Kinnick Stadium, Iowa City, Iowa

 Excerpt from the novel "The Demon's Punt House" about the construction of Kinnick Stadium in 1929 as relayed by a stadium worker.

March 6, 1929.
We have finally begun construction by digging an enormous pit. Mr. Phipp [the head of the project] has told us to expect a grueling schedule. Me and the other most robust lads on the team are taking shifts with the mules to haul earth away.

March 9
Construction has been a difficult slog. Every time we believe we have gotten to the correct depth, a part of the pit fills in. Every day is a new setback. Today, that vigorous ass Inus grew frustrated with his mule and began to upbraid it with cruel words and a few sharp blows to the hindquarters. The beast waited for him to walk behind it and then kicked Inus in the solar plexus, a glancing blow, but one that sent him stumbling headfirst into a bucket which got stuck on his head and as he struggled, he managed to stumble into several mules, agitating all of them and they dropped their loads and began kicking out at all comers, a vicious can-can line of animal rage. It took a large supply of mule-grade laudanum to get them to calm down, but we lost a whole day and we are not sure that after managing to grease the bucket to pry it off of Inus’s head we did not permanently disfigure him with upturned nostrils that have given him an uncanny porcine expression.

March 20
The dig came to a halt as crews hit a large piece of metal with their shovels. After several hours of furious digging, they appear to have unearthed a large metal case. It took dozens of men and livestock to drag it out of the pit. I have taken some time to examine it and it appears to be a box with several moving parts and symbols that line up in some way. The men have been taking some time moving things around to try to open it before being sent back down to continue digging and transporting beams. Dabby Dubbert tried to bash it open with a mallet but the mallet bounced off it easily and hit him in the face and he spun around and fell into a bucket that some of us had been using as a spittoon and that night he vanished from the site without a word.

March 22
The box remains propped up on a table in the office. I have been spending all of my spare time (of which there is little as we had a large shipment of pink paints that I have been told will be used to paint the opposing locker room in order to psychologically diminish them according to top Brains Scientists) pondering the symbols. In my dreams I am arranging them on the case. I see it even when I am supposed to be taking inventory of individual nails or reporting the number of men who have fallen to cases of Stadium Bowels, a plague of which has run rampant through the site. Mr. Phipp personally reprimanded me after one of my reports on the latrine crisis consisted of nothing but doodles of the symbols, something that I do not even remember doing and must have written down as if in a trance. We have gotten little sleep, and Mr. Phipp recommended I take two hours for sleeping followed by a course of medical slapping across the face.

March 24
The large man. The small man. The hunchback. The cornstalk. The hawk. The cow. The eyeball. They spin around the box in some combination. They call to me in my dreams. The others don’t understand. I will arrange them.

March 25
I have been reprimanded for muttering. They said I am also negligent in my duties. My ledgers are filled with the symbols. I have also been banned from the tent where they are keeping the case and all managers on site have been authorized to bludgeon me if I come near it. I had been spending all of my time there, sleeping there, writing and writing trying to find the pattern. I am close, I am very close but they shut me out.

March 30
Bumppo. Bumppo. Bumppo. Bumppo. Bumppo. Bumppo. Bumppo. Bumppo. Bumppo. Bumppo. Bumppo. Bumppo. Bumppo. Bumppo. Bumppo. Bumppo. Bumppo. Bumppo. Bumppo. Bumppo. Bumppo. Bumppo. Bumppo. Bumppo. Bumppo. Bumppo. Bumppo. Bumppo.

April 3
I have the case. I do not know how. I can only recall it in flashes, me wielding a pistol, a desperate cart chase, escaping the clutches of the doctor and his hardest medicinal slaps, yelling “NO” when Mr. Phipp said “come back here you ass.” It is pouring and I am huddling with the case under a tarp in an abandoned barn. I know they’re looking for me but they can’t look too hard. They have a stadium to build and they don’t value the case, they don’t understand it. Not like I do. I consult my notebook and look at the combinations. I will look at the combinations.

April 7
The Combinations.

April 19
The fever has broken. This case was not meant to be opened. It is impossible to break the seal even with a series of powerful kicks, as I have learned and now believe I may have a broken bone in my kicking foot. It is, I believe, perhaps sealed to prevent the unleashing of a great evil. Maybe I should bring it to a university where it can be studied in great detail. Maybe I should bury it far away from the prying of human hands.  

