by Gregory Kay
The noise came again, but this time to his right: up the creek, back towards town. When he turned this time, he thought he caught another shadow out of the corner of his eye, but again, he wasn’t quite sure; like the first, it was gone almost before he saw it.
Another footstep, among the tombstones again.
Spinning, her brought his gun to his shoulder and sighted down the barrel at nothing beyond the falling leaves, their shadows flying half-glimpsed like bats, black-on-black against the darkness.
“Who’s there?” he growled, and received no answer, except for the sound of more movement, only from a new direction: down the creek. By the time he got his gun pointed that way, there was nothing to aim at, but there was another pair of quick steps, one in the cemetery and the other up the creek.
They were all around him; he was surrounded.
Sid knew it had to be at least two or three of those sneaking union bastards trying to creep up on him, and get close enough to rush him. He was confident he could handle them – I damned sure handled those krauts doing that in the trenches! – but he couldn’t help getting a little spooked. Something was not right about this whole situation, not right at all. He should have seen at least one of them well enough by now to have gotten a shot off, but he couldn’t even swear he had actually seen anyone, even though every fiber of his being insisted he had. Still...
If I fire a shot and there isn't anything out there, I'll look like a fool!
Still another step crumpling the leaves beneath it, and he jerked his aim back down the creek.
“This is Red Creek Mine property! Show yourselves, you sons of bitches!”
“Don’t be scared, Sid; I’m right over here.” The voice was a mountain twang, as clear and sweet as honey, and unmistakably feminine.
He wheeled around to point the shotgun at the graveyard, and this time he could make out the silhouette of a woman over his front sight, standing among the markers and making no attempt to hide. Even though all he could see at the moment was her figure, dark gray and black on black against the night, Sid could tell her hair was unbound and hanging over her shoulders, and despite her shapeless dress, it was obvious her slender body was well put-together.
Sid squinted, trying to see her clearly, relieved that this, at least, was no threat, and the other noises had ceased altogether.
“What the hell are you doing out here, girl? It’s after curfew!”
She stepped forward, just far enough to bring her bare feet and lower legs from beneath the hem of her dress into the light, while leaving the rest of her no more than a shadow.
“I’ve come to see you, Sid.” The voice was suddenly sultry, a musky sound that fairly dripped with sex.
Sid’s nostrils instinctively flared, trying to catch her aroma, and his tongue licked at his lips as he lowered his gun to his waist. He was on familiar ground now, and knew what she was. More than a few women were attracted by power and by those not afraid to use it, and now this one had come to him. She wasn't the first, not even in this particular camp.
“Who are you?” he asked, smiling with anticipation even as his erection grew at the thought of what he was about to do. An instant later, it shriveled when she moved forward, and the lantern light reflected red off her eyes like an animal’s. This time her tone was anticipatory, cruel, and hungry.
“Oh, you know me, Sid. Don’t you remember? Well, that’s alright, because I sure remember you!”
She took another step, bringing her face into the light, and Sid’s bladder let go when he saw something he knew could not be. He went cold and numb, and no more felt the warm urine soaking his pants than he did the gun falling from numb fingers to thump down into the leaves at the base of the sign. The only part of his body that seemed to obey his will were his legs that had already begun backing away on their own, and his head that shook back and forth in denial.
His normally coarse voice was a squeak, like a frightened mouse cornered and cringing before a copperhead.
“No! No!”
Turning his head and looking for an escape, he saw more figures, more familiar faces, and more eyes glowing in the lantern light. They alternately giggled like girls and hissed like snakes. The one from the graveyard looked right at him and opened and snapped her mouth open and closed twice, popping her teeth like an angry dog while bitter amusement glittered in her eyes.
Turning to run, Sid saw another one, a man waiting just behind him, his mouth open and full of fangs.
“I told you, Sid.”
