The Prom-posal on The Barrens

A story of brothers uncovering deep secrets.

I am The Rogue Trader. A trader in things forgotten and things feared, a chipped arrowhead, a journal bound in human skin, and stories attached. The most valuable currency, however, is often the truth hidden in plain sight. This particular story came to me attached to a rusted length of half-inch rebar, broken twisted like a snake, found years later half-buried in the clay of the Box Elder Barrens.

It is the tale of two brothers, a full moon, and a proposal that was never finished.

It happened on a comfortable spring night in 1988, although "comfortable" meant something different out on The Barrens. The evening sky above the Wasatch Front was a deep, velvet black, periodically swept by soft gray clouds that drifted across a silvery, perfect full moon, like leaves in a lazy river. The moonlight, when it broke through, illuminated the world in shades of cold platinum and deep shadow.

Robert, the elder, parked his faded baby blue and white Ford pickup a half-mile down a disused dirt track. The spur road was a detour of forgotten asphalt drifting off the Interstate access road. Rob was at this time barely twenty, and settled into his second year at Utah State in Logan, as usual he wore a sensible flannel shirt, and faded jeans. David, the younger, was a ball of nervous energy and cheap cologne, and a senior at Bear River High in Garland, with an absurd, tonight he had an ambitious plan tucked under his arm.

“You sure about this, Dave?” Rob asked, retrieving the bulky can of old house paint and two frayed brushes.

Dave gripped his artistic tools like they were weapons. And he headed to the front lines of the Ogden Portland Cement Factory. “It’s perfect.” He smiled hitching his backpack on his shoulder, “It’s huge. It’s right on the Interstate. Her bus passes here at 7:15 sharp. She’ll see it.” His playful grin stretched wide across his face, “No one else has ever done anything this big for Ashley.”

The brothers hopped the low, rusting fence onto the dead ground. The moment their boots touched the cracked, mineral-rich clay, the comfortable air seemed to turn brittle. This was one of those places where the earth itself had shrugged off the attempts of settlers, farmers, and anyone else who attempts to tame it, the land that had repelled life for a century. Even the moonlight here seemed to possess a different quality, thin and wary, almost alive.

In the distance, the Cement Plant rose, it was a stoic monument of defiance. The structure was a concrete corpse in ruins, its silos and skeletal frames carved against the night sky. Twisted and rusted shards of rebar jutted from its jagged concrete flesh like aged brown bones reaching from the grave. This was the structure built by Chapin Day’s madness, molded from the very materials the Barrens grudgingly yielded.

They walked in an uneasy silence for a minute, the only sounds the crunch of their sneakers on the dried earth and the distant, constant whisper of traffic on I-15.

“Man, this place gives me the creeps,” Rob muttered, pulling the collar of his flannel tighter despite the temperate air. “Always has.”

“It’s just an old factory, Rob. Remember when we used to ride bikes out here,” Dave countered, his voice lacking conviction.

In there uneasy silence they passed the spot where the old marl excavation had created the “swimming hole.” Under the moonlight, the water was still, dark, and utterly reflective. While they uneasily walked by, Rob’s breath caught in his throat. He stopped dead, a sharp, profound chill racing down his spine, a feeling far colder, and deeper than even the air warranted. It wasn't the feeling of being watched by a person, but by something lurking just beneath that moonlit surface, ancient and infinitely patient, tracking, following their approach down the paved pathway to the factory. The desperate whispers of drowned children, and the presence of the unseen force that pulled them, seemed to coalesce into a heavy pressure on his eardrums.

“Let’s just hurry up,” Rob insisted, in his excitement he practically jogging toward the colossal concrete wall.

Dave, too focused on the magnitude of his prom-posal, ignorantly pushed the uneasiness down. They searched and found a relatively smooth section of concrete, a vast slab that would be perfectly visible from the freeway only a few yards away.

Dave worked around the lid with the “key” and wrestled open the can. The old latex paint smelled sour, like some out dates dairy. Then he dipped a wide brush into the sage green paint, and proceed to go to work, applying his message. The gray-white moonlight reflecting dully off the sticky surface.

“A-S-H-L-E-Y…”

He painted the letters in bold, sloppy strokes, each one several feet high. Rob stood lookout, uneasily shifting his weight nervously, the feeling of some cold, quiet observer never leaving him.

It was during the final stroke of the letter 'Y' that the silence broke.

It was a sound so low that at first, Rob thought it was the low-frequency drone of a passing truck. But it held a rhythm, a cadence—a breath.

Chant.

It was a soft, guttural murmur that seemed to pulse beneath the surface of the world. Dave stopped painting, the brush hanging mid-air.

“Did you hear that?” Dave whispered, the nervous bravado draining from his face.

“Yeah,” Rob breathed. “It’s like… under the ground.”

They took a few cautious steps moving to the main structure of the potash plant, its thick sturdy walls a tomb of something unknown, unseen, until now unfealt, following the sound. It was unmistakably coming from the interior darkness of the ruins. The sound was linguistic, yet utterly devoid of meaning they could recognize, a low, melodic drone of vowels and harsh, clipped consonants. It was almost-familiar English, warped and distilled into something ancient.

