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  Mountain Dead

  Edited by Jason Sizemore and Eugene Johnson

  Apex Publications

  Lexington, KY

  This chapbook is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in these stories are either fictitious or are used fictitiously.

  Mountain Dead

  Copyright © 2013 Eugene Johnson and Jason Sizemore

  Cover art © 2013 Cortney Skinner

  Cover design by Justin Stewart

  “Unto the Lord a New Song” © 2013 Geoffrey Girard

  “Deep Underground” © 2013, Sara M. Harvey

  “Let Me Come In” © 2013, Lesley Conner

  “And It’ll Haunt Me (For Long Days to Come)” © 2013, K. Allen Wood

  All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce the book, or portions thereof, in any form.

  Published by Apex Publications, LLC

  PO Box 24323

  Lexington, KY 40524

  www.apexbookcompany.com

  This chapbook is considered an extension of the great content in the anthology Appalachian Undead edited by Eugene Johnson and Jason Sizemore.

  — Contents —

  Deep Underground — Sara M. Harvey

  Unto the Lord a New Song — Geoffrey Girard

  Let Me Come In — Lesley Conner

  And It’ll Haunt Me (For Long Days to Come) — K. Allen Wood

  Deep Underground

  Sara M. Harvey

  Sara M. Harvey lives and writes in Nashville, TN. Although she usually writes fantasy, she has a taste for darker fare as well. Her Blood of Angels trilogy (The Convent of the Pure, The Labyrinth of the Dead, The Tower of the Forgotten) from Apex Publications blends fantasy, horror, and Steampunk. She has an amazing husband, an awesome daughter, and too many terrible dogs. She can be found on Facebook, Twitter (@saraphina_marie), and at www.saramharvey.com.

  Valley folk are often a funny lot. Hill folk enjoy the perspective of a perch above others but still seeking solitude. Valley folk enjoy the security of land on either side, protecting them from the outside world like great, strong arms. This safety can be tragically deceptive. Sometimes that protection does not so much keep the unwanted out, as hold it in.

  Nestled between two craggy foothills of Monteagle Mountain, the highest peak in the southeastern part of the Cumberland Plateau, Stewartsville, Tennessee, and its valley folk were reached only by an unmarked side street of off Ladd’s Cove Road. This lone access road crossed Battle Creek over a picturesque, decrepit covered bridge that threatened to rattle to pieces any time a delivery truck lumbered across it, keeping unexpected and therefore unwanted visitors at bay.

  John Harker had committed two grievous sins in this life. First, he had once dated Bethany, the preacher’s daughter. Second, in the tumultuous aftermath of his and Bethany’s break-up and her turning up pregnant after a whirlwind rebound romance, he had left Stewartsville. This branded him as no longer trustworthy by the townsfolk, even if he was the last of the Edensorrows. He returned to town often to check on Bethany and her little girl, Promise, who, despite her mother’s feeling on the matter, took to calling him “Uncle Jack.” Everyone in town followed suit, not because they loved Uncle Jack, but because they loved Promise. Bethany only ever went so far as to call him just Jack. Her father, the Reverend Absolom Goodstead, insisted on calling him by his given name, John Harker, and occasionally John Edensorrow Harker, Edensorrow being his mother’s maiden name.

  The Edensorrow clan had been one of Stewartsville’s founding families. The town might still carry their name today but for a Stewart lad wooing the daughter of the government surveyor by telling her that the town had been named after the boy’s grandfather, Jeremiah Stewart. The lass reported this to her father, and naught could be done about it after Stewartsville got entered in the official records and the Stewarts went about erecting signs and naming roads—things that the Edensorrows thought far too vulgar and common to be bothered with. But as families and fortunes both rise and fall, by the time of this tale there were no more Stewarts in the town of Stewartsville and only one living Edensorrow, Uncle Jack.

  Evening was coming on fast when Uncle Jack reached the covered bridge at the cut-off into Stewartsville. Once the sun got down past the hills it might as well have been night. He wanted very much to go straight to the church and throw his arms around Bethany. It was Wednesday. That was exactly where she’d be. Even if he was sure she wanted to see him, he had to check on something first. He had hoped not to have to make the trek to the cemetery in the dark, but this burden of knowledge could not wait until morning.

  The larger of Stewartsville’s two cemeteries was positioned at the far end of the valley where the spines of the surrounding foothills met in a lumpy, oddly-shaped lot riddled with rock formations and knotted with roots of trees long since gone, which made it just about as useless for burials as it was for farming. But at the vernal equinox, the light shone down between the hillocks so much like the light of salvation, or so the townsfolk said, that they felt it was a sign that they should brave that forsaken land and bury their kin there so that when Judgment Day arrived, God’s light would guide them up to heaven. That is, of course, assuming Judgment Day was scheduled for the end of March.

  The other cemetery had been established by the Goodstead family, unsurprisingly in the yard of the Stewartsville Church of Christ where a member of that family had ministered for generations immemorial (although town records place the establishment of the church no earlier than the 1870s, twenty years or so after the settlement of the town). They called the Goodstead cemetery simply the “Christian Cemetery” in order to create a sense of desirability and avoid confusion with the Stewartsville Town Cemetery up at the end of the valley, where the old tales whispered of worship practices that might not have been strictly mainstream. The Goodsteads never troubled themselves over worrying about the family dramas that two cemeteries caused in the town.

  Uncle Jack sought answers in both burial sites, but he first drove up to the Town Cemetery, trying to keep as low a profile as possible. That was not going to happen. Everyone in town recognized the rumbling of his old Ford Ranger from 100 yards away, and he knew by the time he circled back down to the church that Bible study would be in full swing and no one would be talking about Jesus anymore.

  Stewartsville Boulevard ran the length of town from the cut-off at the covered bridge all the way to the gates of the graveyard on past the Church of Christ, the five and dime, the hair salon, the post office, the diner, and the two bars. Long before reaching the cemetery, the area became houses and a few farms and lastly a dense wood that pressed against the stacked stone walls of the cemetery’s boundary. No other trees like them grew anywhere else in town, or in the whole area, actually. Uncle Jack didn’t know what kind they were, only that they had always been there. They were quite tall and thick with a great number of slim branches that radiated away from the trunk like spokes, and rough, stringy bark that smelled pungent, almost medicinal. He strongly suspected that the trees that had left roots tangled through the cemetery had been of that same unknown variety. No one had a decent explanation for what had killed those trees but spared the grove on the other side of the wall. Some said it was the iron content of the soil, others said a boring beetle got to them, some swore they’d been felled by a lightning strike, others remembered a forest fire. But all the data Uncle Jack had ever found said they simply died and rotted away, for no discernible reason. And that terrified him.

  In the waning light, the expanse of earth studded with jutting headstones and obelisks held a sinister air. He parked his truck at the gate, got out, and entered the graveyard. Once, a cross pattern with neatly divided sections and clearly marked avenues had imposed order on the burial pr
operty despite the lay of the land. But a particularly nasty influenza one winter brought an influx of dead bodies and a wild land-grab as the town’s well-to-do vied to cordon off large areas for elaborate family plots that never materialized. Instead, parcels got resold, sometimes several times over, until the middle of the cemetery became a maze of curving paths and areas too overcrowded to even set foot on ground that did not cover a body six feet below.

  His family plot lay in a place of prominence right beside the front gate and near enough to the old grove that the trees cast their shade upon his relatives. A spot within the low stone enclosure waited for him, but he didn’t want it. Whenever his time came, Uncle Jack wanted to be cremated and have his ashes scattered over Battle Creek.

  Even before stopping to say a prayer at his mother’s grave, he made his way to his intended first target: the very back of the cemetery, past the last of the grand monuments and humble markers where the narrow hearse road abruptly ended in a field of uneven crabgrass pocked with ominous bald patches. This was the potter’s field, the plague section, the mass grave of unmarked dead. Folks had told him long ago that this section was actually empty, yet to be filled in, and that the strange grave contortions of the midsection were the product of imagination and land speculation. They had lied. And he thought he might know why. He took a small notepad out of his pocket and flipped the pages until he found a hastily sketched map. He checked it against the topography in front of him and brought out his compass to make certain. The needle swiveled and shimmied, not deigning to settle and point properly north. He swore under his breath and put it away.

  In the center of the gently rolling field was a large indentation, roughly squarish, where no vegetation had grown. The X on his little map was labeled “GOODSTEAD” in his tiny, precise handwriting. According to county records, the Goodstead mausoleum had once stood there, the pinnacle of funerary design with Gothic styling and weeping angels. He looked at the pixelated printout that was paper-clipped to the next page and tried to envision it there before him. The Goodstead mausoleum was long gone, now, the family moved to the “proper” cemetery in their churchyard. But the grass had never grown back and no one else had been buried there except the poor, the unmourned, the unremembered. Uncle Jack made a note of it in his book and slipped it back into his pocket.

