Mountain Dead

by Jason Sizemore

  Reverend Goodstead stood in the center, still wearing his black preacher’s shirt with the white band collar. He stood nearly a head taller than the folk surrounding him, all of them skinny and pinched-faced, with a rodent-like look about them. The reverend bellowed in his best hellfire-and-brimstone voice while pointing at the backhoe but the groundskeepers did not budge.

  Uncle Jack took his eyes off of them and peered down into the hole. In the darkness of night, he could not see the bottom but he thought he detected a gleam of opalescence not unlike that at the churchyard. He did not see Promise anywhere.

  He called her name softly. "Promise? It’s Uncle Jack. I’ve come to get you. Please tell me where you are."

  There was no reply.

  This section of the graveyard was a crowded mess of headstones, some erect, others fallen and some graves even sunken into dangerous pitfalls. But a few yards away, he spied the regular shadows of a wrought iron enclosure, one of the few larger plots in this area. Playing a hunch he made his way toward it, weaving around grave markers and praying he didn’t turn an ankle or worse.

  Inside the fence he found her sitting on a fallen marker with her hands bound in front of her and the reverend’s handkerchief tied over her mouth as a gag.

  "Oh, Promise, who did this to you?" Uncle Jack pulled the handkerchief off and unwound the hastily knotted hair ribbon from her wrists.

  "Grandaddy," she whispered. "I don’t know why." He heard a world of hurt in her voice.

  "Come here, Uncle Jack’s got you now." He gathered her into his arms and she eagerly went to him, nestling her face against his neck. "We’re going to find your mama and then we’re getting out of here, all right?"

  He heard a single footfall in the grass behind him.

  "You will do no such thing," said the reverend.

  Uncle Jack straightened, still holding Promise against his chest. "Sir, I’m not sure you understand what’s happening to the town."

  "Son, I understand a great deal more than you know. A great deal." He cleared his throat and smiled a little. "This might work out better than I had hoped. She needs blood, you know. Lots of it. And she’s done receiving the sacrifices of the sick and dying, she wants someone living now."

  "Who does?"

  The reverend nodded toward the hole and the backhoe. "She does. Our Lilith, the mother of this place, the real mother, the dark mother, the one who birthed us all before she was betrayed and made over into a subservient, smiling womb on legs they called Eve."

  "Sir?"

  "Have you forgotten your Bible study, son?"

  "No, sir. But…do you really think…?"

  "It’s close enough. Close enough to make her happy. She’s a vain one. They all are, really, all the Masters-Who-Sleep. Your foolish mother should have told you the stories, son, prepared you for your role in all of this. Instead, she let you get ideas in your head about schoolbooks and learning, and you leaving. So our mother called her home, her and that husband of hers. A Harker." Even in the dark, Uncle Jack could see the man roll his eyes. "But then when Promise was born, I figured it had skipped you, being that you’re a poor excuse for an Edensorrow and always have been."

  Uncle Jack tightened his grip on the little girl. "What’s Promise got to do with any of this?"

  To his surprise, the reverend laughed. "Son, you can’t count and you’re blind. My daughter has only ever been with one man in her whole life. And if you don’t know nine months from that full moon night in September when you and she came in way past curfew and I knew all what had gone on by the look in her eyes and the scent on her skin, then you’re a damned fool."

  Promise raised her head and looked up at Uncle Jack, tears still flowing down her soft, round cheeks and her chin quivering.

  "She sure favors her mama, thank the Lord, but anyone with half a brain could look at her and see your eyes."

  "Bethy said it was Pat Andrews. He swooped in right after we broke up, right after that night. She said she always regretted bedding him to get over me."

  "If she really thought Promise’s daddy was Pat Andrews, she’s a damned fool, too." The lightness of nostalgia suddenly left the reverend’s voice. "Now give her to me."

  From somewhere down in the town, someone started screaming. It was high and shrill and raw and carried easily through the deathly quiet of the night.

  "Listen, son, someone’s blood has got to spill tonight. Yours or hers."

  "Take mine."

