Appalachian Horror Read online

  Aphotic Realm

  Owners|Editors:

  Dustin Schyler Yoak, A.A. Medina, & Chris Martin Art Director: Gunnar Larsen

  APPALACHIAN HORROR

  Edited by: Bo Chappell

  Interior Artwork by: Bo Chappell

  Cover Art Design: A. A. Medina

  All stories are owned by the authors. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form

  or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written

  permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial

  uses permitted by copyright law. For permission requests, send

  an email to the publisher, in the subject, “Attention: Permissions Coordinator,” at the following email address: Questions@ AphoticRealm.com.

  www.AphoticRealm.com

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination or are used

  fictitiously. any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © Aphotic Realm, 2019 All Rights Reserved.

  ISBN: 9781096808039

  TABLE OF CONTENTS

  FOREWORD • BO CHAPPELL

  END TRAILS • JOHN MORGAN

  THE GHOST SANG • JEFFERY X MARTIN

  BLOOD IS ALWAYS THICKER • TONY EVANS

  THE TOWN OF AFURISIT • CHARITY LANGLY

  THE BEND • C. W. BLACKWELL

  BRAIDS, LIKE ROOTS • DAMASCUS MINCEMEYER

  TRESPASSER • RENEE MILLER

  HEMLOCK WINDS • SHAWN LACHANCE

  Foreword

  After Aphotic Realm invited me to guest edit their next anthology, we all sat down to discuss what theme would be fun to explore. It didn’t take long for us to agree that the scariest place can often be your own backyard.

  From the supernatural to the terrifyingly true, stories from the Appalachian Mountains have been home to every conceivable horror lurking just past the blackened trees, nearly invisible if not for the moonlit nights. Inescapable dread nesting ominously in the majestic beauty of the view outside twenty five million people’s window.

  Aphotic Realm invited writers to trek into the uncharted and forge a path for their readers.

  These are their trails...

  Bo Chappell

  END TRAILS

  JOHN MORGAN

  “Do you think he’ll be back?”

  The man who spoke, trail name Nugget, did so sullenly, his face lowered as he absently stripped a gnarly branch of its outer layer with grimy, bloodied fingers. But his eyes were turned upwards to consider the man who sat a small distance away with his back against one of the million or so trees that surrounded them.

  “Hey, Merlin, I said do you think…” “I heard you,” said the other.

  “Well?”

  “How should I know? I doubt it; you did punch him in the face, after all.”

  Nugget tossed the mangled branch onto the ground and wiped its tacky residue from his hands onto jeans that felt stiff with sweat and filth. A stink was all over him like glue. “Well, he was asking for it,” he replied.

  Merlin feigned laughter. “How’d you reckon that?”

  “The crazy talk! He just wouldn’t shut up with it… He was starting to give me the cold creeps. And don’t tell me you don’t know what I’m talking about – I didn’t see you holding me back when I was kicking the shit out of him. The man was just… he was just fucking weird.”

  Merlin opened his mouth to say something, his cracked lips looking only marginally better than the branch that Nugget had disposed of. He seemed to change his mind though, and let his expression do the talking instead.

  An uneasy silence settled between the two while the mountains sighed, breathed and whispered around them; the trees swaying hypnotically in the steadily cooling breeze.

  “It’ll be dark soon,” said Nugget after a while. He waited for a response but didn’t get one. He started again, a little hesitant this time. “Do you think… Do you think we’ll see it again?”

  Merlin fidgeted but said nothing.

  “I said…”

  “I don’t know! Will you please, please, just shut the fuck up! You’re like a fucking record player!”

  Nugget stiffened, his cheeks burning. For a moment he thought about giving his trail-mate a bit of the same as what he gave that crazy old fucker the other night. But then he thought, ‘What if they did see it again?’ He shivered and hugged his knees tighter to his chest. No; there was no point getting into a fight. He didn’t want to be out here alone.

  They were quiet for a while, listening to the breeze and the occasional creeping footfall of unseen wildlife. The shadows lengthened and started to encroach upon the clearing, pooling like spreading blood.

  “I wonder if anyone’s looking for us yet,” Nugget murmured.

  Merlin sniffed. “I doubt it. We probably only strayed off the trail a week or so ago and we already told people we were going to thru-hike; it’ll be weeks before the alarm bells start to ring. Plus, you…we… haven’t exactly hit it off with any of the other hikers we’ve met. I doubt they’ll be keeping an eye out for us or wondering where we’ve got to.”

  “There were those two girls from Sweden.”

  “Are you serious? Man, they couldn’t get away fast enough.”

  Another awkward silence followed, both men watching as the shadows congealed into something approaching true darkness.

  “Maybe the old guy will find his way out,” mused Nugget when the silence started to get uncomfortable. “Raise the alarm, tell someone we’re lost.”

  Merlin nodded. “Maybe,” he said, but without conviction.

  The breeze strengthened and brought with it a dank, wet earthy aroma that barely registered against the eyewatering bite of old sweat that soured the air between them.

  “Well; I think I’m going to call it a night,” said Nugget, rolling down the sleeves of a shirt that felt almost greasy with his excretions.