  He ventured to the very edge of the land where the old mausoleum had once stood and the sensation of vertigo struck him. He crouched down, reaching his fingers into the soil to steady himself. It felt cold there and damp, betraying no sign of being warmed by the waning afternoon sun. The dirt sifted through his fingers, black and loamy. This looked different than the rest of the soil in the cemetery. Smelled different too: acrid, almost coppery, and a little raw. He stood swiftly and brushed his hands against his pants. His gaze wandered across the lumpy field before him. This had been prime real estate once, claimed from end to end by the Goodsteads. Great cost and great effort had gone into relocating every single one of them away from this place and moving them down to the churchyard. And now their erstwhile resting place was filled with generations of rabble.

  By now, the narrow fold of the valley’s end had grown dim enough that the shapes around him had gone soft and indistinct. Swallowing the panic that chilled him to shivering, he turned back toward the gates and the safety of his truck.

  And realized he was being watched.

  The cemetery caretakers were not folks Uncle Jack cared to deal with during daylight hours, and he certainly did not relish the thought of encountering them after dark. A skinny teenager in a raggedy skirt approached him, stepping out from behind a leaning obelisk. She had the narrow face and receding jaw that he usually attributed to poor white trash, the tragically inbred kind.

  “It’s about damn time,” she said.

  He glanced around nervously. “Excuse me?”

  The girl crouched down and dug at something in the dirt. She yanked out a dark, ugly chunk of rock the size of her fist, muttered something at it, and flung it as far as she could across the hearse road. She wore a piece of wood strung on a cord around her neck, like a talisman.

  “Too many stones. It’s like they’re breeding.” She stretched out her arm to encompass the potter’s field before them. “They ain’t satisfied with the blood of the dead no more.”

  Uncle Jack nodded and smiled in his friendliest manner, then slowly edged away from the girl. He tripped on another piece of rock the same dark, glinting color as the one the girl had pitched away. She rushed toward him, but stopped when she reached the stone. She knelt and paid him no more attention as she got to work clawing that one out of the ground too. Several of these stones, each subtly but clearly different from the rest, littered the graveyard. She had quite a task ahead of her if she meant to purge them all.

  He made his way back toward the gates, leaving the rock-crazy girl to her obsession. The Edensorrow plot comprised the entire southwest corner of the graveyard from the front gates all the way to the hearse road that ran along the far west wall. Coming or going, living or dead, the Edensorrows still bore witness to the happenings of the townsfolk. It was the only place in the whole graveyard where the trees still grew nearby. In fact part of the perimeter wall had collapsed under the incursion of the roots of a particularly large tree.

  A slender obelisk dominated the Edensorrow plot, a masterful sculpture draped with a realistically carved cloth trimmed with tassels at the corners and some kind of raised pattern on it. The stone drapery looked so very real, as if a stiff wind might whip it from its perch and blow it away, tassels flapping. A low concrete wall with finials at the corners surrounded the six generations of Edensorrows that had lived in Stewartsville, and adjacent plots held scores of in-laws and cousins and close family friends.

  His place was in the upper right corner of the main plot. His mother, Elinore Edensorrow Harker, was a direct descendant of the line and had therefore been awarded a coveted place “within the walls,” as she liked to say. Her husband, Percy Harker III, had been laid to rest beside her but just on the other side of the divider. We acknowledge you but you weren’t one of us. Uncle Jack couldn’t care less if the place reserved for him, the last of the line, was never filled. He wanted no part of that cursed place and had tried to keep his parents from being buried there, but his mother had added a clause to her will stating that it was her desire to be placed with her blood relations and that her son’s opinions on the matter were not to be considered.

  Uncle Jack decided not to stop and kneel at his mother’s grave. With the darkness falling quicker than usual and the strange girl’s ranting and digging, he was in no mood to linger. He touched his mother’s granite headstone with tenderness as he passed, stepping carefully over the low wall to place a hand on his father’s marker before making straight for the gates and his waiting truck.

  As he jounced down the rutted road back into town, he saw flashlight beams shining across the pitted lawn from the large old mansion that served the dual function of funeral parlor and groundskeepers’ quarters. Someone might have hollered at him to stop, but Uncle Jack sang along to his radio and pretended not to hear. He figured their poor, deranged daughter couldn’t have gotten herself into too much trouble up in the potter’s field, and they’d easily find her.

  The sidewalks were mostly rolled up by the time Uncle Jack came back through downtown, only the bars and the diner were still open, though both were practically empty. Any other night that Uncle Jack was procrastinating an unpleasant task, he might have moseyed on into Shooter’s for a beer and a game of pool, but tonight he stayed on task. There’d be time for beer and pool later, he hoped.

  The parking lot of the church was full. Some folks had even parked on the lawn, so Uncle Jack found himself a not too terribly inconvenient spot on Tulip Poplar Lane, the side street that ran behind the church and over into the wealthy part of town. All the lights were on inside the church and the large community room adjacent to it. Through the tall, narrow windows, Un
cle Jack could see everyone inside but he looked for two people in particular: Bethany and Promise. Only eight months had passed since he’d last seen them, but eight months between three-and-a-half and four-and-a-quarter might as well have been years. When Promise stepped into view, he almost didn’t recognize the child, she’d grown so much. Her hair had taken on a bit of a curl and her long and skinny limbs advertised a recent growth spurt. He ached to go inside and take Promise into his arms and spin her around until she squealed. He had at first loved her solely because he loved her mother, but Promise Goodstead was a true sweetheart and there was no one in this world that Uncle Jack loved more than her.

  Which was why he went instead immediately to the church’s graveyard with his little notebook already in hand.

  The Goodstead mausoleum had not been simply moved, but, according to local lore and legend, dismantled stone by stone and reconstructed into a modern, elegant, and ugly edifice that stood in awkward grandeur amid the modest grave markers in the church’s cemetery. Reverend Goodstead the elder had wanted to make sure everyone knew who shepherded the flock in Stewartsville.

  The moon rose, spilling silvery light across the neatly cropped lawn. No crabgrass or cursed trees grew here. All the same, an unsettling feeling permeated the place. And, he realized, that he smelled the same tangy, acrid scent of the dirt he had noticed at the Town Cemetery. He went boldly to the mausoleum and peered in though the slender doors with their leaded glass windows. Inside was nothing more than dull, white marble drawers along each side and at the far end one of the angels from the original structure crying into her hands. The markers along the walls were primarily 20th century dates, recently dead relations. But on the floor were the old headstones cropped and laid side by side in a mosaic that dated back to the founding of the town. And between each one were slivers of dark, ugly stone like the kind the teenage dingbat in the Town Cemetery had been throwing. In some places, it seemed ground into the mortar and in others just crammed in however it might fit. A strange tribute, bringing the rock down from the other cemetery and placing it here. Probably not at all accidental. He wanted a better look.

  Uncle Jack rummaged in his coat pockets and withdrew his flashlight. Before he could switch it on, movement in the deep shadows between the mausoleum and the church building caught his eye.

  He froze.

  “I’m assuming you have an explanation, Jack.” He reveled in the sound of her voice, even as venom-tipped as it was.

  “Bethy,” he sighed in relief. “Is that you?”

  She looked to her left and to her right and placed her hands on her hips. “You seeing anyone else out here?”

  “No, but that don’t mean nothing.” He pocketed the notebook. “Is there somewhere we can talk?”

  “Not here, I don’t want Promise to see you. I’ll never hear the end of it if she thinks you’re really in town.”

  “But Bethy…”

  “After. I’ll send her home with Daddy, and you and I can chat over coffee at the diner. Just stay out of sight until then. She’s already asked too many questions of the damned gossip-mongers.” Bethany turned on her heel and walked directly back into the community room.

  Uncle Jack watched her go, wanting very much to follow. Instead, he flicked on his flashlight and got out his notebook. He made careful notes about the stones and recorded the exchange with the caretaker’s girl. The pieces were finally beginning to fit together.

  The moon moved behind some clouds and darkness edged in around his solitary flashlight beam. The noise of chatter and guitar strumming from the community room seemed much too far away all of a sudden. The whisper of vertigo returned. Uncle Jack decided to wait in his truck.

  At long last, most of the congregation had dispersed. He watched Promise get into her grandfather’s car and disappear into the tree-lined shadows of Maplewood Drive, just off of Tulip Poplar and a few blocks from the church. Bethany had stayed behind to close up. She was taking an awfully long time.

  Flooded with curiosity and a fair bit of worry, Uncle Jack got out of his truck and made his way back to the church. The sanctuary itself was dark, and only a few lights remained on in the community room. He heard a voice coming from the corridor that connected the two buildings.

  Gertrude Goodstead, Bethany’s elderly maiden aunt, leaned heavily on her cane as she made her slow way toward the exit. She murmured to herself in a long, incoherent line of syllables. Gertrude had been uncharitable to Uncle Jack, but she had been downright vicious toward Promise because the girl had been born out of wedlock and this was, as one might guess, no way to curry favor with Uncle Jack. Still, he approached the old lady and would be civil to her, just like his mother taught him to be.