  "You see, son, any other day I’d take you right up on that offer, you elitist bastard who deflowered my only child, but I got to thinking and I got an idea. Promise is the culmination of both family lines. With her, I could renegotiate a whole new pact with our Mother. Maybe make the trees grow again…"

  A shiver went forth beneath the ground and the trees, that ancient grove that clung to the edges of the cemetery, moaned in reply to it.

  "No," Uncle Jack said. "You’ve got it wrong, Goodstead. You’ve been played for a fool."

  A pair of headlights swept across them as a third car pulled up to the cemetery. Uncle Jack swung Promise over the wrought iron fence.

  "Run," he said to her. "Run to the gates, run toward the candlelight. Mama’s there. Run, Promise!"

  She did, hunkering low out of sight and darting between headstones. Uncle Jack watched her, hoping to see Bethany’s silhouette down by the gates, straining to hear either of their voices in reunion.

  When he was hit from behind, it both surprised him and didn’t. The two men landed hard atop a crumbling bit of marble that gave way beneath their combined weight. All the air rushed out of Uncle Jack’s body, and for far too long of a moment, he could not breathe any of it back in. The reverend grappled with him, knocking his head against the fallen stone. A haze of darkness swam across Uncle Jack’s vision, sparkling blackness that was not unlike the hellish fog. Reverend Goodstead then grasped him about the ankles and dragged him out of the wrought iron enclosure.

  Uncle Jack forced a lungful of air into his chest and then another, willing strength back into his arms and legs. His head throbbed. The blackness in his sight turned reddish and he realized he was bleeding. The drops of blood that fell into the grass lingered a moment then sizzled into wisps of dark smoke.

  "Edensorrow," echoed the voice of the groundskeeper’s girl. "Edensorrow, come home!"

  Reverend Goodstead neared the old mausoleum site. The small patch of barren earth had grown into a scorched circle several yards wide. The crabgrass wilted and died before Uncle Jack’s eyes, just as the trees had died all those years ago. Whatever rested beneath this cursed place was awake once again, and hungry.

  The ground churned and buckled, opening cracks along the surface. Here and there a hand protruded, ghastly and skeletal, reaching skyward trying to catch hold of Uncle Jack as he passed. One desiccated limb, caked with putrid, dried pus, made contact with Uncle Jack’s wounded forehead and the whole graveyard hummed.

  The terrible vapor rose up from the hole in the ground, creeping more slowly than the fog at the churchyard. Uncle Jack could feel them both, like a current of electricity connecting the two places.

  Uncle Jack dug his hands into the soil, slowing the reverend’s progress in dragging him to his doom. The thick crabgrass roots snapped between his fingers and Uncle Jack tried not to imagine that they were sinew and bone of the long forgotten dead, buried here in this mass grave, given as tribute to this monster.

  He remembered what the reverend had said about his mother.

  He remembered what his mother had said about this cemetery, her insistence on being buried here, her insistence that he be buried here as well.

  "You will be the last," she’d told him. "You will make us whole and put to rest many old ghosts."

  Raising his head painfully, Uncle Jack could see the candlelight blazing around the Edensorrow plot at the other end of the cemetery. But it was more than just candlelight, he realized. As darkness spewed forth from the hole behind him, light emanated fr
om his family plot. This was no blessed heavenly light, it was as primal and terrifying as that connected to the dark, awful stones. The difference was that this was his light, the light that shone down from the tree branches and up from the roots. The trees which had lost the battle for this graveyard and the other so many generations ago, but had held fast to their own: the Edensorrows.

  As they neared the hole, the old man’s strength increased and the hands reaching up through the fractured ground helped him, batting Uncle Jack’s fingers loose from the soil, pinching and scratching and prodding and grabbing, anything to keep him from getting into a decent fighting position.

  "I bring you sacrifice, Mother. I bring you the last Edensorrow," Reverend Goodstead said.

  "I’m not the last," Uncle Jack bellowed, desperately hoping Promise was safely away. It was a gamble, but discrediting the reverend might buy him some leverage. "He’s lying to you."

