Harlan County Horrors

Edited by Mari Adkins

Apex Publications

www.apexbookcompany.com

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

HARLAN COUNTY HORRORS

Copyright © 2009 Mari Adkins

Cover art © 2009 Billy Tackett

Cover design by Billy Tackett

Interior design by Jason Sizemore

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

Published by Smashwords

Published by Apex Publications, LLC

PO Box 24323

Lexington, KY 40524

www.apexbookcompany.com

www.mariadkins.com

www.billytackett.com

First Edition: October 2009

"Introduction" © 2009 Mari Adkins, "The Power of Moonlight" © 2009 Debbie Kuhn, "Hiding Mountain: Our Future in Apples" © 2009 Earl P. Dean, "Pyschomachia" © 2009 Geoffrey Girard, "Kingdom Come" © 2009 Jeremy C. Shipp, "Trouble Among the Yearlings" © 2009 Maurice Broaddus, "Spirit Fire" © 2009 Robby Sparks, "The Thing at the Side of the Road" © 2009 Ronald Kelly, "Inheritance" © 2009 Stephanie Lenz, "Greater of Two Evils" © 2009 Steven L. Shrewsbury, "Harlan Moon" © 2009 TL Trevaskis, "The Witch of Black Mountain" © 2009 Alethea Kontis, "Yellow Warblers" © 2007 Jason Sizemore (first published in Murky Depths #2), "A History of Harlan, KY" © 2009 Preston Halcomb

Table of Contents

Title Page

Front Matter

Dedication

Introduction by Mari Adkins

"The Power of Moonlight" by Debbie Kuhn

"Hiding Mountain: Our Future in Apples" by Earl P. Dean

"Psychomachia" by Geoffrey Girard

"Yellow Warblers" by Jason Sizemore

"Kingdom Come" by Jeremy C. Shipp

"Trouble Among the Yearlings" by Maurice Broaddus

"Spirit Fire" by Robby Sparks

"The Thing at the Side of the Road" by Ronald Kelly

"Inheritance" by Stephanie Lenz

"Greater of Two Evils" by Steven L. Shrewsbury

"Harlan Moon" by TL Trevaskis

"The Witch of Black Mountain" by Alethea Kontis

A History of Harlan, KY by Preston Halcomb

Editor Bio

Artist Bio

In loving memory

John Thomas Adkins

June 8, 1961 - October 1, 1980

Introduction

by Mari Adkins

When I close my eyes and think of Harlan County, the first images to appear behind my eyelids are of Martin's Fork Lake, the view from Raven Rock at Kingdom Come, the night sky at Camp Blanton, and the gazebo at Resthaven. Savage beauty draped in a cloak of savage darkness is the epitome of Harlan County. Ugliness, wastefulness, and scars caused by deep, strip, and mountaintop removal mining---and other things---have altered the lush, verdant landscape. The very beauty and abundant game that enticed the pioneers to remain there and evolve into rugged mountaineers would become their downfall.

In the beginning, a pioneer could claim for his own any scrap of land on any hillside or creek bottom. With the abundance of wild game, he didn't have to bother with sowing large crops; small "kitchen door" gardens for needed vegetables and herbs sufficed. The early mountaineer and his family lived a solitary existence, rarely seeing anyone outside their farmstead, as they had no need.

Things began to change once the timber barons came into the Cumberland Plateau in the mid- to late-1800s and saw the vast stands of enormous hardwood trees. Once these were depleted---leaving the landowners with little cash in return, for they had been convinced to sell the timber rights without any claim to the actual land---the area became ripe for the removal of the black gold buried beneath the mountains and hillsides. With water supplies oftentimes buried or otherwise left useless from logging operations, the mountaineer found himself with no choice but to sell his land for what little he could receive for it and move his family into any one of the number of growing, thriving company owned and operated mining towns.

In the mid- to late-1960s things began to change somewhat, as new roads into the plateau brought in a handful of new jobs and opportunities. But unless brought on by outside forces, change has always been slow to come in the Kentucky mountains.

At the brink of my own change and awakening within Harlan County, I moved to Loyall in October 1995. I can't, in all honesty, make any sweeping proclamations about love at first sight, but I can say the county grew on me, tugged at some deep, hidden place within my soul. And I came to call that place "home." I know I sit and talk about Harlan County enough to make peoples' ears bleed, and my running joke is that I know more about Harlan County and love it more than some of its native people. In fact, I'm prone to---and known for---packing friends into my car to make the long drive down so I can share the county with them.

This love brought about the birth of the book you now hold in your hands. I can't quite remember what we said in the Spring of 2007, but one day while I waxed on about Harlan, Jason Sizemore---esteemed High Overlord of Apex Publications---said, "We should do a special Harlan County anthology. Fill it with regional stories by regional writers." I thought it would be fun. So we went to work, but due to the fickleness of the publishing industry, we had to cancel our plans. Admittedly, when the idea first came about, Jason and I thought we were just joking around. But then a miracle happened in the spring of 2008. We got serious and said, "We can do this." Then he looked at me and said, "You can do this." So I did this. I reassembled writers, sent out announcements, and we all went to work.

The Harlan County backdrop described above---the futility of the mountaineer---is difficult to understand or imagine unless it's witnessed or experienced. One only need to step into the county to feel the hopelessness some of these people still live with every day, the darkness enshrouding their lives. With this in mind, I told the writers, "Go forth and create an image of Harlan County."

From the time the first stories began coming in, I knew Harlan County Horrors was going to be something special. Aliens, witches, vampires, portals to hell, zombies, djin, Aztec priests, chupacabra, zombies, and more dance a magical, oppressive, often violent reel through coal, ash, and blood.

It is my sincere hope that you derive as much pleasure from Harlan County Horrors as I did in putting it together. It is my gift of love to the county and to its people.

Mari Adkins

June 2009

Lexington, KY

"The Power of Moonlight"

Debbie Kuhn

Debbie Kuhn is the non-fiction editor for Doorways Magazine. She loves to read and write genre fiction, especially horror stories that involve a nasty ghost or two. Debbie has a habit of roaming around old southern cemeteries after dark. If you happen to run into her at midnight when the moon is full, don't forget to play dead. Curious folk might find it safer just to visit her web site, debbiekuhn.com. She currently lives in Louisville, KY.

Bobby Lee Blackburn got killed exactly three weeks before he was to marry his childhood sweetheart at the New Hope Baptist Church. He died just the way he feared he would---deep underground, alone in the dark, his body entombed forever.

Priscilla Stevens had decided to worship Bobby Lee when they were seven years old. On the day she fell in love, he'd been chasing her around Old Man Griffey's fish pond and she'd tripped and fallen in. Bobby Lee had grabbed hold of her long, strawberry-blonde ponytail and had yanked her out of the water before she could drown.

That boy would always be her hero, even after he broke her heart.

The first time he left her was when they were twelve. His daddy found a better job over in Virginia, and he and his parents moved away from Harlan County. Pris had cried herself to sleep every night for two weeks, keeping her Granny Maeve awake.

About a month after Bobby Lee went away, the old lady woke Pris late one night and told her they'd be taking a walk up the winding mountain trail behind their farmhouse. The two of them sneaked down the back staircase and left without waking Pris' mother.

The full October moon revealed the goldenrod in bloom, and the air smelled crisp and clean and dry. Granny Maeve's knees cracked and popped a little during the climb, but otherwise no sound could be heard except for a light wind rustling through the trees. Nestled in the narrow valley below, the coal town of Russell Fork had fallen silent, with only a few lights left twinkling to give away its presence.

They kept going until they reached a rocky plateau, barren except for a lone sycamore tree. Granny Maeve found a large flat stone to sit on and motioned for Priscilla to join her.

"This spot will do. We can see the Blood Moon and it can see us."

Pris wondered why it was called a Blood Moon when it wasn't even red, but she stayed quiet and watched as her grandma fished around in the pockets of her grey wool sweater. The old woman pulled out a small vial of what she called her "sacred" oil, and then a photograph. The picture had been taken at Pris' birthday party in January. Her mother, Dorie, had snapped a photo of Pris and Bobby Lee sitting next to each other at the kitchen table. Pris was leaning forward, getting ready to blow out the candles on her chocolate cake.

"An only child and an only child," Granny Maeve muttered. She smeared a dab of oil onto the picture and handed it to Priscilla. "You want your friend to come home again, don't you?"

Pris stared at her grandmother, and nodded.

"Well, you can use the power of moonlight just like your granny can. Most folks around here don't believe in such things, and them that do don't think it's right to use the gift, so you best keep quiet about what we're up to---don't you even tell your mama."

"I promise I won't, Granny."

"All right, then. For this spell to work, the moonlight's power has to be mixed with the truth, girl, and the truth is in your tears. You have to cry for Bobby Lee if you want him back---show your love and your need for him---and let your tears fall like rain on that picture so he knows how you feel."

Pris held the photograph up close to her face. Moonlight reflected off the shiny oiled surface. Bobby Lee's perfect dark eyes smiled up at her. She missed him so much her body ached with the pain.

The tears came easy.

Granny Maeve patted her gently on the back as she sobbed. "That's good, my darlin'. Now talk to him, out loud, and tell him what you want."

Pris took a deep, shaky breath, tasting the saltiness of her own tears. She gazed up at the moon's brilliant face.

"Bobby Lee, come back to me. Come back to me, please."

She repeated the phrases several times until her grandma told her she could stop. Wispy grey clouds had drifted across the moon.

"There now, child. It's done."

Granny Maeve spoke the truth. Bobby Lee and his parents moved back to Russell Fork right before Christmas, giving Priscilla the best present she had ever received.

During their sophomore year in high school, Bobby Lee fell for Kara Chambers. Pris wasn't surprised---Kara was half-Korean and seemed exotic compared to all the other girls they knew. Her family had made a lot of money during the coal boom of '74. Now they owned the flower shop in town, and they also ran a catering business out of their grocery store.

Everybody talked about how perfect Kara and Bobby Lee were for each other and what a striking couple they made with their dark good looks. It wounded Pris to see them together, but she felt certain that one day Bobby Lee would realize Kara wasn't right for him and that his best friend was also his true soul mate.

Even though Granny Maeve could have shown her how to speed up such an epiphany, Pris didn't want to win Bobby Lee's heart by using magic. No, his love for her had to be real or it would never last.

It was better to remain hopeful and suffer the wait.

In the meantime, Pris learned all she could from her grandmother about the power of moonlight. She dated a few boys who bored her and a few who didn't. She talked to Bobby Lee whenever he made time for her. She never complained about the times he wouldn't.

And when Kara dumped Bobby Lee right before graduation, Pris was there to pick up all the fragile little pieces of his heart. In June---on the summer solstice---she took him for a drive up to the top of Black Mountain, the highest peak in Kentucky. Pris made love to Bobby Lee on a rough blanket under the Rose Moon. He was her first.

She opened his eyes. He opened his heart.

Pris felt the power of their love and knew it was real.

"Bobby Lee, will you marry me?"

Mr. and Mrs. Blackburn insisted they wait two years. Priscilla knew it wasn't because they didn't approve of her. People thought Pris was attractive because of the confidence she showed, and everybody thought she had a sensible way about her.

"Mark my words, now, darlin'," Granny Maeve had told her. "A passionate love can make the sanest person act plumb crazy." The wedding was still a year off when the old woman passed away in her sleep.

Priscilla's mother had agreed with the Blackburns from the start. "You two have all the time in the world. First thing you need to do is get to work and save some money."

Despite the good pay, Bobby Lee was afraid to become a coal miner like his father, so he went to work at his uncle's auto repair shop on the south end of town. Mr. Blackburn liked to tease his son about being claustrophobic, but Pris knew that a recurring nightmare had kept Bobby Lee from following in his daddy's footsteps. He'd started having the dream when he was fifteen and it was always the same---he found himself falling into a dark hole, deep into the earth where no one could hear him scream. The walls of his prison would begin to collapse and he would suffocate.

Pris refused to ridicule Bobby Lee for his fears. He worked hard to be a decent mechanic, and in six months he was able to rent the apartment over his uncle's garage.

They fell into a comfortable routine, waiting for their wedding day to arrive. Priscilla's mother owned a diner called Rolly's, in honor of Pris' late father. Pris waited tables there and raised an herb and vegetable garden for produce to sell on the side. In the spring and summer she sold berries and mountain wildflowers---daisies were her favorite.

During the work week, Bobby Lee would spend his lunch hour with Pris. She'd bring him sandwiches from the restaurant and they would talk about the future and how many children they would have and how one day Bobby Lee might own his own repair shop.

Priscilla's desire for Bobby Lee only grew stronger as the months wore on. Despite numerous lectures from his devoutly religious parents, they spent time alone together at his apartment. But Pris preferred to make love on her mountain in the special places she'd discovered while digging ginseng and gathering mushrooms and wildflowers.

Once the weather turned warm, she would take Bobby Lee up there late at night whenever the moon made an appearance. They would lie together on a well-worn patchwork quilt in a hidden meadow surrounded by daisies. Bobby Lee would play with her waist-length hair and weave flowers through the unruly tresses.

Then it would be Pris' turn to play. She'd caress every beautiful inch of him, massaging his tense, sore muscles with scented oils, relishing the way his body responded to her touch, his moans of pleasure sending delicious tingles down her spine. She would wait until her own physical needs overwhelmed her senses before allowing their lust to mix with the moonlight.

Deep in that world of forgetting, Pris would nearly sacrifice her soul becoming one with Bobby Lee. She'd wallow in his essence until they were both spent and shuddering.

Afterward, she would lie on top of him gasping, clutching handfuls of his damp chest hair---afraid that if she let go, she'd float off the mountain, a victim of euphoria. Bobby Lee would talk softly then, teasing her, knowing she wouldn't be able to respond for several minutes.

"Priscilla, Princess of Moonlight and Magic, I wonder if you're fertile enough to bear me a dozen young'uns in eight years."

On the last Saturday in March, Pris' mountain swallowed Bobby Lee Blackburn whole. He'd been helping Priscilla search for mushrooms that afternoon near an abandoned coal mine. A collapsing tunnel system had resulted in what the old-timers called a "mountain break"---a rift in the earth above, this one well-hidden by foliage. The hole Bobby Lee had fallen into was eight feet across and hundreds of feet deep. After three days of risky recovery efforts, rescue workers from a local mining company gave up and went home.

The young man's sudden death shocked all of Russell Fork into a grieving silence. The tragedy was whispered about, though no one---not even the Blackburn family---outwardly blamed Priscilla for the incident.

Pris wanted to lock herself away from the town's sympathetic outpouring, but her mother forced her to attend the funeral.

Bobby Lee's parents chose to have the service on the mountain, close to his final resting place. Volunteers cleared the area of brush and vegetation and set up tents and chairs for the mourners. Bobby Lee's sweet young cousin tearfully sang a few hymns in the sunshine and then a Baptist preacher prayed about the loss that was God's will. A touching eulogy followed, given by Bobby Lee's uncle.

Kara Chambers cried. Priscilla couldn't shed one tear.

No, it wasn't until after the funeral reception that she gave in to an onslaught of raw emotions. She sobbed all night, constantly reliving the conversation she'd had with Kara at the Blackburns' house.

Pris had been hiding in a corner of the living room, in view of the buffet. She had no interest in food. The dining room was crammed with hungry, black-clad mourners who would murmur the usual platitudes whenever they bumped into a member of Bobby Lee's family.

Apparently, Kara didn't feel like eating either. She approached Priscilla timidly, as if she was afraid Pris might bolt out of her chair and run away.

"What do you want, Kara?"

Bobby Lee's ex-girlfriend let out a tiny sigh. She looked even prettier when she was sad. "I hate funerals. I usually don't know what to say."

"It would be better if people said nothing at all."

"Oh. Right." Kara started to walk away, and then paused. When she turned around again, Pris could see tears glistening on her long eyelashes.

"I was so stupid to break up with Bobby Lee. I only hope you realize how much he truly loved you, Pris."

Priscilla gave her a frigid stare. "I don't think you'll ever understand how we felt about each other."

"I didn't, but I do now." Kara dabbed her eyes with a tissue. "Look, I'm not telling you this to be mean, but the truth is I thought Bobby Lee got engaged just to make me jealous. He came to see me at The Blossom Shop that morning before he died, and I wanted to believe he was having second thoughts. I...I tried to kiss him, but he stopped me. He was there to place a special order for your wedding night---dozens of daisies for your hotel room down in Bristol."

Pris swallowed hard, suddenly feeling light-headed. Stop it, Kara. Stop talking and let me go home.

"People used to think Bobby Lee was crazy about me, but he loved you more, Pris. I could see it in his eyes when he was talking about you, and I just thought you'd want to know."

On Saturday, the sixteenth of April, Priscilla dragged herself out of bed and opened the windows in her room. She inhaled the fresh warm air, her vision blurred by tears instead of sunlight.

"It's so beautiful, Bobby Lee. No rain on our wedding day."

She wished there was a terrible storm raging outside. She wished it would destroy Kara's big brick house and her family's businesses and all of Russell Fork.

Pris backed away from the window and eyed the prescription bottle on her nightstand. Just a few of those pills would knock her out for several hours, and when she finally woke up again, this painful day would be over.

But will tomorrow be any better?

Priscilla had been sleeping in Bobby Lee's favorite Wildcats T-shirt. It smelled faintly of his spicy aftershave and she didn't want to change out of it. She had no appetite anyway, so there was no reason to go downstairs. Her mother would be working at the restaurant most of the day.

If only she could talk to Granny Maeve.

Pris swallowed a couple of the little white pills and then walked across the hall into her grandmother's cool, dark bedroom. She crawled over into the middle of the feather mattress and buried herself under the heavy quilt. When she drifted off, she dreamed about the past.

Priscilla was thirteen again, sitting in the rocker in her granny's bedroom, turning the crinkly, delicate pages of a brown leather journal and trying to read the faded passages. The enthralling book of spells and rituals had first belonged to Millicent---Granny Maeve's own grandmother.

Near the middle of the journal, Pris came across a section called The Waking of The Dead. It was a ritual for calling back the spirits of those who had passed on to the other side. Just as she began reading the steps necessary to carry out the ceremony, Granny Maeve walked into the room.

"No, child." The old woman rushed over and snatched the journal out of Priscilla's hands. "You ain't old enough yet to learn these spells." Her expression softened when she saw the hurt look on Pris' face. "But don't you worry none---it won't be too long before this book is yours."

Priscilla woke up from the dream. It's mine now.

She shook off her grogginess and hurried downstairs to make a pot of coffee. Late afternoon sunshine poured into the kitchen.

What had happened to the journal? Granny Maeve had kept it in her nightstand until she'd caught Pris reading it, and then it had been moved.

Priscilla started her search in the cellar, looking through a cedar chest filled with musty-smelling clothes and a bunch of old storage bins that overflowed with greeting cards, letters and photographs. No sign of the diary.

Then she remembered the bookcase in the attic.

She found it on the bottom shelf, behind a locked panel. Pris was too impatient to search for the key. She broke the thin pane of glass with a cast-iron doorstop.

Her mother was waiting for her in the second floor hallway at the top of the main staircase. Dorie stared for a long moment at the leather journal Pris had clutched to her chest, and then she looked up at her daughter with tired, sad eyes.

"My little girl," she whispered. "My poor baby girl."

"Stop it." Pris' voice shook with a sudden anger. "You don't understand because you never believed."

"I told your granny not to fill your head with that nonsense," her mother said, gesturing at the book. "Only time can take your pain away, Prissy. Don't you think I missed your daddy after he died? Don't you think I'd have done anything to bring him back if such a thing was possible?"

"You don't have the gift. Granny Maeve told me so."

Dorie moved closer and took Pris' face in her hands. "Honey, Bobby Lee is gone and he ain't ever coming back. One day you'll have to accept that."

Pris had eleven days to prepare for the ritual. According to her great-great-grandmother, the Waking Moon of April could bring the dead and dormant back to life and was at its most powerful when full.

She wished the ceremony could be performed sooner. Her heartache was constant. Guilt and grief warred within her, wracking her body, her mind, her soul. All those years ago, Bobby Lee had left her and she'd suffered and cried for him. But she'd brought him home again.

Priscilla had confidence in her abilities. She knew she had the power to summon Bobby Lee's spirit. He wouldn't be able to stay with her long, but she could look into his eyes and tell him she was sorry and that she'd always love him.

Then she would say goodbye.

And time? Time would never heal this festering wound. Not even if she lived forever.

On the morning of April twenty-seventh, Priscilla stayed home from the diner and made a list of the items needed for the ritual. The forecast called for clear skies that night. Over the last week, she had read Millicent's instructions over and over again to memorize the steps involved. Pris paid particular attention to the narrative parts that described the precautions to be taken and what to expect from the deceased who were called back to the land of the living.

Heed my warning: This greatest of all spells cannot be cast if the Caller does not love the person who has died. Love is the most powerful ingredient in this ritual and it must be true. The best results will be obtained if the spell is worked on the night of the full moon. The spirit will more easily materialize and will be tied to the earthly plane until the Waking Moon begins its descent in the western sky.

Be aware that the spirit of the deceased will have no memory of its death. When they are first called back, the man, woman, or child may seem confused or disoriented. Have patience and explain to them how they died, then state your purpose for the Summoning. Say your peace and be sincere, for this ritual can only be used once to call your loved one home.

Priscilla found a wicker picnic basket in the pantry and placed one of her mother's sharp paring knives inside, along with a container of table salt, a vial of eucalyptus oil, a bandage, a small garden spade, a flashlight, a matchbook, and one white candle. She also put in a photograph of Bobby Lee, taken the previous Christmas, and a lock of his dark hair, which she had stolen when they were twelve.

When the moon began to rise, she donned her tea-length ivory lace wedding gown. She had planned to wear her hair in an old-fashioned upsweep to match the Victorian style of the dress, but then decided to leave it unbound the way Bobby Lee had always preferred to see it.

Since she had to climb a mountain trail, she put on a pair of beaded flat slippers instead of the expensive high heels she had bought for the wedding.

Her mother was working late at the diner. There was no one to question her plans. And there was no one to help her carry them out. Granny Maeve had been dead a year.

Pris left the house, remembering the night her grandmother had first shown her the power of moonlight.

"Guide me, Granny, if you're able. Help me bring him home again."

The moon shined so brightly over the mountain trail that Priscilla didn't need to use the flashlight to find her way. A whippoorwill seemed to follow her for most of the climb, its mournful song sounding loud in the reverent silence. The sweet-smelling wind played with her hair, making her heart ache for the feel of Bobby Lee's gentle fingers.

His gravesite was an inviting place to visit now. The mayor had donated a wrought-iron bench and the Blackburn family had erected a marker made of marble. Pris had planted red tulips and yellow daffodils around the base of the memorial.

Bobby Lee would always be loved and missed, and Priscilla wished she could go back in time and change what had happened. But she could only go forward.

Pris set the picnic basket down on the bench and took out the container of table salt. She walked over to the mountain break, being careful not to step too close to the edge, and began pouring the salt out in a thin line away from it. This would keep Bobby Lee's spirit from wandering away---he would not be able to venture over the line of salt for any reason. Pris didn't want him to see his name on the front of the marble marker, so she was careful to stay behind both it and the bench as she circled back to the other side of the grave.

She took out the garden spade next and knelt beside the deep, dark chasm. She began shoveling crumbly soil from the edge of the break onto the ground in front of her, making a thick circle. If Bobby Lee had been buried in a normal grave, the circle would have been made in its center, but hopefully this would do. Inside the ring of dirt she placed Bobby Lee's picture and the lock of his hair. She poured the eucalyptus oil onto the items, making the shape of a pentagram. Then she lit the candle, letting the wax drip down onto the photograph before touching the flame to the oil.

While the circle of fire burned, she stood with the paring knife and pushed up the lacy sleeve on her left arm. Tears would not be enough to wake the dead. It would take her blood.

She did the deed quickly, knowing that it would hurt worse if she hesitated. The razor-sharp blade cut lightly and cleanly across her upturned wrist. She winced only a little, letting the drops of blood fall into the fire.

Pris dropped the knife and raised her face to the night sky. The wind made the grey smoke from the small fire spiral high into the air. It seemed to caress the glowing moon.

As she stared at it, the bright orb appeared to move closer to the earth. It was time.

She turned toward the grave and stretched out her right arm as if she were about to take her lover's hand.

"Bobby Lee, come back to me. Come back to me now."

The silence of the grave seeped out into the night and everything became still. The breeze died, the birds and insects made no noise, and the smoldering remains of the fire were snuffed out.

Pris cleared her throat and took a deep breath.

"Come to me, Bobby Lee. My love is true and I command you to return."

Her voice had sounded overly loud in the stillness. She could hear her own nervous breathing as she waited for a sign.

But nothing---nothing was happening. Bobby Lee's spirit did not appear.

Why? She still loved him. She would always love him.

Priscilla picked up the knife and walked closer to the rift, standing on the very edge. She slashed her wrist again and let the blood fall into the black hole.

"Bobby Lee, come back to me. Come back to me, please."

Pris felt a slight tremor run underneath her feet. She threw the knife over the line of salt and stepped back from the grave's edge, fearing that it might give way.

A noise like a small avalanche reached her ears. She shivered as the temperature dropped to freezing.

"Prisssssssssssss. Prissssscilla."

That couldn't be Bobby Lee's voice. It sounded so deep and strange.

Pris felt like the air was being sucked out of her lungs. She stood paralyzed, listening to the shifting movements of the earth and the guttural utterances that emanated from the rift.

The full Waking Moon lit the scene before her and Pris wanted to look away from the grave, afraid of what she would see, afraid of what she had summoned. But she could only stand there, transfixed and trembling, as the thing she had once loved crawled out of the hole and collapsed on its back a few feet in front of her.

What was left of Bobby Lee writhed on the ground, moaning in agony. His hands clawed the air as though he were still trying to dig his way out of the grave.

Pris' eyes welled up with hot tears and she let out a strangled sob. The white T-shirt he'd been wearing the day he died was filthy and streaked with blood. His black jeans were torn and his sneakers were caked in dirt.

And his face...

"Oh, Bobby Lee. I'm so sorry."

She'd thought she would only be summoning his spirit, and he would look as handsome as before. His body shouldn't have been raised. This wasn't supposed to happen.

Priscilla hugged herself and stared down at Bobby Lee's mangled face. His sunken eyes were watching her, reflecting the moonlight and his pain and confusion. She wondered why she couldn't smell the stench of decay---like they were trapped in a cold, sterile vacuum.

His mouth opened and closed, his blackened tongue darting sideways. "Prisssssssssss."

The moonlight intensified, glowing bright around him, and Priscilla watched, amazed, as his appearance began to change.

The wounds on his face healed first---new skin filling in the gaps and gashes, making him look normal. His dark eyes were perfect again. When his hands and arms were healed, the glowing light around him disappeared.

Bobby Lee struggled to his feet, his eyes filled with fearful questions. He was shaking all over and Pris wanted to take him in her arms.

"Baby, it's okay now. Please don't be scared."

He took a faltering step toward her. "I'm so cold, Pris. What's wrong with me? I don't feel right."

I can't tell him the truth. I can't do it. I just want to pretend he's alive again until it's time for him to leave.

Pris forced back the tears and smiled. "You were chasing me up the trail, silly, and you had a bad fall and hit your head. That's why you're confused."

Bobby Lee glanced down at his soiled clothing, and then gave her a familiar lopsided grin. "I look like I've been to hell and back. Why are you wearing that fancy dress?"

"I wanted to surprise you. We had a date here in this new special place I made just for us." Priscilla held out her arms. "Come here and let me warm you up."

"But I'll ruin your---"

"I don't care. I just need to hold you."

He wrapped his arms around her, squeezing her tight. His skin felt icy, but he didn't carry the scent of death. Priscilla thought he smelled of moonlight and wildflowers.

"I can't wait for our weddin' day," Bobby Lee said, stroking her hair. "You're about to make me the proudest man in Russell Fork."

His words tore at her heart. "I've always loved you, Bobby Lee."

"Well, you're gonna find out how much I love you on our weddin' night."

Priscilla let out a squeal as he lifted her off her feet and twirled her around. When he set her down again, she reached up and touched his face.

"Babe, I've missed you so much."

His grin faded. "Missed me? What do you mean? I ain't been gone."

Priscilla couldn't hold back the tears any longer. She turned her head away, hoping he wouldn't notice.

"Hey, look at me, princess. Tell me what's wrong."

She could barely speak. "I needed to see you. I thought it would make things right, but nothing will ever be okay again."

"Now, that's just foolish talk." Bobby Lee bent over and began kissing her face, her mouth, her eyelashes.

Remember, child---the truth is in your tears.

Priscilla gasped and jerked away from Bobby Lee, but when she stared into his eyes, she knew it was too late.

His face wore a puzzled frown, as though he were trying to resurrect an unpleasant memory. He grabbed hold of her arms.

"Pris, tell me it isn't true---what I remember, it can't be true."

She held her breath, unable to utter a sound.

He shook her hard. "Priscilla, answer me."

"Please, stop. I'm sorry. I'm so sorry."

She tried to back away from him, but his hands gripped her wrists, causing her to cry out in pain.

"You pushed me, Pris. You made me fall into that mountain break. You made my nightmare come true."

His eyes burned with so much anger and betrayal that it made her flinch.

"No, please understand---I didn't know what I was doing. I was so hurt, so mad...I wasn't thinking straight. I saw Kara kissing you that morning and then when we were here together later that day, you lied to me about where you'd been. I thought you were going to call off the wedding."

Pris collapsed to her knees, sobs wracking her body. "I wish I could go back and change everything, but I can't. Please, please forgive me."

He abruptly let go of her. "Why are you bleeding? What magic have you done?"

She shook her head, not wanting to answer. "I had to do it. I had to say goodbye."

Bobby Lee suddenly staggered backward and let out a pitiful wail. "What's happenin'? It hurts...I hurt all over."

Pris looked up and saw that the moon had begun its descent in the western sky. Bobby Lee would soon return to his grave.

She stood and approached him slowly. "Shhhh, the pain won't last long. I promise it'll all be over soon."

"No, I can't be dead. Help me stay, Pris. Use your magic again."

"I can't, baby. I'm so sorry."

He clutched his head and moaned. "Nooooooo."

"I'll love you forever," she whispered.

Bobby Lee's skin began to glow in the intense moonlight. His wounds were reappearing---he was changing back into a corpse.

Priscilla covered her ears as his screams rent the air. Why did he have to suffer? It wasn't right.

Bobby Lee teetered on the edge of the rift, struggling against an invisible force that was trying to pull him back into his grave.

"Prisssssssss. For God's sake, help me."

His face reflected so much terror that she couldn't bear it, and she knew there was only one way to end his torment.

Pris ran over to Bobby Lee and gave his chest a violent push. His feet slid backward into the gaping hole and he fell forward, latching onto the hem of her dress and pulling her to the ground.

"No! Please, don't do this."

She kicked and screamed and managed to break free, but before she could scramble out of his reach, Bobby Lee grabbed a fistful of her long hair and dragged her over to the edge of the chasm. A bone-chilling numbness spread quickly throughout her body, and Priscilla stopped struggling. Her lover's dead eyes stared into hers, and his swollen lips curved into a grotesque smile.

"I forgive you, princess."

The earth began to tremble and Priscilla closed her eyes. Bobby Lee held her in a desperate embrace as the power of moonlight claimed their bodies, entombing them forever in the darkness of his grave.

"Hiding Mountain: Our Future in Apples"

Earl P. Dean

Earl Patrick Dean is a computer programmer working in Lexington, Kentucky. He holds a BA degree in that field from Transylvania University and holds graduation certificates from The Institute of Children's Literature. He is a past member of the Online Writing Workshops on Science Fiction, Fantasy, and Horror. Earl is active in several writing groups in the greater Lexington area. He reads, writes and collects science fiction and fantasy and has attended conventions in Kentucky, Indiana, Tennessee, and Virginia. He is a University of Kentucky basketball and football fan. Visit his author site at epat02.typepad.com/clamped_planet.

When the aliens came to Salvation, they came as a dark wave rising out of the peaty soil somewhere on Hiding Mountain. They adjusted their form in order to work with us, but never lived here as far as I know. From that work we discovered apples. We people of Salvation work in the squimix midges every day, digging out the apples and showering them under our garden hoses. It's come to be our way. Apples sell. We need the money from outside because our town is small.

My daddy's name is Ken and my brother took Patch for his after his eye was out. One morning they left the house to work in squimix after a breakfast of sausage and eggs; this part tells what happened to Patch. An awful lot more followed this, all tied up in knots. I know it all to the point where my daddy lets off. I tell it so maybe I can gain some closure.

It started at midday.

Their legs were half-buried in the squimix, with the tops of their waders on up sticking out of the midge. Small flies swarmed over their heads, as was usual. Patch pulled his apple-grapple out of the midge, removed the skewered apple and dropped it on the conveyer. He re-sank the apple-grapple and leaned on it, watching the apple he'd dropped as the conveyer pulled it under the shower down-line from his assembly crew. That's how we'd come to work it by then. The apple fell in a packing chute.

"How have we gone on like this for three hours?" Patch said.

Dad's smile soured. "You know I don't think about break. This here is man's work; the only time when I'm glad I don't need sleep. The day will come when I get some medicine. But it'd better not affect my work."

Dad says Patch laughed hard and slipped. I imagine he did slip, that's all I can manage. Sliding off the apple-grapple, he fell under the midge. The one thing the aliens warn you about: squimix on your skin is a killing sin. Daddy talks softly about it, but I know how he screamed. He did not think, just took off his rubber gloves and wiped his hands over Patch's face. He had to do it; the gloves slipped. He screamed. The squimix on Patch's face etched a river through my daddy's heart.

It did no good.

My brother died from the pain.

Brant Allen, their foreman and our neighbor, ran out of his office trailer to see what was screaming. Before he got to the midge, he'd come to approach at a sidelong trot like a horse changing gait. Looking off, yet near to retching, he gave Daddy the talk under his breath, led him to the office trailer.

The office trailer was not too cramped inside. I'd been there on several occasions. Mr. Allen led my glassy-eyed daddy to a chair across from his own and the metal desk that straddled a crescent moon's space between them. Brant stepped around the desk and sat, clawing through his oily hair.

"You ready for this?" Brant said.

If you worked in squimix, you knew what this was.

"I'll let the Didagens examine me," Dad said, "to learn why the squimix didn't kill me when I wiped Patch's face, and to prove that I'm able to work this job---I've got to if I can; I won't have my daughter, Ann, working such risk."

Why Daddy didn't want me working in squimix is plain. But I have always wondered if his big hand pounded the desk, or his belly popped out the shirttail of that faded-out rag he wore for days on end, swearing it passed for flannel. Brant would've nodded. What happened next is policy.

Brant slid the medical release form to Daddy.

Daddy reached over his beer belly with an ink pen. He signed.

A dome on Brant's desk covered a frilly mesh scrap. It trembled if you opened the dome. Brant gently lifted out the scrap and caressed it, walking to the outside door.

The scrap fluttered aloft into blue sky.

It wasn't long before a Didacrawler came to the door.

Didacrawlers are a sort of Didagen, the aliens that work us in squimix to dig out apples, the one I'm speaking of having come, as I said, to the office trailer door.

It took its true form: Didacrawlers have frilly-spaghetti legs that glow and move like willows. We must do as Daddy did when we see one: stand at address as the alien comes in under its oozing lurch-and-slap. As Daddy did so, one of the legs billowed toward him. It whipped slowly.

Daddy believes it gave him a shot.

Last thing Daddy recognized.