  Merlin eyed the thickening shadows. “Yeah,” he said. “Guess I will as well…”

  They both struggled to their feet and trudged to their respective tents. “Merl,” Nugget called.

  “What?”

  “Seriously… what do we do if we see it again?”

  Merlin’s expression was unreadable as he considered the other man for a long moment. “I don’t know, Nugget,” he said, ducking into the tent. “Really... I just don’t know.”

  §

  The night passed badly for both men. They lied awake for most the night, listening to the wind hammer at their flimsy tents and to a spattering of flint-like rain that drifted over a shade or two past midnight.

  And then there was the screaming. The crying. The wailing. Some of it was distant and barely audible in the wind, but some of it was closer to home. Neither one of them went out to investigate. Merlin had made the mistake of doing just that about three nights ago, and he still wouldn’t talk to Nugget about what had happened.

  At one point, it must have been about two, maybe three in the morning, Nugget heard a branch snap a little distance from his tent. His heart jack-hammered between his ears as he held his breath and listened to the shuffling footsteps that passed mere inches from his head.

  “Mommy?” he heard a voice - high and twinkling like an Angel’s. “Mommy? Where are you, Mommy? I’m lost, mommy, and so, so scared.”

  The voice changed even as the words were uttered. It deepened, aged, became throaty and disjointed as if the speaker was trying to force the words through a mush of wasted, sem
i-liquid muscle. And then the awful, hellish laughter began, accompanying what might have been a hand dragging along the fabric of the tent, its finger nails catching and tearing at the tarpaulin like needles.

  Nugget waited for the inevitable; for whatever it was out there to play ever so tantalisingly with the zipper at the entrance to his tent but, perhaps mercifully, he had forgotten to breath throughout the incident and, thank the sweet Jesus, blacked out.

  §

  Merlin knew it was no good. He was never going to sleep; there was no point even trying. He looked at his watch and saw it had just gone past eight o’clock. He felt groggy and sick with lack of sleep but decided it was better to get this over with and take a look outside. He slowly raised the tent’s zipper, his breath a plug in his throat.

  There it was, just as he knew it would be. He glimpsed it though the widening aperture of the entrance even before the zip had reached the top.

  The tent.

  It stood a few metres from where Nugget’s was pitched: a bright sickly yellow, but dark in a lot of places from where the fabric was ominously stained on the inside. He could hear the flies even from here: an angry knot of frantic activity.

  And the smell. Oh, dear God, the smell. He could taste it, even above the thick slab of stink that radiated from his own uncleanliness. He could feel his gag reflex struggling against the fog of decay and putrescence that seeped from the nightmare tent.

  “Nugget,” he called. It was little more than a whisper, really. “Nugget!”

  From Nugget’s tent, he heard a stir of movement. “It’s there again isn’t it,” he heard Nugget proclaim, matter-offactly.

  “Yes.”

  “Jesus.”

  “Get your stuff together,” Merlin said. “Let’s get the hell out of here.”

  They packed their things as silently as they could. The sound of the flies seemed louder now, if that were possible. And every now and then, they would hear the low, muted pops and wheezing of gases being slowly released.

  Every morning. Every goddamn morning since becoming lost, they had awoken to see the same tent. They had never looked inside, not even on that first morning when they had momentarily felt a surge of relief that they might now be with another hiker who would know the way back to the trail. It hadn’t taken long for that sense of relief to evaporate, though. Nugget had taken a couple of steps back when he noticed the staining a second or two before the stench ambushed them.

  Only Irish, the old hiker who Nugget would later punch and cast out, had the balls to take a look, and that was probably because he was still half pissed from the whiskey he had consumed the night before. It seemed that half the weight the old man carried on his hike was down to booze. He had poked his head inside the entrance of the tent, not even bothering to say hello or to ask if anybody was inside, and Merlin would swear to this, in that brief couple of seconds that Irish had his head in the tent, it seemed the old man lost his mind.

  They saw him buck as if touched with a cattle-prod, and then he slowly retreated and scooted back a distance on all fours, his eyes, impossibly wide, never leaving the tent. He never spoke about what he saw inside the tent. In fact, he looked confused whenever asked the question, as if he didn’t know what the hell they were on about. This was when the “crazy talk”, as Nugget had called it, started up.

  The two men quickly chose a path and disappeared into the woods, their motion churning up the light mist that curdled amongst the dense trees. The air was eerily silent apart from the sound of the flies that followed them for longer than they would have thought possible. It was a long while before they spoke and, even then, it wasn’t about the tent. They never spoke about the tent anymore.

  Not for the first time, Nugget commented that they surely to God must be close to a town by now, and maybe they should head for higher ground to see if they can spot any signs of life. Merlin agreed, and they headed towards what looked like a promising vantage spot – a steep, wooded ridge from which an almighty lip of rock protruded.

  Nugget would not shut up; not for a single freaking minute. He talked about everything and absolutely nothing at all, but Merlin didn’t mind. He knew the man was only trying to distract himself from the weighty silence that still hung around them like a guilty conscience.