  The trees around the cemetery shook with a mighty growl and the unnamed dead hissed from beneath the dank, awful soil. So much death, slow death by pestilence and disease. These victims had fed her for so long, but they were not enough. She would rise and devour the town.

  Uncle Jack sank his hands deep into the dirt, desperate to find something, anything, to hold onto. His fingers wrapped around something thicker, more substantial than the withered hands that had been accosting him. The outer layer was slick and sticky with decay, but the core still felt strong. He yanked hard and the crumbling ground gave up this prize: an enormous taproot.

  Armed with a weapon now, Uncle Jack swung at the reverend. It was an awkward hit but enough to make the man stumble and let go. Uncle Jack got his legs beneath him and lurched between the bony, scrabbling hands, tripping on them and kicking them in his attempt to break free. Behind him, the reverend got to his feet and swore like no man of the cloth ever ought to.

  Uncle Jack smashed hand after reaching undead hand, but they kept coming. He wiped the bloodied sweat from his face and when his fingers touched the wood once more, it began to glow.

  It was not a comforting glow, nor a safe one. This thing to which his family had been bound was no benevolent entity; it was simply the enemy of Reverend Goodstead’s "dark mother." Which made it Uncle Jack’s ally. And that was good enough.

  The tentacle arms now rose from the pit, eyes opening and closing in disturbing unison, each one staring down at Uncle Jack with seemingly its own unique sentience. He could hear the guttural noises it made, hear the echo of those alien sounds from halfway down the valley at the churchyard.

  Reverend Goodstead thought he had sectioned enough of it out of the ground, had bound it by placing it into the Christian cemetery. It became obvious that the reverend had been playing a very dangerous game. He really thought he could control this thing.

  "You brought this upon yourself Goodstead, your family chose the wrong side. There are two masters here, yours…and mine." Uncle Jack had no idea how to address whatever might be waiting for his invocation. He didn’t even know if he was right.

  The seething arms shot out of the rent in the ground and toward him. With another sweep of the glowing root, the undead hands finally retreated and he scrambled free, blinded by blood and dirt, hoping he was not running headlong into the pit. One of the undulating arms, spongy and revolting, tripped him. He got his footing back and sprinted clumsily away from the soft, questing limbs. All around the hands returned, reaching farther and bringing up more of the rotten bodies with them. Uncle Jack’s booted foot crushed a skull, spewing its putrid contents across the dead earth like so much spoiled pumpkin. He swung and stabbed with his improvised weapon, striking at those unholy eyes.

  The hum reverberated through the trees, through the fiber of the root he carried. He swung at anything that moved.

  "Edensorrow," the girl shouted again and he homed in on her voice, careening around the elegant twin headstones of a pair of second cousins before stumbling into the low wall of the family plot.

  The click of the gun cocking sounded as loud as thunder.

  "Son, I didn’t want it to have to come to this." Reverend Goodstead stood just outside of the Edensorrow plot, his chest heaving and grimy sweat thick on his face and neck. He held the gun not toward Uncle Jack, but aimed at Bethany and Promise who were waiting at the cemetery gate. Waiting for Uncle Jack.

  "The bridge," Uncle Jack said. "We agreed to meet on the far side of the bridge."

  "I couldn’t leave you," Bethany replied, sounding both ashamed and prideful.

  "She loves you still, you ungrateful bastard, no matter what I did or said. But I don’t need to spill my daughter’s blood. Just her daughter’s. And that will bring both of the Masters-Who-Sleep under my command."

  "Can’t be that way," said the skinny girl. "You’re stupid to think so. Don’t you think someone might have already thought of that since the 1800s? Can’t be that way. You just try it and see."

  The gun went off. It wasn’t Promise who fell, but the groundskeeper’s girl. Someone yelled her name—Betsy.

  "She’s right Goodstead. You can’t claim them both, that’s what wiped most of those towns off the map, their kind can’t be bound that way."

  "What do you know about their kind anyway? What you read in a book, son? I’ve got plenty of bullets, I can plug you full and then go on about my business." He leveled the gun at Uncle Jack’s heart.

