High Lonesome Sound

by Jaye Wells

  Table of Contents

  Preparation For Burial

  Remaindered

  The Scream

  Crossing The Threshold

  A Wolf Enters The Flock

  Ghosts Of Comfort Past

  Tests

  In The Belly Of The Beast

  Dark Moon Interlude

  The Thirst

  Pauper’s Breakfast

  River Songs

  Crying Out In The Wilderness

  Allies

  Job 28:28

  The Steeple Story

  The First Rebellion

  Writer’s Block

  The Reunion

  The Bitter Mourning

  Enemies

  Skeletons

  The Visitation

  Petals And Thorns

  Hoodoo

  Testing The Bead

  Lost On The River

  The Approach

  Coffin Nails

  Cemetery Magic

  The Invitation

  Tending The Flock

  Hair Of The Dog

  So Mote It Be

  The Devil’s Spine

  Meeting With The Mentor

  Porch Diplomacy

  Black

  Fly Away, Pretty Bird

  Bad Dreams

  Jailbreak

  Different Paths

  Storming The Hill

  Damsel’s Distressed

  Lost Lamb

  Fallow

  Signs & Portents

  Paradise Lost

  Fugue

  Moon Hollow Interlude

  High Lonesome Sound

  Jaye Wells

  Contents

  1. Preparation For Burial

  2. Remaindered

  3. The Scream

  4. Crossing The Threshold

  5. A Wolf Enters The Flock

  6. Ghosts Of Comfort Past

  7. Tests

  8. In The Belly Of The Beast

  9. Dark Moon Interlude

  10. The Thirst

  11. Pauper’s Breakfast

  12. River Songs

  13. Crying Out In The Wilderness

  14. Allies

  15. Job 28:28

  16. The Steeple Story

  17. The First Rebellion

  18. Writer’s Block

  19. The Reunion

  20. The Bitter Mourning

  21. Enemies

  22. Skeletons

  23. The Visitation

  24. Petals And Thorns

  25. Hoodoo

  26. Testing The Bead

  27. Lost On The River

  28. The Approach

  29. Coffin Nails

  30. Cemetery Magic

  31. The Invitation

  32. Tending The Flock

  33. Hair Of The Dog

  34. So Mote It Be

  35. The Devil’s Spine

  36. Meeting With The Mentor

  37. Porch Diplomacy

  38. Black

  39. Fly Away, Pretty Bird

  40. Bad Dreams

  41. Jailbreak

  42. Different Paths

  43. Storming The Hill

  44. Damsel’s Distressed

  45. Lost Lamb

  46. Fallow

  47. Signs & Portents

  48. Paradise Lost

  49. Fugue

  50. Moon Hollow Interlude

  51. Restless Villagers

  52. Angels

  53. Devils

  54. Preparation For Battle

  55. The Spooked Flock

  56. Jukebox Of The Dead

  57. Demon Jack And The Cadillac

  58. Family Reunion

  59. Peering Into The Well

  60. Revelation

  61. The Road Back

  62. The River Song

  63. Unburdened

  64. Hopeless

  65. God Is A Bullet

  66. Lamentations

  67. Homeward

  68. Promises

  69. Mama’s Song

  70. The Arrival

  71. Return With The Elixir

  72. The Circle Unbroken

  Acknowledgments

  Also by Jaye Wells

  About the Author

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  “The earth has its music for those who will listen.”

  -Reginald Vincent Holmes

  1

  Preparation For Burial

  Ruby

  The bear was crying again.

  In the cold hours before her sisters demanded breakfast or Daddy got back to drinking, Ruby Barrett lay in bed and listened to the cub down the road holler for its mama. The high, pitiful wails didn't enter through her ears; they shredded through her middle like icy fingers. Once inside, the sounds crawled up under her ribs and throbbed like a second heart.

  The mean old Plott hounds down at Junior Jessup’s farm answered each of the bear’s cries with howls that sounded like hell’s own choir. When she’d first asked Daddy about the bear, he said Junior kept it caged near the dog runs to train the hounds for hunting season come deep fall.

  “If Junior’s in a Christian mood maybe he’ll send some of that bear meat our way for the winter,” he’d added.

  “But isn't it illegal to take a cub?" she’d whispered.

  Instead of answering, he’d punched her. After living in that house for eighteen years, she should have known better than to sass him. These days, the only sure things in her life were Daddy’s fist, the crying bear, and the Mama-shaped hole in the world.

  After he’d hit her, she’d washed the blood from her mouth in the cracked bathroom sink. She sent her anger down that drain, too, because her sanity depended on staying numb.

  The memories faded away, just like the bruises eventually did, leaving her alone in the dark with the rain beating on the clapboards like tears and the cold so hard like a winter grave.

  That morning, they were gonna bury Mama.