Daddy's sight tunneled as he looked past the Didacrawler's hub, which its legs radiate from like spokes on a Ford F-150; different, how I said. Daddy saw the crescent desk reflecting coldly on the window of the trailer door. Suddenly it was the door that wasn't, seeming not the slat-wood gate through which Dad'd entered, but a changed maw of yawning sponge. Daddy thought to himself, lands, what a memory. But mine? Beyond the spongy maw a swath of dirt stretched across a field into a patch of rhododendrons and weeds, giving seclusion till it all reined in at deep woods; nothing of our midge. Above, the sky was cloudy, rainy with no grey; come from the Blue Navy.

The swath held a monument like a wad of mashed potatoes cut rough in steps around its stone sides. Daddy needed to see the back for himself; it seemed what the alien would have him do, so Daddy thought, so he walked out. Climbing the steps, he but kicked a soft spot in the rise. A hole bored through. Framed in mash, far-side steps let out onto rolling savannah littered with iron beds that curved winding to a far-off speck. The beds were made with patch quilts. A person lay face down on each bed.

The blue navied sky rippled like bedding.

Daddy was drowsy.

He closed his eyes.

He wouldn't sick himself at fifty.

Daddy's stomach was bubbling strange.

He opened his eyes. A blur cleared.

Daddy was lying under a patch quilt on a bed in a white room, where a recessed pool in the floor rolled like a cloudy sky with no grey.

Daddy craned a view at his spongy window.

"Clear the film. Show me Hiding Mountain," Dad said.

A Didacrawler bucked subtly across the room at the command, switched out its running bio-segment to get a share of the ad-hoc system that would replace its clinical schedule. Daddy thinks the Didacrawler belched arrogant that it could build the silly window process, appendages off.

"Don't smart me," Dad said. "I know you can, and I know from those pool colors changing, they come from the Blue Navy. This is Hiding Mountain.

"Show it."

The Didacrawler squelched toward the window. When it arrived, one of its legs billowed and whipped slowly.

The spongy window seemed to emulsify its own film until it became clear. Daddy gasped, reacting how he'd have avoided in cases when he could, as he looked out on a vast, starry blackness rising above a promontory that jutted from atop canyon cliffs, lit through alien control. Cliffs fuzzy with blue ferns, yellow grass, edged with low-grown solids. Perched above, blue-glowing Earth took Daddy's breath.

Hiding Mountain was an asteroid.

Daddy sat up, alert in his bed in the white room. The patch quilting fell off and revealed the mound of his hairy belly. He scratched. He soaked in the frigid window scene till the alien Didacrawler bucked and its eyes reddened. To settle its nerves, Daddy lay down. The Didacrawler sloshed to the cloudy pool and whipped out its arm, sinking it in the pool. It hauled out a container, round, of wire mesh. A blue, rumpled sheet packed in, until the Didacrawler dumped it on the floor.

The Didacrawler lurched out the spongy door.

Didaboss came next into the room.

Didaboss was nearly a plain old Didacrawler except for a man's necktie looped around its hub, a fashion it got from us (so Daddy thinks). Didaboss moved on its legs at a quick trot to the sheet that was dumped.

Didaboss shot a leg out, uncurling the sheet in a plane as smooth as a store-bought bolt of fabric. But Daddy knew cotton and flannel, and this was no such bedding. It was plate of mirrored steel. Daddy was awed after seeing it stuffed in a wad. Didaboss scurried around to Daddy, and its eyes lay green on him.

"KEN.

"KEN STAND.

"KEN STAND HERE," Didaboss said.

Didaboss let an appendage rustle in front of the plate.

Daddy middled, facing window.

Didaboss flattened its legs till they slithered beneath the plate some odd way and jacked it up as they reinflated---that's the only word I can conjure for what Daddy thought was done. Didaboss puffed it legs under plate, hefting it until it teetered against Daddy's back. Didaboss gurgled as the plate propped up for the seconds it took him to chatter, waddle and hum over it as he danced a reel. Daddy jumped, too; it would've had him laughing, but the plate fell and slapped the floor.

Daddy didn't laugh, then.

Twice more my Daddy went through that, trying to figure out what was going on. From both of his flanks, it happened. Didaboss finally gurgled out the pliable door.

"THANKS. KEN," the alien said.

The Didacrawler lurch-slapped into the room.

It gave another shot.

Daddy slept. I took the chance to sap his dreams and get all the stuff I've told you so far. I sat up in bed, rubbed my sandy eyes, and focused on the night's moon at my window, a presence soft enough for my trance induction. Dreams are strange, but it's old hat. I know the difference.

What he faced.

Daddy woke to a squashy sound on the floor.

He scrubbed his arms and belly. They felt raw. Didaboss was busy in the room, stretching an elastic brown film between its few legs and chattering as it waddled and hummed. Daddy could only reckon at why it stretched the film across the pool on the floor and restarted its strange, cumulative reel: some soft-shoe on two of its front legs, a quick tapping from the back ones added in, and some razz-a-mattaz tuning from its mouth. This had its own reason and inscrutable purpose.

Something else about Didaboss had Daddy chewing his lip. Seating himself on a spartanly hard chair by the windowsill, he propped on his elbow and thought about this Didagen. The alien bothered him right off: this fellow was a lot smaller than the other aliens he'd seen--- the size of an ocean crab. Didaboss cared less that Dad was amazed. It danced and danced, tuned and tuned, till Daddy clenched his hair.

"QUIT!" Daddy said.

Didaboss hiccupped and restarted.

The alien continued until, at last, it belched.

"EXCUSE. KEN," Didaboss said.

Didaboss sloshed out the spongy door.

That was the last clear dream gleaning I got from Daddy before the end. The final images came to me disconnected from everything I've told you till now. Here's what came last. It starts with Daddy running down a long white hallway lined with doors, chased by a herd of tiny, spidery Didacrawlers.

Daddy could hear them skittering behind him, the combined rattle of the tiny hard carapaces plenty loud. Daddy ran for a door at the end of the hall, arms splayed as he yelled. Daddy reached the door and pressed a long red bar on the wall. The door folded itself along breaks, hissing into the ceiling.

Daddy gasped at what he saw.

The door opened onto broad desert that was edged on the right by a winding river of squimix that stretched away till lost. A stone wall bounded the other three sides to keep in prisoners, probably. Daddy guessed this from a line of dead men and women on iron beds along the curving river bank. Dad recalled the vision of people on iron beds he'd had at his medical exam. Had his vision prefigured this? Death by squimix was no bedtime. The people who lived were to become giants, to judge from Daddy's condition and what he saw: stretched across a gantry, a man-giant roared as a Didacrawler pack swarmed over him, filleting his skin with a battery of spinning blades clutched in accurate appendages.

Daddy was to join these.

The skin was harvested. Its giant pall was placed dead in a giant coffin made from plates like the one Daddy was fitted for during his bogus physical. If squimix did not kill you, it meant you were medically accepting of gigantism, Daddy realized. His rawness, the film he'd seen: it was a skin test, stretched to scale over the pool in order to gauge his progress toward gigantism. From the looks of it, the lucky people died by squimix, unfit for that fate. Daddy's vision was prophetic. Once eviscerated, a giant's sinew and muscle made a sick façade in bas-relief.

The coffin was set afloat.

It moved downriver.

A pack of Didacrawlers stretched the harvested skin across the squimix river. One by one, horrid forms leapt from the river, clothed themselves in the shorn man-skin. Having assumed a land-friendly form, they became new Didacrawlers. Daddy was there; the cipher was his. New Didacrawlers formed ranks around the walls, hundreds of belching ranks.

How many had already formed?

Daddy didn't say uncle.

The Didagens' plan was flawed. Daddy knew.

Gauging the moment, Dad bolted toward the squimix river as the next coffin was cast off. Several Didacrawlers saw what he'd done and lurch-slapped after him. One must've hit Daddy with a shot. The last image I got included sharp pain as my daddy dove hard for the coffin, missed, and went under in the squimix. That was what Daddy felt the Didagens had forgot:

Squimix doesn't kill giants.

Dad gurgled to the surface. He grabbed the coffin.

The coffin floated away. Daddy looked back and saw the clinic getting small in the distance: a three-tiered tower of stone with spongy windows, stair-stepped as in his monument vision. Did it accommodate fast growth to a giant? Maybe Didagens move you to a larger room after a shot. Atop the tallest tier, an octet of willowy legs sought toward the coffin, undulant in the heavy breeze. Were the legs saying goodbye? Beckoning? Daddy fell fast asleep, the image he gave fading quickly. Daddy is sleeping soundly now, with no REM sleep to feed me his dreams. Daddy got his medicine. Was it good for him? I may never know.

I glean dreams best.

But each night in the approach of sleep, the warm breeze touches my hair at the window and the moon is patient and cool, sending its light. I hear the midges buzzing lightly outside in the darkness, and I hear Brant's guard dog baying vacuously down the hollow, outside the office trailer. I try this sending:

I am sorry, Daddy. I'm working squimix, now.

Apples sell.

We need the money from outside because our town in small.

Awaiting you,

Your dream-reader, Annie.

"Psychomachia"

Geoffrey Girard

Geoffrey Girard has appeared in such publications as Writers of the Future, The Willows, Prime Codex, Aoife's Kiss, Murky Depths, and Apex Digest (which serialized his thriller "Cain XP11" in 2008). His Tales Of... series of books now includes The Jersey Devil, Atlantic Pirates, Eastern Indians, and the forthcoming American Colonies. Girard was born in Germany, was shaped in New Jersey, and is currently teaching and writing in Ohio. More info can be found at geoffreygirard.com.

Vincendi praesens ratio est, si comminus ipsas virtutum

facies liceat notare.

---Prudentius

1. Patientia

Each night, except Sundays, the boy nests in one of two porch chairs and quietly watches his father and brother clean up at an old barrel filled with rainwater from the roof. Mother won't ever let either back into the house for dinner until they have. Always says Cleanliness is next to Godliness and that a man can't root with pigs and still keep a clean nose. And so, soiled work clothes always stack up again for the next day. And weary hands scrub away another day's dark labor. And the barrel water always turns black.

It's 1918, September 6th. Both men move strangely tonight. Father stares at his thick hands and lower arms as if he's never seen hands or arms before, slowly turning them over and over and over again. His mouth hangs kinda open as he smoothes the water and soap over the earth-blackened skin, stroking more than cleaning up, then touching his dirty cheeks and chin like a blind man as the barrel's cold water trickles down to carve tortuous grey rivers down his blackened neck and chest. The brother cleans just the opposite and scours his skin like he's whetting an axe blade or sanding a small piece of wood. Patches on his arms and a few knuckles are already scraped red. Other areas remain ignored, still completely black with coal dust. He hasn't even taken off his jacket or hat yet. Neither man speaks.

Something happened in the mine, the boy decides, studying the two. The grimy face blank beneath the leather bill of his father's dirty cloth cap. Empty. The fiery man's eyes queerly sleepy tonight. Dead. His mouth, hands. Must have been something Bad. Another overhead collapsed, maybe, slate fall, shattered sandstone. Or a runaway coal gon careening down the track back into the mine. Someone probably got killed. Lost a hand. Some other miner's face half-smashed. His father always comes home extra quiet on these nights. The two smallest fingers on his father's left hand are clipped off just above the knuckles, a story from twenty years before. Who this time? Some other father or brother.

The boy watches and waits without a sound. Eyes the lightning bugs emerging in the dark woods just behind the tracks that run parallel to his house. Thinks of his upcoming chores. Dragging the fire, letting the cat back in, blowing out the oil lamps, resetting kindling for the morning. Ordinarily, his father leaves him a small piece of cake or some horehound candy to find in his lunch bucket and nibble on while waiting during their nightly ritual. But there is no lunch bucket tonight. Forgotten back at the coalmine, looks like. Another sign something has happened. When he is twelve next summer, he will go to work with them. Ten hours a day. Sure is hungry. He tries to sniff dinner cooking inside. The hog fat dripped on the skillets. Fried potatoes, maybe. Biscuits. He smells only the usual wood smoke and coffee. Something else on the cool dusk air now. A funk. The stink of old sweat. His father and brother, sour. Like they are sick.

Finally, his father shuffles away from the barrel into the house. He passes the boy without a word. The barrel has not taken away the smell, though his brother continues to scrub away. Scraping at the skin. The boy watches him for awhile, thinks of asking him What Happened, but then moves from the porch, too. His brother hasn't even looked at him. Inside, his father has taken his usual spot at the table as Mother bestows cornbread and a bowl each of soup beans and fried potatoes. The girls sit in their chairs waiting for prayer to begin. And for their brother outside.

The boy slides into his chair and studies his father more. The man has placed his hands up on the table as if waiting for food, but the food is already there. His eyes move again to his hands, stare at nothing. "Somethin' happen?" his mother asks. They wait together but no reply comes from the man. "Darryl?" she tries again.

"Cold," his father replies finally and rubs his thumbs against his fingers.

"What's that?"

"It's still so god damned cold." Rubbing, rubbing.

"What's that boy doing?" His mother moves on from Somethin' Happen, gets up from the table. "The gravy's what's getting cold now. Paul? Paul!" She moves straight for the porch.

Their father just stares at his hands and the boy passes quick looks of confusion with his sisters. The older one stifles an insolent laugh.

Screaming. Their mother is now...screaming.

The boy jumps. The smiling sister's eyes now as big and bright as a carbide lamp. Their father has not moved. His face the same. Untouched. More shrieks from the front porch. But his father accords dead eyes. Nothing. The boy slips from his chair. Outside, in the darkness, his mother is now sobbing. Gasping for air. He stands in the frame behind the screen door measuring her sounds. Mother has fallen back and collapsed against the chairs where he watches his father and brother each night.

His brother still lingers over the barrel, and the light from the house casts through the door onto him, the boy's own shadow hiding some of it. At first, it just looks like his brother has put his work shirt back on and that the shirt's sleeves are ripped. Dangling loosely between his elbows and wrists.

Then the boy understands it is flaps of skin. Hanging over the barrel. Uneven shreds between other lumps of dripping muscle. His brother's fingers even now gouging into the other arm. Scrubbing. Ripping. The porch floor is spattered in small round shadows. His brother's eyes are narrow and glassy with determination. He is might nigh smiling. The wailing by the chairs doesn't even sound like their mother anymore. Inside, his sisters are now crying. A flash of glistening wet bone. Still, his brother...washes.

A hand on his shoulder, pushing him aside. His father. Moving out to the porch. He would...his father only reaches for his earth-stained overalls and hat. Dresses. Pays no attention to his oldest son at the barrel at all. Mother's wailing has ceased, her silence somehow even worse. The boy clings to the doorframe to steady himself. His father grabs a lamp and empty lunch bucket, ignoring the snapping of his firstborn's fingers. The boy and his mother watch together as the man steps slowly off the porch into the emergent darkness. His lumbering shadow moves slowly west toward the head of the hollow, back toward the mines. No words spoken.

The boy's brother steeps both arms fully in the barrel, and rain water and blood flow as one over its sides. Mostly blood. The puddle grows out slowly toward the boy and shapes across their porch a shimmering black stain.

It looks just like coal.

2. Industria

The newest run within the Number Three Mine has a bad overhead, and the water is ten inches deep in some spots. Three dead mules litter the low-sloped tunnel. None of that seems to matter. It's quality coal and, even without the mules, most of the men are still pulling out ten tons a day at fifteen cents per ton. Yesterday, Edgar'd pulled fifteen from the earth, dragging each load topside himself after they'd killed the mules. Hadn't gone home when the company steam whistle blew for second or third shift. There's still too much to be done here. The whole earth stuffed, pregnant. Bloated with coal.

He isn't the only one working extra shifts for the Freedom K.Y. Coal Company. Digging until he just caint stand another minute. Replacing some of the others who haven't yet returned. Tunnels are crowded with miners shuffling past this way or the other with picks and carts. It is more than two miles to the surface. Some carry single lumps by hand. Many of their lamps have already burned out, and men keep on working in total darkness.

Edgar knocks away another thick shard of night with the pick and retrieves it from the cavern floor. This hunk drips like the rest, covered in the thinnest sheen of what they all can only think of as ice. Unseen vapor, like breath, rises a far piece beneath the earth to unhurriedly freeze again within the unending walls of coal. It is so fucking cold, it burns through gloves and skin, through bone. Through everything, Edgar dumps the shard into his pushcart, then bends to retrieve his pick. The movement is as natural as breathing, and the blood and ooze from his blisters trickle and tickle down his wrists.

A foot away, Riley Spurlock lies slumped with his back against one of several roof-support timbers. Dropped lifeless like a discarded rag doll. He's left the mine just twice in the past week and has spoken only in gibberish. He hasn't moved in hours and holds the pistol up to his own face, just above the bridge of his nose, just like he's prayin. He's been sitting like this for hours now. The Colt his father'd brought home after time with Company F and the 47th. He's shown it to Edgar many times before. It'd killed two Rebels in Tennessee, Spurlock has claimed, and shot a few rounds at the "battle" of Catron's Creek. But the river'd been too high that day and nothing much had come of that. Catron's Creek...can almost see it. Can't remember exactly when he, himself, has last seen home. Ever since they'd opened the new quarry, after the very first wagons and gondolas were filled. When the mules and pony wouldn't budge no matter how hard you beat them. When they noticed there weren't any rats down here. When some of the men didn't never come back. He's heard some things, gossip, but don't really know. Not really. There is still too much to be done here.

The old Colt finally fires.

When the pushcart fills again, Edgar will need to roll it over Spurlock's legs.

3. Humilitas

Company camps were empty of anything not directly related to coal. Every building, every tool, and each living soul. The Freedom K.Y. Coal Company was founded in 1914 and managed a dozen such camps along the Wallins Creek and down through Puckett Ridge. All combined, the company employed just over one hundred men, pulling in sixty thousand tons year, and was in land negotiations to double that in 1919 [Note: It never happened. Freedom K.Y. Coal Company closed that same Spring.] In most camps, there was a three-story tipple at the head of the hollow where coal was collected from different mines and sorted by quality and size into coal gondolas for shipment down the W & B.M. railroad. Everything else grew out from that. The ancillary train tracks and donkey trails. The piles of slack coal. The one-room company store and miners' houses that dotted both sides of the hollow. The houses, each one painted yellow with red trim, were always brushed over in a fine coating of coal dust. Sometimes black, but the next glance a strange yellow, like when you smash a lightning bug. It depended on how the sunlight caught.

The community church, in what had been the flagship camp of Rockport, was above the tipple and painted white, yet always looked grey. On Sundays, miners from the other surrounding hollows walked or wagoned many miles to reach it. Families marched into the camp on the rails to keep out of the mud, on tracks that still ran right next to the old church. Boys sometimes played among the cars there, pulling the L-shaped brakes for a hiss of air to get nasty stares and a scolding from any nearby men. If too much air was released, the car could simply roll uncontrollably back to the bottom of the tipple where someone might be killed. This miniscule possibility, naturally, was part of the boys' excitement while their mothers gossiped at the water pump and smaller children played for a short bit before heading home again. Further above the tipple were several two-story homes called "Silk Stocking Row," where management and their families lived. Beyond that, only more trees---the leaves of which gave the barest trace of turning---and more hills.

There, the boys sometimes spied Black Shepherd, a shadowy muleskinner who could run his team of Percheron horses up any hollow in any weather in half the time as the next best carrier in three counties. He lived in the hills alone and came into camps only to pick up and deliver company supplies and shipments from other villages in his wagons and high-runner sled. [Note: Court records in Lejunior say he was also a bootlegger.] He was either part Cherokee or part Shawnee. Or part black man, maybe. Either way, the man had never set foot in a coal mine, would only once in his life, and yet his skin was always as dark as night. Most, even the men who'd worked with him, considered him a bit of a monster. A man best to keep away from. The bigger boys sometimes yelled "nigger" and threw railway rocks toward him, but none was ever close enough to hit. He just stared back and usually moved on again whenever church started.

Reverend Enoch Osborne said when church started. For seven years, he'd given the gathered coal camps sermons such as (to name only a few): Rules for Thinking Alongside the Good Book, The Fixed Costs of Resurrection, Dancing with The Prince of Lies, The Value of Souls, The Virgin Birth of Evil, The Seventh Hallelujah, Fasting and Faith, Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God, Vanquishing the Cardinal Sins, Accepting Our Divine Responsibilities, and something called the Contest of Souls. Osborne often spoke a hundred words in a single slow breath and always pronounced Hell as 'Ayell with two syllables and without the H. "That weeeeah, my brathes and sistas, may altogaytha of the same mind and conformnity with the Church and Holy Bible, if they shouldda term anythin' to be black which to our eyes appears to be white, we ought, in like manner, pronounce it to be black, for we mus' without-a-doubt believe the Speerit of our Lord Jesus Christ, and the Speerit of the Church, by which Speerit we are'all governed and directed from the damnations of 'Ayell to the Lord's Salvation, be the same!"

Originally from Tennessee, Osborne was a stocky Baptist who chewed Shoe Peg tobacco and could spit it in your eye from twenty feet away. He'd once accused Owen Ledford of adultery in front of the whole congregation and actually shamed the man into a public confession. He'd whipped Solomon Fouch once while simultaneously scolding the parents for neglecting his Christian upbringing. There was a rumor he'd stabbed a man in Nolansburg. Even the roughest boys lined up quickly when he finally stepped outside to call everyone into service

Still, one Sunday in September, Osborne could not get their Salvation started on time. Some of the adults had been arguing. And their voices, despite Osborne's reproach, eventually grew louder and more violent into the biggest shine anyone'd ever seen. Men threw punches. Someone's jaw shattered when a large rock was thrown, and others wrapped a dirty rag around the man's head to hold it in place.

The cause had been the men from Mine Three. The few who'd actually shown up for church. Others remained working back in the mine and, after the commotion was settled, Enoch Osborne gave the whole congregation a three-hour sermon regarding the Sabbath. Before that, however, all eyes were on these four men. They were wrong. All four still wore their work clothes, each filthier than the last. Stiff with dried sweat. Drenched in coal. Their faces and arms darker than Black Shepherd's. Like walking shadows. Hair greasy and matted with dirt. Disheveled. Unshaven. From the smell, clearly none had bathed in a week or more. Some had cuts on their hands and faces. One face covered in red oozing cysts.

Their wives and children embarrassed, certainly. The rest of the congregation both dismayed and appalled. Reverend Osborne riled to a chilling silence. The four men themselves, it was later recalled, didn't seem to care at all. As if they hadn't the faintest idea what everyone else was fussing about. Didn't even fight back when the hostility started. Ultimately, they were driven away. Back to their own camp, their families in tow but at a distance.

When church was finally over that day, the rest of the congregation stepped back outside. One boy, who walked alone with his mother and sisters because his father was one of the men still working, and his brother was home sick, noticed this: Black Shepherd still in the woods above the church. The criminal muleskinner who looked like he was made from coal. He'd not moved in three hours and was still watching them all.

4. Temperare

Edgar has not eaten in thirteen days.

His shirt and jacket drape oddly now, and the bones of his clavicle and sternum show. The exact shape of bones in his arms and wrists show. Here a while back, his pants slipped off. Skin collecting at his knees and elbows.

The chill of wet coal courses through his whole body. He drops another handful of coal at the mouth of Mine Three and then shambles back toward the darkness below. His body needs nourishment again. The grass and bushes just outside the mouth of the mine are already picked bare.

He does not know that the word Hell---or 'Ayell as his minister often calls it---derives from primordial sounds like helle, hellja, and hölle, and from the Hebrew word sheol. Or that these words, forgotten words created by a dozen different lands, all translate easily to mean "hole" and "cavern" and "hollow" and "to burrow." Or even that each and every one also has a secondary meaning: "to hide." He's never heard these words before. And yet, he understands.

Two others already squat over the bloated mule carcass.

Flies coat its putrid flesh and their green eyes glint like mysterious African jewels.

He kneels.

5. Caritas

The boy hides in the woods. He knows about bobcats and bears and panthers and wild hogs. And Indian ghosts and witches. He is more afraid of home.

Mother does not talk anymore. His sisters just cry and are filthy. His brother is still propped in one of the chairs on the front porch. Sits there each day and night. Never moving, like something resting in its crypt. And no one else will move him. It rains on him. The bandages on his arms are sticky and yellow. The porch floor is still stained black like coal. Their father does not return.

Their hollow is twenty-six miles from the main road. They have eaten all of the canned food. The train does not come anymore. He hears that the mines are shut down until further notice. That management in Rockport says it is only typhoid.

Another man walks into their house a week ago. Mr. Schaffer. A Hungarian who doesn't speak any English. He is completely naked and looks just like a skeleton. Deep black sockets for eyes and a jawbone and skull etched just beneath his coal-blacked skin. He takes food and sleeps in their parents' bed. He leaves after a few hours, taking their only milk cow. Two days later, it is another man. The boy does not know him and he hides in the latrine behind the house. For two days he hides and does not even come out when he hears his sisters screaming. They, and his mom, and the man are not there when he finally comes out.

He runs to find his father but all of the men at the mines and wandering about camp now look the same. It takes another day before he finds the two small fingers on a left hand clipped off just above the knuckles. He finds them on a man he does not truly recognize just outside the mine. His father is a night thing, completely covered in ancient dust from miles beneath the world. The clothes tattered and black. Bones already protruding in barbed angles out of his coated skin. His father does not recognize him either. Just stares as he would at any boy, any thing, any lump of coal.

The boy is now hungry and roots in a cold stream for crawdads.

It has rained, a biddy drownder that fell on him all night, and a dense fog rises in the surrounding hills. On mornings like this, his father used to say that the groundhogs were making coffee over a fire. He misses his father. He misses setting rabbit boxes in holes with his brother. And tying Mother's sewing thread around June bug legs. And playing to hunt for Indians with his friends. And then pretending to be Jesse James. And his mother's chocolate gravy. And spending a single coin of copper scrip at the company store for a chilly imp or birch beer and some peanuts. Making silly faces at his sisters. He misses the whole world.

He reaches back into the icy water and turns another rock. Nothing. He thinks of the wives' saw that you can turn a horsehair into a snake by putting it under a creek rock.

Just like his father turned when they put him under the earth.

This is precisely what the boy is thinking about when Black Shepherd grabs him.

6. Castitas

Females were herded into the mine. Each woman and girl placed into two clumsily crafted pens there. Those who tried to flee were killed there in the dark.

The others were not harmed and used only for procreation.

It was, they thought, just as God intended.

7. Humanitas

Black Shepherd looks exactly like The Devil. Or what the boy imagines The Devil would be. The muleskinner's skin is truly grey. And his eyes glow like stars. He wears a frayed oilcloth slicker. His hair is black and long beneath a wide-brim hat, and it frames his rounded face, which has many scars.

He feeds the boy, who sleeps for two days. When the boy wakes, Black Shepherd offers him a pone of cornbread and some coffee. Black Shepherd talks quietly to the boy. Men sometimes go where they should not, he says. Men sometimes go too deep. The boy is terrified of the man but eats all the same, and listens to every word.

Hell is real. Its falsehoods creep slowly, eternally, from the darkness into light. The greatest deception ever played on man. That which makes man majestic somehow deemed sin. That which makes us loathsome becomes virtue. The seven deadly sins aren't. Imagine, he leads, The Prince of Lies imprisoned in the darkest pit of Earth. A hundred miles below the ground. A thousand. Frozen. Empty. Smiling. His great lie creeping slowly, eternally, from the absolute darkness into The Book, The World. And, just perhaps, that same lie is sometimes carried.

He and the boy approach the mine at dawn.

The entrance gapes. The timbers on either side are fangs. Hot cold breath rolls out the entrance like a fog. The blackness within runs straight down. The creatures milling about do not seem to notice their arrival or intentions. Their own preservation now lost to some icy notion of total humility. While the boy and Black Shepherd prepare, the creatures continue only to dig.

The Percherons resist at first. They will not enter the tunnels. One horse rears, goes mad and is killed. But Black Shepherd is the best hauler in three counties and he Gees and Haws all damn day until the coal is slowly stuffed back into the earth. Carts and wagon and small gondolas fill the passageway, which now runs some five miles into the earth. The boy enters the darkness beside him to place dynamite and charges they've stolen from the mine supplies and from the company store in Rockport. Narrow tunnels and forty-foot rooms packed with explosives. The creatures move around him. Shrunken black things that ought never again to crawl aboveground. The boy does not look for his father. Strange sounds echo through every tunnel. Voices, maybe. Moaning and wails far below.

Black Shepherd must kill his other horses. He and the boy are exhausted from the day's work, but there is still too much to be done. In October moonlight, they move slowly above the tipple where the last gondola waits empty. They fill it with the rest of the powder. The track runs toward the mine. Fire.

The boy releases the brake.

A hiss of air.

8. Pychomachia

Tall grey weeds grow between the railroad tracks and cross ties. The rotted remains of an old tipple loom over the place like a giant grey spider. The houses are empty and boarded over like its empty egg sacks. Years before, typhoid fever wiped out this camp. There was also a mine explosion and collapse that killed as many as thirty miners. Some say it was more than that. Some say the place is haunted.

A girl and her grandmother enter the deserted camp. It is 1931. Hoover says we shall soon, with the help of God, banish poverty, and he has promised a chicken in every pot and a car in every garage. The old woman has seen a truck a few times. The girl has never. The girl is fighting a cold and is grumpy about having to accompany her grandmother on this errand. Her grandmother reminds her that sick persons should have sick persons' manners. The girl stays quiet and twirls the empty bucket at her side to pass the time.

They have come for the strippings.

A small gleaming black mountain of coal. The smaller portions of coal once deemed not good enough for shipment. Discarded. Forgotten. Perfect for nearby stoves. Many have taken from the pile already. For many years, it has, it will, cook meals and warm homes across the county. It always burns bright and long.

The girl finds it cold to touch.

"Yellow Warblers"

Jason Sizemore

Jason Sizemore is a Stoker Award-nominated editor and writer who has seen his work published in a number of science fiction and horror publications including Dark Discoveries, Shroud Magazine, and The Writers Workshop of Horror. His first collection, Irredeemable (a collection of Appalachian horror shorts), comes out in the spring of 2010 from Shroud Publications. Jason is originally from Southeast Kentucky, but currently lives in Lexington, KY, where he works as a software developer and book publisher. He maintains a web presence at jason-sizemore.com.

Golden rays of morning sunlight filtered through the single-glass windowpane, illuminating an elderly man sitting quietly on a cushioned pew, head bent in prayer. His trembling hands held an ancient pair of reading glasses with lenses so marred and scratched it was a wonder he could see anything through them. Outside, a yellow Kentucky warbler sang joyfully, welcoming the warm spring breeze blowing in from the south and the pale green leaves covering the Appalachian countryside.

"Amen," the old man said aloud, finishing his prayer. He stretched out his arthritic, tired legs. Both knees popped like the BB gun he had used in his younger days to shoo away the hungry crows from his garden. He grimaced at the sound---a constant reminder of his age---and at the pain that was his daily companion. Something told him, perhaps it was the Lord whispering to him, to enjoy the warm season. Come this time next year, his old legs wouldn't be much use to him anymore.

A silence enveloped the church valley. The yellow warblers hushed. The blowing wind stopped and the air grew still. A chill spread across the old man's body. He'd lived long enough to know the way of the spirits, to listen when they shouted across the heavens to warn the other side of danger.

Outside, a small alien paused at the foot of the steps. It glanced upward at the white-painted spire that held the brass bell used for calling the congregation on Sunday mornings. The broad leaves of a tall sycamore shadowed the church from the midday sun, giving protection and comfort. The alien climbed the nine wooden steps up to the doorway and entered through the ornate entrance. Angels and demons welcomed it inside.

The alien moved with a grace befitting its slender build and smooth, alabaster skin. The old man had seen one of these before. A Shadow, they'd called it. It had been...what...twenty-three years since last he'd seen one? But there it was, no mistaking. Those large almond eyes in an oval, slightly humanoid face. No mouth. Skin that resembled the plastic of his sister's childhood dolls. Shadows wore no clothes, nor did they demonstrate modesty, avarice, or lust. The man wondered if the Shadows had succeeded in the Garden where man had failed.

Many other thoughts crossed his mind as he watched the alien walk forward. He watched as it touched the back of each pew with padded white fingers. It made little noise, no perceptible sounds of breathing, and even the sound of its bare feet slapping against the hardwood floor was muted like feathers falling from the sky.

The old man stood up. After all, this was the Lord's House and he had a duty to perform. "Hello," he said. "I'm Preacher Jeremiah Jones."

The Shadow paused. Those big, strange eyes stared back at Jeremiah and then at the old wooden cross hanging from the stucco wall behind the pulpit. A moment of worry passed through the preacher's bones. Worry fueled by the deadly sin of pride. The cross had been in the church for 300 years; a true artifact, handmade to perfection and passed down through the protective custody of thirty-one preachers at Harlan Baptist Church. He often considered it divine, almost in the same sense the Roman Church had once believed in miraculous power of objects such as grails and ancient shrouds. It didn't take the awestruck presence of a Shadow to convince him of the power of the cross that hung at his back each and every Sunday morning during his sermon.

"I am...John."

"Amen, praise Jesus!" The preacher skipped a holy dance unlike anything he'd done since his snake-handling days as a deacon back at the one room Pentecostal church down around Martin's Fork. The Shadow had touched a finger to a green box hanging around its neck by a piece of yellow string, activating some type of voice machine.

Last time the preacher had seen one of these creatures, they didn't have such vocal contraptions. But that was twenty-three years ago. Right before his last trip down the Cumberland River to Nashville as the town's supply runner. Now Larson and Cullen handled the duties, two buck-toothed lads, both crazy on the shine and the women. They'd landed in jail a number of times at lift outpost while waiting for the teams of men to carry their raft around Cumberland Falls and delayed the town's supplies, but for the most part, they got the job done.

"I come from the University of Kentucky," John said through his green box. "I am an anthropologist."

That caught Jeremiah's attention. An anthropologist? This did not bode well. The fair folks of Harlan had been living in their utopia of isolation for over forty years. Due to the inaccessibility of the countryside and the fright caused by the Collapse, the only people who had visited the world outside these mountains were the raft captains looking to sell timber for supplies. That meant Larson and Cullen, him, and his dead buddy Maxie Henson. Many of the folks around these parts had never seen a Shadow, let alone such fancy things as newspapers, bathrooms, or people not born and bred in Harlan.

"Your church is wonderful," John said. "We do not have these back at the University, or anywhere else."

A world without the Word of God? No wonder He sent the Collapse on us, foreseeing our heathen ways. "Praise Jesus," was all Jeremiah could muster in response. The typically loquacious man found himself silenced by the visitor.

The Shadow stepped up to the pew and looked out over the church. "I would like to hear you sermonize."

"Yes...yes, I mean, of course. Tomorrow morning, 10 a.m. sharp. The bell can be heard for three miles off on a clear day, I reckon."

John nodded and continued on to the front of the little church until it reached the holy cross hanging from the wall. "This is a lovely religious artifact. How wonderful it is," it said.

"Praise Jesus," Jeremiah said again.

A child ran into the church, breaking up the shared moment of reverie. It was little Mikey Smith from down Baxter. Mikey usually helped clean the building before services. "Hey Preacher, momma's made a blackberry pie and...." He'd spotted the Shadow behind the pulpit, watched as it lovingly stroked the cross. The boy's face turned white.

"It's okay, Mikey. We have a visitor from Lexington," Jeremiah said. "This is John."

Like a frightened squirrel, the kid made a skidding turn in his sandals and sprinted back out of the church, hollering for his momma.

Jeremiah felt a twinge of worry tickle his nerves. He remembered the calling of the spirits. "Now I don't want to be unseemly in God's house, John, but I think you best be heading back down the river. Nothing but trouble to be found here for your kind."

John turned around and looked at the preacher. Those eyes, so beautiful. Jeremiah recalled a snippet of a fairytale he'd once heard...My, what big eyes you have....

"You ask that I leave? But there is so much to see and document. You know that I bring no harm to you."

"But it's not safe."

"Preacher Jeremiah. I want to worship with you."