  When they finally reached the shelf of rock, their bodies doused in sweat and their legs laced with burning, copper wires, they were disheartened to see that they had already used up most of the day’s light. Worse still, the scene before them was a seamless, hilly carpet of forest that stretched in all directions to a horizon that looked to be a hundred lifetimes away.

  “Man, this is total bullshit!” Nugget spat. “How the fuck could we be so lost? There’s nothing! I mean, there’s literally nothing anywhere!”

  “Just calm it down, will you? Take it down a notch.”

  “Calm it down? Look at it, Merl! Look at it. We’re fucking dead.”

  Merlin ran a hand through hair matted with grease. For a moment he played with the idea of reminding Nugget that it was he who lost the GPS in the first place, and he who, for reasons Merlin still didn’t understand, had been hellbent on deviating from the trail. “It’ll be evening soon,” he said. “Let’s just wait a while, have something to eat, and see if we can spot any lights when the sun starts to go down. Like you say, we can’t be that lost. There’s got to be something out there.”

  Nugget was silent a moment. He looked from Merlin to the vast green expanse below and then lowered his head with a sigh. He nodded, speechless.

  §

  They shared an energy bar, one of the three they had left, and watched as the sun dipped the little distance towards the fanged treetops on the horizon. The cloudless sky deepened through a moody spectrum of blues and fruity purples, and both watched the darkening forest for tell-tale lights.

  “There’s nothing out there…” Nugget murmured to himself. “Nothing at all.”

  “Then we head in the opposite direction,” said Merlin, struggling to his feet. “Come on; let’s get moving. We need to find somewhere suitable to pitch tents before it gets too dark... Nugget?”

  Nugget remained seated on the rocks, staring out over the gently stirring forest. “Nugget?”

  “Don’t call me that.”

  “What?”

  “I said don’t call me that. The name’s Steve. Just call me Steve. No more of this fucking trail-name shit. I don’t think we’re exactly on a nice little hike through the woods anymore, do you?”

  “No; I guess we’re not. Okay Steve, so how about we get moving?”

  Steve remained seated for a long beat before getting to his feet with a pained groan. The man seemed to have aged weeks in the past few days, and it wasn’t just the facial hair and the dirt ingrained around the eyes and on his forehead. No, it was the eyes themselves. He looked dazed, exhausted, like a man digging his own grave.

  Merlin watched as Nug–Steve–shuffled by and wordlessly made his way towards the treeline, his shoulders slumped low and his feet dragging across the dusty rocks. Merlin readjusted his backpack and followed with the briefest glance back towards the dark, unbroken forest below.

  They soon picked up on a ‘ghost’ trail that was barely perceptible and looked as if it hadn’t been walked in years. They followed it until dusk began to bleed out into darkness and the temperature started to dip. They found a few markers too faded to read but which Merlin took heart from. They must have been directions to some place.

  Merlin was just about to suggest that they pitch their tents for the night when they heard slow, steady footfalls approaching from behind. Both men stopped and turned to look back up the trail. The trees crowded in on both sides and a vaporous mist was fingering its way towards them through the shadows. Merlin cocked his head at the silence that suddenly seemed to fill the world. Even the wind, which had been rustling through the trees like sea surf, had fallen ominously silent.

  From further on down the thin, strangled trail, they heard the
short, sharp crack of a branch breaking underfoot.

  Merlin felt Steve tense at his side.

  Another branch broke.

  Another.

  And then a shadow came stumbling into view on the trail, emerging from around the bend and staggering forward a few drunken steps. The figure stopped for a moment and rocked on its feet, forward and backward, then side to side. The head was lowered, its arms held slightly out to the side as if for balance.

  The figure burst forward a few jittery steps, and Merlin uttered a curse whilst taking an involuntary step backwards.

  “Irish?” Steve whispered.

  Merlin glanced across. “What?”

  Steve was frowning quizzically, his head cocked. “I think… I think it’s Irish.”

  Merlin turned back to the figure before them. It too seemed to be cocking its head now, and Merlin felt that it was sniffing at the air, sniffing them out. It slowly straightened itself out, and Merlin had to agree there was something vaguely familiar about the stoop of the shoulders and the gangly legs. The figure continued forward, pausing a beat after every couple of steps. It – he – was about twenty feet away now and still featureless in the shadows.

  Merlin slowly lifted his right hand and reached for the clip-on torch he had attached to the shoulder-strap of his backpack. He thumbed the light on and directed the narrow beam at the approaching figure.

  “Jesus…” Steve muttered.

  The beam wavered as Merlin’s hand trembled, the light quivering about the slack Halloween mask that was Irish’s face. The mouth hung open like a tear in wet dough while the soulless eyes were little more than blood-rimmed craters that allowed the torchlight to shine clear through.

  “Oh, dear God…” Merlin sensed Steve backing away up the trail and could hear the hysteria bubbling up in those three short words.

  Irish staggered to a halt again and tilted his head. He seemed to crouch down a little, like he was getting ready to burst into a run. He sniffed at the night air, and his ‘face’ seemed to draw in and pucker around the nose like it was a patch of damp tissue only tentatively attached to the bone beneath.