Horror For Good - A Charitable Anthology

by Jack Ketchum

  "The side tunnels on the right have collapsed," Resendez said. "I don't know how far back the main tunnel leads."

  They went on silently, Garza in the lead, the others following. The tunnel opened up to a large, rectangular chamber, and there they stopped. Wooden platforms, the supports black with mold, ran along both side walls. In the middle of the chamber was a round stone wall, about knee-high, and inside boiled a dark, oily liquid. Toward the back of the chamber stood an altar, and as Garza looked around, Resendez made his way to it.

  Once Resendez mounted the altar, he turned and looked out over the chamber. As he did, a shudder spread through the air. They all sensed it. Garza staggered to one side. Flies buzzed in his ears. He swatted at them, but nothing was there. He felt dizzy, suddenly nauseous, and he thought he could see the ghostlike shapes of men and women and even children standing on the platforms, their eyes pointed at Resendez. He shook his head and blinked, trying to clear his mind, but couldn't. What, at first, he had taken for flies buzzing in his ears now sounded like voices. Slowly, those voices became a chorus that filled the air, and when Garza strained to listen, he found their cadence familiar. He knew the words they were chanting from the book Resendez had found.

  The shotgun fell from Resendez's fingertips and clattered to the ground. His hands spread wide, as though in benediction. The ghostlike visions around him became more solid. The room seemed to brighten. The voices grew louder. Resendez muttered along with them, and Garza too felt a familiar rush pounding in his veins. The words were ancient, powerful. Garza yelled at Resendez from across the chamber, his voice unable to punch through the hazy veil that had enveloped them.

  Resendez went on chanting. The words moved through him, so powerful they shook the walls.

  The oil in the pit began to boil, and flies crawled out of the muck, taking to the air and attacking Delgado and Sturgis. Garza felt himself lensing in and out between two worlds, the world of Delgado and Sturgis screaming in pain on the one side, and the ghost world of the voices and Resendez on the other. The part of him that watched from the ghost world filled with the awe and love of the zealot. Yet that other part, the part still attached to the corporeal world, sensed an overpowering stench rising from the depths of the pit, and was nearly overcome by it.

  He could sense the ghost world gaining strength, and as he looked out over the strangely similar faces of the men, women, and children of the Kretschmer family, he could see their fiercely penetrating blue eyes staring back at him.

  Their cadence grew stronger. The room shook, and clods of earth and stone crashed down around them. Something vast rose from the depths of the pit, something old and powerful. Garza could sense it pushing its way up through the earth.

  On the altar, Resendez was shaking. The man he had been now gone, something different stared back from his mad eyes.

  Garza grabbed the man's shoulders, but Resendez shook him off. Any moment now and the thing rising up through the earth would be free. De Vermis, Garza thought. He had to break whatever had a hold on his friend, but there didn't seem to be any way to reach him. Flies yawned out of the pit by the thousands. Their buzzing made Garza's skin vibrate. He yelled at Resendez, and though their faces were almost touching, they were miles away.

  Garza grabbed the shotgun his friend had dropped and punched Resendez with it. Resendez seemed to hardly feel the blow at first, but then, as he looked up at Garza, pain entered his expression.

  Garza pulled him up to his feet and wrapped Resendez's arm around his shoulders.

  "Come on, man, we have to get out of here!"

  As Garza led him down from the altar, he saw blurry shapes he knew were Delgado and his men standing by the pit.

  He yelled a warning they didn't hear.

  The stone wall collapsed and the boiling, oily liquid in the pit spilled over the ground. Garza yelled again, but not in time. Sturgis was snatched off his feet and pulled into the pit by a huge, blackened tentacle.

  Delgado fell backwards, a scream dying on his lips.

  "Move!" Garza shouted, and ran down from the altar with Resendez on his arm. "Move, man! Move!"

  He stopped long enough to grab Delgado's shirt and pull him to his feet. Then he pushed him to the door.

  The three men ran for the surface.

  From behind them, like thunder under the earth, something ancient struggled to break free.

  ***

  They worked most of the night, packing the entrance beneath the church's altar with dynamite that Delgado and one of his men got from a nearby quarry. By morning, they were ready to light the fuse.

