The Bones of the Earth- The Complete Collection

by Scott Hale

  The Witch: Also known as the Maiden of Pain, the Witch has been responsible for countless deaths over untold years. She attacked Vrana’s village of Caldera, and had been using Vrana as a way by which to spread her influence, so as to increase in power and relevance. The Witch has been influencing individuals in an attempt to build what is referred to as The Cult of the Worm.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  SCOTT HALE is the author of The Bones of the Earth series. He is a graduate from Northern Kentucky University with a Bachelors in Psychology and Masters in Social Work. He has completed The Bones of the Earth series, and has since begun working on a standalone novel entitled In Sheep’s Skin. Scott Hale currently resides in Norwood, Ohio with his wife and frequent collaborator, Hannah Graff, and their three cats, Oona, Bashik, and Bellatrix.

  The Agony of After

  by

  Scott Hale

  is an anthology of four interconnected horror novellas that take place after The Blood of Before and before The Bones of the Earth series.

  A social worker arrives at a low-income housing complex for a routine intake, only to discover it will be anything but, as he is given a firsthand account of his client’s own form of therapy for the world itself.

  A group of twenty-somethings who take pride in their ability to label and judge others discover their LGBTQIA community has become the target of a series of hate crimes by a culprit who appears motivated by the writings of their peerless leader.

  The community of Bedlam is shaken as four children from four separate families are abducted on the same day, at the same time, in the same neighborhood, without any witnesses or apparent motives.

  A wanderer with a memory longer than his lifespan drifts across the Trauma-wracked wasteland of Earth, finding companionship and purpose where he can, until he is taken in against his will by a creature with nefarious plans for the distant future.

  Horrific, satirical, and necessarily uncomfortable, The Agony of After is a realization of what followed the events of The Blood of Before, and a pivotal piece of the secret history of The Bones of the Earth series.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any relevance to any person, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales are entirely coincidental.

  THE AGONY OF AFTER

  All rights reserved.

  Copyright © 2018 Scott Hale

  Cover art & illustrations by Hannah Graff

  Edited by Dawn Lewis

  This book is protected under the copyright law of the United States of America. Any reproduction or other unauthorized use of the material or artwork herein is prohibited without the express written permission of the author.

  First Edition: May 2018

  Copyright © 2018 Scott Hale

  All rights reserved.

  ISBN-13: 978-1-7330966-2-1

  BOOKS BY SCOTT HALE

  The Bones of the Earth series

  The Bones of the Earth (Book 1)

  The Three Heretics (Book 2)

  The Blood of Before (Book .1)

  The Cults of the Worm (Book 3)

  The Agony of After (Book .2)

  The Eight Apostates (Book 4)

  Novels

  In Sheep’s Skin (Coming 2020)

  Subscribe to mailing list for future updates!

  Listen to Terrorcast, hosted by Scott and Kameron Hale.

  THIS BOOK CONTAINS SCENES OF

  EXPLICIT VIOLENCE AND GORE

  CONTENTS

  1

  Where the Dead Go to Die

  5

  2

  Augurs

  65

  3

  A Child in Every Home

  143

  4

  Traumas

  220

  WHERE THE DEAD GO TO DIE

  Despite being at the center of everything, Brooksville Manor couldn’t have been less of this world. Six miles from the highway and five streets from the main road, the low-income housing complex was three sprawling stories of old brick and busted blinds at the bottom of a steep hill that overlooked the river. The Manor’s grounds were an ocean of cracked cement that glistened with shattered glass when the sun hit it just right. The yellow swing-set, green picnic benches, and brown dumpsters were the only true sources of color in the otherwise monotone realm. Everything else, be it from the few cars in the lot, to those fleeting shapes of the souls that lived here, was covered in a grayish wash, like the dirt or dust thrown after some great machine’s take-off. According to those who lived or had lived at the Manor, things had always been this way, which meant both forever and for as long as they could remember. The same could be said for the appearance of the housing complex, which hadn’t seen a hammer, nail, or a fresh batch of paint since its construction in 1950. Brooksville Manor was a place out of time, existing and not-existing. Those who had escaped its gravity never drifted far from its orbit, and those that lived there were seldom seen in the surrounding community. It was a place known solely by its history, for those who might’ve realized its future were never heard from again.

  Dario knew these things because everyone knew these things. It was the worst kept secret in Brooksville, and yet, somehow, it was secret all the same. Leaning forward over his car’s steering wheel, he watched from the farthest end of the parking lot as two kids hauled ass after a dog that looked like a shag carpet with legs. They didn’t get but a few feet before the heat hit them hard and laid them out against the Manor’s façade. They held up there, sweating into their hands and the sleeves of their shirts. Dario checked the clock—4:25 PM—and when he returned his attention to the kids, they were gone—long shadows where once their melting bodies had been.

