Under Rand Farm: An Excerpt

U N D E R R A N D F A R M

Prologue

Saturday, December 22nd, 2001

MY THROAT IS LIKE SANDPAPER, is Sara’s first thought as consciousness finally overwhelms the blank, fuzzy, chemical sleep forced upon her hours earlier.

Her second thought involves hoping to hell it was hours, rather than days.

Like these first two thoughts, her third comes unaccompanied by images since someone or something is obscuring her mind’s eye:

Where the hell am I?

Through the fog of her enforced sleep, Sara knows she’s somewhere very dark or that someone has blindfolded her. Realizes too that her body is shivering; that she is mineralized by a coldness so pure, so precise, she fears the brutal, knock, knock, knocking of her pain-ravaged head against the stone floor, of her knees against each other, will shatter her body into thousands of pieces.

Her consciousness perfuses a semblance of feeling through her, and she tries to move; to take back the command of her body.

At first, she can’t—like a bison being mauled by wolves, a part of her brain is commanding her body to shut down as the rabid lupine pack rips at its flesh, eats it while it dies—but she keeps going.

Stretches her fatigued limbs. She struggles with her right arm and leg—they are squashed under her right side, and she works out she is lying in the fetal position.

Her left limbs don’t fare any better. They are restricted by something. She is not naked—can feel her bra and underwear—but all else has been stripped, and her exposed frozen skin has just enough feeling to register that something is wrapped around her upper arms, her waist, her thighs. Something coarse and thick.

She swallows a lurching fear. Tries to open her eyes. They feel heavy. Gritty. A percussive headache booms through her skull. The grit cracks enough for her left eyelid to open.

Given the pain of the headache, Sara worries that seeing light might actually turn her into powder, but she is not cheered by the pitch blackness that meets her arid left eyeball.

Someone, she thinks. Someone . . . Someone did this to me. A memory fades in from the black . . . The sidewalk. Walking. Music. A van joins the stir of memories; a dark van sliding by her as she walked. Christmas music.

Then, the sound of something rushing at her from behind.

Something hitting her.

Turning, seeing a figure, clad in dark clothing. Looking her way.

Seeing something flying toward her.

A struggle.

A reek of human sweat, mixed with shit. With death.

A stabbing pain in her shoulder.

The memories dim as the savage cold burns through her again, and Sara knows that she has to warm up. Wherever she is and however she got here, she needs her body temperature to rise before she passes out again. The pain, cold, and exhaustion are tugging Sara to the brink of death, and this realization thrusts a sudden anger through her; she tries to scream, but her throat is too dry and her voice too weak.

Did the man have a rope . . . ?

Move, she thinks. Do it. The stirring of anger that led to her silent scream has settled, and from it an image has formed: Lucy. Lucy smiling. Lucy Lucy Lucy. More. She wills her mind to turn the pages of its flicker-book of Lucy’s image; they fade in from the darkness, each one showing her in differing moods and emotions: biting down on her lower lip with her front teeth when she’s feeling goofy; sweeping the left side of her long chestnut hair away from her face whenever she’s excited about something and can’t wait to talk about it. Lucy was always trying to conceal her emotions, which only confirmed their presence.

The relief is welcome but temporary; Lucy disappears and Sara gasps as a tingling wetness slides down her face, whispering and tickling toward her cheek—attacker fingers blood spiders centipedes; who what who who???—The possibilities storm through her mind, and she gargles a shriek as the thing moves down her nose.

Slithers down her cheek.

It comes to her mouth, imparting a saline kiss as the last particles of the teardrop that has streaked across her face touch her lip.

Now a flash of indignant anger pulses through her, shakes her body with one of her and Lucy’s Commandments.

Thou shalt not panic, for it is of fuck-all use.

Not a Commandment she learned in Sunday school; her kin weren’t believers in higher powers and self-sacrifice. They were more of the cold, distant, and plotting kind. But Lucy and she had made a bunch of Commandments way back in high school, mostly the kind that dealt with hangover cures or bitches and dickheads at school. They still needed them once they left school and college and found work. Bitches and dickheads were everywhere.

