Каарон Уоррен - The Best Horror of the Year Volume Ten

“What is that song?” I asked, but she didn’t answer. Instead, her humming grew louder as if trying to drown out my voice, her eyes vacantly staring beyond me.

My skin started crawling. It felt as if there was something else in the room with us, which only she could see, and it was reaching its tentacles up over my shoulders, treading lightly on the skin of my back.

I left her standing there, unsure if she was some kind of mystic or suffering an onset of dementia, but either way the creeping sensation was overwhelming me to the point of panic, and the sound of her humming voice was stirring in my head like the rising cry of locusts. I hurried out into the humid heat of the southern summer, breathing deep and heavy, the air like smoke in my lungs. The city seemed abandoned and lonely in the pastel light of day. I turned left and right. Spun myself around looking for any sign of life until I was nearly dizzy.

A single dark sedan rolled down the street and stopped at a traffic light in front of me. I could see my features in the tinted windows, distorted and twisted into some kind of monstrous being.

The window rolled down and a wizened face scowled at me from the back seat. His face seemed abnormally long and cut with deep lines of folded flesh; his staring eyes were hazy with cataracts. A pungent small wafted from the opened window, and I stumbled away from the car.

The old man continued to stare at me as the darkened window rolled back up and the sedan pulled away from the sidewalk.

I was disoriented and exhausted, and the feeling from the hall of records stayed with me into the evening as I retreated back to the bed & breakfast. Ashcroft Manor was filled to capacity. Elderly men and women mingled in dining rooms, they spilled out into the back patio which looked out on a field of grass and dark trees in the distance. I figured them for tourists but they all seemed so familiar with Ted and Mary. The proprietors mingled with the guests like old friends that hadn’t seen each other in an age. They were all finely dressed, glasses of wine in their hands, laughing and murmuring in the deepening dusk.

The kaleidoscope of my delirium continued. The room seemed to spin. Ted placed a hand on my shoulder, and I told him that I thought I had too much sun. The other guests turned to stare at me, light glinting off pearl necklaces and dangling bracelets.

I saw a dress made of stars. It hung loose and breezy from shoulders of skin tanned like leather.

Beautiful music poured into my mind.

Ted escorted me to my room.

When I woke the following morning, the estate was empty of the other guests. Mary brought ice water to my room and politely suggested that maybe the climate was not suited to me. I conceded that I had been in quite a state. “I don’t know what came over me.”

“Seems you’ve been working quite a lot,” she said. “Southern heat can do that to a man who isn’t accustomed to it.” I asked her where all the others had gone, and she told me that I’d walked in on one their monthly gatherings. “We belong to a small social club,” she said. “True southern society still exists, you know.”

Then I asked her about First Baptist and the clerk at the hall of records.

“Oh,” she laughed quietly to herself. “That’s just Ethel. She’s— ah —a little touched in the head at her old age.”

I spent the morning in my room on my laptop, searching for the First Baptist Church but could find nothing. Based on Ethel’s description I wouldn’t have been surprised if it were abandoned and left to rot in the hills.

Instead, I located Llewellyn Cobb’s home, considered a minor historical site, and maintained by a small town historical society. It also had recently been the site of a murder investigation: the body of a young black male was found in the house several months post-mortem by some hikers. The investigation was pending and despite this turn of events in my research, I decided I should still visit Walker’s house.

I followed the GPS map in my rental car out into the hills beyond Evanstown, amongst winding roads, deep bluffs, shadows, and liquid light. Everywhere were creeks and rivers. The GPS became useless as the roads turned to dirt pathways. My rented Grand Am scraped its side-view mirrors against the thickening underbrush. I was forced to stop the car and continue on foot, finding a small sign pointing toward a Historical Site.

Cobb’s ancient cabin appeared as if manifested by magic from the underbrush. The forest had started to reclaim it, and any historical society that claimed to care for the property was severely negligent. The old southern shack listed to one side and brambles covered its eastern wall. The front entrance was cordoned off by yellow police tape, much of which had come unmoored and snaked through the underbrush. I climbed onto the front porch and passed through the entrance, noting a plaque that gave a brief biography of Llewellyn Cobb, a largely forgotten artist and composer. Inside was dank and dark and haunted with the smell of old meat. There was a pot-bellied stove in the living room, remnants of furniture and sleeping arrangements on the floor—an old mattress stained with blood and putrescence and tattered blankets.

I made my way through each room, trying to envision the life that Cobb had within these walled confines, with only candlelight keeping the darkness at bay, and the freezing winters huddled by the stove; fears of illness and crop shortages; loneliness to the point of insanity in the bramble forest of the South Carolina mountains. I tried to picture him running the hymns from his book over and over in his mind as he scratched out the notes onto paper.

And who should wear the starry crown…

In a small anteroom near the back of the homestead there was a writing desk beside a single-paned glass window that looked out on the forested hillside sloping away from the house. I sat there for a moment in the rickety chair, worn weak by age, and in the light that came through that portal I saw strange decorations made of sticks hung by twine from the wooden ceiling. They turned and twisted in the gravitational vortexes of the earth.

Forest sticks cobbled together like stars and hung from strings like something a child might fashion in school. The smell of gore wafted from the living room on a warm, wet breeze.

I spoke to the empty rooms in a moment of uncharacteristic theatrics: “So you did see stars, my friend.”

I walked back out to the small front porch and looked over the sloping hillside. There was no river to be seen.

I avoided the hall of records, still frightened from the vertigo that had set in the other day and the haunting, elderly clerk.

I asked Ted about First Baptist, and he replied, “Yes… out in the hills. Old, old place but they haven’t held services since the fifties. That old bat at the clerk’s office must finally be losing her marbles.”

“Can you tell me where in the hills? I’d like to see it, maybe get a picture or two.”

“I wouldn’t even know how to get there, son. Trust me. There ain’t nothing out there that could do you much good.”

So instead I conducted an old-fashioned search through the Internet for Thomas Jeery. I finally found a listing that matched the description the town clerk had given me. There weren’t too many Thomas Jeerys that were one hundred and one years old. He was located way off the beaten path in what looked to be a trailer park. I made a phone call but the line was disconnected. I made the drive, instead.

Jeery’s residence was located in The Willow View trailer park, so named for its looking out over a swampy area that was a breeding ground for pussywillows and mosquitoes. In early dusk, the frogs were sounding like an ancient language of grunts and guttural consonants. It was a sad, broken looking place of rust-red dirt and busted screen doors hanging from corrugated hinges; old men sleeping in lawn chairs with bottles in their hand, and cars that had sat so long in one spot the weeds had died beneath them. My passing car elicited strange and strong stares from dark faces. I thought I heard children through my open window, but they sounded far off and as if crying. The heat was oppressive here, like the blanket-weight of history had fallen over it and would never be pulled away. This was a place to die or to never live.