Black Horse and Other Strange Stories

by Wyckoff, Jason A.

‘This snake here?’

  ‘Uh-huh.’

  ‘You pray . . . to the snake?’

  Zedekiah wrinkled his brow at suggestion, as though he thought Bradley was stupid. ‘No! We put our prayers towards it like scripture says.’

  ‘Scripture . . . ?’

  ‘You don’t know your scriptures.’ Zedekiah shook his head again. ‘Numbers twenty-one, verse six through nine.’ Zedekiah’s voice became declamatory in imitation of a preacher’s.

  ‘ “Then the Lord sent poisonous serpents among the people, and they bit the people, so that many Israelites died. The people came to Moses and said, ‘We have sinned by speaking against the Lord and against you; pray to the Lord to take away the serpents from us.’ So Moses prayed for the people. And the Lord said to Moses, ‘Make a poisonous serpent, and set it on a pole; and everyone who is bitten shall look at it and live.’ So Moses made a serpent of bronze, and put it upon a pole; and whenever a serpent bit someone, that person would look at the serpent of bronze and live.” ’

  Bradley was having difficulty understanding the situation; the information he had processed so far didn’t add up. He decided to forego trying to understand the spiritual and moral beliefs of Zedekiah’s people until he had a better grasp of the physical evidence.

  ‘Let’s go back and talk some more about the service and what happened last night.’

  Zedekiah appeared deflated that his scripture recital left no impression on Bradley. He muttered, ‘Uh-huh, sure,’ but failed to take up the invitation.

  An indistinct yell echoed down the hall outside.

  ‘What happened when the . . . when the men came into your, uh, temple last night?’

  Zedekiah stared down. He pulled a hand out from underneath the table and traced several ‘s’-curls on the table-top. ‘They killt everybody. All the grown-ups, you know. You woulda thought they’d use their guns and that’d be it. And sure, they had their guns, but they had axes and knives and baseball bats, too. Didn’t seem satisfied just shootin’ everybody. They was crazy men. I think they wanted it messy. They was beatin’ and choppin’ and stabbin’ so much it wasn’t but a minute before anyone still standin’ started slippin’ and fallin’ down ’cause of the blood everwhar on the floor. And then these women came in behind ’em and started grabbin’ the young-uns and stealin’ us away like we was . . . like they was doin’ us a favour and savin’ us. Like it was the right Christian thing for them to do. They was huggin’ the littlest to their chests, sayin’ “poor things, poor things”, even as the kids are tryin’ to squirm out. One of ’em hugged so hard she smothered Lizzie Minton dead. I went after her and got hit on my head. I think I was ready to get killt by this big ol’ fella with a metal pipe ’cept the lady with Lizzie’s head still stuck in her bosom and her dead body floppin’ around come between him an’ me and said I was too young and maybe there was some hope left for me. My head hurt so bad I threw up. And then that lady didn’t seem like she wanted to save me so much anymore. But they drug me out of there and put me in the back of a truck with some of t’other kids. An’—like I said—I seen ’em start to set fire to the church. I guess maybe I was wrong an’ maybe I just saw the lights off the cop cars—’

  Bradley started. ‘What? The police were there?’

  ‘Mm-hmm. ’Course, they wasn’t killin’ nobody. They was jus’ standin’ back an’ watchin’.’

  Bradley was astounded. Even back in the hills, he couldn’t believe that local law enforcement would sanction a slaughter. And if it did, then the situation wasn’t just tragic, it was still dangerous. He decided Rogers needed to hear the boy’s testimony. He grabbed his cell phone from his pocket and selected Rogers’s number. He heard four rings and then the call went to voice-mail. Dammit. Maybe I’d better go find him.

  ‘Would you excuse me, Zedekiah? I’ve got to—’

  Zedekiah shot bolt upright in his chair and took in a quick breath as though startled. His eyes rolled back for a second and Bradley thought the youth was going to pass out. He leapt out of his chair and hurried around the table.

  Bradley touched the boy’s shoulder. Rigid at first, Zedekiah’s body soon slackened beneath Bradley’s hand.

  ‘Zedekiah?’

