Harlan County Horrors (5 page)

“
QUIT!” Daddy said.

Didaboss hiccupped and restarted.

The
alien continued until, at last, it belched.

“
EXCUSE. KEN,” Didaboss said.

Didaboss sloshed out the spongy door.

That was the last clear dream gleaning I got from Daddy before
the end. The final images came to me disconnected from everything
I’ve told you till now. Here’s what came last. It starts with Daddy
running down a long white hallway lined with doors, chased by a
herd of tiny, spidery Didacrawlers.

Daddy could hear them skittering behind him, the combined
rattle of the tiny hard carapaces plenty loud. Daddy ran for a door
at the end of the hall, arms splayed as he yelled. Daddy reached
the door and pressed a long red bar on the wall. The door folded
itself along breaks, hissing into the ceiling.

Daddy gasped at what he saw.

The
door opened onto broad desert that was edged on the right by a
winding river of squimix that stretched away till lost. A stone
wall bounded the other three sides to keep in prisoners, probably.
Daddy guessed this from a line of dead men and women on iron beds
along the curving river bank. Dad recalled the vision of people on
iron beds he’d had at his medical exam. Had his vision prefigured
this? Death by squimix was no bedtime. The people who lived were to
become giants, to judge from Daddy’s condition and what he saw:
stretched across a gantry, a man-giant roared as a Didacrawler pack
swarmed over him, filleting his skin with a battery of spinning
blades clutched in accurate appendages.

Daddy was to join these.

The
skin was harvested. Its giant pall was placed dead in a giant
coffin made from plates like the one Daddy was fitted for during
his bogus physical. If squimix did not kill you, it meant you were
medically accepting of gigantism, Daddy realized. His rawness, the
film he’d seen: it was a skin test, stretched to scale over the
pool in order to gauge his progress toward gigantism. From the
looks of it, the lucky people died by squimix, unfit for that fate.
Daddy’s vision was prophetic. Once eviscerated, a giant’s sinew and
muscle made a sick façade in bas-relief.

The
coffin was set afloat.

It
moved downriver.

A
pack of Didacrawlers stretched the harvested skin across the
squimix river. One by one, horrid forms leapt from the river,
clothed themselves in the shorn man-skin. Having assumed a
land-friendly form, they became new Didacrawlers. Daddy was there;
the cipher was his. New Didacrawlers formed ranks around the walls,
hundreds of belching ranks.

How
many had already formed?

Daddy didn’t say uncle.

The
Didagens’ plan was flawed. Daddy knew.

Gauging the moment, Dad bolted toward the squimix river as the
next coffin was cast off. Several Didacrawlers saw what he’d done
and lurch-slapped after him. One must’ve hit Daddy with a shot. The
last image I got included sharp pain as my daddy dove hard for the
coffin, missed, and went under in the squimix. That was what Daddy
felt the Didagens had forgot:

Squimix doesn’t kill giants.

Dad
gurgled to the surface. He grabbed the coffin.

The
coffin floated away. Daddy looked back and saw the clinic getting
small in the distance: a three-tiered tower of stone with spongy
windows, stair-stepped as in his monument vision. Did it
accommodate fast growth to a giant? Maybe Didagens move you to a
larger room after a shot. Atop the tallest tier, an octet of
willowy legs sought toward the coffin, undulant in the heavy
breeze. Were the legs saying goodbye? Beckoning? Daddy fell fast
asleep, the image he gave fading quickly. Daddy is sleeping soundly
now, with no REM sleep to feed me his dreams. Daddy got his
medicine. Was it good for him? I may never know.

I
glean dreams best.

But
each night in the approach of sleep, the warm breeze touches my
hair at the window and the moon is patient and cool, sending its
light. I hear the midges buzzing lightly outside in the darkness,
and I hear Brant’s guard dog baying vacuously down the hollow,
outside the office trailer. I try this sending:

I
am sorry, Daddy. I’m working squimix, now.

