Readers unfamiliar with "Noctuidae" may prefer to read these notes only after reading the story.
….Their ascent angled, the trees grew too dense, the vehicles and men fell too small from her height. The trio had left behind every contemporary human trace.
The ridge widened while they were unaware so once they reached a level where it grew mostly flat they realized they could no longer scan its full span side to side. The pines were taller here, the low oaks tight in clumps. Postage stamp meadows separated random rock outcrops and jagged bits of ridge. They'd ascended into a patchwork and come sans compass or GPS. Their original plan had been to follow the river, and how could they get lost then? But they'd lost the river, at least for now. Pete thought the canyon must be to their left, as best any of them could remember left. Ron thought they should head back down or at least to the right to relocate the Blue River edge of the ridge. Pete prevailed before either asked Sue-Min's opinion and they all three began meandering toward a hypothetical directionless port, expecting their way always to open onto a new canyon but coming only into more motley oak and pine after each distinctive bit they traversed, Sue-Min damping her emotions down just short of panic. Ron and Pete? If they were worried, she couldn't tell. They all three tramped along, the guys offering random inanities —At least the weather's good. —I think we're getting close. . . But mostly in silence.
They'd just come onto a stretch of bare rock strewn with stones when Sue-Min concluded to call for a retreat, but before she could speak up Pete called out —Look at this! It's some kind of pattern!
His words still in her ears, she saw it too, gray stones around softball size set in wandering arcs and arabesques on the granite ground. Several closed cells remained intact though the arms of their neighbors disintegrated at inconsistent lengths. Ron shook his head. —Somebody built this—but who?
Pete's reply struck Sue-Min as ridiculous, asinine —Maybe it was the rancher's kids.
Ron swept three stones over soccer style with the side of his foot, bent to inspect them. —No lichen on their undersides, only above. They've been here a long, long time.
Pete's next reply seemed even more out of whack than his first —Maybe it was a Pueblo.
Sue-Min wanted so bad to get up in his face and yell These aren't walls! Where's the rest of the stone then? If this is a dissipated site where is the rest of the stone? Yes, Ancestral Puebloans, Mimbres, or some backwoods branch of the Mogollon had inhabited this canyon, though not right here, not like this. Walter Hough had marked and mapped sites up and down the Blue back before World War I, and Steve Swanson had revisited the area almost a hundred years later. She knew as much, had met Swanson more than once, could share that information, but she had no desire to engage the creeper, let alone antagonize him. Nor to drag things out. She had his number and was maintaining the wall of chill. Measured, measured. Weighed. She spoke as little as she could, kept interaction at the barest min.
He must've read something in her gaze though, fixed his own eyes on her expectantly and tilted his head an inch to the left, and after long enough she'd said nothing, gave the least of shrugs, staring at her still. For once Ron came to her aid.
—Hey, look, there's a gap ahead. He pointed beyond their present patch of patterned mystery stones, between the scrub oaks and scraggly pines. Sue-Min and Pete aligned their eyes to his extended finger's course, saw through the dregs of forest to what seemed an empty span. At least a place with no visible trees, little scrub, no upthrust rocks. . . A shadowed background. Either a seriously major meadow ahead, or Blossom Creek Canyon. Some damn canyon anyway…
* * *
"Noctuidae" (2016) by Scott Nicolay is a well-written novella. Very modern, too, in that the author uses dashes instead of quotation marks when denoting dialogue! (A definition of noctuidae can be found here).
The story explores two characters in extremis as they hide in a cave in the US desert southwest. What are they hiding from? The characters do not know and the reader never finds out: just hints and the awfulness of... inexplicability.
Sue-Min and her boyfriend Ron and Ron's creepy pal Pete decide to spend the night in a cave in what they think is Blossom Creek Canyon, New Mexico. Before dawn the next morning, Sue-Min wakes to Pete on top of her, his hand over her mouth. She immediately begins calculating strategies to confront the jerk she always suspected would turn out to be a rapist. But she realizes Pete is only terrified, and wants silence; then she sees the silhouette of something large moving outside the cave mouth. And Ron has disappeared. And is time at a standstill? Or going in reverse? Or is Pete's watch malfunctioning?
Sue-Min knows she is still not safe with Pete so near. And Pete's idea of making a pass does in fact turn out to be a lot like trying to rape her.
* * *
If I sound glib, it is because so little in "Noctuidae" is offered to the reader outside its two stock characters and their trite emotions. Can cliches even make a character rounded?
Now, I am not suggesting Nicolay should have violated his own "Dogme 2011 for Weird Fiction." But the conclusion of that set of commandments was "I swear as a writer that my supreme goal is to force the truth out of my characters and settings; out of the universe itself."
"Noctuidae" is happy to leave the reader with commonplaces about middle class professionals falling apart in a crisis, already bromide sixty years ago on "The Twilight Zone." We are left no wiser than Sue-Min and Pete. Inexplicability is all well and good, but it does not rule out an explicable story arc for the characters confronting the mystery.
In this sense, "Noctuidae" lags aesthetically behind, say, George Allan England's "The Thing from Outside" (1923).
* * *
I wrote about Nicolay's excellent inexplicable story "Do You Like to Look at Monsters?" (2014) here.
Jay
26 June 2022
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