by J. D. Wilkes
I yell for Carver again and wait for a response.
Only the drone of the woods, howling louder and louder in my head.
“DOOOONEEEEEY!” Hell, I’ll give it a go. Who knows?! I’m desperate at this point and wouldn’t turn down help from any given inbreed.
No response.
Chapter Twenty-Two
OLD KATE
Queen Mab of the Mire.
The Kudzu Couple discovered!
Dooney Burkeholder.
The sky clouds over yet again. Round two.
Sunlight beams in from the west as showers sail in on a zephyr, and the Devil is beating his wife. Rainbows with bizarro anti-colors refract through the charging ozone. I can taste strange new hues. Or is that just the copper tinge of death? As the rain begins smacking the rail grade, I slip to my knees, wet with sweat and cradling my arm like a baby as it clenches into a dead black fist.
A spirograph of starlight shimmers behind my eyelids. Heavenly geometric shapes swirl like interlocking fireworks patterns. Shapes form into faces and, in a split second, I see everyone I’ve ever met fanning past my mind’s eye as if flip-booking through a stack of photos. Within the split-second span of a card shuffle I can somehow appreciate each and every individual face.
Now I am back-diving into a cave of stars. Everything here is made of millions and billions of dots. They dissolve away, reassemble, dissolve away and reassemble again, forming an entirely new locale… a mystic, mercurial replica of The Deadening.
A perpendicular universe.
It’s starting to rain and rain hard. Tin sheets drop like guillotines as the flood zone swells and swells. An inky deluge gushes in violent waves and surrounds my ankles. But as the black storm passes, a figure emerges from the center of a hovering orb of swamp gas. A flat-bottomed boat and its hunching deckhand drudge forth. I can’t take my eyes off her. I dare not take my eyes off her.
She paddles her ferry ever closer. Through the crepuscular gloom I see… a witch.
She stands on the deck of a boat named Copperhead, pulling a long forked stick, and not a ripple is left in her wake. Her hair is stringy and stuck to her face. Bonnet tassels dangle down the front of her threadbare flour-sack robe. It clings to her wet chest where her breasts sag like dog nuts. And it sounds like she’s humming “My Old Kentucky Home” in a minor key.
She’s as ugly as a mud fence, and with each advancing pull through the pea soup the old gal gets even more hideous. She’s like some old gnarly root doctor with warts, whiskers, and a brown cigarillo chomped between her silver-capped teeth. Her body is rotten. Green meat stretches beneath translucent skin, flesh the color of a used condom. A red checkerboard pattern flashes in the milk of her corpsy eyes. Is this a sign of demon possession or is she a demon herself? Most likely the latter. Oh yes, she is a demon herself! The very famous demon of Red River, in fact!
The Bell Witch!
I immediately know I’m in trouble.
“Oh yeah, yer in trouble, boy,” she cackles as her boat shifts its weight; a ballast of skulls clocks together.
Four Mad Stones of different shapes and colors dangle from her leather choker. Her voice gurgles in her throat like a hot mess. She is undead and cold as a snake.
THE BELL WITCH OF TENNESSEE, that invisible agency of Adams, Tennessee, is no peach. “Old Kate” made herself famous in the early nineteenth century when she began centering her “black events” around one Mister John Bell, Esq., and his family. They say she first descended like a spring-heeled Jack, landing upon the rooftop of the family manor at night, clacking her hooves on the shingles like a satyr.
She chose them for reasons unknown to the community, but rumor has it, it was due to a recently disturbed Indian mound. Even Bell’s friend, President Andrew Jackson, verified claims of the haunting. He publicly criticized the demon for terrors he himself endured while visiting the estate. Therefore, he is the only U.S. president to go on record and vouch for the existence of the paranormal. Jackson even organized a band of witch hunters to confront the old gal and subdue her, as is chronicled by one descendant of John Bell:
“Try again,” exclaimed the witch. “Now it’s my turn; lookout, you old coward, hypocrite, fraud. I’ll teach you a lesson.” The next thing a sound was heard like that of boxing with the open hand, whack, whack, and [Jackson’s witch hunter] tumbled over like lightning had struck him, but he quickly recovered his feet and went capering around the room like a frightened steer, running over everyone in his way, yelling, “Oh my nose, my nose, the devil has got me. Oh Lordy! He’s got me by the nose.”
