Mountain Dead

by Jason Sizemore

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  Mountain Dead

  Edited by Jason Sizemore and Eugene Johnson

  Apex Publications

  Lexington, KY

  This chapbook is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in these stories are either fictitious or are used fictitiously.

  Mountain Dead

  Copyright © 2013 Eugene Johnson and Jason Sizemore

  Cover art © 2013 Cortney Skinner

  Cover design by Justin Stewart

  “Unto the Lord a New Song” © 2013 Geoffrey Girard

  “Deep Underground” © 2013, Sara M. Harvey

  “Let Me Come In” © 2013, Lesley Conner

  “And It’ll Haunt Me (For Long Days to Come)” © 2013, K. Allen Wood

  All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce the book, or portions thereof, in any form.

  Published by Apex Publications, LLC

  PO Box 24323

  Lexington, KY 40524

  www.apexbookcompany.com

  This chapbook is considered an extension of the great content in the anthology Appalachian Undead edited by Eugene Johnson and Jason Sizemore.

  — Contents —

  Deep Underground — Sara M. Harvey

  Unto the Lord a New Song — Geoffrey Girard

  Let Me Come In — Lesley Conner

  And It’ll Haunt Me (For Long Days to Come) — K. Allen Wood

  Deep Underground

  Sara M. Harvey

  Sara M. Harvey lives and writes in Nashville, TN. Although she usually writes fantasy, she has a taste for darker fare as well. Her Blood of Angels trilogy (The Convent of the Pure, The Labyrinth of the Dead, The Tower of the Forgotten) from Apex Publications blends fantasy, horror, and Steampunk. She has an amazing husband, an awesome daughter, and too many terrible dogs. She can be found on Facebook, Twitter (@saraphina_marie), and at www.saramharvey.com.

  Valley folk are often a funny lot. Hill folk enjoy the perspective of a perch above others but still seeking solitude. Valley folk enjoy the security of land on either side, protecting them from the outside world like great, strong arms. This safety can be tragically deceptive. Sometimes that protection does not so much keep the unwanted out, as hold it in.

  Nestled between two craggy foothills of Monteagle Mountain, the highest peak in the southeastern part of the Cumberland Plateau, Stewartsville, Tennessee, and its valley folk were reached only by an unmarked side street of off Ladd’s Cove Road. This lone access road crossed Battle Creek over a picturesque, decrepit covered bridge that threatened to rattle to pieces any time a delivery truck lumbered across it, keeping unexpected and therefore unwanted visitors at bay.

  John Harker had committed two grievous sins in this life. First, he had once dated Bethany, the preacher’s daughter. Second, in the tumultuous aftermath of his and Bethany’s break-up and her turning up pregnant after a whirlwind rebound romance, he had left Stewartsville. This branded him as no longer trustworthy by the townsfolk, even if he was the last of the Edensorrows. He returned to town often to check on Bethany and her little girl, Promise, who, despite her mother’s feeling on the matter, took to calling him "Uncle Jack." Everyone in town followed suit, not because they loved Uncle Jack, but because they loved Promise. Bethany only ever went so far as to call him just Jack. Her father, the Reverend Absolom Goodstead, insisted on calling him by his given name, John Harker, and occasionally John Edensorrow Harker, Edensorrow being his mother’s maiden name.

  The Edensorrow clan had been one of Stewartsville’s founding families. The town might still carry their name today but for a Stewart lad wooing the daughter of the government surveyor by telling her that the town had been named after the boy’s grandfather, Jeremiah Stewart. The lass reported this to her father, and naught could be done about it after Stewartsville got entered in the official records and the Stewarts went about erecting signs and naming roads—things that the Edensorrows thought far too vulgar and common to be bothered with. But as families and fortunes both rise and fall, by the time of this tale there were no more Stewarts in the town of Stewartsville and only one living Edensorrow, Uncle Jack.

