Black Mercy Falls

by Christopher Fulbright

  That bastard had spilled every detail of Colleen and Jeremy’s demise to the paper. Every last detail was there. What gave that asshole the right to make their personal family business public? Lance banged his open palm against the steering wheel, accidentally honking his horn.

  He looked through the windshield to see if he had disturbed anyone. His waitress was staring at him through the diner window with a sorrowful expression. Everyone knew everything.

  Lance shoved the key into the ignition. He tore out of the parking lot, gravel kicking up in his wake and pulled onto Main Street. He drove the Pathfinder to the sheriff’s office and rolled into a parking spot.

  Fury raging through him, he thrust open his door, leapt from the vehicle, slamming the door behind him. Not even taking the time to formulate what he would say, he stomped into the jail.

  A middle-aged female officer looked up from a computer. “Can I help you?”

  “Where’s Perry?”

  “Sheriff Perry’s getting a haircut down at Jake’s. He should be back in—”

  Lance turned around and pushed through the door, leaving it swinging behind him. He stood for a moment looking up and down the street at the various signs that hung in front of stores, spotted the red and white barber pole, and marched to Jake’s.

  He yanked open the door. Sleigh bells rattled against the tinted glass. Perry was seated in the chair next to the window, the barber brushing the last of the clipped hairs from his uniform. Lance balled his fists.

  “Where the hell do you get off telling every fucking detail of how my wife and kid died to the paper? And, apparently, from what I’ve heard, to everyone else in this god damned town too?”

  Perry blinked at him. The barber took a step back, started to hold up his hands.

  “Don’t try to deny it, Perry. It’s in the fucking paper. Front page for Christ’s sake!”

  “Now, now. I don’t want any trouble in here,” the barber said.

  “I think it would be a good idea for you to calm down, Mr. Evans,” Perry’s voice lapsed into a deep authoritative tone. Gone was the old friend banter of last night.

  “Calm down? Calm down? I’ll calm the fuck down when you shut the hell up. If I wanted everyone and their god damn dog to know how Colleen and Jeremy died, I would’ve told them myself!”

  Sheriff Perry stood, walked purposefully up to Lance, and gripped him firmly by the arm. “I suggest we take this outside and that you start reminding yourself exactly who the hell you’re talking to.” His voice was low, gravely, the voice of a long-time smoker.

  Lance grit his teeth. He set his stance and didn’t move.

  “I guess I need to remind you that you’re in my town. And in my town, you don’t come charging into the barbershop while I’m having a friendly chat with Jake and start making threats.”

  “Your town? You’re the sheriff. You answer to the people of this town.”

  “Son, I run this town, and every god damned soul in it answers to me. Now, I suggest—”

  Lance jerked his arm away from Perry’s grasp and turned abruptly, stomping out the same way he came in, the sleigh bells beating a tinny tune on the glass door.

  He didn’t wait for Perry to follow him outside. Instead he made his way to his vehicle, climbed in, slammed the door, and screeched his tires on his way back to the road.

  12

  Lance knew he had to call Colleen’s parents yet, but that would have to wait. His mind ran through a list of things he reasonably should be doing, but his anger blazed and obscured reason with a lust for vengeance. He knew exactly what he had to do next. It was simple. There really was no other option as far as he could see; he was going to destroy Mercy Falls.

  As he returned to Uncle Ballard’s property, his dark mountain inheritance, he decided to blow the waterfalls into a million fucking pieces; specifically, the pit of black ichor in that cursed cavern beyond the falls, the foul thing that throbbed and shivered at his presence. Whatever that thing was, its destroyer had come. Lance planned to use the dynamite—plant it right at the edge of the small, arched doorway in the cave where he’d encountered the globular mass. He’d have to use a quick timer on the blasting caps based on how fast the tarry substance had come after him before, but that didn’t really concern him. Life for him from this point forward didn’t hold much promise. Live or die, the deed would be done.

  Set on his plan, he drove through the hollow of trees over the last of the driveway. As he emerged from the forest into that bleak valley’s end, he stared warily beyond the closest trees toward the falls. It made him sick to look at the water, to think about what it had taken from him, what it must have taken from the whole town through the years—mothers, sisters, brothers, lovers.