  Dario fell back in his seat. His hand hit the windshield wipers. They screeched across the sun-scorched glass and gave him a minor heart attack. Flicking them off, he pinched the bridge of his nose and hated himself and the anxiety bubbling in his gut. He’d bounced around most of his early life between places like Brooksville Manor. They all had their stories, and they were all some parts bad and some parts good. Villains and victims. The vindictive and the vindicated. Single mothers. Loving fathers. Alcoholics and Sunday regulars. No, it wasn’t the people here or anywhere else that made him nervous. It was the building itself. In some ways, it was more alive than the few individuals he’d seen roaming around it. Maybe it was the urban legends. Maybe it wasn’t. But he wasn’t here for that, and here he had to be, for an unknown duration, until the person he’d come to see was better, went missing, or just fired him altogether. Even in the bleakest bowers, it couldn’t be about him.

  Because he was a social worker—a mental health therapist, more specifically—and he wouldn’t be any good to anyone if, during sessions, all he thought about was himself. Early into his career, he’d thought the possibility unlikely. But after having spent some time in the field, he came across many professionals just as lost as those they were trying to help. Misery loves company, if only to get a chance to break out its tools and peel back the flaps of those worse off, to see itself reflected in the glistening folds and find its answer in the agony of others. Dario didn’t want to be like those other social workers, who brought their work home with them every night and let it fester in all the cracks they refused to patch. For eight hours a day, he just wanted to do right by those who’d been wronged for so long it’d become routine.

  He was cynical, and naïve, and not very popular.

  Dario checked the clock again—4:28 PM—and turned off his car. At 4:35 PM, he had an appointment with Oblita Vesper—a sixty-five-year-old Caucasian female with a name that sounded like something his daughter might make up. She had been referred to his office a year ago, but she never followed-up beyond the initial phone call. Last week, Oblita contacted the office stating that she needed help with her depression and feelings of guilt, and that although she wasn’t suicidal or self-harming, sh
e wasn’t doing well. Oblita Vesper lived alone on the third floor of Brooksville Manor. She was Dario’s last client for the day.

  Grabbing his bag, he got out of the car, locked the door, and then locked it again. Without his air conditioner shield, the heat had its way with him. It moved like clammy hands over his body and filled his lungs with sickly breaths. Quickly acclimating to hell’s climate, it was the smell that blindsided him next. Though the river was hidden behind the Manor at the bottom of the hill’s sheer drop, its presence was undeniable. The air was musty, humid, with hints of chemicals and bitter notes of dead insects. It smelled like a shed might smell in the fall, when all the creeping things inside decided to die before letting winter get ahold of them. To Dario, it was a precise odor he could never place. A certainty he was never certain of.

  Brooksville Manor was the shed its community leaders had forgotten. The naïve man inside him told him it was because of funds. The cynical man inside told him it was on purpose. He was biased, being of the gutter himself, but the lower-class were the creeping things everyone else could do without. It was so cliché it was stupid, but it was true, wasn’t it? Squandered potential. Hard men, women, and children made harder, stronger by their hardships. Weak men, women, and children given over to shadows and erosion. Good and bad. That’s what made the shed stay sealed shut. Everyone wanted one or the other—good or bad—otherwise, for most, it wasn’t worth looking up from the cell phones for.

  Starting to feel something like a hateful martyr, Dario furrowed his brow and crossed the parking lot. The closer he drew to the Manor, the more tangible its atmosphere became. He could hear TVs blaring at full volume from the first and second floor, and pockets of Hip Hop thudding like a chain of throbbing nerves all across the building. Laughter, too, and voices he couldn’t place.

  He stepped up to the sidewalk and headed to the front door, which stood underneath a skybridge that connected the second and third floors of the divided buildings. There were people up there, behind the glass, but they weren’t paying him any attention. Sometimes, Dario felt like a person of interest as a social worker, or even an uninvited guest. But most of the time, most people didn’t really give a shit.

  The front door was a heavy metal barricade that had seen its fair share of beatings. Dario went for the handle and then noticed the keypad and intercom on the wall. He hated these things. They barely worked. Most of the time he would just slip into the buildings as someone was leaving. But no one was leaving Brooksville Manor today, because no one ever did.

  He opened his bag, peeked inside Oblita’s folder, and found her phone number. Sweat stinging the corner of his eyes, he squinted it out, punched in the digits on the keypad, and then pressed pound.

  While the system dialed her number, he glanced inside the building through the horizontal glass that was framed within one side of the door. Blue patterned carpet covered the floor. Seething fluorescent lights lined the ceiling. He noticed a door opening at the farthest end of the hall. Instinctively, his hand went up—he wasn’t about to be standing out here for fifteen minutes on a day like today—but before he could knock, the intercom buzzed and the door was unlocked.

  Oblita Vesper had let him in without even asking who it was or why they were there, calling her number. He made a mental note of this, for the progress note to come, and let himself in.

  The long hallway didn’t offer much in terms of what he could expect from the Manor. To his left, there was a bank of mailboxes too stuffed with letters and catalogues to be locked. To his right, there was a sign that read “Office” and underneath it, a puddle of tobacco chew from some undoubtedly disgruntled tenant. And up ahead, past several apartments, was the door Dario had seen opening through the glass. Beside it, a large man stood in baggy sweat pants and a pristine white tank-top.

  He gave Dario a nod and said, “Hot enough out there yet, brother?”

