This topic is currently marked as "dormant"—the last message is more than 90 days old. You can revive it by posting a reply.
1MyriadBooks
Does anyone recall a short story along the horror / sci-fi vein that featured a farmwife communicating with monster-like underground dwellers?
From what I recall, the wife was married to a lazy, greedy, and cruel man. Something happened and a great pit opened up in their farmland, and the husband tied a flashlight to a bit of rope to try to see the bottom of the hole. He played the rope the whole way out, until the light of the flashlight couldn't be seen, but, when he drew the rope back, he found the flashlight had been taken off and replaced with a bar of gold and a note in an unknown language.
The husband announces that, clearly, there are people down the hole and that they are in desperate need of flashlights, so he drives off to town the buy as many as he can find. The wife figures that the neighborly thing to do would be to send them a generous lunch, with which she also includes her dictionary. The underdwellers quickly respond with a new note in perfect English, praise for the meat that was in with the lunch, vague scorn for the 'weak death-ray' that was the flashlight, and request for more meat.
The husband arrives back at about this time, goes himself down into the pit with his load of flashlights, and is promptly eaten by the underdwellers. The last bit of the story is the wife reading the note that accompanied an enormous mound of gold and was full of praise for the new meat, which they took to be a turkey, and a demand for the wife to send down more turkey at once.
I probably read this story in the 90s in a collection of genre or horror works, but I suspect that the story had been written sometime earlier. Is it familiar to anyone?
Thanks much for the help!
From what I recall, the wife was married to a lazy, greedy, and cruel man. Something happened and a great pit opened up in their farmland, and the husband tied a flashlight to a bit of rope to try to see the bottom of the hole. He played the rope the whole way out, until the light of the flashlight couldn't be seen, but, when he drew the rope back, he found the flashlight had been taken off and replaced with a bar of gold and a note in an unknown language.
The husband announces that, clearly, there are people down the hole and that they are in desperate need of flashlights, so he drives off to town the buy as many as he can find. The wife figures that the neighborly thing to do would be to send them a generous lunch, with which she also includes her dictionary. The underdwellers quickly respond with a new note in perfect English, praise for the meat that was in with the lunch, vague scorn for the 'weak death-ray' that was the flashlight, and request for more meat.
The husband arrives back at about this time, goes himself down into the pit with his load of flashlights, and is promptly eaten by the underdwellers. The last bit of the story is the wife reading the note that accompanied an enormous mound of gold and was full of praise for the new meat, which they took to be a turkey, and a demand for the wife to send down more turkey at once.
I probably read this story in the 90s in a collection of genre or horror works, but I suspect that the story had been written sometime earlier. Is it familiar to anyone?
Thanks much for the help!
2lucien
I think it's Hey, You Down There! by Harold Rolseth.
3MyriadBooks
Yes, I think you're right! The story summaries I'm seeing online match perfectly.
Thank you!
Thank you!
5slaughterhousedb
I have found an online version of this book at https://julie-cfahs.wikispaces.com/file/view/Hey+You+Down+There
The story you're looking for is very definitely "Hey, you down there" by Harold Rolseth. The story has stayed with me for almost 40 years and I can always remember it by reciting the line "SEND US TURKEY IMMEDIATELY".
The story linked above seems slightly different than the story I recall, but that may be a few decades of dust obscuring the version I read.
The story you're looking for is very definitely "Hey, you down there" by Harold Rolseth. The story has stayed with me for almost 40 years and I can always remember it by reciting the line "SEND US TURKEY IMMEDIATELY".
The story linked above seems slightly different than the story I recall, but that may be a few decades of dust obscuring the version I read.
6MyriadBooks
>5 slaughterhousedb: Thanks very much!
7JAL75
This story was adapted for the 80's TV series Amazing Stories. http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0511117/?ref_=ttep_ep9