  He drove the Pathfinder up to the end of the driveway near the cabin. As soon as he shut off the ignition, a preternatural stillness fell over the area. The vehicle’s cab muffled the sound of the falls. He stayed in the driver’s seat for a minute, exhaustion washing over him. He gave the torrents of water an even stare.

  I’m going to kill you. He was talking to it, to that thing, to that evil hungry for souls.

  The Pathfinder nudged forward as if shoved from behind.

  Lance’s heart trip-hammered. His palms on the steering wheel went clammy. He looked in the rear view mirror—nothing but shadows and forest behind him. His hand went to the key in the ignition, and turned it.

  Nothing.

  The key clicked, but no dash lights came on, no warnings buzzed. It was dead. Lance checked if the shifter was in park. It was. He tried starting it again. Nothing.

  “Son of a bitch,” Lance muttered, reaching for the door handle. He yanked it—the wishbone-like piece of plastic snapped off and the door remained closed. He looked at the broken handle in his hand. He pressed the unlock button on the main switch console, trying to unlock the doors. They stayed locked. That was when, out of the corner of his eye, something in the cab of the SUV moved. Since he barely perceived the movement, he thought it must be a living thing, something small and fast—some rodent that had crawled into the car. He turned. Nothing was there, but the gearshift moved.

  Dear God, it moved.

  He stared at the gearshift, not breathing, unwilling to touch it. The transmission was now in neutral. The Pathfinder began to roll slowly backward toward the creek—and the shed.

  Snapping out of his shock, Lance gripped the shifter, trying to force it into park, but it wouldn’t budge. He yanked the lever to activate the emergency brake, but it was as if it had become a solid iron bar never intended for movement. He wrenched it with all of his strength, yelling as he tried to force it—no use. It was frozen in place.

  The Pathfinder picked up momentum. It rolled off the side of the driveway, heading down the slope toward the creek.

  Lance glanced in the rearview mirror. The vehicle was barreling toward the shed—the shed containing just enough unstable dynamite to rip this section of forest to shreds and take a chunk of the mountain with it. He gripped the steering wheel, trying to turn it. It was locked into position; the key hadn’t released the theft deterrent feature. Frantically, he twisted the key again, stomping on the brakes to no avail—the pedal went to the floor as if the lines had been bled dry of brake fluid.

  The Pathfinder increased in speed, bouncing over the rocks and forest floor. A quick glance behind told him everything he needed to know; he was still on a collision course with the shed. Lance moved toward the middle of the car and pushed both feet against the windshield. Then, he delivered a two-legged kick that would’ve broken a man’s ribs.

  The windshield bowed but didn’t crack. A second hefty kick yielded the same results.

  Lance scrambled into the back seat. He headed for the rear hatch compartment where the tire iron and jack were buried under extra sweatshirts, a gallon of water, and some bungee cords. He gripped the cold metal of the tire iron.

  He tried to climb back up front.

  On its way down the hill, t
he rear wheel of the Pathfinder struck a boulder. The truck bounced into the air. Lance’s head hit the roof and his neck kinked. Slamming against the door, his left arm folded the wrong way with a sickening crack. The dull end of the tire iron clanged against his forehead hard enough to deliver solid pain. Still, he didn’t have time to dwell on his injuries—with his good arm he swung the iron at the nearest window.

  —snap—

  All at once the safety glass webbed with cracks. Lance struck out with a kick, and this time the window folded outward in a mostly solid flap, leaving glass teeth around the edge. Behind the vehicle, through the back window, the shed was fifteen yards away and getting closer every second.

  Lance forced his body through the hole in the window, ignoring the shards that gouged his hands and flesh as he shoved his way out. His T-shirt snagged and he swung, half in and half out of the car. He ripped the shirt free, hanging suspended in the window of the Pathfinder until another jarring bump threw him clear.

  Lance’s body arched through the air. He landed hard, gasping for breath. Pain shot like fire through his left arm as he shoved himself to a standing position and sprinted away from the shed.