  Evening was coming on fast when Uncle Jack reached the covered bridge at the cut-off into Stewartsville. Once the sun got down past the hills it might as well have been night. He wanted very much to go straight to the church and throw his arms around Bethany. It was Wednesday. That was exactly where she’d be. Even if he was sure she wanted to see him, he had to check on something first. He had hoped not to have to make the trek to the cemetery in the dark, but this burden of knowledge could not wait until morning.

  The larger of Stewartsville’s two cemeteries was positioned at the far end of the valley where the spines of the surrounding foothills met in a lumpy, oddly-shaped lot riddled with rock formations and knotted with roots of trees long since gone, which made it just about as useless for burials as it was for farming. But at the vernal equinox, the light shone down between the hillocks so much like the light of salvation, or so the townsfolk said, that they felt it was a sign that they should brave that forsaken land and bury their kin there so that when Judgment Day arrived, God’s light would guide them up to heaven. That is, of course, assuming Judgment Day was scheduled for the end of March.

  The other cemetery had been established by the Goodstead family, unsurprisingly in the yard of the Stewartsville Church of Christ where a member of that family had ministered for generations immemorial (although town records place the establishment of the church no earlier than the 1870s, twenty years or so after the settlement of the town). They called the Goodstead cemetery simply the "Christian Cemetery" in order to create a sense of desirability and avoid confusion with the Stewartsville Town Cemetery up at the end of the valley, where the old tales whispered of worship practices that might not have been strictly mainstream. The Goodsteads never troubled themselves over worrying about the family dramas that two cemeteries caused in the town.

  Uncle Jack sought answers in both burial sites, but he first drove up to the Town Cemetery, trying to keep as low a profile as possible. That was not going to happen. Everyone in town recognized the rumbling of his old Ford Ranger from 100 yards away, and he knew by the time he circled back down to the church that Bible study would be in full swing and no one would be talking about Jesus anymore.

  Stewartsville Boulevard ran the length of town from the cut-off at the covered bridge all the way to the gates of the graveyard on past the Church of Christ, the five and dime, the hair salon, the post office, the diner, and the two bars. Long before reaching the cemetery, the area became houses and a few farms and lastly a dense wood that pressed against the stacked stone walls of the cemetery’s boundary. No other trees like them grew anywhere else in town, or in the whole area, actually. Uncle Jack didn’t know what kind they were, only that they had always been there. They were quite tall and thick with a great number of slim branches that radiated away from the trunk like spokes, and rough, stringy bark that smelled pungent, almost medicinal. He strongly suspected that the trees that had left roots tangled through the cemetery had been of that same unknown variety. No one had a decent explanation for what had killed those trees but spared the grove on the other side of the wall. Some said it was the iron content of the soil, others said a boring beetle got to them, some swore they’d been felled by a lightning strike, others remembered a forest fire. But all the data Uncle Jack had ever found said they simply died and rotted away, for no discernible reason. And that terrified him.

  In the waning light, the expanse of earth studded with jutting headstones and obelisks held a sinister air. He parked his truck at the gate, got out, and entered the graveyard. Once, a cross pattern with neatly divided sections and clear
ly marked avenues had imposed order on the burial property despite the lay of the land. But a particularly nasty influenza one winter brought an influx of dead bodies and a wild land-grab as the town’s well-to-do vied to cordon off large areas for elaborate family plots that never materialized. Instead, parcels got resold, sometimes several times over, until the middle of the cemetery became a maze of curving paths and areas too overcrowded to even set foot on ground that did not cover a body six feet below.

  His family plot lay in a place of prominence right beside the front gate and near enough to the old grove that the trees cast their shade upon his relatives. A spot within the low stone enclosure waited for him, but he didn’t want it. Whenever his time came, Uncle Jack wanted to be cremated and have his ashes scattered over Battle Creek.

