A jubilant cackle erupted from below, so loud its force shook the foundation of the house. It was a laugh with which the children of Devil’s Creek were well familiar, culled from their recurring nightmares. The mere sound raised the hairs on their arms and necks, the sensation of chilled air on a brisk winter night, cold enough to steal one’s breath.
The voice did not belong to Laura Tremly.
“No bickering, children. Come, let me look at you.”
4
Less than a mile away, Riley Tate slowed his father’s car to a timid five miles an hour. His trip around the outskirts of town via the Stauford Bypass went without incident, allowing him time to grow comfortable behind the wheel, a brief respite from the living nightmares miles back.
As he left the bypass and turned west along Breyersburg Road, signs of the corruption grew more apparent, and his heart sank when he realized how far it spread. Mile after mile, house after house, he saw more of the same blue-eyed horror from which he’d escaped on the other side of town. Figures clad in makeshift robes walked hand in hand down both sides of the road, heading west toward the heart of town. Adults and children alike made their unholy pilgrimage, called forth by the same corrupting force.
I wonder if Dad’s doing the same thing. He’d always thought of his father as an automaton of sorts, living his life by a book that didn’t make sense to the boy, spending more time in servitude of an invisible all-seeing entity than with his own family.
Before she got sick, Janet Tate spent every evening with Riley, discussing his homework, talking about his day, chatting about what books he was reading or the music he listened to. Janet didn’t share his interests, but she didn’t shy away from them, either. Not like his father, who spent more time trying to find ways to convert people to his way of thinking, his way of believing.
Riley was so caught up in the past, he almost missed the turn for Standard Avenue. Old Lady Tremly’s estate wasn’t far now, just around the bend and at the top of the hill, but the mass of bodies congregating in the street forced him to slow. There were men and women, boys and girls of varying ages, clad in their shoddy robes and walking hand in hand down the center of the street. Together, they sang the chorus of an old church hymn, one he’d heard at his father’s church once or twice before.
“Give me that old-time religion, give me that old-time religion…”
He slowly pressed down on the gas, but the mob in front of him had thickened. He held his breath and tried to hold back a rising panic in his chest, hoping none of them noticed his presence.
“Hello, Mr. Tate.”
Riley cried out in surprise and slammed on the brake. Assistant Principal Meyers stuck his head through the shattered window and grinned. Thick rivulets of black gunk squelched from between his lips and dribbled on the passenger seat like hot tar. A vein bulged from his forehead.
“I’m willin’ to let bygones be bygones if you’ll suffer for me, son. Will you do that? Will you suffer for the lord?” The vein in his forehead burst with a sickening plop. A tear of black fluid leaked from the opening, followed by a worm working its way toward the open air. A pair of them emerged from beneath the man’s eyes, coated in the same viscous sludge. “Come on, Mr. Tate. Let me teach you about the Old Ways.”
Riley didn’t wait for the scream rising in his throat. He stamped the gas pedal and shot forward, plowing through the corrupted mob. A young woman in stained drapery flew onto the hood of the car and shot into the air. The young boy she was carrying smashed into the windshield, bouncing off with a dull thud as the glass cracked from the impact. The child’s infected blood coated the right side of the car like thick blackberry jam. Riley finally freed the scream building within, a rattling cry of fear and disgust and anger filling his mouth with the bitter taste of bile, the heat of hatred.
His gut lurched as the sedan cleared the fallen bodies and returned to asphalt. Panicked, his tears clouding his vision, Riley slowed only once to look in the rearview mirror. The mob was still coming, stepping over the bodies of those he’d crushed, their singing more pronounced than before. Some of them were laughing in the cloud of fumes.
Riley watched them in the rearview for a moment longer until he saw the figure of Stauford High’s assistant principal emerge from the crowd. David Myers’s face had split open, flaps of skin held aloft by the worms protruding from his skull. Before Riley turned away, he thought he saw dark fingers poking out from the man’s gaping mouth.
“Hallelujah,” he chanted. “Give me that old-time religion.”
Riley swallowed the taste of bile and stepped on the gas.
