Harlan County Horrors Read online

  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 a
s 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."