Jeremiah swallowed hard as he heard the sudden commotion build outside the church. That didn't take long. Larson and Cullen, the town's raft captains---and the town's de facto leaders---came stomping up the wooden steps. Once inside, they slammed the door shut behind them hard enough to rattle the church bell. Both carried shotguns.

"I'll be goddamn, Cullen, it's one of those little grey freaks."

"Mr. Larson," Jeremiah admonished, "you know better than to take the name of the Lord in vain!"

Larson leveled his shotgun at Jeremiah. "Shut your mouth, old man. You know how I feel about you and your church. Scaring people with your talk of hell and damnation, but you know what, I've seen hell and damnation, I see it every six weeks when me and Cullen go up the river, so I don't want to hear a goddamn word out of you." Larson's stone-cold gaze froze Jeremiah's tongue.

Cullen carried a ridiculously large double-barreled shotgun. At present, it was pointed at John's head.

"Why you here, Grey?" Larson asked.

"To study," John answered.

Cullen and Larson laughed. "We don't want no studying. Why you think we're stuck ass-deep in these here hills?" Larson said.

"I do not know," John said. "Appalachian cultural history shows a tendency toward xenophobia."

Cullen looked at Larson. "Xeno-what?"

"You got two choices, Grey. Tell us why you're here and die quickly. Or don't tell us and die a slow, agonizing, painful death."

"I am an anthropologist," John said. If the alien showed fear through its voice, the box didn't register it.

"A what?" Larson asked Cullen. "I got to tell ya, it might be fun to set this one loose in the woods. Ol' Blue hasn't had a good hunt all year."

The pair laughed and poked each other in the ribs.

Larson nodded at Cullen. "Cover me while I tie this ol' boy up." The husky riverboat captain grabbed the alien and forced its arms behind its back. He drew out two feet of hemp cord from a baggy pocket and tied John's arms together.

"Is that necessary," Jeremiah objected. "He's not here to harm nobody. He came to worship."

Larson pushed John forward until all three stood in front of the preacher. "You old fool, when was the last time you been up the river? Twenty years? You have no idea what's changed in that time, what the Greys do. You haven't seen the rows of crucified children along the crumbling highways. You haven't witnessed the execution of women by flogging in the public squares. Next time you get to thinking this Grey isn't here to harm nobody, you think about that, will you?" To accentuate his point, Larson lifted the nearest of the pews and knocked it over. Hymnals and Bibles clattered across the floor. "Come on, Cullen."

They left, pushing the tiny alien in front of them.

Preacher Jeremiah climbed the rocky steps leading to his grandson's hovel. Like most of the community's dwellings, Jake's home was built into the side of a steep, forested hill---the ground flattened with only the strength and will of men, women, and tools. The mud-hut wasn't much to look at, but all the same, Jeremiah felt that old vice of pride reach into his heart and swell. The boy had done well with his life.

Jeremiah, paused, caught his breath and rattled the straw curtain that served as the door during the spring season. He wanted to kneel over, put his hands on his knees and gasp, but it wouldn't do for them to see him like that.

Jake's wife came to the door. She pushed the curtain back and invited the preacher inside.

"Howdy, Jeanette. How's the family?" The mundane was a great stress reliever in times of crisis.

"Oh, you know how they are. Momma's down in her back, does nothing but sits in that old rocker of hers and cusses at the flies and wasps. She just ain't been the same since Daddy died."

Jeremiah nodded, sadly. "I reckon not, Jeanette. Not many of us are when we lose someone close."

"Jake is down at the creek gathering water," she said, getting to the crux of the visit and away from the depressing talk.

Jeremiah liked the young woman. Strong at heart, not one to dwell on past sadness. "I need to see him, it's kind of urgent. Think you can give him a holler?"

Jeanette smiled. "Of course, just a second." She disappeared behind the curtain and went outside. A few seconds later her deep voice rolled out across the hillside.

"Thanks," he said, as Jeanette came back inside. She poured him a cup of ginseng tea and took a seat at the table with him. Jeremiah played with the cross he wore on a leather strap tied around his neck, a nervous habit he had picked up during his many trips...and prayers...while managing the boat upriver during the harsh winter seasons.

As he finished the last of the tea, a strapping young man appeared with two aluminum pails filled with water. "Care for a drink, Granddad?"

"No thanks. I need to ask a favor."

"What's that?"

"I need you and Jeanette to ride downriver with me."

Jeanette let out a noise that sounded like a bark. Jake set the buckets down and frowned.

"Only Larson and Cullen are allowed downriver. You know the rules. You used to be a captain."

"Of course I know the rules," Jeremiah said. He slapped his hand against the table in frustration. "A Shadow came into the church this morning and they took him."

Jeanette gasped. "One came into the church? I thought nobody knew we existed."

"I guess they do now. It said it wanted to worship with me."

"You think Larson and Cullen are going to hurt the Grey?" Jake asked.

"John, its name is John, and I think they plan on killing it."

"We can't go downriver. If they're going to kill...John, they'll do it before we even reach the mouth."

"Maybe not," the preacher said, "but we have to warn the university. John says he is an anthropologist from Lexington. Don't you see? When John doesn't return, the university will send someone else down to investigate his disappearance. Are we going to let Larson and Cullen kill that person, or that alien, too? Whatever the case, more Shadows will come---they'll make us leave Harlan. They won't understand we're not all like Larson and Cullen."

Jake stood up. He placed his hands on Jeremiah's shoulders. "Grandfather, how old are you? Eighty-seven? That's a long time to live, and I know you've seen a lot, done a lot more than I ever will. But sometimes there's nothing to be done."

"Jake..." the old man whispered.

"And maybe Larson and Cullen know some things you don't?" Jeanette added, breaking her silence.

Jeremiah stood up, his knees popping, sending the pain of the arthritis shooting through his body. He hugged his grandson. "I know you mean well. May God be with you." He nodded to Jeanette and walked out through the straw curtain into the bright daylight.

The preacher slowly worked his way back down the hillside to his church. What he saw almost made his heart fall through the pit of his stomach.

Tied to a freshly built crucifix that had been planted right in front of Harlan Baptist Church was John the Grey. Wood and brush was being collected and deposited around the alien's feet. Cullen watched over the proceedings with a quiet menace and a shotgun resting over his shoulder.

It felt like it took his creaky old legs decades to reach the church's front lawn where, instead of alien burnings, they held their annual summertime tent revival. Jeremiah's heart pounded, black specks invaded his vision. Dying would almost be worth not having to witness this travesty.

Reaching the crucifix and the alien, he began to kick out the shrubbery and boards of wood building up around John's feet. Cullen forced himself between the wild old preacher and their Grey captive, before shoving him backwards to the ground.

The shotgun was leveled at the preacher's face. "Out of respect for who you are, I'm not going to kill you tonight. But if you don't get on out of here, you might just go up in flames like this Grey."

"You can't do this. Anything but burning..." Jeremiah objected. Cullen pressed the shotgun barrels against the preacher's forehead.

"One more word, and I'll send you to kingdom come."

Jeremiah looked past the double barrels, into the placid face of John the grey. A Kentucky yellow warbler landed on top of the horizontal bar of the crucifix and skipped around, chirping a beautiful melody. John looked up with his big almond eyes and whistled.

Jake and Jeanette came rushing to the lawn and picked up their grandfather by his arms.

"You can't let this happen, Jake," Jeremiah pleaded. "We have to go."

A crowd gathered around. Some brought more wood. Others just milled around, somber faces unwilling to screw up the courage to object to the pending murder.

"Hush, Granddad. It's just another one of your fits."

As the evening faded to night, and the stars and moon made their appearance in the heavens, Larson struck flint to an oil-soaked torch. Jeremiah had discovered that Larson had dragged every single member of their community to the show, all 128 of them, to bear witness.

Jeremiah sat with his back against a grand old sycamore tree that spread its branches over the yard and church. Men stood around while chewing tobacco, participating in idle gossip with their friends and neighbors. Children circled around him and the tree, laughing as they played a new game called "catch the Grey." Across the way, he spotted little Mikey with his mother sharing a picnic of buttermilk biscuits and chicken with blackberry pie for dessert.

It wasn't until Larson took a spot in front of the crucifix that the festivities ceased. For the second time that day, Jeremiah felt the spirits chill his body.

"Decades ago," Larson bellowed to his congregation, "the Collapse nearly destroyed our civilization. War, famine, plagues..." Larson leveled his gaze at Jeremiah. "All of it in Biblical proportions. Two years later the Shadows appeared, just in time to become our saviors. And since those hard times, we have pressed on in Harlan, relying only on ourselves, our families, our friends."

Larson turned around and faced John, the torchlight sparkled in the alien's eyes. "We must send a message to the race that brought on the Collapse. We know what you did. We know how."

Preacher Jeremiah blocked out the rest. Jake started to hold his grandfather back, but he backed down when his grandfather took a path away from the crowd.

Jeremiah walked upwind of the senseless murder, of the soon-to-be burning alien flesh. Was this truly senseless? Was there any chance Larson and Cullen told the truth about what they had seen? He couldn't be sure. Nobody could be sure, at least not the people in this community.

A yellow warbler sang off in the distance. Or was that the sound of John being burned alive?

Perhaps Larson and Cullen did know a few things. But the old preacher man had learned his share of lessons during his years as riverboat captain, as well. Most importantly, he knew the melting flesh of a Shadow cast off a smoky neurotoxin strong enough to kill a horse.

Now he heard the screams. The sound of a double-barrel shotgun firing---soon they'd all be dead. Like a modern day Sodom and Gomorrah.

"Kingdom Come"

Jeremy C. Shipp

Jeremy C. Shipp's work has appeared or is forthcoming in over 50 publications, the likes of Cemetery Dance, ChiZine, Apex Magazine, Pseudopod, and The Bizarro Starter Kit (blue). While preparing for the forthcoming collapse of civilization, Jeremy enjoys living in Southern California in a moderately haunted Victorian farmhouse with his wife, Lisa, and their legion of yard gnomes. He's currently working on many stories and novels and is losing his hair, though not because of the ghosts. His books include Vacation, Sheep and Wolves, and Cursed. And thankfully, only one mime was killed during the making of his first short film, Egg. Feel free to visit his online home at jeremycshipp.com.

My filter edits out the utility wires and pollution so I can truly appreciate the view. And as foggy fingers caress the curves of the earth, I think of heaven. Not the heaven I envision today, with walls and guns and sentinels. No, I'm reminded of my childhood heaven, where everyone wears flip-flops and walks on clouds.

I was a stupid kid.

And in my underdeveloped mind, I imagined my parents and my sisters and me living together in a white castle, one big happy family again. I knew this would never happen in my lifetime. But I thought if God embraced my father, forgave him, then my mother would follow suit.

Back then, I didn't know much about my father. Sure, I knew he was a coward. I knew he refused to fight. And I knew he was the worst kind of man, because that's what my mother told me. But I thought I loved him anyway.

I loved him even when my mother cried and told me she couldn't go on. And I tried to convince her life was worth living. I talked about her favorite foods, and my good grades, and Christmas.

After my rambling, she would hug me and say, "You're a brave boy. If you were older, you'd fight for me. I know you would."

And she was right.

But the war's over now, and I'm sitting on top of the world, or at least at the highest overlook in Kingdom Come Park and Penitentiary.

The Cumberland Plateau bursts with fall foliage, dazzling my eyes.

I feel so small. So connected.

And as I read in the brochure, these feelings, they're a warning sign. Symptoms. If I don't medicate myself soon, I could develop a full-blown case of Thoreau Syndrome.

So I hop off the stone column and lead my family to the Art Hut.

There, I sit on a bench and study the black bears.

And I chuckle, cured of the reverence plaguing my soul. These creatures look so pathetic, stuffed in glass boxes like the contortionist I once marveled at in my youth. But unlike the performer, these creatures inspire only pity, victims of their own weakness.

Sure, beasts like these posses a certain raw strength, but their power can't compare to that of a human being. Of an American.

Therefore, these bears will live the rest of their wretched lives in these boxes, with tubes jammed in their orifices and flesh.

I laugh again.

Then my son cries.

And I notice a young couple. Pointing, smiling.

"What's wrong with you?" I say, holding my son's shoulders.

"They want to go home," he says.

"Who?"

"The teddies. Can't we let them go with their mommies?"

"Stop crying."

And after I touch my belt, my son obeys.

"Maybe I should take him outside," my wife says.

"No," I say. "He needs to see this."

An older man in a suit steps closer to me. "It's refreshing to see a father taking an interest in his son's artistic development. You'd be surprised what a rarity that is these days."

"You're right. I am surprised."

The old man grins. "I'm John Miller, the curator."

"Samson Carter."

We shake hands.

And after a few minutes of talking about black bears, we shake hands again.

"See you tomorrow night, Mr. Carter," the curator says. "Assuming you and the missus are planning on attending the show."

"Show?" I say.

"I'm surprised you haven't heard. All of Kingdom Come's buzzing about tomorrow's guest. He's supposedly quite the comedian."

"I doubt we'll be in attendance. I'm not a comedy fan."

"Well, to each his own."

Outside the hut, my son approaches one of the glowing rhododendrons, and I have to grab him by the arm.

"Don't touch those," I say. "Don't even get near them."

"Why?" my son says.

"Because I told you not to."

And that's the end of that.

One good thing about my son, he knows when to shut up.

Thankfully, my Filter's sophisticated enough to differentiate between the day-to-day screaming in Kingdom Come and the yelling of my wife. So the machine lets me hear her, and I wake up.

And I find her on her knees, a few meters from the tent.

"What's wrong?" I say.

"It took our son," my wife says. "It took our son."

I glance around. I don't see him. "Who took him?"

"A monster." She cries.

I feel like shaking the truth out of her, but there's no time for that. "Which way did they go?"

"I don't know. It pushed me into a bush, and when I got up, they were gone."

By now, a small group has formed around us, and a middle-aged woman steps forward. "I seen what happened. They went that way." She points.

"Call the Guardians," I say, and look down at my wife. "Don't tell them what you think you saw. They'll lock you up."

"Your wife ain't tetched," the middle-aged woman says. "I seen the creature too."

But I trust this hick even less than my wife.

"Tell them you can't remember," I say to my wife.

She nods.

And I run.

A few times, I stumble on steps and the roots bulging from the earth, and I remember the veins that swelled on my mother's forehead whenever she exercised or threw my father's porcelain horses at the wall. She limited herself to only destroying a couple every few weeks, because she wanted them to last.

Eventually, I end up catching my breath beside what looks like a fallen petrified tree. But no, I read about this in the brochure. Log Rock's a natural sandstone bridge, and my Filter's supposed to edit out all the vandalism, the names and messages scratched and spray painted into the stone.

For a few moments, however, I see enormous letters that run almost the entire length of the bridge.

THE MONSTER IS INSIDE.

And I hear a chorus of screams.

Then, silence.

I follow the escort into the Coal Mining Museum and Guardian Headquarters, up the stairs, to a large office on the fourth floor.

Standing in front of Warden Rose is almost like looking in a mirror. The same buzz cut. The same color suit. And if you squinted, you might mistake one tie for the other.

While the escort whispers into the warden's ear, I let my eyes explore the photographs on the wall. Photographs that the warden obviously acquired from the exhibits, because the pictures impart a bloody history of the coal industry. Mining accidents, burning houses, dead families. I also see some newer photos of the reconstruction, when the mines were transformed into the jail it is today.

Warden Rose shakes my hand, smiles. "Do you always bring suits along on your camping trips, Mr. Carter?"

"Yes," I say.

He sits, and motions for me to do the same.

I obey.

Then he leans forward, frowning. "I want you to know, we're making every effort to find your son. We already tracked down his Filter, but I'm afraid the device wasn't attached to his head."

My head vibrates with a shiver. "Would such a removal cause him any permanent damage?"

"That depends on our enemy's knowledge of Filters and the tools at his disposal. For now, let's assume your son is alive and well."

I nod. "Do you have any leads?"

"Yes. But I didn't call you here to brief you on the investigation. Your desire to assist in this case is understandable. However, you aren't qualified---"

"I fought in the war, Warden Rose. I'm more than capable of---"

"With all due respect, Mr. Carter, your attempts to help would only reduce your son's chances of survival. I read your file, and I know you're a man of myriad abilities. But this is a matter of harmony. If I allowed you to enter our system, we could no longer synchronize and achieve perfection. I hope you understand, I'm not trying to insult you. I only want to save your son."

I still feel angry, but I also feel more respect for this man and his organization. "I understand."

"Good. Now." The warden taps a button on his desk, and a monitor lowers from the ceiling. "As you must know, there are security cameras in place throughout Kingdom Come. One such camera captured the initial moments of the kidnapping." He presses another moment.

And I see a monster with black matted fur and metallic fangs. It pushes my wife's chest. Snatches up my son. Runs.

Then the warden turns off the monitor. "I don't blame you for not believing your wife. Like me, you're a man who refuses to accept outlandish stories without empirical data."

A hint of guilt tingles in my gut, but the feeling's soon overpowered by rage. I told my wife not to talk about the monster, and she did so anyway.

"But now you've seen the truth," the warden says. "Now you can give your wife the validation she needs. Don't tell her about the recording. Just tell her you believe her. And convince her that what she saw was a man in a suit. I'm sure she'll see reason, if it's coming from you."

I nod.

"One more bit of advice," Warden Rose says. "Take your wife to the show tonight. I hear our guest is a genius in his field."

"I'm not in the mood for comedy," I say.

"That's exactly why you should attend. Laughter is the best medicine, Mr. Carter. At least promise me that you'll consider the matter further."

"Alright."

"Good." The Warden stands, and I do the same. "I'll contact you as soon as I find your son."

"Thank you."

We shake hands.

And halfway to the door, I turn around. I almost forgot. "My Filter's been malfunctioning ever since my son was taken."

The Warden sits. "How so?"

"The audio and visual editor shut off once, for a few seconds. And my dialectal translator doesn't seem to be working at all anymore."

Warden Rose rubs his eyes. "I apologize for the inconvenience. To be honest, the Filters have a hell of a time coping with the effects of heartbreak. Still, this is no excuse. My Guardians assured me they'd stomped all the bugs in this new model, and they're going to suffer for their failure, I assure you. I'll send a technician to your tent tonight, and he'll fix your Filter while you sleep."

"Thank you," I say.

And all the way back to my tent, I search myself for the heartbreak Warden Rose spoke of.

Sure, I find annoyance, outrage.

But I don't feel any sorrow.

In fact, I can't even picture my son's face.

The Guardian tries to stand, fails.

So I help him to his feet. "What happened?"

"I'm sorry, sir," he says. "It ate my gun, knocked me unconscious. I'm sorry."

I check the tent.

Empty.

And still, I don't feel anything but anger.

Anger at the monster, of course.

Anger at this pathetic excuse for a Guardian.

And more than that, anger at myself. Because what kind of man doesn't protect his own family?

A man like my father, that's who.

I punch my forehead, hard.

And a few hours later, I'm lost among the trees. This isn't easy to accomplish, due to my impeccable sense of direction. But I manage, somehow.

Once again, the natural world makes me feel small, connected.

Calm.

And I realize I'm not even looking for my wife and son anymore.

Because without my fury, I'm numb.

Empty.

Or maybe not.

Maybe the words on Log Rock were meant for me.

Maybe there's a monster inside me.

I laugh at the thought, and then feel an aggressive desire to return to my tent.

But I ignore the emotion.

Eventually, I find myself staring at a patch of thirty-two luminescent flowers, and part of me hopes that my Filter will malfunction again.

Then my wish comes true.

And there are thirty-two men and women sitting on blackened circles of earth, weeping, screaming, the hairs on their bodies sticking straight out.

They look ridiculous.

I search their faces, looking for my father.

He was caught four years ago, so there's a chance he's serving his time here.

I used to tell myself that I didn't want to confront my father, but right now I feel eager, desperate.

And I don't know if I want to hug him or kill him.

Probably the latter.

But I don't find out, because he's not one of the men.

As I sit there, watching them shake and jerk in agony, I begin to feel a faint cramp in my chest.

Empathy.

I feel sorry for these insurrectionary bastards, when I can't even muster the same sentiment for my own missing family.

There must be something truly wrong with me.

"You deserve this," I whisper.

These people are political prisoners of the worst kind. And if the Guardians didn't force these traitors onto the anomalies, the unhampered energy would erupt and find another human body to bind with. Man, woman, or child.

The energy doesn't discriminate.

So if someone has to suffer, better the guilty than the innocent.

Better them than me.

According to Warden Rose, criminals are like coal. If you press them hard enough, they'll eventually become diamonds. But once in a great while, the Guardians find themselves clashing with an unfortunate soul beyond help, beyond hope.

Hunter Hill is one such devil.

"I can't give you back your family," the warden says. "But I can give you Hunter."

So about thirty minutes later, I'm underground, in a white room, holding the warden's gift.

Hunter struggles against the ropes.

Useless.

I let out a primal roar, and judging by Hunter's expression, I'm a monster in his altered vision.

A monster with black matted fur and metallic fangs.

Just like the warden promised.

"Beg," I say. "Beg for your life."

Hunter trembles. "I ain't playin' your games no more, Rose."

"I'm not the warden."

"Whoever. Just do what you come to do and let me back in my cage."

"You're not going anywhere until you beg."

"No."

I growl and slash his face with my claw.

"Fuck you, Rose," Hunter says.

"My name is Samson Carter," I say.

"Don't ring no bells."

"You killed my family." I take the gun out of my pocket.

And how this looks to Hunter, I don't know. Maybe I'm ripping the weapon out of my flesh.

"I knowed you was Rose," Hunter says.

"Will you stop saying that?" I say. "I'm Samson Carter."

"You got the warden's gun."

"He let me borrow it."

"Nah, you'd never let anybody touch your pistol."

After a deep breath, I point the gun at his face. "You killed my family, and now you're going to die."

"I ain't no killer. That's why I got sent here in the first place."

"Shut up." I cock the hammer.

A tear rolls down the bastard's cheek, and he closes his eyes. "Goodbye, Earl."

I lower the gun. "Who's Earl?"

"I weren't talkin' to you."

Again, I point the gun between his eyes. "Who's Earl?"

"A better man than you."

And I consider pressing the matter further, because I see love and respect for this man swarming in Hunter's eyes. And if this Earl is a prisoner in this facility, maybe I could torture him in front of Hunter.

The warden would probably permit me that right.

But I'm feeling more than a little tired.

So I pull the trigger.

And Hunter's skull bursts with fall colors, dazzling my eyes.

I laugh.

Then metallic fangs gnaw on my innards, and I double over and vomit.

I've killed men like Hunter many times before.

But somehow, this feels different.

I feel different.

And maybe the warden was wrong about me.

Maybe I'm not brokenhearted.

Maybe I'm just broken.

I try to stand, fail.

The audience laughs.

I'm in a cave, and Guardians fill the amphitheater risers, and Warden Rose approaches me, smiling.

"What am I doing here?" I say.

"You're here for the show," the warden says. "You're going to entertain us with your comedy."

"What?"

Warden Rose helps me to my feet, then points his pistol at my face. "Get on your knees."

I obey.

"Beg for mercy," he says.

"Why are you---"

"Beg!"

"Please. Don't shoot me."

"You can do better than that."

I force my hands together. "Don't shoot me!"

The Guardians laugh.

Warden Rose lowers his weapon and smirks. "You're pathetic. You know that, don't you?"

I don't move a muscle.

"I asked you a question, Earl," the warden says, looking right at me.

"What?" I say.

"I said you know you're pathetic, don't you, Earl?"

I don't know why he's calling me that, but I nod anyway. "Yes."

"Good. Now we can start the second act." He presses a button on a remote.

And my mind surges with fear, and I imagine my body filled with TNT.

But, of course, I don't explode.

Instead, my Filter hums and drops off the back of my head.

"I have some questions for you," the warden says. "They should be easy enough for intelligent young man such as yourself. Are you ready?"

"Yes," I say, because he's still holding the gun.

"Who are you?"

"Samson Carter."

"Wrong." And he shoots my leg.

I collapse, screaming.

The audience cheers.

"Let's try that again." The warden points his gun at my other leg. "What's your name?"

But I don't answer, consumed by my hatred for this man.

"Hurry now," the warden says. "Before your time runs out. What's your name?"

"Earl," I say.

The warden nods. "Now tell me the names of your wife and son."

I grasp at shadows. "I don't know."

And in fact, I don't think I ever knew.

"One last question, Earl," the warden says. "What's your last name?"

I open my mouth to say, "Carter."

Then the fog clears.

And I know myself again.

"Hill," I say.

That's the right answer, but he shoots my leg anyway.

Just like I knowed he would.

"Enough questions." The bastard points at a space behind me. "Let's begin act three."

I look back.

And John Miller, the curator, winks at me, standin' beside a small glass box.

"Fuck you, Miller," I say, and turn back. "Fuck you, Rose."

Rose chuckles, then flicks his hand. "Put him in."

I struggle against his foot soldiers.

Useless.

So they get to work.

And I think about what they done to me.

Raped my mind with their fuckin' machine.

Made me act like 'em.

Think like 'em.

Even tricked me into killin' the man I love.

I shake and jerk with sorrow.

And when they're done with me, I'm naked, trapped in a much smaller cage than I'm used to, tubes jammed in my holes and flesh.

Rose faces his men.

Gives a big thumbs up.

Applause, applause, applause.

I thought I knowed every nook and cranny in these fuckin' mines, but this here room is new. And I thought Angelica was dead, but there's her rabbit tattoo on the squashed body in front of me. I reckon there's at least a hundred men and women boxed up in here, stacked on a giant circle of black stone.

And I know Rose wants to keep us here for the rest of our lives.

Because we're troublemakers, the whole lot of us.

Unfortunate souls deemed beyond help, beyond hope.

I added my name to Rose's shit list the day I escaped the mines. I knowed I wouldn't get far, of course, but I wanted a victory. Even a small one.

And after I broke out, I had just enough time to write on that log.

THE MONSTER IS INSIDE.

I reckon Rose thinks I'm referrin' to him in that message, callin' him a monster for all the fucked up stuff he's done.

But that ain't it.

The monster's inside me. Inside all us captives.

Rose and his men don't know that, of course. They don't know nothin' about the monster and the so-called anomalies.

They don't know the anguish we feel with this energy gushin' inside.

They don't know how eventually, if we remain in this state long enough, we transcend the pain.

And when that happens, a monster transcends the earth.

And fills us.

Sure, the beast don't have black matted fur and metallic fangs.

But she's dangerous.

And as her electric fingers caress the curves of my tormented body, trying to work her way inside me, I think about my childhood hell. With walls and guns and sentinels. Even then, I knowed hell was a prison built to keep certain folks out of heaven.

I was a smart kid.

And in my hopeful mind, I imagined myself breakin' my mama out of hell, and takin' her to a cabin in the woods where we could live in peace.

Back then, my mama was the world to me. Even after she died.

Sure, I knowed she was a traitor. I knowed she defied the will of the government. And I knowed she was the worst kind of woman, because that's what my foster parents told me. But that only made me love her more.

I loved her, and when I growed older, I did everything I could to honor her memory.

So when my government demanded that I fight in their war, I refused.

They throwed me in prison, and I'm sure they reckon I'm a coward. But what they don't understand is that I'm a warrior at heart.

And one day, the monster, she'll grow strong enough to free us from these cages.

And then the war will finally begin.

"Trouble Among the Yearlings"

Maurice Broaddus

Maurice Broaddus works as an environmental toxicologist by day, a horror writer by night, and a lay leader at The Dwelling Place, a faith community in Indianapolis, Indiana. He is a notorious egotist who, in anticipation of a successful writing career, is practicing speaking of himself in the third person. His stories have appeared in dozens of markets (from Weird Tales Magazine to the Dark Dreams anthologies to Horror Literature Quarterly to Apex Magazine), but it should be noted that he only wants to get famous enough to be able to snub people at horror conventions. His novellas include Orgy of Souls, co-written with Wrath James White (Apex Books), and Devil's Marionette (Shroud Publishing). Visit his site so he can bore you with details of all things him at mauricebroaddus.com. Most importantly, read his blog. He loves that. A lot.

Ernest Mayfield raced across the bridge toward home, his world little more than a jagged scar in need of suturing. Weathered hands had hammered the narrow stretch of rotting planks together years ago; now they were crisscrossed with newer boards. He ran along the central beams placed on top in presumed reinforcement, despite his pain and limp. His footfalls echoed along the scored wood like a palpated heart.

He slowed as he approached a rabbit warren of a home. Corrugated tin roofed a wood-framed hovel, its logs cut, hewn, notched, and stacked. Kudzu vine snaked along its side and threatened to digest the entire structure. A string of gourd birdhouses dangled from a pole. A little girl clad in a flower print Sunday school dress paced the wooden porch in her bare feet, oblivious to the melody of the wind chime overhead and Ernest's nearing. Her eyes never met his; her attention was on her doll. Its large eyes fluttered noisily and its large bald head gave it an alien aspect. Dirt-tinged fingerprints smudged its color to a dull grey. Behind her, an older woman rocked gently in a chair.

"What'cha doing, Ms. Clark?"

"Sittin' around watching the hippercrits." Minnie Clark's wet black hair guarded a sunken face. Wizened arms, deceptively strong as many a whupping had taught him, waved him over. Her breasts hung like apples in the bottom of a gunny sack. A long gunny sack. "I need to get the grass cut before it starts raining."

"Ain't a cloud in the sky."

"It's gonna rain tomorrow and we got a church meeting tonight." Minnie let the last plume of smoke escape her lips as she studied him. "So what happened?"

"Me and Uncle Russell had gone fishing up at Bob's Creek."

"No school?"

"There's little point in going to school anymore, not for me." Ernest slouched, hands in his pockets. His shoe dug into the dirt and overturned a rock.

"Oh, I see."

"Anyway, we'd just settled down into our favorite spot and cast our lines when we noticed an odd stink."

"It always smells odd 'round these parts." Minnie sucked her teeth.

"Yeah, but this was like moldy game. So we got up to check it out. The odor got worse behind this bend in the creek where the water pools a little deeper. When we stooped down, this body bobbed up. Half of its head was chewed away. It was bloated and swollen, like a big leech with blood still oozing down its face..." his voice trailed for a moment while he squirreled together another reserve of composure. "It stared at us with its one good eye. I swear it looked like it was grinnin' at us."

"Who was it?"

"Don't know."

"Couldn't be from around here, then. What'd you do after that?"

"We ran. Twisted my ankle somethin' fierce. Didn't want to go straight home on it."

"And your uncle?"

"He went home."

"And you left the body? I wonder if we should call the sheriff."

"Yes ma'am...I mean, no ma'am."

"You know what I think? I think you and your daddy's fool brother got to playin' too rough, you hurt your ankle and your belly got to grumblin' and it was all the excuse you needed to stop here." Minnie stood up, revealing a picture of Jesus on her faded T-shirt, and tossed a cigarette butt into a thatch of dirt. "You boys and your fool notions. Look at you. Chest all puffed out without an idea of where to go. There is real darkness in the world we have to guard against. No sense conjurin' up some for no good reason. Come on inside."

The thick door clattered shut, the lock busted; not that it mattered: the home was long past caring if anyone robbed it. Swatches of paint, lacquer scabs of corrosion, flaked away. Patterned with a swirl of feathers, the curtains covered windows whose glass didn't quite fit. Minnie cast her eyes about for a place to sit, obviously self-conscious of how much stuff cluttered up her home. Plaster praying hands clasped toward the heavens beseeching an unseen God sat above the doorframe. Jugs of drinking water gathered in parade formation along the floor. Yellowed newspapers were stacked in the corner. Jars of preserves lined the shelves alongside oil lamps. A beautiful fanned-out turkey tail was mounted on the wall. She lit up another cigarette and sank into her couch, whose inner sponge burst through the threadbare material.

"You gonna call a doctor?" A flicker of fear underscored his thin, tremulous voice.

"You see a hospital around here? You doctor yourself or go without."

He winced when she grabbed his ankle. "It hurts."

"Have a shot of physic." Minnie poured a couple of tablespoons worth of a clear liquid from a Ball jar into a metal coffee cup.

He sniffed at the moonshine and offered a questioning raise of his eyebrow.

"It's either that or I hit you upside the head and tell you to hush up."

Ernest downed the liquid the same way he took cod liver oil: he pinched his nose and tossed it back to have as much of it as possible bypass his tongue. The liquor burned his throat, and an unbidden gasp gave way to a flood of coughs.

"That hit the spot." Tears welled in his eyes; his face flushed to a mild red.

"You taking to the mines tomorrow?"

"Yes, ma'am."

"Won't be your ankle ailin' you 'fore too long."

Minnie's father had died of died pneumonia when she was a young girl. Since then, she'd become a true root woman. Gesturing for Ernest to lie back and pull up his shirt, she lit a candle and placed it on his chest. He anxiously eyed the wax melt and pool, waiting for the molten liquid to land on his belly. She turned a glass over it and dimmed the flame. The sting of onion juice as she dripped it on him caused him to blink his eyes.

"You really are scared, boy," Minnie said.

"Just got a bad feeling is all."

"Some of us were born more sensitive than others. I know that I always trust my feelings. Sometimes they know things your head ain't quite ready to know. Iffen I had to guess, you just startin' to wake up to your calling, your true life, is all. These hills are all I know, but they bury secrets as well as anywhere else." After inspecting her handiwork, she patted him on his shoulder. "There, you all fixed up. Now you're ready to go home."

The sign for Bob's Creek teetered on a rusted metal arrow pointed toward a hollow gravel road that looked like the bottom of a creek bed. The town---more like a wide spot in the road---sat within a cradle of hills, the clouds poured along the tree line like smoke from the rest of the world erupting in flames. Bob's Creek was one of those places where people hid, though not especially well. A fox lay flattened in the middle of the road, its brains spilled into the pavement. Crows picked at the soft bits in his mouth. Ernest thought it a waste of some perfectly good stew meat.

Uncle Russell had been like another father to him. Had been out hunting with his brother, Ernest's father, Gene, up on Daggett's Ridge the day he met Momma. Though they weren't real quick with strangers, they took her in as part of the family. Apparently family didn't mean as much as it used to: Uncle Russell had moved in with Ernest's other uncle's wife in a trailer of their own further down the hill. Ernest picked up a stone and threw it at the trailer. The metallic thump sent him darting out of sight.

Ernest's dog, appropriately named Dog, stared with mild disinterest, not lifting its head. A skullcap of black fur matched a similar splotch on his back on an otherwise white body. Their home trailer was tucked into a corner of the dirt lot. The headboard from a twin bed leaned against it, as did a plastic reindeer with buckshot in its side. Firewood was piled at one end of it while wasp nests dangled from strings on the other end. A cross made out of preserved flowers sat on a rotted stump with the word "Grandpa" splayed beneath it. Ernest spat on it as he trundled past.

Rough and tumble and full of hope, his little brothers, much younger than he, played without a moment's care. John and Mark, named from books of the Bible, often left Ernest feeling like the odd apostle out. John wore only blue jeans, his feet buried in earth as he ran a fire truck into a mound of dirt. Mark, who'd left one side of his overalls unfastened and drooping off his shoulder, paused at the wooden steps and stared at an overturned truck.

Laundry---consisting of overalls and thick shirts---bowed the line from a tree to the trailer and shaded Gene Mayfield as he tinkered with his still. Other than the creases in his forehead, he had a smooth, jowly face. A cigarette was nestled behind his ear, though he hadn't smoked in over a decade. A reminder of who he used to be, it doubled as a constant test of himself. His left hand missed a thumb, though it wasn't immediately evident past his long fingers. He had been born in the house, delivered by a horse doctor, and had never been beyond the hills and proudly declared so.

"Got your chores done?"

"Yes, sir," the boys answered as a Greek chorus of innocence percolating mischief.