  Gertrude had always favored her left leg, but this evening her limp was far more pronounced. She all but dragged her bad leg behind her, and as she drew closer Uncle Jack could see that her knee was bandaged; the hem of her skirt had been pinned up so it wouldn’t irritate the wound. He also saw that Gertrude, who had been a nurse nearly all her life at the tiny town hospital, wore her starched white cap, crisp pinafore-style uniform dress, and a navy blue cloak. The cloak hung awkwardly from one shoulder and swayed as she shambled toward him. The woman was ancient and crone-like and Uncle Jack had never really liked her, even before Promise.

  She said nothing to Uncle Jack—she merely paused in her halting walk toward the door and stared at him, hard. Her grey eyes were as shrewd and as cruel as ever, and her mouth formed the same self-righteous frown it had the last time he had seen her.

  “Good evening, Miss Gertrude,” he said. “It’s a pleasure to see you again.”

  Gertrude made no immediate reply, she only shifted her weight, bracing against her cane. Uncle Jack saw the bandage around her knee shift and slide a bit.

  “Are you hurt, ma’am? Can I call Bethy for you?”

  Gertrude’s head snapped up and she might have growled, or perhaps simply cursed at him under her breath. “No one needs or wants your help, John Harker. You should never have come back here.”

  “If you’ll forgive me, ma’am, I simply…”

  “No, I do not forgive you. You are not to be forgiven. Not for this.”

  He was genuinely taken aback. “I’m afraid I don’t understand.”

  Gertrude made another strange sound, even more unsettling and guttural than the first. The bandage fell, sliding down her spindly leg to hang on the drooping nylon of her knee-high stockings. The flesh revealed below it was bruised dark purple, and a putrid gash ran across the center of the joint. It looked infected, angry.

  “Ma’am,” Uncle Jack began to say.

  What words that were meant to follow died in his throat when the wound on Gertrude’s knee opened like an eye.

  Uncle Jack shouted and sidestepped the old woman. He fled toward the church and called for Bethany.

  “I thought I asked you not to come in here?” Bethany met him in the corridor, her jacket over her arm and her keys in hand.

  “What the hell is wrong with your aunt Gertrude?”

  “First off all, do not use that language in this place. And second…” she trailed off, a suspicious light coming into her eyes. “Aunt Gertrude is dead. She passed on a few months ago.”

  “Dead? But…why didn’t you tell me?”

  “Because I was afraid you’d show for her funeral.”

  Uncle Jack closed his eyes. Too many emotions gathered there, and he had to fight to stay focused on the one thing, the only thing that was important. “Dead?” he repeated.

  “You must have confused another congregation member for Aunt Gertrude.” Bethany straightened and looked him in the eye. “After I specifically asked you to—”

  “It was her, Bethy. I’d know that old battle-axe anywhere. She spoke to me. It was her, I’m telling you!”

  “What did she say?”

  “She told me that I shouldn’t have come back. That no one would ever forgive me.”

  Bethany nodded. “Well
, that does sound like something Aunt Gertrude would say.”

  “And she was wearing the weirdest costume. I know she was a nurse, but what’s with the get-up? The hat and the cloak?”

  Bethany paled. “She was wearing a hat? A white nurses’ cap?”

  “Yes. And a navy blue cape. With red lining. Had it hanging from her right shoulder, because she had her cane in her left hand.”

  “Was her…her left leg bandaged?”

  Uncle Jack’s heart pounded through his whole body. “Yes.” He was disinclined to say more and was not given the opportunity.

  Bethany took a step back from him then looked past him into the darkened community room. “That’s what she was buried in, her old nursing school uniform. She took a horrible infection in her knee, she was diabetic, you remember. She fell and banged it up, but it wouldn’t heal. That’s what finally got her, sepsis from that wound.”

  “Bethy, we have to get out of here right away. We have to get out of this building, hell, out of this town. I thought I had more time.”

  “What are you talking about, Jack?”

  “Go get Promise and meet me back at the bridge. As quickly as you can! I’ll explain there.”

  “Jack, this is ridiculous!”

  “Please, Bethany. Go and get Promise, I won’t leave without her. Or you. Hurry, or we’re all going to die.”

  “Die? Jack, do you hear yourself? Seeing my dead aunt, telling me I need to flee my own—”

  Through the window, they saw a light in the churchyard. For an instant of desperate hoping, Uncle Jack supposed it could have been the reflection of headlights, or maybe a firefly out too early in the year, or the gleam of the moon. But it was none of those things. It was a light eerie and unearthly and Uncle Jack knew then that he had come home too late.

  The glow emanated from the Goodstead mausoleum, almost as if someone was inside with a flashlight. Which Bethany mentioned as a distinct, although improbable, possibility. But that didn’t explain the fog that oozed along the ground, shining bleakly with opalescent flecks of blue and green and violet. It was beautiful but sinister, and Bethany’s rational explanations failed her.

  “What is this, Jack? What do you know about this?”

  “I know this valley is cursed. The whole lot of it, not just our corner of it. All the way from Monteagle to Chattanooga there are little cemeteries here and there. Cemeteries but no houses, no towns. Didn’t that ever strike you as strange?”

  Bethany crossed her arms. “I can’t say I ever gave it much thought.”

  “I’m sure you gave it more than you want to admit to me right now. I’ve known you since you were a girl, Bethany, you were always the curious one. That was why I first fell in love with you…”

  She raised an eyebrow and dismissed his train of thought with a wave of her hand. “So, the cemeteries?”

  “Something lives here, in this place. From the legends, it resides under the whole of the Cumberland Plateau, but in places where the land has opened—like valleys, like this valley—the presence is exposed.”

  “Like…erosion?”

  Uncle Jack grinned despite himself. “Exactly. I think the presence is bound to the soil or the rock or something within the very earth below our feet.” He reached out and took Bethany’s hands. “I knew you’d get it.”

  She gave his fingers a momentary return squeeze before disengaging herself. “Understanding what you’re getting at and believing it are vastly different.”

  He pointed out the window where the fog had pooled all around the mausoleum.

  “Well, yes,” she replied.

  “There were rocks in the mausoleum.”

  “Yeah, they’re called headstones.”

  “No, Bethy, dark rocks brought down from the Town Cemetery, little bits of them crammed in anywhere they could be. Some look like they’ve been there a long while, others look newer.”

  “Who would have done that? You know my feelings on that rotten piece of land up at the top of the valley, my whole family’s feelings.”

  “A pact was made, a long time ago. A blood pact.”

  “Between who? For what?”

  Uncle Jack took out his notebook and thumbed through a few pages quickly. He turned the book toward Bethany and let her read what was there.

  “My family…and yours? Over rocks?”

  “The Goodsteads and Edensorrows were the first families of this town. If the diary from Deertrace is to be believed, a pact was made between the people of this valley and this…entity, whatever it is. A pact of safety, of coexistence. Certain promises were made. And I believe they have not been kept. Just as they weren’t kept in Deertrace. Or Jasper’s Fork.”

  “Deertrace? Jasper’s Fork? I’ve never heard of those places.”

  “I know.” Uncle Jack sighed. “They’re long gone now. Struck from the earth without a trace. Leaving behind only the cemeteries.”

  Out in the churchyard, something moved in the spectral fog, something long and sinuous.

  Bethany clutched Uncle Jack’s hand once more. “Snakes?”

  “If only.” Keeping hold of her hand, Uncle Jack made for the door at the far side of the community room. “We need to move and we need to move now. This graveyard is too close to the bridge for my comfort, if this spreads…” He wasn’t sure how to explain the phenomenon he had read about. “Let’s get to Promise.”

  Outside, the air smelled of mildew and damp and something metallic, sending chills through Uncle Jack’s flesh. Bethany stood transfixed at the edge of the churchyard. As if scenting them, the luminous fog changed course, bearing down on them. Uncle Jack pulled Bethany back toward him, so her feet no longer touched the hallowed ground and rested instead on mundane asphalt. The creeping mist stopped at the edge of the grass, spreading side to side as if searching for a path to them.

  “Can’t it leave the graveyard?” Bethany wondered.

  “It may not have enough strength, not yet. But I have no doubt that sooner rather than later it’s going to break free of whatever binds it here and come after us…all of us.”

  “What about the rest of the town? We’ve got to warn them!”

  “When I am certain that you and Promise are safe—”

  “No, Jack, we have got to warn them now!” She tugged once at his sleeve, but her gaze focused beyond him on the churchyard.

  Something moved, a shadow denser than the tendrils of fog and more upright than the curving shapes that writhed within them. It moved with a stumbling gait, as if with a limp.

  And it was not alone.