  The sound of the vehicle smashing through the last few feet of forest was a cacophony of crunching wood soon eclipsed by an earthquake and supernova when the vehicle plowed through the shed. Everything exploded as the hurtling automobile and its tornado of destruction became a source of light, heat, and annihilation.

  The power of the blast was like a wall of concrete slamming against his back at high speed. It threw him twenty-five yards toward the rocky shore. The nucleus of the explosion was white hot, a lightning strike to the eyes. Orange flame erupted from the corona like a swirling fireball, engulfing the trees, rocks, shrubs, animals, creek, and forest, ripping everything into decimated black ash like a hurricane of fire.

  In a slow-motion nightmare, Lance careened to the earth at the edge of the pool, his back smashed against a large boulder, head cracking against the pebbled shore. Air pushed from his lungs. In the napalm-like blast, skin blistered on his arms and face, hair burned to a crisp. He sizzled and smoked, stirring in the throes of pain. When the debris of the explosion fell in a rain of death, Lance was broken beneath it. Massive hunks of granite that had dislodged from the earth and flown into the air within pillars of smoke and dust now bowed to the forces of gravity and began to fall.

  Amidst the after-blast shower of fire and stone, a two-hundred-pound chunk of granite fell like a guillotine across Lance’s thighs, grinding through flesh. It hit him hard enough to shred the meat of his legs with one impact, pulverizing the bone. His legs were severed. His spasming body rolled as he was cut free of the fallen rock, his legless torso precariously close to the water.

  The giant cloud of rising smoke darkened the already gray sky. Acrid plumes drifted from the explosion like low clouds over the end of the valley. A fiery perimeter surrounded the charred crater where the shed once stood. The mangled steel of the Pathfinder lay crumpled on its side in the creek; paint melted away, metal crushed as if by the hand of a giant. Up the hill, a swath of charred grass edged up to the building and part of the cabin roof was ripped away. The windows on one side had imploded.

  The falls, however, remained unscathed. The water roared, mighty as ever, into the pool of black water.

  Dust and ash settled. He lay with one cheek to the damp earth, tears flowing, one arm crippled and the other disinclined to do anything at all. Below his waist, he heard the splashing sound of spurting liquid. The sound coincided with the beating of his heart. He pushed himself up using his good arm. Both of his legs were ragged stumps. His shorts were drenched with mud and blood. The pulpy meat of his legs glistened pink and wet. His splintered femurs jabbed out of the veiny mess. Deep crimson arterial blood gushed over the rocks, mingling with the ash and water.

  Lance fell back. From where he lay, he could see across the surface of the cursed pool. He stared over the water that had claimed his wife, his son, and his life…everything.

  It all ended here.

  He was in shock, and yet knew he was dying. His heart slowed. Precious waves of blood poured from his mutilated body, but he wasn’t in any position to tourniquet the ragged stumps that were once his legs. The spattering sound of blood as it washed over rocks marked the final moments of his life.

  He prayed to join them. He couldn’t live without them. He didn’t want to. Not now. Not after everything with Anna, and Jeremy, and Colleen and their unborn child…too much lost. Too much fucking pain. He just wanted to go with them, to be united again, in death or the hereafter.

  He lay there, staring across the surface of the water, thinking of God and wishing for death as an eerie numbness seized his being. The waves shimmered. Something beneath the black water shone silver, as though ignited by a deeper glow somewhere in the heart of the pool.

  Lance’s breaths came shorter and shorter. Tears poured from his unblinking eyes. Vision hazy due to fire-seared eyeballs, he reached with one good hand toward the churning water.

  A small head rose from the surface, waves lapping at a bald cranium, the skin covering it moist and blackening from rot. When the head emerged above the water line, filmy eyelids slid open on yellow eyes. Nostrils flared and a pink serpent’s tongue, forked and long, slipped and flickered between blue lips. The small creature crawled toward him through the shallow water. It was a human fetus, its body covered in aqueous slime, with fishy, mottled gray skin.

  It crawled toward Lance on little hands tipped with claws. Its small mouth opened, but instead of a baby’s wail, black excreta dripped in a lumpy flow onto the rocks. Worse than the foul odor of its discharge, though, were those inhuman yellow eyes.

