Dark Light 3
Anthology
Edited by Sarah Jayne Carr
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, including photocopying, recording, or transmitted by any means without written consent of the author.
This is a work of fiction. Characters, establishments, names, companies, organizations and events were created by the author. Any resemblance to persons, living or dead, or actual events, companies or organizations is coincidental.
Published by Crushing Hearts and Black Butterfly Publishing
Text Copyright 2013 held by CHBB Publishing and the Individual Authors
Cover by Rue Volley for Vivid Designs
Table of Contents
Harby’s Last Stand—Christian A. Larsen
From Out of the Night—L.D. Ricard
Possessing Bailey—Jenna Pizzi
Tossed and Found—K.E. Robiscoe
Trapdoor—William Rasmussen
The Hognissaga—Avalon Brantley
The Squat—Dene Bebbington
I Come to Teach—A.A. Garrison
Fallen Angel—Zoe Adams
The Incident of Pokrov—Erica Sim
The Black Womb—Michael McGlasson
The Devil Within—Justin Zipprich
Cheating Death—S.J. McMillan
Inner Storm—Jay R. Thurston
The Machine—Linna Drehmel
Dead By Dawn—KR Jordan
The Hamlet Of Maysouth—Ryder Ataxia
Switch—Fred Waiss
Enteric—W.B. Stickel
Miriam—Shaun Meeks
Dante’s Circle—Ericka Kahler
The Monk—JT Lewis
13—K.R. Helms
Hob Gob—Jonathan D. Nichols
Neighbors From Hell—J.R. Roper
Evander Holbrook—Greg Quinion
Siren Song—Anna Yeatts
Harby’s Last Stand
By Christian A. Larsen
Sergeant Major Lev Harby was the last Confederate veteran of his rank to die, depending on whom you asked. For him, the war was never really over. He spent those far-reaching post-war years sitting on the verandah in a rocking chair. The sound he made as he rocked was like teeth grinding, but you knew they weren't his because he was mostly gums by the time I knew him. I would roll by on my soapbox kick scooter in my short pants, and he'd follow me with those watery old eyes of his like I was a Union soldier coming over a ridge or something. Naturally, he didn't suspect a child of any such thing—he wasn’t senile—but it didn't matter. He hated Union-sympathizers and Republicans as much as he hated Negroes and carpetbagging Northerners. If he didn't know for a fact that you weren't one, then you were.
“You look like a Yankee, boy, with those dark pants crawling up the crack of your ass like that,” Harby said to me one day the summer I was nine.
I must’ve looked at him in a way he didn’t like. I don’t necessarily remember meaning it, though I could have. He used to say a lot of mean things when people passed by, and I was no exception, even though I was a child.
“Boy, are you sassin’ me?”
I shook my head.
“I have a mind to whip you right here in front of God’n everyone for that kind of attitude.” He stabbed his silver-tipped cane into the floorboards. “And if it bothers your momma, tell her she can send your daddy to settle things up with me. Aw, but’cher old man’s dead now, ain’t he? Well, looks like the only thing between you’n a good old fashion Dixie whipping’s my forgiving streak. Get on with you!” His hatred was hot. It was as hot as a west Arkansas afternoon in August when the flies would drop out of the air like slivers of pecan shells.
Before my father was killed in a hunting accident, he would tell me stories of when he was a boy. They were about how Harby, an old man even then, was a regular at Malvern’s, the sandwich shop in town. He ate breakfast, lunch, and dinner there. Sometimes, he would pay, but more often he wouldn’t. No one ever said ‘boo’ about it because he would just harp on about how he bled for Arkansas under Nathan Bedford Forrest in the War Between the States. He’d say if a town like Prudhomme couldn’t take care of its own, why did he bother fighting anyway? If he felt extra feisty, he would take the paper cup he’d been filling with tobacco juice and dump it all over the table. It’d ooze off the edge like the ichor out of something from a William Gaines comic before the Comics Code Authority ruined everything.