And now, despite the cold and blackness enveloping her, she swallows a gasp, replaces it with a hoarse growl. The Commandment begins to flow.

Focus. Don’t panic because that’s what can make people stare at you like you’re an idiot and make you gabble on and turn your cheeks red and make everything spiral downward, to loneliness . . .

. . . instead, slow down your thoughts and go over them one word at a time, breathe slowly, think of your heart as a drum and your lungs as woodwind; orchestral instruments conducted by your brain . . .

It works for a little while, but the cold and the dark are incessant, her pain embedded. She mixes up the sentiments of the Commandment. Her resolve begins to dissipate.

Then Lucy punches her way back into her mind, smashing through the frozen darkness. Bringing warmth and light with her. Helps her to . . .

Slow it down. Panic is danger and fear and not knowing, like a fire triangle, Lucy had once said. Oxygen, fuel, ignition. Those are three things needed to start a fire, right? And if you remove one of these, the fire has nothing to do but die. Apply it to panicking, and the elements are presumed peril, other people, your own mind.

Like fire, it all boils down to fear.

Concentrate on taking away one of the elements—the biggest danger this particular fire holds over her is dying of its icy opposite. Lucy remembered this kind of shit from school all the time and used those memories to form her own funny little analogies, often at odds with the situations. But here Sara’s freezing to death and all Lucy can contribute is her fucking fire triangle?

But, okay. Deal with it. Put out the fire of panic, then warm yourself. Your forearms are free: rub your hands together. Spread the little heat they have. Rub their opposing upper arms. Build your own fire.

Sara wills her fingers to slide down her upper arms; after a split-second she’s forced to gasp in shock as a coldness even more potent than that already surrounding her pours onto the exposed skin. She grits her teeth; grunts, in a defiant hum that reverberates against the back of her mouth

Her icy fingers are so numb she doubts they will ever feel warmth again, but she has no choice.

Build it up, girl, she tells herself. You need to survive.

And this is not Sunday school.

A new crackle of energy pulses through her; she uses this to rub her fingers up and down her arms, any point of them she can reach. Friction. She rubs faster. Up and down her arms; she moves her inner knees against one another; she tenses her lips; her feet; her toes.

Now she bunches her fists as her energy starts to crackle and spit embers. Her blood starts to simmer. She rubs still; deeper, faster, her fingers catching on the tattered cloth on her arms. The flicker-book of Lucy is open at a page with Lucy wearing the woolly hat, the one they’d bought in that little town in Colorado, ridiculously oversized with floppy felt moose antlers growing out of the top; her head tilted, one antler flopped down and mingling with the dark chocolate coils of hair not obscured by her headwear.

Clusters of freckles spattered around her nose. Maple eyes. A goofy smile on her cold, chapped lips.

She opens her eyes as she feels Lucy’s warmth radiate into her, and rubs faster. Her eyeballs are as sore and dry as her throat. It is as dark as she feared, and she can’t make out her own hands rubbing her arms. But she is warming . . . slowly, slightly. She manages to take a grip of the thing wrapped around her, its coarse thickness, its twisted construction . . .

The memory comes now, bleeding through the sack that her mind had bundled it into. Earlier. Walking with Lucy, the two of them having shared a precious hour of post-work, pre-Christmas drinks with friends . . . Lianne and Perri had been there. John and Nick too? Beers, then some Christmas-themed cocktails. Talk. Laughter. Hugs. Goodbyes. Then the two of the them alone, together outside, ensuring the other was as buttoned up and protected from the cold as they could be, before setting off to rekindle the warmth they found in the pub with their friends in their apartment, just a couple of blocks away. Close, but tactically imperfect for picking up what they’d early on decided they would treat themselves to tonight: more wine and Chinese food. A 7-Eleven lay due west a block with Hing’s, their neighborhood’s premier producer of heavenly stir-fried delicacies, aptly situated eastward. They reached the corner that triangulated their apartment with Hing’s and the store, and unclasped their hands on the empty sidewalk.

“Pretty quiet, babe,” she’d whispered to Lucy.

