The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror. Volume 13

Donald R. Burleson Pump Jack

It was strange, being back in the desert.

That’s what this land was, all right, however stubbornly a half-dozen generations of sheep ranchers had struggled to carve a living out of this sandy, mesquite-dotted soil.

Cal Withers pulled his rental car over to the side of the lonely road and got out and sniffed the air. After the clamorous squalor of city life, he wasn’t used to all this space, all this quiet, and it tended almost to make him nervous. But the limitless deep blue sky was delectable, no denying that, especially when one was used to cramped city skies stained an ugly grey by skyscrapers.

All these years, back East, he had thought of the desert lands of southeastern New Mexico as a kind of childhood dream. This yellow prairie land had been his home for the first seven years of his life, till his dad, weary of farming, had found a new job and moved them all to the frozen northlands, leaving the old farmhouse in the dubious hands of Uncle Bill and Aunt Clara. Growing up in Boston on the banks of the Charles River, Cal had found it easy just to stay there, settle into life there, grow older there. But now he wondered whether he had made a mistake, never coming back here till now.

Well. He surveyed vastnesses of gently rolling ground, furred over with wheatgrass and spiked with yucca. What would he have done here, anyway, if he had stayed? Would he have had the patience to coax a living out of this ground, tend ragtag herds of sheep, run a ranch, like nearly all his family before him? He wondered. Probably not, the truth to tell; it took a different kind of mentality to live like that.

But damn, this clean, clear sky looked nice, with its regal flotillas of billowy white clouds driven onward by a tempest of sunlight. High above him, a hawk fell across the sky like a meteor, spread its wings, wheeled, and was gone, fluttering into the sun. Somewhere nearby, grasshoppers ratcheted lustily. Even in late October the air was warm and the land bristled with desert life. The place really brought back all the fond old memories.

And yet its pleasantness didn’t quite banish the not-so-fond old memories.

The sky seemed to darken almost imperceptibly for a moment, until he realized that it was not the air but his own mood that was slipping into shadow. Funny — he hadn’t thought about that other business for years.

And wasn’t sure he wanted to think about it now.

He got back in the car and headed farther down the road, toward what the locals called the old Withers place. If he had his bearings straight, the venerable woodframe house wouldn’t creep into view for several miles yet, and even then would only barely be visible from the road, a gabled gnome nestled back in a wilderness of chaparral. He would be there in a few minutes, and felt rather curious to see the old place again. But another sight greeted him first.

Here and there, now, at great intervals on both sides of the road, stood the eternal profiles of little oil wells.

There had never been any wells drilled on the Withers property, so far as he had ever heard, but you saw them all over the county, pretty much — here, there, one bundle of hope or another, pumping, pumping, imploring the ground for oil. These were the first wells he had seen in all the years since he was a child here. He stopped the car again, got out, leaned against a jagged post, and watched a nearby pump jack, perhaps only a hundred feet from the road. Somehow he had always found these things lulling, comforting, almost meditative to watch.

Except when he remembered—

But why dwell on that? Inane old stories, the wide-eyed foolishness of infancy. For now, he was content to watch the grasshopper-like head of the pump jack on the end of its long beam, nodding, nodding, nodding to the earth, piercing the desert soil again and again with its drilling rod like the proboscis of some strange hungry insect. Off in the distance, humming among waving seas of chamisa, other insect-heads slowly nodded and nodded, probing the dry earth to their own tune, and the tune of the sighing wind. There was no other sound, no other motion. It was like a scene in a dream, a bit of theater on a stage at the end of the earth.

Rousing himself, he drove on down the road, finally spotting the old two-storey house off at the end of a bumpy drive to the right. Arriving in a cloud of yellow dust, he parked beside a rocky ridge near the house and clumped up onto the creaky wooden porch. He had stopped in town for the key, but he needn’t have bothered; the door was open. Out here where one measured the distance to one’s nearest neighbor in miles, what did it matter? At his push, the door swung inward with an osseous creak, intruding upon shadow. In the window beside the door, the truculent fat face of Uncle Bill hung, scowling. But no, this was only a crumpled place in the brittle paper shade, an imagined face staring but not seeing, then not even staring. Uncle Bill and Aunt Clara were dead. If there was any certainty in the world, it was that their faces would not be present at dinner. Cal took a breath and stepped inside.

