Harlan County Horrors (14 page)

PJ
stomped around to the back of his trailer, kicking loose a piece of
aluminum underpinning as he went. A party was the last thing he
needed to deal with. Especially after putting up with Slick. But it
wasn’t the drinking that bothered him. Lord, no. If anything,
drinking was good. And it wasn’t the smoking. Nor the smell of
marijuana burning. What grated on his nerves more than anything,
driving him absolutely mad to the edge of insanity, was the
never-ending, bone-rattling bass of their music. The obnoxious
racket wasn’t playing at the moment, but he knew it would start up
again. It always did.

PJ
entered the back door of the trailer and shoved his stuff onto a
kitchen table already cluttered with empty beer cans, half-eaten
frozen dinners, and empty Styrofoam take-out trays. Before he did
anything else, he reached into the cabinet and pulled out a pint of
whiskey.

He’d barely gotten a drink down before the music
began.

“
Dadgumit!” he roared and started pacing the floor, swigging
the whiskey as he went. He drank and walked and drank and
walked–over and over across the same worn path in the linoleum that
stretched from the back door of the trailer, through the kitchen,
and into the living room where the carpet began.

Thump, thump-thump, thump.

The
windows rattled and the doors shook.

Thump, thump-thump, thump, thump.

PJ’s stomach twisted into knots.

He
tried everything to drown out the annoyance. He turned up the
volume on the television, played his own stereo, and even crammed
toilet paper into his ears. But the music could not be quelled. So
he drank. And the more PJ drank and the more he walked past the old
Polaroid of Arlene on the refrigerator door–the one he had taken of
her at Cumberland Falls, sitting there in her long blue jean skirt
and plain white T-shirt–the more agitated he became.

A
second bottle of Jim cracked open.

Pacing by the kitchen table for the umpteenth time, PJ noticed
the lantern he had brought home. “What’r you lookin’ at?” he
shouted. The lamp didn’t respond – he hadn’t expected it to, but
somehow it seemed to call to him all the same. Beckoning for his
attention. Drawing him closer with an unseen power. And for a
moment the music seemed to fade into the background, replaced by an
ominously growing wall of silence. Pulsating. Buzzing. Whomping in
his head. Before PJ realized what he was doing, he was sitting at
the table, brushing the black dust off the intricately carved
lantern, wiping clean its blood-colored globe. Jiggling the lamp,
he could hear fuel sloshing inside and wondered if it could still
be lit. One way to find out. He raised the glass and struck his
lighter, holding it steady against the crusty, dry-rotted wick. A
moment later, the flame took hold and a dark plume of smoke
pillared toward the ceiling. A red aura illuminated the room,
glowing against the wood paneling, reflecting off the mirrored
sconces that Arlene had bought back when life had been better.
Sweeter.

PJ
sat, staring into the light, inhaling the fumes. The aroma was
strange, yet intoxicating. His mind cleared. Peace overwhelmed him.
Clarity. Then a sense of power. Slowly at first. He felt it in his
joints. His back became strong again. Young. A new energy burned
within him. His senses heightened. His eyes came alert. He could
smell everything in the room. The leftovers. The lingering scent of
Arlene’s perfume. Arlene. He also felt his spirit rising. Soaring.
Awakening in rebirth. And, for once in his life, he felt as if he
were in complete control of everything around him.

Then the silence snapped. The music from the party suddenly
blared into his ears, exceedingly louder than before.

THUMP! THUMP! THUMP!

PJ
jumped back, knocking the whiskey off the table while throwing the
chair to the floor.

THUMP! THUMP! THUMP!

The
bass pounded his eardrums like a sledgehammer, and he clasped his
hands over his head. Pain wrought his face as he opened the back
door, exposing himself to the cool night air.

“
Shut up! Shut up, y’stupid potheads!” he shouted.

The
music reverberated inside his skull.

“Dammit! Argh! STOP! I wish to
God
you’d stop!” He squeezed his
head, weeping uncontrollably. “I wish to
God
you’d all just roll over
and
DIE
!”