  The mausoleum trembled, then finally shook violently as if an earthquake had struck it. But it did not collapse in on itself. Instead, the walls tumbled outward, spilling masonry and shards of dark stones onto the grass. A maw had opened through the center of the ruined building and the light flickered up from it, unholy and terrifying.

  “We’ll have your father help us warn them, all right?” Uncle Jack pulled her insistently toward his truck. She finally shook herself free of the mesmerizing scene and allowed him to move her. “Besides,” he continued, “it’ll give the good Reverend Goodstead something to occupy his time that doesn’t include me.”

  At the mention of the reverend’s name, all motion in the graveyard paused. The snake-like shapes rose up, much like cobras, breaking through the low-lying fog. They were long and thick as a man’s leg, tapered toward the ends like an octopus arm, and the same livid, bruise-purple color of Aunt Gertrude’s knee. All at once, across each of these slithering appendages, dozens of eyes opened and fixed upon Uncle Jack and Bethany. The same guttural growling that Gertrude had uttered reverberated through the stillness of the night and the serpentine appendages undulated toward them.

  Bethany screamed, half a primal shout of fear and half a cry of defiance.

  “Promise,” Uncle Jack urged her and they both turned and ran for his truck.

  He hopped the curb and cut the corner from Tulip Poplar onto Maplewood, knocking over s
omeone’s mailbox in the process. In the rear-view mirror, the lights and fog at the churchyard looked like a grand Halloween party.

  He roared into the driveway of the Goodstead home, but the place was dark and empty.

  “Where are they?” Bethany hopped out, her legs uncertain as she jogged across the lawn while yelling for her father and daughter. She disappeared into the house for a long handful of minutes before she returned, eyes wide and face ghastly pale. “No one’s there…maybe they went for ice cream?” The optimism in her suggestion skated thinly over her mounting panic.

  “We’ll go check the diner, get in.”

  They were headed back in the direction of town within seconds.

  “Take me back to my car. We’ll split up,” Bethany said.

  “No. Too risky.”

  She flashed him a smile. “Oh, Jack.” As he slowed at the corner of Tulip Poplar, she jumped out of the truck.

  “Bethy!”

  But she was already gone, sprinting toward her little four-door still parked at the community room’s side.

  “Damn it!” He punched the steering wheel.

  Bethany was just pulling out of the parking lot when the pulsating light in the graveyard changed. All the shadows bent toward Stewartsville Boulevard…no not exactly, Uncle Jack thought, but to the northwest. Toward, he reckoned, the Town Cemetery.

  Uncle Jack rolled down his window. “The other cemetery,” he shouted.

  “I’ll go to the diner, see if they’re there. Meet you on the far side of the river in no more than thirty minutes,” Bethany called back.

  “Thirty minutes,” he confirmed. He pulled out onto Stewartsville Boulevard and turned left, gunning the engine as he pushed the old truck to accelerate. There was no traffic out on the road, which was unsurprising but still unsettling.

  As he passed the diner, he glanced at it: red vinyl booths, Formica countertops and tables, shiny chrome trim, all the lights on. But not a soul inside. He didn’t stop to investigate, he had to trust Bethany. Instead, he continued up to the Town Cemetery.

  There was another car at the gates, a sleek beige Buick—a preacher’s car.

  The truck’s engine shimmied when he turned it off, as if in protest.

  There was no fog here, none that he could see anyway, but there was a strange light. Several strange lights. Candles. Small tealight candles had been placed all along the low wall surrounding the Edensorrow plot.

  Uncle Jack got out of the truck, the crunch of gravel under his boots sounding too loud. All around him, the old grove of trees groaned and creaked as if blown by a stiff wind, but their branches were still.

  The girl was there, the caretaker’s daughter, waiting at the gates. She rubbed the wooden talisman she wore and eyed him nervously. “The masters are unhappy and ain’t no one else but you that can put it to right again, Edensorrow. Damned Goodsteads likely to get us all killed. Or worse.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “Quit playin’ stupid with me.” She pointed at his jacket pocket, where he kept the notebook. “You know. You know good and well what’s happening.”

  “Not exactly.”

  “Guess ‘cause you never bothered askin’ any of us. We’ve been groundskeepers here as long as there been a here and we learned a thing or two. About the rocks, about the trees. But both those Goodsteads and the Edensorrows were too high and mighty to ever give us the time of day.” She glared, then straightened up and looked to the trees. “He’s here,” she said in a calming, nearly cooing tone. “He’ll make it right.”

  Uncle Jack tried to follow her gaze but saw nothing. He thought he understood the rocks, but there was nothing in his research that said anything about trees.

  “We ain’t got an abundance of time, Edensorrow. Get your ass in there. The reverend already has the backhoe going, and Pa’s trying to stop him.”

  “The backhoe…?”

  The girl looked a little crestfallen and wrapped her thin fingers around the piece of wood. “I couldn’t get out all the rocks. There’s still so much of it, buried deep. They didn’t bring it all up when they moved the Goodstead plot. Damn that man, but he’s diggin’ for the rest.”

  Uncle Jack thought of the light and fog and the walking dead down at the other cemetery and nearly turned right back around. But if Reverend Goodstead was here, so was Promise.

  He ran, leaving the strange girl to her vigil of his family plot. The spot where the Goodstead mausoleum had once stood was now a gaping maw beside a pile of sickly-looking black dirt studded with chips and hunks of the dark stone. The backhoe was still running, but no one was in the compartment. From around the far side of it came the sounds of men arguing.

  Reverend Goodstead stood in the center, still wearing his black preacher’s shirt with the white band collar. He stood nearly a head taller than the folk surrounding him, all of them skinny and pinched-faced, with a rodent-like look about them. The reverend bellowed in his best hellfire-and-brimstone voice while pointing at the backhoe but the groundskeepers did not budge.

  Uncle Jack took his eyes off of them and peered down into the hole. In the darkness of night, he could not see the bottom but he thought he detected a gleam of opalescence not unlike that at the churchyard. He did not see Promise anywhere.

  He called her name softly. “Promise? It’s Uncle Jack. I’ve come to get you. Please tell me where you are.”

  There was no reply.

  This section of the graveyard was a crowded mess of headstones, some erect, others fallen and some graves even sunken into dangerous pitfalls. But a few yards away, he spied the regular shadows of a wrought iron enclosure, one of the few larger plots in this area. Playing a hunch he made his way toward it, weaving around grave markers and praying he didn’t turn an ankle or worse.

  Inside the fence he found her sitting on a fallen marker with her hands bound in front of her and the reverend’s handkerchief tied over her mouth as a gag.

  “Oh, Promise, who did this to you?” Uncle Jack pulled the handkerchief off and unwound the hastily knotted hair ribbon from her wrists.

  “Grandaddy,” she whispered. “I don’t know why.” He heard a world of hurt in her voice.

  “Come here, Uncle Jack’s got you now.” He gathered her into his arms and she eagerly went to him, nestling her face against his neck. “We’re going to find your mama and then we’re getting out of here, all right?”

  He heard a single footfall in the grass behind him.

  “You will do no such thing,” said the reverend.

  Uncle Jack straightened, still holding Promise against his chest. “Sir, I’m not sure you understand what’s happening to the town.”

  “Son, I understand a great deal more than you know. A great deal.” He cleared his throat and smiled a little. “This might work out better than I had hoped. She needs blood, you know. Lots of it. And she’s done receiving the sacrifices of the sick and dying, she wants someone living now.”

  “Who does?”

  The reverend nodded toward the hole and the backhoe. “She does. Our Lilith, the mother of this place, the real mother, the dark mother, the one who birthed us all before she was betrayed and made over into a subservient, smiling womb on legs they called Eve.”

  “Sir?”

  “Have you forgotten your Bible study, son?”

  “No, sir. But…do you really think…?”

  “It’s close enough. Close enough to make her happy. She’s a vain one. They all are, really, all the Masters-Who-Sleep. Your foolish mother should have told you the stories, son, prepared you for your role in all of this. Instead, she let you get ideas in your head about schoolbooks and learning, and you leaving. So our mother called her home, her and that husband of hers. A Harker.” Even in the dark, Uncle Jack could see the man roll his eyes. “But then when Promise was born, I figured it had skipped you, being that you’re a poor excuse for an Edensorrow and always have been.”

  Uncle Jack tightened his grip on the little girl. “W
hat’s Promise got to do with any of this?”

  To his surprise, the reverend laughed. “Son, you can’t count and you’re blind. My daughter has only ever been with one man in her whole life. And if you don’t know nine months from that full moon night in September when you and she came in way past curfew and I knew all what had gone on by the look in her eyes and the scent on her skin, then you’re a damned fool.”

  Promise raised her head and looked up at Uncle Jack, tears still flowing down her soft, round cheeks and her chin quivering.

  “She sure favors her mama, thank the Lord, but anyone with half a brain could look at her and see your eyes.”

  “Bethy said it was Pat Andrews. He swooped in right after we broke up, right after that night. She said she always regretted bedding him to get over me.”

