BY Mike Prask
Our barn doesn’t need an outside motion light, so my husband says, emphatic. But Daniel is also
ever-indulgent, and the soonest Saturday, he’s out on the ladder, early before Fay or I are awake. I can’t
explain why the light. We haven’t had problems with thieves, not since we inherited the place. Still, my
head fills with illuminated intruders, sneaking away chastened and empty-handed. Truth is, anything
valuable on Blue Bluff Farm had been already marauded from the machine shed, after Uncle Tim got
sick, before he’d willed the place to us. Cancer.
We’re like many marriages, where I watch him perform a household task and am sure I’d have
done it better or quicker. But he needs to do it himself -- bolt the shiny mounting bracket into place, drill
holes in the barnwall for our neighbor, Evert Peters, to later come and run the electrical. Ilet him work,
keep my comments to myself. Daniel can read critiques on my face, intuit the unsaid words from across
the lawn.
But two nights after they finish the install, the light shines straight through our bedroom
window, truer than the Bat Signal. My eyes first find the clock in the dark, but its glowing numbers won’t
make the light make sense. My sleep patterns, from waking with Fay are fucked up beyond cognition,
have been for two years. As I get to the window, the light goes out again.
The light comes on again the next night, the timing the same, within ten minutes of when it lit
up the night before. Daniel has snored himself to sleep. I try to muster frustration that my good night of
sleep has been ruined, but I haven’t had one in ages. I’m bewildered in my half-sleep, but I think I hear --
both nights -- the carom sound of car doors slamming in the yard. I’m awake enough to cross over to the
window and see there’s nothing out there. Nothing to activate the light. Nothing to make any slamming
sounds.
When he was around ten, Daniel would come up to stay with his Uncle Tim at Blue Bluff in the
summers. A month or so at a time. When Tim went into Baraboo, to town, sometimes Daniel went with
him. Sometimes, he stayed back to explore the property, especially the barn. Being up in the loft didn’t
creep him out, he tells me, with the sunlight and sliding doors. But the rest of the barn, at ground level,
with its skeletal husks of broken equipment and shit that felt ages-old, the side room stacked with
splintering furniture, or the gloomy cellar below, he wouldn’t spend an extra second. He didn’t feel
differently about the barn now that it was ours.
One of those summer days, he wandered the farm, carrying around a stack of baseball and
football cards. Only Brewers and Packers -- he’d tossed the ones from other teams, terrified to tell his
older brother he’d done it, since it wasn’t clear who was the cards’ rightful owner anymore. When he
got to the barn, Daniel set the stack of them, twenty or so, neatly onto a wooden crate before scurrying
up the ladder to the loft. When he climbed down, the cards -- the eye-blacked faces, hitters in mid-
swing, and portly relievers wobbling on one knee -- had been fanned out like a poker hand. I say the
same thing each time he tells me the story. “It was you,” I say. “You arranged them like that without
thinking. Then just forgot about it.” He smiles sweet and shakes his head, like it’s him who feels sorry for
me.
The next Saturday, a crisp, quiet one, Daniel goes outside to check the light after two coffees, no
breakfast. He’s sure it’ll be an easy fix -- I can tell as I watch him lean the ladder against the barn. He’ll
count it a success, if he can finish before Fay wakes up. I can’t tell if he knows I’m awake or not, if he can
hear the dish noises I make in the kitchen. Either way, he wisely ignores me.
I move to the porch and watch as Daniel stays poised before the bottom rung longer than
necessary. He looks over at me after staring above him at the loft doors. He gives me a slow wave, but
I’m not sure if he means any message with it. I watch, willing him to start the climb in my head. Finally,
he takes the first few steps. I purposely look over his head, not directly at him, to feel like I’m giving him
room. I see the clouds swirling in space over the barn, the pale moon, insomniac like me against the
heavy blue of the sky. I look back down to see Daniel with his hands on the motion light. As I watch, his
body starts to convulse, then stills itself. I trip down the stairs towards him, thinking he’s electrocuted
himself.
As I cross the lawn, I can see, expecting him to look injured or stricken, he instead looks like he’s
solved something. But then I notice the light fixture loose in his hands, freed from its mounting on the
side of the barn. He hurls the defunct light onto the hard, packed dust at his feet, I think before it
registers with him that I’ve approached.
“What happened?” I ask when I get to him.