5
“Ah, my little lambs. Don’t be shy. Come, let me see you.”
Jack led the way down the basement steps, half-expecting to see his father waiting for him at the bottom. What he remembered of Jacob Masters was forever ingrained in his mind, a dark blue-eyed specter haunting his dreams for the better part of thirty years. The notion that Jacob would be down there waiting in the dark with Laura didn’t seem implausible.
But when he reached the landing and switched on the light, there was only his mother, still bound to the support beam. Dark tears streamed from her cheeks, and something black squirmed from one of her nostrils. A blue aura surrounded the orbits of her eyes. She smiled when she saw them. A thick clump of black mud dripped from her mouth.
“I’ve missed my lambs. Time’s been good to y’all.”
Stephanie gasped, raised her hand to her mouth. “What’s wrong with her voice?”
“That isn’t her,” Jack whispered. He turned to Chuck, who stood dumbstruck at the bottom of the stairs. “Does that look like performance art to you?”
“Jack, I—”
“Ever the Doubting Thomas, little Chuck. I remember the first time I fondled your tiny cock, you tried stopping me. I told you, ‘Don’t worry, little lamb. It’s the lord’s will.’ And you know what you said to me?”
Chuck blinked back tears. “I don’t believe you.”
Laura Tremly leaned her head back against the beam and laughed. “Do you remember everything else I did to you down there in the dark where the lord was watching? You couldn’t sit down for days.”
“You fucking bitch,” Chuck growled. He raced forward and struck Laura with the back of his hand. “You’re not him. You’re not him!”
Dark sludge streamed from Laura’s nose. A long dark worm slipped from her nostril and writhed along the floor toward the shadows. She looked up and laughed. “Still doubting the power of your father, child. I wish I’d slit you open for our lord to eat your guts.” Her eyes rolled up in her head. “I still may, if my other children don’t get you first.”
Chuck balled his hand into a fist, was about to take a swing when the professor caught his arm. Tyler shook his head.
“Is it really him?” Stephanie asked, holding back tears. She stepped forward, hesitant to get any closer but unable to stop herself. Here was the beast they’d escaped all those years ago, speaking through his most faithful servant, in captivity for all to see. Stephanie stopped short of Laura’s feet and crouched before her. “Father?”
“Little Stephanie. Not my favorite lady, but close. You always put up a fight when I took you down to the temple. Not like your sister Susan. She was a good little lamb.”
Stephanie struggled to keep her composure. “How is this possible?”
“As the lord speaks through me, I speak through His followers, for I am His apostle. You could be one of my flock, child. Just like your sister Susan, or your brother Zeke. Even your brother Bobby saw the light. So shall you all.”
Jack knelt beside his sister, put his arm around her in comfort.
“What do you want, Jacob?”
“Callin’ your daddy by his name don’t make you a big man, Jackie. I want what I’ve always wanted. A pure world, a heaven on earth. I want to spread the seeds of Eden and free my lord from His earthly prison. I want what I promised your heretic grandma the day she killed me. I want b
lood and fire.” Laura’s eyes rolled toward the old man. “And I want what you stole from me.”
Professor Booth met Laura’s glowing gaze, his resolve withering, a visible tremor rippling through his elderly frame. He stepped away from Chuck and back toward the wall. Jacob’s laughter swelled, exploding from Laura’s mouth in a burst of chortles and chunks of earth.
“I heard you step into my house that day, teacher. Heard you fumble your way through the dark. You glimpsed the nature of god and didn’t even know it. Whole lot of good all that education did for ya.” Laura closed her eyes and inhaled, relishing the rancid scent wafting through the room. “I know my lord’s idol is here. I sent my love to retrieve it, and she will. A little carving of a hungry baby, and what is God if not hungry? I am His apostle, His caretaker. I will give my lord what He wants. I will give Him the blood He desires, and in return, He will give me the world I want.” Laura craned her neck toward the basement window and sighed. The black veins spreading from her eyes deepened, cracking her flesh. “My children have been busy. While you’ve been bickerin’, I’ve been preparing Stauford for the reckoning it deserves. Soon, very soon, I’ll finish what I started, and then my perfect kingdom of suffering will be chartered, hallelujah—”
A car horn startled them, blaring in three quick beeps as tires squealed to a halt outside. Jack shot to his feet. Stephanie followed, approaching the basement window. She stood on her toes and looked outside.
