Brian Hodge
“As early as my boyhood and teenage years,” writes Brian Hodge, “before I’d even discovered H. P. Lovecraft, wide open spaces and rural ruins and desolate roads struck me as eerie locales, haunted by their pasts and potentially harboring newer menaces. Terrible things can unfold, slowly, where few human eyes are around to witness them, and landscapes have long memories.
“I come from farmers who plowed the earth, from miners who crawled inside it. I grew up a town kid, but when visiting grandparents, my playgrounds were fields and woodlands. My relationship to remote places has always been that of a heathen, allowing for the possibility of heathen gods.
“So, when I first read works such as ‘The Dunwich Horror’ and ‘The Colour Out of Space’ they had, despite their alien monstrosities, the kind of immediate familiarity that comes with seeing your worst suspicions confirmed.
“To me, ‘Lovecraftian’ is more than a stew of ingredients — start with these trappings, sprinkle in these settings, season with references to this deity or that grimoire — although you’ll find a few familiar flavors in ‘It’s All the Same Road In the End.’
“I also regard ‘Lovecraftian’ as a way of looking at the earth and the night skies that engulf it. It’s a sense of memory and process; a recognition of the vast antiquity of the soil underfoot and the waters that carve it. It’s a realization that the molecules in your body may have traveled billions of years to get here, and more may be on the way, in a myriad of forms, and that the ground they land on will, in time, yield to whatever proves best equipped to colonize or conquer it.
“And who’s to say the earliest emissaries aren’t already living at the end of a very long road.”
Brian Hodge is one of those people who always has to be making something. So far, he’s made ten novels, and is working on three more, as well as 120 shorter works and five full-length collections. Recent and forthcoming works include In the Negative Spaces and The Weight of the Dead, both standalone novellas; Worlds of Hurt, an omnibus edition of the first four works in his Misbegotten mythos; an updated edition of Dark Advent, his early post-apocalyptic epic; and his next collection, The Immaculate Void. Hodge lives in Colorado, where he also likes to make music and photographs; loves everything about organic gardening except the thieving squirrels; and trains in Krav Maga and kickboxing, which are useless against the squirrels.
It’s All the Same Road in the End
The roads all looked the same again, along with the dried-up little towns they led to. They’d all looked the same again for the last couple of years, the way they had at the beginning.
Funny thing — there was a stretch in the middle when they hadn’t. Two or three years when Clarence and Young Will’s eyes had grown keen enough to pick up on the subtle differences that, say, set Slokum apart from Brownsville. Here, the peculiarities of a water tower, with the look of an alien tripod; there, the way a string of six low hills undulated across the horizon like the humps of a primordial serpent.
But now they’d let the distinctions slip away. From place to place, it wasn’t that different after all. They’d seen it all before and forgotten where. Everything was the same again.
This was how things hid in open daylight, beneath the vast skies, out here in the plains of western Kansas. There was no need for mountain hollows or fern-thick forests or secret caves tucked into seaside coves. The things that wanted to stay hidden would camouflage themselves as one more piece of the monotony and endless repetition.
The worst thing Clarence could think of was that he and his brother were now a part of it too. That the land was digesting them so slowly they didn’t even realize it.
Five days into this trip, the latest of many, all the Brothers Pine had to show for it was another gallon of gas traded for another dusty roadside hamlet that, until this moment, was just a name along a blue line on the most detailed map they’d been able to buy. Gilead, this time. Sometimes there wasn’t even enough town to land on the map.
Another stop, another chance for the truth. More or less, it always went this way:
They started with a feed-and-seed store a block away from a grain elevator. From the moment they stepped in, they drew looks from the old man on one side of the counter and the farmer on the other. No hostility, just curiosity, and why not — both men probably knew every face within ten or twenty miles. But the pair of brothers was a disruption, their arrival like the stroke of a bell that made the farmer aware of time again, and all he had left to do in the day. He made his goodbye and his exit, out to an old workhorse of a pickup truck with a bed full of fifty-pound bags.
“Help you?” Already the old seed man sounded puzzled. They often sounded puzzled.
Small talk first. Sure is hot today. Sure is. Looks like you could use some rain. Sure could. Could always use more rain.
It was better when they were old. The elders were the ones with the longest memories, and a need to hang onto the stories of the things that had happened around them, especially the things that shouldn’t have. They remembered events that younger people — Clarence and Young Will’s peers, especially — never knew, or never had time for.
Even Will Senior had known that, way back when.
“This may seem like a funny question,” Young Will said. He was the one feeling talkative today. Just as well. He had the friendlier face, oval and open and guileless, and the taller stature that commanded attention. He looked as if he should still be in college, shooting hoops and resolute about never breaking the rules. “But have you ever heard anything about a man named Willard Chambers? This would go back quite a few years.”
Then he produced the picture, the first one, black and white in a thousand grainy shades of gray. It had a vintage look, a vintage feel, showing a square-faced, wavy haired man who cracked a grin both impish and wise as he gestured with a cigarette pinched between his thumb and forefinger. Did men in the prime of their lives even look like this anymore? Clarence had never seen one.
The old man dipped into memory’s well and came up empty. “Can’t say any of it rings a bell. Should it? What did he do?”
“He disappeared.”
“Sorry to hear that.” The old man’s sympathy was genuine and matter-of-fact. You didn’t get to be this old without a long acquaintance with loss. “When?”
“A little over fifty years ago.”
“Mercy. That is a spell.” From behind black-framed glasses sturdy enough to take a punch, the old man peered at the photo again, maybe looking for something familiar. “Did he come from around here? Have kin around here?”
“No sir, he didn’t.”
He took one more look at the photo, then gave them a fresh appraisal, seeing the connection in Clarence, maybe. He had inherited the square features, if not the freewheeling demeanor. He had the knitted eyebrows of a born worrier.