Apples sell.

We
need the money from outside because our town in small.

Awaiting you,

Your dream-reader, Annie.

“
Psychomachia”

Geoffrey Girard

Geoffrey Girard has appeared in such publications as
Writers of the
Future
,
The Willows, Prime
Codex
,
Aoife’s
Kiss
,
Murky Depths,
and
Apex Digest
(which serialized his thriller
“
Cain XP11”
in 2008). His
Tales Of…
series of books now
includes
The
Jersey
Devil
,
Atlantic
Pirates
,
Eastern
Indians
, and the
forthcoming
American Colonies
. Girard was born in Germany, was shaped in New Jersey, and is
currently teaching and writing in Ohio. More info can be found at
geoffreygirard.com.

Vincendi praesens ratio est, si comminus ipsas
virtutum

facies liceat notare.

—Prudentius

1
.
Patientia

Each night, except Sundays, the boy nests in one of two porch
chairs and quietly watches his father and brother clean up at an
old barrel filled with rainwater from the roof. Mother won’t ever
let either back into the house for dinner until they have. Always
says Cleanliness is next to Godliness and that a man can’t root
with pigs and still keep a clean nose. And so, soiled work clothes
always stack up again for the next day. And weary hands scrub away
another day’s dark labor. And the barrel water always turns
black.

It’s 1918, September 6th. Both men move strangely tonight.
Father stares at his thick hands and lower arms as if he’s never
seen hands or arms before, slowly turning them over and over and
over again. His mouth hangs kinda open as he smoothes the water and
soap over the earth-blackened skin, stroking more than cleaning up,
then touching his dirty cheeks and chin like a blind man as the
barrel’s cold water trickles down to carve tortuous grey rivers
down his blackened neck and chest. The brother cleans just the
opposite and scours his skin like he’s whetting an axe blade or
sanding a small piece of wood. Patches on his arms and a few
knuckles are already scraped red. Other areas remain ignored, still
completely black with coal dust. He hasn’t even taken off his
jacket or hat yet. Neither man speaks.

Something happened in the mine, the boy decides, studying the
two. The grimy face blank beneath the leather bill of his father’s
dirty cloth cap. Empty. The fiery man’s eyes queerly sleepy
tonight. Dead. His mouth, hands. Must have been something
Bad
. Another overhead collapsed, maybe,
slate fall, shattered sandstone. Or a runaway coal gon careening
down the track back into the mine. Someone probably got killed.
Lost a hand. Some other miner’s face half-smashed. His father
always comes home extra quiet on these nights. The two smallest
fingers on his father’s left hand are clipped off just above the
knuckles, a story from twenty years before. Who this time? Some
other father or brother.

The
boy watches and waits without a sound. Eyes the lightning bugs
emerging in the dark woods just behind the tracks that run parallel
to his house. Thinks of his upcoming chores. Dragging the fire,
letting the cat back in, blowing out the oil lamps, resetting
kindling for the morning. Ordinarily, his father leaves him a small
piece of cake or some horehound candy to find in his lunch bucket
and nibble on while waiting during their nightly ritual. But there
is no lunch bucket tonight. Forgotten back at the coalmine, looks
like. Another sign something has happened. When he is twelve next
summer, he will go to work with them. Ten hours a day. Sure is
hungry. He tries to sniff dinner cooking inside. The hog fat
dripped on the skillets. Fried potatoes, maybe. Biscuits. He smells
only the usual wood smoke and coffee. Something else on the cool
dusk air now. A funk. The stink of old sweat. His father and
brother, sour. Like they are sick.

Finally, his father shuffles away from the barrel into the
house. He passes the boy without a word. The barrel has not taken
away the smell, though his brother continues to scrub away.
Scraping at the skin. The boy watches him for awhile, thinks of
asking him What Happened, but then moves from the porch, too. His
brother hasn’t even looked at him. Inside, his father has taken his
usual spot at the table as Mother bestows cornbread and a bowl each
of soup beans and fried potatoes. The girls sit in their chairs
waiting for prayer to begin. And for their brother
outside.

