Harlan County Horrors (4 page)

Pris looked up and saw that the moon had begun its descent in
the western sky. Bobby Lee would soon return to his
grave.

She
stood and approached him slowly. “Shhhh, the pain won’t last long.
I promise it’ll all be over soon.”

“
No, I can’t be dead. Help me stay, Pris. Use your magic
again.”

“
I
can’t, baby. I’m so sorry.”

He
clutched his head and moaned. “Nooooooo.”

“
I’ll love you forever,” she whispered.

Bobby Lee’s skin began to glow in the intense moonlight. His
wounds were reappearing—he was changing back into a
corpse.

Priscilla covered her ears as his screams rent the air. Why
did he have to suffer? It wasn’t right.

Bobby Lee teetered on the edge of the rift, struggling against
an invisible force that was trying to pull him back into his
grave.

“
Prisssssssss. For God’s sake, help me.”

His
face reflected so much terror that she couldn’t bear it, and she
knew there was only one way to end his torment.

Pris ran over to Bobby Lee and gave his chest a violent push.
His feet slid backward into the gaping hole and he fell forward,
latching onto the hem of her dress and pulling her to the
ground.

“
No! Please, don’t do this.”

She
kicked and screamed and managed to break free, but before she could
scramble out of his reach, Bobby Lee grabbed a fistful of her long
hair and dragged her over to the edge of the chasm. A bone-chilling
numbness spread quickly throughout her body, and Priscilla stopped
struggling. Her lover’s dead eyes stared into hers, and his swollen
lips curved into a grotesque smile.

“
I
forgive you, princess.”

The
earth began to tremble and Priscilla closed her eyes. Bobby Lee
held her in a desperate embrace as the power of moonlight claimed
their bodies, entombing them forever in the darkness of his
grave.

“
Hiding Mountain: Our Future in Apples”

Earl P. Dean

Earl Patrick Dean is a computer programmer working in
Lexington, Kentucky. He holds a BA degree in that field from
Transylvania University and holds graduation certificates from The
Institute of Children’s Literature. He is a past member of the
Online Writing Workshops on Science Fiction, Fantasy, and Horror.
Earl is active in several writing groups in the greater Lexington
area. He reads, writes and collects science fiction and fantasy and
has attended conventions in Kentucky, Indiana, Tennessee, and
Virginia. He is a University of Kentucky basketball and football
fan. Visit his author site at
epat02.typepad.com/clamped_planet.

W
hen the aliens came to Salvation, they came
as a dark wave rising out of the peaty soil somewhere on Hiding
Mountain. They adjusted their form in order to work with us, but
never lived here as far as I know. From that work we discovered
apples. We people of Salvation work in the squimix midges every
day, digging out the apples and showering them under our garden
hoses. It’s come to be our way. Apples sell. We need the money from
outside because our town is small.

My
daddy’s name is Ken and my brother took Patch for his after his eye
was out. One morning they left the house to work in squimix after a
breakfast of sausage and eggs; this part tells what happened to
Patch. An awful lot more followed this, all tied up in knots. I
know it all to the point where my daddy lets off. I tell it so
maybe I can gain some closure.

It
started at midday.

Their legs were half-buried in the squimix, with the tops of
their waders on up sticking out of the midge. Small flies swarmed
over their heads, as was usual. Patch pulled his apple-grapple out
of the midge, removed the skewered apple and dropped it on the
conveyer. He re-sank the apple-grapple and leaned on it, watching
the apple he’d dropped as the conveyer pulled it under the shower
down-line from his assembly crew. That’s how we’d come to work it
by then. The apple fell in a packing chute.

“
How have we gone on like this for three hours?” Patch
said.

Dad’s smile soured. “You know I don’t think about break. This
here is man’s work; the only time when I’m glad I don’t need sleep.
The day will come when I get some medicine. But it’d better not
affect my work.”