  Zedekiah exhaled. His head bobbled for a second, and then he looked up at Bradley, seemingly recomposed. ‘I’m all right. It’s jus’ like I says it: I know they went back and set that church to burn again. I feel it all lit up now. It’s open.’

  Bradley abandoned any idea of going to look for Rogers. He crossed back to his seat.

  ‘Zedekiah, did you recognise any of the men who came into your church last night?’

  Zedekiah shrugged. ‘Some was neighbours that hated us. Most I didn’t know. People get prejudice ’bout what they don’t unnerstand. Them as found out about us could get real riled up. Our congregation kept to itself out of necessity.’

  ‘Because of your beliefs.’

  ‘Not . . . exactly. Yeah, it had to do with the church, but more it had to do with our history. The way the families came together.’ Zedekiah chuckled darkly. ‘The ties that bind.’

  ‘I don’t understand.’

  A scream resounded down the hall and Bradley jumped. A squeal of laughter followed. Bradley exhaled as the adrenalin buzzed warmly in his arms. Goddammit, somebody better get control of those kids. Bradley stood up and looked out the window. Through the exterior windows lining the corridor, he could see several children run across the playground towards the church. Where is Rogers?

  ‘We come down from miner folk.’ Zedekiah appeared unfazed by the disturbance. ‘I guess there’s prolly quite a few left over from miner-folk who stayed put. Some turned to moonshine, some turned to . . . religion. Some just turned to shit.’

  Bradley was surprised at the sudden vulgarity. Then he wondered why he should expect Zedekiah to be so well behaved if the reports of his people’s religious beliefs were accurate. Bradley sat down again. He re-opened the folder and again looked at the damning photograph.

  ‘Then the mine . . . ran dry?’ Bradley was unsure of the terminology.

  ‘Oh, there was somethin’ in the mine all right. Still is, really: ’Bout a hundred dead miners!’ Zedekiah laughed openly at the punchline. Bradley was alarmed. Zedekiah lifted his eyebrows and whistled with self-satisfaction. He looked Bradley in the eye. ‘Them that did come out didn’t come out alone. They tried to seal up the mine, but they couldn’t hold It in by collapsin’ the entry with dynamite. It was too late for that.’

  Bradley had no doubt: Zedekiah’s tone had noticeably changed. Bradley thought maybe the subject matter excited the youth. But the effect was different from when Zedekiah had recited gospel; now, the confidence was corrupted by something sinister, a presence that leaked into the room and thickened the air. Bradley felt goosebumps rise up on his arms. His mouth was dry; he had to swallow before he could speak again.

  ‘I—I don’t understand . . .’

  Zedekiah leaned forward and held Bradley’s eyes fixed in his gaze. He hissed through clenched teeth, ‘They were the seal made flesh. And they could contain It so long as they could pray as their fathers had taught them. But now the communion is sundered, their church laid waste!’

  Bradley caught himself before he whimpered again about his lack of understanding. He looked again at the last photograph, saw again the mangled lamb lain on the altar before the abomination, the goat-headed idol with inverted pentagram carved into its chest and smeared with blood, clutching candles dripping black wax through claw-like fingers. Bradley turned the photograph and pushed it across the table as though to ward off the rising power he found so abhorrent in the youth.

  ‘You are Satanists!’ he yelled as his last defence.

  Zedekiah threw back his head, laughing hard and loud. When his head lolled forward again, the voice mimicking the preacher’s fervid tones was not wholly Zedekiah’s, was not wholly human.

  ‘ “Just as when you are bit by the snake and you are infected by its
poison do you raise your goodly prayers up to the serpent for deliverance, so, too, when you are afflicted by evil must you raise up your prayers to he whom afflicts thee so that you may be set free!” ’

  Bradley staggered backwards and knocked his chair to the ground. Nausea twisted his gut. He felt a wave of cold pass through him. The sight of the satisfied young man calmly sitting at the table and smiling serenely drove Bradley from the room.

  Bradley began to move down the hall towards the centre of the school. His legs felt sluggish and uncertain beneath him. He took his cell phone out and dialled again for his boss. He didn’t wait for the first ring to end before he shouted, ‘Rogers!’ For each ring on the phone, Bradley barked out the man’s name, but no response came to either salutation.

