Harlan County Horrors Read online

  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 s
o 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.