Dad
says Patch laughed hard and slipped. I imagine he did slip, that’s
all I can manage. Sliding off the apple-grapple, he fell under the
midge. The one thing the aliens warn you about: squimix on your
skin is a killing sin. Daddy talks softly about it, but I know how
he screamed. He did not think, just took off his rubber gloves and
wiped his hands over Patch’s face. He had to do it; the gloves
slipped. He screamed. The squimix on Patch’s face etched a river
through my daddy’s heart.

It
did no good.

My
brother died from the pain.

Brant Allen, their foreman and our neighbor, ran out of his
office trailer to see what was screaming. Before he got to the
midge, he’d come to approach at a sidelong trot like a horse
changing gait. Looking off, yet near to retching, he gave Daddy the
talk under his breath, led him to the office trailer.

The
office trailer was not too cramped inside. I’d been there on
several occasions. Mr. Allen led my glassy-eyed daddy to a chair
across from his own and the metal desk that straddled a crescent
moon’s space between them. Brant stepped around the desk and sat,
clawing through his oily hair.

“
You ready for this?” Brant said.

If
you worked in squimix, you knew what
this
was.

“
I’ll let the Didagens examine me,” Dad said, “to learn why
the squimix didn’t kill me when I wiped Patch’s face, and to prove
that I’m able to work this job—I’ve got to if I can; I won’t have
my daughter, Ann, working such risk.”

Why
Daddy didn’t want me working in squimix is plain. But I have always
wondered if his big hand pounded the desk, or his belly popped out
the shirttail of that faded-out rag he wore for days on end,
swearing it passed for flannel. Brant would’ve nodded. What
happened next is policy.

Brant slid the medical release form to Daddy.

Daddy reached over his beer belly with an ink pen. He
signed.

A
dome on Brant’s desk covered a frilly mesh scrap. It trembled if
you opened the dome. Brant gently lifted out the scrap and caressed
it, walking to the outside door.

The
scrap fluttered aloft into blue sky.

It
wasn’t long before a Didacrawler came to the door.

Didacrawlers are a sort of Didagen, the aliens that work us in
squimix to dig out apples, the one I’m speaking of having come, as
I said, to the office trailer door.

It
took its true form: Didacrawlers have frilly-spaghetti legs that
glow and move like willows. We must do as Daddy did when we see
one: stand at address as the alien comes in under its oozing
lurch-and-slap. As Daddy did so, one of the legs billowed toward
him. It whipped slowly.

Daddy believes it gave him a shot.

Last thing Daddy recognized.

Daddy’s sight tunneled as he looked past the Didacrawler’s
hub, which its legs radiate from like spokes on a Ford F-150;
different, how I said. Daddy saw the crescent desk reflecting
coldly on the window of the trailer door. Suddenly it was the door
that wasn’t, seeming not the slat-wood gate through which Dad’d
entered, but a changed maw of yawning sponge. Daddy thought to
himself,
lands,
what a memory
. But
mine? Beyond the spongy maw a swath of dirt stretched across a
field into a patch of rhododendrons and weeds, giving seclusion
till it all reined in at deep woods; nothing of our midge. Above,
the sky was cloudy, rainy with no grey; come from the Blue
Navy.

The
swath held a monument like a wad of mashed potatoes cut rough in
steps around its stone sides. Daddy needed to see the back for
himself; it seemed what the alien would have him do, so Daddy
thought, so he walked out. Climbing the steps, he but kicked a soft
spot in the rise. A hole bored through. Framed in mash, far-side
steps let out onto rolling savannah littered with iron beds that
curved winding to a far-off speck. The beds were made with patch
quilts. A person lay face down on each bed.

The
blue navied sky rippled like bedding.

Daddy was drowsy.

He
closed his eyes.

He
wouldn’t sick himself at fifty.

Daddy’s stomach was bubbling strange.

He
opened his eyes. A blur cleared.

Daddy was lying under a patch quilt on a bed in a white room,
where a recessed pool in the floor rolled like a cloudy sky with no
grey.

Daddy craned a view at his spongy window.

“
Clear the film. Show me Hiding Mountain,” Dad
said.