The
boy slides into his chair and studies his father more. The man has
placed his hands up on the table as if waiting for food, but the
food is already there. His eyes move again to his hands, stare at
nothing. “Somethin’ happen?” his mother asks. They wait together
but no reply comes from the man. “Darryl?” she tries
again.

“
Cold,” his father replies finally and rubs his thumbs against
his fingers.

“
What’s that?”

“It’s
still
so god
damned cold.” Rubbing, rubbing.

“
What’s that boy doing?” His mother moves on from Somethin’
Happen, gets up from the table. “The gravy’s what’s getting cold
now. Paul? Paul!” She moves straight for the porch.

Their father just stares at his hands and the boy passes quick
looks of confusion with his sisters. The older one stifles an
insolent laugh.

Screaming. Their mother is now…
screaming
.

The
boy jumps. The smiling sister’s eyes now as big and bright as a
carbide lamp. Their father has not moved. His face the same.
Untouched. More shrieks from the front porch. But his father
accords dead eyes. Nothing. The boy slips from his chair. Outside,
in the darkness, his mother is now sobbing. Gasping for air. He
stands in the frame behind the screen door measuring her sounds.
Mother has fallen back and collapsed against the chairs where he
watches his father and brother each night.

His
brother still lingers over the barrel, and the light from the house
casts through the door onto him, the boy’s own shadow hiding some
of it. At first, it just looks like his brother has put his work
shirt back on and that the shirt’s sleeves are ripped. Dangling
loosely between his elbows and wrists.

Then the boy understands it is flaps of skin. Hanging over the
barrel. Uneven shreds between other lumps of dripping muscle. His
brother’s fingers even now gouging into the other arm. Scrubbing.
Ripping. The porch floor is spattered in small round shadows. His
brother’s eyes are narrow and glassy with determination. He is
might nigh smiling. The wailing by the chairs doesn’t even sound
like their mother anymore. Inside, his sisters are now crying. A
flash of glistening wet bone. Still, his
brother…
washes
.

A
hand on his shoulder, pushing him aside. His father. Moving out to
the porch. He would…his father only reaches for his earth-stained
overalls and hat. Dresses. Pays no attention to his oldest son at
the barrel at all. Mother’s wailing has ceased, her silence somehow
even worse. The boy clings to the doorframe to steady himself. His
father grabs a lamp and empty lunch bucket, ignoring the snapping
of his firstborn’s fingers. The boy and his mother watch together
as the man steps slowly off the porch into the emergent darkness.
His lumbering shadow moves slowly west toward the head of the
hollow, back toward the mines. No words spoken.

The
boy’s brother steeps both arms fully in the barrel, and rain water
and blood flow as one over its sides. Mostly blood. The puddle
grows out slowly toward the boy and shapes across their porch a
shimmering black stain.

It
looks just like coal.

2.
Industria

The newest run within the Number Three Mine has a bad
overhead, and the water is ten inches deep in some spots. Three
dead mules litter the low-sloped tunnel. None of that seems to
matter. It’s quality coal and, even without the mules, most of the
men are
still
pulling
out ten tons a day at fifteen cents per ton. Yesterday, Edgar’d
pulled fifteen from the earth, dragging each load topside himself
after they’d killed the mules. Hadn’t gone home when the company
steam whistle blew for second or third shift. There’s still too
much to be done here. The whole earth stuffed, pregnant. Bloated
with coal.

He
isn’t the only one working extra shifts for the Freedom K.Y. Coal
Company. Digging until he just caint stand another minute.
Replacing some of the others who haven’t yet returned. Tunnels are
crowded with miners shuffling past this way or the other with picks
and carts. It is more than two miles to the surface. Some carry
single lumps by hand. Many of their lamps have already burned out,
and men keep on working in total darkness.