Gravel Switch: the black goat chronicles book 1
a Weird Tale of Extreme Horror
Aleister J. Davidson
Black Mantis Press LLC
Copyright © 2017 by Aleister J. Davidson
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.
All characters are fictional. Some are loosely based on amalgamations of real people. The story is based on events both real and fictitious.
Dedicated to Sandra Faye Davis.
Those who dream by day are cognizant of many things which escape those who dream only by night.
-Edgar Allan Poe
Contents
Prologue
1. The Landlord and the House
2. The Attic and the Doll
3. The Historian and the Plea
4. The Doctor
5. The Party
6. Old Friends
7. The Afterparty and the Dream
8. The Hunter and the Beast
9. The Monster and the Medicine
10. The Thing in the Basement
11. The Railwayman
12. The Book and the Fire
13. The Daze and the Struggle
14. The Fox and the Hound
15. The Apprentice, the Junkie and the Microbiologist
16. The Writer and the Thief
17. The Victims and the Warriors
18. The Crown
19. The Flood
20. The Threshold
21. The Battery
22. The Harvest
Epilogue
Afterword
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Prologue
Lester and Betty were having an exciting day for a couple in their seventies living in the middle of nowhere, outside Perryville Kentucky. A young couple in their early thirties was coming to see them about an ad they had run online for a rental property. They both knew that they had already rented the house out to a writer and his wife, a schoolteacher. Still they were willing to withhold that information from the young couple just for the chance to have some company.
Things moved very slowly in Marion County and something as uncommon as visitors less than half of one’s age was a big deal to talk about. As she realized that she would be the talk of the town at her next BINGO game Betty prepared some sweet tea before the guests arrived as Lester went out to the toolshed to deal with a problem. It was a problem he couldn’t be having when guests arrived.
Lester took a syringe and a medicine bottle of clear liquid with him out to the toolshed. He opened the door to see the fat, middle aged man still hogtied on the floor. He was obviously exhausted and dehydrated but he somehow managed the strength to squirm in protest and scream through the gag that was in his mouth.
“Jesus, Phil. You stink to high heaven,” the old man said as he wafted the air away from his nose. Phil had been left with no choice but to wallow in his own waste for the week that he had been left in the shed.
Lester stepped forward into the shed, uncapped the syringe then closed the door behind him. Phil continued to waste his energy, squirming and screaming. Lester forcefully stuck the needle into the fat man’s leg, through his blue jeans.
“Now Phil, this here is a sedative. You’re gonna be out for a while. After our visitors leave then I’ll come back and check on you. If you’ve come to by then I’ll bring you some food and water. Gotta fatten you up some more anyway buoy!” Lester said in his thick country accent, teasing Phil and poking at him.
Phil knew he had gotten himself in way over his head. He just prayed that the folks who were coming to visit were able to see through Lester and Betty and their kinfolk. Sure they seemed nice enough on the surface, but…Phil found the sedative working and his thoughts faded into obscure dreams as he slept in the hot shed, snoring loudly.
Lester heard Betty calling him from the back porch, “Company’s here dear!”
The old man walked back to the house, leaving the syringe in the shed with Phil. He locked up with a combination padlock and prayed that Phil wouldn’t wake up and make any noise while the visitors were on the property. The last thing he needed was some city folk to get offended and not understand what he was doing.
The old couple met the young couple on the front porch like a modern American Gothic portrait. He was wearing a red flannel shirt and she had a serving tray with glasses of iced tea. “Welcome,” they said in unison.
“Hi there,” the wife said as she got out of the car. “I’m Amy Ramsey. This is my husband Hank.” Her neutral accent didn’t have anything of country life in it at all.
“Nice to meet you. I’m Lester and this is my wife Betty. Would you like some iced tea?” the old man asked as his wife lifted the tray up and took a few steps towards them. Both of the Ramseys were grateful to have a cold glass of tea, but Amy was quite shocked by how sweet it was.
“You guys are welcome to stay for dinner if you like, but I’m afraid that we have already rented the place you guys came all the way out here to look at,” Betty said in a maternal way, trying not to disappoint them too hard.
Hank began to wonder why the couple couldn’t have just told them. It was an hour and a half drive from where they lived in Lexington and he thought that the old couple had been quite rude not to have at least called them and let them know. They thought they were going to be looking at and possibly renting a new place to live that day. When Lester spoke though, Hank knew that he had judged them too soon.
“We have some friends just down the way in Gravel Switch that have a house near twice the size and its half as much. I heard they want to rent it, but it needs some work. They haven’t had a tenant in twenty years. I will give you their number. I just talked to them last week and mentioned I was gonna rent my other property and they seemed really interested to do the same,” Lester reassured them both.