“I was trying to adjust it, Elena. The arms,” he says, as he dips his head forward, toward the
ground. “They were stiffer than I expected, and I, you know, moved them around -- tried to. The metal
started to get hotter under my hands, like someone was turning a stove knob on me.” He holds his
hands out to me, like I’m supposed to see something unusual about them. “Then,” he says, “I felt a
shock pass through both hands and up to my shoulders. So when I jerked backwards from that, I ripped
the whole thing off -- light, base, all of it -- and threw it on the ground before I realized what I was
doing.”
I ask if the wood behind the light had rotted. Something. Anything to explain it.
He rubs his hands together, his elbows resting on his knees. “It was fine. Clean. Dry. Just how it
was when I drilled into it the other day.”
We both startle when we hear Fay cry from inside, upstairs. I wait for her to mount her usual
protest at being crib-bound. Daniel looks up at her window, then behind him at the ladder and sighs. I
tell him to finish what he’d started, while I go tend to our daughter.
Daniel reinstalls the light from scratch while I watch from the kitchen. Finished, he waves and
hops in front to test the sensor. I chuckle at him, the only man I know could get me to take responsibility
for a place like Blue Bluff, where none of our handiwork actually works, where we’re too tentative to
take on more livestock aside from the cluster of goats that roam the property, and where Fay will likely
grow up an only child. No matter how Daniel cavorts, the light stays unlit, and he slinks in to join me in
the kitchen.
“I spliced it all back together,” he says.
“But no go?” He nods slowly. “Get Evert back out?” I ask.
Daniel sighs. “Better than paying a real electrician,” he says.
“Tell him there’s an extra hundred in it for him,” I yell from the next room, once Daniel’s got him
on the phone, and it’s clear Evert is giving him shit about coming back.
“What was he worried about?” I ask once they hang up.
“He wouldn’t tell me,” Daniel says. I look at him and wonder if Evert wouldn’t tell him or my
husband won’t tell me.
Evert comes back a couple days later. I have Fay on the swings. The goats make slow circles
below us, down by the creek that deviates through the back of our property. A loud crash comes from
the barn, and I hear Evert bray out, “Aw shit.” I glance at Fay, secure in her bucket-seat swing and jog
towards the barn. As I get a few yards away, Evert’s step ladder jettisons out the door, like a drunk
leaving a bar the hard way. It lands upside-down before falling toward me, a few yards from where I’m
standing. I look overhead. The motion light is lit, presumably from the movement of the ladder.
“The fuck, Evert?”
He stands in the doorway, his face purple. As I watch him, the color drains from his face. “The
ladder came down underneath me,” he says, “like someone pulled it out.”
“You OK? Did you hit your head?” It’s a question that suits ninety percent of my interactions
with Evert, but here it’s sincere.
“You know what’s weird?” he asks. I wait, thinking the ladder mysteriously getting upended was
weird enough. “Something...told me it was gonna happen before it did. I jumped off right in time. Ain’t
had anything like that happen to me before.”
“But it’s fixed?” I ask.
“That’s not the important thing, but yeah. I had to go all the way back to the junction box.
Which was also a little peculiar.” I raise my eyebrows and give him a quick nod to continue. “The
electrical nuts? The little yellow or orange plastic thingies?”
“I know what they are, Evert.”
“They’d been unscrewed. Just sitting in the box, under the loosed wires.”
“I’m sure that’s not that unusual, ” I argue despite not knowing what he’s getting at yet.
His eyes narrow. “I’m still gonna get me the hell out of here.”
“Your money,” I say. “It’s up at the house.”
He picks up the ladder with one hand and waves his phone at me with the other. “Just shoot it
to me here,” he says. The fact that Evert has a PayPal account ranks as peculiar a phenomenon as
everything else he’s told me.
Once back in his truck, he looks more his normal self: pink at the cheeks, sweaty locks of hair
poking out of his hat. I lean against the truck’s doorframe, even though I know he prefers I don’t.
“Daniel probably fixed it,” I say. “It just didn’t stay that way because of something weird.”
He sighs, then shakes his head. “I expect weird shit in that little back room area. Not the big part
of the barn,” he says, as he turns the key in the ignition. I ask again about his money. Now, calmer, he
relents. Once I return with his cash, I ask what he meant about weird shit.
He smirks and exhales from his nostrils as he folds the two hundreds into his shirt pocket.