And when Old Man Malvern’s niece—who was still the new girl in town after moving in from Zionsville—passed him the check one time, he took that cup of dip and tossed it all over her pretty white apron quicker than lightning. My dad said the mess looked just like a gunshot wound. And he should know because he was sitting at the next table over and got some of it on him too. Harby got a little of himself on everybody in town, and maybe even the whole county. Malvern’s niece didn’t know better at first, but she learned quickly, after just that one lesson. You might think that’s how Harby got his nickname, “Heartless”, but it went back further than that.
The reason wasn’t nearly so innocent.
Heartless Harby was a member in good standing of the Ku Klux Klan almost as soon as the ink was dry at Appomattox. He was known to have beaten the teeth out of several Negroes who “stepped out of line”, which meant they deigned to act like human beings. Rumor had it that he did nothing to discourage being connected with the murder of a white family that moved to Arkansas from Illinois so the husband could run for office during Reconstruction. Someone nailed the doors and the shutters closed. Then, they set the house on fire. The couple had two daughters, not much out of the cradle, and all Harby would ever say about the matter is that they had it coming. Even after President Grant passed the Force Acts, effectively wiping out most Klan chapters, Harby kept holding meetings in his parlor. When the Klan came back after Birth of a Nation was released just before the Great War, he was already there, calling them greenhorns. Well, he called them worse, but decorum prevents me from repeating his actual words.
That was nothing compared to what Harby did during the Battle of Fort Pillow. It was built as a Confederate fort on the Mississippi River in western Tennessee in 1861, but fell to Union forces the next year. It changed hands again two years later when Nathan Bedford Forrest’s forces recaptured it at about four o’clock in the afternoon on April 12, 1864. All accounts say Harby fought with almost a reckless abandon, requiring the troops serving under him to do the same. When the Union forces finally capitulated, Harby lined Union prisoners up and started executing them with his pistol, beginning the Fort Pillow Massacre. Rumors circulating years later said Harby shot the whites in the back of the head, but he shot the Negroes in their guts, leaving them to die a slow death while the bloodbath unfolded around them.
He did this after they laid their guns on the ground.
He did this while their fingers were laced behind their heads.
He did this while they were calling out to God, begging for mercy.
Harby rode home a hero after that battle, with several dozen notches in his belt and a commendation from General Forrest. Unspecified, it was probably for replacing his horse for him two of the three times it was shot out from under him. Plus, he received a red badge of courage on his chest that changed slowly to brown as the days and weeks passed. They say he put a stink-on to beat the grave, but he never cleaned up on the road, and he didn’t take that butternut off until he came home to Prudhomme, Arkansa
s. It hung in his closet untouched, except occasionally by his housekeeper, a former slave named Cleta. She swore until her death in 1923 that it couldn’t have been Harby’s, or that he stole it off of whomever was shot in it. She said if the bloodstain belonged to one man, it was enough to kill two.
“Your daddy couldn’t take a bullet.” Harby leaned forward in his rocking chair when I didn’t skedaddle. The floor under the runners squealed and begged to be let go. “And being the fruit of his loins, I bet you couldn’t take a beating.”
The sun beat down on me; it was a relentless, school’s-coming-kind-of-torturous-blast, but I didn’t even notice it. The blast coming out of Harby’s eyes was worse, like the cloud of moonshine reek that rolled out of his mouth over the brown, wilted lawn. And it made everything still. Corpse still. There was no one on the street, up or down, as far as the eye could see. Even stranger, there were no birds and the last living thing I saw move was the poof of a squirrel’s tail as it escaped in to the upper canopy of a blackjack oak.
“My daddy died in a hunting accident!” I said with my lip trembling. I could still remember him, less than a year ago laid out in that plain pine box, dressed in his good suit with his hands clasped over his stomach. It didn’t look like my daddy. He had always been so alive.