  “If she really thought Promise’s daddy was Pat Andrews, she’s a damned fool, too.” The lightness of nostalgia suddenly left the reverend’s voice. “Now give her to me.”

  From somewhere down in the town, someone started screaming. It was high and shrill and raw and carried easily through the deathly quiet of the night.

  “Listen, son, someone’s blood has got to spill tonight. Yours or hers.”

  “Take mine.”

  “You see, son, any other day I’d take you right up on that offer, you elitist bastard who deflowered my only child, but I got to thinking and I got an idea. Promise is the culmination of both family lines. With her, I could renegotiate a whole new pact with our Mother. Maybe make the trees grow again…”

  A shiver went forth beneath the ground and the trees, that ancient grove that clung to the edges of the cemetery, moaned in reply to it.

  “No,” Uncle Jack said. “You’ve got it wrong, Goodstead. You’ve been played for a fool.”

  A pair of headlights swept across them as a third car pulled up to the cemetery. Uncle Jack swung Promise over the wrought iron fence.

  “Run,” he said to her. “Run to the gates, run toward the candlelight. Mama’s there. Run, Promise!”

  She did, hunkering low out of sight and darting between headstones. Uncle Jack watched her, hoping to see Bethany’s silhouette down by the gates, straining to hear either of their voices in reunion.

  When he was hit from behind, it both surprised him and didn’t. The two men landed hard atop a crumbling bit of marble that gave way beneath their combined weight. All the air rushed out of Uncle Jack’s body, and for far too long of a moment, he could not breathe any of it back in. The reverend grappled with him, knocking his head against the fallen stone. A haze of darkness swam across Uncle Jack’s vision, sparkling blackness that was not unlike the hellish fog. Reverend Goodstead then grasped him about the ankles and dragged him out of the wrought iron enclosure.

  Uncle Jack forced a lungful of air into his chest and then another, willing strength back into his arms and legs. His head throbbed. The blackness in his sight turned reddish and he realized he was bleeding. The drops of blood that fell into the grass lingered a moment then sizzled into wisps of dark smoke.

  “Edensorrow,” echoed the voice of the groundskeeper’s girl. “Edensorrow, come home!”

  Reverend Goodstead neared the old mausoleum site. The small patch of barren earth had grown into a scorched circle several yards wide. The crabgrass wilted and died before Uncle Jack’s eyes, just as the trees had died all those years ago. Whatever rested beneath this cursed place was awake once again, and hungry.

  The ground churned and buckled, opening cracks along the surface. Here and there a hand protruded, ghastly and skeletal, reaching skyward trying to catch hold of Uncle Jack as he passed. One desiccated limb, caked with putrid, dried pus, made contact with Uncle Jack’s wounded forehead and the whole graveyard hummed.

  The terrible vapor rose up from the hole in the ground, creeping more slowly than the fog at the churchyard. Uncle Jack could feel them both, like a current of electricity connecting the two places.

   Uncle Jack dug his hands into the soil, slowing the reverend’s progress in dragging him to his doom. The thick crabgrass roots snapped between his fingers and Uncle Jack tried not to imagine that they were sinew and bone of the long forgotten dead, buried here in this mass grave, given as tribute to this monster.

  He remembered what the reverend had said about his mother.

  He remembered what his mother had said about this cemetery, her insistence on being buried here, her insistence that he be buried here as well.

  “You will be the last,” she’d told him. “You will make us whole and put to rest many old ghosts.”

  Raising his head painfully, Uncle Jack could see the candlelight blazing around the Edensorrow plot at the other end of the cemetery. But it was more than just candlelight, he realized. As darkness spewed forth from the hole behind him, light emanated from his family plot. This was no blessed heavenly light, it was as primal and terrifying as that connected to the dark, awful stones. The difference was that this was his light, the light that shone down from the tree branches and up from the roots. The trees which had lost the battle for this graveyard and the other so many generations ago, but had held fast to their own: the Edensorrows.

  As they neared the hole, the old man’s strength increased and the hands reaching up through the fractured ground helped him, batting Uncle Jack’s fingers loose from the soil, pinching and scratching and prodding and grabbing, anything to keep him from getting into a decent fighting position.

  “I bring you sacrifice, Mother. I bring you the last Edensorrow,” Reverend Goodstead said.

  “I’m not the last,” Uncle Jack bellowed, desperately hoping Promise was safely away. It was a gamble, but discrediting the reverend might buy him some leverage. “He’s lying to you.”

  The trees around the cemetery shook with a mighty growl and the unnamed dead hissed from beneath the dank, awful soil. So much death, slow death by pestilence and disease. These victims had fed her for so long, but they were not enough. She would rise and devour the town.

  Uncle Jack sank his hands deep into the dirt, desperate to find something, anything, to hold onto. His fingers wrapped around something thicker, more substantial than the withered hands that had been accosting him. The outer layer was slick and sticky with decay, but the core still felt strong. He yanked hard and the crumbling ground gave up this prize: an enormous taproot.

  Armed with a weapon now, Uncle Jack swung at the reverend. It was an awkward hit but enough to make the man stumble and let go. Uncle Jack got his legs beneath him and lurched between the bony, scrabbling hands, tripping on them and kicking them in his attempt to break free. Behind him, the reverend got to his feet and swore like no man of the cloth ever ought to.

  Uncle Jack smashed hand after reaching undead hand, but they kept coming. He wiped the bloodied sweat from his face and when his fingers touched the wood once more, it began to glow.

  It was not a comforting glow, nor a safe one. This thing to which his family had been bound was no benevolent entity; it was simply the enemy of Reverend Goodstead’s “dark mother.” Which made it Uncle Jack’s ally. And that was good enough.

  The tentacle arms now rose from the pit, eyes opening and closing in disturbing unison, each one staring down at Uncle Jack with seemingly its own unique sentience. He could hear the guttural noises it made, hear the echo of those alien sounds from halfway down the valley at the churchyard.

  Reverend Goodstead thought he had sectioned enough of it out of the ground, had bound it by placing it into the Christian cemetery. It became obvious that the reverend had been playing a very dangerous game. He really thought he could control this thing.

  “You brought this upon yourself Goodstead, your family chose the wrong side. There are two masters here, yours…and mine.” Uncle Jack had no idea how to address whatever might be waiting for his invocation. He didn’t even know if he was right.

  The seething arms shot out of the rent in the ground and toward him. With another sweep of the glowing root, the undead ha
nds finally retreated and he scrambled free, blinded by blood and dirt, hoping he was not running headlong into the pit. One of the undulating arms, spongy and revolting, tripped him. He got his footing back and sprinted clumsily away from the soft, questing limbs. All around the hands returned, reaching farther and bringing up more of the rotten bodies with them. Uncle Jack’s booted foot crushed a skull, spewing its putrid contents across the dead earth like so much spoiled pumpkin. He swung and stabbed with his improvised weapon, striking at those unholy eyes.

  The hum reverberated through the trees, through the fiber of the root he carried. He swung at anything that moved.

  “Edensorrow,” the girl shouted again and he homed in on her voice, careening around the elegant twin headstones of a pair of second cousins before stumbling into the low wall of the family plot.

  The click of the gun cocking sounded as loud as thunder.

  “Son, I didn’t want it to have to come to this.” Reverend Goodstead stood just outside of the Edensorrow plot, his chest heaving and grimy sweat thick on his face and neck. He held the gun not toward Uncle Jack, but aimed at Bethany and Promise who were waiting at the cemetery gate. Waiting for Uncle Jack.

  “The bridge,” Uncle Jack said. “We agreed to meet on the far side of the bridge.”

  “I couldn’t leave you,” Bethany replied, sounding both ashamed and prideful.

  “She loves you still, you ungrateful bastard, no matter what I did or said. But I don’t need to spill my daughter’s blood. Just her daughter’s. And that will bring both of the Masters-Who-Sleep under my command.”

  “Can’t be that way,” said the skinny girl. “You’re stupid to think so. Don’t you think someone might have already thought of that since the 1800s? Can’t be that way. You just try it and see.”

  The gun went off. It wasn’t Promise who fell, but the groundskeeper’s girl. Someone yelled her name—Betsy.

  “She’s right Goodstead. You can’t claim them both, that’s what wiped most of those towns off the map, their kind can’t be bound that way.”

  “What do you know about their kind anyway? What you read in a book, son? I’ve got plenty of bullets, I can plug you full and then go on about my business.” He leveled the gun at Uncle Jack’s heart.

  “Then this is the way it’s got to be.” Uncle Jack stepped over the low concrete wall, careful not to dislodge the candles Betsy had so carefully laid out. He backed slowly toward his corner, the last space left in the Edensorrow plot. It had been dug open to reveal a neat rectangle that glimmered at the very bottom. Recently dug. Betsy’s family worked quick.

  The Reverend Goodstead matched him step for step, coming to stand atop Percy Harker III’s grave, just over the wall.

