—”
“I’ll take you up on breakfast too,” Hastur says, ignoring him and unhinging his jaw.
***
It’s easy to settle into a kind of domesticity together. Far easier than Hastur would have ever imagined. Ligur lurks, a shadow, in the corners of the curved walls. Hastur licks at the peeling plaster frequently and emphatically, feels rather than sees the pleasant ripple of transgression from Ligur’s direction as he savors the taste of freedom for them both. The pipes drip and hiss. The silo still smells pleasantly of radiation. In the mornings, Hastur likes to lie down on top of the blast doors and think about them opening, the whole earth blown to smithereens, the end of the world that they had deserved and been denied. Ligur does not like to come out in the sunlight, but he will hover beneath the blast doors as Hastur lies on top of them and occasionally his front will press up against Hastur’s back through the cold metal.
The official map at the county courthouse (Hastur had seen it when he got peckish and stopped in to eat a notary) labeled their home as “decommissioned.” Hastur thought about that word later, as he slouched on the old control panel where there were two large red buttons, separated by more than a single humans’ arm span. If pressed simultaneously, they ought to have made the birds fly.
Are we decommissioned? Hastur thought at Ligur.
Dunno, thought the shadow that was Ligur. Are we?
Hastur thought they might be, but the thought didn’t bother him the way it should have. It wasn’t so bad being decommissioned. It wasn’t so bad being decommissioned with Ligur.
Come here, he thought. Taste the notary I ate today. He spent twenty years taking bribes. I know how much you love the taste of greed.
How can I eat? I don’t have a mouth.
Come here, Hastur thought again and then Ligur was there, lodged behind his breastbone where a heart ought to be.
Yeah,‘s tasty, Ligur thought and then the weight of his shadow shifted. He reached out. Hastur reached out. There were two separate buttons, and when pressed simultaneously, who knew what would happen? Maybe the birds would fly. Maybe the world would end. Maybe it would be remade as something else entirely.
***
They say the old missile silo on Country Road 666 is haunted. They say that schoolboys joyriding their dirt bikes out that way don’t always come back, and that even grown men sometimes disappear on that narrow lonely road, leaving their trucks empty to be found in the ditch come morning.
They say that Farmer Jenkins drove his cattle down there by accident once and only half the herd returned. Depending on who you talk to, the ones that came back were either clean skeletonized or else had the flesh stripped from their backs, hanging in bloody curtains by their sides.
Jack Whitney, the preacher, liked to give fire and brimstone sermons warning that sinners would find their end on County Road 666, so when he disappeared one night, you can bet people around town had a lot to say about it.
No one really knows the truth of those stories, but just the other day the reclusive old man who bought the place nailed up a sign at the entrance to the long drive.
“The Hungry Toad and Peckish Chameleon” the sign says. “An All-Inclusive Bed and Breakfast.”
So if you really want to know if the old missile silo is haunted, stay there and find out for yourself.
—-----
NOTES:
1.Death might always come on time, but the devil (or, in this particular case, a high ranking employee of the same) makes no such promises.↩
2. The owner of Taco Hut Blast, one Mr. Sable Black, would be disappointed to learn that Mr. Derendorf’s current predicament has nothing to do with his breakfast and everything to do with a “little whoopsie” by one Mx. Chalky White forty odd years ago that should have designated this piece of land as a superfund site had not someone (to wit, the very same Mx. Chalky) misplaced the paperwork. ↩
3. If it takes Mr. D 30 minutes to drive home but there is a 50 percent chance he will evacuate his bowels on the nice leather seat of his father-in-law’s truck, is it mathematically better for his dignity to just shit behind that bush by the Quonset hut, yeah that one right over there with the spindly little branches that absolutely won’t cover his bare ass but might break up the silhouette just enough that passers by on the road could reasonably mistake the flash of pale cheeks for a rare species of ground bird? ↩