"We got no sorry people around these parts. We ain't goin' to fool with 'em." Poppa turned to Ernest. "What about you? You ready for tomorrow?"

"Yes, sir."

"I know you don't feel all good about this, son, but a man's got to do right by his kin. Muck is in your blood. Minin' was good enough for your grandpa, good enough for me, and good enough for you."

"I know, sir." The mine would one day kill him, as it had his grandfather and as it chewed away at his father.

"All right then." The words had an air of finality to them.

Not self-reflective by design or intent, Ernest he knew he wasn't destined for much. He didn't dream of becoming a doctor or lawyer. Not a president or astronaut. He knew his place and wasn't about trying to upset the natural order of things. A lesson hammered home by Grandpa, he knew he had to be about his family first. Maybe his kids would be good enough to go to school.

As if sensing commotion, Faye Mayfield came around from tending her garden out back and gave a gruff wave to the boys. They ducked into the kitchen only to bound out the door moments later eating ketchup sandwiches. Ernest sat on the porch, content to watch the boys play tin can alley. Faye leaned over him---her eyes, cold and grey, tired but strong, echoed a face fraught with worry---and placed a sympathetic hand on his shoulder.

"Where have you been?"

"Fishin' with Uncle Russell."

"That man never was much good, but he's kin." She offered him a sandwich, but he waved it off. "Only yesterday, you were swimming in the water hole. A chubby little thing, your britches pulled up."

"Momma, I'm fit to work and we need the money. It's a fine job. Good enough for Grandpa, good enough---"

"I know, I know." Ernest knew he didn't have to explain it to her, though he tried to hide the bitterness in his voice. "Momma, you ever get the feelin' like you...I don't know...just didn't fit right?"

"These are good men. They done real good by us."

"I know, but sometime I just feel called to somethin' else," he said, though his place was beneath the earth. Muck was in his blood.

"You should listen, then. At least hear yourself out."

Dog started to howl as if it talked to the dead.

Sleep eluded him, as it often did. His thoughts drifted down to a place of blackness, and like a line cast into a pond only to be pulled out again, his mind stirred in a fitful approximation of rest. A dark swirl of ideas and images passed for dreaming: a waking paralysis, a glimmer of grey floating above the deep waters of his thoughts.

The morning was already hot, the air thick with the promise of rain. Spun with his own momentum, an inexorable foreboding pulled Ernest into its spiral as he and his father pulled up on their mule and wagon. The mine at Bob's Creek was technically across the main road and up the hollow at Mary Helen. The previous mining company had quit its operations after carving out all of the easy coal. The men knew they were doing little better than scavenging now, but desperate times---and a desperate company that pressured its managers to not let any complaints or regulations irregularities climb any higher than plausible deniability allowed---called for desperate measures.

A two-room shed doubled as a washroom, consisting of a shower room and a dry room; street clothes and work clothes left to dry dangled from hooks above them, dozens of lynched bodies suspended from chain nooses. Mining belts, wool socks, gloves, steel-toed boots and headlamps with names emblazoned on the sides stocked the shelves. Only once Ernest had changed into his gear did the initial trepidation wear off enough for him to face the mine.

The high voltage cables and the roof bolts heavy with rock dusting made for a forbidding entryway. However, Ernest felt his fear a healthy one. Electricity, dust, gas, explosives, machinery accidents; there were a lot of ways to go. The shaker conveyer advanced the coal, a tongue lolling out of the mouth of the mine shaft. Thick black glasses hooked around the jutting ears of Dewey Elkins, his face black with soot except for his eyes and teeth. His face was a filigree of wrinkles and forlorn crags; black gaps winked along the bottom of his smile. A slug of brown spittle from his mouthful of chew stirred the cicadas. Next to him sat Kenny Jenkins, the lone Negro of the bunch, swapping sandwiches and exchanging jokes. Dewey remarked for all to hear that he "didn't trust a man who ain't a little black," obviously his favorite joke describing his friendship with Kenny. With his thick sideburns and easy smile, Kenny surveyed Ernest, then the men exchanged furtive glances.

"Don't worry, son," Gene reassured him. "Sometimes new folks make us a mite testy. When you're down in the mine, your life depends on the man next to you. So they need to know they can count on you. They'll come around to you."

"I guess." The men's cool reticence didn't bother Ernest. He wandered past the men as he strapped his gear back on.

"It's not so bad," Kenny said without facing him, as if talking to the cave walls. A massive individual, his broad white-toothed smiled dispelled any quiet menace about him.

"You get used to it?"

"I won't say that. But my family's gotten used to food on the table and jobs're scarce 'round these parts."

"I just wanted more."

"I know, kid." He walked toward the elevator. "The muck calls."

The mine was as small and decaying as the town itself. Ernest didn't intend to work there very long, though he feared that was what his father had told himself, and his father before him. With each step toward the shaft, hope drained from his life. Only the vaguest idea of a future smoldered in his young mind.

The elevator car creaked as it wobbled to life, a shuddering start as it lowered. For most of the morning, he wandered about near the mouth of the shaft, crouched within its four-feet-high confines, slowly acclimating himself to the low mine. Never straying toward the depths promised by the shaft, Ernest watched it descend. The steeply slanted roof prevented him from standing fully up. In a squat shuffle, the work, while not overly arduous, after years would take a toll. The tedium of their labors---no deviations from the daily rituals, no promise of higher opportunities---reduced, drained, and broke strong, vital men. Their good cheer masked dilapidated spirits, a resignation to their lot in life; meat puppets waiting to be ground by the company.

Momma packed the lunch and probably would have brought it down herself if women coming underground weren't considered bad luck. Bologna between slices of white bread protruded from a sandwich bag. He fished for the canteen of coffee from his metal lunch bucket to wash it down, hating the taste of each. Yet eating among the rest of his crew, each sharing similarly bland meals, made him feel like one of them.

"You scared, boy?" Dewey was a thick, no-nonsense man with hard eyes and silver stubble. Up close, his crooked yellow teeth---two uneven rows---were still stained with fresh brown spittle. Grey chest hair sprouted in tufts above the fall of his shirt. He spoke with a lethargic drawl.

"No." Ernest turned to Gene, who stared straight ahead and drank his coffee. He'd have to make his own way without Gene's help.

"I can smell it on you. Don't let no fear demons get in the way of doing a good job." Dewey was now the superintendent, but he regaled Ernest with tales of how he used to cut timber to hold up the ceilings, before the roof bolters, and dug up coal with a number four shovel for eighty cents a ton. He'd joined the United Mine Workers in 1948 for ten dollars and had carried the card with him ever since...reminding Ernest of his grandfather.

The thing about his grandfather was that Ernest had hated him and everything he stood for. His grandfather had been a breaker boy at age nine, breaking larger blocks of coal with a sledgehammer or picking rock or slate from coal as it left the mine. He'd graduated to a trapper, who closed and opened the doors to allow the coal cars to travel in and out of the mines---since the doors had to be closed to direct the airflow to the working face---still an unpaid apprentice in order to gain the experience. Ernest hated the way the old man had assumed he was just as simple-minded. A killer of dreams, drumming into him to aspire to nothing higher than mining.

He'd died of black lung. The mines had killed him. Ernest spat at his feet.

"You okay, son?" Dewey asked.

"All of the stories you heard and dreams you ever had are true."

Dewey held an odd frozen rictus of a smile on his face. "What about the nightmares?"

"Especially the nightmares."

"You're a very odd boy. Not at all what I expected from Gene's boy."

"I get that a lot."

Muck was in his blood.

The desolate mine shaft stood, a festering sore among the landscape. The machines continued to pound. The wind picked up and the rain scourged the mouth of the mine. The drill struck from above, boring deep beneath the folds of sifted earth to find where the coal seam ran. The agitation of his heart, the racing of his blood, the asthmatic seizing of his breath---Ernest attributed his state to his deprivation of decent sleep, not to the opening in the earth. A mouth locked open in an eternal scream only truly understood in the night. The elevator compartment closed in on them, the thick wire mesh clamping shut like a jaw. The compartment rattled to life and then lowered. Over seven hundred feet of granite stood between them and daylight. The elevator opened into an expansive chamber: a crude coring of rock and a patchwork of beams and braces. A series of tunnels, capillaries carrying the flow of coal, sprang from the main shaft. Occasionally rapping a sounding rod against roof to determine the safety of the shaft, Dewey, with the regular rhythm of a sonar ping, dug holes every twenty feet.

"He's digging test holes," Gene answered Ernest's unasked question. "If he got a trickle of water, we'd shut things down. Danger of tunnel collapse."

"It's like being buried alive. Like we're already dead." Ernest placed his palm to the stone wall. It thrummed with life.

"Miners expect death every day," Gene broke his reverie. "The air tastes sweeter. Your mother looks as good, or even better, every evenin' I make it home."

The darkness held a sumptuousness to it. The air smelled loamy and sweet. Ernest knew a sense of home within the craggy vestibule. Filth crusted under his fingernails. Dust mixed with sweat, formed a grey grime. He wiped his face, smearing himself in earthen war paint.

Ernest prepared to plunge his shovel into the ground, then suddenly froze. To the man, the miners stopped moving. They knew something had gone wrong before the sirens went off. The subtle shift of earth, the barest tremor, like exposed skin under a sudden cool breeze. The cavern shuddered, a cascade of stone and dirt followed by an explosion of dust. Earthen veins opened as a rocky tumult collapsed, leaving plumes of smoke.

"No!" someone cried, his voice distorted by the cacophony of stone.

Ernest huddled against the craggy rock; the song of a cave's silence exaggerated the noise of shadows. Every distant plink, every choking breath or stifled cry, every despondent moan, every shuffling, every shift of scree, landed in Ernest's ears with the force of exploding dynamite. Within the wan light of his headlamp, he stooped, cramped by the low ceiling, and he peered into the dark recesses, the sacred depths of the cavern. The feeder shaft was reduced to a bottled up earthen intestine. Many of the honeycombed passageways had collapsed. Twisted and corroded, the metal skeleton of the elevator crumpled under its own weight. Sparks jumped, ethereal will-o'-the-wisps, until the power finally shut off. Cut off from outside, the winds, cold and distant, and rain beating like the plaintive wail of a mother along a casket faded to a brittle memory.

Ernest's jaundiced lamp dulled to a burnt orange glow; the light withered before the towering shadows as the failing battery sputtered. The outcropping of rock formed small chambers, barely man-sized nooks, which cut off their freedom in degrees. A faint groan emanated from the pool of cloying darkness. Something sparkled in the faint reaches of his light. Ernest inched along the claustrophobic enclosure, the passage reduced to a slot as rock scraped him on either side.

"Poppa?"

"I'm all right." Sprawled under the rubble of rocks, Gene propped himself up on his elbows. Bruises the shape of rotted apples dotted his skin, his body battered in a mosaic of wounds. His helmet was slung at a peculiar angle, his eyes wide and lost. His breaths came in spastic, shallow bursts.

"Can you move?"

"Yeah."

"What happened?" Ernest hooked him under his shoulder and helped him up. Suddenly the man he called "Poppa" seemed very small.

"Top was bad."

"But it had been inspected."

"My ass 'it had been inspected.' The company's gonna have the rock fall cleaned up before the inspectors ever get here. But they'll pay for this. It's our way. Someone does harm to kin, even if it takes years, blood is avenged. 'Blood for blood.' "

"'Life for life.'"

"It's all about kin. Come on, let's keep moving. The mine's no place to leave your ghost."

"I think I heard someone this way."

"It's all right to admit you're scared, son."

"I'm not."

The image of dust in the lone lamp beam added to his mounting dread, each breath becoming more and more of a struggle. He flashed his light about the cavern, scourging the shadows, then paused to listen and gain his bearings; each tunnel was identical to the last. The writhing darkness scattered the frail light of his beam.

"Who's that?"

"That you, Dewey?"

"Gene?"

"Yeah. Me and the boy."

His face an ashen lump, Dewey was an echo of the man Ernest knew, frozen in terror with the dawning realization he was dying alone and in the dark etched in his eyes. The rocks had collapsed onto his waist and pinned him. His breath came in hitching gulps.

"My rheumatism seems to be actin' up."

"That might be the rocks on top of you," Gene said. They both forced a chuckle.

"I sure could use me a cigarette."

"I hear these things are bad for your health." His hands trembling, Gene put a cigarette in his mouth, though he wouldn't light it even if he could for fear of another explosion. The taste of the tobacco in his mouth seemed to be enough.

"Tell my girl---"

"Tell her yourself."

A knot rustled in Dewey's throat. His chest stopped moving. Ernest brushed against the sandpaper scrape of his face and closed the man's eyes.

A wail over the unsteady pounding of his heart broke the viscous silence. Ernest swallowed hard at the hollow howl of grief and abandoned hope. The endless darkness undid the men who lay trapped and dying in the dark. The scent of gunpowder charged the air. With a nod, he led Gene toward the sound. Despite the hunch of his posture, he found a foothold and inched his body forward. His fingers dug along the unforgiving rock walls. Scarred rock. His fingers scraped across the stone, studying the braille of the crevice. Runes, primitive calligraphy etched into the walls, each crevice a sarcophagus of stone. The passageway canted upward into an unfolding network. The black dust of coal reduced them to walking silhouettes.

Ernest stopped abruptly. Gene trundled past, not noticing the niche in the cave wall, then sidled up alongside him. Rats, finely arranged in a crude geometry. Their bellies gnawed through, their furry bodies in varying states of decay. The state of deformity pregnant with meaning. The sense of otherliness, of transition, brought to fullness upon entering the caves. The susurrous, indefinable noises brought a measure of comfort.

"Poppa, somethin' bad happened," Ernest whispered, overwhelmed by the reverence demanded by the room.

"I know, but we'll get out, you'll see. I bet the rest of the men are already halfway through to digging us out." Gene's arm dangled at his side.

"No, not this. To Uncle Russell." Ernest spoke with a grave sincerity.

"What happened?"

"We were fishin'. Sittin' there like we always did, feet dipped into the water, lines cast out. Not expectin' to catch anything---we never did---it was just our excuse to be out in the air. In the light."

"Go on."

"Poppa, it was like a fox raised with hens. They might play nice at first, but eventually the fox will remember it was a fox, and the hens weren't its playmates, but its prey. One moment we're sittin' there laughin'; the next, he suddenly looks like...food."

"What did you do, boy?" Poppa grew even smaller in bearing. Pale, thin, and soft.

"I didn't do nothin'. All of a sudden, his fishing line got tight. We stared at each other, stunned that we caught anythin'. He grabbed his rod with both hands, screamin' about what a fighter it was. Maybe a ten pound catfish. A shadow crept across the water. Next thing I know, somethin' yanked Russell into the water. He fought. Water splashed everywhere, a churn of pink bubbles, and then it stilled. The thing in the water...all I remembered were its eyes. Cold and grey. And I ran."

"You did what you had to. You're still a boy. My boy. You were afraid."

"Except I wasn't afraid. I know those eyes. They felt familiar. That day you and Russell went huntin', the day you met Momma, had you killed anythin'?"

Ernest raked his fingers across his father's throat. Gene clutched at the sputtering gurgle his neck had become. His eyes bulged with an almost alien aspect. Ernest twisted his Poppa's head until he heard a sound that reminded him of the cracking of ice along the creek. He stood, transfixed at the sight of the broken form of his father. Intruding on his small, child-like world, a familiar thrum of a dim voice called across the darkness to Ernest.

Exhausted, running on the fumes of adrenaline, Ernest's head ached. Gene's body dragging behind him, he tromped through a puddle and skidded, re-twisting his ankle. His blood sludged through his veins. Cold and numb, he no longer felt his foot within his boot. Having grown up on a farm, Ernest knew well the smell of an abattoir. He entered a new chamber. An initial wave of panic surged in him at the horror of wounds. The bodies of the men were indistinguishable in the dark. Claw marks within torn flesh. Bodies half stripped, slabs of beef presented as offering. An assembly line of flesh, fit for little more than stew meat and bones for dogs to grind up.

A wet slithering echoed from behind him, dragging itself toward him. The shadows coalesced into a malformed image. Indistinct, ruined features. A head lolled to the side, its neck too thin to support its weight. An aperture of some sort, not quite a proboscis, but more like a sucker in the center of what passed for its face. The affect of a snail, scraping along the wall of the dead, the hole in its face opening and closing. The rest of its body swollen, a shapeless mass pulled along by its awkward gait. In the bleak light, it produced a slobbering noise as it slithered more than crawled.

Instinct overtook Ernest; he piled the bodies of the dead about him. An arm draped across him. His skin ached where their cold flesh touched his. Their blood soaked into his clothes. He interlocked his legs with his father's and lay awkward and stiff, a disjointed crook to his neck, within a chrysalis of corpses. His eyes wide open, he waited for the creature to pass, though he knew there were more where it came from.

"Momma?"

The creature let loose a sputtering mewl. He knew two smaller creatures would one day crawl toward them and join in the chorus. Its lonely, pathetic cries reminded of the stirrings in his own heart. Unnamable. Unknowable. The call of home.

Ernest joined in its strange song.

Minnie rocked back and forth in her chair. Her fingers combed through the soft curls of her little girl's hair. One day she would know the call of the caves, the secret of the hills. Her mind was gripped by dreams not her own, lost in the swirl of grey fog. For the longest time she stared across the hollow they called home. With their cold and grey eyes.

"Spirit Fire"

Robby Sparks

Originally from the beautiful hills of Southeastern Kentucky where his father worked as a coal miner in Harlan County, Robby now resides in the Sunshine State. An electrical engineer by day, he moonlights as a writer and filmmaker by night. His short fiction has appeared in Apex Digest and the Harvest Hill anthology, available by Graveside Tales. His films, produced under Sour Orange Productions, have been shown at various festivals, including a VIP screening at the Melbourne Independent Filmmakers Festival. Robby would like to express his thanks to Misty, his wife, for her aid in his creative endeavors. You can contact Robby and catch his occasional ramblings at robbysparks.blogspot.com.

PJ was exhausted. Even as the mantrip rolled through the mine, jerking and jostling along the iron tracks, its diesel engine clacking like the barrels of a Gatlin gun, he could hardly keep himself awake. He had just finished a ten-hour shift in a section that stood four feet at its highest point. Drained, he lay back, squeezed between the shoulders of two other men. In his lap, along with a lunch box and battery pack, sat a strange and peculiar relic.

Another mile of darkness passed before the boxy railcar shimmied out from the Kentucky mountainside. It squealed to a halt in the middle of a wide clearing, surrounded by a plethora of oaks and pines. Everywhere, heavy machinery lumbered about. Scooping coal. Hauling coal. Dumping coal. Pushing coal. All to the backdrop of the rolling green hills of Appalachia. Harlan County.

As PJ rose out of the transport, his joints popped. His back ached from having to hunch all day, while the cracking of his knees sounded like the seal breaking on a new bottle of Jim Beam. He wished he had some Jim right now. He usually poured a little into his thermos before he left for work, but this morning he had forgotten. His mind had been too clouded from all the drinking the night before, and probably the night before that, too. He wasn't sure. His mind was always clouded these days.

Walking toward the parking area, PJ noticed five miners approaching from the supply shed. Filthy and soiled, they looked as if they'd been rolling with swine.

"Wha'chya got thar, PJ?" one of the men called out. It was Randy Hoskins, or "Slick," as some of the other guys called him. The nickname was etched out with reflective tape across his hard hat. "Di'ja hyer me, ol' timer? I said wha'chya got."

PJ glanced down at the object dangling from his calloused hand--an old lantern of sorts that he had found while digging. It resembled the ones used in mining years before, but with unusual wire coils wrapped around its stained red glass and foreign markings carved upon its base.

"None of yer damn business what I got," PJ snapped.

Slick grinned, a wad of tobacco pooching his bottom lip out like a tumor. "Cum'on. Y'gonna let yer ol' buddy Slick see wha'chya got, ain'chya?"

Before PJ could reply, the big-bellied man snatched the lantern and started studying the item with a distasteful scowl.

"Looks like a stupid antique to me," he huffed. "Kinda like you, huh, PJ? A worthless, good fer nuthin' antique." And he laughed. His buddies--Flea, Beanpole, Tennessee, and Hawk--all joined in, their white teeth gleaming like pearls against their blackened cheeks.

"Give it back!" PJ fumed, reaching for the lantern.

Slick held the relic away. "Whoa, now. I'm still lookin' at it."

PJ persisted. "Give it back, I said!"

"What fer? It ain't no count."

"Cause it's mine! Now give it!"

Slick puffed out his chest, inflating his body like a blowfish. "Why don'chew make me? Cum'on. I know y'wont to."

There was no denying, PJ did want to, for Slick had been tormenting him for years--from stealing his tools to sabotaging his battery pack to carving obscenities into what good paint was left on his truck. Once, Slick had replaced the contents of PJ's lunchbox with dog feces, though he never owned up to it. PJ knew he had done it. No one else would have had the nerve. At this point, PJ had just about all he could take from the arrogant, two-bit slob, and the open invitation to give him a good ass-whipping was one he was willing to take.

"Don't say y'didn' ask fer it!" he said, clenching his fists. But as he cocked his arm to swing, the muscles in his lower back froze, seizing him with a horrible spasm. PJ grabbed his side. Cramped in pain, he stumbled awkwardly and, without even throwing a punch, fell face-first into the dirt.

Slick doubled over, wheezing from laughter. Meanwhile, PJ coughed up the dust he had swallowed.

"Wha'sa matter?" Slick jeered. "Y'got the black lung? Maybe y'should retar."

Flea squeaked in, "He cain't retar, Slick. He's gotta have money to buy his liquor."

"And pay that alimony," piped Tennessee. "I hyer it's a doozy."

"But di'ja hyer the latest?" said Hawk, hovering behind the other men. "His ex-wife's been datin' that preacher over on Big Creek."

The miners produced a succession of hoots, hollers, and whistles. One shouted, "Amen!"

"I bet I know wer all that alimony's goin'," Beanpole said.

"In the offering plate?"

"Nuh-uh," grinned Slick. "Probably towards a new wedding dress." His fat belly rolled as he laughed. "In fact, I bet her and that preacher are smoochin' right now."

With puckered lips, the other men started making kissing sounds.

PJ wobbled to his feet. "Yuns shut up! Just shut up! Yuns don't know nothin'! Y'hyer me! Nothin'!"

Unfazed, the miners kept taunting, even as PJ stewed on the verge of tears. He'd loved Arlene. He still did. But his drinking had caused complications, especially with her being a devout Pentacostal.

"It's purty bad when ya woman trades y'in fer a preacher," Slick gibed. "Purty bad."

Satisfied with getting PJ riled, the large man relinquished his hold on the lantern, tossing it harshly onto the ground. "Hyer's yer stupid antique," he said. But then, adding injury to insult, he sloshed his jaws about and squirted a glob of tobacco juice that dinged the lantern's chimney.

"Bullseye!" yelped one of the cronies.

As the gang proudly sauntered away, PJ picked up the lamp and wiped off the brown spit. Between adrenaline and nerves, his body quivered. Slowly, he hobbled to the parking lot and pitched his gear onto the bench seat of his battered truck. He then sat down on the torn vinyl, glowering through bloodshot eyes as the other men drove away.

"Yuns're gonna git it," he growled, wringing the contours of his faded steering wheel. "I swar, by all that's in me, thar'll be a reckonin'!"

"Dispatch to SO4," the radio crackled.

Boo Jenkins took another bite of his burger.

"See," he mumbled to the officer sitting on the stool beside him. "This happens every time I try to eat."

The deputy chuckled in agreement.

The radio squawked again. "Repeat, dispatch to SO4. You copy?"

Boo plopped the sandwich down and squeezed the transceiver clipped onto the shoulder strap of his shirt. "SO4 to dispatch. Go ahead."

"SO4, are you 10-6?" Was he busy?

Boo looked down at his plate. "You could say that. I'm Signal 5," which meant he was eating. Everything over the police radio was one big code.

"When you're finished, can you respond to a disturbance down on Couch's Branch? Second house from the mouth of the holler. Neighbors say thar's a party going on. Complaining about the noise."

Boo rolled his eyes. He'd just been out there for the same thing the week before. Ended up arresting two men for possession of marijuana. Another for meth. Probably have to take somebody in this time, too. "On my way in fifteen."

"Copy that," replied dispatch, and the radio went silent.

Boo fumbled again with his burger, repacking a pickle that had fallen loose from the fold. "Anyway, like I was saying, I saw some strange stuff during Desert Storm."

"Like what?" asked the deputy, chomping on his own food.

"Like this one night, our squad ran into a group of Iraqi Republican Guard; this was right after they lit up all those oil fields, too. Anyway, as we sneaked up on 'em, we realized they were all sitting around a fire from an uncapped oil well, doing some sort of séance or something."

"That's weird."

"You ain't heard the half of it. Just as we were closing in, one of the guards steps into the fire. I mean, he walks right on in and stands there, like it's nothing! Then the rest of 'em get up real slow, like they're in a trance, and start shooting at each other. At each other! Some even shot themselves! It was mass chaos, like the whole bunch went off their rockers. But the strangest thing...the strangest thing was their shadows."

"Wha'dya mean?"

"Well, they didn't look human, s'all I can say. They looked evil. Like the guards were possessed or something. I'd never seen anything like it. I thought it might've been a trick of the light at first, y'know, with all the oil fields burning behind us, but the other guys in the unit said they saw it, too. It freaked me out. It freaked us all out."

The deputy had stopped eating, fascinated by the account. "So wha'chuns do?"

"We high-tailed it outta there, that's what," Boo answered. "People, we can handle. Demons and Alibaba-type stuff...nothin's gonna help with that, no matter how big'a gun y'got."

"Who's Alibaba?"

"You know...the Forty Thieves?"

"Phfft!" the deputy scoffed, squaring his shoulders and squinting coyly. "Sounds to me like Alibaba lacked proper law enforcement. Too bad he didn't have you and me around to straighten thangs out."

Amused, Boo shook his head, stuffing the last bit of burger into his mouth.

"Yeah, too bad." He swallowed. "He would've never kept us fed."

Swiping his hat off the counter, Boo strolled out of Pat's Diner and, a moment later, was cruising down US-421, past the flood walls of Harlan.

PJ drove fast around the winding mountain road, hanging curves recklessly and skimming the guard rails. He was angry, embarrassed, and nearly in convulsions from going all day without a drink.

Screeching up to his two-tone, single-wide trailer, he cursed. "Dammit! Not again!"

In front of his home and all down the dirt road beside it was a line of cars. Next door, people were gathered on the front porch, drinking and laughing and smoking.

Sliding out of his truck, PJ stared down the carousers. "Cain'chya give it a rest!" he yelled, his voice echoing off the surrounding hillsides.

As usual, the people on the porch ignored him.

PJ stomped around to the back of his trailer, kicking loose a piece of aluminum underpinning as he went. A party was the last thing he needed to deal with. Especially after putting up with Slick. But it wasn't the drinking that bothered him. Lord, no. If anything, drinking was good. And it wasn't the smoking. Nor the smell of marijuana burning. What grated on his nerves more than anything, driving him absolutely mad to the edge of insanity, was the never-ending, bone-rattling bass of their music. The obnoxious racket wasn't playing at the moment, but he knew it would start up again. It always did.

PJ entered the back door of the trailer and shoved his stuff onto a kitchen table already cluttered with empty beer cans, half-eaten frozen dinners, and empty Styrofoam take-out trays. Before he did anything else, he reached into the cabinet and pulled out a pint of whiskey.

He'd barely gotten a drink down before the music began.

"Dadgumit!" he roared and started pacing the floor, swigging the whiskey as he went. He drank and walked and drank and walked--over and over across the same worn path in the linoleum that stretched from the back door of the trailer, through the kitchen, and into the living room where the carpet began.

Thump, thump-thump, thump.

The windows rattled and the doors shook.

Thump, thump-thump, thump, thump.

PJ's stomach twisted into knots.

He tried everything to drown out the annoyance. He turned up the volume on the television, played his own stereo, and even crammed toilet paper into his ears. But the music could not be quelled. So he drank. And the more PJ drank and the more he walked past the old Polaroid of Arlene on the refrigerator door--the one he had taken of her at Cumberland Falls, sitting there in her long blue jean skirt and plain white T-shirt--the more agitated he became.

A second bottle of Jim cracked open.

Pacing by the kitchen table for the umpteenth time, PJ noticed the lantern he had brought home. "What'r you lookin' at?" he shouted. The lamp didn't respond -- he hadn't expected it to, but somehow it seemed to call to him all the same. Beckoning for his attention. Drawing him closer with an unseen power. And for a moment the music seemed to fade into the background, replaced by an ominously growing wall of silence. Pulsating. Buzzing. Whomping in his head. Before PJ realized what he was doing, he was sitting at the table, brushing the black dust off the intricately carved lantern, wiping clean its blood-colored globe. Jiggling the lamp, he could hear fuel sloshing inside and wondered if it could still be lit. One way to find out. He raised the glass and struck his lighter, holding it steady against the crusty, dry-rotted wick. A moment later, the flame took hold and a dark plume of smoke pillared toward the ceiling. A red aura illuminated the room, glowing against the wood paneling, reflecting off the mirrored sconces that Arlene had bought back when life had been better. Sweeter.

PJ sat, staring into the light, inhaling the fumes. The aroma was strange, yet intoxicating. His mind cleared. Peace overwhelmed him. Clarity. Then a sense of power. Slowly at first. He felt it in his joints. His back became strong again. Young. A new energy burned within him. His senses heightened. His eyes came alert. He could smell everything in the room. The leftovers. The lingering scent of Arlene's perfume. Arlene. He also felt his spirit rising. Soaring. Awakening in rebirth. And, for once in his life, he felt as if he were in complete control of everything around him.

Then the silence snapped. The music from the party suddenly blared into his ears, exceedingly louder than before.

THUMP! THUMP! THUMP!

PJ jumped back, knocking the whiskey off the table while throwing the chair to the floor.

THUMP! THUMP! THUMP!

The bass pounded his eardrums like a sledgehammer, and he clasped his hands over his head. Pain wrought his face as he opened the back door, exposing himself to the cool night air.

"Shut up! Shut up, y'stupid potheads!" he shouted.

The music reverberated inside his skull.

"Dammit! Argh! STOP! I wish to God you'd stop!" He squeezed his head, weeping uncontrollably. "I wish to God you'd all just roll over and DIE!"

"I don't know about the God part." A silky voice sliced through the black smoke. It whispered gently. Soothingly. Calmly into PJ's mind. "But the dying, I can certainly arrange."

Boo pulled up to the house at Couch's Branch just as a man tore through the swinging screen door and leapt off the porch. His fingers were clasped about his neck as if he were asphyxiated, his eyes bulging from their sockets. Others were already in the yard, doing the same. They flailed about, wailing and screaming. Blood flowed from their mouths, eyes, and ears. Finally, as they each let out one last agonizing shriek, their pupils exploded, sizzling with bursts of flame. Then their bodies flopped to the ground.

Frozen, Boo sat in his cruiser with a hand on the hilt of his gun, watching in complete and utter horror.

PJ laughed as the last person scrambled out of the house, screaming in pain.

"Take that, y'buncha potheads!"

Then he turned to the smoke, which had oddly begun to take a form -- arms, head, two orbitals blazing with fire.

Curiously, though, PJ did not feel surprised or afraid.

"Who'r you?" he asked, his ears, once again, filled with the ominous silence.

"Power," a voice said. Smoky tentacles extended out from the form, encircling PJ's head. "Wealth." They explored his ambitions, searched his thoughts, probed his dreams. "Anything your heart desires."

As dark wisps curled into PJ's ears, his face lit with an evil grin. A wicked sheen glistened in his eyes. "Anythang, huh?"

"Yes," the voice whispered again. Softly. Lullingly. Prickling his neck like the breath from a red-hot lover. "Anything."

PJ chuckled. And his laughter grew until he was bursting out like a crazed maniac, cackling at the top of his lungs.

The next day at Pat's Diner, Boo sat in his usual seat. Dark circles shaded the skin around his puffy red eyes, while deep wrinkles creased his brow. It seemed he'd aged ten years overnight. Having worked the grisly crime scene, he had not been able to sleep--if, in fact, what had happened was a crime. Boo really couldn't say. All he knew was that a lot of people had died in the same strange and horrible fashion, and that the ground had been saturated with their blood.

His face was still pale from disgust.

"Howdy thar, Boo. Burger today? Grits?" the waitress asked.

Boo almost hurled at the thought. "No thanks. Just coffee, please."

Except for a few rowdy guys in the back of the restaurant, the patrons were generally quiet, their mood somber. Word was getting around town fast of the incident at Couch's Branch, no matter how well the local law enforcement tried to keep it under wraps. Too many people owned police scanners, and too many people knew the police codes.

Boo thumbed through some information he had printed out from the Internet. He had researched various drugs and their side effects during the early morning hours at the station. If anything, he figured the deaths were caused by an experimental new drug gone wrong. Or, at least, that's what he hoped. So far, there was no account of anything that would explain the tragedy he had witnessed.

The officer from the day before sat down next to him.

"Dang it, man. Y'look like crap."

Boo sipped some coffee. "I feel like crap."

"So tell me...what happened out thar last night?"

Boo shook his head. "Weird stuff, man. Scary stuff."

"Like Alibaba?"

"Worse."

"Do y'thank it was drugs?"

Boo took another sip from his cup. "Not sure. I'm doing some research, but ain't found a thing yet."

The deputy took off his hat, then glanced around to see if anyone was listening. "Well, get this...I was talkin' to ol' man Sizemore this morning. Y'know him, right?"

Boo had to think a moment. He had seen Sizemore only twice in his life. As he recalled, he was a scraggly, bearded backwoodsman in coveralls who looked as if he needed a bath. Smelled like it, too.

"Isn't he that ol' coot that lives up on the mountain?"

"Yeah, that's him. Apparently he'd heard about what happened last night. Turns out, his dad was half Indian, y'know...passed down all these tales of thangs dating way back before Daniel Boone even came to these parts, when Indians were the only ones around. Anyway, he was saying thar was this pipe the Indians found--a spirit pipe, they called it--that supposedly gave 'em the ability to channel spirits or demons...some hogwash like that. Anyway, he told me the Indians forbid the use of it. Said the ones who had smoked it ended up being possessed by the very spirits they conjured, losing their minds and dying from unnatural causes. 'Death by fire,' he called it."

Faintly, someone started coughing in the background as if he or she had inhaled smoke.

Boo pondered the tale. He thought about the people the night before, flailing about, and how he could have sworn their eyes had exploded in flame. "So you think the people last night might have gotten a'hold of a spirit pipe...or maybe the drug that was used in one?"

The coughing grew louder. Stronger.

"I wouldn't put it past 'em. They were always smoking something at that place," the deputy said, playing with a pack of Sweet N'Low. "And it sounds just weird enough that it might be true, even if it is a bunch of Indian voodoo."

Boo thought a moment. "Voodoo's more like a Caribbean thing, isn't it?"

The deputy shrugged. "Voodoo...hoodoo...it's all the same, if y'ask me. Even that Alibaba stuff. 'Same thang, different name'--that's what my granny used to say. Like 'potato' and 'tater.' Speaking of which," the deputy motioned to the waitress, "I thank it's time fer some fries."

But the waitress wasn't looking. Like most others in the diner, she had been distracted by the coughing, which had now escalated into deep, blustering blows, coming to a head as a man at the corner table, sitting with four other guys, staggered to his feet, whooping hard while clutching his chest. He took a few steps forward before collapsing onto the floor, trembling in an apparent seizure. Boo immediately sprang from his stool. Rushing across the diner, he slid by the large man's side and tried to hold him steady--as did the deputy--but the convulsions were too strong. The man continued to shake harder, more violently than anyone Boo had ever seen. Then, to everyone's surprise, a filthy ooze began to seep from the man's mouth, bubbling from his nostrils like dirty black suds. Boo and the deputy stepped back. They heard a loud crack. Blood splattered all over the floor, and the man's chest burst open wide.