Suddenly, as if by its own accord, the door flew open and the [witch hunter] dashed out, and made a beeline for the lane at full speed, yelling every jump. Everybody rushed out under the excitement, expecting the man would be killed, but as far as they could hear up the lane, he was still running and yelling, “Oh Lordy.” Jackson, they say, dropped down on the ground and rolled over and over laughing. “By the eternal, boys, I never saw so much fun in all my life. This beats fighting the British!”
—from The Bell Witch of Tennessee
by M. Ingram, 1894
At present, Kate is way upriver and far, far away from her present-day home in a Tennessee cave. Far from the old Adams, Tennessee, schoolhouse, the home of the “Bell Witch Opry,” a weekly commemorative music jamboree in the small town she made famous. Every Saturday night the locals pick bluegrass tunes and cakewalk with the shadows of her memory. But if they could only see her now, tying off her boat with a slimy rope, they wouldn’t sing so pretty.
“Yeah, yer definitely in trouble, boy. Definitely in trouble. Trestpassin’, cussin’, balsphemin’. A-hangin’ onto things what don’t belong to you. Haw Haw Haw!”
She is pure hate and there is nothing but pointy-eared evil in her words. But I am at her mercy. Despite the tourniquet, my arm is swollen and blackened with poison, and my system is starting to shut down. But I’m still not certain I am truly here. Maybe I’m really just at home, dreaming in the safety of my own bed. Or maybe I’ve been pumped so full of Carver’s horror stories (and even old Brother Withers’ religion), I’ve become entangled in a vine of lies.
But no. I snap-to and find my throat truly in the crux of the witch’s forked staff. She’s got me pinned to a cypress knee and her minions are tying me up with rope. They are masked imp-like little bandits with grotesque gap-toothed smiles. “Hoptown Goblins” perhaps, up from the Red River of Hopkinsville’s cave system? My eyes cloud over in their sockets. Although groggy and in shock, I am able to observe my deviant surroundings. Perching on every branch, every sloping bough, and hunching in the marsh are thousands of bizarre characters, seemingly transported from a Hieronymus Bosch triptych.
OSMOSIS
In western Kentucky, we are taught that our waterways are akin to conduit. They carry the electric traffic of spirits and have done so ever since the Second Day of Creation. Genesis 1:7 states that water flowed both below and above the firmament, on Earth and in Heaven. This means that watery climes are where spirits originally came from and where they will always prefer to be. If you don’t believe me, take a ghost tour past the brick alleys and wrought-ironed balconies of New Orleans, Savannah, or Charleston and see for yourself. The lapping tidewaters upon such famously haunted ports act to transubstantiate water-borne wraiths into thin air, where they may then freely move about within our realm. It is a fascinating cycle that is perpetually occurring, just like the processes of osmosis, evaporation, or precipitation. Yet, all the while, we blindly go traipsing through their midst. Traipsing through the troposphere of our strange haunted planet.
Then went the devils out of the man, and entered into the swine: and the herd ran violently down a steep place into the lake […]
—Luke 8:33 KJV
WEIRD KENTUCKY
The Bell Witch? Old Kate? Bae Bae? Whatever the nomenclature, this “Queen Mab of the Mire” is devil all the same. She has summoned to herself a maelstrom of centuries-old r
iverdead, drawn up through the Southern waterways like blood siphoned backward through the veins.
I recognize the soldier souls of the S.S. Sultana. They are the Union prisoners of war that were burned alive when their paddle wheeler exploded on their return trip home. Drawn up the tributaries of the Mississippi River, they have materialized into a slack-jawed multitude of smoldering skeletons. Together they sing low in a silent key. And I am completely surrounded.
“You mewlin’ sissy,” Kate taunts. “Turn out yer pockets and hand hit over!”
Now I must call upon my years at Fellowship Assembly, summoning the Holy Ghost, walking and talking with God… walking in on exorcisms. I have trained for this day. For this very moment. So here goes. Faith, don’t fail me now!
“I rebuke you in the name of Jesus!” I command, doing my best to will this thing away.
Indeed, Kate’s checkerboard eyeballs bulge at His mere mentioning, and the cigarillo suddenly falls from her razor lips. But after a pause she continues, “How do you know hit ain’t He what sent me?”