  “You listen carefully,” Uncle Jack said to the trees, to the freakish light still shining from the potter’s field. “This ends now. Find another town to prey on, your sacrifices have come to an end.” He paused to take one last look at Bethany and Promise. “Leave here, tonight. And don’t ever come back. I love you both.”

  Uncle Jack swung the taproot as hard as he could, connecting savagely with Reverend Goodstead’s left temple with a terrible, wet crack that splintered the wood. The gun went off just as Uncle Jack stepped back into the open grave, his grave that had been waiting for him for generations. The bullet passed just above him, embedding itself into the obelisk and leaving an ugly divot in the perfect marble.

  What met him there in the darkness were not fleshy, bruise-colored tentacles but hard, gnarled roots that pierced his flesh and dug into his muscles. He cried out, but merciful tubers coiled into his mouth, silencing him. They dragged him down into dark, loamy soil into which no other body had been cast. He heard a woman’s scream, heartbreaking and piercing and calling his name but the earth filled up his ears until the only sound was the creaking of ancient, tall trees bending in the wind. It sounded like breathing, like the deep, contented breathing of someone falling fast asleep.

  Unto the Lord a New Song

  Geoffrey Girard

  Geoffrey Girard has penned dark fiction for publications including Writers of the Future and the recent Stoker-nominated Dark Faith anthology. He’s recently earned a MA in Creative Writing from Miami University and is the Department Chair of English at a private boys’ school in Cincinnati. Simon and Schuster will publish two Girard novels in 2013: Cain’s Blood, a techno thriller which first appeared as a serialized novella in Apex Science Fiction and Horror Digest in 2007/08, and Project Cain, a spinoff novel for young adult readers. For more information, visit www.GeoffreyGirard.com.

  Let me take you back. Queen Arlene in there’d heard all about this church from one of the other holy hens who tells her all about this pastor’s kid, ‘you gotta go see this pastor’s kid,’ and this choir thing he’s got going on out there and all. And then she, Arlene, well she just wouldn’t stop talking about it, I mean, with all those heads and all and what that kid was doing with ‘em and because she’d been on Jesus and that kinda stuff going on maybe five years then. Just to pass the time at first, you know, because we didn’t have any kids or nothin’ together and mine were, well, you know, and the only real work she’d had was running payroll for me, which took all of maybe an hour a week or so, and mostly she just sat around thinking up stuff to busybody about. So I wasn’t completely surprised when all this churchy stuff started but then a Sunday here and there turns into Bible study twice-a-fucking week and then some woman’s group about living more like Mary and all that and, even then, I didn’t mind it, because it gave her something to do, you know? But now when I went and, you know, left her and all that time, well, then she really started praying to Jesus and Peter and Mary like Lord knows what, praying to bring my sorry ass back home. And, goddamn, sure enough if I don’t go and come back. What’s that tell you, huh? I mean, kids dying of cancer or the dead walking around again, or whatever, but fuck if Arlene Schadder’s silly prayer ‘bout me ain’t the one request to get through and reach the Big Boss upstairs. ‘Can’t stand ya,’ I’d told her. ‘Biggest mistake I ever made,’ I said. Even got my own place awhile over in Berwick, already messing around some with this other woman at work, buying her kid—Jesus, can’t even remember his name anymore, he was, hell, he was one of the ones they shot hanging around at the school, you know?—that car and all, and still I come crawling back home maybe about six months later like a zombie myself, you know? Like nothing ever happened and she’s all it’s the praying that brung me back, but I’m only thinking I can’t afford another divorce right yet and anyways I kinda fucked this other new girl out, you know. But I kept such thoughts to myself and, well, then that was that. She’s all ‘thank you Jesus’ now and I even have to start church again myself and then, what, maybe another six months and all fuckin’ hell gone break loose, of course, all this zombie bullshit, and we end up right on down to the church just like a whole bunch of folk did, end of the world and all, half the fucking town turn up, and I’d be lying if I told ya I wasn’t praying double time like the Pope himself. And you hear everything just outside the church, you know. Gunshots and whatnot and screams. Remember the screams? People trying to get into the church and all, folk barring the fucking doors, everyone all crying and shouting and everyone all screaming, screaming bout damnation and retribution and all that. Couple people got killed too, you know, right there in the church by people people. But mostly we’re all there on our knees, eyes squeezed shut like little kids pretending if we don’t open them again all that bad stuff is just gonna go away or somethin’. And I start praying for my family, you know. My family family. My first wife and all. Celia and the girls. And I’m just hoping they’re OK, right? Asking God to maybe look out for them and all because I hadn’t seen them in, you know, maybe years by that time. I mean, if He somehow maybe had something, anything, to do with helping Arlene get my sorry ass back home, maybe He might just lend a hand to this small little matter too. When we divorced, Celia’d moved to Harrisburg to work for the state and all and
the girls, the girls were still…. They still weren’t talking to me much. Not after I left their mom for Arlene, you know. Queen Arlene, they called her, Queen Arlene. The girls said the two of us deserved each other, ain’t that the truth, said they never wanted to talk to me again. You know, teenagers. And so I’m down on my knees in that church and thinking about them in Harrisburg and all because, I mean, everyone’s seen the pictures by then. On the TVs and all. I mean Harrisburg is gone, right, overrun. Dead city. I mean Hazleton was half gone by then too, remember, but half gone ain’t all gone, and I’m thinking, I’m praying, maybe they got out somehow, you know? Some way. Who the fuck knows? And also thinking she just should have fucking stayed in Hazleton and all. Because then they’d be OK. Then, maybe, I could help and all. Go over to the house, you know, because I can’t do shit one with them in Harrisburg. I mean, what could I do? And I can, you know, imagine these things getting all, you know. And I can see their faces. My kids’ faces. And they’re all alone. And I’m feeling so, so… So fucking hopeless, you know. Useless, I mean. One big worthless piece of shit. I’d left Celia, Celia and the girls, for this bony bitch kneeling next to me in this shit church surrounded by fucking dead people. Ruined up my whole life for this girl, Queen Arlene, who’d turned into an old lady herself before the ink on my divorce papers with Celia had dried, and this, this is what I’m now thinking about kneeling in that pew, about what I’d given up and how my family, my real family I mean, was probably being torn apart, being eaten, being raped by looters, I don’t fucking know, all while I’m here on my knees praying next to this woman I still, despite her prayers, can’t stand anymore. And how maybe now might be a good time to do something about that. About her, I mean. And that’s when I get this vision, you know? An honest-to-God vision, closed eyes and all I’m seeing it at clearly as I’m seeing you sitting there with that beer in your hand. It’s Celia and the two girls and they’re getting in this car and driving away and all. Zooming around the roadblocks, those things bouncing off the car, they’re getting out, you know. It’s beautiful, right? A fucking miracle or something and maybe I was just lying to myself again, but OK, because I had some real goddamned peace then, just for a minute maybe. But enough. Enough. And so, six months later, when Arlene tells me we just gotta go up to see this new church, I’m thinking OK, sure. Why not? What else we all doing in this shithole, right? Just waiting to die ourselves, right? And just maybe I’ll experience something again that’ll make me not feel like total shit again for a couple seconds. So this kid’s set up shop in that old radar station up da mount’n on Beryllium, you know the one. Air Force built it in the sixties, part of some Air Defense Cold War bullshit. Been abandoned twenty years now, converted to a forest tower. Not too many zombies coming back around. So five of us hiked over that day. Not much trouble heading up or back. Shot one up near Stockton mostly for the hell of it. Ran into another group of tourists heading up for the same thing. Couple of the spics, you know. Vargas was one of ‘em, seen him since. Service at sunset, everyone’s expected to spend the night after. We get there maybe an hour before. Building’s located in the middle of this large field up there, both sides lined with all these antennas mounted on telephone poles. Fenced off and they got some guns up there. Whole mess of rusted out UHF ground-to-air radio transmitters and receivers and computers and shit all dragged out into the open now. Inside was standing room only, but they were still happy as hell to see us. Must have been two dozen folk, I figure, with us. I mean, this place was small, but standing room only, like I said. Still got an extremely large diesel generator inside, lights work, working boiler, whole thing, and they got three pews from somewhere they drug up there and but mostly fold out chairs all lined up and, after some pleasantries and all, we took out seats and waited like everyone else. And he’s got it sitting right up front, you know? Covered with this red sheet. And that sheet is moving and shifting beneath, and everyone’s just waiting now. So this kid comes out, you know? Couldn’t be no more than fifteen. Skinny little shit, looks half-dead himself, and he welcomes us and we all go about our church business and he’s not bad, not bad. The sermon and all. I mean, he’s not a natural, you know, but he knows his verse well enough and can talk the talk well enough, about his father’s mission before you know and then how after the Lord first impressed upon him to carry His word on by way of the music, and the crowd is giving Halleluiahs and Amens in all the right places but you can tell we weren’t the only ones there to see the choir, hear it I mean. I mean what this kid’s put together. And he’s no dumb-dumb and gets around to it soon enough. Gives his little speech about God’s plan and all that and everyone’s getting ready and then he finally pulls back that blanket and holy shit, friend! I’m telling you. Before they sang a lick, I knew this pastor’s kid had really done somethin’. Up on this pedestal, was this five tier stair-step display stand—kind of thing the missus would put plants on, you know?—‘cept here each row is heads. Four or five to a row. Just three on the top shelf. Some more rotted than others, you know? All the teeth knocked out, of course. Lower jaws, tongues, too. But the necks was there. And I haven’t seen the tubing yet, you know, because he’s got them covered over with like these little curtains on each row. You know, it looks good. And most of the heads are moving and all, couple eyes drifting this way and that, twitchin’ noses, as this kid steps up behind the stand. And he’s citing Psalm Ninety Eight and all—Sing to the LORD a new song for he has done marvelous things—and some of the crowd is saying it right with him, but I’m just watching because I didn’t know it yet then, the psalm, and then they start. Singing, I mean. This damn kid’s back behind them heads, working these foot bellows, you know, the kind you’d use to pump up a pool float or air mattress something like that, and he’s got half a dozen of these things back there and he’s stepping on ‘em like Geddy fucking Lee, you know, and doing stuff all this and that, like, with his hands back there too, making it all work. And then, then you realize what this kid’s done. And these heads, these fucking zombie heads. They start making that sound, you know. And first thing, you halfway jump out of your chair. I mean, you just wanna piss yourself. That fucking moan sound. Nails on a fucking chalkboard, right? That wet moaning shit, all quavery, like an old diesel warming up in February, or maybe a radio station out just a little too far out keeps coming and coming on you, but then a little more air starts pumping through and a couple more of those heads start making noise and then everything that kid was saying before made a little sense. I mean it was fucking notes, man, and I just closed my eyes and listened, you know? Some low and some high and some all wobbly or gruff, and two of the ones, women looked like, up top all kinda wailing, and next thing you know all coming together as one sound. Like harmonies and shit, one voice, an honest-to-Christ church choir, all them different moans. And for the second time, I, you know, got that feeling again. Like the kid was right or something, and that there was a purpose to all of this and all that. And it lasted just, just… Just a moment, but it was there. That I didn’t feel like the world’s shittiest father. That I didn’t hate my life. That I didn’t think I was living in Hell, you know. And so when they asked me to, you know, help go find this replacement, zombie head, you know, what was I gonna say?