“I know! I guess everyone’s either staying out to party, or being miserable and staying in. Let’s be miserable and stay in. On the sofa. Actually, that sounds like my kind of party . . . You wanna get the wine or the food?

“Can’t we both go togeth—”

“Uh-uh, I’m starving and I need to pee. I’ll go to Hing’s. You get the wine . . .” Lucy squinted into the distance, as if about to reveal an invidious decision that mankind’s future rested on.

“. . . and ice cream, too. Something fruity. Any flavor but chocolate. Well, a little chocolate is okay, but . . .”

She’d laughed, ten percent put out, but ninety percent happiness. Lucy looked into her eyes, checked that the ratio was favorable, and kissed her on the cheek. “Okay, go go go! First one home chooses the movie! Which must— must—be Christmas themed.”

And with that, Lucy had flashed a smile, squeezed her arm, turned on a heel, and scuttered off toward Hing’s, where fried pork balls and egg-fried rice (her), crispy shredded beef, tomatoes, and special noodles (Lucy) were only ever minutes from making the short journey from ancient wok to take-out bag.

Sara giggled, feeling . . . say, 97 percent happy. And, post the electric warmth that was spending time drinking with Lucy, merely being with Lucy, she realized that the remaining negative percent was due to the fucking weather. Which was even more apparent now that a preamble of snow was circling around her head. But no matter; work was done for the week. The somewhat drawn-out drinks with the others complete. The neighborhood was quiet and she would soon be home. She shivered, and walked on toward the welcoming light of the 7-Eleven and its promised land of five-dollar Chardonnay. The ice cream would be more expensive.

A van approached; its front window was rolled down substantially enough for her to wince at the thought of the evening’s freezing winter air unnecessarily invading the warmth of the van’s cab. She guessed the cab contained a smoker. Wow, cancer and pneumonia for this guy. The van seemed to slow. She narrowed her eyes and gazed toward the driver’s window but the weak light of the moon, several failed streetlights, and the tint of the van’s windows precluded her from seeing any more than a rather shaggy silhouette. The van was moving even slower. Then music had been blaring from its open window. Something dark and metally, something her brother, Ricky, would swing his lank black hair to while yelling, “Rah!” System of a Down, maybe.

She delved her gloved hands into her coat’s coarse pockets and pulled out the iPod that Lucy and she had bought to share on the day of its release—now that was four hundred bucks sensibly invested six weeks before Christmas—along with its spaghetti mess of earbud wire. The van stalled for a moment, and she cursed both its unwanted presence and the complex tangle of wires that stopped her from drowning out the driver’s music. Then, a Christmas miracle: the driver, perhaps sensing that his choice of song was working on dampening her 97-percent positivity, ratcheted up the engine and sped away from her.

This left her free to concentrate on plugging the freshly detangled buds into her ears and search for something rather more seasonable, and a sight more pleasurable, for her iPod to pump into her ears. She was a little drunk and it took a couple of minutes to find the playlist that Lucy and she had put together last weekend to soundtrack the decorating of their apartment. She wanted the one by the Puerto Rican guy, with the ridiculously upbeat rhythm that she could never remember the damn name of although it’s sung over and over . . .

She beamed upon seeing it in the playlist, wondered how she could have forgotten . . .

¡Feliz Navidad!

She had been about to play the song but realized that her beer-and-cocktail-stymied search for the playlist had brought her to within a half block of the store. She decided to wait until she had picked up wine and ice cream and was walking home to Lucy to begin their near-perfect Christmas. They had made a conscious decision never to describe anything in their lives that made them 100 percent happy because—Thou shalt never be too perfectly happy, for that will surely bring about a fall—one of her and Lucy’s Commandments rang through her mind. Be humble, girl. And humble she shall be, she had thought to herself.

