Broadside

Broadside

Silver, dark, custed-up, ancient ashtrays needed to make a comeback. Hot rods needed to make a comeback.

Cram soared along the empty highway, pushing 130. One of the benefits of being in this county for his entire life was that he knew when and where the porkos would be. If a serial killer ever figured out their simple and unrefined routines of Milligan and his bootlickers, there’d be a lot of bodies piling up. Fuck, they wouldn’t even notice unless the person was a) white, b) an attractive woman, and c) someone they knew.

The only thing they were good for was protecting the dark monolith binding all these Podunk towns in this growing infamy.

That damn, cursed barn.

From a distance, the barn was just another dilapidated building that city folk gawked at on their way to their million-dollar cottage. Up close, it was the Amish version of Fort Knox.

The three, idiot, Gen-Z YouTubers had somehow come across the Mack homestead. Cram had managed to find out very little in his own research and was surprised these three, who had probably never stepped inside a library, had stumbled across it.

In their video they found the sign hanging by what would’ve been the main entrance doors, underneath the hayloft. The wooden plaque had been all but erased by more than a century of weather but 3 unmistakeable relics remained. The first wasn’t as ominous; the impression of horseshoe hung upside-down from a piece of animal footwear lost to time. The other two were inexplicable red marks, almost like they had been painted on recently. The thing is, they had always been there as far as anyone could remember.

“Christ, Steve. Look at this creepy-ass shit! There’s no light out here except our flashlights and equipment but you can see those two spots up there! And like, if you move -” the YouTuber suddenly bolted as fast as he could away from the person filming. The camera then panned away at the still and overgrown field around the trio.

“Haitch! What are you doing, man?! You wanna get lost out here?”

The camera centered back on this Steve. It took a second for his smaller image to come into focus with the limited light barely creating an outline of his form.

“The eyes! Steve! They fucking follow you! We’ve got some creepy-ass shit here! This is going to be a good one! I can feel it!”

Cram had watched the videos, specifically the one of the ‘ghost hunter bros’ trying to infiltrate the building, dozens of times. He knew the 10:33 playtime through and through. He had even made a transcript of all the dialogue, and rolled his eyes too many times at the slang and poor grammar throughout.

So they noticed the pupils of the wooden beast. There were legends in the surrounding area of a group of teens went to the Mack homestead with paint and axes to try to destroy the peepers is some kind of Lord of the Rings shit and they were, of course, unsuccessful. Legend says they disappeared after that never to be heard from again.

The surrounding libraries and town hall records did not really shed any light on this playground story. Cram had been able to track down one of the supposed kids, albeit with a slightly different name, in a mental health facility in Bellwoods.

He had considered trying to visit the man but decided that was one step too far on his quest. He didn’t want to step into obsession territory. But having many hours alone in the shop waiting for orders and commissions to come in gave him way too much time to think and plan and ruminate.

But the video had given him something to dig into on those long, dull days. It beat going into town and have all the residents remind him that he had been chosen to be an outsider. Even getting pet food became a chore within itself.

“Fine. Whatever. You can be assholes to me, but this is for Checkers. He’s just a fucking cat. Cat’s don’t have ulterior motives.”

The seventeen-year-old cashier, who was going to get to escape her purgatorial roots soon, just gaped at him.

That wasn’t a great day.

But the internet and YouTube and the ghost hunter bros provided new data and new info through their idiotic actions. The damage had been done and Cram needed to finally just raze all this secrecy and bad mojo back into the Earth.

The legends and interest would die there. Cram had already seen the fansites and forums. The Mack homestead was on the cusp of becoming internet famous and he didn’t need more people being inflicted by the cursed barn.

“Lyle. What the fuck is going on? Why does this place have fucking metal sliding security things?” Haitch wrapped on the solid, silver barricade. “We’ve been doing this for like three years now and I’ve never seen this kind of resistance to break-ins. It’s like, fuck, don’t they know we have jobs to do?”

“There’s gotta be a way in. Buildings have entrances. That’s how they work. You build buildings with entrances” (This line was the one that always killed a bit of Cram’s soul when rewatching.)

“We’ve circled this place eleven times! Eleven! All of the windows are under the same lockdown. Steve is still recovered from falling into the hay-dirt-rock combo while trying to scale this thing. I don’t know how to say this, but this might be the one that got away.” Lyle unceremoniously turned the camera on himself. “I just want to apologize to all our subscribers out there. Maybe we’ll come back with axes or something.”