To a man, the guards in town denied hearing his screams, even though the miners cowering in the nearest cabins insisted they heard them all too well; after all, they were loud and went on for a very long time not a hundred yards away. They gathered up what was left of Sid the next morning and buried him in the graveyard only feet from where he lay, and Harvey Goldman was the one who came out with a bucket and a rag and scrubbed the blood spatters off the sign that read WELCOME TO RED CREEK. Most of it came off, but some had sunk through the paint and into the wood, and a deep crimson stain remained.
Chapter 2
Morgan's Knob, West Virginia, 24 November, 2014
Almost a hundred miles by road from Charleston, Morgan’s Knob lay closer to the border of Virginia than to its own state’s capital. The little town was much like any number of others in the southern West Virginia coalfields, nestled in a deep valley where, as they say, you have to look straight up to see the sky. Sheltered at the base of the mountain that gave it its name, watered by the babbling stream of Morgan's Lick, 'The Knob' as the locals called it, was reasonably clean yet at the same time comfortably shabby and unpretentious, with the tallest structure being the white steeple of the Methodist Church, one of a dozen such houses of worship of varying denominations in and around town. Solidly white-skinned and blue collared, the residents prayed hard, played hard, worked hard, and occasionally fought hard, and they believed in enjoying the fruits of their labors. Modest cars and fancy pickups lined the curbs and driveways under the light of the few street lamps, motorcycles and ATVs were housed in almost every garage, and the population of fifteen hundred souls slept peacefully in the predawn darkness...or at least most of them did.
It was barely three in the morning, but Nellie Estep had been awake for hours. At 92 years-old, Nellie generally slept when she wanted, or, rather, when her body wanted, but not this night, nor the past few nights. She'd been waking up, not from the usual arthritic and other age-related aches and pains, but from knowing something was wrong. In tiny Morgan's Knob, she was famous for knowing things.
Forty-two years ago, she'd known her husband, Warren, was dead hours before the men came down from the mine to tell her of the cave-in when the mountain swallowed him up, and she'd known when her daughter Ruth had lost the battle with cancer, despite Ruth being all the way up north in Cleveland at the time. She knew when her grandson Frank was trapped in the crushed wreck of a car over a mountainside, more dead than alive, and had called the police, told them where to look, and demanded they get the hell over there right then and do it. They had, and her grandson had lived and had given her a great-grandson named Jake.
A lot of people came to her, some of them from far away, asking her things, sometimes offering her money if she'd tell what they wanted to know, but Nellie sent them all away with their wishes unfilled. She wasn't a fortune teller – She was a Christian, and God forbade that kind of foolishness. And anyway, it didn't work on anybody but her family. She reckoned she'd been given a gift, and it was something to be thankful for; the Lord worked in mysterious ways, and that was that.
And these dreams have sure been mysterious!
Pouring a cup of coffee and grunting at the noise of her joints and tendons crackling like brittle paper while she eased herself into the wooden kitchen chair, Nellie settled her bony backside into the thick, homemade cushion and squinted into the inky blackness of the cup, hoping it might tell her something. After all, she'd heard of people overseas who could se
e things in tea leaves, but that had never worked for her, and she reckoned maybe it wouldn't work at all with coffee, but it was worth a try since she had a cup anyway.
She looked around at her kitchen – an old woman's kitchen, with flowered wallpaper and knickknacks on the shelves – sometimes she'd see something telling in the pattern, or in the expression on a ceramic figurine when the light hit it just the right way...but not tonight.
Not this morning, she corrected herself, glancing at the clock on the wall in the shape of a rooster.
Still, she knew something was coming, something real bad; she'd felt it even before she'd had the dreams…but those dreams...
Nellie shuddered at the thought.
She'd seen coffins walking through the night-time woods, dim shadows black-on-black, moving through the trees on legs like men, and never making a sound.