  The blast shook the lake and sent birds sprinting to the air. When it was done, and the land where the church had stood was just a smoking, crumbling crater in the ground, Garza went walking through the tall grass near the rim.

  He walked until he saw a dead coyote, its legs bent under its body, the head twisted against the ground. Its eyes were open, bulging, and though no life lit them, they were still powerfully blue.

  He stared into those eyes and thought of the thing he'd just faced. A great power had lurked beneath that church, something dark and ancient and evil beyond the narrow limits through which most men understood those words. Maybe it was still down there, waiting for another man like Resendez to open its way through the depths of rock and earth.

  One thing eluded him, though. The eyes of the coyote seemed hauntingly familiar. Other eyes that same color blue had stared at him from the ghost world Resendez had opened up, but he wouldn't believe—indeed, couldn't believe, if he had any prayer of holding on to the tattered remnants of his sanity—that they were the eyes of the Kretschmer family.

  Still, there was no way to be sure.

  —Lorne Dixon

  Lorne Dixon lives and writes off an exit of I-78 in residential New Jersey. He grew up on a diet of yellow-spined paperbacks, black-and-white monster movies, and the thunder-lizard backbeat of rock-n-roll. His novels Snarl, The Lifeless, and Eternal Unrest are available from Coscom Entertainment. His short fiction has appeared in dozens of anthologies and magazines, most notably five appearances in Cutting Block Press' +Horror Library+ series, PS Press' Darkness on the Edge, and Edge Publication's upcoming Danse Macabre: Encounters with the Grim Reaper.

  —Consanguinity

  By Lorne Dixon

  Walking beside her twin brother Perry, Adelaide worried the tour guide might catch a sniff of their overcoats and recognize the clingy stench of a hundred-and-forty-year-old grave. The scent of their great, great grandfather's coffin—mold on rotten linen, wet clay, dusty human remains—lingered on their clothes, as if polyester and denim had an elephant's memory. They'd washed themselves in river water, but ever since they'd been evicted from their family home they hadn't enjoyed a proper shower, and their effort in the Sucarnoochee made little difference. If anything, it added the scaly odor of skipjack shad. They kept themselves a few steps behind the other tourists in hopes to keep suspicion, and inquiring noses, at bay.

  The name on the tour guide's bright yellow name badge was Linda, with a tiny red heart drawn above the second letter instead of a tittle. She walked in her tan businesswoman skirt with the grace of a pair of brand new scissors, hour-a-day workout legs moving with machine precision. Mesmerized with envy, Adelaide had a tough time drawing her eyes off them. Frowning, she forced her gaze downward, studying each disappointment of her own body for the millionth time; feet three sizes too large to be feminine, swollen ankles, flabby legs, uneven pear-shaped hips, bulging stomach, a pair of ugly, drooping breasts, and wide, masculine shoulders. She hated every inch of herself.

  She knew she needed to size up the crowd. The loose Mississippi gun permit and carry laws meant that any number of the big-eyed men and women in the museum could have a sidearm nestled under their belts.

  She was less concerned by the security, though she noticed that Perry kept a constant, suspicious eye on the overweight, out-of-shape men in loose-fitting uniforms. Adelaide knew they didn't h
ave guns. There was no way the institution's liberal patrons-of-the-arts benefactors would have allowed any such thing. No, if there was a threat here, it was from Joe or Jane Sixpack.

  She had her own gun, a well-worn Colt 1917 handed down from her Pop, stashed in the inner pocket of her coat. It bumped against her ribs with every step. Nothing in the world felt more reassuring. Perry's gun was newer, an ugly little .22 with its serial numbers filed off. The pistol matched her brother well. He was short and wide, with an uneven, greasy mustache, a thinning hairline, and a long list of aliases. As a young felon, freshly released from federal prison, he'd burnt off his fingerprints with a kerosene lamp.

  Linda led them through the prison, pointing out displays erected in cells where men had once spent long spans of their lives. Here, she informed the group, was where Jack Haley, the bank robber, hung himself from the top rail of his double-bunk. And here? That was Benjamin Roost's death row cell until he was given a reprieve by the Governor. He murdered his cellmate the next day. She told her stories with surprising candor, never betraying the fact that she must have spun the same script half a dozen times a day, every day.

