"The Shadow Over Grainfield" by Earl S Wynn

    When visiting the humble, sleepy little village where the sign on the one road in or out of town demurely states that you’ve entered Grainfield, California, you cannot at first imagine the kinds of horrors that stir in the shadows there on the long, flat streets at night. Your mind never lights on the unspeakable rituals that unfold in hidden groves and in the basements of churches, the things that lurch through cow pastures and fields or howl in sickly, gibbering cries in hidden rooms beneath aged, crumbling houses lost on roads that meander miles from the highway.

    Grainfield is nothing like you expect to see in California; it’s a midwest town transplanted on the edge of the central valley where the mountains rise up against the horizon in dark and rolling ridges. There are no movie stars here, no surfers, no beaches, and the only sunshine is a hot oppressive wash of light that bleaches and burns through everything too long under its eye. It’s not the sun that should worry you, though, anymore than it’s the locals that greet you kindly on the street, offer you discounts and deals because a customer is a precious thing to them. It’s the unspoken thing that connects them all, that keeps them all locked up in this rotting cow town, unable or unwilling to leave. It’s the secret that makes them lock their doors at night, that keeps them all going to the same church every Sunday, the reason why their town has no hotel and all the businesses close up like clockwork when dusk begins to fall. It’s the reason why the local hardware store stocks three different grades of heavy duty nautical cable when the nearest lake is over forty miles away, the reason why the butcher packs a dozen unlabeled boxes in the back of his SUV before driving home at the end of the day. It’s the shadow that hangs over Grainfield and taints everything that everyone does in some subtle way, the reason why the only person who doesn’t sleep with the light on at night is the priest who lives in the basement of the church. It’s the thing that drives him to wake up every morning, hours before anyone else, and sit down in the center of the tesseract drawn in chalk on the floor of the basement with a revolver in his lap. It’s the last thing he thinks of before he closes his eyes and clears his mind, before he turns on the tape recorder and opens his mouth to let the words of a dead god come through.