Harlan County Horrors Part 14

"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 p.i.s.s-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 c.u.mberland 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 s.e.x 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 b.r.e.a.s.t.s.

"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 s.n.a.t.c.hes 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 a.s.sumed 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 sh.e.l.l 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 b.i.t.c.h sisters dry before I'll spend another day hiding in this h.e.l.lmouth! 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 G.o.dd.a.m.n 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 c.o.ke 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 h.e.l.lacious 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 G.o.d 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 G.o.dd.a.m.n 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 d.a.m.n her? Did I d.a.m.n 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 pa.s.sing 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 coa.r.s.e 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 sh.e.l.l that followed me; it was the heart. But without its sh.e.l.l, could it be destroyed? And without the magical energy that held it closed, could the sh.e.l.l be destroyed as well?

My theory was that the sh.e.l.l 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 sh.e.l.l 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 sh.e.l.l 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 s.p.a.ces 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, pa.s.sing 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.