  “Too hot.” He pointed to the doorway beside the large man. “Stairs?”

  The large man’s eyes went wide for a split-second. “Who you here to see?”

  Dario gave him a shrug that told him he couldn’t really say and said, “Just need to get up to the third floor.”

  “These go down to the basement,” the large man said, pointing with his thumb at the door beside him.

  Dario nodded and started down the hall. He passed the Office, whose door was shut and whose lights were out, and gave the large man a small smile. Some of the apartment doors past the Office were decorated. A few with fist marks, others with stains. The apartment nearest the large man, who wasn’t budging, was covered in pages that had been torn from the Bible. A portrait of a black Jesus drawn in crayon crowned the display. It wasn’t half-bad, except for the fact that the artist had drawn what looked like maggots onto Jesus’ open palm. The other hand was a fist, and red faces, like blood drops, were dripping out of it.

  “Kind of freaky,” the large man whispered, wrinkling his nose. “What do you think?”

  Dario went sideways to slide past the man, to get around the corner.

  The large man touched his gut, sucked it in, and said, “Sorry.”

  Dario kept smiling. Around the corner was another set of doors that split the hallway in two. He wondered if the whole building had been built like this, in segments, so that portions of it could be closed off from the others.

  There was that smell again, that river smell; this time laced with incense. It was coming from behind, out from under the door the large man said led to the basement. The scent reminded Dario of church. He breathed it, and it took him back, ten years ago, to a Sunday with his grandmother, in the pews, on their knees, the smells of her kitchen drifting around her, promising his seventeen-year-old-self a meal she’d worked too long on, and one he’d take for granted. It had been, as his mother put it, their last supper.

  “Hey, bro, how long you staying?”

  Dario shook the memory and turned. “Not really sure.”

  The large man kept holding onto his gut. “It’s easy to get turned around in here is all. And people get a little… strange at night. Listen, if anyone gets in your ass about anything, tell them to take it up with Jam.”

  Jam held out his fist.

  Dario channeled is inner bro and gave it a hearty bump. “Appreciate it, Jam.”

  Jam’s gut rumbled. He cringed.

  “Third floor past these doors?” Dario asked.

  Jam belched up a cloud of onions. “Yes, sir. Stairs go down to the basement in that well, too.”

  There he was warning him about the basement again. And there it was again, the anxiety in his stomach, boiling over like a chemistry experiment gone wrong. He didn’t want to ask, but the social worker (and survivor) in him deemed it pertinent. “What’s wrong with the basement?”

  Jam traced the outline of a Fu Manchu on his face, said, “Nothing,” and walked away and out of the building.

  Dario went through the second set of doors. There were more apartments on the other side, and a kid. It wasn’t one of the boys he’d seen earlier. This one was sprawled out across the bottom step of the stairs he needed to climb. He had to be about ten going on twenty. With designer jeans, a haircut so high and tight his forehead might snap, the latest smartphone in his tiny grip, and a cigarette behind his ear, he was so hard he could have sunk the Titanic.

  “Sorry,” Dario said, stopping a few feet away, “have to get up there.”

  “You going to see Oblita?” the kid asked, pocketing the smartphone. “Basement’s not open until six.” He wiggled his feet excitedly. “Got a light?”

  Dario shook his head and said, “Just need to get to the third floor.”

  Taken aback, the kid pulled his legs in. “You play video games?”

  “Yeah, when I have time.”

  “MichaelIndomitable. Look me up.”

  Dario grinned.

  “What’s your tag?”

  “MichaelIndomitable1.”

  Michael snorted. “Shut up. For real, though, i
f you’re here to see Oblita… don’t.”

  Dario, trying to hide his concern, said, “Why’s that?”

  He didn’t answer.

  Dario’s bag was starting to feel heavy at his side. Suddenly, the little information he had on Oblita Vesper became crucial clues to a potentially problematic puzzle. Initially, she had been referred to the office by her primary care physician, Isabella Ødegaard, for social anxiety, which may or may not have been the manifestation of an undiagnosed body dysmorphic disorder. From reading the documentation, it wasn’t entirely clear to Dario how Isabella Ødegaard came to that conclusion, as that visit had not only been Oblita’s first, but also her last. And in an off-the-cuff comment reportedly made by Oblita during her appointment, that had been the first time Ms. Vesper had ever visited a doctor in her entire life.

  “Have a good day,” Dario said, going up the steps. It was his go-to phrase for strangers that carried on conversations like they were the plague.

  Michael called after him, “Hey, how long are you going to be here?”

  Dario looked down from the sticky second-floor landing, where the falling light shone through the eight opaque, square glass windows. “Awhile,” he said with a smile, but the boy was already gone.

  At the door that led into the third floor, Dario stopped, checked his surroundings, and took out his phone. Oblita Vesper was either dangerous, or she had spent the better part of the week talking up an appointment with her therapist to anyone who would listen. It didn’t fit the symptoms of the social anxiety she supposedly had, but that was mental health, wasn’t it? A blueprint done in crayon; consistent until it wasn’t. Sometimes it made him wish he had pursued a career that dealt with more tangible issues. Not the ghosts that haunted our skulls.