Some people gasped. The waitress screamed.

Meanwhile, from the rupture of bone and flesh, two dark slug-looking creatures slithered out. They snaked across the floor, a streak of crimson blood trailing behind.

"Good Lord! I-i-i-is that his lungs?" The deputy gaped.

Boo didn't know what to say. The creatures indeed appeared to be the man's lungs--dark, decrepit, black with decay. The organs swelled up and down, as if they were exchanging air, as if they were still working inside the man's chest.

The four guys who had been sitting with the victim were aghast.

"W-w-what happened to Slick?" one of them asked.

Boo didn't know how to respond to that either. He didn't know about anything anymore.

Suddenly, the man who had asked the question began scratching. "What the..." He dug at his neck, chest, and legs--clawing himself hysterically with his nails. "Sum'ns eatin' me up!" he cried.

Everyone watched as what started out as small specks on the man's skin multiplied into a horde of moving black dots that appeared to be thousands, if not millions, of...

"Fleas!" The man fell backward, knocking over a table and screaming on the floor. "They're killin' me! Make 'em stop! Please! Nooo!"

His friend, the one called Beanpole, frantically searched about. "Hold on, Flea! I'll find sum'n to git'em with. I'll find sum'n--" But abruptly his words and actions were cut short as a succession of vines shot up from the floor, wrapping themselves around the man's body until he was completely encased in a cocoon of green.

As for the other two--the one called Tennessee had already started gagging, unable to breathe as his skin turned a bright orange, while Hawk had sprouted feathers and was hopping about, flapping his arms as he cawed for help.

"This whole place has gone mad!" one person exclaimed.

"It's the end times!" an old man shouted.

Meanwhile, out of the corner of his eye, Boo happened to see someone standing outside the diner's main window, peering through. Laughing. Leering.

"Isn't that PJ Smith?" he asked.

His fellow deputy glanced up, still awe-stricken by the weirdness around him. "Huh...y-yeah, that's him." Then he added. "Don't he live by that house where all those deaths happened last night?"

Boo hadn't realized it before but, oddly and suspiciously enough, it was true.

"He sure does."

PJ continued to gaze through the window, pumping his fist with glee while watching the turmoil inside. His face beamed with a sinister glow. Behind him hung a dark cloud that seemed to originate from a lantern connected to his belt. The form resembled a person's shadow, except for something peculiar. Strange. Then Boo's heart stopped. He couldn't believe it. The shadow was the same as the ones he had seen in the desert, when the guards had shot themselves, when they had all looked possessed.

PJ twisted his lips into an evil grin, reveling at the chaos for a moment longer. Then he jerked away from the glass and disappeared.

Boo gathered his nerves. "Stay here," he ordered, stepping around the two black slugs that had now sprouted teeth and were gnawing on the dead man from which they had been spawned.

"Wait a minute!" the deputy implored. "You cain't leave me with these thangs! What am I supposed to do?"

"Call for backup!"

"What'r they gonna do?"

Boo was already out the door.

Sprinting into the parking lot, he caught a glimpse of PJ's truck spinning away and rushed to his cruiser to pursue.

45...55...60 miles per hour.

PJ's truck moved faster ahead.

85...95...100.

Boo's car struggled to make the curves, yet the dented old pickup in front of him, which appeared to be one rust hole away from the junkyard, rounded them with ease, pulling away at even more improbable speeds as if powered by an unseen source. As if goaded by Satan himself.

Finally, Boo was forced to slow down, easing up on the accelerator as PJ's truck careened out of sight. He kept driving nonetheless, hoping that he might miraculously catch up with the vehicle or, at least, stumble upon some clue as to where it had gone.

The decision paid off.

After several miles, he saw the truck parked at a holiness church on the outskirts of Big Creek.

Pulling up beside the church, Boo got out of the car and slipped into the small vestibule just inside the front door. He could already hear PJ yelling inside, ranting uncontrollably.

"Wha'chew doin' with this hyer preacher, Arlene?"

Boo peeped around the corner.

"Wha'dya mean?" a woman at the front of the church asked. She wore a floral dress, her dark hair draped down her back.

"Y'heard me! Wha'chew doin' with this preacher? This hypocrite!"

Behind the wooden pulpit cowered a thin man wearing a grey suit and paisley tie. No other people were in the building.

The woman answered, "I've been praying," and she motioned to the man. "We've been praying."

"LIAR!" PJ shouted. "I know what yuns been doin'!" He paced back and forth, the lantern still dangling by his side. The shadow, barely visible, still loomed behind him.

"I've been praying," Arlene repeated.

PJ stomped. "Prayin' fer what! Huh? Fer love! Fer money! My money!" Veins throbbed in his neck. Rage burned through his gaze. "I gave you ever'thang, Arlene! Ever'thang y'ever wanted! And y'left me! Y'left me fer him!"

Normally, Boo would have stepped in at this point, but he didn't quite know what he was dealing with yet. All he could think about was what had happened out at Couch's Branch last night. And at the diner a few moments ago.

Arlene's voice broke in. "You've been drinking again, PJ. Why don'chew just go home. Go home and sleep it off."

PJ smashed a vase filled with artificial flowers, then took the offering plates and slammed them onto the floor. "I don't need to sleep it off! What I need to know is why I was never good enough fer you. Won'chew tell me that! Huh? Was I a bad man?" he mocked. "Was I a sinner?"

The woman looked frightened, yet held her composure rather well. "No, you're not a bad man. You just had issues that made you hard to live with."

"Fer better or worse, Arlene. What happened to that?" PJ steamed.

The woman shook her head. Tears streamed down her cheeks. "I loved you, PJ. But we're not together anymore. Don'chew understand? We're just not. And we cain't ever be. Not with you like this."

The words cut him deeply; PJ said nothing. All that could be heard was his breathing, which grew louder and stronger as anger boiled inside him, filling his mouth with a taste bitter as bile. The shadow behind him fed on the rage, growing proportionally in size. Finally, PJ released his fury on the man behind the pulpit. "It's all yer fault, Preacher!"

"No! No, it's not, Brother," the preacher said.

PJ roared. "Don't start brotherin' me! It's all yer fault, and y'know it! You and yer damn snake church!"

The preacher looked confused. "But this ain't no snake church."

PJ sneered. Lifting his hands, he brought the lantern over his head and laughed. "Well, it is now."

Suddenly, the earth started to quake. In the vestibule, Boo stumbled backward, grabbing the doorway for support. Throughout the old church, floorboards rippled. Pews upended and flipped. Chunks of the ceiling crumbled. Then, from the center of the sanctuary, the ground cracked open. Flames licked up through the fissure as out from the fiery hole burst a copperhead snake, forty feet long and as round as a car tire. Venom dripped from its curved fangs; its forked tongue flapped viciously with each hiss.

Arlene screamed. The preacher ducked behind the pulpit and began reciting the twenty-third Psalm.

PJ stood in the front of the church with outstretched arms. Gleaming. Basking in the power to command nature and creation at will. A fire rose up from the floor to surround him. Flames danced in his eyes.

Boo took particular notice of the strange lantern, its scarlet glow throbbing like the beat of a heart. The thin stream of smoke that billowed out from the artifact wrapped about PJ's head, flowed through his hair and around his ears, and eventually curled back to form the tail of the demonic shadow--now a gargantuan entity hovering over PJ like a puppeteer over a marionette.

The preacher spoke louder, trembling with a semblance of spiritual authority. "Yea, though, I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I shall fear no evil..."

PJ cackled. "Welcome to my valley!" His voice was different. Colder. Then it morphed to sound like a legion of demons squealing from Hell. "Welcome to your DOOM!"

With those words, the snake struck out, sinking its fangs into the pulpit and splintering the wood into a thousand pieces.

The preacher was thrown back against the wall. Arlene scampered beneath an overturned pew.

From the vestibule, Boo took a deep breath. To protect, honor, and serve. He repeated the oath in his head, trying to figure out where giant snakes and the forces of darkness fit in. The last time he had faced such evil, he and his fellow soldiers had rightfully retreated. This time, however, two innocent lives were at stake. And a peaceful community. Possibly the fate of Harlan, itself.

Boo had to do something. He couldn't simply stand by and watch any longer.

"Stop!" he shouted, running out with his gun raised high. He let out a flurry of shots that riddled the snake in the back of the head. The creature flinched only slightly, as if rapped by a handful of pebbles, then whipped about, peering at its assailant through slitted yellow eyes. In an instant, it snapped forward, coiling around Boo and leaving him immobilized from the chest down. With his arm still free, however, he continued firing into the reptile, but to no avail. The weapon was useless.

The snake constricted tighter, and Boo could feel the life being squeezed out of him. He couldn't breath. Everything around him started to fade, consciousness slipping away. In desperation, he pointed the gun toward PJ.

"Shoot me!" PJ dared, the flames around him lifting higher, enveloping his body but leaving him eerily unscathed. The dark form overhead swelled with delight.

PJ cried out again, "Go ahead and shoot! I am invincible! I am a GOD!"

Boo flashed back to that night in the desert. The guard walking into the fire. The others shooting themselves. Bullets flying. Oil fields burning.

Other memories followed. Children crying over dead mothers. Bodies singed beyond recognition. Death. Destruction. The face of war. The face of the shadow.

"You're no god," Boo wheezed. Then he pulled the trigger.

The bullet sailed just shy of PJ, barely catching the threads of his shirt. Instead, it ripped into the base of the lantern, causing an explosion that shook the foundations of the church. The dark shadow wavered. Furiously, it clamored about, looking for a way to maintain its existence, but with its source of fuel destroyed, it quickly dissolved into nothingness. The giant snake that held Boo vanished, as well.

Around PJ, however, the wall of fire began to spin. A hole opened up under his feet, forming a whirlpool of brimstone that sucked him downward.

Death by fire, the old Indian legend had said.

PJ called out as he clung to the edge of the swirling abyss. His voice sounded normal again. Gentle. "I'm sorry, Arlene. I'm sorry fer ever'thang. I always loved you. I never meant to hurt you. I never meant to hurt nobody."

And in a poof of flame, the hole was gone. PJ, too.

The next day, a fresh breeze blew through the Appalachian valley. At the diner, Boo sat in his usual seat, a bandage stretched over his left brow, the deputy perched on the stool beside him.

"So," the deputy started, "y'gonna tell me what happened out at that church yesterdi'?"

Boo shook his head. He looked weathered. Worn. "No, Douglas, I don't think I am."

The deputy nodded.

Boo said, "Let me ask you something, though."

"Shoot."

"Do you think I'm a sinner?"

The deputy huffed. "Do what?"

"Just answer me."

The uniformed man thought a moment. "Well, my granny used to say that we're all sinners, just depends on the time of day." He smiled at Boo and winked. "And, of course, how pretty the girl is."

Boo couldn't help but smile back.

Then, as if it were nothing, the deputy changed the subject, pointing at Boo's fries. "Y'gonna eat those?"

Boo looked down at his plate. "No. Help yourself."

Meanwhile, on the other side of the world, a man tending a rice field stumbled upon a strange lamp buried deep in the muck.

"The Thing at the Side of the Road"

Ronald Kelly

Ronald Kelly resides in the hills and hollows of central Tennessee. After a decade-long hiatus from the horror genre, he's back, writing his unique brand of Southern-fried horror. His novels and collections include Fear, Blood Kin, Hell Hollow, Undertaker's Moon, The Sick Stuff, and Midnight Grinding & Other Twilight Terrors. Please drop by his web site at ronaldkelly.com.

The thing at the side of the road worried Paul Stinson something awful.

He didn't know why, since it was nothing more than roadkill. Some unfortunate creature that had strayed onto the blacktop of Highway 987 and got clipped by a passing vehicle. Or maybe it had reached the center line, got mashed beneath speeding tires, and crept its way back to the side before curling up and giving up the ghost. Either way, it was dead. Paul had passed it on the way to work and back for the past two weeks and it hunkered there in the exact same spot...nothing more than a clump of glossy black fur amid a fringe of brown weeds and wilted cocklebur.

Paul couldn't easily identify it, and that's what bothered him. What the hell is that thing? he wondered every time he drove past.

Not that the thing at the side of Highway 987 was the only thing about Harlan County that bothered Paul. No, since the company sent him down from Louisville to take over the local State Farm office, he had found more than enough to be bothered about. The people, the way they looked and acted...hell, even the lay of the land was all somehow wrong. But it was nothing tangible, nothing he could actually put his finger on. Every time he tried expressing his concerns to his superior back at the main office he came off looking like a freaking idiot.

That Saturday afternoon, on the way home from getting groceries in town with his wife, Jill, Paul decided that he had finally had enough. He wasn't driving another mile without finding out exactly what that furry black thing was.

When he slowed the Escalade and stopped, Jill turned and looked at him. "What are you doing?"

Paul sighed and put the vehicle into park. "You remember that thing at the side of the road? The one I pointed out on the way to town?"

Jill nodded. "The dead dog?"

"Yeah, but that's the point," said Paul, shutting off the engine. "I don't know if it's really a dog or not."

His wife regarded him with irritation. "What do you care?"

Paul exhaled through his nose and gripped the steering wheel. That was Jill's typical reaction. March on through life with blinders on. No curiosity, no worries. Just that annoying, sugar-coated Pollyanna attitude of hers.

"I care because it's bugging the shit out of me and I need to know, that's why."

Jill stiffened up a bit and sat back in her seat. She knew better than to argue with her husband when he was in such a pissy mood.

Paul climbed out of the Escalade, leaving the driver's door open. "I'll just be a minute."

"Don't touch that thing. It could've died of a disease or something."

Paul ignored Jill's comment. As he walked down the shoulder of Highway 987, a beat-up Ford pickup passed by. The driver---an old man wearing a green John Deere cap---threw up his hand at him, as the old folks did in greeting.

I don't know you, buddy, thought Paul, neglecting to return the gesture. Ignorant hick.

As he walked toward mound of black fur, he surveyed his surroundings. The valley was narrow, with thin stretches of farmland on either side. Across the road was a small farm; a two-story white house, greywood barn, a few outbuildings. Being early spring, the pastures were empty of crops. No cows around at all.

A little smile of triumph crossed Paul's face as he came within eight feet of the questionable roadkill. Now, let's see what the hell you are. He bent down and picked up a dead branch that lay nearby.

When he finally stood over the animal, he realized exactly how large the thing was. Even curled inward the way it was, it was huge...much bigger than a normal dog. All he could see was that glossy black coat with a strange grey-striped pattern running through it. He couldn't make out the creature's head, tail, or legs; they were completely tucked from sight. Standing close to it, Paul found that the coat wasn't actually fur, but heavy black bristles, more like that of a wild boar than a canine.

Also, even after a couple of weeks of rotting on the side of the highway, Paul smelled no trace of decay, only a heavy muskiness to the thing.

He should have found all this, well, unsettling. Instead, he found his inability to identify the animal infuriating. "Well, we'll just flip you over and take a better look at you," he said. Paul wedged the tip of the branch underneath the thing and started to exert a little leverage.

That was when the thing at the side of the road woke up.

"Damn!" Paul jumped back as it stretched and then lifted its head. Its massive head. The thing's black-bristled skull was long and narrow, almost rat-like in a way, its tiny ears laid back sharply toward its broad neck. It had silver eyes. Silver like polished chrome. And the teeth. Lord have mercy! How could anything have so many long, jagged teeth within the cradle of two jaws?

Paul Stinson knew then that the thing at the side of the road hadn't been dead for two weeks.

It had been waiting. Waiting for someone stupid enough to stop by and wake it up.

Paul held onto the stick but knew it wouldn't serve as any sort of effective weapon. He'd fare better going against a pit bull with a toothpick. He took a couple of wary steps backward as the thing stood up on short, stubby but powerful legs. It shook its coat off with a shudder, shedding a couple weeks' worth of debris. Dead leaves, gravel, an old Snickers wrapper someone had tossed out a car window. It yawned, stretching those awful triangular jaws to capacity. The thing could have swallowed a softball without strangling. And all those damn teeth! And a long, thick tongue as coarse and grey as tree bark.

Paul began to back away. "What...what the hell are you?"

The thing cocked its huge head and grinned.

Paul suddenly remembered the Escalade behind him. The driver's door stood wide open.

The thing saw it at the same time.

Paul turned and began to run. He didn't get far when he sensed the thing beside him, then outdistancing him. Up ahead, in the passenger seat, sat Jill, her pretty face a frightened mask blanched of color. She watched, mortified, as the thing about the size of a young calf poured on the speed, heading for the open door of the SUV.

"Paul," he saw her mutter. Then he heard her, loud and shrill. "PAUL!"

"Stop!" Paul muttered beneath his breath. "Stop, you sonofabitch!"

But it didn't. It knew its target and it got there a moment later. The black-bristled thing leapt into the Escalade and, with a long tail as sleek and serpentine as a monkey's, grabbed the door handle and slammed the door solidly shut behind it.

"NO!" Paul reached the door as the power locks engaged with a clack! The thing was smart...and it knew what it wanted. And what it wanted at that moment was to not be disturbed.

"Paul!" shrieked Jill, hidden by the thing's heaving, black bulk. "Oh, God...Paul, help me! Oh, God...it hurrrrrrts!"

Outside the vehicle, Paul could hear the thing at work. Biting. Tearing. Ripping.

Frantic, he looked around and found a large rock at the far side of the highway. He grabbed it up in both hands and battered at the side window. It held fast, refusing to shatter. Damn safety glass!

Without warning, the inner glass of the Escalade began to gloss over with great, thick curtains of crimson. "Paul!" screamed Jill from inside that slaughterhouse on wheels. "Paul...pleeeeeeease!"

Her husband began to scream himself, loud and horrified, full of utter hopelessness. He paced back and forth beside the vehicle, wishing...no, praying that some ignorant Kentucky redneck would happen along to help him. But the highway remained empty and no one came.

The last window to gloss over with gore was the driver's window. The thing turned and grinned at him with those awful, four-inch teeth. Pieces of Jill clung in between. Her ear, the ruptured sack of an eye, the bottom half of those ruby red lips he had kissed so passionately following their wedding vows seven years ago.

The thing licked its glistening grey lips, then turned back to the ugly, jagged sack of seat-belted carrion that had once been Paul Stinson's wife. Rivulets of blood obscured the horrible sight from view...but far from mind.

At a loss for anything better to do, Paul dug his cell phone from his jacket pocket and dialed 911.

The first one out of the Harlan County Sheriff's car was a tall, burly fellow in his fifties. "What seems to be the problem, sir?" he asked. He had a stern, suspicious expression on his broad face, the same severe look that the locals customarily directed toward people who had been born and bred beyond the county line.

Paul quelled the impulse to run up and grab hold of the man in complete desperation. "An...an animal of some kind is inside my car!" he said. "I...I...I think it's...oh, God...I think it's killed her!"

The deputy, whose name tag identified him as Frank McMahon, walked briskly toward the Escalade. His eyes narrowed as he saw the blood-splattered windows. "What sort of animal? A dog?"

Paul laughed, almost hysterically, then caught himself. "No...no...wasn't a damn dog."

Deputy McMahon tried the doors. They were all locked. He turned questioning eyes toward Paul.

"It locked them...by itself."

The law officer regarded him suspiciously. "Sir...exactly what is going on here?"

Anger flared in Paul's eyes. "I told you...some...some thing...it jumped in there and attacked my wife..."

"And it slammed the door behind it and locked it?"

Paul realized how very lame that sounded. "Yes."

McMahon studied Paul for a long second, then turned to his partner, a tall, lanky young man who stood in front of the patrol car. "Grab the Slim Jim, Jasper...and the shotgun."

Soon, both county deputies stood next to the Escalade, looking at one another. They then looked at Paul, pacing back and forth at the front of the vehicle.

"If there's an animal in there, sir," said McMahon, "why can't I hear anything?"

Paul shrugged. "How should I know? You could sure as hell hear it fifteen minutes ago!" He shuddered at the memory of those wet, ripping, slurping sounds.

"I'll take your word for it...right now. But you stay put, do you understand?"

Paul swallowed dryly and nodded.

The elder officer turned to his subordinate. "Okay, this is how we're gonna work it, Jasper. You jimmy the lock and open the door. I'll shoot the thing when it comes out." He jacked a shell into his twelve-gauge Mossberg with a metallic click-clack.

"Gotcha," agreed Jasper. His hands trembled as he stepped to the driver's door and inserted the narrow length of the Slim Jim with slow precision past the blood-soaked window and down into the body of the Cadillac's door.

Frank McMahon stepped into the center of the highway and lifted his shotgun, bringing the butt securely against his shoulder. "Okay. I'm ready."

Jasper fished around with the jimmy until something within the door went click. "Get ready. Here goes!" Then he grasped the handle and pulled open the door.

At first, nothing happened. Then Deputy McMahon's eyes widened. "What the shit?"

Paul watched in horror as the thing burst from the gore-encrusted cave of the Escalade, leaping straight toward the lawman. It was bigger---twice as big as it had been before---and, it seemed, twice as fast. It barreled out of the vehicle with sharp jaws gnashing, a deep, thunderous roar rumbling up from out of its gullet.

Deputy McMahon managed to put a load of double-aught buckshot smack-dab in the center of the thing's chest but wasn't able to jack another round into the breech. The creature landed atop him, seemingly unharmed. The officer cried out as he hit the pavement hard, his eyes bulging as the monster's teeth burrowed deeply into the tender flesh of his throat.

"Do something!" screamed Paul. "Shoot it!"

Deputy Jasper dropped the Slim Jim and nervously fumbled his service revolver from its holster. He held it in both hands, pointing it at the thing on top of his partner. During his hesitance, the thing brought its powerful jaws together in a bone-shattering crack! His victim's head separated from the neck bone, rolling lopsidedly across the highway, stump over balding scalp.

Jasper looked over at Paul in indecision. "I...I might hit Frank."

"Frank's head is in the freaking ditch!" Paul yelled at him. "Shoot the damn thing!"

The deputy turned back and pumped the contents of his .38 into the back of the creature's head and spine. Instead of suffering from the gunfire, the thing seemed to regard it as an annoyance. It looked over its shoulder, shook its leering head as if saying, "Stupid bastard!" then lashed out with its bristly black tail. The blow took Jasper's right hand off at the wrist. Both severed fist and the gun clutched tightly within it crashed through the windshield of the patrol car, leaving a jagged black hole.

"Mama!" Jasper croaked just before the black thing whirled and turned its fury and hunger on him.

"To hell with this!" muttered Paul. He turned and began to run down the stretch of Highway 987.

Intending to head toward the farmhouse, he was crossing the narrow road when he heard a great, bellowing roar split the air behind him. He glanced over his shoulder and pissed himself. The thing bounded down the two-lane blacktop toward him, its paws shattering the asphalt with each heavy footfall. Its awful hunger had fired its metabolism and started a growth process that could only occur in things not fully of this world. The black-bristled creature was nearly as big as the Escalade now. Its open mouth, full of long ivory and ragged meat, looked large enough to swallow a man whole.

Paul bounded over the drainage ditch at the far side of the road, then scrambled over a barbed wire fence. His left foot became entangled in the strands before he could clear it. As he struggled to kick free, the thing's head appeared. The horrid jaws dipped downward and chomped. As burning agony shot through Paul's ankle and up his calf, he looked back to see the thing rolling something around in its mouth. It was a pocket of Eddie Bauer leather with a meaty morsel of Paul Stinson tucked neatly inside. The thing gobbled it down and winked---dear Lord, did it actually wink?---before it began to skitter across the fence toward him.

On half a foot, Paul limped toward the farmhouse, gibbering, crying, even laughing for some awful reason he couldn't figure out. "God, God, God, oh, God," he sobbed out loud. Funny that he would call upon that name so freely now...since the only way he had used it in the last few years was with the word damn tacked to end.

But, then, Paul Stinson had "gotten religion," as the old folks called it.

That awful kind of Harlan County religion preached by things that posed as harmless roadkill at the side of deserted country roads.

As he ran, shrieking, toward the old farmhouse, Paul sensed that the thing was toying with him. It would dart out in front of him, then circle him, allowing him to get a head start and then begin the torturous cat-and-mouse game all over again. He was almost to the front porch when the thing's long tail lashed out and struck him across the lower back. Paul wailed as his kidneys ruptured and the lower vertebrae of his spine were pulverized into jagged splinters.

He hit the ground hard, facing the house. An old woman opened the screen door, looked out, then retreated with an expression of panic and horror. That door isn't going to help you, lady, he thought. That whole damned house isn't going to protect you. He doubted that the vault of the Harlan County Bank & Trust would hold up against this demon's ceaseless hunger.

As the thing pounced and landed atop him, Paul thought of his mother and some of the quirky sayings she used to pass on to him. One came to mind as he felt the thing's claws meticulously, almost tenderly, separate the back of his leather jacket and the cloth of the shirt just beyond. Curiosity killed the cat?

No, that wasn't it.

It's best to let sleeping dogs lie.

Yeah. Oh, hell, yeah...that was it.

Paul Stinson felt the thing's long, grey tongue---peppered with taste buds the texture of sandpaper and broken glass---run the length of his back, from the nape of his neck clear down to the cleft of his buttocks. It somehow tickled and hurt all at the same time.

Paul began to laugh.

He laughed wildly, madly, straying far beyond the limits that humor tastefully allowed...until, finally, he could laugh no more.

"Inheritance"

Stephanie Lenz

Stephanie Lenz lives in western Pennsylvania with her husband, daughter, son, and two black cats. She has published short fiction in Quantum Muse, Journal of the Blue Planet, Flashquake, Northpoint, and other journals and is managing editor of the literary journal Toasted Cheese. Her web site is piggyhawk.net.

The kitchen reeked of lilies and Jania's diaper. I scrubbed Becca's lasagna pan with steel wool and stared through the window at a patch of early-turned leaves.

Becca thunked a laundry basket onto a clear space of kitchen table. "Baby needs changed," I said.

"You can't do it?"

"I'm washing your dishes."

"So? I was washing your shirt."

"Where is it?" I half turned to look at the laundry basket.

Becca scooped up her youngest and tickled her. "In Mark and Tommy's room."

"Is that where I'm sleeping?"

"Unless you want the attic."

"No," I replied too quickly.

"You still afraid of the attic?"

"Not afraid," I said, running fresh, steaming water over the pan. "The stairs are too narrow. Too steep."

"I put the boys up there," she said, turning her back to me.

"Do they go up there much?" I tried to cover the crack in my voice with a cough.

"You are still afraid of the attic."

I began to protest, but she'd already taken Jania up the stairs.

That night, I read while the boys watched an obnoxious movie on DVD. Becca knitted a sock, her first, and she constantly wrinkled her nose at the book providing the instructions. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw her sigh, close the book, and coil the half-knitted sock around its needles. She stashed everything in a canvas bag and popped back the recliner.

"What're you reading?"

"It's for work," I said, not looking at her.

"About what?"

"Selkies."

Her sons turned around. "What's a silky?" Tommy asked.

"Selkie, not silky. It's like a woman with a seal skin she can take on and off, kinda like a mermaid."

"Never heard of that," Becca said.

"We got a report of some sightings in Scotland." I decided to keep my transfer to myself. The timing was perfect and I'd been raised too superstitious to do anything to jinx it.

"Cool," Matt said.

Becca threw her feet over the edge of the chair. "How do you study all these things and you don't believe any of them?"

"Because I study them." I turned a page I hadn't really read.

Matt opened his mouth, but before he could speak, Becca announced that it was bedtime. The boys groaned. "We have to get up early for Grandma. I don't want any fighting or sass tomorrow."

As soon as the three of them headed to the attic, I flipped off the TV and followed their footfalls. The boys settled in the back of the attic, near the door for the steps. That was good. It was the front of the attic that concerned me. I hadn't yet figured how to get Becca to allow me to poke around, but I needed to see the trunk. Better yet, I needed to see that it wasn't there.

Becca had a couple of drinks before we headed to the Baptist church in Evarts. I drove her van and made extra sure the kids were buckled before we headed out. Matt asked me to turn on the radio, and when I told him no, he pouted the whole trip. Tommy played some kind of little video game and Jania kept setting off some electronic musical toy.

Our brother and sister were already at the church. When Becca crumpled into a chair in front of the urn that held our mother's remains, Sissy asked me if she was drunk. I said that she'd had a few.

I hadn't seen JR in a couple of years, since Gertie had closed and he'd started driving trucks. I thought he'd turned manager at a Wal-Mart or something, but I wasn't sure. His boots didn't have a trace of dirt. None of them ever understood my job so we never talked much about what we all did.

"Came on quick," JR said, like he was the authority on our mother's cancer. "She didn't want no treatment but she could've if she'd wanted it."

I swallowed hard and pushed my hands into my pockets.

"How's she doing?" He nodded toward Becca.

I shrugged. "Couple shots this morning, but that's all she's had since I been home. Boys look good. Baby's healthy. Place is clean."

"I'm glad it's over," Sissy said from behind me, holding our niece on one hip. "Mama being sick, I mean."

"Same here," JR said.

"Becca's glad too, even if she won't say," Sissy added. "I'm glad Mama didn't drag it out. She said to me, 'I want this over and done with' and it was. Just the way Mama wanted."

"Reckon we should sit down," I said, sliding in beside Becca. I draped my arm over the back of the pew, and she took it as a sign to curl toward me. I spent the first half of my mother's memorial smelling Jack Daniels and handing Becca balled-up Kleenex out of her purse.

By the time we were to sing "What a Friend We Have in Jesus," I whispered to Becca that I would find Sissy and Jania, see if the baby needed anything. JR slid over toward her when I rose and inched my way along the pew.

I found them in the otherwise empty nursery, Sissy watching the crowd through a one-way window.

"Nice turnout," she said when I closed the door. "Mama'd be happy."

"I had a hell of a time talking her out of having Mama laid out." I wanted to add that our mother must've told me a thousand times, begged me even, to have her cremated.

"You want a drink of water, Peter? You don't look so good."

"I...I just want to make sure everything's how she need...wanted it."

"Well, we done the best we could. She didn't leave us clear instructions. She just told you everything. Always did." Sissy crossed the room and popped a paper cup out of a dispenser. "You coming to the will reading?"

"Yeah. You?"

"Suppose." She filled the cup with cool water and brought it to me. "So you gonna tell me all her secrets now?"

I smiled to avoid lying. "Sissy, let her rest."

Sissy nibbled her lip for a minute and considered. I could see the thoughts flashing before her eyes--the insinuations, the blame, the rumors.

Her voice calm, she said, "Tell me Poppa was my daddy."

"Oh he was, he was," I said, filled with relief. "You never believed that rumor, did you?"

"Course I did."

"Pop didn't...what he did had nothing to do with you. Hear?"

Sissy sat on the floor beside Jania and started building a tower of blocks for her to topple.

"Things weren't...he was so different when he came back from that second tour, Sis. He wasn't...the man he became, it near about killed Mama. If he hadn't done what he did, she'd have died thirty years ago. You'd never have remembered her."

"Sometimes I wonder if that might've been better."

"It wasn't anything about you, Sissy. She went through an awful lot. Married at sixteen, pregnant with me and JR not a year after. Pop being drafted. Helping with the strike. Pop coming back and going into the mine. Becca and then with you on the way, Pop re-upping and coming back. It was hard going, Sis."

"And no different from any other Harlan woman's story either, Peter. But they don't use it for an excuse to treat their children like dirt underfoot." Sissy held her anger for a few moments, then sighed. "Guess it's over now. Don't do any good to hold on now, does it?"

I hid my grimace behind the cup, already empty, and pretended to drink.

While the family hosted the post-funeral dinner at the church basement, I excused myself and said I needed to take care of some things. I spent the drive over to Harlan biting my thumb and letting the "scan" feature run endlessly on Becca's radio.

I passed the old company houses, including the one where we'd lived until Sissy was born, and drove through Fisher's Hollow. I glanced down the road toward Gertie, her rusting tipple poking through the pines. I rubbed my eyes with one hand and accelerated.

With Becca and the kids at the church, I figured I wouldn't get a better chance to go into the attic so I took it. I didn't stop at the front door, just bounded up the steps and then up into the attic, walking sideways to fit my feet.

The boys had two camp mattresses set up under the window in the back. I stepped around the puddled blankets and inched toward the front of the room. The stuff there hadn't been moved for ages. Trying not to raise too much dust, I sifted through the piles of junk until I spotted the rotting steamer. Its rust-speckled latches creaked as I flipped them. I brought my keys out of my pocket and found the one Mama had sent me. It slid into the lock with surprising ease, clicked, and the trunk seemed to sigh with release.

I choked back the tears from my nose and inched open the lid. On top of a tattered, moth-eaten wool blanket was a letter in a yellowed, unsealed envelope. The letter read, "I'm sorry. Jesus forgive me."

I replaced it on top of the blanket and secured and locked the trunk. No one knew. No one had seen. Now I had to get it out of the attic and get rid of it. Alone.

Mama hadn't had much, so it surprised us that we had to go to a will reading. She'd had a little savings, which she'd left to Becca for taking care of her. There was also a letter for each of us. Mine was much thicker than the others, but I made a joke about being the oldest and it seemed to settle any reason for it. She also left a short list of possessions she wanted distributed a certain way.

Sissy looked at Becca and said, "Keep 'em" when the list of things Mama had bequeathed to her was read. JR got a few things that had belonged to Pop, like his medals, uniform and dog tags, both from the service. To me she left "your father's purple heart, the old steamer trunk, and Ching-Ching." The lawyer raised his eyebrows and said, "What's a ching-ching?"

I felt a flash of nausea while the others laughed. JR spoke up. "It's this godawful thing our pop brought back from Vietnam." To me, he added, "Guess you win, Pete."

"Ching-Ching's gonna get you," Sissy added with an extra laugh.

I forced a smile and pressed my fist against my mouth.

The boys ran straight upstairs when we got back to Becca's. As I stripped off my jacket, I asked, "So where is Ching-Ching anyway?"

"On the shelf." She lifted her chin toward a bookcase beside the TV stand. "It's up top so I don't have to look at it. Go ahead and pack it. Jesus, I'll be glad to be rid of it." As she took the baby up for a nap, she added, "It gives me the willies."

I spotted it right away in the back, on the topmost shelf, half-behind a framed photo of our dad in his uniform. I lifted it out and blew the dust off it. It had always reminded me of a coconut, but egg-shaped, with the flatter end on the bottom and covered in coarse brown hairs. It had a thin white line around what would be its waist and, near the top, an engraved and painted face with narrow, angry eyes and a firm mouth. It had more hairs sprouting from the top of its head, worn at the ends and frazzled but originally in a freakish bowl cut meant to emphasize its eyes. JR and I used to play GI Joes with it until Mama caught us, whupped us, and put it on top of the refrigerator. When Pop died, she moved it behind his photo and we were all glad to be rid of the sight of it.

I remember him bringing it back after his second tour. Sissy was walking already and he had gone back into the mines. He pulled it out of his duffel and showed it to Becca, JR and me. We gathered around, simultaneously repulsed and attracted. He explained something about it, using words that sounded so exotic I decided that if the war started up again, I would go. All I caught out of it was something that sounded like "Ching," so we named the little figure "Ching-Ching." Pop kept it on top of the chiffarobe, beside Mama's bottle of Skin So Soft. When he found out we'd played with it, we thought he'd kill us. Instead, he said, "I didn't bring that halfway across the goddamn world for you to break it."

I put Ching-Ching back in its spot and went out to the kitchen. Becca surprised me hot on my heels. "You want some coffee?" she offered.

I considered a moment and asked for something stronger.

She got the coffee going and opened a high cabinet. "What do you want?"

"Anything."