  "Then this is the way it’s got to be." Uncle Jack stepped over the low concrete wall, careful not to dislodge the candles Betsy had so carefully laid out. He backed slowly toward his corner, the last space left in the Edensorrow plot. It had been dug open to reveal a neat rectangle that glimmered at the very bottom. Recently dug. Betsy’s family worked quick.

  The Reverend Goodstead matched him step for step, coming to stand atop Percy Harker III’s grave, just over the wall.

  "You listen carefully," Uncle Jack said to the trees, to the freakish light still shining from the potter’s field. "This ends now. Find another town to prey on, your sacrifices have come to an end." He paused to take one last look at Bethany and Promise. "Leave here, tonight. And don’t ever come back. I love you both."

  Uncle Jack swung the taproot as hard as he could, connecting savagely with Reverend Goodstead’s left temple with a terrible, wet crack that splintered the wood. The gun went off just as Uncle Jack stepped back into the open grave, his grave that had been waiting for him for generations. The bullet passed just above him, embedding itself into the obelisk and leaving an ugly divot in the perfect marble.

  What met him there in the darkness were not fleshy, bruise-colored tentacles but hard, gnarled roots that pierced his flesh and dug into his muscles. He cried out, but merciful tubers coiled into his mouth, silencing him. They dragged him down into dark, loamy soil into which no other body had been cast. He heard a woman’s scream, heartbreaking and piercing and calling his name but the earth filled up his ears until the only sound was the creaking of ancient, tall trees bending in the wind. It sounded like breathing, like the deep, contented breathing of someone falling fast asleep.

  Unto the Lord a New Song

  Geoffrey Girard

  Geoffrey Girard has penned dark fiction for publications including Writers of the Future and the recent Stoker-nominated Dark Faith anthology. He’s recently earned a MA in Creative Writing from Miami University and is the Department Chair of English at a private boys’ school in Cincinnati. Simon and Schuster will publish two Girard novels in 2013: Cain’s Blood, a techno thriller which first appeared as a serialized novella in Apex Science Fiction and Horror Digest in 2007/08, and Project Cain, a spinoff novel for young adult readers. For more information, visit www.GeoffreyGirard.com.

