Harlan County Horrors Read online

  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 swallowe
d 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.