  Even before stopping to say a prayer at his mother’s grave, he made his way to his intended first target: the very back of the cemetery, past the last of the grand monuments and humble markers where the narrow hearse road abruptly ended in a field of uneven crabgrass pocked with ominous bald patches. This was the potter’s field, the plague section, the mass grave of unmarked dead. Folks had told him long ago that this section was actually empty, yet to be filled in, and that the strange grave contortions of the midsection were the product of imagination and land speculation. They had lied. And he thought he might know why. He took a small notepad out of his pocket and flipped the pages until he found a hastily sketched map. He checked it against the topography in front of him and brought out his compass to make certain. The needle swiveled and shimmied, not deigning to settle and point properly north. He swore under his breath and put it away.

  In the center of the gently rolling field was a large indentation, roughly squarish, where no vegetation had grown. The X on his little map was labeled "GOODSTEAD" in his tiny, precise handwriting. According to county records, the Goodstead mausoleum had once stood there, the pinnacle of funerary design with Gothic styling and weeping angels. He looked at the pixelated printout that was paper-clipped to the next page and tried to envision it there before him. The Goodstead mausoleum was long gone, now, the family moved to the "proper" cemetery in their churchyard. But the grass had never grown back and no one else had been buried there except the poor, the unmourned, the unremembered. Uncle Jack made a note of it in his book and slipped it back into his pocket.

  He ventured to the very edge of the land where the old mausoleum had once stood and the sensation of vertigo struck him. He crouched down, reaching his fingers into the soil to steady himself. It felt cold there and damp, betraying no sign of being warmed by the waning afternoon sun. The dirt sifted through his fingers, black and loamy. This looked different than the rest of the soil in the cemetery. Smelled different too: acrid, almost coppery, and a little raw. He stood swiftly and brushed his hands against his pants. His gaze wandered across the lumpy field before him. This had been prime real estate once, claimed from end to end by the Goodsteads. Great cost and great effort had gone into relocating every single one of them away from this place and moving them down to the churchyard. And now their erstwhile resting place was filled with generations of rabble.

  By now, the narrow fold of the valley’s end had grown dim enough that the shapes around him had gone soft and indistinct. Swallowing the panic that chilled him to shivering, he turned back toward the gates and the safety of his truck.

  And realized he was being watched.

  The cemetery caretakers were not folks Uncle Jack cared to deal with during daylight hours, and he certainly did not relish the thought of encountering them after dark. A skinny teenager in a raggedy skirt approached him, stepping out from behind a leaning obelisk. She had the narrow face and receding jaw that he usually attributed to poor white trash, the tragically inbred kind.

  "It’s about damn time," she said.

  He glanced around nervously. "Excuse me?"

  The girl crouched down and dug at something in the dirt. She yanked out a dark, ugly chunk of rock the size of her fist, muttered something at it, and flung it as far as she could across the hearse road. She wore a piece of wood strung on a cord around her neck, like a talisman.

  "Too many stones. It’s like they’re breeding." She stretched out her arm to encompass the potter’s field before them. "They ain’t satisfied with the blood of the dead no more."

  Uncle Jack nodded and smiled in his friendliest manner, then slowly edged away from the girl. He tripped on another piece of rock the same dark, glinting color as the one the girl had pitched away. She rushed toward him, but stopped when she reached the stone. She knelt and paid him no more attention as she got to work clawing that one out of the ground too. Several of these stones, each subtly but clearly different from the rest, littered the graveyard. She had quite a task ahead of her if she meant to purge them all.

  He made his way back toward the gates, leaving the rock-crazy girl to her obsession. The Edensorrow plot comprised the entire southwest corner of the graveyard from the front gates all the way to the hearse road that ran along the far west wall. Coming or going, living or dead, the Edensorrows still bore witness to the happenings of the townsfolk. It was the only place in the whole graveyard where the trees still grew nearby. In fact part of the perimeter wall had collapsed under the incursion of the roots of a particularly large tree.

  A slender obelisk dominated the Edensorrow plot, a masterful sculpture draped with a realistically carved cloth trimmed with tassels at the corners and some kind of raised pattern on it. The stone drapery looked so very real, as if a stiff wind might whip it from its perch and blow it away, tassels flapping. A low concrete wall with finials at the corners surrounded the six generations of Edensorrows that had lived in Stewartsville, and adjacent plots held scores of in-laws and cousins and close family friends.