  Let me take you back. So this kid’s dad was the pastor over in Weatherly. A pretty good one too, by all accounts, even though he was one of these new-age hippie type of holy man, you know, with the rock band in church and all, and the little gold cross, like, pierced in his ear, which is important to the story, got it? Evangelical Lutheran. He’s the one that started that shelter pantry halfway place for the Mexicans and all in that old dispatch building on Hudsondale. So, this guy’s pretty occupied with his flock and all and family time and all that keeps coming second fiddle to the needs of his growing spiritual community and like most kids, this kid just wants a bit more of dad’s attention—no matter how much you give ‘em it’s never enough, right?—and this kid’s no dummy. He’s seen his old man in church
and knows his father loves the band, loves the choir, the music, man. This guy, like, plays bass for the band and sings with the choir and all that hippie shit and the kid’s never seen his dad more joyful than when he’s singin’ out to the Lord, you know. Grows up watching this. So, kid’s taking to his piano lessons, hanging around at rehearsals on Tuesday and Thursday nights and eventually dad proudly drags him out in front of the whole congregation, maybe ten years old, to sing some kinda song together. Proudest moment of the kid’s life, you know. I remember watching Laura, my oldest, pitch a shutout once and she, she had this look… You know? Anyhow, so they got this shared love of music now and wasn’t more than a couple years later and the whole world goes to shit. As chance would have it, pastor dad is down in Mexico on some kinda mission trip with a dozen other fine Christians when it starts. Building houses and shit like that down in Piedras Negras. I imagine there are worse places to be when the world ends, but can’t name one now. So dad and two older sisters get eaten by Mexican zombies and kid and mom are left up here to fend for themselves. She didn’t make it long, turns out. But the kid somehow got through it—Like we did, you know—who knows how, and downtown Weatherly is fucking gone, not as bad as Hazleton of course, but still gone, and this kid ends up hiding up here on Broad with just about everyone else. And this is like a year later and one day these kids up there are fucking round with this zombie torso, you know, a crawler. Already’d Louisville Sluggered its teeth out, and they’re just kinda fucking with it is all, and this kid keeps burning it with this lit stick, you know, and every time he does, the thing moans a little louder. Same moan, you know. I mean, each one sort of has its one sound, but pretty soon he’s using just that one note and the rhythm to get this thing moaning out fucked-up versions of ‘Mary Had a Little Lamb’ and ‘We Will Rock You.’ And the whole camp is laughing so fucking hard, and this kid sees people happy, you know. Real happy. So he starts trying out new stuff and one day, he and his pals get hold of just a head, one left over from a little Friday Night Fights, you know, and they just wanna kick it around and all, but he wants to try something out. He wants to make the zombie head moan, you know. Just the head. Get it to make sound. I mean, Christ Almighty, gotta be the worst fucking sound you ever heard, right. But next thing you know, he’s jamming this, like, raft pump into the zombie’s throat, trying to produce sound. That’s all it is, really. Air. Those days we went out, he showed me how it worked after, you know. Even let me play a little, I took some piano myself back in the day. He’s got all these books and shit, tried all sorts of stuff. With lungs, without. With jaws, without. With tongue, so on. Eventually, he’s got these heads down to the bare minimum. You know how we make sound? Air comes up the lungs, through the trachea and into the, ah, larynx— looks just like a shaved honey pot, you know — and the air makes these vocal things in these larynx vibrate, releases air up through the, ah, pharynx and out the mouth. Knee bone connects to the shin bone, you know. So he figures if he control the air going in, he control the sound going out. Simple. After that, just a matter of getting hold of some heads and trying out different tubing. Garden hose, duct tape, bendable PVC. Even tried the hoses and splicers out of an old radiator kit a couple times. Next thing you know, he’s got a couple up on a table, each with its own sound and so he’s kinda playing notes, you know. Starts preaching a little then, about what it all means. Sing a new song, faith in the Lord’s plan, and all that. And so he sets up shop up there on Beryllium, cause there aren’t hardly ever zombies and now it’s six months later and Arlene’s telling me ‘you gotta go see this pastor’s kid.’ So the thing of it is, is the heads eventually go bad. Rot out, you know? Because they’re not feeding on nothing. How that works exactly, you’d best ask someone smarter than me, all I know is, every couple months, he gotta go out and fine a new head or two. Ones with the right pitch. The right tone. So this kid takes a couple of volunteers out and about to find the new members of his choir. And we’d been going there a couple months now and so I agreed to go along this time, because A, it would get Arlene off my back some, and B, I actually thought this kid was actually doing something kinda worthwhile, you know? Well, the first day, it was me, Eddie Desson, and this young guy named Canzler and because two of us were originally from Hazleton, the kid thought we could start looking over town there. He’d never been down that way and I hadn’t been down in a year myself to tell the truth. I mean it’s still crawling, you know. Funny, when I was a kid, there was this guy who use to hang around Vine and Chestnut, crazy motherfucker we all called The Mangiacavallo. Old miner turned bum who looked like a fucking troll, a hundred years old probably, and we’d throw bottles and shit at him and he’d chase us and all, and we knew if he ever caught us, no thank you… Mangiacavallo means ‘horse eater’ and there weren’t no doubt this rickety motherfucker would eat you if he ever nabbed you, and fuck me if Hazleton ain’t now full with, like, forty thousand real-life mangiacavallos all stumbling around familiar grounds looking for something to eat and so we got about a mile from the city that day and said fuck that shit about getting any closer. We found a couple stragglers out there but the kid just kept shaking his head. First he’d, like, close his eyes and listen, you know. Listen to each moan while we messed with them. ‘Not the right tone,’ he’d say. The right tone, funny. Mariah fucking Carey could have been down there, we didn’t care. This kid was gonna have to look somewhere else, you know. The next day, we took him over to see Big Daddy Duser, you know. Maybe there was something we could just trade for, you know. And Duser’s always got a dozen or so to choose from up there with all the girls, goats and gasoline. So we’re walking this kid through the one barn, where he got ‘em all chained up. Most of ‘em have had their jaws and teeth knocked out already. For mules, security, whatnot. Hell, usually he cuts the voice box out so you don’t have to hear that shit when you buy one, but he had a couple that still had sound. Kid would close his eyes, listen. Nah, he said. Duser told us he could get the kid whatever he wanted. Kid tried humming the right sound he was looking for but no one seemed too optimistic that’d lead to something. It was another couple days of this, heading down toward the city. Eventually, we took one down wandering up Stockton. A teen just like the kid, we figured. Don’t even think he particularly liked her sound, but was all getting antsy. We had the axes and took the legs first to get her down, you know, then the arms and choppy right in the middle. Kid had a hammer for the teeth and jaw and all. Real pro. When he was done, we loaded her up into the bag, and all the while, I was both pissed at Arlene for sending me out on this bullshit errand, and, also, enjoying myself because I was away from, you know, all her snippy comments and Bible talk. I was out, you know, doing something constructive. The girl was ‘ok’ he admitted, but not exactly what he was looking for and five days in now, he says he wanna try the churches. The ones down in Weatherly, says he’s gotten some good chorus members there before. So we head down and spend damn-near half the day just trying to get around this cluster of zombies who’ve set up shop on Third. I mean it’s probably close to sunset before we even reach the second church, and Steve’s yelling at this kid that we gotta get the fuck outta here, and kid’s going ‘just another minute,’ and closing his eyes and listening. There’s gotta be twenty of those things down there, wandering in and out of the church doors, between the pews and all. Then he finally hears it, you know. Kid’s whole face lights up. ‘Yeah, that’s the one,’ he says. And we’re just thinking fanfuckingtastic, cause now we can get the hell outta here. No way we can operate out here in the open, so we just take out the legs, wrap the head, and get this one into the canvas bag to clear out. Fucker’s squirming the whole way out of town but we drug him up da mount’n some but it’s too dark now so best just get back to home base, you know. Well, here’s the thing. We’re back in the kid’s workspace and his shelf of little choir heads are watching us from across the room as we shake this new one out of the bag and it’s rolling around the floor and we get that head wrap off to take care o
f the teeth and all and the kid stops us. This thing is moaning and flopping around, and this kid just keeps getting closer. Head cocked like a dog listening, you know. And next thing, the pastor’s kid is right next to this thing and leaning in to hear better, and he’s kinda toeing it with his sneaker, you know, trying to get it over on its back for a better look. Next fucking thing you know, the kid’s like crying and shit, sobbing, really, and we’re all looking at each other like what the fuck and then, then, goddamn if this thing’s now grabbed the kid by his leg and is pulling him down. I mean it happened like that. And then the kid’s screaming and this thing’s got a damn good bite on him pulling away muscle and t-shirt and all in one chomp and the blood is squirting out all over the place and Eddie slips and falls on his fucking head. And this Denzler guy and I start hacking away and its too late. This kid, you know. And he’s all like ‘Dad,’ ‘Dad’ and then it’s like, fuck me. It’s all right there, man. I mean, I look down at this zombie on the floor and his mouth is filled with half this skinny kid’s chest and he’s got this gold cross earring and all. And I didn’t know what that meant yet, but I did, you know? And this thing is still chomping away on the meat in its mouth and the kid reaches out. Wants to touch this thing. His… Must have took him damn near two years to walk back. And now I’m thinking about my daughters and all again, and, and how I’d… So the kid bleeds out right there and it’s not a minute later when, you know. So we, you know. And Eddie and Denzler got the fuck out of there, but I couldn’t leave. Just couldn’t. Kept thinking about my girls and all. And this kid…. So I did the best that I could, I guess. He had all those books and I’m pretty good with my hands. Took me all through the night and well into the next day. But I think I did a pretty good job. Put him and his dad right up top where they can, you know, sing together again and all. Forever. Or for awhile, at least. And they’re the best two on the whole bunch, I swear to God they are. Last show, must have been twenty people in that room. I can’t quite play like the kid yet, of course, but that’s getting better too. Couple things I’m still wanting to try out with, you know, like clutching the vocal chords maybe for different pitch but that I’ll figure that out soon enough. Which, of course, explains all that stuff in the kitchen. I mean, Arlene’s head and all, you know?