  “Daaaaa….”

  “Oh God,” Lance breathed shallow, with one arm outstretched. “No….” Blood flowed in dying spurts from the pulp of his legs, emptying his broken corpse of life. Wracking sobs consumed his remaining breaths. Sobs turned into a deep, gut-churning groan as he saw, in his last moments, what followed the awful fetus from the water.

  Colleen’s bloated corpse rose to the water’s surface. She bobbed on her side, hair stringy, plastered over her face, blue lips and white countenance of death, one eye eaten from its socket, leaving behind shreds of tissue and a dangling cord of pink nerve. Her stomach had been ripped open over her womb, presumably as this horrid thing freed itself from her abdomen. Phallic lengths of her intestines floated obscenely about her, twisting in a soupy froth with dark pieces of her insides. Coiled from within the rent flap of her flesh was the child’s umbilical cord by which the evil spawn dragged her through the water.

  The crawling horror drew closer, fixing upon Lance with its fierce yellow gaze.

  This isn’t my child.

  With that simple thought, a calm fell over him, followed by light-headedness. His heart slowed.

  In the distance, he heard gravel under tires as someone drove over the driveway and parked. The sound of an engine cut off. A car door slammed. There were slow, deliberate footsteps.

  Through the wall of smoke curling from the rubble of the old shed, the sheriff emerged in silhouette; tendrils of smoke clinging to him like a vision. He stood above Lance, looming like a giant in a dream of clouds. Sheriff Perry looked down with a stoic face.

  Something happened around him, something Lance couldn’t be sure was real. Perhaps the spirit world was revealing itself to him as his soul shuffled off its mortal coil, passing into the land of the dead. There was a stirring of demonic shadows around the sheriff, like wisps of dye swirled in water. The shades of dark children gathered around Perry, whispering, echoing in sing-song cries for his attention. Little hands lovingly caressed his legs and hands. Eager faces turned toward his. The gathering grew in number.

  Ghosts of children?

  No. Manifestations of demons…the demons washed free by the cleansing water of the falls, released from the souls of the children thrown into the water more than a hundred years a
go. Just shapes, child-like, twisted and deformed, yet none of them possessing enough corporeal substance to be seen as anything more than shimmering waves of translucent darkness.

  Perry frowned. “You thought you could blow the falls? Just like that? You really think it’s that easy?”

  “Almost— ” Lance’s vision started to fade. The figure of Perry trembled behind a gossamer veil.

  “Almost? Almost nothing. Look at it!” Perry waved his hand toward the churning falls, still cascading steadily, unscathed by the explosion. “The falls have been here for centuries. Maybe longer. A little dynamite isn’t going to change that. If it were so easy, don’t you think I’d have tried it years ago?”

  Lance gurgled on the blood that frothed from his mouth.

  “Sorry about this, Lance. All of it. But I really didn’t have much choice.” Perry paused. “When my brother died here years ago, it was supposed to have been me. I’m the one that fell in. But, when that ancient force pulled me down and met me beneath these black waves, I made a bargain in exchange for my own soul.

  “This place is inhabited by the evil that’s been left behind. The soul flies pure to God, but the evil…the evil stays here. Growing, multiplying, ever hungry, Lance. It owns this land, these waters, and my soul.”

  “Damn you,” Lance whispered.

  “Damn me? I already did that to myself now, didn’t I? Pushed my brother, my own flesh and blood into this pool for my first payment.” A grim smile creased the whisker-shadowed face of Perry. “Way I figure it, none of us are innocent anyway. Some of us have got it coming more than others.”

  Lance’s vision dimmed.

  “We’ve all got to pay, Lance. Every last one of us.”

  Sheriff Perry’s boot heel hovered above Lance, and pressed against his shoulder. Rocking his legless torso onto his side, Perry pushed him off of the jagged rocks and into the pool.

  Lance plunged into the cold water of the pool. It penetrated the pores of his skin, tingling, numbing him. A shimmering brilliance formed, brief and scarcely visible as it flowed out from him like a final breath and rose to the heavens.