“Boy, don’t you think I don’t know that?” Harby cackled. “One errant shot and he goes down like a Yankee battle plan. I seen men take ten times the punishment he did and get back up for more, you hear? If we had less of him and more Nathan Bedford Forrests, we’da won that war and been saluting the Stars and Bars these past eighty years. Your old man was weak, and it wouldn’t surprise me one bit if he let himself get killed because he couldn’t support you and your momma. Now stop blocking the sidewalk, you snot-nosed sonofawhore.”
Part of me wanted to drop my soapbox kick scooter and cut across every lawn in town to get home to my momma. I wanted to bury my face in her gingham dress, coughing the tears into her softness until my throat hurt and my hair clung to my face with sweat, but I couldn’t. Even all these years later, I don’t know if it was because I wanted to prove that I had some Nathan Bedford Forrest in me, too, or if it was because my sneakers had melted to the cracked bone pavement of the sidewalk under the heat of Harby’s stare. I suppose it didn’t really matter, but what I did next most certainly did.
I squared my shoulders at him. “What did you call me?”
“A snot-nosed sonofawhore. If you don’t know what that means, you will. You’ll be dipping your wick in the cheapest cooze this side of the Mississippi before too much longer, I ‘spect. Just like your daddy did to your momma.”
I stooped down like I had to tie my shoelaces, even though both of them were tied. Harby could probably see that from up on the verandah, even if he was about a hundred years old at the time. The crack in the sidewalk zigzagged under my feet, like a lightning bolt cut into the concrete. Several slivers were set in there, like sharp little eyots with nothing holding them in place. I worked one out of the crack with my fingernail and held it by my side in my fist. I could feel the blood running where the jagged edge had cut me.
“You take it back.”
He struggled to his ancient feet, sensing more fight coming than perhaps he had at first expected; I swear to this day, he smiled. “Boy, I ain’t never took nothin’ back, and if you think that any runty scalawag like you is going to make me with those tiny little fiss’ an’ runny nose, then maybe I should rethink that whipping I mentioned before.” The verandah creaked as he took a step toward me.
“You take it back…what you said about my daddy and my momma.” I wasn’t old enough to understand it all, exactly, but I knew that none of it was good. “You take it back right now you dirty old bastard, or you’ll regret it. I swear to God.”
“Oh, you swear to God now?” He had been using his cane to balance his steps, but now he choked up on it as if it were a silver-tipped baton. “I’ll learn you not to use the Lord’s name in vain, you slimy little bit of afterbirth. Come over here for your lesson!”
“You won’t dump your dip cup on me, Heartless Harby!” I screamed, ripping the veil of afternoon heat like the one in the temple when Jesus was crucified. The rock sailed from my hand, whizzing like a wasp with a thousand stingers, covered in my own angry blood.
I remembered seeing it with perfect clarity; the edge of the rock met the thin, wrinkly skin of his temple, where it had clung like cobwebs for so many years. And then, in an instant, it was gone and was replaced with a gash of red gore.
Heartless Harby crumpled.
And I was myself again.
“Help!” I screamed. “Someone help!”
It was still preternaturally quiet up and down the street, but I could hear life coming back to Prudhomme in the distance. Except for the prostrate old man, I could see everything coming back to normal, like binoculars coming into focus. Locusts started their crescendo, birds were alighting on the gutter, and I even saw what I’m pretty sure was the same squirrel come scampering back down the blackjack oak. Maybe it was a coincidence, but I think the animals felt it was safe to come out again. Heartless Harby was known to kick a dog.
“What’s all this carrying on?” asked Doc Heller, stepping off his porch a few houses down the street. “Who’s that? Harvey Campbell?”
“Yes, sir!” My feet were still glued to the sidewalk. “It’s Mr. Harby! He’s hurt!” I stood there awkwardly, like I had just soiled my pants and couldn’t stand the feel of it on my skin. It felt like that in more ways than one.
Doc Heller came on fast, leaving his black bag on the table in his foyer where he always kept it. He ran right through Mrs. Lange’s flowerbed as if it weren’t even there. Doc Heller was a good man; he was so good he didn’t care he was running toward evil.