  Adelaide didn't give a good goddamn about Jack Haley, Benjamin Roost, or any of the other semi-infamous prisoners who had spent their sentences in these cages. She and Perry shuffled along at the back of the pack, listening without interest, waiting for the tour to bring them to their destination. Although she'd never set foot inside Camp Croix, she didn't need a guide for this tour. Her research had been extensive, if undisciplined. Barely better than illiterate, she'd never read any of the dozen books written about the Civil War-era prison or its infamous uprising, but she knew the story with sharper detail and more scope than anyone could ever have gained from a historian's retelling. Passed down through the generations, the history of this place was a rot that spread up from the trunk of the Spratlin family tree, infected each of its branches until suicides and death sentences reduced it to a withering, hollow pole. Adelaide and Perry were the last.

  Linda led them through a maze of rusted bars, slanted floors, and uneven walkways. She called out for the tourists to watch their step as they descended a steep flight of concrete stairs. Bare bulbs ran along ceiling wires for lighting, casting strange long shadows down the counter-clockwise spiral of steps. At the bottom, she turned to face them and walked backward with the same feline grace as before. "These are the guard stations. You can still see where the munitions stores were located along that far wall. And now, just a tiny step, and we're entering the living quarters. The Confederate soldiers who served as guards lived in town and commuted to work every day. There were no horses to spare, so they hoofed it. But the general who ran Camp Croix lived here, inside the prison, with his family."

  Adelaide attempted to visualize the empty, dingy living quarters in her great, great grandfather's time. It was impossible. She could not imagine life in these subterranean caverns. How had a family gathered around a dinner table surrounded by such gloom? Had they somehow found enough peace in these damp, concrete corridors to pray? To laugh? To grieve? To fuck? From her view, Woolfolk Spratlin and his family lived only marginally better than the inmates above.

  Anticipation began to build inside Adelaide. She exhaled in quick, staggering breaths. Glancing at Perry, she saw her brother was untroubled. That'd always been the case, though. Their parents believed Perry to be stoic and fearless. They were wrong. It only took one look into his astigmatic eyes to tell the true story: Perry just didn't give a fuck, not about his family's destiny, his sister, himself, or anything.

  As kids, Adelaide's favorite pastime was netting creek bullfrogs and bringing them back to the antique, metal-framed aquarium in the cramped bedroom she shared with her brother. Perry's favorite pastime was squashing Adelaide's pets with a wooden mallet. In time, Adelaide came to understand that her brother didn't enjoy killing the frogs in the least. What he enjoyed was the tears, anger, and fisticuffs that inevitably followed.

  "General Woolfolk J. Spratlin ruled over the prison with an iron fist. The Northern soldiers held here feared him. He had a reputation for employing drastic corporal punishment in the everyday running of Camp Croix. Caning was common, but his favorite way to correct an inmate's attitude was to have him tied, kneeling, to the camp's flagpole. A hauling donkey would be brought over from the stockyards and backed up to the prisoner. Guards would stab the animal with their bayonets in its rear until it kicked. The lucky ones got away with broken noses and missing teeth. Some came away with faces that were, well, no longer faces."

  There were nine tourists in all, five men and four women, not counting the siblings, all wearing bright yellow admission bracelets. Adelaide sized up each of them as they passed, single file, through a narrow doorway into the final room. None seemed like a particular threat, not even the tallest of the bunch, a three-nights-a-week gym membership standing in a pair of beaten-up sneakers. She'd dealt with the type before, turning a last-call bar pickup into a simple hit-and-run robbery, and knew that a single shot to the face would bring Mr. Cardio Infomercial down. Break his nose and the deal'd be done.

  "Camp Croix is famous, of course, for the riot of July, 1863. Vicksburg had fallen two weeks earlier, and news had made its way back, by word of mouth, to the Northern troops imprisoned here. They overcame the guards in a three prong coordinated attack, simultaneously taking control of the courtyard, the eastern cellblock, and the watchtower. The guards were forced to the center of the complex and found themselves surrounded. They knew that because of the way the prisoners had been treated, surrender would not spare them from the inmates' wrath, so they fought to the last man, retreating underground into the General's living quarters. They barricaded themselves in and hoped they could hold out until reinforcements arrived."