“The room over the old hog pen. Don’t you ever go in there?” he asks. “With the stories, it
would be the first thing I’d have done moving in.” He pauses. “Or maybe the last.” I look over at Fay
kicking her legs in the now-motionless swing, waiting for me. “Ask Daniel,” Evert says, as he slides the
truck into Reverse. “Ask him about the Devil’s Lake Social Club.”
On his lunch period, Daniel texts to ask about the light. I answer, but in spite of myself, save my
question about the Social Club for later. After dinner, washing dishes, while Fay watches an on-demand
episode of Sesame in the other room, I ask him.
He chuckles. “It wasn’t really a Social Club. It was Tim’s father and uncles. Friends. Women who
floated in and out. They’d congregate in the barn, play cards, and get shitfaced. Or skip the cards and
just drink when the bars in town had kicked them out early” As he talks, I can’t help notice him slip in
between past and present tense.
“Sounds enough like a Social Club to me,” I say. “Or a speakeasy.”
“I don’t think this was all that secretive, Elena. Or that it needed to be. If you weren’t an asshole,
and you liked to drink, you probably had an open invite.”
“So that leaves Evert Peters off the invite list?” I say.
Daniel shakes his head. “What about Evert?”
“Any reason he’d be afraid to go back there?”
“I think people have seen things back there.”
“Like a ghost?” I ask.
“Or more than one.” I dig my nails into the counter, but feel them slip on its surface.
“Doesn’t this feel like something you should have told me before?” I ask.
Daniel turns off the sink, dries his hands, and leans against the counter, facing me. “I’ve heard
plenty of stupid things about that part of the barn, Elena. I haven’t seen anyone, but I also haven’t been
back there for a while.”
I look at him and let him shut down the converation for now.
Later, in bed, I start it back up.
“Why didn’t they call it the Devil’s Head Social Club,” I ask. “It’s the cooler name.”
Devil’s Lake was a mile or two away, between us and town. Devil’s Head was a ski resort that
overlooked our farm. Both had been formed back when glaciers coasted along, carving up pre-historic
Wisconsin. I never understood why the original settlers had been so preoccupied with naming things
after the Devil; they couldn’t help themselves. The resort didn’t exist back in the Social Club days as
Daniel was describing them, at least I didn’t think, but the mountain sure as hell did. If everything they
saw put the devil in their minds, I couldn’t fathom why those same settlers hadn’t kept moving west till
they found somewhere that didn’t. Or maybe they’d given up trying, however many stops they’d made
along the way to get to this point.
“Maybe they’re second-guessing it themselves,” he says, “and that’s what’s kept them from
crossing over to the other plane of existence.”
“Sounds like earlier, you didn’t think it was ghosts.” I don’t wait for him to answer. “Why would
they care about the motion light?” I ask, unsure where that thought came from.
“Maybe they don’t like anyone knowing when they come and go.”
“You think their ghost wives don’t already know they’re not at their ghost houses?” I ask.
“Their real houses,” he says. “It would still be their real houses.”
I’d had no reason to say it a moment ago, but I feel credence build as I think. The noises I heard.
Were they the Social Club, calling it a night and going home? Till the next night, when they started all
over?
“What’s weird for me,” I say, “is none of this other shit got mentioned with the baseball card
story.”
He sniffs in the dark. I look towards the window, wondering if the motion light would choose
now to kick on. “That story was easy,” he says. “I liked giving you the idea it was the worst thing that
happened to me out there.”
It obviously wasn’t.
Another day with Tim gone, off the property, Daniel had gone back to the barn. No sooner was
he up in the loft than he realized he had to take a piss. Instead of aiming himself out the loft doors,
something made him climb down to find more seclusion. Halfway down, his foot slipped. But it didn’t
slip. It was like his whole body was floating, he says, while his hands went near-numb from gripping the
ladder. He collected himself, but not before he felt a spread of warmth and wet, and his reason for
leaving the loft no longer a pressing concern.
Once he realized he’d wet his pants, he wandered around the barn, while I kept my questions
about his ten-year-old logic to myself. Picking his way around the old equipment, and piles of grain and
soil covered with dusty tarps, he found himself in front of the low saloon doors that led to the
partitioned room over the livestock pen, the dirt-floored, stone-walled area where the hogs sheltered
when it got cold.
