Scary Rednecks & Other Inbred Horrors (33 page)

His mind shrieking for him to flee, Silence faced the direction of Dylan’s muffled screams, his teeth biting painfully into his bottom lip to chase back a sob.

I’m not a coward, Daddy,
Silence thought.
 
Someday you’ll see that.

Silence ran after Dylan into the darkness of the jutting tombstones, the jumpy beam of the flashlight cleaving through the air around him.
 
Off in the distance, he could see Dylan’s white face traveling through the cemetery like a floating orb—then it vanished with a soft splash.

Silence whimpered, his frayed nerves twitching on his face as he moved towards the splash.
 
Something had taken Dylan into Lake Angel, the very same place he had almost lost his life.

Silence remembered the cold and slimy hand that had clutched his ankle as a child.
 
Not a day went by he did not recall the glowing white eyes in the murky depths of Lake Angel.
 
He had left the lake without his voice, vowing never to go near it again.

Two drag lines led through the mud and into the water of the jet-black lake.
 
Silence let the flashlight beam travel out into the gently undulating water and sobbed.

Dylan was in the creek about fifteen feet away, his shaven head protruding out and glistening in the light.
 
Bubbles of water shot from his nose.
 
Though he could not scream, his eyes did it for him, widening to the point that they looked like white shrieking mouths.

Then he was gone, pulled into the coal-black water in a quick splash.
 
Bubbles broke the surface—an anticlimactic sound to what Silence knew was a scream sharp enough to wake the dead.

There was whispering coming from the large pine tree just above the
Crowlin
mausoleum, a rush of hissing from the shadowy branches.
 
Silence turned to face the mausoleum.

It feels like I was supposed to be here
, he thought,
almost like I was required to finish something that had started almost 100 years ago.

Something grabbed his palm, a child’s hand, both cold and warm.
 
It pulled him gently toward the tree and he felt himself moving through the thick, damp air of
Greyson’s
Cemetery.
 
The dark windows of the mausoleum were illuminated in a dull, muddy glow.

Within the bony branches of the pine tree perched dozens of children, their legs dangling and swaying as if to their own ghostly breeze.
 
White faces radiated in the darkness above like miniature moons.
 
Their eyes were blots of black on their pale faces, their mouths small and pulled tight in painful frowns.
 
One little girl cocked her head to the side slowly, almost like a dream, and studied Silence, her head drifting back and forth.
 
Dylan’s ghost stood under the tree, his ebony eyes staring ahead without emotion.
 
Silence cried, his sobs exploding from his small body, nearly costing him his balance.

Some of the children were moaning, their mouths opening and closing.
 
They cried out, a ghostly choir, their sad faces looking upwards as if to a Heaven that would not accept their souls.

Silence knew, then, that the children had been buried underneath the pine tree.
 
All of the missing.
 
Jakep
Crowlin
had been a clever murderer.
 
He had known the townsfolk of
Rawley
would not think to look in the cemetery for their missing children.

With a rusty groan of protest, the mausoleum doors creaked open behind Silence’s tiny form, a faint glow covering his body like mist.
 
Never in his young life was he more painfully aware that he was unable to scream.
 
The children above all turned to face the doors, low, melodic wails rustling from their dead lips.
 
Dylan just stared ahead, his body rocking and back and forth drunkenly.

Jakep
Crowlin
, the Nightwalker and child murderer, stood before the open doors, a cryptic smile on his phosphorescent face, his malevolent eyes narrowing into slits.
 
His long hair flowed around his face like underwater reeds.
 
Craig’s body was on the stone floor inside, his right arm resting over his throat as if he had struggled to breathe before he died.

Crowlin
nodded and held out his long arms, his dark eyes blazing with quiet rage.
 
Silence felt himself drawn to the figure, the wispy and ethereal forms of dozens of dead children pushing him forward and into old man’s arms, their moans singing a morose lullaby.

Crowlin
embraced Silence fiercely, his frosty arms wrapping around his slender frame like the loving father he never had, both inviting and suffocating.

Silence looked up into
Crowlin’s
dusky eyes and felt dead and rancid breath blow from the decrepit mouth.

The last sound he heard before he died for the second time in his life was the harsh slam of the mausoleum doors closing behind his back in a rush of frigid wind.

Silence perched in the pine tree, his brothers and sisters lodged in the limbs around him as he clung to the dead branches.
 
He felt oddly sad watching his Dad search for him through the cemetery.
 
Silence could tell by looking at his father’s face that he had really loved his son, and that he had many regrets.
 
Many people had searched the graveyard for the missing children, but Silence merely watched from the tree, neither caring nor remembering why anything mattered.

Some lost part of his soul knew no one would think to look under a tree that’s been undisturbed since the nineteenth century and he moaned, his small feet swinging from the rotting branch as if moved by a ghostly breeze.

by Weston
Ochse

E
dwin had mixed feelings about being home.
 
It had been twenty years, and instead of returning as the conquering hero he’d bragged about so long ago, he’d returned penniless, homeless and
dismarried
.
 
He liked to call it that because he’d been married several times, but for many reasons, most involving his eternal love affair with alcohol, they’d never panned out.
 