  Let me take you back. Queen Arlene in there’d heard all about this church from one of the other holy hens who tells her all about this pastor’s kid, ‘you gotta go see this pastor’s kid,’ and this choir thing he’s got going on out there and all. And then she, Arlene, well she just wouldn’t stop talking about it, I
mean, with all those heads and all and what that kid was doing with ‘em and because she’d been on Jesus and that kinda stuff going on maybe five years then. Just to pass the time at first, you know, because we didn’t have any kids or nothin’ together and mine were, well, you know, and the only real work she’d had was running payroll for me, which took all of maybe an hour a week or so, and mostly she just sat around thinking up stuff to busybody about. So I wasn’t completely surprised when all this churchy stuff started but then a Sunday here and there turns into Bible study twice-a-fucking week and then some woman’s group about living more like Mary and all that and, even then, I didn’t mind it, because it gave her something to do, you know? But now when I went and, you know, left her and all that time, well, then she really started praying to Jesus and Peter and Mary like Lord knows what, praying to bring my sorry ass back home. And, goddamn, sure enough if I don’t go and come back. What’s that tell you, huh? I mean, kids dying of cancer or the dead walking around again, or whatever, but fuck if Arlene Schadder’s silly prayer ‘bout me ain’t the one request to get through and reach the Big Boss upstairs. ‘Can’t stand ya,’ I’d told her. ‘Biggest mistake I ever made,’ I said. Even got my own place awhile over in Berwick, already messing around some with this other woman at work, buying her kid—Jesus, can’t even remember his name anymore, he was, hell, he was one of the ones they shot hanging around at the school, you know?—that car and all, and still I come crawling back home maybe about six months later like a zombie myself, you know? Like nothing ever happened and she’s all it’s the praying that brung me back, but I’m only thinking I can’t afford another divorce right yet and anyways I kinda fucked this other new girl out, you know. But I kept such thoughts to myself and, well, then that was that. She’s all ‘thank you Jesus’ now and I even have to start church again myself and then, what, maybe another six months and all fuckin’ hell gone break loose, of course, all this zombie bullshit, and we end up right on down to the church just like a whole bunch of folk did, end of the world and all, half the fucking town turn up, and I’d be lying if I told ya I wasn’t praying double time like the Pope himself. And you hear everything just outside the church, you know. Gunshots and whatnot and screams. Remember the screams? People trying to get into the church and all, folk barring the fucking doors, everyone all crying and shouting and everyone all screaming, screaming bout damnation and retribution and all that. Couple people got killed too, you know, right there in the church by people people. But mostly we’re all there on our knees, eyes squeezed shut like little kids pretending if we don’t open them again all that bad stuff is just gonna go away or somethin’. And I start praying for my family, you know. My family family. My first wife and all. Celia and the girls. And I’m just hoping they’re OK, right? Asking God to maybe look out for them and all because I hadn’t seen them in, you know, maybe years by that time. I mean, if He somehow maybe had something, anything, to do with helping Arlene get my sorry ass back home, maybe He might just lend a hand to this small little matter too. When we divorced, Celia’d moved to Harrisburg to work for the state and all and the girls, the girls were still…. They still weren’t talking to me much. Not after I left their mom for Arlene, you know. Queen Arlene, they called her, Queen Arlene. The girls said the two of us deserved each other, ain’t that the truth, said they never wanted to talk to me again. You know, teenagers. And so I’m down on my knees in that church and thinking about them in Harrisburg and all because, I mean, everyone’s seen the pictures by then. On the TVs and all. I mean Harrisburg is gone, right, overrun. Dead city. I mean Hazleton was half gone by then too, remember, but half gone ain’t all gone, and I’m thinking, I’m praying, maybe they got out somehow, you know? Some way. Who the fuck knows? And also thinking she just should have fucking stayed in Hazleton and all. Because then they’d be OK. Then, maybe, I could help and all. Go over to the house, you know, because I can’t do shit one with them in Harrisburg. I mean, what could I do? And I can, you know, imagine these things getting all, you know. And I can see their faces. My kids’ faces. And they’re all alone. And I’m feeling so, so… So fucking hopeless, you know. Useless, I mean. One big worthless piece of shit. I’d left Celia, Celia and the girls, for this bony bitch kneeling next to me in this shit church surrounded by fucking dead people. Ruined up my whole life for this girl, Queen Arlene, who’d turned into an old lady herself before the ink on my divorce papers with Celia had dried, and this, this is what I’m now thinking about kneeling in that pew, about what I’d given up and how my family, my real family I mean, was probably being torn apart, being eaten, being raped by looters, I don’t fucking know, all while I’m here on my knees praying next to this woman I still, despite her prayers, can’t stand anymore. And how maybe now might be a good time to do something about that. About her, I mean. And that’s when I get this vision, you know? An honest-to-God vision, closed eyes and all I’m seeing it at clearly as I’m seeing you sitting there with that beer in your hand. It’s Celia and the two girls and they’re getting in this car and