Eventually Quan stopped, unsure if Amy were still alive or not. He stood over her, panting hard through Hank’s lungs. Amy heard him turn his attention to the doll and begin speaking to it. She was too dazed to try to pay attention to the words he used, but she knew it was her chance, possible her only chance to make a dash for the door.
She kicked out at him with both legs, one at the knee Hank had hurt the night before and one at the groin. It knocked Hank down and gave her just enough time to get to the stairs. Hank’s hand reached out for her as he got back up, missing her shirt by inches. She spun out of his reach, throwing herself down the stairs frantically, just trying to put distance between them. She was stunned, at the bottom of the stairs, blood pouring into her right eye was making her half blind.
Amy heard the footsteps of the man who was no longer her husband coming down the stairs, slowly, deliberately. She ran to the living room and saw that Hank’s shotgun was still there. She wasted no time, snatching up the gun and running back to the stairwell. As Quan poked Hank’s head through the door she set upon him with the shotgun, holding it by the barrel and wielding it like a baseball bat. Her first swing hit him square across the jaw, smashing it. She was sure it broke, but she swung again. The second blow hit Hank’s body in the shoulder, instantly knocking his whole arm out of socket. She dropped the gun and punched him several times in the face.
“Get out of my fucking husband you motherfucker!” Amy screamed as loud as she could. Then it occurred to her that she needed to get him out of the house. Perhaps removing him from the property would relinquish Hank from the clutches of the spirit that had him.
She grabbed him and pulled him toward the front door. She had always been bigger than he was and usually had twenty pounds on him, but since he was in declining health he had lost quite a bit of weight. Amy was thankful, realizing she would have been battered much more if Hank had been at full weight. As it was she outweighed him by thirty five pounds and found it easy to drag him through the house once he was stunned. She just hoped that she didn’t do any serious damage that couldn’t be fixed.
As they got to the porch he found a second wind and began to punch her in the stomach as she carried him. She did her best to ignore it. Amy found that she was through with the situation and would endure whatever she had to to make it end. She threw him down the stairs and he hit the ground hard, bouncing his head off of the concrete walkway to the driveway. She was shocked that she had put so much force into it and she ran down the stairs as fast as she could to begin dragging him toward the car, to get him away from the house, away from the spirit that she was sure was bound to the place, not the person.
When she got to him she waited, clenched fist, to lay him out. To hopefully knock him unconscious so that she could load him up and they could make their escape. He didn’t move. She waited a few more seconds. By then she noticed that there was a steady trickle of blood pouring out of his head, soaking into the ground. She looked up, instinctively looking for someone else to call to for help but all she saw were corpses in black robes strewn about the yard, still lit tiki torches and the scorched earth where the fire had been.
She tried to remain calm and crouched beside him, checking for a pulse. She couldn’t find one in his neck. She tried his wrists and couldn’t find one in either one. Amy sat down in the bloody ground and began to cry over him. She cried and cried. She cried for so long that she had no idea how many minutes or hours had gone by. Eventually she gave up. She tried shaking him. She tried praying over him. She tried everything that she could do but to no avail. Amy had killed her husband. She had been trying to protect herself, trying to get him away from the monster that raged inside him and took him over. It was all her fault. Amy was only able to blame herself, as justified as she had felt throwing him down the stairs she knew it wasn’t her husband. She should have done more to try to protect him.
Amy got in her car and drove down the driveway, leaving Hank lying face down in the front yard. She didn’t look into the rearview once. She could drive away from Gravel Switch Kentucky but she could never drive away from the memory of what she had just done to Hank. The feeling of guilt became a tsunami of suffering as she drove on, just heading west, not even having the slightest clue as to where she was headed. She thought it would be best to stick to the plan and to go to the west coast.
She found the road to be boring and probably the worst thing for her in the state of mind she was in. Her emotions were totally fractured and she was unable to focus. She almost caused several accidents on the interstate. Realizing she would eventually get pulled over Amy decided to get a hotel room somewhere in Missouri. She had never been there before and didn’t plan to stay. So far everything she had seen of the state left her unimpressed. She was happy just to get a bed and sleep. She’d have the entire next day to check out the state and hopefully find at least something interesting about it.
She found a run down old motel that looked like it had seen much better days. She didn’t realize she still had blood on her face, caked on her forehead and her eye until she looked into the mirror to check her self before going in to pay for a room.
There was an old man in a bath robe and a wife beater tank top shirt at the desk and he was smoking a cigarette and watching old reruns of Barney Miller on an antiquated cathode ray tube television. He ignored Amy even though he had seen her walk in. She stood there for a few moments before passive aggressively clearing her throat to try to get his attention. He didn’t take his eyes off of the television but pointed to a sign on the counter with his cigarette that said For Assistance Please Ring Bell.
“Are you kidding me?” Amy said under her breath, sure the old guy couldn’t hear her.