Like being disenfranchised, dismissed and diseased, he was just
dismarried
.
 
To set the record straight, he wasn’t exactly penniless, either.
 
After all, he did have his Army retirement, and half pay for doing nothing the rest of his life wasn’t too bad a deal.

His main concern, however, was a place to live, and that’s what had sent him out of town on this old two-lane road.
 
The drive brought back memories.
 
Some good ones— remembrances of hunting, fishing and the frolics of youth.
 
And some bad ones—- demons that possessed the soul until one’s only friend was oneself.
 

For the hundredth time this week, he wondered what had drawn him back.

Like all the roads up on the mountain, this one wound along property lines, creating a dangerous meandering path through dense forest, blind corners and switchbacks.
 
His daddy had been a moonshine runner when he was young, and used to tell young Edwin stories about taking these roads at a hundred miles an hour in the old Chevy as
Smokies
tried in vain to keep up.
 
Even so, Edwin would never be his daddy and he took it slow and careful.

There was a break in the forest up ahead as it gave way to a split rail fence, old and gray with kudzu wrapped around as if it was what kept it from falling.
 
Edwin slowed the pickup as he approached the mailbox and read the cramped painted words, faded and flaking after years of neglect.
 
Jonston
.
 
This was the place.

He examined the house, once a proud two story, now in disrepair with several differing shades of paint and tar lathered on to repair cracks and sprung seams.
 
He could just see the silken tips of some healthy looking corn in the back yard, probably twenty acres planted with waist-high tobacco. Edwin didn’t see a silo for the corn or a barn to dry the tobacco, so he supposed the old man must be either leasing the land or selling the raw product.
 
Not as much money to be had, but still, it provided some income.
 
Edwin figured the land had been in the old man’s family since they’d originally sharecropped and other than taxes and electricity, there shouldn’t be too many bills.

He’d met the old man at the Legion Hall last week when all the veterans and townsfolk had gotten together and celebrated Edwin’s return.
 
Only in a small town would they have a party for someone they hadn’t seen in twenty years.
 
It wasn’t Edwin they liked anyway, it was his service record and the uniform they loved.
 
Still, the food was free and the drink was plentiful.
 
Then the old man had approached him and offered free room and board and three hundred dollars a month if he’d sign on as a live-in caretaker.
 
Edwin pulled in and up the dirt drive thinking this might just be the opportunity he needed.

Old Man
Jonston
sat on the porch, a pitcher of iced tea breathing on the table next to him.
 
Edwin prayed that it was whiskey, but he knew that it was only his preference.
 
As he pulled up, the old man walked to the top of the stairs and waved.
 
Edwin waved back and stopped behind the old man’s truck— same make and model as his own, but thirty years older.

Edwin hopped out and moved up the stairs, noting how they creaked and already thinking about ways to fix them.

“Welcome, Mr. Lavern.
 
Have any trouble finding the place?”

Old Man
Jonston
wore black work boots and faded denim dungarees over a white t-shirt.
 
Edwin held out his hand and smiled.

“No, sir. Everything’s coming back to me, and your directions were dead on.”

“I bet,” said Old Man
Jonston
.
 
“Here, let’s sit a spell and you can tell me about your world travels and about old Saddam.”
 
With a liver-spotted hand he gestured toward several chairs on the other side of the round table.

Edwin moved over and went to sit down.

“NO!
 
Stop.
 
Not that one,
that
one,” indicated the suddenly irate old man.

Edwin was caught in mid-sit and stood up slowly and sat in the chair indicated.
 
This one was old and rickety and he discovered right away that you had to sit perfectly straight and still or it threatened to break.
 
He glanced longingly at the chair he’d almost sat in and envied its sturdy lines and well-used cushion that still held the indentations of a million sits.

The old man sat across from him in an equally comfortable-looking chair and laid his hands face up.

“Sorry about that, Mr. Lavern.
 
That was Henrietta’s chair, may she rest in peace.
 
That chair is reserved for her, you know.”

Edwin raised an eyebrow, then smiled.
 
The old man was certainly getting along in years, maybe even a little senile.
 
Edwin waited as
Jonston
lit a cigarette, noting the old ceramic mixing bowl that was being used as an ashtray and the hundred or so butts that almost filled it.

“It’s okay, Sir.
 
And please, call me Edwin.
 
I’ve never been called Mr. Lavern and it sounds funny.”

“That’s right!
 
You went in the Army when you was eighteen.
 
Probably never heard anything more than Private and Sergeant in your life.”
 
The old man’s cigarette was perched in the corner of his mouth.
 
He reached over and poured a tall glass of tea and slid it in front of Edwin.
 
“And stop calling
me
Sir.
 
I bet you had enough of that to last a lifetime, Huh?
 
Call me
Jonston
.
 
Everyone else does, anyway.”

“Too true.
 
Too true.
 
Alright, then... just
Jonston
,” he said taking a sip of the tall glass, wishing it was whiskey.
 
He’d a flask in his pocket and as soon as the old man turned his back for more than a moment, he was going to spike it proper.
 
“Mighty good tea.”