April 20
I believe I have had a revelation about the combinations. It is not about the figures themselves, it is about a narrative message within the symbols. The father and the son. The eye. I see it now.

April 23
I am sore and wounded.  A group of geese also decided to make this barn their temporary home and we were happy sharing the space until they grew aggressive and I had to take out the largest goose, the leader, and in the tussle I sustained several serious pecks before I was able to subdue it with some scientific pugilism and some threatening honks summoned from the deepest recesses of my lungs. The horde flew away leaving behind only feathers and offal. But now I can at last return to the task of opening the case.

May 12
It is open. Forgive me if these writings are blurred with the celebratory tears. I could not believe the happiness I felt when I finally heard that click. I don’t know what I was expecting. Light, music, some sort of revelation. But what was in the case will require further study. They appear to be some sort of tablets and even some papers. This will require further study in the morning.

May 13
I have studied the objects. They are some clay tablets with more symbols similar to the ones outside the case. There are also newer engravings and some paper. It appears that this case has been opened repeatedly and added to. All of the symbols show a common element: a small figure, a larger figure and various other symbols but always those two in that configuration. I call them the Father, the Son (larger and somewhat oafish in appearance). There is also a canister containing a canvass with a large painting of the father at the head of a great host of helmeted men in a field gesturing as if making commands and the son lost in a bog making the same gestures. There is a carving of people looking at a man kicking what appears to be some sort of animal.

May 15
I have been going through a sheaf of papers. One appears to be a journal written in a language I cannot understand but illustrated with pictures of a man kicking. But, in the very back of this case, faded and crumbling but still legible, there is something in an older version of English. It appears to be a part of a log from a ship’s manifest and someone has circled Mr Foghens and Mr Foghens (son, oaf’s passage) bringing with them a Quantyty of Swynne’s Skinness.”

May 31
I have made my way back to the City. Though my beard has made me largely unrecognizable to anyone working on the stadium, I have taken great pains to avoid the site. I have used some money I had saved and bought myself nice clothing, bathed, and restored my appearance as I had grown my fingernails out into what I called “goose claws.” I have spent time at the library researching ancient languages and have sought out an expert at the university in Professor Clegborne, esteemed expert on Sinister Archaeology. I forged a letter of introduction from a colleague of his whom I took from the footnotes of one his publications “I Said Go Ahead and Smash the Laughing Demon Idol” from the pages of Traps and Blowdarts: A Compendium of Modern Graverobbing and presented myself as ancient objects dealer A. Vont Montgontage.

I showed him the objects telling them I have acquired them from the ancient artifacts underground and touched my nose, a gesture meant to show him I knew about where he got things from but one that seemed to leave him baffled. He was very interested in my objects though and said he had never seen anything like it. At first he seemed skeptical like I had made it up (archaeological hoaxes were in fashion on college campuses, as I had read in some publications, and many faculty had been taken in by embarrassing undergraduate mummy scams).  He was able to decipher that one of the writings, one of the most detailed ones, seemed to be written in Old Church Slavonic and he wanted to keep it for further study since he had a book to translate it.

June 4
Midnight. Someone pounding on the door. I would like to say I had been sleeping but I had been troubled by nightmares of the man and his terrible son since I had opened the case and I was up doodling figures. It was Cleghorne. He was distressed. He told me he had translated the document or at least some of it and it was one of the most sinister objects he had ever seen in his long career. Something he saw that disturbed him were repeated references to “the field of maize,” and “the great maize palace” even though there was no reason for anyone writing at the time to know about the existence of corn. There was a reason why this was buried here, he told me. Something terrible was going to happen if they built that stadium.

June 5
We ran to the stadium site and demanded to see Mr. Phipp. The stadium had crude outlines for grandstands and the beginnings of dressing areas for the team. The site was no longer a tent city, and Mr. Phipp had lodging in town. Prof. Cleghorne told him about objects found under the stadium, but Phipp told us they had been hauled away by a madman who had worked here. I grabbed him by the lapels and told him I was that man and in fact I was not mad but the sanest person he had ever met, in fact the most sane person on the site. I told him that the objects in the case portended great calamity if the stadium had ever been built, something that would potentially destroy the sport of football itself. He laughed and asked Cleghorne why he was listening to me and that I had been administered mule-grade laudanum for my many muttering fits. The professor said “I agree, this man must be insane” and then he whispered apologies but he had his position here at the university to worry about and then the cudgeling crews swarmed and threw me out of the stadium site.  By the time I got back to my lodgings, the case was gone.