She got a room after a few minutes of dealing with him, although he wouldn’t talk to her until she rang the bell, which only let out a dull thud. She found him to be cantankerous and nearly hostile. Amy chalked it up to him being from Missouri. The people must just be rude. She got the room key as quickly as he would give it to her and immediately went to her room, room twenty two. There wasn’t much for furniture, just a chest of drawers with an old television on it and a beat up bed that looked like it probably had bed bugs or lice. She sat down and just tried to collect her thoughts, gather her emotions together and come up with a plan for her life.
Soon she broke into tears that she couldn’t control. The weight of what she had done came crushing down on her. She thought of what she had done to Hank in contrast to what he had done to Boris and found sad irony staring back at her. How she had left him when he was sick to be with Jared. She had abandoned Hank when he needed her most.
Wallowing in misery since she no longer had driving to keep her at least a little distracted Amy went out to the car to get some pills and some weed out of the glove box. She was sure that she wanted to get as intoxicated as she could. Amy knew opiates could help with emotional pain just as much as physical. When she opened the car door and went into the glove compartment she saw that she had five or six bottles of pills in it. She grabbed them all indiscriminately and noticed that under all of the bottles was Lief’s thirty eight revolver. She took it too. She never knew what to expect from anyone anymore. She didn’t know if she had been followed by any of the cult. She even got so paranoid that she thought that the hotel proprietor was possibly a cult member and she had walked into a trap.
When she got back into the room Amy sat the pills on the bed and the pistol next to them. She pulled a bag of marijuana out of her pocket and some rolling papers. As she began to twist up a joint she noticed that one of the pill bottles was Hank’s seizure medication. Another wave of uncontrollable pain overwhelmed her. She felt like her heart was cut out of her chest. There was nothing but a hollow emptiness where it had once been. She thought that she would never love again. She thought that she didn’t deserve it.
Amy smoked her joint, taking deep, long pulls off of it. She didn’t care what the marijuana laws were in Missouri. She didn’t care one bi
t. If the cops came she could flush the little bit that she had on her person down the toilet. She only hoped that they wouldn’t search the car where they had stashed several pounds, to finance their new life wherever they moved.
She sobbed to herself for a few hours, popping pills every twenty minutes or so. The joint she smoked was followed by several more until her small sack of head stash was gone. By the time Amy had smoked all of her weed and eaten so many pills she felt a calmness and numbness like she had been looking for. She decided to take a shower and relax but spent only a few minutes in the bathroom, unable to enter the shower as the room filled with the stench of brimstone; a flashback to her recent horrors overtook her, triggered by the smell that reminded her so much of the ghosts of Gravel Switch. She panicked and fled into the dingy room, not understanding that the motel used well water and that she was smelling sulphur. As she got to the living room, unaware that she was overdosing on an extreme amount of pills, Amy saw two red eyes shining through the blinds. “Have I been too careless? They’re here, but I won’t let ‘em take me!” she thought as she decided to act.
She reached across the bed and grabbed Lief’s gun. She held it to her temple, imagining what it would be like to just end it all. To just end up swallowed by darkness and never have to worry about anything again. The longer Amy thought of it the more she liked the idea. Amy even considered that she might see Hank again if she did pull the trigger. The thought wasn’t abhorrent to her at all. She held the pistol there for what seemed to her to be a long time, where she considered the fate of her soul itself. But it had only been the briefest of moments before she made her choice. She wasn’t going to let the demon take her.
“I’m coming Haaaannk! “ Amy screamed just before she pulled the trigger. She never heard the sound of the revolver as the bullet exploded out of the chamber and tore through the side of her head in an eruption of brains and skull fragments, splattering the wall behind her. The tail lights of the truck right outside her window illuminated the dripping gore with a red glow.
22
The Harvest
Hank awoke on the ground in his front yard with the worst headache he had ever felt to find that it was dark out. He saw that he was in a pool of his own blood. It was a few minutes before he could even sit up. When he did he saw that his front yard was empty of any corpses. The only sign that anything had happened at the property at all was the black spot on the ground, the remains of the bonfire pit. Hank stood up and wiped his hands on his pants. Things weren’t too clear to him. He was uncertain why he was in the yard, wondering if he had suffered a seizure. He had no idea how long he had been there, but could tell by the position of the moon in the sky that it was not late at night but already early the next morning.
He took a few deep breaths and noticed that Amy’s car was gone. He was alone at the house which panicked him a bit after the night before. It was several minutes until Hank got his head straight enough to think of what to do next. He decided to go inside and get his cell phone and call somebody to come get him. Part of him just wanted to get up and walk out of town, maybe hitchhike to Lexington.
As he approached the house he saw that the front door was open and the doll Matilda was lying there, just inside the door. He bent down to pick up the doll and as soon as he touched it everything came back to him. Everything he had done when Quan had seized control of him. He even remembered Amy trying to wake him up, checking his pulse and deciding he was dead.
He dropped the doll and recoiled from it, ran into the house and got his phone out of the bedroom. He tried to call Amy but repeatedly got her voice mail. He left message after message explaining that he was sorry for what Quan had made him do. He kept getting a gnawing feeling in the pit of his stomach that he could not shake. A feeling that something was very, very wrong.