Nellie didn't know how many there were; not many, but she couldn't get an exact count, because they moved from shadow to shadow, there one instant and invisible the next. They came sneaking out of a holler, stalking something, or someone, like a hunter stalking a deer. All the could glean from that was that death was coming, and probably a whole bunch of it at once. And then there were the hands.
She'd dreamed of the hands for years, for decades, she reckoned, but it was one of those dreams that always dissolved right out of your memory when you woke up, and you wouldn't remember it until the next time you had it. Well, not until last night, anyway, and now she knew she'd never forget it.
On the surface, the dream wasn't bad, she didn't reckon, but it certainly wasn't right. She recalled hands brushing almost imperceptibly before moving on just like always, looking for something, feeling for it, groping blindly in the night for something important, something needed. Then, last night for the first time, she felt the hands close on something she couldn't see, but something she knew was close to her.
She took another sip of coffee.
I just wish I knew what it was. No, she corrected herself, who it was. She couldn't shake the feeling that it was a person, and whoever it was was teetering right on the edge of life and death...or on the edge of something else, something she couldn't understand, at least not yet. The part that really frightened her was that nagging feeling that it just might be something worse than she could imagine.
Pushing the cup back, she settled herself more comfortably and folded her hands.
I'll have to pray about it.
Chapter 3
In one room of a single story white frame house along Walnut Street, where both a green F-150 and a bright red Ranger pickup marked the family’s preference for Fords, someone else was struggling with dreams of his own.
Jake. Jake Estep. Come on, Jake; I’m waiting for you.
It was the sweetest and yet most demanding voice Jake had heard in his eighteen years of life, and he had heard it repeatedly every single night for better than two weeks now. Squirming and writhing in the throes of what the lucid part of him knew to be an erotic dream, Jake was desperate with longing. What made it worse was that the dream was always as pitch black as the bottom of a mine, involving every sense but sight; he could hear her, smell the faint musk of her femininity, taste the soft saltiness of her skin, feel her...Oh God yes, he could feel her, her mouth, her fingers, her body, but he could see nothing, not even a shadow.
“Who are you?” he mumbled through half-open lips. “Why can’t I see you?”
Because you're there and I’m here. I want you. I’m waiting for you. You know where to go; just cross the creek, and I’ll love you forever. It’ll be good, Jake; I promise it’ll be sooo good! Let me show you...”
Once again, he felt the familiar hands roving over him, the now-familiar lips pressed against his before moving down his body, alternately kissing, licking, and playfully nipping at him, the brushing of her long hair dragging behind across the sweat on his belly as she went lower still, the ecstasy building up like the steam in a boiler, waiting to explode...
At the sound of the alarm, he shot straight up in bed, nearly choking on the aspirated saliva from his watering mouth. In a rage at being awakened, he let out an inarticulate shout as he hit the electric alarm clock with his closed fist like a hammer and heard plastic crack. Blinking, he looked over through bleary eyes to see what had been numbers reduced to flashing, nonsensical red LED hieroglyphics. The digital time piece was obviously history. He leaned forward and put his face in the palms of both hands.
“Damn it! So close! So...”
He started; he realized he was literally crying with disappointment this time, the tears flowing down his cheeks in salty rivulets.
Not again! What the hell’s wrong with me? I can't even finish a wet dream!
Furiously wiping his face with a corner of the sheet, Jake flung it aside before turning and swinging his feet off the bed and onto the handmade oval rag rug on the floor beside it, a gift from his grandmother. His head was pounding, and his erection was throbbing in time so hard it hurt. The disappointment was a palpable thing, but in a way, less in the uncompleted act and more in the fact that, while he had been having this same dream night after night, he had yet to see her face, or any other part of her for that matter.
With too much self-discipline to either jack off or lie back down and try to sleep once more when he had things to do, he pulled on his briefs and stumbled for the bathroom.