She poured. When I asked if she'd join me, knowing I shouldn't, she shook her head. I watched her lean against the counter, her body language exactly like Mama's as she lit a cigarette and tossed her lighter back into her purse. She half-filled a cup of coffee, topped it with milk and three spoonfuls of sugar. As she came over to join me, I saw something out of the corner of my eye and gasped.

Ching-Ching sat in the passage between the kitchen and the living room, its gouged, white eyes staring in my direction.

"Damn it," she said, slamming her mug down on the table. Becca stomped over to it, snatched it up, and headed into the living room. I heard her set it back in place and yell up the stairs, "Y'all leave this thing alone!"

The response was a creak of the floor in the attic and a ripple of feedback on the baby monitor.

"Of all days," she said, taking her seat at my knee.

I sipped my drink and kept my eyes on the doorway.

"Becca."

"Yes?"

"How come you weren't gonna follow Mama's wishes and cremate her?"

Becca took a long draw on her cigarette, her fingers trembling, then tapped it on a breakfast plate. "I wanted to see her, Peter."

"You'd seen her for months."

"Sick." She flashed her filling eyes at me. "I wanted to see her made up and pretty one more time, all right? I saw her all sunken and ashy and vomiting blood every goddamn day. I didn't want that to be how I remembered her. We didn't get to see Pop and I wasn't going to be cheated out of seeing Mama."

"You know why we didn't see Pop."

She opened her mouth and snapped it shut just as quickly. In the silence, I stole a glance at the doorway. Nothing.

I said, "I suppose now she's gone, we can talk about it. Why he k---"

"I don't want to talk about it."

I nodded and finished my drink, my eyes locked to the spot where the kitchen's linoleum met the living room's shag carpet.

At around 3 a.m., I woke out of a sound and dreamless sleep. I rolled onto my back and stared at glow-in-the-dark stickers on the bottom of the bunk bed overhead. There wasn't a lot of moonlight, but there was enough that I could make out shapes on the dresser. A baseball in an acrylic box. Stacks of folded clothes waiting to be put away. Something small, almost round, with white eyes...

I sat bolt upright and began to hyperventilate. I clapped my hand to my mouth, partly to calm my breathing and partly to keep from being sick. I knew the boys hadn't brought it in. I knew Becca wasn't playing a practical joke. I'd locked the door and put a useless beanbag chair behind it.

I stood and snatched up Ching-Ching. Warmth. And underneath its hard shell, a pulse---single, almost electric, combined with a constant hum. In that moment, I suspected what Mama had told me was true. But it wasn't enough. Without letting go of the thing, I shoved my feet into my sneakers and grabbed my keys and jacket.

It only took four and a half minutes to drive to #17 and another thirty seconds to run as far as I could into the shaft. I didn't want to follow the tracks into the four-foot-high maw that lead to the collapsing and crumbling mine.

"Where are you?" I yelled into the darkness. My voice echoed off the stone that glittered with threads of virgin coal. After a while, I yelled again. "I know you're here. I know it."

Silence.

I stomped toward one of the seemingly bottomless air shafts along the walls. "Get out here or I throw this thing down the chute."

"You know it'll just come back."

I gasped so hard that I choked. The voice came from the darkness of the mine, where the trams sat rusting.

"What is this?" I growled toward the voice as I held out the throbbing mutant coconut.

"It don't matter, Peter." He stepped from the darkness into shadow, the slightest bit of moonlight creeping in as far as where we stood, defining his hands and the line of his jaw. "What matters is that now it belongs to you."

I poised over the manway. "I don't want it."

"Yet you know that if you drop it, you'll drive home and find it waiting on your pillow."

I shook to the point that I had to grip the wall for support. I nodded and waited for him to speak again.

"You don't seem surprised to see me."

"'Surprised' isn't the word for it, Pop."

"She told you. She told you what I'd become."

I nodded again. Desperate for something to do, I turned Ching-Ching over in my hands. Its pulse grew stronger and it became downright hot, almost too hot to hold. I set it on the ground at my feet.

I said, "I couldn't hardly believe her, though."

"So you spent your life trying to prove creatures like me don't exist, that it? 'Cause if you can do that, it was all in her head. And what come after, well, that would've been in yours."

I slumped against one of the support pillars, my elbows on my knees and my head in my hands.

He walked toward me, but not with the gait of a sixty-something-year-old man or a thirty-year-old one. He moved slowly, as though forcing an illusion of grace. He knelt beside me as I looked up. My eyes had adjusted to the light, and I could see the reality of him. He was no ghost, no figment of my imagination. He was exactly as I'd remembered him, which was impossible. Longish hair and sideburns, now with strands of silver but styled as they had been in the years after he'd crossed the ocean. But how? I said to myself. How is it possible?

I opened my mouth to say something, but before I could decide what to ask, he said, "Your mother's trunk."

His eyes held mine. I nodded and exhaled. "Yes."

"Where is it?"

"The attic. Becca's attic."

"She left it to you."

"The trunk? Yeah."

"Get it and bring it here."

"But I can't---"

"We can get it down the cage, you and me. After that, I'll take care of everything."

"Take care of it?"

"I know what's in the trunk, Peter."

"She told you?"

He nodded. "I know your hand in it, too."

I felt sick. My father sat cross-legged on the ground beside me and picked up Ching-Ching. As he talked, he passed it between his hands, as I had. I felt its pulse under his words and in the rock that surrounded us. Everything in the mine came alive with exotic, living energy.

"I was hurt bad at Xuan Loc. Real bad. A hole in my chest big enough to stick two fists in. I watched medics pass me by, over and over. I laid there with my eyes staring into the sun, then the dark of night, unable to die."

"I can't believe that, Pop."

As if I hadn't spoken, he continued. "Locals come by, pointed at me, whispered. I couldn't move my head, my eyes even, to see what they were doing. They used a blanket for a gurney and carried me through the jungle to a thatch hut so camou'ed, you didn't even realize it was there. I felt solid ground under my body. An old man with long white hair bent over me. I felt his hands on me, inside me. I couldn't speak. I heard his voice in my head. He spoke Chinese and I could understand him, Peter. I knew a language I'd never heard and I knew what language it was. He said 'Your p'ai is strong.'

"I told him I wanted to go home, that I had a baby I'd never seen and I had to see her, had to see my wife, had to see you. I told him your names. While I spoke to him with my mind, he worked and nodded. Aloud he spoke Chinese, and I couldn't tell what he said but he used the word p'ai again. Room smelled like incense and blood. In my head, he said, 'I will make you strong but your body will be weary.' I closed and opened my eyes. I felt tears on my cheeks. It was a miracle. A true miracle, son. This old witch doctor was fixin' me up and I was goin' home. Layin' on the floor of that hut, I promised Jesus I would never leave you all again. If it meant I had to stay in these mines the rest of my life, I'd never, ever leave none of you."

He paused, turning Ching-Ching over in his palms. He traced its engravings with his fingertips.

"I thanked him inside my head and he said he was gonna give me something to make me sleep, that it'd be easier for me to get home but they'd have to smuggle me. They could send me back with the dead men from my unit so's I could sleep. He gave me this," he held out Ching-Ching, "and told me that my return, as a whole man, depended on the care of it. I told him I'd do anything to get back here."

He unbuttoned his shirt down to the middle of his chest and opened it. I knew then why he'd been the only dad in the hollow who wore an undershirt to cut the grass or barbecue. His scar was a twisted mass of smoothed, hairless flesh.

"Why didn't you tell me?"

"Tell you what, Peter? That I'm dead?"

"You're not dead, Pop. You're right here."

"Peter..."

"Why did Mama tell us you shot yourself?"

His hands stilled and he sighed.

"Why'd y'all lie to us? You have any idea what we all've gone through thinking you come down here and done that? Especially Sissy? Rumors went around you ate a shotgun down in #17 'cause you found out she wasn't yours. Then Mama tells me--just me--that you're still alive but I can't see you or talk to you or tell anyone? Don't tell me 'vampire,' neither, 'cause I won't believe it." I can't believe it, I said to myself.

"It was near impossible to keep it up, Peter. I needed more energy than your mama could give me. It was better for me to sleep here, hibernate like, than to keep asking her to provide---"

"Wait," I said, my legs shaking. "What do you mean, 'energy?' "

"I needed ying energy, Peter, to stay alive, so to speak. Female energy, to balance mine. To feed my p'ai. Your mother gave me what I needed as best she could, only way she knew how."

I pushed myself to my feet, using the pillars to guide myself to the chute I'd threatened to throw Ching-Ching down, and vomited. Pinpricks of light danced in the blackness before my eyes. The trunk. What Mama had done. What she'd asked me to be complicit in helping her do. It came together.

I flattened my palms on the wall over the chute and let my words tumble into the depths of the mine. "Chiang-shih. Not ching-ching. You're chiang-shih. A dead shell that houses a living minor soul. My god. Chiang-shih."

"Chiang-shih," he confirmed in a whisper. I turned to see him. He held Ching-Ching in his left hand, near his hip. "I don't want blood. I don't need it. I don't need food or water. All's I need is energy."

I stood silently for a solid minute. "Did you kill Mama?"

"No, Peter."

I clarified through clenched teeth. "Did you take her energy, then?"

I saw the flicker of a smile in his young, pale face and a shimmer in his eyes. "She called for me her last night and I came. When I come back from Xuan Loc, I seen her in new dimensions. Soft yellow-green energy around her, flickering with her mood, turning clover green every time she'd get pr---"

To stop him and to bring him back into the present, I said, "Pop. Her energy?"

"When I went to see her last week, she couldn't speak but I could talk to her like I talked to that old Chinese voodoo man. She asked me to help her. Said she couldn't stand the pain. Couldn't stand Becca's pain. If I could just bring her to the edge of death, she would take that last step herself and then we'd be together forever like I told her. I didn't do more 'n what she asked me to, Peter. I drained her energy, the last bit of yellow light until she burned bright white, and I became more alive than I'd ever been."

"This is sick. This is a sick, horrible joke. I don't know where you learned about chiang-shih or what game you've been playing these decades, if you got some other woman or you just didn't wanna work in the mines or if you thought it'd be easier, us livin' on handouts, government checks, and piss-poor insurance payouts..."

"Bring me the trunk," he said, "so I can help your mama finish our journey."

"What?"

The pulse around us thickened, emanating from the rock, coursing through my body.

"Bring me the trunk and everything in it. You know why I need that trunk, Peter. I need it to bring her back. I need to make her like me."

I turned and ran back through the adit and into the growing dawn. I needed a drink, more than a drink, and someone to talk sense to me and to wash away the idea that my father wasn't dead or alive but some thing that existed between states, waiting to make my mother like him. I headed for the liquor store in Cumberland and drank cheap whiskey in the cab of the truck until the dawn turned black.

On Friday, I dropped Becca off at Wal-Mart while I went to check on Mama's grave. The engraver hadn't yet added the death date to Mama's side of the stone, but the fresh-tilled circle in the ground showed me where her urn had been buried beside my father's empty coffin. The idea of his plan, one he thought her body waited here to help him complete, made me half sick again. I decided I'd get something for my stomach at McDonald's and wait for Becca in the store parking lot. After half an hour, I went in after her, stopping to buy a $100 gift card at the express lane.

That night, after their father picked up the boys and the baby for weekend visitation, I surprised Becca with the card. "It's just a little something to thank you for taking care of Mama. I know you've not been taking care of yourself. I want you to go and have some fun."

She squeezed the breath out of me and called one of her girlfriends as she slipped on her shoes. They decided to meet in twenty minutes. I told Becca I'd stay and pack for my drive home and finish my reading for work, that she should go and treat herself and not worry a lick about me. After she left, I opened the bottle I'd picked up and headed for the attic, ignoring Ching-Ching's grin from where he'd appeared on my suitcase overnight, returned to me from the mine.

The trunk was easy enough to drag across the junk-littered floor. I knew it had to fit down the stairs, since someone had gotten it up there in the first place. I turned it on its side and got in front of it, easing it over the steps. I stumbled near the bottom and out into the hall. It shot past me and crashed into the linen closet. I whispered a thanks that it hadn't popped open and I got it down the main stairs and into the back of my truck with a lot less difficulty.

I sat in the truck, engine off and guzzling booze for half an hour. I considered my father's story and reconciled it with what Mama had told me when I was twelve, when she enlisted my help.

August 1975. He'd been home for a little while and Mama was pregnant. Becca and JR didn't know that. Sissy was too young. I only knew because I'd overheard them talking about it in bed. Since Pop had come back from the second tour, they'd been having sex just about every night. I'd started to keep myself awake to hear them. That night they weren't but my Pavlovian response was to lay there and listen through the wall. Pop said something about "I can only use it if it's a girl."

I took a long drink, long enough to wash that memory out of my head.

There never was a baby. I kept waiting for the announcement that Sissy wouldn't be "Little Sissy" anymore and we could start calling her by her name. It never came. Twice more before the bicentennial, I heard the same conversation. No babies.

Mama was dying, I thought. Dark circles deepened around her eyes and her fingers blossomed orangey nicotine stains. Her flesh became ashy and she dropped enough weight that her clothes hung off her like she was a wire hanger. The more of a ghost she became, the more manic Pop was. He'd taken a job in the mine and it got to the point where we were happy to see him go off to work each night, the last time being in February 1977. Mama told us he'd had "an accident." The funeral was closed casket.

Then she was pregnant again.

She came and got me out of school. The car ashtray overflowed with Salem stubs. She babbled about Pop not really being gone, her voice shaking and cracking to the point where I could barely understand her words. "I need your help, Peter." I thought she'd gone crazy with grief.

We pulled into the gravel drive and I followed her into their room. I wanted to ask her whose baby it was, how she could do something like that with Pop not even cold. As I sat at the foot of their bed, she undressed and I saw the advantage of her wearing her old draping housedresses. Her belly swollen but not quite full, she told me she had "already started things" and that she absolutely refused "to give him another one." I couldn't wrap my mind around what she could mean. She stood in front of me, her hands on my shoulders, and said, "I've done this before, Peter, but I can't do it again. It'll kill me. You don't want to be all alone, do you?"

I shook my head and looked her in the face to avoid looking at her blue-veined breasts.

"Then I need you to help me. I don't care how you do it, but once it's done, you take it up and you put it in my old trunk in the attic with the others, hear?"

I shook my head and tried to refuse her but she tightened her grip.

"I need you to do this, Peter. Please. It's not a baby. It's not. It's...a horrible thing. I've pushed three of them and I've seen what they are. He made me have them and carry them just so far. This one...something's wrong. It's not the same as the others, I can feel it." The light of her soul flickered in her eyes. "You understand what I'm tellin' you? No, you can't understand, and I can't explain it right now. I don't have time. We don't have time, Peter. It's coming. Right now. I need you to help me. Please. Please, baby."

"He come to you after... after he...died? He can't have, Mama." Horror rushed through me at the idea that either she believed this fantasy or that it could conceivably be true.

"I'll bring it out. If you can't look at it, don't. Just finish it off and put it in the trunk and it'll all be over. It'll be our secret and you'll never have to do it again. I promise. He'll never come back. He won't have the energy."

I twisted the key and started my truck. The engine purred in the gathering dark.

I didn't open the bundle Mama handed me. There was no sound but there was a pulse and warmth. Blood seeped through the towel, staining my hands and my T-shirt. What could I do with it? Beat it with a shovel? Shoot it? She'd left open the door to the attic, so I sat on the steps with the pulsing mess bleeding onto my lap. I cried as quietly as I could. Mama ran water in the tub and sang in her trembling voice, "What a friend we have in Jesus..."

I couldn't bring myself to do anything to it, whatever it was, baby or demon. I crept up the stairs and found the trunk. Mama kept the attic neat as a pin. I walked among the snatches of our lives to the trunk she said held the quilts her great-grandmothers had hung on the line to point the way north. I placed the bundle at my knees and flipped up the latches; she'd already unlocked it.

I peeled back an old grey blanket, and underneath there were three swaddled white bundles padded by newspaper. Blood rushed through me like a flood. I didn't want to open them. I didn't want to know more than I did. I knew too much. I lifted the one she'd entrusted to me and placed it atop the others. I wanted to pray, but if what she'd told me in the car was true, it was an unholy creature and not worthy of my prayer.

I spotted some old stationery in a box of papers and rooted through the box until I found a pencil. I wrote two simple sentences that said all I could articulate, folded the paper and placed it inside the envelope. As I put the blanket back in the box, I whispered, "Goodbye." I put my note on top and latched the trunk closed. I shoved it up against the wall and started to hide it behind as many boxes as I could find. Satisfied that it no one could get to it or out of it, I went down to the kitchen to wait for my mother. She took our clothes to the burn barrel and as we watched the flames consume them, she wrapped her arms around me and repeated the Lord's Prayer until the fire died.

It took me a good ten minutes to get to Gertie. I drove as slowly as possible, partly because I was nearly blind drunk but more because I really didn't want to get there.

I dragged everything into the mine, and once I reached the point where the moonlight faded, I whispered, "I have it."

"Good." He seemed stronger than he had the night before. He held Ching-Ching in one hand, and when I saw it, the pulse began around and inside me. I knew I'd left it on my suitcase. So it wouldn't just follow me home; it would follow me anywhere. Anywhere it needed to be, at least.

He helped me carry it to the cage: the unsteady elevator that men took to get into the recesses of the mine. He threw the lever and we rattled slowly into the belly of the earth. We went for a few minutes before stopping. There was a good six inches between the edge of the elevator car and the solid ground of the shaft. He'd lit a few lanterns along the walls that gave me just enough light to see by. He handed Ching-Ching to me, stepped over the gap and, alone, carried the trunk further into the shaft---#17.

I stayed in the cage, still unsettled from the swaying. He called over to me for the key. I set Ching-Ching on the floor of the antique elevator so I could use both hands to uncoil the key from my ring. Once it was free, I tossed it toward him. When it didn't clatter, I assumed he'd caught it. Through the gloom of the mine, I heard him twist the lock and ease open the latches.

The pulsing entered my head, so strong it nearly knocked me over. I curled my fingers through the wire of the cage as his voice began to seep through the incessant pounding.

"I'm glad she trusted you with this." He ran his hand over the blanket. "She knew you, Peter. She knew you wouldn't be able to kill it. You didn't, did you?"

There was no tone of a question in what he said. I shook my head slightly.

"It was male. The first since JR. It was a sign. The time had come. We made it together, for her, so she could become like me."

"But she'd have to be dead or dying for you to..."

I lifted my eyes toward his voice and felt the presence of his hand near my face, even though I could see him clearly enough twenty feet in front of me. The blackness and pulse closed tighter around me. The lamps seemed to falter as the bleeders exchanged the musty air with fresh from the main chamber.

He removed the blanket, the lower half stiff with thirty-year-old blood. "Now all I need is her."

"You mean Mama?"

"When I visited your mama that last night, I sent Becca a message, too." He tapped his temple. "She might've thought it was a dream, if she even knew about it. She helped me make sure I'd be able to bring her back."

Bring her back?

I heard his voice in my head, strong and clear: Your p'ai is strong, Peter. Like mine. She knew that. I tried to convince her to take you, make your energy into her own, but she wouldn't. She loved you too much. More than she loved me. No matter now. My p'ai is stronger than yours, and this shell of a body has strength and speed you can't begin to imagine. When I finish my task, when I bring her back, I'm going to make sure your mama has all the yang energy she needs. She'll be hungry and she'll drain you dry to get it. I'll help her do it, even if she wouldn't give me your sisters and left me here to sleep for thirty years. She thought you'd keep them safe, once you knew. She thought you'd be able to outfox me. Seems she was wrong. Now why don't you just come a little closer to your pop so we can have a little talk? Just a little closer is all I need.

The lamplight caught his smile as he turned his face toward me and tensed his body as though he were a cat about to pounce.

The wire of the cage suddenly felt like molten metal. I jumped back, letting go and stumbling back into the elevator. My sneaker caught on Ching-Ching, and before I realized what had happened, it tumbled forward, into the gap, and clattered against the walls as it fell endlessly into the pit of the mines. Without sliding shut the gate, I yanked the lever and sent the cage shooting to the surface.

"Peter!" he yelled. "Peter, you can't run, boy! You've got nowhere in this world you can hide from me! Once I have her, once I bring her back into this world with this creature we made, I'll feed her with another! With you! With JR! And I'll drain your bitch sisters dry before I'll spend another day hiding in this hellmouth! You hear me?"

My hand trembled as I reached into my jacket pocket for the envelope. I pulled out the note I'd written so long ago, the one I'd left in the trunk. As the elevator climbed and I struggled to my feet, dirt from my trip to the graveyard sloughed from my shoes through the cracks in the floor.

"There is somewhere I can go," I whispered. "I know you can't cross water, and that's why they voodooed you up to ship you home. You can't so much as go to the graveyard 'til the creek goes dry. And I'm fixin' to make it so you can't never get me, Pop. Nothin' can get you across a goddamn ocean without someone to help you. And you got no one."

I reached inside my jacket pocket for my old letter and used the lighter I'd swiped from Becca's purse to get it going. The yellowy paper curled and blackened. I knelt at the edge of the cage and held it until the flames licked my fingers. I watched it float through the coal-rich blackness of the shaft until it disappeared.

Back at the level of the main chamber, I threw the brake and I ran, tripping over hogbacks as the air freshened into damp autumn night. I started my truck in an instant and floored the gas pedal, not stopping until I got to an interstate gas station in Tennessee. I filled the tank, bought a sixty-four ounce Coke and had a nervous breakdown in the parking lot, crying, coughing, and screaming until I fell unconscious.

Like Pop said, it was there when I got home. I'd expected it to be. Ching-Ching grinned its devilish grin from the "C" on my welcome mat. It wasn't as hot as it had been, but it still pulsed, faintly but with the same constancy and intensity.

That Monday, I tried calling Becca and JR to tell them the story I'd planned about moving overseas indefinitely, but there was no answer anywhere, not even on Becca's cell. I took a couple of the pills I'd been prescribed and I called Sissy.

As soon as she heard me speak, she said, "You haven't heard?"

"Heard what?"

"Two big things, Peter. One is that there's a fire at Gertie."

"Fire?" My voice sounded rusty.

"Yeah. They can't fight it. They've had to block it off and let it burn out. They say it could turn into another Centralia."

"What else?"

She whispered, "Someone disturbed Mama's grave. Buncha others too. There was a hellacious mess over the whole cemetery, like a bunch of teenagers run wild in a tornado, kickin' over stones, uprootin' trees, you name it."

My heart rose into my throat, choking out any words I would have said.

"Becca's so upset, she got admitted to the hospital. I have the kids here. JR's trying to sort it out, talking to the cops." She paused. I heard her sip a drink.

"But JR's okay? You're all okay?"

"Fine, Peter. Becca'll be fine too. She's just drained."

"What do you mean, 'drained?' " I snapped.

"Tired, Peter. Don't you think she has the right to be?"

"Sorry. I just...I'm kinda drained myself."

Sissy sighed. "You didn't say goodbye, you know."

I ran my hand over my unshaven face and decided to tell her. "I'm being transferred to the UK. I leave tomorrow."

Silence.

"I have to do this, Sissy. You have no idea."

"I do, Peter."

I said nothing. I wanted to tell her. I wanted to tell her to get as far away from Harlan as she could, that the stories were true about the evil lurking in the mines. That she wasn't safe and neither were Becca and Jania.

"Chiang-shih," she said.

"What?"

"Chiang-shih, Peter."

"How do you know?"

"Becca asked me to come over and sit a spell with Mama while she went grocery shopping. She'd gone delirious and kept saying this word and I must've wrote it a thousand ways before I hit the right spelling. Thank god for Google."

"Why didn't you tell me? At the funeral? Why didn't you tell me what you knew?"

"You're the occultist, not to mention Mama's secret-keeper. Why didn't you tell me what you knew?"

I sighed and rubbed my eyes.

"Can you get rid of Ching-Ching? Would that help?"

"I've tried for a solid goddamn week. I've run it over with the truck, I set it on fire, I gave it an acid bath...I can't even crack it, much less open it. I don't know what else to do."

"I have to go. Call me when you get to the UK." She disconnected us.

I picked Ching-Ching up and turned it over in my hands like Pop had done that night in the mine. As I turned it, I saw the white band around its middle develop a thin, dark gap.

I turned it over faster and faster, thinking of my mother and what I'd done for her. Did I help her? Did I damn her? Did I damn myself? The gap widened. The thing was opening like a plastic Easter egg.

Blisters rose along my palms and fingers; my skin pinkened with the heat it generated, but I didn't dare stop passing it between my hands. The bubbles of skin burst and began to fester into bleeding sores as tears rose in my eyes and my nose. As my blood soaked into its coarse hair, the pulse quickened into a rapid tattoo and the little figure split neatly along its waist. I eased its halves apart with my tender flesh and the pulse hit me square in the chest. I dropped the pieces when I stumbled backward and something fell out of its hollow body with a thud and landed between my feet.

Your father's purple heart, the old steamer trunk, and Ching-Ching.

Your father's purple heart.

Your father's heart.

It pulsed slightly, like a sleeping beast saving its energy. I gathered it with my bare, bleeding hand and took it out to the back porch. I didn't know if it would work, but I had to try. I didn't think that it would. It wasn't the shell that followed me; it was the heart. But without its shell, could it be destroyed? And without the magical energy that held it closed, could the shell be destroyed as well?

My theory was that the shell had kept it safe, kept it whole, and kept it from destroying itself as it accompanied my father's body over the Pacific Ocean. Pop had to have been under some kind of sedation to get back to us in his chiang-shih state---keeping the heart with him, near him but not vulnerable---disguised as one of the truly dead. If the rest of my theory held, neither he nor his heart would be able to follow me over the water.

I took the broken Ching-Ching to the grill, doused it and the heart with lighter fluid, and tossed a match onto them. To my astonishment, Ching-Ching's remains began to splinter and break, curling in the blue-orange flames. I watched them turn to ash, flaking and falling into the copper bowl below the grate. I smelled the heart cooking, but not burning. I latched the lid of the grill. Purple-black smoke poured through the air vent and I watched it rise, willing myself awake all night to see it.

I stirred around dawn, having fallen asleep in a webbed lawn chair. My back ached and my legs were stiff but I pushed up, took a deep breath, and flipped back the grill's lid. Ching-Ching, the enchanted shell that had protected his heart when his body was weak from its transformation, had incinerated down to its last wiry brown hair. The heart remained, slightly charred but mostly untouched, a material form of his p'ai. There was nothing to be done but to take it with me, taking away its power to follow me and destroying his p'ai, that minor soul that still burned in the shell of his body.

I couldn't decide what kind of container to pack it in. I would definitely check it, but I certainly didn't want anyone to open it in an NSA check or something. I dug out some old sample containers marked "biohazard" with the university logo engraved into the metal lids. I had no idea if it would burst into flame, explode, implode or what. I waited on the porch for my seven a.m. shuttle, nodding off into a dreamless sleep. I slept again while I waited for boarding and all through the flight into Gatwick.

I arrived by train and then walked to the B&B where the university was putting me up until housing opened for me on the islands. The old woman who greeted me talked about her time in America, how much the mountains in the east had reminded her of the bens at home. I asked her if she could make me something simple to eat with a dram on the side. She replied that she loved my accent and I returned the compliment.

After she left, I toppled my largest suitcase and ran the zipper open around its edge. I sat back on my heels and took a deep breath. I ran my fingertip around the container's edge. No use in waiting, I said to myself. I twisted it open, and as I did, realized that it was light. Too light. As though it was empty. But it couldn't be empty.

I peeled away the lid and peered into the blackness. A thin trail of purple-black smoke rose out of the container and fought the air currents to reach me. I pushed back and hit the edge of the mattress. The smoke followed. Instead of scrambling onto the bed, I slouched down, covering my face with both hands. The smoke invaded the tiny spaces between my fingers. I held my breath as best I could but panic made me breathless and dizzy. I gasped and inhaled. The vapor felt thick, almost liquid, passing through my nose, throat, and lungs. It affected me like liquor, numbing my fingertips first. The room grew dark, the air oppressive and scented with burning leaves, fresh earth, and pine; it smelled like home.

The hardwood below me became packed earth choked with roots. I lay on my side, frozen between worlds, unable to connect to either. I reached for where I knew my suitcase had been and felt nothing. Not even what I saw: my mother's trunk.

Distorted and foreign, I heard Sissy speaking. I recognized her voice first and then deciphered what she said.

"I'm absolutely sure he took it with him."

Then our father's voice, clearer, as though he spoke a language I could understand when my sister only spoke it in snatches. "Then that must be what's happening to me. I'm dying. My heart and soul are destroyed and I'm dying."

"Is there anything I can do?"

"For me?" I saw shapes, black on black in the gathering darkness. My sister, leaning over me, touching my hair. Not my hair but my father's. I existed inside him, looking out through his soul like a child watching snow thicken outside a window. Sissy spoke to him and to me in consequence. My head, his head, moved in response to her question.

"Did he know? That by doing this, he would kill you?"

Something coiled around my heart like barbed wire. It released and my mouth, his mouth, whispered, "He knew."

I feel you, his voice said inside my head. You and I will be one until the moment my p'ai leaves this plane.

I shook my head.

His tone was vicious. You knew it would destroy my heart to take it over the water without my body or its case to protect it. You knew, didn't you, you whelp? And now I can't get you to teach you a lesson. And you destroyed your mother's body.

She told me to. I directed my thought back toward the source of the voice in my head.

Liar!

You think she wanted to be a monster? Spawning the demons you needed to feed your twisted soul? She did not. No one would.

My arm reached for my sister's face, still unfocused in the dim light. The hand touched her cheek but I felt nothing. "I'm gettin' weak, baby. Do remember what you need to do?" His voice gathered thick in my throat.

"Everything."

"I need to see you before I fade," he said.

Sissy flipped back the twin latches on the trunk and eased open the lid. Through him, I tried to yell to her to stop, not to open the trunk. She lifted off her heels and eased both arms into the trunk, emerging with the blood-stained bundle I'd stored away over thirty years before. She scooted back and placed the lump at her feet. I felt its pulse, deeper than the pulse I'd felt in the mine. It beat its tattoo through my body, into the depth of my soul, the part my father called p'ai.

Tears gathered in my eyes as I struggled to make the body move. If I could just speak or reach out to grab her arm, I could stop her from seeing it. My father was much too strong for me, holding down my will and allowing me just enough to see what was happening.

"Yes," he said, in a long exhalation. I tried to intrude on it and heard him laughing in my head.

It was formless, a writhing puddle of flesh, covered with a membrane like raw, bloodied egg white. It had no arms, legs or head. Sissy ran both hands over it like it was a mound of dough she meant to form into bread. She leaned over it, her face moving ever closer to the gelatinous heap.

I couldn't stop her. I could only watch, through my father's eyes, exactly what he wanted me to see.

Her fingers splayed around the creature; she lowered her opened mouth onto it. Her hands opened and closed, sometimes digging into it as what seemed to be a kiss melted into a feeding. The pulse deepened within me, quickening and dying as my sister withdrew her mouth from the now-still thing that lay before her on the ground.

Sissy's image became clearer. Her bare arms were streaked with blood, her skin had turned pink from what had been a deathly blue. I saw the long, narrow wounds along her wrists and I knew. He had done to her what he couldn't do to our mother: made her like him.

"Poppa?" Her voice came clear.

"You done fine," he said.

"Don't leave."

"Can't help that now, baby. Your big brother made sure I'd never get to know you." His voice lost strength, and for a moment I thought I'd be able to overtake him and speak to Sissy. Instead, the scene began to fade as he did. I struggled to stay with him. "Before I go, promise me."

"Anything. You know I'd do anything for you Poppa."

"Your brother."

"Yes?"

"Find him."

"I promise."

Sleep well, Peter...

I blinked and found myself lying on the floor of my room. I sat upright and exhaled a thin stream of black vapor that evaporated before my eyes. I snatched my phone out of my pocket and fumbled through my contact list. The seconds it took to connect seemed an eternity. As I waited, my hostess knocked on the door. I heard her set down a tray and leave.

"Did you land?"

"Sissy, are you okay?"

"I'm fine. Why?"

"I need to know that you're okay."

"What's wrong?"

"Tell me you didn't...I mean...I don't know how to say it. I'm just..."

"Calm down, Peter." She didn't sound unusual.

"Where are you?"

"I'm at home."

"You're not out in the Black Mountain woods?"

"Why in the world would I be up there?"

"You swear you're not out in the hollow or at the mine or something?"

"I got the TV on and I'm tryin' to find something to watch. I have a meatloaf in the oven and I'm boilin' potatoes. I haven't been out all day except to get the mail."

I sighed and sat down on the bed. "He must've been messin' with me," I said aloud to myself.

"What?"

"Nothing, nothing. You enjoy your supper. Mine's waiting."

"I was thinking, Peter. Maybe if you're still there around Christmas, I could come and see you. I've never been to Scotland."

"Sure, yeah I have to go, okay? I'm just glad, you know. Let me know how you're doing."

"Enjoy your whisky," she said, a smile in her voice.

"I w...wait. How did you..."

The line went dead. She must've assumed I'd be drinking scotch in Scotland, I said to myself. It's a natural assumption.

It had to have been a dream, I said to myself. Jetlag plus stress. Worrying about the trunk. Vampires, including chiang-shih, don't exist. Simple people trying to make sense of things they can't understand. Everything had been a hallucination. Grief and exhaustion combined.

I stood quickly, too quickly, and the room spun a bit. What was that smell? It smelled like...pine. Seemed to be on my clothes. Must have been some kind of air freshener. I eased my way toward the door. I needed some food and sleep. Some solid sleep without dreaming about vampires and demon babies. I opened the door.

Things came to me backward, like instinct had outrun common sense. I heard doors open and footsteps rush toward me as I lay sprawled across the floor, halfway inside my room. I saw blood on my palm and remembered Sissy's arms. I saw the broken glass and felt alcohol burn my open wound. I struggled to stay present, not to let the panic fill my mind. The spilled scotch streamed over what would have been my dinner, dripping off the edge of the plate. My eyelids grew heavy. I heard someone with a UK accent say, "Bandage his hand," and another said I was fainting and to call 9-9-9. Deeper inside my head, I heard someone laughing -- the younger of my sisters.

Sleep well, Peter.

Beside the broken glass, Ching-Ching's white, still smile, stained with whisky and blood, faded into the gathering blackness.

"Greater of Two Evils"

Steven L. Shrewsbury

Steven L. Shrewsbury lives, works, and writes in central Illinois. His horror novel Hawg was released by Graveside Tales in 2009, and his book Tormenter will come out summer 2009 from Lachesis Publishing. His novel Stronger Than Death will be released by Snuff Books, August 2009. His collaboration with Nate Southard, Bad Magick, will be released late 2009 from Bloodletting Press' Morningstar line. While writing other solo novels, Steven is hard at work on collaborative books with Brian Keene and Maurice Broaddus. He has had over 350 stories published in print or online media. His work can be found in Apex Digest, Legends of the Mountain State 2, Monstrous, and RAW. He maintains a web site at stevenshrewsbury.com

He who fights with monsters might take care lest he thereby become a monster. And if you gaze for long into an abyss,

the abyss gazes also into you.

---Friedrich Nietzsche

Good Christ, it must be true." That statement came from the voice of one of the young men in black overalls. "Blackthorn must really be able to see the past by touching things."

This youth conferred with others who carried my six-foot-ten-inch body out of the cavern in the earth. They lay me in the grass and put a camouflaged backpack under my long obsidian hair as a pillow. The blazing sun over Kentucky kissed my face, and it felt as wonderful as the breath of God.

The other young soldier looked into my eyes and said to his compatriot, "Christ, Bill, he about flipped out down there in the chamber. If he can really see into the past, I wonder what he saw? Better get the agents over here, pronto."

Chamber---an amusing name for the underground realm the United States government covert operations men had found. Always trolling for new subversive bases in America, they appeared stunned that such a large domain existed undiscovered under Harlan County.