  His place was in the upper right corner of the main plot. His mother, Elinore Edensorrow Harker, was a direct descendant of the line and had therefore been awarded a coveted place "within the walls," as she liked to say. Her husband, Percy Harker III, had been laid to rest beside her but just on the other side of the divider. We acknowledge you but you weren’t one of us. Uncle Jack couldn’t care less if the place reserved for him, the last of the line, was never filled. He wanted no part of that cursed place and had tried to keep his parents from being buried there, but his mother had added a clause to her will stating that it was her desire to be placed with her blood relations and that her son’s opinions on the matter were not to be considered.

  Uncle Jack decided not to stop and kneel at his mother’s grave. With the darkness falling quicker than usual and the strange girl’s ranting and digging, he was in no mood to linger. He touched his mother’s granite headstone with tenderness as he passed, stepping carefully over the low wall to place a hand on his father’s marker before making straight for the gates and his waiting truck.

  As he jounced down the rutted road back into town, he saw flashlight beams shining across the pitted lawn from the large old mansion that served the dual function of funeral parlor and groundskeepers’ quarters. Someone might have hollered at him to stop, but Uncle Jack sang along to his radio and pretended not to hear. He figured their poor, deranged daughter couldn’t have gotten herself into too much trouble up in the potter’s field, and they’d easily find her.

  The sidewalks were mostly rolled up by the time Uncle Jack came back through downtown, only the bars and the diner were still open, though both were practically empty. Any other night that Uncle Jack was procrastinating an unpleasant task, he might have moseyed on into Shooter’s for a beer and a game of pool, but tonight he stayed on task. There’d be time for beer and pool later, he hoped.

  The parking lot of the church was full. Some folks had even parked on the lawn, so Uncle Jack found himself a not too terribly inconvenient spot on Tulip Poplar Lane, the side street that ran behind the church and over into the wealthy part of town. All the lights were on inside the church and the large community room adjacent to it. Through the tall, na
rrow windows, Uncle Jack could see everyone inside but he looked for two people in particular: Bethany and Promise. Only eight months had passed since he’d last seen them, but eight months between three-and-a-half and four-and-a-quarter might as well have been years. When Promise stepped into view, he almost didn’t recognize the child, she’d grown so much. Her hair had taken on a bit of a curl and her long and skinny limbs advertised a recent growth spurt. He ached to go inside and take Promise into his arms and spin her around until she squealed. He had at first loved her solely because he loved her mother, but Promise Goodstead was a true sweetheart and there was no one in this world that Uncle Jack loved more than her.

  Which was why he went instead immediately to the church’s graveyard with his little notebook already in hand.

  The Goodstead mausoleum had not been simply moved, but, according to local lore and legend, dismantled stone by stone and reconstructed into a modern, elegant, and ugly edifice that stood in awkward grandeur amid the modest grave markers in the church’s cemetery. Reverend Goodstead the elder had wanted to make sure everyone knew who shepherded the flock in Stewartsville.

  The moon rose, spilling silvery light across the neatly cropped lawn. No crabgrass or cursed trees grew here. All the same, an unsettling feeling permeated the place. And, he realized, that he smelled the same tangy, acrid scent of the dirt he had noticed at the Town Cemetery. He went boldly to the mausoleum and peered in though the slender doors with their leaded glass windows. Inside was nothing more than dull, white marble drawers along each side and at the far end one of the angels from the original structure crying into her hands. The markers along the walls were primarily 20th century dates, recently dead relations. But on the floor were the old headstones cropped and laid side by side in a mosaic that dated back to the founding of the town. And between each one were slivers of dark, ugly stone like the kind the teenage dingbat in the Town Cemetery had been throwing. In some places, it seemed ground into the mortar and in others just crammed in however it might fit. A strange tribute, bringing the rock down from the other cemetery and placing it here. Probably not at all accidental. He wanted a better look.