  The thought created a crack in the dam she’d built around her heart. She swiped at the first couple of tears, but soon she couldn’t stem the tide anymore. Her sobs weren't as loud as the bear's, but they sounded and felt just as hopeless.

  Squeezing her eyes closed, she listened hard for the song. She yearned for the sound of wind whispering secrets through the trees and the distant rumble of highland thunder. Mama had been the one to teach her how to listen to the mountain’s music. But when Mama died, so had the songs, and now the only music in her life came from that terrified bear cub.

  Without the mountain to tell her its secrets, she had no choice but to turn to God for help. “Please, Jesus,” she whispered. “Bring me a miracle.”

  In all her life, she’d only known two people who escaped Moon Hollow. The first was Jack Thompson, but even he hadn’t lasted a full year at college before he lost his scholarship and moved back to his mama’s trailer. Last time she’d talked to him, he’d said he was looking into work down in the mines. Might as well have said he was buying a plot up on Cemetery Hill, which is right where her mama, the only other escapee, would be buried that very morning.

  “Please help me leave this place.” Something deep in her chest, some burning knowledge that was not of the brain but of the heart, told her that if she didn’t find her song, Moon Hollow would become a tomb and she’d be buried alive.

  But Jesus didn’t answer her prayer that morning. The only response came from down the road.

  She wondered if the bear had watched its mama die, too.

  Like lightning, an image appeared in her head of Mama’s whole body shuddering as death asked her to dance. The jerky steps of that morbid waltz represented the surrender of Rose Barrett’s body and soul. The remembered smell of cinnamon and grain alcohol from the spilled apple pi
e moonshine—a perfume she now would always associate with death—filled her nostrils. She swallowed hard and pushed the ugly memory back down into the dark vault where she hid all of her ghosts.

  Funny, she never remembered hearing that bear cry once the sun was high and the dew baked off every blade of grass. But at that moment, in the dark, in the cold dark, the world felt impossibly small and filled with the terrible realization that the only thing worse than those cries was knowing that soon enough they, too, would fall silent.

  2

  Remaindered

  Peter

  The bookstore used to be a temple where he’d communed with the gods of story, but now it felt like a crypt where his dreams had gone to die. The musty scent of old paper and binding glue, once so dear, now repulsed him, made him ashamed.

  He pasted a smile on his face for the old woman behind the counter. Last time he’d been in for a book signing, she’d predicted big things for his career. Now she barely met his eyes as she waved. “Mr. West,” she said in a patronizing tone.

  He scanned the store to see if any fans might poke their heads over shelves to catch a glimpse of famous horror author, Peter West. But there were only two other people in the store—a five-year-old boy and his mother, who was too busy forestalling a tantrum to be impressed by the arrival of an almost-big-time novelist.

  The woman behind the checkout desk busied herself placing stickers on copies of the latest blockbuster horror novel from that hack author Hollywood loved. All the reviewers called him, “a natural storyteller,” which every real writer knew meant he couldn’t write his way out of a grocery list, but he still sold a metric ton of copies, regardless of his lack of talent. Peter took a deep breath and dismissed that old rant because the only way to shut up that voice was to drown it with whiskey.

  “Mr. West?” What’s-her-name—Gladys? Gertrude?—was talking again. “I said, it’s been too long.”

  Understatement of the century. Oh, he knew she was referring to how long it had been since he’d visited to buy books. But he also heard the unspoken judgment about how long it had been since he’d published a new novel. “Been busy,” he lied. “Working on something new.”

  Her smile was too polite to be sincere. She went back to stickering the hack’s books. Grateful for the excuse to escape, he ducked into the regional lore section. At least it wasn’t the local authors area, where he’d be faced with seeing how few copies of his last book they carried—or worse, discovering that they’d already remaindered the few copies they’d had.

  The thought reminded him of the time he’d gone out back to smoke during a signing at a Barnes & Noble in Chicago. The Dumpster in the alley had been overflowing with the novels waiting to be pulped after the covers had been stripped to return to the publishers for refunds. The unbound pages lay in the rain, bloated and naked as corpses.

  Wicked Ink Book Store in Raleigh, North Carolina, was one of the few independent bookstores in the southeast that had yet to show any signs of shuttering. They thrived on a robust special order business of devoted horror fans. All the biggies signed at Wicked Ink, and every fan of the genre knew the store’s name. He still remembered the first time he’d signed there. Only five people had shown up, but he’d been grateful for the opportunity and that anyone was reading his work at all. What a desperate asshole he’d been.

  He half-heartedly scanned the shelves for interesting titles, but his mind was busy planning what he’d say to Renee.

  The call had come in a few days earlier. As usual, he’d ignored the ringing phone, but that time she’d left a message. Short and polite, it had asked him to meet her at the store at ten on Wednesday morning. She didn’t say what she wanted to discuss, but he knew.