I pause. A witch, in league with Christ? I don’t think so.
Sensing my reticence, she bares her terrible teeth and slowly raises her vulture-like claws. At the snap of her fingers, more ghastly forms step forward. I see the Goatman, the legendary monster from Pope Lick Creek. Then there’s Fishhead of Reelfoot Lake. And flickering in and out appears a parade of feedsack-hooded Night Riders sloshing through the marsh on coal black mares. One rider, a bushwhacker, caps a Ball jar of extracted teeth and laughs with a raspy death rattle.
The executed dead from the state pen, I suspect. Cast-offs from the old prison body chute. That’s how institutions disposed of bodies in the old days, and why such places were built so close to rivers. They would just slide the dead down a concrete shaft and into the water. Little did the prison guards suspect that they were supplying a direct deposit into the River Styx.
Then what to my wondering eyes appears but the familiar face of my old high school teacher. Brother Withers! I recognize the curve of his harelip in the petrified grain of a cypress trunk. He bends low and woe-begotten like a Jack o’ the woods. A beard of bees swarms around his horrified pleading hole. Bless his heart. I reckon it’s true. Just like in old Dante’s dream: com-mitters of suicide really do come back as trees.
“Dear Jesus, help me!”
MEAT
They say “stars fell on Alabama.” That’s nice. But meat once rained on Kentucky. True story! And it’s happening again. Piles of raw flesh smack the swamp, splat upon the limbs, and land on my head.
For it is written…
Flesh Descending in a Shower, An Astonishing Phenomenon in Kentucky.
Fresh Meat Like Mutton Falling from a Clear Sky.
On last Friday a shower of meat fell near the house of Allen Crouch, who lives some two or three miles from the Olympia Springs in the southern portion of [Bath] County, covering a strip of ground about one hundred yards in length and fifty wide. […] [Mrs. Crouch] said it fell like large snowflakes […] One piece fell near her which was three or four inches square. Mr. Harrison Gill, whose veracity is unquestionable, […] hearing of this occurrence visited the locality the next day, and says he saw particles of meat sticking to the fences and scattered over the ground. The meat when it first fell appeared to be perfectly fresh. Two gentlemen, who tasted the meat, express the opinion that it was either mutton or venison.
—New York Times, March 10, 1876
But above it all, stretching from due east to due west is the looming skyscape of an angry great spirit. His arms are out-held like Christ. However, I sense his intentions are anything but Christ-like. It appears he is the one directing this moment like a grand puppeteer. In each fist he grips the weft and the warp of space-time in curling strands.
My head rolls back on my neck as Old Kate’s gap-toothed goblins gather up the pulp of my dying body. Fain to resist, I’m soon set back on my feet and scourged forth by the Night Riders. The Sultana soldiers hold their bayonets on me and off I’m driven, paraded through the netherglades, past the other lost souls trapped as trees. Before long I am lashed to a gnarly dead oak. The POWs and Night Riders form a gunpoint circle around me as the Bell Witch shoulders herself through for one last assault.
“Haw Haw Haww-w!” goes her crackle. “Now where’s th’ Stone?”
“Huh?”
“If ye hain’t got the Mad Stone, who does?”
“Mad Stone? If I had that I would’ve already dealt with this snakebite, and I sure as hell wouldn’t be dealing with you!”
“Everwhat ye want!” Kate cries, raising both sets of talons with a maestro’s flourish. A Brueghel-esque scene of revelry erupts. Her minions commence to celebrate with crooked fiddle tunes and ghoulish double-time dancing, like the fast-motion footage of a lost silent film. My only comfort now is the drone I’ve heard all my life. Comfort in knowing that I was right and Carver was wrong. The sound definitely comes from the trees. It is the ghostly moan of Hell’s choir blasting up from yawning wooden chambers. As if in celebration that Hell is currently reigning on Earth.
MEDUSA
Kate produces a budding young sapling of the infamous Kudzu kind. Her grasp loosens and down it plops into the swamp. Upon impact, the depths begin to bubble and roil. Soon all of Clarks River and its tributaries, as far as the eye can see, become a churning cesspool, dredging up the filthiest, utmost dregs from the bottoms. Green gunk, sewage, and sediment rise to the top, and in an instant, a leafy flourish explodes from the waters. Like the snakes of a caduceus, they wrap me head to toe and lift. I plead for mercy but Kate and company vanish in a blue flash of foxfire.