He switched on a light and looked around. It wasn’t quite as bad as he’d expected, but bad enough, though there was no way of knowing how much of the general neglect here was due to an aging Bill and Clara’s laxness at housekeeping, and how much was due to the fact that the house had sat empty for several months. Good thing he had arranged for the power to be on, because the place was morbid enough even in the light. Sea-bottom mantles of dust swam everywhere, undulating, blanketing the furniture, obscuring corners and angles. Old papers, clothes, rags, and nondescript debris cluttered the corners, the floors. The house smelled sour, and Cal pulled up a shade and pried open a window. No question, he had some cleaning up to do if he was ever going to sell this place. But who would buy it, out here? He cleared a path through the clutter and went down the hall toward the back of the house, to the kitchen.

Amazing, how clearly he remembered where everything was. Nothing much seemed to have changed all these years. The refrigerator was an addition, but the old stove was the same, only more battered-looking now. He hoped the butane tanks weren’t empty, as he would have to bring his bag of groceries in from the car and do some cooking tonight.

For now, he had a lot to do, and figured he might as well be about it. Retrieving plastic trash bags from the car, he started making his way through the house, filling the bags, some with trash and some with things to take into Hobbs sometime later to give to charity: clothing, extra sets of dishes, a few books, countless odds and ends. What he was supposed to do with the furniture was a mystery. He didn’t want any of this stuff himself; his own life had collected enough barnacle-clinging detritus, without taking on anyone else’s. By the time he had made an initial pass through all the downstairs rooms, he had filled several bags, and they stood bulging in a row along the porch now like a strange gaggle of plump children. There were only two bedrooms and a bathroom upstairs, and Cal could see to those tomorrow. It was nearly sundown, and he was getting hungry.

Cooking a meal here wasn’t quite the unpleasant chore he had somehow expected it to be. After washing his dishes he tamped some tobacco into his pipe and strolled outside and down the drive toward the road, and sat on a rock and smoked. He wanted to see the desert sunset.

Its explosion of color didn’t disappoint him. In the west, long filaments of lithe cloud glowed red and gold and orange. Behind him, when he looked around, the distant windows of the old house gave the light back like pairs of feral eyes. For a few fleeting moments the effect of the sunset extended to the entire sky, painting wisps of cloud even on the opposite horizon in salmon-pink hues against the deepening blue, like pastel water-colors. Everywhere but in the west, the colors faded quickly to purplish black, but in the west it was another half-hour before the crimson oven-glow of the sky paled to a faint memory, then went out like embers.

And then it was night.

Real night. Night in the desert.

It came back to him, now, what that was like. The sky became a great vaulted dome frosted with stars. How open it was, how fathomless, an infinite black sea which, one felt, might come crashing down in titanic waves. One felt like an exhibit on black velvet here; the over-arching window of heaven was open, and all the universe looked on by starlight.

Not that the stars provided much in the way of light, he thought, getting up and making his way back to the path. Though he was facing the house now, he couldn’t make out the faintest outline of it; even the desert terrain immediately around him was the vaguest of ghost-impressions, dark against dark. He rather wished the moon was out. As he started walking, the path somehow seemed rockier than before; in the inky dark his feet from time to time stumbled against large stones. This in itself was disorienting, and besides, the path must have branched, because by the time he had trudged through stony sand long enough easily to take himself back to the porch steps, he wasn’t back there, but was staring out only at more blackness, more night.

Surely this was at least approximately the way back to the house, though he might have been a little confused in the dark. He eased forward, feeling his slow way with his feet on what he hoped was still the path. Even now, when his eyes had had time to adjust to the dark, the chaparral around him loomed only as dim shadows without detail, and it made him uncomfortable to move on without quite being able to tell where he was going. He walked in this fashion for what seemed like a good while, and at length he felt his feet fetch up against a vertical object. This had to be the bottom porch step; he had to be back at the house. He had been mistaken about the moon; it was out, but had been obscured by low-scudding black clouds backlit now in wan yellow light, and as the clouds lifted the gibbous moon shone through, a half-eaten face of chalk. When he looked up he reflected that that angular object beginning to take form in the moonlight could only be a corner of the overhang to the porch.

But it wasn’t.

Poised motionless above him, it was a pump jack, its oblong head raised as if contemplating the moon. Had it been pumping at the time, he would no doubt have heard it long before blundering into the edge of the platform on which the structure rested. The odd thing was that in the dark he must have wandered off the Withers property altogether.