"My gloves," I muttered and raised my enormous hands to the sky. "Get me my gloves."

The two soldiers stepped aside. A man dressed all in black held a pair of thin leather gloves. He dropped them on my chest and smiled. A tremor ran over my heart as I tried to bury the horror of my psychometric vision in the chamber, but his eerie face was a cold reminder that my terrors were just beginning.

"Dr. Blackthorn must wear his gloves," the tall agent from the government told the young soldiers, but I am certain he meant for me to hear his words. "God only knows he would go mad if his visions of the past never stopped."

Though moderate for this time of spring in this part of Kentucky, my hands felt like ice as they entered the gloves. I watched the stern features of the agent dismiss the two soldiers with a gesture before kneeling down beside me.

"God Lord, agent Alexander," I gasped, not wanting to tell the truth of what I had seen. "Is this some sort of modern acid-test by you spooks?"

The eyes of the thuggish agent narrowed at me. He wore a quizzical expression, and I knew that my assertion was false. I hoped beyond reason that my vision was a simple horror conjured up by one of the aged Nazi scientists working in one of the famed Areas of the desert.

"We called on you, Elijah, because we know of your talent to see the past with a touch of your hands," agent Alexander stated plainly as he soothed back his long blond hair. "Though this talent is not widely known nor accepted, yet, we know that your ability is real because of the results. I'm sorry to pull you away from the conference with Cardinal Micah at Miskatonic."

I sat up, pushing myself to my backside, and blinked. "I'm sure the good Cardinal will forgive you. That's his job. It's what he does."

"Yes, yes," agent Alexander responded, wanting me to talk. He was hungry for what I had seen. His was a world of science and apparently it had only taken his agency so far. They needed more. They needed me.

"If you called on me, you must've been concerned over what really was in the chamber, at one time."

Agent Alexander rubbed his bearded chin and said, "Our sonic scans and satellite images could only tell us that this symmetrical design existed below the surface. Since there was little in the way of artifacts, we were at a loss. There are enough weirdoes running around this sector of the United States looking for UFOs, red-headed mummies, or whatever they chose to believe in, so we weren't about to announce the existence of this place."

"Nice of you."

Alexander smirked and looked around at the surrounding mountains. "Play your cards right, Doctor, and you may be the one who found it."

I glared at him. "But you must have a suspicion that something bad happened below, no? You must know something---"

Agent Alexander winked and cracked his knuckles. "A good agent doesn't tell everything he knows. Tell me what you saw and I can make everyone happy."

I buried my face in my gloves and sighed.

Good Lord, where would I start?

Down in the belly of this mighty place in the earth, a symmetrical chamber existed, a reverse image of the famed step pyramids of the Yucatan. It reminded me of a Bundt cake mold that my son, Jakob, used for making false mud huts in his sand box.

The climb down the steps of the temple-mold earlier proved disorienting, so I took it slow. Plenty of the soldiers and agents hung around, taking photographs, but they let me walk free. I remembered to count the steps, like in Central America. Just like the Mayans pyramids, there were 364 steps, and the last one made 365. A mighty big coincidence that this total equaled the number of days in a year.

When the agents shined a violet light on the rocky surface, it glittered like glass. I knelt at the bottom of the inverted pyramid and felt a fine dust...but it was not sand, exactly. On my gloves, I saw it glitter...like crushed crystal.

My body trembled as I slipped off my gloves. My hiking boot stepped out of the bottom area as I stepped over near the artifacts. The straight lines of the pyramid outline seemed dented as I scuffed my boots in the glassy substance. I absently wondered if a giant stomped these impressions out with the heel of huge boots.

Agent Alexander and few soldiers stood ten yards above me on the steps. I looked at the artifacts closer and flexed my hands. The fragments appeared to be the remains of a clay bowl and a section of a spear. On the spear appeared to be a chip of some sort, white and fused to the wood...but when I touched it with my flesh, I knew it to be bone.

And the rest was history.

No longer was I Elijah Blackthorn, an American with Apache blood...but my eyes opened into the world of one called Tayanita. My brain grew afire as the information flooded fast and had to be false. The Indians of the area were sometimes Cherokees, Shawnees or some other offshoot, but I was a Quadrule native in what would become Harlan County. My skin was not the clichéd "red Indian" of past tales, nor was it the tan hue of my own. My flesh was nearly Caucasian, perhaps no darker than a Spaniard.

However, I was not in the underground spot where I had picked up the relics. I was outside in warm air. The sun washed over my nude body as I ran with my tribe up a long series of stone steps. Indeed, we scaled a step pyramid identical to those I helped to clear away vines from in the Yucatan. Yet, there was no such object in Harlan County! We gave out a war howl as we rushed up the steps. It was so insane, for the Cherokee were known to be warlike and the Quadrule a peaceful people...

Was I seeing a different time in Tayanita's life? Did he attack those ancient ones in the Yucatan far from what we call Kentucky? Something felt wrong about that assumption. When I looked off the side of the pyramid, the distant lands looked oddly like the ones I just had lain down in, hemmed by rolling mountains.

Impossible! There are no step pyramids in Kentucky!

I knew what Tayanita knew, and that was what drove me to the edge of madness. The rush of information was hard to grasp, but flooded across my mind, ready or not.

Our warriors were almost gone, driven to extinction by invaders from far-off lands. Some believed them to be the very gods form the sky themselves. Tayanita did not accept this and set out to prove this wrong. These folk we fought had no scent of settlers, as history would come to know them.

One of the foreign men came out of the apex of the temple and started down. Behind him appeared more men, but at a slower gait. The charging man unsheathed a gleaming blade, and I roared my defiance.

I raised a long flute-like object to my lips and blew through it. Immediately, a small dart flew from the weapon and lodged in this man's neck. A look of shock spread on his face. He was no tribesman, but a foreign born man as alien to these Quadrules as an animal. He stood, frozen as one of my braves threw a tomahawk, cleaving his skull in half. When he fell, I saw the skin of this man was white. He was Caucasian, but these were not Conquistadors. I saw my reflection on his sword and was taken aback briefly. Surely, this reflection was the true face of the ancient Quadrule, a more civilized, complicated species...but who were these invaders? Their vestments were strange, not Spanish...the era was all wrong.

As I thought my revelatory powers were showing me a mad vision of impossibility, we stopped. For at that moment, the Mage of these interlopers stepped onto the three hundred sixty-fifth stage of the high temple. How did I surmise he was the Mage? He was dressed like a Shriner or a member of a Masonic order. In each hand hung severed heads, tethered down as if spiderwebs grew from his fingers. The warriors with me refused to step forward as the heads chanted! Surely, it was lunacy; surely, it was a trick to fool these primitive men.

Tayanita understood fear, but it did not defeat him. He scoped up the long, heavy sword the white man dropped and charged forward. The Mage was somewhat surprised that I---he---never stopped in horror. The sinister wizard raised both heads, and each severed face howled. The two warriors nearest me gripped their skulls. Blood spurted from the noses of my tribesmen. As they fell, convulsing, I swung the blade, aiming at the heart of the Mage.

The blow should have split the man at the collarbone and continued on into his heart. The blade did cleave in, but stopped in a mesh of metal clothing. Confused but undaunted, Tayanita drew back and chopped the left hand from the Mage. The chanting head tumbled free and headed down the structure, bouncing and leaving wet bloody spots as it went. I brought up the heavy weapon, slicing between the legs of the wizard. A high-pitched squeal echoed out as the crude gelding ceased. I left the blade buried in the Mage's pelvis, gripped him by the metallic shirt, and threw him off the temple.

I ran into the apex of the pyramid, followed by many of my brothers. "Show yourself," I shouted in their old tongue, gripping my tomahawk and the sword. "I shall eat the heart of a god and waste on your bones!"

On a single stone pillar sat an elderly man. His beard was white and his skin shone pale, like the others. Over his face was a mask of glass or crystal. His vestments were strange, but I can recall them now. NO! It is foolishness! On either side of him sat two gleaming orbs of crystal. When this grey man smiled, the globes glowed red. I knew these were not globes and I drew back my arm to throw.

Many of the brothers crumbled and fell. I felt the power in the air that killed them. The hairs on my arms stood and heat washed over me. I froze as I heard a hideous bellow from below us. On the other side of the wizard I heard a thudding, crushing sound. I heard the screams of the lost, and I heard wet, squelching sounds echo.

Summoning every strength of my ancestors, I threw the tomahawk. It struck the wizard between the eyes and split the crystal mask on his face. His head was unharmed and he wore a look of shock. Something told me I had but one chance to act. I ran forward, shouting a war cry...and the man focused on me. The globes at his hands---crystal skulls---glowed scarlet. Something echoed in my skull as I collided with the wizard. The long blade entered his body, but I hardly had the will to drive it through him. I swept him off the slab and we fell down into a deep chasm. Stretching out before us was an empty shell of the temple arising from the floor...and an identical triangle growing deeper into the earth. As we fell, the man cursed me. The sword fell free and the weight of it disappeared from my mind. I could see strange creatures in the shell of the temple, things unnamable; hideous beasts with hairy legs and tentacles around their bodies...with insectoid eyes and heads like toads.

I fell on top of the wizard and felt his body break as I took him down. My air was gone and the world became dim as I looked back up. The crazy beasts stomped all around my damaged body. The ends of their hairy legs terminated in giant hooves, like something on a beast of burden. One picked up the wizard and opened its toadish mouth. Tiny tusks, not unlike those of a warthog, curled out and inserted into the wizard's ribs. They started to suck the outlander into their mouth and his body relaxed like dead leaves.

I tried to raise my flute to fire a dart, but my arms were paralyzed. The creature towered over me, and its hungry roar filled me with terror.

And then it was over.

"It was bad," I muttered to Agent Alexander. Standing up with my hands trembling, I looked at the small cleft in the earth where confused soldiers still peered out.

"Agent Alexander?" one of the soldiers called out. "Better come look at this. Bring the doc if he feels up to it."

Alexander smirked at me and said, "Ready to go back in there, Blackthorn?"

I trembled as I thought of the visions in which I'd seen the beast before. It was an evil, malignant beast conjured from beyond time itself. I'd seen it in Siberia in a vision years ago. An insane doctor at Miskatonic University had tried to clone such a beast in the belly of an elephant and I had stopped him. Now, I saw what had made the local tribe lose their warriors and will to fight.

I looked into the chasm again and murmured, "No wonder so many disappeared. They were meat for the beast."

Just inside the chasm were soldiers carrying a long stone object that almost looked like a crate. They put it down and exhaled, taking the lid off. Alexander swore salty and then said, "Damn! I told you not to move anything!"

The soldier shrugged and said, "This was hidden right by the surface. I cannot believe it was there. Doc, you gotta look at this."

Again, I ventured deeper in the cavern, my breathing heavy as I looked inside the crate of stone. I took a few steps and swept back my mane of black hair. Looking down, I noted again the dents in the temple mold. Not dents, I knew after witnessing the beasts. Hoofprints.

Alexander peered into the crate and looked at me. "Doc? Elijah? Ya wanna explain this to me?"

He reached down and moved a rotting cloth from the top of the crate. Inside was a perfect crystal skull. Beside this were tubular canisters. Alexander held up the cloth and asked, "Wanna explain what you saw? How does a Crusader banner get in a cavern not opened for seven hundred years?"

I climbed out of the chasm and sat down again.

Alexander followed me, but his confrontational attitude was gone. "Doc?"

"It isn't a Crusader banner," I explained. "It is the blouse of a jerkin worn by a member of the Knights Templar. I can tell by the eight-pointed cross over the heart of the garment worn by the man in my vision. Many think it was a Maltese cross, but that was worn by the Hospitaler Knights. The garment is green, because it was a worn by a Templar chaplain. I slew---Tayanita slew---a Templar sergeant at arms on the steps of a temple that is gone from this place."

"You are serious?"

I nodded. "Most of the Templar order was slain or vanished on a fleet of ships."

Alexander gaped at me and then said, "Are you trying to tell me that the Templars were here in Kentucky, seven hundred years ago?"

I rubbed my eyes with gloved fingers. "That is the theory."

The coda to this tale is not satisfying, but it is funny in a broken penis sort of way.

I returned to Miskatonic University, mouth sealed and mind abuzz with the new discoveries. Unsure about how the powers that be would be with their take on history, or if I needed to fight them, thus throwing my nuts in the machinery of history, I went back to my usual routine. In cases like this, I usually heard from the men who had previously contacted me. They would give me a call, drop in to see me, or give me a check and a pat on the head.

Nothing happened. I didn't hear jack, nor did I pass go and get a cookie nor fruitcake arrangement.

Somewhat enraged, but used to the government hand job method, I went about my usual life of searching for ancient relics. However, I did make a few inquires to the agents I met. No words returned. In time, this became annoying, but I knew what I had to do.

After I ferreted out the prow of a Viking vessel rotting in the mud near New Madrid, Missouri, I went over to Harlan County to the site where the new underground base was to be. What I found was aggravating, but par for the hand job course.

The area was fenced off and a few trailers dwelled around the new mound of dirt rising over the spot where the underground chamber existed.

"Landfill?" I said, gaping at the mound of dirt and debris in the picturesque mountains.

One of the workers, truly oblivious of anything under the earth, told me, "Yeah, we got a sanction from the governor to use some cavern underneath to fill in wastes for a good spell. The money to the county is brilliant, and heck, they are bringing in crap from as far a way as Chicago."

I turned away and said, "Talk about a sin against the earth."

"You some sorta tree hugger?"

I shook my long hair from side to side. "No, sir, but I hate it when the earth is raped, her history, her life in any regard."

Unsure of what threat to history or the status quo existed in my vision or their discovery, I left Harlan County and never looked back.

"Harlan Moon"

TL Trevaskis

TL Trevaskis fell in love with Harlan the moment he entered the county. Author of the paranormal romance The Forgotten Disturbed, he resides in Washington State where he tries to come to grips with the wonderful things he experienced in Kentucky. He maintains a writing blog at celticscribblings.blogspot.com.

Night always arrived too soon for Brett "Feral" Branson. It would descend with a deceptively soft landfall, sliding along the bottom of Ivy Hill and pooling in the hollow of the small town's center before rising up the sides of the buildings like a floodtide. The horseshoe of mountains wrapped around Harlan, Kentucky, quickened twilight's descent, making it necessary to turn on house lights before the darkness actually reached the upper floors. The sight would have filled Feral with easy pleasure anywhere or anytime else. But not here. Not now.

Not that he was afraid of the dark. Twenty-three years working in the coal mines had cured him of that. Even after the accident, he had no hesitation about returning to the claustrophobic depths and continued to work until his injury finally made it impossible for him to do so. The mines called to him in his disturbed dreams, and his dreams bled over into the day.

No, it was definitely not the dark he was afraid of.

The landscape didn't help. Occupying a deep, narrow gorge between the Martins and Clover forks of the Cumberland River, Harlan had no trouble remaining isolated from the rest of the world. Coal was everywhere: running down chutes stabbed into the tortured folds of the mountains; scattered like gravel along the streets; lurking behind the resigned gazes of the long-suffering people. Its power to trap the soul emanated from beneath their feet, rising up like heat currents to fill the very air of the small town. That air hung, heavy and breathless, like a wet blanket pressing down on the hearts and minds of a populace that asked nothing more than the chance to make a living from the miles-long shafts crisscrossing the interior of the mountains.

Even though it cost them their lives.

A weight pressed down there, a drawing down of mass and energy that made itself known in the dullness of the colors, as if light had trouble propagating in the humid, sluggish air. The town seemed to sit in a pocket of gravity, as if all the weight of the mountains had rolled down the gorge to settle in a man's soul. It pressed that soul right out of him, down through his feet, where it leeched into the soil and the rock and the coal, until he could no more move away from the place than could the trees. He no longer had the will or the strength or the courage. Over the course of a life hard lived, the miner and the town and the mountain became as one, and no one ever left Harlan alive.

The warped, twisted stone of the mountains, squeezed and thrown about by unimaginable forces, left its mark in the warped and twisted contours of men's minds, their feverish thoughts thrusting through the bedrock of sanity until nothing remained but nightmare visions of black shafts and endless dark.

In that darkness, the terror brooded. And Feral found himself drawn toward it.

Resthaven Cemetery sprawled around him, a broad landscape of rolling green grass rising up suddenly to the east beneath dark pine woods. Harlan County's most famous citizens and oldest families were buried here, their graves sometimes marked with elaborate headstones or graceful sculptures. His own great-grandfather, a volunteer in the Harlan County Battalion and hometown hero of the Civil War, lay under this pleasant surface. Almost every plot held a pot of bright flowers, red and yellow and orange dotting the grounds as far as the eye could see, like balloons at a carnival. Those colors were obscured outside of the flashlight's beam. As its name promised, this was a quiet place. But if Feral's neighbors were to be believed, below its peaceful façade lurked a terror of unspeakable menace.

They were here, tonight, to find out. And to do something about it.

The group had gathered first at the Dairy Hut south of Harlan, about halfway to Grays Knob along Highway 421, for a quick dinner just before dusk. Cars crowded the gravel parking lot surrounding the fast food place, poised like animals at a watering hole. Feral sat in the Formica booth under the fluorescent lamps, their stark bluish light casting too-sharp shadows on the drab white walls, watching Joe Ellis scarf down his Giant Burger. The thing was the size of a catcher's mitt, but the truck driver had already finished one off, and Feral knew he would have no problem downing his second one as well. Joe was the de facto leader of the believers. At age thirty-two, he was just under twenty-four years younger than Feral---young enough to fall for the stories, yet old enough for others to trust in his judgment. Joe had in turn placed that faith in Feral, talking him into this excursion by appealing to his own reputation in the town. Both men had been sports legends in their high school days, and everyone looked up to them for their past exploits, if not for the mundane way their lives had turned out.

That's how Feral remembered it, anyway.

Randy Vaughn sat next to Feral, and next to Randy was his girlfriend, Kathy Taylor. The two twenty-somethings appeared to him to be more interested in each other than in hunting demons in the cemetery. Their bodies were almost indistinguishable, so closely did they press against each other in the booth. Charlene Williams was a surprise. Feral would never have expected the town's high school librarian to get caught up in this kind of nonsense; she seldom attended bake sales. Tonight, fear had washed the color out of her face. That wouldn't help matters. She sat next to Joe, nervously sipping a Coke through a straw.

The others---Harold, Frank, Eliza, and Josh---were all kids from the town's high school, eager to test their fighting skills against what they no doubt imagined would be martial-arts-practicing caricatures like the demons they had seen on "Buffy the Vampire Slayer." They sat in the booth behind the adults, talking animatedly amongst themselves, wolfing down hamburgers and fries, itching to head for the cemetery. Each had given typical teenage excuses to their parents for being out that night.

Feral wasn't sure which troubled him more: his suspicion their parents didn't know where they were, his own culpability in bringing them along, or his growing apprehension, as the sun began to set, of what they might run into.

"We're not going to stay there all night," he said. He spoke to the group as a whole, but to Joe in particular.

"We have to wait long enough for them to come out," Joe said. "At least until midnight."

"How do you know they come out at midnight?"

Joe didn't answer.

Josh said, "Our parents won't mind if we stay out longer."

"Yeah, right," Feral said, turning. "But I will." As Josh opened his mouth to protest, he added, waving a warning finger at him, "And I'm the one who's responsible for y'all."

Josh ducked his head. "Yes, sir."

"So," Charlene asked, "how are we going to go about this?"

Feral felt compelled to look around the diner before answering, to see if anyone nearby was listening. No one paid the group any attention. Keeping his voice low, he said, "I figured we'd break up into three groups, fan out, and kind of keep watch on the graves. Especially the newer ones."

"Three groups of three," Charlene murmured, smiling. "Interesting."

Feral stared at her, uncomprehending.

"It's kind of a Pagan thing," she offered.

"Yeah," he said. "Well, we don't have enough people to cover the whole place. We'll stay within sight of each other, so we can gather quickly if we have to."

"That should be enough," Joe said.

"Considering we're not going to see anything," Feral said, "it's more than enough."

"What does it mean if we don't?" Charlene said. "Not seeing something doesn't mean something isn't there."

Joe laughed. "Don't confuse Feral." He pronounced the nickname as if it had only one syllable. "If nothing shows up by midnight, I think we can pretty much be sure they're not going to. And at least we can sleep peacefully tonight."

"I think it would be better if we find one," Charlene said. "That way we don't have to keep wondering." She glanced quickly at the others, and just as quickly dropped her gaze. "I would rather be sure."

Joe looked squarely at Feral. "Wouldn't we all?"

So there they were, huddled together somewhat self-consciously at Resthaven, seeing nothing out of the ordinary as the darkness gathered around them. Feral set them up in teams, making sure each of the teens had a male adult with them. Since Randy was barely out of his teens himself, Feral placed his group at the main gate; Eliza and Charlene went with him. Kathy had protested this last, but Feral was adamant. He didn't need Randy and Kathy absorbed in each other if something did happen. And this way, he had those he considered to be the weakest in the safest place.

Joe's group consisted of Josh and Harold, who was a linebacker on the football team. Feral was thus left with Kathy and Frank. He felt fairly confident that each team could handle itself well enough. Especially, he kept telling himself, since they wouldn't need to anyway.

As they started out across the grounds, Joe lit a bitumen torch. The flames shot up with a sound like crinkling paper, lighting up an area about fifteen feet in diameter. Feral looked at him with a mixture of surprise and consternation.

"Joe," he said, "what the hell d'you think you're doing?"

"Gotta see somehow."

"Don't you think you're going to scare the vampires off?"

"Vamps ain't afraid of fire." He fingered the huge silver crucifix that dangled on a chain around his neck. It glinted with a sinister light.

Feral sighed, resigned. "Let's go," he said.

He had chosen the eastern side of the cemetery for his team, the side bordered by thick stands of pine lining the crest of a hill. The hill made a good landmark, a darker blotch against the night sky. Directly across from it, in the center of the graveyard, stood a gazebo, their rendezvous point. The three groups checked their flashlights, turned on their cell phone vibrators, hefted their clubs, and set off in their appointed directions, talking softly amongst themselves. The whole thing would have reminded Feral of his days walking point in Vietnam had it not all been so utterly ludicrous.

The cemetery was characteristically quiet, no more ominous than could be expected for a harbor of the dead after dark. A light mist drifted down from the stand of pines, but the full moon peered out from behind broken clouds, casting its silken web across the landscape. Even so, Feral preferred to leave his flashlight turned on. Moonlit shadows had a way of playing with a man's perceptions, which in turn put his fears on hair-trigger overload. The flashlight cut through a lot of illusions. He was embarrassed to admit to himself that he wouldn't have minded having Joe's torch after all. That torch could be seen, comedic in its bouncing among the gravestones, across the cemetery from where Feral's team meandered. Feral shook his head at the sight.

Then he stopped and turned, facing his little group. "Okay," he said, trying to maintain some semblance of authority. "This is our station. Let's form a circle so that we can look out in all directions. We don't want anything escaping our attention."

"Or sneaking up on us," Frank said.

"Right. Or sneaking up on us."

Feral felt foolish, standing there with his back to the others. The silence among them quickly became awkward. But he really didn't know what to say. He tried instead to concentrate, peering into the darkness, looking for---what, exactly? Moving shadows, he supposed. Glaring yellow or red eyes. Bela Lugosi, maybe.

It was impossible to tell how long they stood like that. To Feral, it seemed like forever. The moon peered over his shoulder, witness to his growing unease.

"It's getting cold." Kathy's voice, though hushed, reverberated in the silence.

"Yeah," Feral said, surreptitiously pressing his limbs against his body. "Kinda wish I'd brought my gloves."

"Hard to wield a stake with gloves on," Frank said, chuckling.

"I suppose," Feral said. He didn't bother to mention the stakes he was carrying. Not that he was scared of the dark.

He turned to peer up at the hill behind him, an inkblot spilling out of the night sky. The earlier clouds had moved on toward the southern horizon, leaving the moon above the hillside free and round and untouched. The moon challenged him. He couldn't bear to look for long at its face. Still, he felt silly holding a flashlight in such a bright landscape, when none of the others had theirs on. After a moment's hesitation, in which he somehow had trouble getting his thumb to move, he switched the flashlight off.

No sooner had he done this when a commotion arose across the cemetery. Whipping back around to face the noise, he fumbled with the flashlight, almost dropping it. At last he got it switched on. But its beam didn't penetrate far enough to illuminate the headstones twenty feet in front of him, let alone the gazebo, over a football field away. Fully embarrassed, he switched the useless light off again.

"What was that?" Kathy's voice was a gasp.

Feral motioned for her to keep quiet. The three of them strained their attention into the interior of the cemetery, hoping to make out what was going on. They could hear voices, but the rise of ground past the gazebo muffled the sounds, with only the odd shout breaking through. The glow of the torch Joe carried bobbed along the crest of the rise. Feral couldn't determine what its movement indicated.

"Joe!" he called out at last. He was careful to keep any note of urgency out of his voice.

No answer came, although the torchlight appeared to flare more brightly for a moment. The group continued to watch, listening intently. The silence became all there was in the world.

A sharp report made Feral jump. But as soon as he heard it, he recognized the source of the noise. From beyond the rise, where Joe's team was patrolling, a dog had barked.

Feral released a breath he hadn't realized he was holding. He also realized he was sweating. He looked at Kathy and Frank, hoping they hadn't noticed his fear.

"Let's go," he said.

They traipsed across the grounds, careful to skirt the grave mounds. Many of these were marked with small, low headstones, dangerous in the dark. It took them several minutes to reach the gazebo. They stood at the top of the rise for a moment, looking down into the shallow bowl where Joe, Eliza, and Harold played with a small terrier. Feral shook his head and moved to join them.

"Look what we found!" Eliza said, laughing. The dog jumped at her outstretched hands, barking and growling.

"It's probably all we're going to find," Feral said, relief in his voice.

"Isn't it cute?"

"Yeah, it's cute. But it isn't exactly dangerous." Feral raised his hands. "I say we call it a night."

"Are you all right?" Joe said.

"Yeah. Nothing's going to happen here. I'm headed back."

Joe peered at him intensely. Slowly, he nodded. "Yeah, okay. Full moon's better for werewolves, anyway." He wrestled playfully with the terrier, which was yapping and snapping and circling among them. "Right, boy? Wolves like you, eh?" He laughed.

The dog, crouching in a ready stance, stared up at Feral with a knowing glare.

Feral awoke groggy and restless the next morning. His knee was stiff, the result of clambering around in the cold the night before. Damn fool, he thought. He wasn't sure at whom the epithet was directed.

The midmorning air was reasonably warm, so he soon found himself ambling aimlessly along Mound Street. Named to commemorate the old Amerindian burial ground on which the town was built, the street divided the downtown business district from the elegant residential section of Ivy Hill. Brick and colonnades were the order on the north side. The sun cast long westward shadows under the trees, although Mound was open to the sky. Feral luxuriated in the heat flowing through his body, loosening the ligaments in his damaged knee.

He hoped the night's excursion had satisfied the group's vampire lust sufficiently to preclude another attempt. He didn't relish spending any more of his nights in such fruitless adventure. This whole vampire scare was utterly ridiculous, in his opinion.

And yet...there was certainly something going on.

He looked up at the ridgeline of Ivy Hill, rising on his left some two hundred feet above his head. Behind that skyline, along the next ridge beyond the hollow, it had long been rumored a "family" of vampires congregated. This rumor had persisted over most of his life, but Feral had never really put any stock in it. Before now. Of course, he wouldn't put it past the rich to practice any eccentricity, and Coldiron Heights was the wealthy section of town. Money made for some strange behavior.

But maybe not that strange.

Man, he thought. This stuff is starting to get to me now.

He was almost to the corner of South Williams Street, the last chance to turn back up the slope toward the town center before taking the switchbacks that wound their way up Ivy Hill. He could see the elementary school, heavy and rectangular like the red blocks that made up its structure, looming on the far side of the street. He slowed, wondering if he should continue up or down. As he considered this, standing in front of the yellow clapboard façade of the Rich Funeral Home, he suddenly jumped at the sound of approaching footsteps behind him. He hadn't realized he wasn't alone on the street.

He also hadn't realized he was so nervous.

"Joe," he said, turning. "Damn, man, don't do that."

"Feral," Joe said, his voice so low the name came out like a growl. "I think you need to come see this."

"What is it?"

Joe shook his head. "You really need to look at it."

Feral sighed. "Not even a 'good morning' first?"

"Come on." Joe began walking off in the direction he'd come along Mound. He glanced over his shoulder. "Good morning."

Feral followed him.

"How'd you know where I was, anyway?"

"You was looking the other way when you passed by my street."

Up at Ivy Hill, Feral thought. And Coldiron Heights. At the vampires.

They turned back one block, then headed south on Third Street, a neighborhood of small, well-kept houses under spare, graceful shade trees. Feral could see a group gathered on the sidewalk up ahead, in front of Joe's place. The looks on their faces made his heart squeeze in his chest. Their voices were subdued as he approached, greeting him in chorus.

"Morning, everyone," he said. "Don't any of you guys ever sleep?"

"Not very well," Charlene said, taking his question seriously. "I've been having nightmares."

"And it's no wonder," Joe said. "Take a look at this."

The group parted as Feral stepped up. In the gutter lay the little terrier from the night before, its throat ripped out.

"Jesus," Feral said.

"Been laying here all night, by the looks of it," Joe said.

Feral shook his head. "That's just wrong."

"So what do you think did it?" Kathy said. Her voice quavered; she seemed more anxious this morning than she had in the cemetery.

Maybe she was beginning to believe, Feral thought hopelessly. "Coyote, maybe?" he suggested.

"Nah," Joe said. "Coyote'd eat the whole thing."

"Dogfight?" said Randy.

Feral nodded. "That would make sense."

"Except," Joe pointed out, "this here dog shows no sign of having been in a fight. His throat was just tore clean out. Nothing else on him was touched."

Feral grunted. "That is kind of weird."

"Damned straight it's weird. It's a sign."

Feral sighed. He stared at the carcass. Somehow the horror of it seemed even more grotesque in the clear morning sunlight. His stomach turned. This wasn't the sort of thing he needed before breakfast. "A sign of what, exactly?"

"I don't know. Maybe we're too close. Something's trying to warn us."

"To keep us from wandering around the graveyard? Do you know how stupid that even sounds, Joe?"

"All I know is, there ain't no blood in the gutter."

Feral looked again. Joe was right. There was a small stain on the concrete from some residual dripping, but otherwise the street was clean.

"So the dog didn't die here." He hated having to admit it.

"Nope. Someone killed it, then brought it here afterward. Put it right in front of my house."

Jesus, Feral thought.

Joe said, "This is the dog from the cemetery last night."

"Are you sure?"

Joe glared at him. "It's the damn dog, Feral."

Feral nodded. There was no use arguing the point. Besides, he was pretty sure Joe was right.

"So now what?" he said.

"We should bury it," Eliza said. She wiped away a tear.

"Or at least tell the owner," Frank said. "Anyone know whose it is?"

No one did.

"Shouldn't we report it?" Harold said. "I mean, this is pretty scary."

"Yeah," Feral said. "Animal control can take care of it."

Harold pulled out his cell phone and moved off to make the call.

"This has to be stopped," Joe said.

"Joe, we don't even know what happened."

"Well," Randy said, "we have to do something."

"I wonder," Charlene said, "what it was doing in the cemetery."

"Hunting," Joe said. At Feral's glare, he pointed at the dead dog. "There's dirt on his front paws. He's been digging." He squinted up at Ivy Hill. "We should've stayed last night."

"And done what, Joe?" Feral said. "Do you really think that, after we left, some vampire broke out of a grave, chased down this dog, bit off its throat, walked the four miles here, dropped it in the gutter, and then went back? Or that we could've stopped him even if he did?"

Joe didn't remove his gaze from the tree-studded hill.

"One way to find out," he said.

And so once again Feral found himself, against his better judgment, in Resthaven Cemetery.

The place looked less sinister in the daylight, as most places do. But not all, he decided. Southeastern Kentucky Baptist Hospital, out in Corbin, was downright creepy. Boarded up now, awaiting the order to be torn down, the red brick building exuded an otherworldly horror. The place was just wrong. Feral had no trouble believing the stories he'd heard of demented patients throwing themselves through what used to be plate glass windows on its façade. Or any other bizarre rumor about the place. Even today, in full direct sunlight, a misbegotten visitor could still all but hear the screams emanating from its empty black heart. No one tarried on its misshapen grounds for long.

Considering such things, he wondered how long it would be before he embraced Joe's assertions about vampires invading Harlan.

Something just was not right about this county, he concluded.

"Where do we even start?" he asked to the group in general, and Joe in particular.

Joe considered for a moment. "Prob'ly over where we found the dog," he said, gesturing toward the gazebo.

They headed there. Feral glanced around at the group surrounding him as they walked. It appeared he was now the only one who doubted. Everyone else wore looks of stricken determination on their faces. He felt defeated.

Am I the only sane person left in Harlan? he wondered. And immediately, he had to doubt his own sanity as well. After all, wasn't he there with them?

They clambered down the small rise to where Joe's group had encountered the terrier the night before, just beyond the gazebo. Everything seemed normal there.

"Now what?" Feral said.

Joe scrutinized the area, finally settling on a course. "Over there," he said.

Feral followed dutifully. But as it turned out, Joe knew what he was doing. As they crossed the small bowl of grass to its opposite side, they spotted a disturbed piece of ground off to their right. Approaching it, they saw that it was a newly dug-up grave.

Several of the women gasped.

"It's okay," Joe said. "Nothing can hurt us now."

Feral stared at the broken earth. The hole was considerable, given the hardness of the soil. Loose dirt was piled haphazardly around the indentation, indicating that whatever---or whoever---had dug it had been in a hurry. If that something had indeed been the small terrier of the night before---the dog that was now lying dead in the gutter in front of Joe's house---then its efforts had been determined. The hole lay at least two feet deep, and more than that in diameter.

"This doesn't look right," he said.

"Dog was hunting," Joe said.

Feral shook his head.

"Why would a dog dig into a grave?" Charlene asked.

"Damned strange," Feral said. He stepped up to the grave and squatted down to look more closely at it. He motioned with his hands as he spoke. "Look at the dirt around this hole. It's all over the place. When a dog digs, he uses his front paws to push dirt behind him. Most of it ends up as a single pile on one end of the hole."

Charlene's eyes widened. "You're right," she said. "What does that mean?"

"Looks like," Joe answered for Feral, "something broke its way out."

"Except," Feral jumped in, with a warning glance at Joe, "this hole doesn't go all the way down into the grave. Unless of course the zombie reburied it, tried to cover his tracks."

Joe nodded. "That's possible."

"I was joking, Joe."

"I know. So was I. Thing is, we don't really know how one of these creatures is going to behave. They might do anything."

"Which is just another way of saying they might do nothing. Of saying they don't exist." Feral stood up. "I say we consider this whole thing to be the work of a wild animal of some sort. Coyote, cat or something. That's the only logical explanation, the only one that fits the facts."

The others assented, relieved to have such a normal explanation.

Except, of course, for Joe. He glanced repeatedly over his shoulder as the group moved off toward the gate, staring at the hole as if he fully expected a demon to rip its way out of the remaining ground and come charging after him.

Feral rode with Joe back to his place. About halfway there, he felt a sudden kind of snap in his mind. He looked out of the car window, watching the passing landscape as though he had never really seen it before. Joe gave him a sidelong look, relief washing over his face. But that relief was immediately replaced by his earlier look of grim anxiety.

Arriving at Joe's house, they stood on the driveway for a few minutes, discussing the morning's events. As they talked, Feral gazed at the street. The gutter, he noticed, was empty. The dog was gone.

"Animal control must've come by," Feral said.

"How's that?"