But that doesn’t mean we don’t deserve a little sweetness tonight. We shall have Reese’s Pieces upon the ice cream! The light of the 7-Eleven was fifty yards away. She yanked out both earbuds and delved back into her pockets for her Nokia to call Lucy, see if she wanted anything extra. Then she heard the rushing sound. Almost like someone running . . . but then something had hit her. Hard. Back of the head. She had gasped then turned around. Under fuzzy streetlighting, a dark figure was standing in the middle of the sidewalk. Slender build, and not much taller than her. Her focus sharpened to show a white male face with dark and fierce eyes staring directly at her from a black hoodie. He wore dark pants and boots that seemed oversized on him. He was whirling something around and around in one hand. A pale loop. The rope. Stunned, she opened her mouth but the man flung the rope again, and this time it had sailed over her head and knocked both the iPod and the Nokia from her grasp, before it settled around her chest.

The fucker had lassoed her. She managed to whip her right arm out of the rope, but it had tightened, suddenly, brutally, and the man began to haul her in. The sudden lurch made her yelp and stumble his way. The sudden lurching forward caused her to trip, and she fell face-first onto the sidewalk. She scrambled to her feet and turned to flee. The rope tightened, squeezing the air from her, spinning her back around. She cried out, but the man pulled her into his aura, clamped a large hand gloved in stale black wool tight to her mouth, spinning her once more so she faced away from him. A knee to her lower back winded her, and she couldn’t form any noise, any kind of cry for help on the street, which remained devoid of people.

She looked back to where she had dropped her phone and her iPod as the man started to drag her back to the van, which she then saw had only circled the block and crawled up behind her again, coasting to a stop a couple dozen feet back. She tried to rally by swinging a heel into the man’s shin. He suppressed a moan of pain, then clamped his hand so tight to her mouth she couldn’t breathe. They stumbled back just a couple of feet from the van. She looked around and grabbed for a sapling planted in a square of earth on the sidewalk. She wrapped the fingers of her free hand around it, but he wrenched her away, making her digits white hot with pain. She worried she would pass out from the lack of oxygen. He seemed to sense her weakness and removed the hand from her mouth. Seemed to frantically fiddle with something. But despite this brief advantage, the figure remained stronger and in control.

Before she could regain her breath, a piercing pain screamed into her shoulder. The rope tightened again, and her consciousness began to fade as he worked his way backwards through the open side door of the van, sat on its floor, and hauled her in, over its threshold. He began wrapping the rope around her, slowly but not meticulously—she had wriggle room—but she was too close to passing out to take advantage of this. The man stopped to inspect his handiwork with the rope, and he seemed to realize it was sloppy because he shrugged at her as if to say, Oh well. It’ll do. He stared at her with dark unblinking eyes that poisoned a young pale face sprinkled with the sparse filings of an incipient beard. Then he wheeled away from her, jumped back onto the sidewalk, grabbed the van door and slid it shut. She thought of her phone, didn’t know if her call to Lucy had connected. If Lucy had heard the horror. The man had not gotten into the van yet.

Lucy, I need you!

The phone was nowhere. She was nauseated. The van was spinning. The man was still outside.

Whatever the man stuck into her shoulder was wrangling the remaining dregs of consciousness from her. She squirmed weakly. The driver-side door to the van clucked open, and the man quickly got in. Slammed the door shut. She couldn’t hold her eyes open. Silence from the front seat. Then the cruelest thing . . . her phone rang. From the front of the van. She realized that the man must have collected the phone. He growled, frustrated with the phone’s incessant tone, trying to curtail its urgent trill, but fucked up by pressing the loudspeaker.

She heard the sound of Lucy’s voice—

. . . Hey, babe!

. . . Babe?

She was barely there, but Lucy had unknowingly given her hope. This had hastily ended as the man finally managed to end the call, and been replaced by the sound of the van failing to start. But then she regained hope, despite the growing lull of unconsciousness consuming her when her phone buzzed again.

Lucy . . . but the sound was instantly truncated. The man growled as a sudden tinny burst of the Spanish Christmas song blurted from his radio—hey, I was just about to listen to that—and he stopped the music. Instead, the air filled with the crunching of gears as the van stalled. Then silence. She could feel the man’s sense of urgency, smell him sweating in his seat.

She passed out as the van finally started, and she was driven away from the sidewalk. Away from home. Away from Lucy.

To this lightless, frozen tomb of a place.