It was important to Hank to move out to the country. He had been suffering from severe epilepsy for years. He had hit his head into the steering wheel, rear-ended in a car wreck, when working as a pizza delivery man. Ever since that fateful day he had been having seizures and he just wanted to live out in the middle of nowhere and relax. He didn’t tell Lester and Betty that he intended to grow marijuana in the house, but he certainly didn’t hesitate to take the number from them.
The four of them had a nice meal in the dining room of the little country home. Fried chicken, mashed potatoes, corn on the cob, greens with cornbread and salad. It was a veritable country feast and did as much to nourish the Ramseys emotionally as it did physically.
After dinner the younger couple thanked the older for their hospitality and kindness profusely. They drove home back to Lexington feeling confident about the kind of people that they would meet in their new community. They talked about it all the way home as if the house that they hadn’t even seen yet would be theirs. It excited them. They had seen Lester and Betty’s house and it was more than enough for the two of them. A house twice the size would give them all sorts of opportunities.
Hank could get started growing his marijuana again. They had been shut down by the D.E.A. after getting raided years before and hadn’t ever been able to reestablish their grow operation. The government raid had changed everything about their lives. There were many things that they had to do in order to remain free f
rom prison. Things neither of them wanted to do nor ever thought they would be capable of doing. One of the sources of Hank’s greatest anxiety was running into someone seeking retribution for the actions he had taken trying to keep himself and his wife from being locked up. And anxiety was one of the major contributors to Hank’s seizures.
So the Ramseys saw no other choice than to move out to the middle of nowhere. Both to get away from their own conscience and to be in relaxing surroundings. They reasoned that if the house had been empty for twenty years then they should have no problem getting it. There obviously wasn’t much of a demand for it. It mattered little to them if there was work to be done. Hank had done roofing as a teenager and he had plenty of friends in the construction business. And with that attitude they returned home to Lexington for the last time.
1
The Landlord and the House
Even at first glance Hank could tell the house was not typical in any way, shape or form. Sitting a quarter mile off of the main road, down a driveway partially gravel and partially dirt, it stood. A massive Queen Anne Victorian on a sprawling lot. Acre upon acre of fields, woodlands, rolling hills, ponds…this property had it all. Everything he imagined that would relax his stressed out mind when he set his sights upon greener pastures and decided leaving the city was in his cards. Hank was a simple man and he had simple pleasures. This slice of heaven would do for his purposes just fine. He wondered what was going through Amy’s head as they approached the giant house. Was she as impressed as he was? If so it did not show on her face? In fact there was nothing but distress showing on her face. She was doing her best to hide it, but he knew that look too well.
Before they had even gotten down the entirety of the driveway Hank knew her superstitious side was getting the best of her. The house certainly did look the part of a demon house from some half baked, nineteen eighties, low budget horror movie. He chuckled a little to himself as they got to the end of the driveway. She smacked his arm with her purse and shot him a dirty look, knowing that he was amused by her obvious fear.
This was it. The place they had been looking for. A large house, out in the middle of nowhere, where they could relax and grow their signature strain of marijuana undisturbed by anyone or anything. On the phone the landlord said the property rented for all of $300 a month, which Hank found to be much more disturbing than the look of the house itself. “With any deal this good there is always a catch,” he thought. “I wonder what is wrong with the place?” He got out of the car and stretched his legs, took a deep inhale of the country air and began to laugh hysterically.
“Amy, I think this is it! We’ve found our new home! After looking for months, we’ve found our home and it is perfect,” he said with a boyish tone that revealed he was truly in a state of wondrous, joyful bliss.
“Don’t get too exited Hank,” Amy deadpanned as she batted her eyelashes at him, trying to remind him that she also had a say in the situation. “We haven’t even seen the inside yet. And we haven’t met the landlord either. What if he’s some sort of psycho-freakazoid or some kind of inbred, hillbilly retard? I don’t know if I’ve ever even been this deep out in the country before; this remote. What if they’re all Deliverance-y?”
She jokingly began to make pig noises at Hank, mocking him back for the way he had treated her on the way down the driveway.
“My god Amy…you never stop do you?” he began to speak with an authoritative tone to let her know they were about to bicker. He stopped himself when a vehicle appeared on the road and began down the driveway toward them. It was an old pickup truck that looked, much as the house did, like a relic of a bygone age. It putted down the driveway at a crawl and at first had appeared to be a dark brown but as it approached revealed itself to be solid rust. The Ramsey’s were both intrigued by it and wondered how it was still running and what make and model it was.
“Well here he is now Hank. Guess we’re about to see…”
The truck came to a stop next to their Subaru Outback, sputtering to a halt and spewing out clouds of steam from under the hood. Dust seemed to kick up around it just for the hell of it. Out of the truck stepped a woman in her mid thirties. Dark haired and athletically built she carried herself with a confidence that left Hank and Amy immediately wondering if she drove cattle or rode bucking broncos in the rodeo. She was dressed in riding boots and jeans and wore an Almann Brothers Band t-shirt.