But no — now that the light was better, he could see, traced along behind the oil well, a half-collapsed old fence stretching off into the night, rusty wire strands dividing the Withers property from the adjacent land to the west. And the pump jack was on this side of the fence. Did the fence, some yards back, look trampled down? How could it be? He must have been mistaken about the location of the pump jack.

Suddenly the sight of it, that sardonic metal head atop its walking-beam, filled him with nameless panic, and it wasn’t until he had backed away from it and sprinted across the chaparral to the house and bounded up the steps, past the procession of trash bags and through the door, and had slammed and latched the door behind him — it wasn’t until then that he thought consciously about what it was that was bothering him. Pulling the brittle shades down to shut out the night, he realized now that it must have been bothering him all along, ever since he saw the area again, maybe even before.

It was the old story of Pump Jack, with a capital P and a capital J.

It had never been clear to him, either when he was a child or later, whether this bizarre story was merely a family foible or a folktale of wider currency. In any case, Uncle Bill and Grandpa Willis used to terrify him with endless accounts of Pump Jack, the wayward oil well that wouldn’t keep to its proper place, but tore out of its moorings and moved around at night — seeking, Uncle Bill warned him with great solemnity, seeking someone to punish. Bad little children were its favorite feast. And if it caught you, Grandpa intoned ominously as Aunt Clara fluttered her hands — well, sir, if it caught you, it would pounce upon you with its uprooted metal feet and drive its pumping rod straight into your heart like a giant mosquito and suck your body dry of blood, leaving you lying desiccated upon the sand, dry and dead as a lizard.

Cal snorted, going around and pulling more shades down, though he was not sure why he did so, since no one would be likely to be peering in at him, out here in the middle of nowhere in the dark of night. Pump Jack and his nocturnal feastings — perfectly delightful tales to tell an impressionable child! What in the world was wrong with Grandpa and Uncle Bill and the others? At least his own father had disapproved of such frightful storytelling. His father just might have been one of the few sane people in the family, when you got right down to it.

Not relishing any further reflections on the matter just now, Cal turned in early, choosing the front bedroom upstairs and making the bed over with fresh sheets. When the light was off and he was lying in bed listening to the night in the desert, where the wind made a forlorn moaning sound around the eaves of the old house, he half fancied he heard some furtive creature rooting and nuzzling about outside, somewhere near the house. But he fell asleep before he could worry about it, and apparently dreamed of things strange and vaguely disturbing, though he couldn’t quite remember them in the morning.

He rose tired and moody. Breakfast did little to dispel the feeling, and he went about his work more out of duty than desire. By noon he had bagged up more than would even fit in the car. He packed as many bags as he could into the back seat and front passenger seat, and drove the fifty miles into town. The real-estate agent was typical of the profession, eager to help in any way possible, blithely confident that the property would sell quickly, don’t you worry about a thing, Mr Withers. Afterward Cal disposed of his trash and his charity items, had lunch at a diner, and spent a good portion of the afternoon just idling about town before he realized that he was making excuses to himself to delay going back out to the ranch.

Preposterous, of course. There was no reason to avoid driving back out, and indeed he should have done so earlier, as there was a good bit of work left to do today, and little of the afternoon left to do it in. He pointed the car back out into the desert and was bumping back up the rocky drive before sunset.

Desert sunsets were incomparable, but he wouldn’t go out and watch that spectacular event this evening. Why not? some corner of his mind niggled. Because, his answer was,there is simply no point in it; I saw the sunset last night, and tonight I have more pressing things to do.

But he found himself not doing them. There was indeed a great deal more in the house to bag up, including two closets full of clothes that he hadn’t even approached yet, but at dinnertime he hadn’t tended to any of it, and after his cheerless meal he felt even less like bothering. There was no particular hurry, he thought, pulling the shades down again and shutting out the encroachment of night that yawned limitless beyond the windows. Why not just grab a good book from his suitcase and settle into the easy chair in the front parlor? He’d been working hard enough, and travel itself had been tiring; he deserved a night off. He eased himself into the chair with the copy of Bleak House he’d been promising himself for weeks to start on, and he switched on a lamp and began to read.

. mud in the streets (he read) as if the waters had but newly retired from the face of the earth, and it would not be wonderful to meet a Megalosaurus, forty feet long or so, waddling like an elephantine lizard up Holborn Hill.

