Harlan County Horrors Read online

  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. A
nd 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."