  It had been a year. Plenty of time for her to realize her mistake and swallow her pride. The choice of a bookstore for the meeting had been his first clue. They’d met in a bookstore twenty-five years earlier at UNC Chapel Hill. He’d offered to buy her the book in her hand, which had turned out to be a romance novel. She hadn’t argued when he put that book back and selected a copy of The Haunting of Hill House by Shirley Jackson instead.

  “But I don’t like horror,” she’d complained.

  He had wanted to suck that pout right off her lips. Instead, he’d leaned in and said, “You will by the time I’m done with you.”

  As he read aloud the passage about Eleanor Vance’s cup of stars, Renee took him into her mouth for the first time. That’s when he knew it was love.

  These days, he wasn’t sure he’d ever really understood love at all, but after twelve years of marriage and a nasty divorce he sure as hell had intimate knowledge of hate.

  He passed the shelf dedicated to the lore of North Carolina’s coast and moved toward one labeled, “True Ghost Stories of Appalachia.”

  How should he play it? She’d be coy about it, of course. Try to blame him for what happened. Bring up the fling with his T.A. at Meredith College. He’d remind her it was just the once, but, Christ, he was a male professor at an all-girls college, he should get credit for having screwed only one—or three, he’d silently amended—of them. Next, she’d bring up his drinking and the way he’d disappear into his office for days on end. She never did understand the demands of the creative life—the burden of his imagination.

  He ran a finger over the spines. The words and colors blurred together until the wall morphed into a great mosaic of ideas. Where were all those writers now? They were non-fiction sorts, which meant they probably had day jobs as technical writers or copywriting advertorials. He couldn't judge them, not really. The only thing keeping him from declaring bankruptcy was his adjunct salary at the college. Meredith had fired him after the incident in the library with the T.A., but Wake County Technical College wasn’t too picky about who taught basic comp to budding HVAC specialists.

  At random, he pulled a book from the shelf. The cover showed an illustrated night scene of a full moon over a mountain cabin with a few pairs of predators’ yellow eyes looking out from the dark. The title was Appalachian Hauntings. Peter fanned the pages and stopped at random. The chapter he landed on appeared to be about stories of ghosts living in the coalmines of southwest Virginia.

  The bell over the door announced a new arrival.

  “Peter?”

  With a finger holding his place in the book, he turned toward Renee’s voice. “Hey,” he said too eagerly.

  She didn’t smile and her eyes narrowed a fraction, as if it allowed her to see through his façade. “You okay?”

  He laughed. “Sure, sure. I was just reading.” He held up the book. She barely spared it a glance.

  “You look good.”

  Here we go, he thought. Play this cool. Think Marlowe, The Big Sleep. “And you look like trouble, sweetheart.”

  Her expression cooled. “Coffee?”

  “Sure.” He smiled and let his gaze wander down her body. She stepped back, telling him she didn’t take it as a compliment. Okay, maybe not Chandler. She was always more of a Nicholas Sparks girl, anyway, but damn him if he was going to spout that saccharine dialogue. Maybe he could meet her halfway with some Tennessee Williams or Fitzgerald. Yeah, that was it. Renee certainly had Daisy Buchanan’s beauty and depth. Of course, in this version he’d play Nick Carraway, not that pathetic sap Gatsby.

  “Peter?”

  He looked up to see Renee already halfway to the coffee stand. He brought the book with him, as a sort of totem. Maybe he’d tell her he was doing some research for a book he was writing. Oh, I can’t talk about it yet. You know how it is. Don’t want to jinx it.

  She ordered a cup of tea with cream and sugar. He asked for dark roast, black. They took their drinks to the small bistro table, one of three in what passed for Wicked Ink’s version of a coffee shop. While she stirred her tea, he sat back and waited for her to figure out how to begin.

  She used a small wooden stirrer, moving in smooth clockwise circles. Orderly and neat. When she was done stirring, she tapped the stick
three times before setting it on a napkin, which she folded once, twice, three times. Finally, she looked up and met his gaze. He smiled a smile that said, we’ll get through this together.

  It had been—what? Six months since their last conversation. Hadn’t that been such a joy? He still carried a faint bitterness on his tongue from the words he’d spoken that day when she’d called to yell at him to “just sign the papers already, damn it—put us both out of this misery.” Well, signing the papers might have put her out of her misery, but it had been the start of his.

  He hadn’t been able to write a word since.

  “Thanks for meeting with me today,” she said finally. Instead of looking at him, she stared at the steam rising from her tea.

  “I’m surprised you still had my number.”

  She smiled with infinite patience—the kind she’d never shown when they were married. “Of course I had it. But you made it pretty clear last time we talked that you weren’t too interested in keeping in touch.”

  The names he’d called her goose-stepped through his memory. “Sorry about that. I wasn’t in a good place.”