*

THE RECOLLECTION HAS TERRIFIED HER, but she remembers the Commandment and concentrates on trying to rouse herself.

Her efforts to warm herself move the loosely tied rope from her upper limbs, and she bundles the coarse length together and holds it against her chest. The action hurts, but it also rekindles feeling. Wisps of energy climb along her nerves. She is still shaking with the cold but has a measure of control now over her limbs and stretches them out, relieved to find that she is not bound, that despite the oppressive darkness about her, she still has her mobility. Each limb protests in cold, drugged pain, but responds nevertheless. She rolls onto her back. Writhes on the floor. Pulls the rope so hard around her torso and along her arms that it burns. Breathes on her hands. Lets out a dry, hoarse grunt. Tries to push her body into a sitting position. Fails, and her back and neck and head tip backwards, painfully reacquainting themselves with the cold, unforgiving floor.

Doesn’t panic.

Controls her breathing again.

One step at a time, Lucy whispers to her.

She decides to wait a minute or two before trying to sit up again.

And that is when she hears the hiss.

PART ONE

BLOODLINE

HENRY RAND HAD A LIKING for the countryside and a grievance with following his father’s path in accounting. He spent the late 1950s cutting his teeth as an itinerant farmhand in the rolling fields of upstate Pennsylvania, before finding a permanent position at Markington Farm, a small wheat-and-cattle affair run by its titular mom and pop.

The Markingtons were happy to let diffident, softly spoken Henry sleep in one of the farmhouse’s bedrooms. Pop enjoyed the house’s gender ratio being equal and invited Henry to join his brood in the living room to watch Bonanza and Gunsmoke on the family’s Admiral TV set. They had their lone child, Beatrice, rather late for the time; they were in their mid-forties when she came along. Their daughter was an able if reluctant pair of hands about the farm, and her parents, approaching their seventies, were dreaming of bringing their farming days to a comparatively early end; many of their friends and acquaintances in the farming community worked the fields into their nineties. Something that didn’t appeal to the Markingtons.

Over the daily farmhouse breakfast—eggs, blueberry pancakes topped with further blueberries, juice, coffee—hearty sustenance for Pop’s arthritic bones, Mom often remarked that they should sell up and move somewhere with less wind, less cow shit, and more seafood. Beatrice encouraged the idea; had plans of her own involving the brooding, quietly handsome farmhand who now slept two rooms along from her.

Pop’s initial resistance to the idea subsided as the thought of reworking their annual weeks’ vacation to the Jersey coast, where casting a line into the Atlantic and supping their bodyweight in shrimp, grew on him. He became a hearty advocate of the idea. Beatrice suggested that they ensure sunshine and replace Jersey with Florida. Swap land cows for sea cows. Drink fresh OJ.

Henry stowed away the Markingtons’ musings, lit them on a back-burner. He liked the farm, its rolling acres. Liked the frequent hours he spent tending to his duties with only the small head of cattle, the chickens, and the wild creatures who shared the Markingtons’ tenancy of the farm for company. Baby rabbits frolicked along its verges as their elders dug warrens in its fields and looked out at the manifold dangers that nature presented: the birds of prey that wheeled in the sky, the foxes who prowled the farm’s perimeter, sniffing the air. The snakes that lay in the grass.

As much as he liked the Markingtons themselves, Henry preferred his own company. Wanted the place to himself. Knowing Beatrice liked him—had regularly sneaked into his room once Mom and Pop had filled the farmhouse with their snoring—he began to think of the future.

Their nighttime liaisons developed into a more formal romance. They sat next to each other at breakfast and Beatrice would stroke his hand when adding a spoonful of blueberries to his plate. He asked Beatrice to marry him—delighting Mom and Pop, who thought highly of this hardworking young man who dressed smartly for the fields, and didn’t pollute the farm with drunken antics or cussing. It seemed natural that they would remain in the farmhouse as the Markingtons went to live on the coast; but for this, money was needed. A small farm had yielded small profits, and Mom and Pop had little in the way of life savings. Henry turned to his own parents, whom he had seen infrequently since plumping for a farming life, for help. He drove home with Beatrice to tell them the news. To outline their plans.