With no intended slight to Dickens, Cal’s attention had already begun to wander, because although he found himself looking away from the page and thinking back over this Dickensian image, or what should have been this image, the passage had changed in some insane way of its own accord. And it would not be wonderful to meet Pump Jack, twenty feet long, waddling like a bug up the hill from Hobbs, he reflected, and chided himself the next moment. Balderdash and nonsense. Cretinous drivel. It was a sad comment on something or other, if a man couldn’t keep his mind from—

What was that sound?

He sat still, holding his breath, listening.

Nothing. More nonsensical—

No. No, there it was again. Like something bumping and scraping around outside, near the porch. Probably some animal looking for food, he thought, though this evening there were no bags on the porch to tempt any four-legged scavengers. Sighing, Cal got up to find out what was going on.

When he stepped out onto the porch and switched on the light out there, he could have sworn that something large and of indeterminate shape scuttered away just beyond the reach of the light. Now come on, this was getting to be absurd. If somebody was trying to— he had to go out and have a look around.

Getting his jacket, he went down the steps and paced about the area near the house, but saw nothing. At first. Then, off on the horizon — something, he thought. Something moved in the moonlight. He walked in that direction, puzzling it over in his head. What was he so distraught about? Some lunatic folktale designed to scare children into submission? It had nothing to do with him now. Maybe he had deserved a bit of censure from time to time when he was a kid—

You don’t listen too good, do you, boy? Hey? Late for supper again. Think you’d know better by now. And after dark too. Why, old Pump Jack just loves to hunt ‘em down, kids like you.

Yeah, well, put a lid on it, Uncle Bill. Somebody already did put a lid on you, as I recall, and about time too.

Thinking this rather uncharitable thought Cal made his way, through the mesquite and yucca and cactus, to the spot where he thought he had seen something. But nothing moved here now except crescents of mesquite-beans waving in the wind. Nothing.

Wait — out there, farther off. Something was moving, by God. Maybe it was a coyote. But it had given the impression of being bigger than that. He loped across the sandy ground toward it, but when he arrived, again there was nothing to see but the austere moonlit trappings of the desert terrain. Then again, farther out — another glimpse, or imagined glimpse, of movement.

He ran on, determined to find out. Sable clouds drew themselves over the moon like ragged eyelids, and he began to have trouble seeing where he was going. Slowing to a walk, he felt his way tentatively forward, having no desire to blunder into a cluster of prickly-pear cactus or sharp-spiked yucca, and no desire to put his foot in a rattlesnake hole. Now and again a bony bit of moon would slip out from behind the cover of cloud, but it was only enough to confuse him more, as things looked different when he caught sight of them in momentary moonlight to how he had expected them to look; where the land, he imagined, sloped down, it really sloped up, or where he thought there was an unobstructed way, a ridge of rock jutted in mute defiance.

Cal kept moving, increasingly wondering why he was out here, what he was doing. Even in the context of that ridiculous childhood legend, what should he have to fear?

He’d done nothing to be punished for.

Had he?

Nothing, except perhaps moving away?

Did the gods of the desert resent one for doing that?

He really must be getting daffy, even to entertain such a thought.

He hadn’t been paying attention to where he was going, and now, as the moon came back out, he found himself standing in the very shadow of a great pump jack, its motionless head angled above him.

Was this the same one? In the same place? He couldn’t tell. There didn’t seem to be any fence nearby, and he had only a very uncertain idea as to where he was.

But in any event, the chase was over. Idiotic! Imagine, some animal scavenger makes some noise up near the house, and good old Cal goes running about the desert chasing phantoms, like a madman or a fool. He sat down on a rock near the pumping platform, and heaved a sigh of relief. He looked up at the profile of the pump jack, bizarre and cold-looking in the wan light, but harmless.

‘Well, Jack, here’s one old boy you’re not going to terrorize. The desert may be a strange place sometimes, but it’s not that damned strange.’

He waited. ‘How’s about it, Jack? Aren’t you going to say anything?’

The pump jack sat silent, an absurd insectoid shape against a starry sky.

‘That’s what I thought.’ Cal slapped his knees and got up off the rock and laughed outright.

The laugh, however, caught in his throat.

Whether it was the sight or the sound, he couldn’t have said. But nothing that came afterward, right down to the end, would disturb him any more than that first impression, that first moment.

The moment when the great oblong head, perched atop its neck of steel, bestirred itself with an unthinkable metallic groan and turned, coldly predatory in the pallid moonlight — turned to look at him.