“What happened, Harvey?”
“His head,” I said, still standing with my feet fast. “His head is bleeding.”
“I can see that,” said the Doc. He rolled up his sleeves and eased Mr. Harby onto his back. Grabbing one of the old man’s skeletal wrists, he checked for a pulse. Then he stuck his thumb under the old man’s jaw. Nothing. Finally, Doc Heller cupped one hand over the other and pressed down on the middle of Mr. Harby’s chest to see if he could start his withered old heart beating again. When he came down, he went all the way through to the verandah floor. It was like he punched a hole in the old man with his weight.
From that day to this, I never saw a grown man blanch like that in all my life, but I swear Doc Heller went white as a sheet. He thought he tore through the old man, like snot through a tissue, but what he saw next made him turn gray. He tore open Harby’s shirt to see what he had done. Between the old man’s bluish nipples, was a gaping chest wound where his heart should be—a gaping chest wound that had healed over some eighty years before.
From Out of the Night
By L.D. Ricard
Jeff wasn’t too keen on Art’s brainstorm. Sure they could use the money, but it didn’t feel right to make it poaching. Still, Steve was in and if he backed down now it would mean getting ragged on until he graduated. The part of the mountain where they were going hunting was reputed to be haunted. Just perfect, he thought. Not that he paid much mind to what the old-timers thought.
Art pulled the monster 4x4 off the dirt trail. “Here we are boys. Me and the dogs tracked a big ole’ bear here two nights running.”
Jeff wondered why the idiot hadn’t shot the darn thing then.
Steve was unloading the rifles from the truck. “You sure bear gallbladders really sell?”
Art rolled his eyes. “Of course I’m sure. Them Asian types buy them. Not sure what for though. Isn’t that why there’s Viagra? We don’t want to get caught. Heavy jail time. With the money from the gallbladder, meat, and hide we’ll be set for a good little while.”
Jeff wondered if the criminal mastermind had figured out exactly where they were going to sell the stuff. He wandered back to help with the two hounds. God—he wond
ered for the umpteenth time—why had his parents relocated to this spit on the map little burg? Things were fine back home in Boston. Get caught with one little joint and it’s the end of the world. It was the first time he smoked the shit too. Well, less than a year and he’d be eighteen and New England-bound.
Steve handed him a rifle, and they followed Art into the woods, not knowing they were being watched…closely. The hounds strained to get their leashes off. After thirty minutes, Art turned them loose. With the full moon, it was easy to see where they were going. Jeff was by no means a country kid. Oh sure, he’d hunted before. That was in the early mornings or evenings, not to mention it was legal. If this were his punishment for a joint, he couldn’t imagine what they would do to him if he were caught doing this.
Lost in his thoughts, he didn’t realize the hounds were baying until Steve gave his arm a shake. “Wake up, Yank! You go that way.” He pointed to the left. “Art’s staying on the dog’s trail and I’ll go right. Keep your eyes peeled, and for gosh sakes, don’t accidentally shoot one of us or the dogs.”
Again, Jeff wondered about the wisdom of his coming along. He could barely hear the hounds now, and he thought that maybe if he hung back far enough he wouldn’t actually have to shoot anything. Deer were one thing, but he hadn’t been honest with the others. He’d never shot anything in his life, and he didn’t think pop bottles counted.
He started walking again. Suddenly, he heard a strange mewing noise to his right. Eyes straining against the shadows, he could swear there was a naked woman in the brush—a naked woman with glowing yellow eyes. She seemed to wink at him. He closed his eyes and rubbed them. When he opened them again, she was gone.
He cautiously walked to where she had appeared to be. Kneeling down, he found a set of tracks. He was no expert, but he swore they were some kind of big-ass cat tracks. These weren’t your average household tabby tracks. They were as big as his fist, if not bigger.
Dark Light Book Three (Dark Light Anthology) Page 1