“Hi there. You must be Hank and Amy. I’m Bernice. Bernice Hickman. But you can call me Bernie. All my friends do,” she said in a thick country accent that they both found endearing and comforting. There was something nurturing and maternal in her voice, even though she was only a few years older than they were.
“That’s us,” Amy said before Hank could answer. “Nice to meet you.”
“Oh you too Honey. Now let me show you around,” Bernice said as she looked though her key ring for the keys to the house.
Bernice walked across the yard, from the driveway to the front porch. To Hank it seemed to take forever as the front yard alone was several acres. The stairs to the front porch left Hank feeling quite small but he followed her and Amy was close behind him.
“Look at the huge porch Hank!” Amy said excitedly. Hank was spacing out, paying more attention to the peeling paint, which showed the age of the house. He experienced a moment of pareidolia, seeing several faces in the patterns of decay and laughing to himself that the house must have many secrets to tell. He shrugged it off and wondered if seeing an old Deadhead friend in the middle of nowhere had prompted him to have an acid flashback. He had often heard the old hippies speak about their flashbacks from taking LSD but he had never experienced one himself up to that point. Hank blinked his eyes a few times and found himself to be just fine. A fleeting moment of strangeness that he quickly forgot about.
As he got to the bottom of the stairs Bernie pointed at the front door. “They don’t make ‘em like that anymore,” she said with a deep country drawl. The door was eight feet high and looked to be solid oak. It was as old as the rest of the house (Hank and Amy both noticed the cornerstone stating it was built in 1893 on the way to the front door) and had a large oval shaped piece of rounded glass for its window. It evoked an earlier time, when everything was hand made and folks took a certain pride in their work. Although the porch itself was empty other than a few antique rocking chairs it extended across the entirety of the front of the house and continued along the eastern side. The door with its oval window complimented it quite well, tying everything together and giving the place a sense of grandeur both fading and lasting.
“Plenty of room for rocking chairs,” Bernice, picking up on what they were both thinking, stated the obvious.
“Just what I was thinking,” Amy returned in her neutral southern Illinois accent. “We’ll have to put a grill out here Hank. What an awesome porch.”
“Yeah, I like that idea a lot. But let’s see…you know, we haven’t signed a lease yet. Who knows how we’ll like the inside, or if it will be right for us,” Hank returned casually, but she could tell he was already sold on the place.
“How could he not be?” she thought to herself.
It was perfect. Secluded, relaxing, stress free country life was what they both needed after their ordeal in Lexington. A simple place to work out of and to grow their marijuana in peace and quiet. She shuddered at the thought of guns in her face, yelling, blue and red lights and those cold cuffs on her wrists. She shuddered again remembering the deal they made for their freedom, the deal that allowed them to be looking for a new life. Before the ramifications of what they had done weighed on her like a bag of bricks on her chest Amy cleared her throat. “Shall we then?”, she motioned towards the door.
“Yeah, go ahead it’s unlocked. Take as much time as you need to look around. Just don’t go upstairs until I get back. I need to run over to my house for a few minutes. I just stopped by on the way back from town…and shoot, I was already late by then….” Bernice stammered on. “Mo
m and dad need help this time of day. Couple hours before the sun goes down they have a lot of medicine to take. Let me go take care of that and I will be right back. Probably 15 to 20 minutes tops.”
“Ok, great,” Hank exclaimed, boyishly excited.
He turned the doorknob as Bernie walked back to her truck and entered a large foyer with high vaulted ceilings and a giant mirror opposite the front door. The wallpaper was old. So old it may have actually been original. There were doors off of either side with a hallway continuing around to the right and couches along the walls covered in dust covers so filthy they both wondered as to how anything could be clean underneath. The house had the grime of ages past that was for sure, but it had a unique charm unlike anything either of them had ever known. Immediately they both felt at home.
They toured the house slowly, but not together. Hank took the left door, and Amy walked right, down the hallway toward what appeared to be the bedrooms. They both found the high ceilings made the place seem much more open than it already was, but the house was filled with more furniture, everywhere they went. Even the kitchen had lots of old furniture and odds and ends. Still they quite easily imagined where their own possessions would fit. As Hank rounded through the living room and the adjacent den he came through the kitchen and saw Amy standing there with her jaw agape. She looked almost in shock, like something was wrong. He wondered if she had seen a ghost. He approached her cautiously as she seemed to be staring off into space. He reached out to touch her shoulder and just as his hand reached her she began to sob.
Gravel Switch: the black goat chronicles book 1: a Weird Tale of Extreme Horror Page 1