  Three laughing, squealing children crossed in front of Bradley and burst through the door into the courtyard. The one in front was a girl, taller than the two boys following her, but still struggling as she ran, encumbered as she was by the tan windbreaker. The arms were rolled up, but the zipper slapped against her knees with each step. She laughed at the playful chase of the two smaller boys, their small fists bobbing up and down, stabbing with scissors at the air in her wake. Bradley stumbled out into the playground just as the boys disappeared into the church. He looked through the courtyard windows back towards the schoolroom where he’d been conducting the interview. Zedekiah stood in the hall, looking out at him with placid menace.

  Bradley hurried across the playground and into the church. As he raced down the dim hallway, he heard a growing cacophony of childish delight coming from the sanctuary. He leapt up the short stairway in two bounds. He rushed around the corner, came into sight of the sanctuary, and slammed to a dead stop.

  The eleven urchins gathered around the altar fell silent and stared at Bradley. A few younger gigglers were shushed by the elders. Bradley’s anxiety compelled him to leave, but his strength wavered and he staggered forward to grab at the altar rail for support. In response to his movement, the children parted and retreated around the altar. Bradley’s scream caught in his throat so that only a pathetic keening creaked out. Rivulets of blood dripped down the altar from an indistinct mass on top. There was little to identify the sickeningly incomplete corpse beyond the faded, fraying, lavender cardigan still wrapped around half of it. The children smiled at Bradley. They eased back around the altar, turning to face the tabernacle and the crucifix situated over it, and then kneeled and bowed their heads. They muttered a series of unison grunts and hisses and words that Bradley could not understand.

  ‘Yes, we learned from them who kept us held back,’ Zedekiah’s even-toned voice caused Bradley to whirl around. The boy continued, gazing rapturously towards the communion around the altar and the crucifix, ‘Direct your prayers towards he whom afflicts thee and thou shalt be, at long last, set free.’

  ‘Zedekiah?’ Bradley asked, a plea to bring out the dormant human in the boy.

  The youth ignored the question of identity. ‘We have no quarrel with you. You have provided passing entertainment. But you should leave quickly.’

  One of the boys at the altar broke off from his prayers to turn and hiss at Bradley. His twisted countenance projected hate and contempt for the quivering man. The boy leapt forward at Bradley. Zedekiah raised his arm and the boy levitated several feet into the air, legs still churning and arms clawing forward in impotent rage as he hung there.

  Zedekiah chuckled. ‘You shouldn’t wonder we lack the virtue of patience, as, indeed, we lack all of them.’

  Bradley couldn’t say if it was some last kernel of courage imploring him to attempt to contain these small abominations, or if some residual concern for their corrupted vessels spurred him to speak. ‘I can help. I can keep you together. They’ll split you up. They’ll send you away, out into the world . . .’ Bradley’s voice trailed off as the horror of the possibility dawned on him.

  ‘My dear Mr Thurman: That’s exactly what we’re counting on.’ A sound welled up from Zedekiah and erupted into the church, a roaring laugh swollen with bass that rumbled and echoed and shook the pews. A disharmony of voices called from inside the boy’s mouth, ‘Now run! Run!’

  The laughter came again and chased Bradley down the nave. Bradley turned and saw the boy floating in the air sailing after him, closing in. The other children broke from their positions and ran screaming down the aisle, the blood of the nun on their hands and on their faces, hellish red masks of warpaint smeared over foul contortions of childhood. Bradley slammed into the locked door. The key was in the lock, but Bradley was so agitated that when he grabbed at it he pulled it out and dropped it to the floor. He bent and grabbed at it, only to snatch it and have it bounce against the door and down to the floor again. He bent and grabbed at it more sure handedly, and then . . . realised that the terrible sounds of pursuit had ceased. He heard only laboured, anticipatory breathing close behind him. Warily, he turned around. He threw his back against the door. They had caught up with him seconds ago. Now, they were only waiting.

  Were they letting his terror build before they pounced? Were they only toying with him? ‘What do you want?!’ Bradley cried.

  He waited five eternal seconds.