  Let me take you back.

  Let Me Come In

  Lesley Conner

  Lesley Conner grew up along the Ohio River in Ravenswood, WV. In 2004, she graduated from WVU with a BA in English. Today, she lives near Hagerstown, MD with her husband and two daughters, where she's a Daisy Girl Scout Leader, horror writer, and editor for Apex Publications. She's currently working on an alternative history horror novel titled The Weight of Chains. To find out more about Lesley and her writing, check out www.lesleyconner.com, or follow her on Twitter at @LesleyConner.

  Bacon.

  He smelled them. Savory. Plump. Fat with oh so much melt-in-your-mouth blubber. He licked his lips, anticipating the rich grease that would soon be dripping from his jaws.

  The wolf had stalked the three pigs from their mother’s house a few weeks before and watched as they each set up a little home, a sweet home deep in a hollow in the mountains of West Virginia. As walls were raised, the anticipation of the hunt grew. The last few days the urge to jump in, jaws snapping, had almost been too much to resist but he’d held back. It wasn’t fun if it was too easy. Now the houses were complete, the pigs were relaxed, and it was time to sweep in and collect his prize. The first two houses were going to be easy to breach. Straw and twigs! What had they been thinking? But the third - the third pig wasn’t stupid. She’d used red brick and concrete. Even the windows were some type of reinforced glass. Getting piggy number three would be more difficult.

  That was okay. The wolf loved a challenge. It made the meat sweeter.

  He trekked through the forest, an experienced and dangerous hunter, never rustling a leaf or cracking a single branch that might alert his prey. Soon he came upon the first house. It was right on the other side of the tree line, crisp and clean and waiting for him to burst through its flimsy straw walls. He’d eat this one quickly to satisfy his primal hunger. The second he would eat slowly, keeping the pig alive for as long as possible, keeping the meat fresh and warm.

  Crack!

  A nervous squeal slipped from the house at the sound of a snapping limb somewhere deeper in the forest. The wolf’s chest tightened. This was his territory. His hunting ground. If someone else fucked up his kill, then that someone would die.

  He swung his snout back toward the shadows of the forest, drawing in a deep breath. Rotted flesh. Putrefaction. He wrinkled his nose in disgust.

  Scavengers? Probably a stupid coyote dragging road kill back to their nest, and not concerned with pigs or houses. As long as they steered clear, he’d let them pass, but…

  Crack! Crack!

  He heard a chair clatter to the floor within the house and could imagine the pig pacing nervously, occasionally pressing its pink little pig nose to the straw as it tried to determine what was outside.

  The wolf turned, annoyed. Who was stupid enough to be dragging a rotting corpse while charging through the forest with no thought of stealth or surprise? His fur bristled, rage coiling in his legs, bunching the muscles in preparation for a fight. A low growl rumbled in his chest, and the pig squealed with fright. This pleased the wolf. His meal wasn’t going anywhere. It’d still be right there, too scared to leave, while he dealt with the noisy intruder.

  A moment later a buck burst through the trees. Splotchy fur revealed patches of greying skin and open wounds that didn’t bleed. One antler had been broken off, leaving a short dagger of bone in its place. The other was strung with leaves and debris hanging like tinsel.

  Confusion pressed at the wolf’s resolve to defend his hunt. He knew this deer. Or, more appropriately, had known him. He’d been dinner more than a week ago, a mercy killing, the wolf taking him down before the broken antler could hurt the buck’s pride. He smiled as he remembered the fear and panic reflecting in the deer’s eyes as he took a chunk from his neck, hot blood spraying down his throat. He’d gulped down a few mouthfuls of meat before leaving the carcass to rot. He hadn’t been that hungry and the deer had been tough with age.

  Yet, here it was standing before him, staggering slightly but upright. The wolf didn’t understand how this could be. He’d felt the pulse slow and then stop beneath his tongue as he’d lapped at the killing wound. Tentatively, he sniffed the air, and was punched in the gut by the odor of death. His stomach rebelled, making him retch. The deer turned toward the sound, flaring his nostrils, as if scenting for his killer. The one remaining eye rolled in its socket, unable to focus. Flat herbivore teeth snapped together as the deer charged blindly toward him.

  A growl rumbled in the wolf’s chest. He wasn’t sure how he could be facing the buck again, but he had no doubt he’d kill him just as easily as he had the first time. Widening his stance, he watched the deer plunge toward him, antler and bone dagger lowered to gouge him. The wolf twisted away from the broken antler as he snapped his teeth around the deer’s neck. Rancid meat separated from bone, falling limply into the wolf’s mouth, but the deer didn’t flinch, didn’t react with pain. He didn’t react at all to the wolf taking a bite out of him. Instead, he came to a lurching halt and swung his head back in the direction of the wolf, starting his charge again.

  The wolf gagged, letting the hunk of wormy meat splash onto the forest floor in a spray of vomit. He’d never tasted anything so vile, so utterly stomach churning. Fear washed over him as he watched the deer come closer. The vertebrae in his neck gleamed white against the black rot of the meat around it.

  Fear turned to terror when the forest around the buck came to life with movement, limbs bending, brush rustling. As the wolf twisted around to run, the forest exploded with a parade of dead animals.