A
Didacrawler bucked subtly across the room at the command, switched
out its running bio-segment to get a share of the ad-hoc
system that would replace
its clinical schedule. Daddy thinks the Didacrawler belched
arrogant that it could build the silly window process, appendages
off.

“
Don’t smart me,” Dad said. “I know you can, and I know from
those pool colors changing, they come from the Blue Navy. This is
Hiding Mountain.

“
Show it.”

The
Didacrawler squelched toward the window. When it arrived, one of
its legs billowed and whipped slowly.

The
spongy window seemed to emulsify its own film until it became
clear. Daddy gasped, reacting how he’d have avoided in cases when
he could, as he looked out on a vast, starry blackness rising above
a promontory that jutted from atop canyon cliffs, lit through alien
control. Cliffs fuzzy with blue ferns, yellow grass, edged with
low-grown solids. Perched above, blue-glowing Earth took Daddy’s
breath.

Hiding Mountain was an asteroid.

Daddy sat up, alert in his bed in the white room. The patch
quilting fell off and revealed the mound of his hairy belly. He
scratched. He soaked in the frigid window scene till the alien
Didacrawler bucked and its eyes reddened. To settle its nerves,
Daddy lay down. The Didacrawler sloshed to the cloudy pool and
whipped out its arm, sinking it in the pool. It hauled out a
container, round, of wire mesh. A blue, rumpled sheet packed in,
until the Didacrawler dumped it on the floor.

The
Didacrawler lurched out the spongy door.

Didaboss came next into the room.

Didaboss was nearly a plain old Didacrawler except for a man’s
necktie looped around its hub, a fashion it got from us (so Daddy
thinks). Didaboss moved on its legs at a quick trot to the sheet
that was dumped.

Didaboss shot a leg out, uncurling the sheet in a plane as
smooth as a store-bought bolt of fabric. But Daddy knew cotton and
flannel, and this was no such bedding. It was plate of mirrored
steel. Daddy was awed after seeing it stuffed in a wad. Didaboss
scurried around to Daddy, and its eyes lay green on him.

“
KEN.

“
KEN STAND.

“
KEN STAND HERE,” Didaboss said.

Didaboss let an appendage rustle in front of the
plate.

Daddy middled, facing window.

Didaboss flattened its legs till they slithered beneath the
plate some odd way and jacked it up as they
reinflated
—that’s the only word I can conjure for
what Daddy thought was done. Didaboss puffed it legs under plate,
hefting it until it teetered against Daddy’s back. Didaboss gurgled
as the plate propped up for the seconds it took him to chatter,
waddle and hum over it as he danced a reel. Daddy jumped, too; it
would’ve had him laughing, but the plate fell and slapped the
floor.

Daddy didn’t laugh, then.

Twice more my Daddy went through that, trying to figure out
what was going on. From both of his flanks, it happened. Didaboss
finally gurgled out the pliable door.

“
THANKS. KEN,” the alien said.

The
Didacrawler lurch-slapped into the room.

It
gave another shot.

Daddy slept. I took the chance to sap his dreams and get all
the stuff I’ve told you so far. I sat up in bed, rubbed my sandy
eyes, and focused on the night’s moon at my window, a presence soft
enough for my trance induction. Dreams are strange, but it’s old
hat. I know the difference.

What he faced.

Daddy woke to a squashy sound on the floor.

He
scrubbed his arms and belly. They felt raw. Didaboss was busy in
the room, stretching an elastic brown film between its few legs and
chattering as it waddled and hummed. Daddy could only reckon at why
it stretched the film across the pool on the floor and restarted
its strange, cumulative reel: some soft-shoe on two of its front
legs, a quick tapping from the back ones added in, and some
razz-a-mattaz tuning from its mouth. This had its own reason and
inscrutable purpose.

Something else about Didaboss had Daddy chewing his lip.
Seating himself on a spartanly hard chair by the windowsill, he
propped on his elbow and thought about this Didagen. The alien
bothered him right off: this fellow was a lot smaller than the
other aliens he’d seen— the size of an ocean crab. Didaboss cared
less that Dad was amazed. It danced and danced, tuned and tuned,
till Daddy clenched his hair.