*

HENRY RAND’S PARENTS EXPRESSED DELIGHT upon hearing their lone child, whose infrequent visits home were marked by his sullen quietude, was to marry. They liked Beatrice, and after a trip upstate, declared that they liked the Markingtons. Henry brought up the subject of money. Martin Rand, whose profession had made him an inveterate saver, delved into the family coffers, and after he had had run an astute eye over its mortgage proposal, the bank saw to the rest.

Henry signed the deeds, saw that his prospective parents-in-law got a good price for their years of endeavor. They were so happy for their daughter and their new son-in-law that they weren’t in the least bothered that the place was to be renamed Rand Farm, and that in the event of his Henry’s, the place would become the property of any children that Beatrice and he sired.

*

HENRY AND BEATRICE WED IN the spring of 1960 at a small church near Henry’s childhood home. The season proved to be exceptionally busy; Mom and Pop found a quaint little clapperboard house within their price range on Florida’s gulf coast, just south of Naples, and moved there with the Rand family’s help. The newlyweds began to share a life together, and without the constant company of the Markingtons, Beatrice fell pregnant as spring signed off.

Henry worked tirelessly to provide for his expectant wife. He refused both families’ offers of additional support; wanted to be the true king of all he surveyed at the farm. Beatrice worked until autumn, when her husband insisted that she stand down.

The relentless toil involved in running his kingdom helped keep Henry from dwelling on an inner turmoil that the upcoming birth of his child had relit.

Martin had molested Henry on and off for nearly two decades before he left home.

Henry hated his father and what he had done to him. Furthermore, as his will to repress his childhood horror was eaten away, Henry hated the fact that he needed—and accepted— his father’s money and financial astuteness to secure the farm. Hated the fact that he had felt compelled to rename the farm in the family name. Still, he worked the land. Turned its soil. Fed its cattle.

Jack was born at Rand Farm on Christmas Eve. Beatrice was in love with a second Rand; Henry was overwhelmed with emotions. His parents stayed for Christmas, helped mother and child settle. Henry found he couldn’t look at his father, who was cowed by his ostracizing.

Henry kept his distance from his father when with his child. When the wives were otherwise occupied, he fired fierce looks of utter contempt at him.

Told him to get out and never enter his life or his land again.

Martin understood. He kept his distance while the newborn was settled, and drove away with his wife on New Year’s Eve.

The Markingtons were ecstatic, and flew in from Florida in early January, tanned, rested, and loaded with enough boxes of saltwater taffy to build a new barn with.

*

MARTIN HANGED HIMSELF IN THE spring of 1961. Left a note for his family, begging their forgiveness for his sins. Sins that he hadn’t been sorry enough to detail.

Selina, Henry’s mother, was devastated by her husband’s death. But Henry kept his father’s dark secret to himself; let it fester in a deep, dark recess inside his mind. Selina would never know what her husband had done to their son.

In the following months, Henry’s dark place began to ooze its foulness into the farm. It bled into its grasses. It polluted its acres; poisoned Henry’s mind. Its hate flourished in the very fields that Henry nurtured each day. It followed him into the farmhouse each evening, where he would sit with his wife and child. He batted it away, fended it off. Beatrice knew he was upset—how could he not be—but she was as in the dark regarding Martin’s abuse as everyone else.

Henry plowed on alone. Kept the hate at bay long as he could.

But by the time that Jack turned four, Henry realized that while he had dodged following his father’s footsteps to a respectable career in accounting, he had taken up Martin’s darkest path. He began to lead Jack into the cellar while Beatrice tended to the farm. But of all the hate that Henry Rand now radiated, none of it was inward. He sowed it again and again into the soil beneath him, for the delectation of the platoons of sightless worms that squirmed unseen, under Rand Farm . . .

I hope you enjoyed this excerpt! You can read the full novel *free* via with Kindle Unlimited, or order the paperback version/own the Kindle version.

JS Harding is a short story writer, kids' poet, and humour writer who has provided copy for BBC Comedy and NewsThump - he is also the author of Under Rand Farm (writing as LJ Denholm).