The view suddenly switched, again, to the corner of the barn. All Lyle could hear was scratching or something being chipped away. The thuds lasted the nanoseconds of a pebble falling into still water.

“Haitch? Steve? Evil boogeyman? What is that noise?”

The Fox Body Mustang pushed through the vegetation in front of it. Cram had done a lot of the work on the ride himself and he knew how good the shocks were.

He had his phone up on the dash being held by some holster with a flame decal on it he had bought off of some seller from the Prairies on Etsy. She had purchased one of his small metal sculptures a few years back and he figured he would also support a fellow seller.

The GPS kept trying to point him back to the service road to the south. He didn’t need it for directions other than to tell him when he was getting close.

He would’ve preferred to walk but this job needed power.

A gopher’s eyes lit up in the headlights before it jumped to escape a squishy death.

Cram knew if there was still wildlife around, he wasn’t yet in the area.

He looked to the light of his phone and constant flash of the green, left-turn arrow.

He waited for it to go dark.

The prevailing theory is that somehow Haitch had hit some kind of wire running through the building (a possibility due to the security devices the police had equipped the building with in the early aughts) or that there was some kind of electric fence or barrier protecting William Mack’s barn.

He also could’ve been faking it.

But in the video he was shaking on the dirt, with a flip knife laying close by. The camera panned against the exterior of the building three times and zoomed into the area where one of the three bros had been trying to ‘cut’ his way in. Cram couldn’t prove it but he was sure all but Lyle were high as shit that night.

The dialogue became almost unintelligible at this point near the end of the video. There’s freaking out and Steve limping into the shot and Haitch convulsing on the ground. Eventually he sits up and his two ‘friends’ continue to look around or study the barn to catch something on camera.

“We’re going to get something! We’re going to get something!” Cram knew after so many times that this was Lyle’s voice.

The final shot, which, to the team’s credit was a great one, is of Haitch slowly looking up at the camera with a distance expression on his face. And his eyes looked, off. Blurry somehow.

Most commentators thought this was achieved through digital effects.

Cram had another theory.

The dust started to settle in the antique building. Moonlight crept in through the new entrance and light a small portion of the space inside. Wooden beams barely stood, not due to the impact, but to years of neglect and insect dinners. They were full of holes and some parts had become incredibly thin.

Cram kept shaking his head, trying to get the dizziness out of his skull. His car was not smoking like it would be in the movies but was just making a pathetic puttering noise that wasn’t helping this new and expected headache.

He thought on his uncle that raised him. He thought of the man who year after year somehow got smaller and smaller. The man refused to break down into obvious vices like drinking or gambling or violence but just kept pushing his entire body into the work with the crops and the animals. He became more quiet year after year. But he muttered. Often. Under his breath. In his sleep. And the muttering at first freaked out Cram but then after so long it started to make a certain sense. And it was connected to the cursed barn.

The tombstones reminded him of the funeral for his uncle and the lack of people in attendance. The townsfolk had shunned him for being one of Mack Junior’s early victims all those years ago.

…

Cram refocused his eyes. There were four grave markers. Four bodies were buried here and the police and the town councils wanted to keep them hidden behind these walls.

The ghost story bros’ video left out what happened next. They eventually gave up for the night and went to create a bonfire and get drunk. The silent alarms in the farm had gone off and the trio were caught and arrested while trying to tip a cow. In that 30-minute period they had somehow managed to upload their unedited video to YouTube.

The internet knows all and even though the post was taken down, the footage still remained available in virtual form. Cram was able to track it down and study the footage. He noticed what every else didn’t. It had been stabbed and bled out chunks of wood. It wasn’t impenetrable. It could be broken down.

So many forces now looked at Cram. He could feel them all. Somehow, the two red marks were also inside the barn and were looking down at him, rage cutting through the absolute darkness of that side of the building. Something was stirring under the graves and up in the rafters and in the piles of hay. He had felt this evil when he had first saw the video. He knew that things had been set in motion when those kids desecrated the sanctity of this flesh and wood temple.

Heavy footsteps lead to the still puttering car. Cram had his eyes closed. It was easier to concentrate on the task at hand.

Luckily he knew the interior of his ride inside and out.

The car shook through forces unknown and threw Cram against the dash.

He struggled back in the seat and turned the key. The exposed engine started to rev and then trail off.

He tried again, this time eyes open.

The illumination by the taillights somehow was being eaten by the barn and coming directly for Cram.

The engine roared one last time.