“That’s Bobby’s car.”
They all went upstairs together, eager to leave the maddening sermons of their father behind. Outside, Bobby Tate’s Acura sat at a crooked angle, its engine ticking as it cooled. Riley Tate sat on the edge of the driver’s seat, hunched over and vomiting on the ground. Stephanie was the first to reach him, shocked to find her nephew instead of her brother behind the wheel. She put her hand on the back of the boy’s neck to comfort him, whispering that it’s okay, he’ll be okay.
Chuck walked around the side of the car, exchanging confused glances with Stephanie when he saw the boy.
“Riley,” Stephanie said. “Honey, where’s your dad.”
“Gone,” Riley croaked. He wiped his mouth and blinked away tears. “Dad’s one of them now.”
“One of who?” Chuck asked.
The boy climbed to his feet and pointed down the hill. The mob of corrupted neighbors marched along Standard Avenue toward the home of Stauford’s one-eyed witch. Jack Tremly walked to the edge of the driveway, shielding the sun from his eyes as he peered down the hill. A cold snake slithered through his gut.
“One of them,” Riley said.
CHAPTER TWENTY
1
One of them. Stauford was no stranger to the phrase. The upstanding members of Stauford’s elite, families that lived within the city for generations, and even Riley’s father to a degree, did everything they could to bury that part of the town’s history. But if they were to go digging along the foundations of Main Street where Jacob Masters and his children now marched, they might find in the earth a festering boil, covered in a thin layer of dirt and stone, ready to be lanced.
They might discover the very foundations of Stauford were built upon a fragile attitude of “them” and “other,” making a mockery of the Christian ideals they claimed to uphold. They might discover cracks in the mortar, years upon years of layered sediment, scar tissue in stone, poured with each generation’s refusal to confront the blemish of truth at the core of Stauford’s necrosis.
Before today, if you were to ask anyone in town, they might say Stauford’s only controversy was the burning church in the woods back in ’83. And why would they say anything different? Generations of white-washing and silent indifference saw to that. History always tends to fall prey to revisionists, especially in an echo chamber like Stauford, Kentucky.
The truth was this: Stauford’s tainted history didn’t begin at Devil’s Creek. It didn’t begin with the burning of a church, a ceremonial suicide pact, or six surviving children.
It began with a poker game, a town awakened in the middle of the night by mob justice, and a passionate preacher’s fiery condemnation of those involved.
2
Jacob Masters thought of these truths as he left the mind of Laura Tremly and rejoined his children on the streets of a town that shunned his family. The whispers from the grave ignited his hatred for the decadence of this town, its hypocrisy, its lies. For over thirty years, he’d lain dormant in a shallow grave while the world moved on above him, and in that time, cocooned in the husk of his decaying body, the lord whispered to him.
They have forgotten you and your hate. You must remind them, Jacob.
And he would. Only Jacob remembered his father’s sermon of revelation and retribution to a bleary-eyed congregation of hypocrites one Sunday morning. Only Jacob remembered the cause of the old man’s fury.
His children frolicked down Main Street, singing the hymns of old while they smashed windows and set fire to Babylon. He stopped at the corner of Main and 3rd, staring up at the building formerly known as the Hinkley Hotel. It was a brewery and taproom now, a place for the sinful to imbibe and poison their temples. He watched with proud glee as a boy with black tears streaming from his eyes smashed the glass door and climbed through the jagged opening.
The foundations were rotten here, a black river of sin flowing below the masonry. He heard the babble of whispers lost to time, echoes from the phantoms who’d lost their lives one night in 1919. He heard the raucous, drunken laughter of men over a poker game one warm Saturday night. He heard their footsteps as two of them stumbled their way out of the Hinkley Hotel, around the corner, and toward the railroad tracks across from Depot Street.