Feral didn't answer. He stood staring at the gutter, a coldness rising in his chest. Something didn't seem right. Finally, it dawned on him.

"There's no bloodstain," he said.

"Bloodstain?" Joe said. "What the hell are you talking about?"

"Maybe animal control cleaned it up."

Joe studied his friend, a mixture of fear, sadness and sympathy on his face. At last, he said gently, "Prob'ly."

Feral nodded, deep in thought.

Feral tossed and turned that night for several hours. The day's venture had been a fizzle, of course, just as he had expected it to be. Expectations had a way of sneaking up on a man, revealing themselves at times when he wasn't looking for them. That was why he wasn't sleeping. Because he expected to have nightmares. Because what didn't show up in a man's life always showed up in his dreams.

In his dreams, he hung suspended over a deep mine shaft that dropped beneath him into the unimaginable depths of Earth. Gravity tugged at his body, pulling him on every side, so that he had no sense of up-and-down, left-and-right; there was only down, down in every direction. An infinite plunge opened before him, a horror-filled maw. And it was waiting for him.

That horror had driven him to the cemetery. A connection lay between them, the shaft and the grave, a connection of death he knew was bleeding him dry. No, it wasn't the dark he was afraid of. It was the night itself, the night that lay within him like a well in his soul, waiting to engulf him in its murky, watery depths, pressing the black air out of his lungs until he awoke screaming into the cold-soaked sheets, night after night after night.

Tonight he would not sleep. Tonight he would not scream. Tonight, he decided, it would all end.

The mine shaft gaped before him, a hole in the earth, a hole right through the earth, never ending, its emptiness textured, gritty with coal dust and dried blood and the cobwebs of terrified men's screams. Those screams echoed in his head, where they mingled internally with his own to stand as a warning, to keep him from entering. Yet somehow, though it took all of his courage to do so, enter he would. He had no choice.

This mine had not been worked for decades. It had been shut down shortly after Feral's injury. For some reason, though, it had never been shut up; its entrance lay open like a wounded mouth, at once repulsive and fascinating. Perhaps the company had been afraid to board it up, afraid to block it off. Afraid of angering whatever had scared them out of it.

The coal seam had run deep, so this shaft dropped into the earth at a steep angle, diving directly for the root of the ridge running off of Grays Knob. They'd dug only a quarter mile when they'd run into an obstacle, something they couldn't get through. The rock was no problem for the machines; the problem was no one wanted to operate them.

The men abandoned the borers and abandoned the shaft. Then the company abandoned the men.

Those men had poured forth from the maw of the shaft like living dead. Trembling with shock, gibbering and screaming, their faces chalk white under the black coal dust; they were taken for medical treatment to the nearby Appalachian Regional Hospital. All were admitted for psychiatric evaluation. Some never were released. Several of them died within a few years. Most of the released never worked a mine again. The company quietly issued them their pensions under the condition that they never speak of the incident to anyone. The men were only too happy to oblige, as none of them even wanted to think about it. Their names were taken off the rolls; the company denied to the outside public that they had ever even worked there. The names of those who died did not appear on the miners' memorial outside the courthouse.

Another mining company bought the operation shortly thereafter, and the shaft running under Grays Knob was closed, never to be mentioned again by anyone.

Feral stood at the entrance, staring into the abyss. The opening seemed to waver in the moonlight, a black ripple in the black night, a portal into another dimension. He checked the equipment he had brought with him: his lamped hardhat, a flashlight, a pickaxe. He had also brought along a small toolkit. Holding his breath, he took his first step into the source of his madness.

Only a few feet inside he encountered the rail tug once used to haul men and equipment up and down the shaft. The company had left everything behind, choosing to write off the cost of the lost equipment rather than attempt to salvage it. Maneuvering around the loose rocks to the front of the tug, he was pleased to confirm that what he had hoped to find was actually there: the flux magnetometer. The instrument was used to determine direction and depth in the complex set of shafts that made up most mines. He flipped the power switch and the small box---about the size of a large candy bar---lit up. He smiled through the grimness of his fear. He shut the machine off again and used the tools from the kit to disconnect it, along with its attached voltmeter, from the tug. He wouldn't need the gyroscope, so he left that. He carefully hung the devices on the utility belt at his waist and turned them on once again. The voltmeter immediately registered a nominal reading. He nodded to himself. He was ready.

As ready as he was going to get.

He entered the mine, the light from his hat bouncing in front of him, its movement pronounced by his limp. The darkness closed in around him, but his determination kept it at bay. He walked as steadfastly as he could, trying not to go weak in the knees, glancing occasionally at the magnetometer to judge his progress. It was impossible to tell how far he had walked otherwise; it seemed as though he had been on this journey his entire life. The world quickly collapsed in his consciousness to the black shaft, the light piercing its depths in a tight beam, and the wooden posts along the walls holding it all together.

Holding the shadows close to him.

Those shadows held demons. Feral swore he could see red eyes glaring at him out of the niches in the rock, bared fangs glowing in the reflected light. He tried not to think of them, tried to will them out of his mind, out of existence. But they accosted him at every step, making him flinch and sometimes cry out. Still, they made no real move to stop him, so he made his way in, deeper and deeper, lower and lower.

The first wrenching of his gut corresponded with the first spike of the voltmeter. A wave of nausea washed over him, a gentle lapping that was more portent than malady. He pushed through it. But almost immediately another wave pushed up from the depths, from the belly of the Knob, to twist his own belly and constrict his throat. He wanted to turn and run, but he refused the urge, refused the demand of his mind that he escape while he could. He had to continue downward, and so he did. Another wave rushed over him, doubling him over and forcing his breath into tight gasps, his stomach cramping. The fear rose up within him with every such wave, but still he pushed onward. Reaching the end of the tunnel was the whole point of his being there.

The whole point, he now suspected, of his being at all.

The voltmeter spiked erratically. With every spike, the demons howled louder.

The fear and the nausea and the burden, the whole weight of the mountain pressing on his back, caused him to stoop; it was, he supposed, too much to ask that he might approach his end standing upright like a man. By the time he reached blank rock, he was virtually crawling.

The magnetometer needle was pegged.

He stood for a few minutes, leaning against the wall, struggling to calm himself. Moving quickly, before he lost his will altogether, he switched on the flashlight and wedged it into the rocks so it shined on the end of the tunnel. The pickaxe was a dead weight in his trembling hands, but he managed to swing it, nonetheless. Its arc over his head was his flight to freedom. He was surprised at how easily it crumbled the rock, surprised at how much strength he still had. He swung with the determination of a desperate man, again and again and again. With each swing, the demons behind him yelled and mocked and laughed. And with each swing, the dull grey spike a blur in the focused light, the rock of the shaft gave way, until at last he broke through.

The sudden hole in the wall, with its gentle blast of cold air in his face, so astounded him that he stood for a moment, staring at it, unable to believe in its reality.

A soft bluish light emanated from it.

The demons fell silent.

He dropped the pick and stepped up to the hole. Drawing a deep breath, he put his face to the portal and looked through it.

The saucer filled most of the interior cavern. Dull grey-black, with no markings on it at all, it hummed with energy at a frequency just below audible range. A thin electric blue light danced along its perfectly smooth surface, oscillating with the beat of the hum. The craft glowed like the moon. Feral felt the bottom drop out of his stomach, and the dread dropped with it. A great laughter, hysterical and uncontrollable, engulfed him as his memories came flooding back. His memories of what had happened here, in this mineshaft, to those lost miners. To what had happened to him. He had always known he was not crazy, had always known this ship existed. Since that day, so many years ago, the day of his injury, the day the vampires had arrived in Harlan.

A movement caught his eye, a swift darkness against the grey of the ship. It moved about and around the craft, quickly scurrying up to the hole where Feral stood watching. He couldn't make out its shape or features in the backlit dark. It stepped up to the wall and pressed its face to the hole.

And Feral felt his mind melt.

"So how did you know where to find him, anyway?" Dr. Peterson asked.

"He said something about going back to the shaft," Joe said. "The shaft where he was injured."

Peterson looked up from the notebook where he had been writing. "He wasn't injured in the mine," he said. "He was evaluated here with the others and kept over for a few weeks. But he was eventually released pretty much with a clean bill of health."

"Yeah, I know. It's weird. He seemed pretty convinced he had hurt his knee somehow. Was even walking with a limp."

"Oh? How long had he been doing that?"

"Last couple of months, I guess. I once caught him limping on the other one." Joe paused, wondering how much he should say. But his friend was in trouble, and he was determined to help him if he could. "That's not the damnedest part, though," he said at last. "Around the same time, he started talking about weird stuff. Vampires, and grave robbing, and mutilated animals. He even took some of us out to Resthaven one day, to show us."

"And?"

Joe swallowed hard. "There was nothing there, of course."

"Of course."

There was more to tell.

"He also," Joe started to say, then stopped. This will sound crazy, he thought. Like I'm crazy. But Peterson was looking at him, waiting, so he continued, "He also seemed to be always talking to a crowd. Like there was others around, even when there wasn't."

Peterson nodded. "Pretty classic symptoms," he said.

"Of what, Doc?"

Peterson cleared his throat, studying Joe intently. "Paranoid schizophrenia," he said.

Joe dropped his gaze.

Peterson continued, "His is an interesting case. I don't think I've ever seen a patient before who fantasized a normal existence, while living in a fantasy. His inner story put him in the role of the skeptic, with you--and apparently all of us--as the lunatic. Whatever happened in that mine all those years ago, it certainly was traumatic."

Joe had no idea of what to make of this. He swallowed hard. His voice choked when he spoke.

"Can I see him?"

Peterson considered. "Maybe for a minute."

He led Joe to the ward where Feral was under observation. Joe had found him the previous week, collapsed at the mouth of the old Grays Knob mine, weeping and babbling something about demons, about the moon in the earth. He had quickly brought him here to Harlan ARH. The doctor stepped aside as they reached the room, and Joe, after a moment's hesitation, peered in through the laminated glass window.

Feral was sitting on the bed against the far wall. He seemed calm. Joe breathed a sigh of relief; he wasn't really sure what he had expected to find. He stood there for some time, his heart welling over for his friend, the broken man sitting there so forlornly.

At last he could bear no more. He started to turn from the door when a movement caught his eye, and he stepped back up to the window. For a moment---but only for a moment---he thought he saw two figures standing next to Feral. They were roughly humanoid in shape, with grey skin and bulbous heads. They had placed their long, insect-like fingers on Feral's forehead and seemed to be communicating with him. One of them turned to look at Joe with red, glaring eyes. It spread its lipless mouth into a grin, revealing glowing white fangs.

As Joe gasped in shock, Feral looked up and locked his gaze onto him. What Joe saw in those eyes caused his blood to run cold. Feral, sucking in Joe's fear, opened his mouth and laughed.

"The Witch of Black Mountain"

Alethea Kontis

New York Times bestselling author Alethea Kontis is a princess, a goddess, a force of nature, and a mess. The sister of a famous jewelry designer and granddaughter of an infamous pirate, Alethea has profited from screwing up the alphabet, organizing Sherrilyn Kenyon's Dark-Hunter universe, sharing all her family's deepest, darkest secrets, and making little girls cry. She makes the best baklava you've ever tasted and sleeps with a teddy bear named Charlie. Alethea has lived in Murfreesboro, Tennessee, for over ten years now, and is trying to adjust to her recent coronation as Queen of New Tornado Alley. Her web site can be found at aletheakontis.com.

Letting Anthony Gentry get her pregnant was the stupidest thing Ennica Jamison had ever done. Hiking to the summit of Black Mountain to see a witch was the second. It had been a warm November afternoon when she'd left her stolen horse on the path at the base of the mountain; now it was cold and dusk. She placed a foot on the first step of the abandoned lookout tower. She'd been walking for hours, slow but determined, sprinkling what sanity she had left behind her like breadcrumbs in the dirt. She grasped the rusted orange railing firmly with a gloved hand. One last thing left to climb. One last moment before she discovered just how stupid she really was.

She stomped her boots hard on the metal to make sure there was no ice; each step brought one more inescapable thought along with it. Every time she closed her eyes, she saw herself stabbing Anthony in the heart---the heart he didn't have---so she tried not to close her eyes, but her mind still raced against her will. How he and that bitch Tanya must have laughed at her; how they must be laughing at her still. Her father would be mad that she'd taken the horse out overnight, but he'd be furious when he found out he was going to be a grandfather.

It didn't have to be a knife. Maybe a spear, like in the ancient days of Spartans and honor. Anthony wouldn't have survived long in that world. The dream of his blood pooled in her hands, all his life and all his lies drained away. No. Concentrate on something else. One more step.

She was high enough now to see where the elevation benchmark disc lay, the official plaque set in stone by the Geodetic survey crew back in the fifties. She had passed it fifty yards or so back and wondered if she'd been kin to anyone on that team. Probably. Over four thousand feet up...and two more steps.

Her panting breath froze her tongue, the fog before her reminding her of the surreally beautiful ice on the rock face a mile or so back. If she was ever crazy enough to come back this way, she'd have to bring a camera. If she survived. Three more steps. The tower creaked and shivered. It might have been her shivering.

It had been a girl in the schoolyard who had told Ennica about the lookout tower. "But built to look out for what?" she'd asked rhetorically, chewing on the end of one of her ribboned chestnut plaits. "I'll tell you what. My nanna says if you climb to the top of that tower, it'll show you where the witch lives." The Witch of Black Mountain, the dark fairy long ago cast out of the magic circle. The one who grants wishes and eats babies and who'll come and suck your soul if you don't put your toys away before supper.

Supper. Ennica couldn't remember if she had stopped for supper. It didn't matter. One final step, and she was at the top. She looked out over the clearing, scanned the treetops.

A lone crow drifted in and out of the mist on the early evening currents. Other than that, she saw nothing.

Ennica took a deep breath, sucking in more cold than oxygen, and blew out another cloud of fog. She wasn't surprised; deep down she'd known this was a one-way trip. Supplies would have just slowed her down. Her whole body was tired. She just didn't have the strength to walk anymore. They'd find her huddled at the base of the tower, peacefully frozen in her sleep. Or perhaps she'd just stay right here up at the top, the closest she'd ever be to the stars in this life. Spiritual, almost.

A sob escaped her; her chest felt like a mason jar about to explode. Her cry echoed over the quiescent landscape, unanswered by nightingale or Chuck Will's Widow or that ephemeral crow. Even the cicadas didn't dare infest this high. The night was a tomb. Fitting, really. She felt tears eke out and freeze on her lashes. She refused to be a wimp, especially if she was the only one around to witness it, so she blinked them away. Blink.

Anthony. Stabbed. Blood. Relief.

Ennica gasped and opened her eyes again. She wished she was brave enough to go through with something like that, brave enough to save the world from one more lying, cheating, thieving bastard. Hell, she couldn't even save herself. If she'd have lived through this, her kid would have been a bastard too. She didn't mind.

She put a hand on her still-flat belly. Hopefully it was warmer in there. Without closing her eyes, Ennica imagined she was sitting in front of a nice, warm fire. It smelled of cedar and coal and hand-me-down quilts. It blurred her vision and burned her eyes. She rubbed them, looking out over the mountaintop.

She wasn't dreaming.

Ennica followed the smoke trail back to its origin, and could just barely make out the silhouette of a rooftop among the trees. She memorized its location in relation to the tower before scrambling down, snatching her pack up, and hightailing it to the front door. She pulled off her gloves; her skin was so dry when she rapped on the door that her knuckles bled.

"Yes?" the soft female voice was followed by the furious flapping of wings and the cackle of a crow.

"I'm looking for the w---" Ennica stopped herself. "Witch" didn't quite seem the polite term. "---the dark fairy," she finished.

"Fairies. Bah," said the woman. "Blanton Forest is about four leagues west. If you want romance, you're on the wrong mountain."

"Romance got me into this," Ennica called through the door. "Now all I want's revenge." There was no reply. Ennica counted her heartbeats: One. Two. Three. Four. Five. When she got to a hundred she'd...she'd what, leave? She had nowhere to be. Here on this porch seemed as good a place to freeze to death as any.

She heard rattling, and then the door opened a crack. "Come in."

The cabin was small---only one room---with no furniture to speak of apart from a simple table and two chairs beside a squat black stove. Ennica fell to her knees before it, suddenly aware of how cold she was and exactly how close to death she'd come already. The fire smelled of coal, wood smoke, apple pie, and lilacs. There. It was official; she'd lost her mind. But she'd suspected that the minute that low-down dirty rotten liar had kissed her.

Lord bless the genius who one day invented the soap that could wash memories like that out of her mind.

"Sit," said the witch. She had taken one of the chairs at the table, the crow perched on her shoulder. Before the other chair sat a plain white teacup filled with water. Ennica pulled herself up into the chair and cradled the cup in her icy fingers.

"What's this?" she asked.

"Whatever you want it to be," said the witch. The crow agreed.

Ennica nodded and took a sip. What hit her tongue was not water but hot chocolate---not the weak, powdery stuff she'd drunk as a kid but honest-to-goodness cocoa, the thick, molten creaminess that rich people had for breakfast in all those books she liked to read. See, baby? she said to her womb. This is what you deserve in life. Not too bitter; not too sweet. It tasted elegant and beautiful, and as it coursed through her veins it calmed her nerves and warmed her bones, lulling her into a sense of comfort. She closed her eyes...

...and saw Anthony and Tanya, naked, passionately devouring one another. She mentally skewered them together with one thrust of her spear and shoved the vision aside. Damn them both. They were not going to ruin her chocolate.

Bravery reinforced, she opened her eyes. She'd doodled her fair share of witches on her notes in class; old and wizened and warty, sultry and buxom and irresistible. The woman stroking the silky coal-black feathers of the crow didn't look anything like them. She wasn't young or old. Her features and coloring were the averagest of average. She could have been any woman on the street. She could have been the clerk at the grocer's. For that matter, she could have been kin---she looked quite a bit like her cousin Jessica. Ennica sipped her magical chocolate again. "I'm Ennica," she said finally.

The witch raised her eyebrows. "Interesting."

"I was named after my grandmother, Eunice," Ennica explained. "The nurse who filled out the birth certificate had terrible handwriting." Her words sounded stupid even as she was saying them. Nice, Ennica. Now maybe we can chat about the weather and our favorite music and try on each other's clothes. "Are you really a witch?" Oh, well done there, idiot.

The witch smiled.

"Sorry. I'm just...I mean, I meant..."

"Don't apologize," said the witch. "So few people ask the right question. For all your self-loathing, you're really quite perceptive."

Right. If she was so perceptive, she would have known that Anthony had never loved her.

"That's exactly what I'm talking about," said the witch, reading her mind. "Now cut it out and drink your chocolate."

She'd been raised to respect her elders...which she figured might as well include anybody who might have the power to turn water into chocolate. Ennica did as she was told.

"This is Mr. Hue," the witch introduced the crow, and it lowered its head to Ennica.

"Nice to meet you, Mr. Hue."

"To answer your question: No. We were here before witches were witches and words were words and the world was the world. Not Mr. Hue, of course, but the rest of us. We have been called the Wild Things, the Wrong Ones, the Widdershins, the Damps. We were the afterbirth; after Chaos came Order. We are the facilitators of that utter perfection."

"Chaos," Ennica repeated. "You're talking 'beginning of the universe' type stuff."

"A never-ending series of storms in a never-ending line of teacups. Life is Chaos. So it follows that we are Death." The witch pet the crow reverently. "He was once a majestic bird with rainbow plumage, Mr. Hue was. His first taste of carrion flesh turned him black. He is much more elegant now, don't you think?" She nuzzled his sharp beak with her nose. "Even more majestic."

The chocolate in her mouth turned to dirt, and Ennica forced herself to swallow. She had already welcomed insanity, or she would have never climbed this mountain in the first place. "Are you evil?"

"We are evil to good as night is to day and the end is to the beginning. We are solace and silence and solitude. We drew blueprints in the stars and fashioned this world from the dust, and we return all that thrives here to it. We complete the circle."

"By killing people."

"By bringing order to chaos."

"So...by killing people."

The witch shrugged. "As you wish."

"What do you get out of it? Power? Joy? Vengeance?"

"Balance," said the witch. "It is the way of things. Up, down. Life, death. Action, reaction. The reason we do what we do is because the universe could not exist without us."

"If you hate life so much, you must find me revolting."

"Not in such harsh words."

"Tell me then," said Ennica. "What do you see when you look at me?"

The witch studied her with strange eyes, bright in contrast to the dark shadows in the skin that surrounded them, but still flat, like the crow's, like the deer heads mounted in Ennica's father's garage. They burned like a fire with no flame. Like the coal, deep in the heart of the mountain beneath them.

Ennica imagined herself through those dead eyes. A short, pudgy girl with stringy hair and blotchy skin. A good heart and a soft life. A mouse in a field waiting for an eagle to prey on it, waiting to be wanted somehow, by someone. Desperate and sad and stupid and too full of dreams and fairy tales to be of much use to anyone.

"I see a mess waiting to be tidied up," said the witch. "I see a life within a life, and I pity you both."

If the witch could read her mind, then her knowledge of the pregnancy was no surprise. Smile, baby. You've just met your first witch. "If you find humans so unpalatable, why look like one?"

The witch folded her arms and crossed her legs under the table. Her feet were bare beneath her ragged skirts, but there wasn't a speck of dirt on them. "You came all this way to ask my story?"

"Look," said Ennica. "It's been a long day, I imagine it will be a longer night, and I have little left to lose. My mind's full of its own misery, and to be honest I'm tired of it. I would love nothing more than---okay, than my ex's head on a platter, but second to that, I'd love to hear about some troubles that aren't my own, you know?"

"I like you," said the witch with her dead eyes.

"I might like you too, but the jury's still out," said Ennica. "So spill. Why live the life of a human?"

"It is my curse," she said. The crow murmured a consoling caw.

Ennica picked up her teacup again. "Oh, this is going to be good."

"We were young," said the witch, "mere millennia old, a blink of an eye in the yawn of the universe. We were reckless, learning our boundaries, testing their resistance."

"Not so very different from humans," said Ennica.

"Only we lived deep down under the earth, in the soul of the world, in the heart of the mountain. Our paths were never meant to cross with the humans. And so it remained, until the humans discovered an aspect of our existence they couldn't live without."

"Coal."

"In our wake, we cannot help but arrange the basic elements into their purest form. Given enough time---"

"---the earth would be a diamond." Ennica's grandfather had been a miner. He'd taught her about coal, and its varying degrees of carbon purity. The purest carbon, given time and the pressure of the world above it, was a diamond.

"Unfortunately, humans evolved before that time had come to pass. They dug tunnels into our sanctuary and brought light and noise and chaos where there had once been silence."

In a twisted way, Ennica could relate. "It's never fun to have your once peaceful existence smashed to pieces by some uncaring lout."

"Exactly so. My siblings and I try and maintain our privacy when we can, in our way."

"Siblings?"

"The imp, the angel, the twins, and I."

"You lost me," said Ennica.

"You can always tell the imp's passage from his distinct odor. The angel has put so many birds to rest that she takes wing herself now, most days. The twins, they fight. Always fighting. They are the argument, and the cold shoulder."

"And you are the blackdamp," said Ennica. Her grandfather had told her stories of men killed by the damps in the mine. The stink damp reeked of sulfur. The whitedamp killed the canary before it killed you. The firedamp exploded. And the afterdamp got you when the dust settled, just when you thought you were safe. Then there was the mixture of everything, the queen of them all: the blackdamp.

The witch had called them the Wild Ones, the Widdershins, and the Damps. Ennica wondered what the miners would say if they knew it was vengeful fairies smothering their brothers to death in the bowels of the coal mine.

"I was always drawn to the humans; they were complicated beings, and so am I. They disgusted and repulsed me, but I was fascinated. I knew I should stay away, but I could not. " The witch cocked her head to one side, a gesture that would have looked more natural performed by Mr. Hue. "Does this make sense to you?"

Let's see: desperately wanting something you know you shouldn't, and then later being burned by same. Oh, yeah. She'd written that scene in her diary a time or two. "Yes," said Ennica.

"We are completely different," said the witch. "There is nothing of us in you, and never should be."

"Should?" asked Ennica.

"There is one thing." The witch raised a finger. "The spark. I would never have known it had I not seen it with my own eyes, for it was something I never would have guessed on my own. The Damps, we are one or we are many. We are legion or solitude, at will. We are here, there, and everywhere, or nowhere, as we wish." She looked pointedly at Ennica's stomach and Ennica raised a hand, as if to shield her unborn child from those dead eyes. "We do not procreate as you do. We simply exist."

"But you know about human procreation?"

"Yes. A man and woman once came into the mine, back when the tunnels were first being shored up. There have been many since, but this one...this one was my folly. They shed their clothes and came together and created a life."

Or ruined one, thought Ennica.

The witch's eyes glowed, and suddenly did not seem as flat and lifeless as they had before. Ennica wasn't sure it was a good thing.

"The spark," said Ennica.

"I witnessed it, that one perfect moment in the midst of all that chaos when two souls came together and merged perfectly into one. And it was..."

"...a miracle," said Ennica.

"But only for that moment," said the witch. "That one, blessed moment when your species and mine suddenly have the same goal: simplicity and beauty in one perfect unity. Not long after, that unity divided into two, and then four, and again and again, creating that thing"---she looked down at herself in her grey rags---"this thing you call a body." She touched her arms, the skin at her throat, her face. "How can you stand to be trapped in this prison, ever slowly succumbing to entropy?"

"How did you manage to become trapped in it?"

"I was caught up in the moment. Mesmerized. When the spark was created, my essence was trapped within it and I became its soul."

"You became that baby?"

"I became a spirit trapped in a messy carcass." She spat out the rancid words. "I did not become human."

Ennica did not want to upset the witch before she asked her request, so she kept her talking. "What happened to the soul of the baby that would have been?"

The witch blew across her fingertip as if blowing out a tiny candle flame. Though she was no longer cold, Ennica shivered.

"I was invincible. I was immortal. I was before time and after. I was perfect. And but for that one, beautiful, damning spark, I would be perfect still."

"So if you're no longer human and no longer a Damp, what are you now?"

Dead or not, Ennica recognized the look in those eyes: that same look she had seen in the bathroom mirror, splattered with the vomit that had ricocheted off the sink after she'd found out that...after she'd found out. It was a look of confusion, devastation, and loss. And as soon as Ennica saw it, it was gone. That blissful innocence had been replaced by something stronger. Something deadlier. Something...else. Something with the power to grant wishes, to tame crows, to climb mountains.

"I don't know," said the witch. "We were not meant to feel. We were not meant to love or hate. We were simply meant to be, until the end of the universe and beyond."

"You loved?" It was impertinent to ask, but Ennica could not help herself. In a way, she was jealous. She wished she didn't have to feel anything. How much easier her life would be right now if she couldn't experience the pain of love and hate, humiliation and responsibility.

Mr. Hue cawed again and preened himself. Had the crow been her lover? "No," said the witch. "Mr. Hue and I connect beyond trivial emotions. But I did love a man once, a human man. I yearned to hold him in my arms, to sink my hands into his flesh and watch him crumble to ash, to free him from the prison of life."

Ennica wasn't sure if she should be more worried that the witch spoke so casually of murdering her lover, or that Ennica herself wasn't moved by it. "You didn't kill him?" she asked.

"Worse," answered the witch. "I doomed him to live. I fled into these woods, as close as I could ever be again to the heart of my home, my mountain, and here I have remained."

"I'm sorry." Ennica reached her hand across the table to pat the witch's arm, give her some comfort in knowing that, for this little while at least, she was not alone. The witch's skin was cool and smooth, like marble. Like death.

Ennica bit back a sigh. Only she would be stupid enough to comfort Death.

"It is late for you," said the being to whom time meant next to nothing. "You should rest; regain your strength." She opened the door behind her, a door that had not been there until she reached for it.

The house was like the teacup of water, then; it was whatever she wanted it to be. Nice. In the room was a bed, as simple a furnishing as the table at which they sat, but it would suffice. Beggars can't be choosers. Still far and away better than slowly dying outside on the frozen ground.

The teacup was now gone, as was the table. And when Ennica stood to follow the witch into the room, the chair beneath her disappeared as well. Would that certain memories could vanish just as easily.

"I will grant your wish," the witch told her. Mr. Hue cawed his concurrence from her shoulder.

Ennica had never voiced her desire aloud, but she apparently hadn't needed to. "Thank you."

"For once, I believe it is I who should be thanking you," said the witch. "Sleep well."

Ennica did sleep well; her exhaustion caught up with her the moment her head hit the thin feather pillow. But her dreams were not sweet.

As before, the shadows on the backs of her eyelids resolved themselves into Anthony and Tanya. Ennica clenched her fists as she watched them conspiring, laughing, carefree without so much as a passing worry about the innocent life---lives!---they had ruined in their selfish wake.

She was not a fairy; she was no firedamp. She could not stand aside with a soul of vapor and a heart of coal and watch, indifferently, as she doomed her lover to live out his life. She walked up to the couple, her long black skirts swirling about her legs and brushing the tops of her bare feet. With one pale arm she pushed Tanya to the side, and with the other she swept Anthony up in her cold embrace and kissed him. Through that kiss she fed him all her love and all her pain and everything else she had in her that he never did---and never would---understand.

He tasted like chocolate.

She felt his heart stop, felt his body grow cold in her arms. She felt him crumble to dust beneath her lips until there was nothing in her hands but ash. She felt the rainbow colors of the baby inside her melt away into a majestic, elegant blackness. There was no noise, no mess, and the feel of the soft soot between her fingers was ecstasy. She knelt, thrust her hand in the pile of Anthony at her feet, and pulled out the one thing that would not have turned to ash: his spark. It was a diamond now, burning with a deep, pure fire, and Ennica marveled at its perfection.

The horse woke her, nuzzling her face and shoulder and nudging her into the sunshine. The house was gone; the witch was gone. She and the horse were alone at the base of the mountain. She squinted up at the sky, up the mountain path she'd have sworn she'd climbed the day before, and then she remembered how stupid she was, and how insane, and possibly how hormonal. She shrugged it off. A shame, really, that her little adventure had all been a dream.

She slowly picked her aching body up, moaning and cursing the unforgivable ground that had been her bed and wondering where the rocks had been that made her hurt so badly. She bent and stretched, trying to work enough kinks out to remount the horse; she should really get it back to the stables before her father started to worry. As for the rest of her life...she put a hand on her belly.

Odd; she felt none of her previous hatred toward Anthony anymore. She could honestly say she no longer loved him. In fact, she didn't feel anything. She closed her eyes...and thought of an abandoned watchtower, and teacups filled with chocolate, and a stove that smelled like apple pie. All those horrible memories and terrible feelings and atrocious, nonsense fantasies were gone.

"Thank you," Ennica whispered to no one, for if it had all been a dream, there was really no one to thank. As if in reply, a crow swooped down in a whirlwind of ebony feathers and dropped a shiny object in the dirt at her feet. Cawing triumphantly, it flew away, back up the mountain, into the mists from whence it came. Ennica bent down gingerly to retrieve the diamond, and the knowledge that came with it.

She would return the horse and say her goodbyes. She would not stay for the funeral or the gossip; that was some other girl's life now. That blissful innocence had been replaced by something stronger. Something deadlier. Something...else. Something with the power to grant wishes, to tame crows, to climb mountains.

She lifted her face back up to the path through the trees and the red-tinged dawn of the new day. Somewhere on that mountain, there was a cabin waiting for her.

A History of Harlan, KY

by Preston Halcomb

Harlan's very name conjures up memories of blood and violence. Decades of strife have engulfed the county, fueled by both the local coal mining industry and by feuds between individuals and whole families. This gives the people here a unique outlook on both morality and life, and this outlook makes the county an ideal setting for the stories contained herein.

Harlan County began life in 1819, incorporated from a piece of Knox County, Kentucky. Over the years, it has been chiseled away to form parts of present-day Bell, Leslie, and Letcher counties. The county as it exists today covers about 470 square miles of hills and valleys. The biggest cities in the county include the county seat of Harlan, as well as the cities of Cumberland and Evarts.

The county was named after Silas Harlan, who served as a scout and a major in the Continental Army. Harlan came to Kentucky with James Harrod in 1774, where he assisted Harrod's party in Harrodsburg, delivering gunpowder to settlers and helping them against the British during the Revolutionary War. Harlan built a stockade near Danville known as Harlan's Station; he also assisted in the establishment of Fort Jefferson at the mouth of the Ohio River in 1780. Silas Harlan died leading the advance party at the Battle of Blue Licks on August 19, 1782.

Harlan County has been rocked by great labor union unrest since the early part of the twentieth century, primarily centered on the labor unions associated with the coal mining industry. The area gained one of its enduring nicknames, "Bloody Harlan," due to the riots and murders that occurred. The conflict originally stems from a series of United Mine Workers strikes and labor-management battles that ended in a shoot-out between deputized guards and miners on May 4, 1931 in Evarts. This resulted in the confirmed deaths of three guards and one miner; an undetermined number were wounded.

The labor unrest was felt as late as the 1970s, the period documented in the film Harlan County, USA by Barbara Kopple, and one of the most violent times in the county's history. In 1973, workers at the Eastover Coal Company's Brookside Mine voted to join the United Mine Workers Union. Soon after, management disputes led the workers to go on strike. The mine brought in "scabs" (non-union workers) to continue production, but miners who felt they were being illegally replaced attacked the scabs. During the strike, mine workers' wives and children often joined them on the picket lines. Many were arrested, hit by baseball bats, shot at, and struck by cars. One miner, Lawrence Jones, was shot and killed by a replacement worker; the murderer, Bill Bruner, served no time for this incident. Special Judge F. Byrd Hogg, a local coal operator who had been assigned to the union case, ruled in favor of the mine management.

The county is filled with folklore and legends going back before its founding. On a spiritual level, Harlan County is a very devout place. Churches spring up like mushrooms on a cool morning. Underlying it all, however, is the same fatalistic worldview for which people from the area have become known. They have an inherent understanding that there are things out there that go bump in the night, and can be counted upon to spin ghost tales about the area whenever they get together.

Harlan County today is still a place where the nights are dark and the shadows deep, but there is a growing lightness as well. Many efforts have been made to modernize the area: a new ATV park is drawing nationwide acclaim and bringing much needed revenue into the county; the schools are being upgraded and consolidated; Harlan County's rich natural beauty is being exploited to bring tourism dollars to the area. The future of Harlan County looks bright, even if it is shrouded in a past filled with blood and darkness.

Preston Halcomb

June 2009

Lexington, KY

Editor Bio

Mari Adkins is a paranormal fiction writer who grew up in the coal mining community of Woodbine, Kentucky. Her fiction has appeared in the anthologies Stories from the Red Light District, Aegri Somnia, Vampire Bytes, and Help, as well as in Toasted Cheese and Apex Magazine. She is a submissions editor for Apex Magazine, and the social media maven for Apex Publications, in addition to doing freelance editing, writing, and book reviewing. Her current home is Lexington, Kentucky, where she lives with her husband and their calico cat. She is a mother and an avid supporter of kidney disease awareness and living organ donation awareness. The Kentucky mountains, their culture, their superstitions, and their particular magics will always be in her heart and her blood.

Artist Bio

Award-winning artist Billy Tackett is the creator the writer of the upcoming graphic novel Dead White and Blue comics, the official artist of Shane Moore's Abyss Walker series, and the self-proclaimed "Creepiest Artist in America".

He maintains a web site at billytacket.com.

Table of Contents

Title Page

Front Matter

Dedication

Introduction

“

Hiding Mountain: Our Future in Apples”

Psychomachia”

Yellow Warblers”

Kingdom Come”

Trouble Among the Yearlings”

Spirit Fire”

The Thing at the Side of the Road”

Inheritance”

Greater of Two Evils”

Harlan Moon”

The Witch of Black Mountain”

A History of Harlan, KY

Editor Bio

Artist Bio