Likewise, I am in transit, intertwined with The Vine That Ate The South. Up, up, and up! Like a beanstalk in a Jack tale. Away into the pinetops, I am gathered by its tentacles. Now it is I who will feel the fate of my long-sought prize, the dead lovers of the Kudzu House of Horrors. My morbid curiosity. My fascination with my homeland. My need to be adventurous. It’s got me nowhere nearer to that for which I was searching. I might as well have stayed at home.
But wait! I spoke too soon. They are right here. Right beside me! The dead husband and his wife, flanking me like thieves on the cross. We are all three displayed in a gothic Golgotha of bones and Kudzu, pitched high as the steepled tent of the Devil’s circus. Tight wires and trapezes, nets and rope, as if all tangled by a twister. Tangled like the chicken scratch of Satan’s own signature. Our bodies must forever hover together here now, woven in Kudzu, the three of us, lashed as Mazeppa and stitched into infinite density. A breeze clonks the old man’s skull against the tree, like a head hits hard on the timbers of a pall-borne coffin. His brow is tethered by the dry, dead tendrils of his Caesarian laurel… a loose yo-yoing leash of ivy that keeps letting his head knock and recoil in the wind.
And she is just hanging here horrified.
“If thou be our lone savior, why dost thou not save thyself?” he asks.
But the other, answering, rebukes him, saying, ‘Dost thou not even fear God, seeing thou art under the same condemnation? And thou and I indeed justly, for we receive the due reward of our hermitage; but this boy hath done nothing wrong.”
Then he turns his skull to say unto me, “Boy, remember us to the world if thou returneth to thy people.”
In turn I reply, “Varily, I say, today thou shalt be in Paradise.”
O such indignity! But at least Stoney Kingston’s tag is nowhere to be seen on the tree. At least, as far as I can see, he is a liar. Plus I am their “lone savior”! At least there’s that.
The floodwaters below are but a glistening glass-bottom, reflecting a sentinel of rising stars. I can barely take in air, trapped between thick rustling leaves and the bulging veins of the purple-plumed Lobed Mountain Child.
Woe is me, I am undone. I am, at long last, abandoned in a delirium to ponder my slow supernatural homicide. My untimely demise.
ALOFT
From my treetop loft, I hear t
he clacking fan blades of Old Man Demp’s windmill. It’s not the kind of windmill that siphons up water for cattle. It’s the kind that drills an annoying noise into the earth to scare away the gophers and moles. I can hear pie tins rattling in his garden too. All sounds meant to frighten off living things. I imagine the furrows of his farm to be the shallow graves of his many victims, buried lengthwise, head-to-toe and row after row.
There are signs of civilization though, each one a strange, mild comfort in my final moments: the dusty high beams of a combine working into the night, the vesper bells of Fellowship Assembly, a cumulus of steam from the coal plant, drifting contrails set alive by the receding sunset, and the red beacons of distant phone towers, whose signals are useless here. They pulse on and off, almost in mockery.
My spirit jumps with the phantom gestures that come with claustrophobia, like a baby chick trying to muscle out of its shell. Please, God. I want to be free again to savor each of life’s little freedoms. Rescue or death, hell or high water, free me from this Kentucky crucifixion. Hear my message. Send it forth! Spark my teeth!
Although struggling in the last moments of life, I can make out the sweeping light from a nearby airstrip. My fading eyesight follows the swirling beam as it alternates blue and white, cutting the night into moonbow rings.
REVENGE OF THE SIN EATER
But, I am quickly sickened as the light strikes the face of Dooney on his treetop plank just yards away. Grinnin’ like a possum eatin’ peach seeds, he can clearly see me struggling like a tangled marionette. Still he squats on the balls of his feet, arms extended straight between his bent knees, wristbones touching, and toting a rifle that lies flat across his forearms. He is a tow-headed troll of a man; an Ed Gein doppelganger, with a jacked-up face, gin blossoms, and a cauliflower bulb for a nose. He dons a flannel hunting cap with the flaps snapped up, revealing equally cauliflowered ears. I put him around 40, 42-ish. And though supposedly mute, he can be heard speaking.