  Receiving no answer, he reached behind him and found the lock. Not daring to move his gaze away from his pursuers, he managed to turn his shoulder just enough to get the key around his body. It took several shaking jabs at the hole before he got the key into the lock. Still the greedy, white smiles stared out from the bloodied faces. But otherwise they remained unmoved. The boy in the air hung above the others, sharing that damnable, united expression. It was terrible for Bradley to look out at them, these faces of children, terrible to see the shadow in the back of their eyes that was only the faintest hint of the fiend out of the depths of the earth contained in their small bodies, and more terrible still to think there was something of childhood left in them.

  They’re waiting for me to unlock the door, he thought. Are they bound by the hallowed ground? Or do they just need . . . me?

  Bradley let go of the key and faced the children. He rolled back his shoulders as he straightened to his full height. He held up an index finger.

  ‘All right,’ he said. ‘But we go together.’

  The Trucker’s Story

  It was just me at the counter sipping on a cup of Walt’s greasy coffee and talking to the man himself when the trucker came in. There was no special reason business was slow that night. It was late summer, cool, with a three-quarter moon looking down on Walt’s silver-sided shack—good driving weather, really. That might have had something to do with the lack of customers at the diner. There are a hundred good places to stop in Ohio on the state routes and even the county roads, not to mention the burger chains right off the highway exits: God bless the man for trying, but Walt’s place just isn’t one of them. His food is all right if you don’t mind tasting it, and the owner keeps the place cleaner than he does himself, but there isn’t a big lot and the few truckers that stop there just pull off on to the wide shoulder that’s been rubbed smooth over the years.

  The trucker might’ve been about fifty, which means he looked sixty at least. The salt and the pepper in his beard were still fighting, but topside the battle was over a long time ago, and chances were there was a full retreat going on underneath his Caterpillar cap. He had the extra pounds a man picks up along the road and his hands were rusty brown from resting on a steering wheel too long. He could’ve been any old trucker at all, really. He ate his burger and fries at the counter without wincing while Walt and me kept on jawing. He seemed to take an interest, so we opened up the conversation. He didn’t seem to have much to say at first, but after he pushed his plate away, he laid out a whopper. A lot of truckers have a tall tale, but this one topped them all. The thing of it was, though—it didn’t wrap up with a hearty laugh like most do. I’ve tried to figure out after the fact if he told us this story because I mentioned I was a writer (notice I didn’t say professional writer)
or if he told it to anybody he thought would listen along the way. That second idea didn’t seem too likely; he left pretty quickly after telling his story, kind of embarrassed and sullen.

  Walt said it was a good story and I should write it up and sell it.

  ‘Yeah,’ I said, ‘but I’d have to sell it as fiction, ’cause nobody would believe it.’

  He laughed. ‘Well, of course it’s fiction! It’s straight-up bulls—t! You didn’t believe that, did you?’

  Of course I usually don’t believe it when a stranger tells me something crazy. But there was something to the trucker’s story that bugged me. If you hear something that’s supposed to be true, and something about it bugs you, you try to figure out why it’s not true. It turns out to work the same way in reverse: the trucker’s tale was impossible, but something made me mull it over again while Walt bussed the dishes. Without further ado, here is what the trucker told us as best as I can remember his words:

  ‘It was about a decade back. Well, it was about a decade or so. I wasn’t driving a rig back then, not full time. I was working for a freight company, and I wasn’t on a regular run. So you never knew what the job would be. Sometimes you were just a mover, you know? You’d load up everything a family owned and drive it to Miami or Seattle, or just from Lexington to Cincinnati. It could be industrial, but usually not. I took a ten foot bronze crucifix across two time zones once. Could be anything. But even knowing that, this job was a surprise.

  ‘I wasn’t driving on this job. That was Jerry Urlich. Me and Speed Duncan—I don’t think I ever knew what his real name was—we were there to help with the load, so we trailed Jerry’s eighteen-wheeler out there in a flatbed with a small crane on it and a forklift and a bunch of cardboard and padding tied down to the bed. It wasn’t quite dawn yet when we got out there, and there was morning mist pretty thick all around. Our pick-up was at this country house back just a bit from a county two-lane. There was a sign out front that made me and Speed say “Oh boy!” and laugh: It said “Walsh’s Fantastic Natural History Roadside Museum”. We knew we were in for something. Were we ever.