A few minutes into trying to call Amy he got a call himself. It was from a county sheriff’s office in Missouri. He would normally never answer such a call, but under the circumstances he figured that it was best to do so. He figured that it might have something to do with Amy. He answered with a plain, “Hello”, as his heart sank. The feeling that something was just horribly wrong swelled in his chest.
“Mister Ramsey?” the voice on the other end sounded semi-robotic.
“Uh huh. That’s me,” Hank started to tremble.
“Mister Ramsey this is deputy sheriff Larson with the Jefferson County sheriff’s department in Missouri. Sir, I regret to inform you that your wife Amy has taken her own life. She shot herself at a motel this morning. I’m sorry for your loss,” the sheriff delivered the news emotionlessly. Hank wondered if the officer actually was a robot as he dropped the phone and fell to his knees, clutching at the ground and wailing in emotional agony from the devastating news.
The sheriff stayed on the other end for a few minutes, but Hank paid him no attention. Hank couldn’t even hear the man talking over his own miserable sobbing and gasping. He felt like his own heart had been torn out. He had driven her to such lengths that she thought that she had killed him and in her own desperate emotional state had shot herself. He let the thought sink in, but knew the weight of the emotional magnitude would be a surreal thing that would slowly consume and envelope him entirely.
He flew into a rage, jumping up quickly and rushing through the house to the stairs. He went up them and got the shotgun Amy had left up there when she came to see if he was alright, when Quan had taken him and he had attacked her. He went to his room and found some shells and walked back to the front porch, picking up the doll Matilda on the way.
He threw the doll high into the air into the yard and raised the shotgun, fired and decimated the rotten thing. The buckshot smashed her head apart and tore through what was left of the fabric of her dress. He fired the other barrel at hit her again as she lay on the ground. Hank walked over to the doll and shot her until he was out of shells.
Still fuming he began to smash what was left of her head with the butt of the shotgun. He then grabbed her and tore at her clothes with his bare hands, trying to shred her last tattered bits to nothing. When he was satisfied that it could never be repaired in any way Hank scooped up the pieces. He carried the shattered parts down his driveway, walked out to the road and headed for Bernice Hickman’s house.
It was quite a long walk in the state of mind he was in. He didn’t even know what to say to her, he just wanted to get the doll as far away from him as he could and to show Bernice that he had destroyed it. Even after everything it was the doll that he loathed the most. More than Alan, more than Jared. More than anything he could think of Hank despised the doll.
When he got to Bernice’s house Hank was happy to see that she was home. It was s short driveway up to a house twice as big as the one she had been renting him. It was a veritable mansion. In its day it must have been quite a luxurious home, but its day had come and gone over a hundred and fifty years before. She was sitting on the porch, smoking a cigar and sipping moonshine from a mason jar. It didn’t occur to him that she was already drinking heavily that early in the morning.
“I have your damn doll Bernie! I want you to have it back!” he was still furious and tried to carry that energy with him. He tried to deliver some sort of righteousness with his words that she obviously failed to recognize.
“I see that you didn’t take good care of her Hank,” Bernice said as Hank approached. She had a wry smile on her face. “Well, her soul is at peace now at least.”
He got to the bottom of the porch and threw the doll parts and tattered fabric, some of which was essentially just powder and dust, at the feet of his landlord. Hank didn’t know what to say, he didn’t know what to do. He only knew he was hurting inside so badly that he couldn’t take it. He turned his back and began to walk away when Bernice stopped him with a loud whistle, the kind one would use to call a dog or a horse. He stopped in his tracks.
“Come on, sit down Hank. Let’s smoke a joint. Have a sip of ‘shine. I’m sorry to hear about Amy,”
Hank gave her a puzzled look as she revealed that she knew about Amy’s demise. “Oh, yeah. I have the same gift as Phyllis did. Not as strong… but I have it too. I felt her presence leave this plane as soon as she was gone.”
Hank looked puzzled but sat down to have a smoke and a drink anyway. He didn’t care. What did he have to lose? Amy was gone, the house was gone. The grow was gone. Amy had taken the money and the crop. Every single thing they harvested and saved up to make their move to California or Washington was gone. Every dollar he had was gone. He was broke, desolate, homeless and a widower. Hank couldn’t get any more broken than he was, by his own reckoning.
He sat quietly on the top step of the porch and took a gulping drink off of the moonshine, oblivious to the fact that it seared his throat and tongue. He sat the jar down and made a beckoning motion for her to pass him the joint she had just lit. She giggled a little at his impatience.
They sat there until the afternoon had come and smoked and drank themselves half stupid. Hank wondered why she was being so kind to him, considering everything that had happened, he was still unsure where she fit into it all. She didn’t seem to mind one bit that he had destroyed her doll. If he should even think of it in such terms he was unsure. It was definitely its own entity, its own presence. Hank found himself considering that perhaps she didn’t own it. Perhaps it owned her.
The fall afternoon was cold and after an entire morning of drinking and smoking Bernie found that she was hungry and offered Hank some reheated pot pie that her mother had made the night before. He accepted her offer and within a few minutes she had come back with a steaming hot plate for him that she admitted to being embarrassed for microwaving.
Gravel Switch: the black goat chronicles book 1: a Weird Tale of Extreme Horror Page 19