“
I
don’t know about the God part.” A silky voice sliced through the
black smoke. It whispered gently. Soothingly. Calmly into PJ’s
mind. “But the dying, I can certainly arrange.”

Boo
pulled up to the house at Couch’s Branch just as a man tore through
the swinging screen door and leapt off the porch. His fingers were
clasped about his neck as if he were asphyxiated, his eyes bulging
from their sockets. Others were already in the yard, doing the
same. They flailed about, wailing and screaming. Blood flowed from
their mouths, eyes, and ears. Finally, as they each let out one
last agonizing shriek, their pupils exploded, sizzling with bursts
of flame. Then their bodies flopped to the ground.

Frozen, Boo sat in his cruiser with a hand on the hilt of his
gun, watching in complete and utter horror.

PJ
laughed as the last person scrambled out of the house, screaming in
pain.

“
Take that, y’buncha potheads!”

Then he turned to the smoke, which had oddly begun to take a
form – arms, head, two orbitals blazing with fire.

Curiously, though, PJ did not feel surprised or
afraid.

“
Who’r you?” he asked, his ears, once again, filled with the
ominous silence.

“
Power,” a voice said. Smoky tentacles extended out from the
form, encircling PJ’s head. “Wealth.” They explored his ambitions,
searched his thoughts, probed his dreams. “Anything your heart
desires.”

As
dark wisps curled into PJ’s ears, his
face
lit with an evil grin. A wicked sheen glistened in his eyes.
“Anythang, huh?”

“
Yes,” the voice whispered again. Softly. Lullingly. Prickling
his neck like the breath from a red-hot lover.
“Anything.”

PJ
chuckled. And his laughter grew until he was bursting out like a
crazed maniac, cackling at the top of his lungs.

The
next day at Pat’s Diner, Boo sat in his usual seat. Dark circles
shaded the skin around his puffy red eyes, while deep wrinkles
creased his brow. It seemed he’d aged ten years overnight. Having
worked the grisly crime scene, he had not been able to sleep–if, in
fact, what had happened was a crime. Boo really couldn’t say. All
he knew was that a lot of people had died in the same strange and
horrible fashion, and that the ground had been saturated with their
blood.

His
face was still pale from disgust.

“
Howdy thar, Boo. Burger today? Grits?” the waitress
asked.

Boo
almost hurled at the thought. “No thanks. Just coffee,
please.”

Except for a few rowdy guys in the back of the restaurant, the
patrons were generally quiet, their mood somber. Word was getting
around town fast of the incident at Couch’s Branch, no matter how
well the local law enforcement tried to keep it under wraps. Too
many people owned police scanners, and too many people knew the
police codes.

Boo
thumbed through some information he had printed out from the
Internet. He had researched various drugs and their side effects
during the early morning hours at the station. If anything, he
figured the deaths were caused by an experimental new drug gone
wrong. Or, at least, that’s what he hoped. So far, there was no
account of anything that would explain the tragedy he had
witnessed.

The
officer from the day before sat down next to him.

“
Dang it, man. Y’look like crap.”

Boo
sipped some coffee. “I feel like crap.”

“
So tell me…what happened out thar last night?”

Boo
shook his head. “Weird stuff, man. Scary stuff.”

“
Like Alibaba?”

“
Worse.”

“
Do y’thank it was drugs?”

Boo
took another sip from his cup. “Not sure. I’m doing some research,
but ain’t found a thing yet.”

The
deputy took off his hat, then glanced around to see if anyone was
listening. “Well, get this…I was talkin’ to ol’ man Sizemore this
morning. Y’know him, right?”

Boo had to think a moment
.
He had seen Sizemore only twice in his life. As
he recalled, he was a scraggly, bearded backwoodsman in coveralls
who looked as if he needed a bath. Smelled like it, too.

“
Isn’t he that ol’ coot that lives up on the
mountain?”