  Adelaide's eyes locked onto the iron door against the far wall. Green from oxidation and accented with patches of crimson rust, it was nothing like the stories she'd been told. Family lore described a towering, impenetrable metal barrier fit for a royal castle's gate.

  "The General gathered his family together and headed through that door into a small room cut into the bedrock. Locking the door behind him, he intended to wait out the siege with his family." Linda gestured to the door with the grace of a game show hostess displaying a prize. "There was a problem with his plan. Inside this "safe" room, he kept a week's worth of canned provisions and water. The riot, however, lasted three weeks."

  Once, when she and Perry were seven, her brother surprised her. Instead of killing the day's catch of frogs, he slid a lock into the ornate metal grill on the old aquarium's lid, leaving only pinholes for air. Unable to feed her pets, she'd begged Perry for the combination. When that failed, she'd tried hundreds of random combinations and watched the frogs grow weaker and weaker. The largest of the bunch, a squat, proud-looking tyrant, didn't wait long before he began eating the fresh corpses. And eventually, he didn't even wait for them to die.

  "When Confederate forces finally arrived and quelled the uprising, the General emerged from behind that door. His wife and his two sons did not. Only his deaf and dumb daughter survived the ordeal. And she, naturally, was in no position to offer testimony about the horrors that happened in that dark room over those long weeks. The neat, clean pile of bones in one corner told the part of the story she couldn't. Another hidden detail of the ordeal was revealed nine months later when, at thirteen, she gave birth to a son."

  A few of the tourists winced. Adelaide did not; although she wasn't really listening, she knew where the story led and easily enough deduced why they reacted. Her grandfather told the same story in Biblical terms, referencing Lot's daughters, who seduced their father, as directed by an angel, to continue the family bloodline. Adelaide had never been upset by the implications suggested by the story, but now, in the company of the pretty tour guide and the upper-class tourists, she felt a reflexive anger rise up inside her. Murder and cannibalism hadn't disgusted these people, but the creation of new life had. Scan
ning the small crowd, from face to face, she felt judged by their scowling expressions.

  One of the tourists, a six-credits-a-year college twenty-something with a pair of earbud headphones dangling from his shoulders, raised his hand. Linda squinted and pointed. "You have a question?"

  "Yeah," the slacker said through the braces-straightened teeth of a smug, interminable grin. "Did she call the baby her son, or her brother?"

  A few of the others giggled

  Perry didn't laugh. His temper didn't have a short fuse, it had none at all. Adelaide glanced at her brother, fully expecting him to erupt into violence, kick his heels off the floor, and tackle the dumbshit college brat. She was relieved to see Perry standing still, eyes still glazed over in disinterest.

  "We really don't know much about what happened to the daughter, or her child." Linda handled the question as a serious one, not missing a beat. "Although a birth certificate still exists for the baby, no other records remain to tell us whatever became of the boy."

  Records, no, Adelaide thought, and very few left alive that knew, either. The boy, her great grandfather, Alessander Spratlin, lived long enough to marry, spawn two children, contract Syphilis, and buy the gun he used to end his life.

  Linda moved toward the door, prancing with her perfect legs and rolling, seductive hips. The tourists followed. A woman holding a tri-fold brochure in her hand asked in a thick Georgia mountain pine accent, "It says in here that there's some kinda treasure in there?"

  Placing an open palm against the door, Linda turned to the woman with dimples etched so deeply into her smiling face that they must have reached back to her tonsils. "That's the mystery. When the Northern soldiers originally arrived here, the General had every one inspected." She opened her mouth and tapped her central incisors. "Back then, gold fillings were very common. We can't know how much gold the General harvested from his captives, but I can tell you this: 39,000 captured Federal soldiers came through this prison during the war, second only to Andersonville. A mass grave was uncovered in the fields behind the camp back in '83. One in every three bodies excavated showed signs of having teeth pulled shortly before their deaths. It stands to reason that a large fortune was made."