Jason Sizemore - Mountain Dead

>

Mountain Dead

Edited by Jason Sizemore and Eugene Johnson

Apex Publications
Lexington, KY

This chapbook is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in these stories are either fictitious or are used fictitiously.

Mountain Dead

Copyright 2013 Eugene Johnson and Jason Sizemore
Cover art 2013 Cortney Skinner
Cover design by Justin Stewart

Unto the Lord a New Song 2013 Geoffrey Girard

Deep Underground 2013, Sara M. Harvey

Let Me Come In 2013, Lesley Conner

And Itll Haunt Me (For Long Days to Come) 2013, K. Allen Wood

All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce the book, or portions thereof, in any form.

Published by Apex Publications, LLC
PO Box 24323
Lexington, KY 40524
www.apexbookcompany.com

This chapbook is considered an extension of the great content in the anthology Appalachian Undead edited by Eugene Johnson and Jason Sizemore.

Contents

Deep Underground
Sara M. Harvey

Sara M. Harvey lives and writes in Nashville, TN. Although she usually writes fantasy, she has a taste for darker fare as well. Her Blood of Angels trilogy ( The Convent of the Pure , The Labyrinth of the Dead , The Tower of the Forgotten ) from Apex Publications blends fantasy, horror, and Steampunk. She has an amazing husband, an awesome daughter, and too many terrible dogs. She can be found on Facebook, Twitter (@saraphina_marie), and at www.saramharvey.com.

Valley folk are often a funny lot. Hill folk enjoy the perspective of a perch above others but still seeking solitude. Valley folk enjoy the security of land on either side, protecting them from the outside world like great, strong arms. This safety can be tragically deceptive. Sometimes that protection does not so much keep the unwanted out, as hold it in.

Nestled between two craggy foothills of Monteagle Mountain, the highest peak in the southeastern part of the Cumberland Plateau, Stewartsville, Tennessee, and its valley folk were reached only by an unmarked side street of off Ladds Cove Road. This lone access road crossed Battle Creek over a picturesque, decrepit covered bridge that threatened to rattle to pieces any time a delivery truck lumbered across it, keeping unexpected and therefore unwanted visitors at bay.

John Harker had committed two grievous sins in this life. First, he had once dated Bethany, the preachers daughter. Second, in the tumultuous aftermath of his and Bethanys break-up and her turning up pregnant after a whirlwind rebound romance, he had left Stewartsville. This branded him as no longer trustworthy by the townsfolk, even if he was the last of the Edensorrows. He returned to town often to check on Bethany and her little girl, Promise, who, despite her mothers feeling on the matter, took to calling him "Uncle Jack." Everyone in town followed suit, not because they loved Uncle Jack, but because they loved Promise. Bethany only ever went so far as to call him just Jack. Her father, the Reverend Absolom Goodstead, insisted on calling him by his given name, John Harker, and occasionally John Edensorrow Harker, Edensorrow being his mothers maiden name.

The Edensorrow clan had been one of Stewartsvilles founding families. The town might still carry their name today but for a Stewart lad wooing the daughter of the government surveyor by telling her that the town had been named after the boys grandfather, Jeremiah Stewart. The lass reported this to her father, and naught could be done about it after Stewartsville got entered in the official records and the Stewarts went about erecting signs and naming roadsthings that the Edensorrows thought far too vulgar and common to be bothered with. But as families and fortunes both rise and fall, by the time of this tale there were no more Stewarts in the town of Stewartsville and only one living Edensorrow, Uncle Jack.

Evening was coming on fast when Uncle Jack reached the covered bridge at the cut-off into Stewartsville. Once the sun got down past the hills it might as well have been night. He wanted very much to go straight to the church and throw his arms around Bethany. It was Wednesday. That was exactly where shed be. Even if he was sure she wanted to see him, he had to check on something first. He had hoped not to have to make the trek to the cemetery in the dark, but this burden of knowledge could not wait until morning.

The larger of Stewartsvilles two cemeteries was positioned at the far end of the valley where the spines of the surrounding foothills met in a lumpy, oddly-shaped lot riddled with rock formations and knotted with roots of trees long since gone, which made it just about as useless for burials as it was for farming. But at the vernal equinox, the light shone down between the hillocks so much like the light of salvation, or so the townsfolk said, that they felt it was a sign that they should brave that forsaken land and bury their kin there so that when Judgment Day arrived, Gods light would guide them up to heaven. That is, of course, assuming Judgment Day was scheduled for the end of March.

The other cemetery had been established by the Goodstead family, unsurprisingly in the yard of the Stewartsville Church of Christ where a member of that family had ministered for generations immemorial (although town records place the establishment of the church no earlier than the 1870s, twenty years or so after the settlement of the town). They called the Goodstead cemetery simply the "Christian Cemetery" in order to create a sense of desirability and avoid confusion with the Stewartsville Town Cemetery up at the end of the valley, where the old tales whispered of worship practices that might not have been strictly mainstream . The Goodsteads never troubled themselves over worrying about the family dramas that two cemeteries caused in the town.

Uncle Jack sought answers in both burial sites, but he first drove up to the Town Cemetery, trying to keep as low a profile as possible. That was not going to happen. Everyone in town recognized the rumbling of his old Ford Ranger from 100 yards away, and he knew by the time he circled back down to the church that Bible study would be in full swing and no one would be talking about Jesus anymore.

Stewartsville Boulevard ran the length of town from the cut-off at the covered bridge all the way to the gates of the graveyard on past the Church of Christ, the five and dime, the hair salon, the post office, the diner, and the two bars. Long before reaching the cemetery, the area became houses and a few farms and lastly a dense wood that pressed against the stacked stone walls of the cemeterys boundary. No other trees like them grew anywhere else in town, or in the whole area, actually. Uncle Jack didnt know what kind they were, only that they had always been there. They were quite tall and thick with a great number of slim branches that radiated away from the trunk like spokes, and rough, stringy bark that smelled pungent, almost medicinal. He strongly suspected that the trees that had left roots tangled through the cemetery had been of that same unknown variety. No one had a decent explanation for what had killed those trees but spared the grove on the other side of the wall. Some said it was the iron content of the soil, others said a boring beetle got to them, some swore theyd been felled by a lightning strike, others remembered a forest fire. But all the data Uncle Jack had ever found said they simply died and rotted away, for no discernible reason. And that terrified him.

In the waning light, the expanse of earth studded with jutting headstones and obelisks held a sinister air. He parked his truck at the gate, got out, and entered the graveyard. Once, a cross pattern with neatly divided sections and clearly marked avenues had imposed order on the burial property despite the lay of the land. But a particularly nasty influenza one winter brought an influx of dead bodies and a wild land-grab as the towns well-to-do vied to cordon off large areas for elaborate family plots that never materialized. Instead, parcels got resold, sometimes several times over, until the middle of the cemetery became a maze of curving paths and areas too overcrowded to even set foot on ground that did not cover a body six feet below.