“
Yeah, that’s him. Apparently he’d heard about what happened
last night. Turns out, his dad was half Indian, y’know…passed down
all these tales of thangs dating way back before Daniel Boone even
came to these parts, when Indians were the only ones around.
Anyway, he was saying thar was this pipe the Indians found–a spirit
pipe, they called it–that supposedly gave ‘em the ability to
channel spirits or demons…some hogwash like that. Anyway, he told
me the Indians forbid the use of it. Said the ones who had smoked
it ended up being possessed by the very spirits they conjured,
losing their minds and dying from unnatural causes. ‘Death by
fire,’ he called it.”

Faintly, someone started coughing in the background as if he
or she had inhaled smoke.

Boo
pondered the tale. He thought about the people the night before,
flailing about, and how he could have sworn their eyes had exploded
in flame. “So you think the people last night might have gotten
a’hold of a spirit pipe…or maybe the drug that was used in
one?”

The
coughing grew louder. Stronger.

“
I
wouldn’t put it past ‘em. They were always smoking something at
that place,” the deputy said, playing with a pack of Sweet N’Low.
“And it sounds just weird enough that it might be true, even if it
is a bunch of Indian voodoo.”

Boo
thought a moment. “Voodoo’s more like a Caribbean thing, isn’t
it?”

The
deputy shrugged. “Voodoo…hoodoo…it’s all the same, if y’ask me.
Even that Alibaba stuff. ‘Same thang, different name’–that’s what
my granny used to say. Like ‘potato’ and ‘tater.’ Speaking of
which,” the deputy motioned to the waitress, “I thank it’s time fer
some fries.”

But the waitress wasn’t looking. Like most others in the
diner, she had been distracted by the coughing, which had now
escalated into deep, blustering blows, coming to a head as a man at
the corner table, sitting with four other guys, staggered to his
feet, whooping hard
while clutching his
chest. He took a few steps forward before collapsing onto the
floor, trembling in an apparent seizure. Boo immediately sprang
from his stool. Rushing across the diner, he slid by the large
man’s side and tried to hold him steady–as did the deputy–but the
convulsions were too strong. The man continued to shake harder,
more violently than anyone Boo had ever seen. Then, to everyone’s
surprise, a filthy ooze began to seep from the man’s mouth,
bubbling from his nostrils like dirty black suds. Boo and the
deputy stepped back. They heard a loud crack. Blood splattered all
over the floor, and the man’s chest burst open wide.

Some people gasped. The waitress screamed.

Meanwhile, from the rupture of bone and flesh, two dark
slug-looking creatures slithered out. They snaked across the floor,
a streak of crimson blood trailing behind.

“
Good Lord! I-i-i-is that his lungs?” The deputy
gaped.

Boo didn’t know what to say. The creatures indeed appeared to
be the man’s lungs–dark, decrepit,
black
with decay. The organs swelled
up and down, as if they were exchanging air, as if they were still
working inside the man’s chest.

The
four guys who had been sitting with the victim were
aghast.

“
W-w-what happened to Slick?” one of them asked.

Boo
didn’t know how to respond to that either. He didn’t know about
anything anymore.

Suddenly, the man who had asked the question began scratching.
“What the…” He dug at his neck, chest, and legs–clawing himself
hysterically with his nails. “Sum’ns eatin’ me up!” he
cried.

Everyone watched as what started out as small specks on the
man’s skin multiplied into a horde of moving black dots that
appeared to be thousands, if not millions, of…

“
Fleas!” The man fell backward, knocking over a table and
screaming on the floor. “They’re killin’ me! Make ‘em stop! Please!
Nooo!”

His
friend, the one called Beanpole, frantically searched about. “Hold
on, Flea! I’ll find sum’n to git’em with. I’ll find sum’n–” But
abruptly his words and actions were cut short as a succession of
vines shot up from the floor, wrapping themselves around the man’s
body until he was completely encased in a cocoon of
green.

As
for the other two–the one called Tennessee had already started
gagging, unable to breathe as his skin turned a bright orange,
while Hawk had sprouted feathers and was hopping about, flapping
his arms as he cawed for help.