Cautiously they entered the ruins. The air inside still and heavy, smelling of dust, rust, and the metallic ozone that precedes a storm. The sound was loudest beneath the massive foundation of the old potash facility, the mosalem a portion of the plant that the land itself had refused to allow man to destroy.

Near the center of the concrete slab, where the flooring should have been continuous, they found a small opening. It wasn't the jagged, casual break found elsewhere. This was a definite architectural feature: a descending stairwell built of careful brick and mortar, different from the rough, poured concrete of the rest of the factory. It was a secret entrance, sealed over but now open, a wound leading into the structure's core.

“That’s not supposed to be there,” Rob whispered, his voice catching.

Dave, the thrill-seeker, couldn’t resist. He retrieved a flashlight from his back pocket. “Come on. It’s probably hobos.”

Rob, terrified but unwilling to abandon his little brother to whatever dwelt in the dark, followed.

The brick stairwell was tight, it's stone steps worn with years of treed, far more than it should ever had been, spiraling down twenty feet before the masonry ended abruptly. The walls on the descent turned from artisan construction to rough-hewn cavern walls, not forged by modern tunneling but widened, deepened from the natural rock below. It was as if the ground itself, that ancient, forbidden clay, had been carved to accommodate something utterly unnatural. The air grew immediately cold, thick with the scent of wet stone and an acrid, metallic tang that tasted like old pennies.

They followed the narrow, twisting passage for what felt like an eternity, shifting their bodies through narrow passages, the echoing, chanting growing louder, enticing, eventually resolving into distinct syllables that nonetheless remained meaningless to the human ear. It was a prayer to a silence that precedes man, even God.

Suddenly the stories they heard their entire lives, the murmuring, the feelings of gloom and dread made sense.

The passage suddenly opened into a vast, natural chamber, a cave hidden beneath The Barrens. The flickering light of half a dozen tallow lamps cast dancing shadows, illuminating the scene.

A group of perhaps a dozen people, shrouded in heavy, dark robes, stood in a loose circle. They weren't teenagers or vagrants, or even creatures whispered on bonfire nights after a school dance. They were Human, old and young, faces obscured by deep hoods.

In the center of the circle, where a stone altar had been crudely carved from the living rock, stood the idol. It was vaguely human-shaped, yet horribly wrong: it possessed too many limbs, articulated in impossible joints, and its head ended not in a face but a smooth, polished beak. It was not human, an effigy of something older and darker than the industrial waste above them, a residual force of "The Barrens" given shape.

The chanting then reached a fever pitch, with a inhuman cry. The cultists swayed, offering small, dark artifacts onto the altar.

As Rob raised the flashlight to get a better look, the beam caught on the wet rock, reflecting off the wall. The light was sudden, stark, and utterly alien to the shadowed cave.

The chanting abruptly stopped.

Thirteen heads, hooded and faceless, snapped toward the light.

“Run!” Rob yelled, shoving his brother.

Panic seized them both, like the grip of an ancient Grecian athlete. They didn't need to be chased; the silence that replaced the chanting was enough. The sound of their footsteps echoed like thunder as they scrambled back into the narrow cavern, crashing into the walls as they ran in a panic. Behind them, a ragged, horrifying cry ripped through the air, a sound that was certainly human, but fueled by the devotion to the beaked thing they had just seen. They heard the frantic movement of robes behind them.

They clawed their way back up the brick stairwell and stumbled out onto the concrete floor of the main factory, gasping for the relatively clean, cool night air.

They ran, tripping and falling over rusted debris and uneven concrete, across the vast, empty flatness of The Barrens. They didn't slow down until they reached the low fence, David tripping as Rob grabbed the back loop of his Levies and pulling him over. They scrambled across the dirt road and tumbling into the old Ford.

Rob fumbled with the keys, his hands shaking violently as he jammed the long silver spear into the ignition. Turning it the engine roared to life. Slammed the truck into drive, spraying dust and gravel, they sped away without looking back, merging onto the I-15 access road at a reckless speed.

David sat hunched over, his chest heaving, his hand still clutched around the brush. On the immense, gray wall of the cement plant, under the cold silver of the full moon, stood the last, lonely vestige of his plan.

A-S-H-L-E-Y… P-R-O…

The rest was lost, a proposal swallowed by the deeper, darker demands of the land.

And that, my friends, is why the old cement plant ruins bear that unsettling duality. To the casual traveler, they are just a curiosity, a place where love was occasionally declared in bold block letters. But to those who know the history, who know the nature of The Barrens, and who feel that inexplicable cold dread when speeding past at 80 mph on I15, they understand that the concrete skeleton is not a ruin; it is a gate.

This twisted rebar I traded for this story was found right near where that message was left unfinished. It’s highly polished now, but if you hold it long enough, you can still feel the faint, cold thrum of a rhythm that isn't quite any known language. I keep it safely locked away, a reminder that the most durable structures aren't those built of concrete and steel, but those built of devotion to the unseen.