After relieving himself, he looked at his face in the mirror and frowned at his angular, slightly long features. He was handsome enough, he guessed; at least the girls in his high school thought so. More than one of them insisted that he looked just like a younger version of the actor Matthew McConaughey, but he didn't reckon they'd think so if they saw him right now, unless it was McConaughey on a two-week bender; he looked like hell. There were dark circles under his eyes, and he looked more like thirty than his actual age of seventeen. All he needed to complete the picture of dissipation was a dark shadow on his jaw, but his facial hair was the same color as its slightly shaggy counterpart on his head; it didn't grow thick, at least not yet, so he didn't have a whole lot of stubble and, being dark blond, what he had didn't show much.
I reckon I'll pass on shaving; the way I feel right now, I'd probably cut my damned throat.
Shaking his head, Jake shrugged off the gathering gloom as best he could, and washed his face, brushed his teeth, and combed his hair before going back to his room.
It didn’t take him long to pull on his hunting clothes, since he'd laid out the long underwear, jeans, red plaid wool shirt, heavy socks, boots, orange vest, and camouflage cap and coat the night before. He was organized, and his room showed it. An eight-point buck's head and a big largemouth bass looked down from the wall, free from the dust that mounts tended to collect, and the rest of his room was as spotless as the rifle, shotgun, and compound bow hanging in the rack above his bed. Before he put on his coat, he took a moment to make his bed, straightening out the sheets and quilt. He was dependable and responsible, everybody said...Oh yeah, and organized.
Jake knew personal responsibility was the ideal you were supposed to aspire to, and yet the thought depressed him even more, especially here lately, and he wondered if he was doing the right thing today; following a voice from some crazy dream didn't sound very responsible at all, when he thought about it, and he knew his mom and dad would be shocked at it, especially coming from him. His parents didn’t nag him much; they had no need to, because doing the right thing was his nature. Oh, he definitely knew how to have fun and was more than willing to have it, and it had gotten in trouble a few times, but nothing too serious. He had organized his life from the earliest years, making good grades, wrestling and playing baseball, and this past summer, he had taken the underground mining course offered at the vocational school that would practically guarantee him a job in the mines when he graduated this spring: just about the only good paying job in these parts. He knew he should be happy, but there was something missing he couldn't seem to put his finger on,
like a piece gone from a jigsaw puzzle that had been put together face-down, so you couldn't see the picture to tell what was on it so you'd know what to look for.
It wasn’t sex; he wasn’t going steady with anyone and hadn't for awhile now, but he played the field and got laid more than almost any other boy in town, almost as often as his friend Joe Bob – of course, nobody got laid as often as Joe Bob MacKenzie, who got more ass than a toilet seat in a girls' school – and even though Jake was much more selective as to who he went out with, he had never wanted for dates. Sometimes he even got dates he didn’t plan on and didn’t want, like last month...
No, I won’t go there. Best just put it out of your mind, pretend it never happened.
He forced his thoughts to change the subject, and they immediately switched back to the dream. Every night lately, the mysterious girl had come to him, calling in the darkness, her voice begging, her hands and mouth and body caressing. The thing was, he never got to finish, never even saw who she was, and he suspected it was the wondering, the not knowing, more than the frustration, that had cut his sleep in half and had made the decision for him.
One way or another, it ought to be solved today. She's called, and I'm coming! We'll see if she's real or if I'm crazier than a loon.
Taking the Remington Model 700, chambered for the powerful .300 Winchester Magnum cartridge, off the rack, he walked out of his room, switching off the light behind him.
Sitting at the kitchen table in his socks, sweat pants, and tee shirt, Frank Estep, an older, burlier, slightly graying version of his son, smiled as he watched his wife’s bottom wiggle beneath her housecoat while she flipped the cakes of sausage in the pan. They would be married twenty years this coming summer, and he had never tired of looking at her. Kathy was thirty seven, three years his junior, and she wasn’t more than twenty, maybe twenty-five pounds heavier than the pretty little black-haired, freckle-faced teenage girl he’d married so long ago.