Daniel stood outside the room, one hand on the door slats. Nothing seemed unusual from
outside. He could see the scattered old furniture inside, old wooden chairs with broken legs, wide,
round tables upended in odd places and left there. Dust accumulated along the floorboards in drifts, like
snow.
Once he entered the room, he smelled something like sour medicine. He realized, years later,
that it was whiskey, but had no reason to know that at that age. The odd smell distracted him for a
moment. That was when he saw the two men. They sat at one of the tables, the only one left upright.
They wore the kind of clothes -- dress boots, bowler hats -- you’d see in town, rather than around the
farm. Daniel could see faint shapes pass between them. They made motions, he realized, like they were
playing cards, even though to him, their hands appeared empty. The motion was disjointed but
constant, moving then not, skipping like an old computer video game. He unfocused and the kinetics of
the card game became less hypnotic. That was when he saw the knife. One of them had a knife in front
of him, appearing in much sharper relief than the cards. Something told Daniel he couldn’t reach out
and touch it, but there was a tangible relationship between the bowler-hatted man, the knife, and the
way the man’s eyes fixed on Daniel. The man spun the knife, lazy but not so at all, in a circle in front of
him.
“Was he fucking with you?” I ask, unsure who was intruding on the other, Daniel or the ghostly
card players.
“No, nothing like that. Next thing, I heard Tim’s truck in the driveway, and when I turned back
the two guys were gone.”
When he finishes the story, I lean over and kiss his forehead, a recuperative gesture, like you’d
do for a kid’s skinned knee. I wonder if letting him surface a past trauma, voice a past mystery is
consolation enough. Eventually, we fall asleep, our heads filled with things our land can’t bring itself to
forget.
The next day is Monday. Daniel is at school. Fay is playing in the next room.I look out the kitchen
window and realize the light hadn’t tripped the night before. Sunday. The Lord’s Day. A day of observed
rest for the Social Club.
When Fay naps later, I cross the lawn towards the barn. Inside the doors, in the cool dark, my
eyes scan for shadows, weird shapes, but see nothing. I wend my way through the remnants of
threshers and barrows, equipment not useful enough to have been plundered when Tim fell ill. I don’t
notice till I’m in front of them, but I reach the saloon doors, the barrier into our haunted room.
I look at my phone, see no signal and feel a burble of panic in my chest. But our farm has poor
coverage, and I have no shortage of places I can go -- the eclipse of the ski hill next door, the hollow
behind the creek, out by the tension lines -- where I lose my bars. There’s nothing sinister about the
barn, I tell myself.
I look back into the room and bat at the swinging doors before slipping through. Oddly once
I’m inside, I feel safe. Far safer than I’d expected. I wander around, righting one of the high-backed
stools onto its feet, bending to lift a table how it belonged. I walk over to the wall, lightly running my
hand along it, picturing the wonders a new coat of paint might do, when I notice something.
Right above knee level are some carved lines in the wall. In the low light, it takes me a moment
to recognize it as a Hangman game. I hope only a game. A little stick figure is stretched, dangling from a
stick gallows. There are no letters or blank spaces for letters carved underneath, but it doesn’t mean
someone didn’t lose the game.
Cold grips me, and I glance up at the rafter overhead, expecting to see an actual rope noose
strung over it, but there’s nothing there. I squint harder at the carving. Whoever made the Hangman
marks is long gone. If it were Daniel’s card players, they haven’t made themselves known to me
otherwise, as they did with him. I can’t feel them; the space may no longer be theirs.
I clap my hands on my knees and lift myself from the chair. I find a chisel on the shelves by the
main doors to the barn. Back over at the wall, I sit and tentatively scratch my own markings, then dig in
earnest. First a gallows base, then the support and the crossbar. Then an irregular noose, no perfect
circle. I don’t care to come back, see if the ghosts take up my game. Instead, below, I scratch six spaces
for letters and fill our name in one letter at a time.
I replace the chisel on my way out and grab a shovel. I heft it in my hand. A clean whack will
knock the motion light off its moorings. Outside, I look up, confident I can reach without the ladder. One
of us is asking too much of the other, but I’m not sure if it’s me or Daniel. We have no need, though, to
reinstall the light. As I swing the shovel, I’m already anticipating an undeserved, satisfying sleep.
Mike Prask is a fiction writer whose work has appeared in HAD and Rejection Letters. This submission is part of a collection of linked stories, some of which have been published in West Branch and Five South. He lives and works in Highland Park, Illinois