Jacob followed in their footsteps, breaking away from the violent singing mob of his own making. There, across the street, near the slope leading up to the tracks, those two men were held at gunpoint by a pair of black men. Only they weren’t black at all—Jacob knew now, another secret given to him by the grave, made clear across the cosmic expanse of death and the universe. No, they were two white men who’d arrived in town the week before by way of the railroad, looking for work but finding most laboring jobs filled by a small community of black men across town. They’d heard of a poker game at the hotel happening Saturday night, and wouldn’t it be something if they could get their hands on some of those winnings?
They’d covered their faces in engine grease, dirtied their clothes to look like two good-for-nothin’ niggers, and waited for a drunk poker player or two to wander their way.
Jacob tasted the air with his leathery tongue, breathing in the smell of smoke. He supposed his father’s crusade was foolhardy given the time and place, but without it, Jacob’s communion with the lord would have never come to pass. The lord, He did work in mysterious ways.
The drunks who were robbed at gunpoint that night staggered back to the hotel and told their friends what happened. What followed was a shameful act of cowardice and fear, of supposed racial superiority and white ignorance. Hours later, the screams of men and women and children filled the night as they were marched down the street, driven from their homes by a mob of angry white men.
He heard the phantoms of their conspiracy, indignant remarks about too many blacks in Stauford, and what good did they do, anyway? They were there to help while the men were away at war, and the Great War was over, had been for almost a year. The men were home and they needed work. Stauford was a white town, and the last thing they needed were a bunch of blacks muddying the waters, marryin’ their women, taking their jobs, and getting rowdy in town on the weekends. They needed to know their place—and that place wasn’t here, friend. No, sir.
As Jacob walked back to Main Street, he heard the bubbling river of sin below, for here the black abyss ran deepest, thickest. These streets were paved over the blood of the innocent, where men were whipped and beaten as they were marched toward the railyards. There, they were loaded onto a series of cattle cars and sent south to Chattanooga. T
he few who tried to run were either shot or lynched from the bridge over Layne Camp Creek.
A plume of flame engulfed the steeple of First Baptist in a cloud of orange and black. Cheers erupted from the crowd, raising their hands to the sky as they shouted Hallelujah, and Jacob joined them. Let their temple burn. Their bed of sin was made there. So shall they lie in it.
The morning after their purge, the same men who’d spilled innocent blood wandered through the doors of First Baptist, took their seats, and feigned their faith before Jacob’s father. Thurmond Masters heard what they’d done, heard they’d even set fire to the small one-room church outside of Stauford the black folks used for worship, and his fury was unmatched. Following the passion in his heart, Reverend Thurmond Masters preached a different sort of sermon, one of fire and brimstone and revelation visited upon those who’d knowingly turned away from the teachings of Christ.
Amen, they’d said, nodding their heads in agreement. Thurmond Masters, hands shaking, his brow coated in sweat, slammed his fist on the lectern and screamed, “You are all murderers in the house of the lord!”
These men, these white men who’d exiled entire families from town on account of their skin color, were more than just murderers—they were landowners, business owners, elected officials in town. They were on the side of public opinion, held a higher office than the local reverend, and they saw to it Thurmond Masters preached his final sermon at First Baptist that humid Sunday morning in 1919.
He was cast out like Adam and Eve from Eden, a bad seed who would soon take root in the wilderness outside of town. There, he claimed the voice of God called to him among the trees, leading him with whispered direction toward a knob of earth standing solely in a clearing. God told him to build a temple for His children, and good Thurmond Masters, ever the man of faith, did as his lord bid him.
And so, the Lord’s Church of Holy Voices was established, its walls blessed in the name of the father, the son, and the holy spirit, amen. For decades they prayed and sang to a false god above, decrying the decadence of the Babylon beyond the trees. Soon, Pastor Thurmond preached, a reckoning would come to Stauford, a reckoning of blood and fire raining down from the heavens. God’s retribution for the people exiling their only voice of purity and reason.
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