Harlan County Horrors Part 15

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 s.n.a.t.c.hes. "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? Sp.a.w.ning 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 s.n.a.t.c.hed 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 a.s.sumed I'd be drinking scotch in Scotland, I said to myself. It's a natural a.s.sumption.

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 gla.s.s 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 gla.s.s, 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 gra.s.s and put a camouflaged backpack under my long obsidian hair as a pillow. The blazing sun over Kentucky kissed my face, and it felt as wonderful as the breath of G.o.d.

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, p.r.o.nto."

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. "G.o.d 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.

"G.o.d 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 a.s.sertion was false. I hoped beyond reason that my vision was a simple horror conjured up by one of the aged n.a.z.i 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."

I sat up, pushing myself to my backside, and blinked. "I'm sure the good Cardinal will forgive you. That's his job. It's what he does."

"Yes, yes," agent Alexander responded, wanting me to talk. He was hungry for what I had seen. His was a world of science and apparently it had only taken his agency so far. They needed more. They needed me.

"If you called on me, you must've been concerned over what really was in the chamber, at one time."

Agent Alexander rubbed his bearded chin and said, "Our sonic scans and satellite images could only tell us that this symmetrical design existed below the surface. Since there was little in the way of artifacts, we were at a loss. There are enough weirdoes running around this sector of the United States looking for UFOs, red-headed mummies, or whatever they chose to believe in, so we weren't about to announce the existence of this place."

"Nice of you."

Alexander smirked and looked around at the surrounding mountains. "Play your cards right, Doctor, and you may be the one who found it."

I glared at him. "But you must have a suspicion that something bad happened below, no? You must know something-"

Agent Alexander winked and cracked his knuckles. "A good agent doesn't tell everything he knows. Tell me what you saw and I can make everyone happy."

I buried my face in my gloves and sighed.

Good Lord, where would I start?

Down in the belly of this mighty place in the earth, a symmetrical chamber existed, a reverse image of the famed step pyramids of the Yucatan. It reminded me of a Bundt cake mold that my son, Jakob, used for making false mud huts in his sand box.

The climb down the steps of the temple-mold earlier proved disorienting, so I took it slow. Plenty of the soldiers and agents hung around, taking photographs, but they let me walk free. I remembered to count the steps, like in Central America. Just like the Mayans pyramids, there were 364 steps, and the last one made 365. A mighty big coincidence that this total equaled the number of days in a year.

When the agents shined a violet light on the rocky surface, it glittered like gla.s.s. I knelt at the bottom of the inverted pyramid and felt a fine dust...but it was not sand, exactly. On my gloves, I saw it glitter...like crushed crystal.

My body trembled as I slipped off my gloves. My hiking boot stepped out of the bottom area as I stepped over near the artifacts. The straight lines of the pyramid outline seemed dented as I scuffed my boots in the gla.s.sy substance. I absently wondered if a giant stomped these impressions out with the heel of huge boots.

Agent Alexander and few soldiers stood ten yards above me on the steps. I looked at the artifacts closer and flexed my hands. The fragments appeared to be the remains of a clay bowl and a section of a spear. On the spear appeared to be a chip of some sort, white and fused to the wood...but when I touched it with my flesh, I knew it to be bone.

And the rest was history.

No longer was I Elijah Blackthorn, an American with Apache blood...but my eyes opened into the world of one called Tayanita. My brain grew afire as the information flooded fast and had to be false. The Indians of the area were sometimes Cherokees, Shawnees or some other offshoot, but I was a Quadrule native in what would become Harlan County. My skin was not the cliched "red Indian" of past tales, nor was it the tan hue of my own. My flesh was nearly Caucasian, perhaps no darker than a Spaniard.

However, I was not in the underground spot where I had picked up the relics. I was outside in warm air. The sun washed over my nude body as I ran with my tribe up a long series of stone steps. Indeed, we scaled a step pyramid identical to those I helped to clear away vines from in the Yucatan. Yet, there was no such object in Harlan County! We gave out a war howl as we rushed up the steps. It was so insane, for the Cherokee were known to be warlike and the Quadrule a peaceful people...

Was I seeing a different time in Tayanita's life? Did he attack those ancient ones in the Yucatan far from what we call Kentucky? Something felt wrong about that a.s.sumption. When I looked off the side of the pyramid, the distant lands looked oddly like the ones I just had lain down in, hemmed by rolling mountains.

Impossible! There are no step pyramids in Kentucky!

I knew what Tayanita knew, and that was what drove me to the edge of madness. The rush of information was hard to grasp, but flooded across my mind, ready or not.

Our warriors were almost gone, driven to extinction by invaders from far-off lands. Some believed them to be the very G.o.ds form the sky themselves. Tayanita did not accept this and set out to prove this wrong. These folk we fought had no scent of settlers, as history would come to know them.