driving away and all. Zooming around the roadblocks, those things bouncing off the car, they’re getting out, you know. It’s beautiful, right? A fucking miracle or something and maybe I was just lying to myself again, but OK, because I had some real goddamned peace then, just for a minute maybe. But enough. Enough. And so, six months later, when Arlene tells me we just gotta go up to see this new church, I’m thinking OK, sure. Why not? What else we all doing in this shithole, right? Just waiting to die ourselves, right? And just maybe I’ll experience something again that’ll make me not feel like total shit again for a couple seconds. So this kid’s set up shop in that old radar station up da mount’n on Beryllium, you know the one. Air Force built it in the sixties, part of some Air Defense Cold War bullshit. Been abandoned twenty years now, converted to a forest tower. Not too many zombies coming back around. So five of us hiked over that day. Not much trouble heading up or back. Shot one up near Stockton mostly for the hell of it. Ran into another group of tourists heading up for the same thing. Couple of the spics, you know. Vargas was one of ‘em, seen him since. Service at sunset, everyone’s expected to spend the night after. We get there maybe an hour before. Building’s located in the middle of this large field up there, both sides lined with all these antennas mounted on telephone poles. Fenced off and they got some guns up there. Whole mess of rusted out UHF ground-to-air radio transmitters and receivers and computers and shit all dragged out into the open now. Inside was standing room only, but they were still happy as hell to see us. Must have been two dozen folk, I figure, with us. I mean, this place was small, but standing room only, like I said. Still got an extremely large diesel generator inside, lights work, working boiler, whole thing, and they got three pews from somewhere they drug up there and but mostly fold out chairs all lined up and, after some pleasantries and all, we took out seats and waited like everyone else. And he’s got it sitting right up front, you know? Covered with this red sheet. And that sheet is moving and shifting beneath, and everyone’s just waiting now. So this kid comes out, you know? Couldn’t be no more than fifteen. Skinny little shit, looks half-dead himself, and he welcomes us and we all go about our church business and he’s not bad, not bad. The sermon and all. I mean, he’s not a natural, you know, but he knows his verse well enough and can talk the talk well enough, about his father’s mission before you know and then how after the Lord first impressed upon him to carry His word on by way of the music, and the crowd is giving Halleluiahs and Amens in all the right places but you can tell we weren’t the only ones there to see the choir, hear it I mean. I mean what this kid’s put together. And he’s no dumb-dumb and gets around to it soon enough. Gives his little speech about God’s plan and all that and everyone’s getting ready and then he finally pulls back that blanket and holy shit, friend! I’m telling you. Before they sang a lick, I knew this pastor’s kid had really done somethin’. Up on this pedestal, was this five tier stair-step display stand—kind of thing the missus
would put plants on, you know?—‘cept here each row is heads. Four or five to a row. Just three on the top shelf. Some more rotted than others, you know? All the teeth knocked out, of course. Lower jaws, tongues, too. But the necks was there. And I haven’t seen the tubing yet, you know, because he’s got them covered over with like these little curtains on each row. You know, it looks good. And most of the heads are moving and all, couple eyes drifting this way and that, twitchin’ noses, as this kid steps up behind the stand. And he’s citing Psalm Ninety Eight and all—Sing to the LORD a new song for he has done marvelous things—and some of the crowd is saying it right with him, but I’m just watching because I didn’t know it yet then, the psalm, and then they start. Singing, I mean. This damn kid’s back behind them heads, working these foot bellows, you know, the kind you’d use to pump up a pool float or air mattress something like that, and he’s got half a dozen of these things back there and he’s stepping on ‘em like Geddy fucking Lee, you know, and doing stuff all this and that, like, with his hands back there too, making it all work. And then, then you realize what this kid’s done. And these heads, these fucking zombie heads. They start making that sound, you know. And first thing, you halfway jump out of your chair. I mean, you just wanna piss yourself. That fucking moan sound. Nails on a fucking chalkboard, right? That wet moaning shit, all quavery, like an old diesel warming up in February, or maybe a radio station out just a little too far out keeps coming and coming on you, but then a little more air starts pumping through and a couple more of those heads start making noise and then everything that kid was saying before made a little sense. I mean it was fucking notes, man, and I just closed my eyes and listened, you know? Some low and some high and some all wobbly or gruff, and two of the ones, women looked like, up top all kinda wailing, and next thing you know all coming together as one sound. Like harmonies and shit, one voice, an honest-to-Christ church choir, all them different moans. And for the second time, I, you know, got that feeling again. Like the kid was right or something, and that there was a purpose to all of this and all that. And it lasted just, just… Just a moment, but it was there. That I didn’t feel like the world’s shittiest father. That I didn’t hate my life. That I didn’t think I was living in Hell, you know. And so when they asked me to, you know, help go find this replacement, zombie head, you know, what was I gonna say?