Blackdark Hollow in Southern Fried Cthulhu from Mechanoid Press
Editor Jim Palmer’s Mechanoid Press has had a successful kickstarter and produced a cool new anthology of Lovecraftian stories set below the Mason-Dixon Line….
From the publisher:
H.P. Lovecraft. His fiction conjures images of sleepy New England villages, ivy-covered walls, and fragile academics paying the ultimate price for gaining forbidden knowledge from eldritch tomes.
But what would happen if Lovecraft’s elder things ventured down south? What would they make of Waffle Houses, monster trucks, and trailer parks? What dark secrets might be lurking under the kudzu?
We’ve seen how Lovecraft’s stodgy academics deal with elder things from beyond, but what would a bunch of beer-swilling, gun-toting rednecks think of Shoggoths or Night Gaunts? How would they react to an ancient, eldritch horror gurgling up from the depths of their favorite fishing spot? What would they make of ancient, cyclopean ruins in the middle of a swamp?
Join John Hartness (Bubba the Monster Hunter), Dan Jolley (DC Comics’ Firestorm), Edward M. Erdelac (Rainbringer: Zora Neale Hurston Against The Lovecraftian Mythos, The Merkabah Rider series), David Boop (Straight Outta Tombstone) Jayme Lynn Blaschke (Interzone, Electric Velocipede), and a bushel of amazing authors as they explore the Lovecraftian Mythos with a Southern flair.
Ia, Ia Cthulhu fhtagn, ya’ll!
I like writing for James because he’s a professional, his concepts are always cool, he puts out great books, and he invariably doesn’t consign me to the And Others attribution – there’s my name on the cover!
My offering this time out is a little Southern gothic horror story called Blackdark Hollow, about a woman named Liradelle who falls head over heels for a handsome snake handling preacher against the warnings of her shrewd grandmaw. When the shady Charismatic puts the old lady aside, Liradelle crawls into the dark cleft from which the Blackdark Creek streams into the hollow, to ask a favor of the Old Friends….
Here’s an excerpt.
Down in Newton County, twenty miles outside Newtonia along Route CC and within whistling of the old Frisco Railroad, there dozed a little community called Bodach of about a hundred twenty souls. Ninety of those souls belonged to Pastor Howbeit John Grady, Holiness Serpent Handler of the Church of Lord Jesus with Signs Following, and none of them more than his wife, Leradelle.
Or at least it had, until the day her Granny died.
Leradelle’s daddy had been killed in jail when she was seven years old. Her mama had left her a silver cameo pendant and her old half-blind granny to go off and chase the Devil out in the world. Something of Leradelle’s mother had remained behind in her, for she had often lain awake nights listening to the clatter and shriek of the freight trains waiting for Granny to commence snoring so she could slip out to play pool and drink strange men’s beer at Barrymore’s out on Route 86 with the other thirty five sinners in town who did not attend the Methodist church.
Granny was a patient old lady, and frank, and for that Leradelle loved her. She admitted to Leradelle that trying to pin her mama down had only caused her to flutter off on the wind, and so she would not make that mistake with her granddaughter. She counseled her to keep her drinking to a minimum when slim men were about, cross her legs when sitting in a skirt, and as always, never kill ‘them old things,’ or their ‘old friends.’
‘Old friends’ were what Granny had always called snakes. She was always doing that, mixing in practical advice with backwoods hokum.
“Wear a jacket, Leradelle. It’s a’goin’ to rain. Table salt clumped up this morning.”
She was a little touched, but harmless. Mama used to tell her stories about how Granny was a witch, and saw more with her janky coloboma eye than she did with her good one. It was true she had a lot of strange ways, but if she was a witch she was not a good one. They had lived in the same rusty, drafty old trailer for as long as she could remember.
It took a man of God to change their predicament.
Not the Methodist minister. He had fled town ahead of some scandal involving a young boy. It was Pastor Howby, an intense, handsome young preacher who blew in from Buckhannon, West Virginia.
He appeared one rainy night at Barrymore’s, asking for directions to the church. At first sight of the black-haired Pastor Howby, his pristine white collared shirt plastered to his broad, hard muscled shoulders, Leradelle slid out from under Joe Clister’s hairy arm at the pool table and sidled up to tell him the way.
Joe, seeing he had lost her attention, attempted to jerk her back by her sleeve, but Howby laid Joe out with one blow across the pool table, then gallantly offered to drive her home.
The whole car ride he talked to her excitedly of his plans for the church, how he’d once been a sinning man before he’d come to God. Like Saul on the road he’d fallen, and rose up anew an Apostle Paul determined to share the light he’d found with everyone he ran across. He pointed out a flaw in his black hair, a little streak of white over his left ear he said his own hard times and wicked ways had marked him with, like Cain.
She told him it wasn’t a flaw at all, but made him look as though the angels had laid a hand on him.
Granny made him tea. They had a pleasant conversation and she had sat staring at him as he drank. Right then he was the one to keep and protect her.
Granny wasn’t convinced.
“I seen you touch the back of that man’s head, girl. Best watch out. I found a peapod with nine peas out in the garden this morning,” she said ominously, pointing to where she’d tacked the vegetable surreptitiously above the door. “First male to pass under it’s meant to be the one you wed.”
Leradelle smiled at this, but Granny had held up one gnarled finger.
“T’weren’t him. I chased a stripey buck polecat outta here with the broom this afternoon.”
Howby introduced Leradelle to the Holiness creed, which pointed to Mark 16:17-18 as the bedrock for his five-fold ministry;
“And these signs shall follow them that believe; In my name shall they cast out devils; they shall speak with new tongues; They shall take up serpents; and if they drink any deadly thing, it shall not hurt them; they shall lay hands on the sick, and they shall recover.”
She watched him do it the first night he gathered the God-hungry folks into the old church. He kissed all the male worshippers in greeting, lit into a tumultuous sermon about living and dying for the Lord, and then took a slug from a little brown bottle of poison that did no more than turn his face red. Then he lifted two writhing massasauga rattlers from a pair of carriers behind the pulpit and led the church band in You Gotta Walk That Lonesome Valley as they curled around his thick arms.
“If’n I am bit, it’s by the Lord’s will I live or die. Ain’t that the truth, brothers and sisters?”
One of the hissing rattlers did haul off and strike him in the wrist. The congregation gasped and rushed to his side, but he waved them off, laid the offending snake gently back in its box, and finished the ceremony with his arm swollen double its size, like a Popeye cartoon. The blind guitarist, Brother Boma, played through the hymn without missing a beat, oblivious to what had happened.
She insisted he go to the hospital, but he demurred, citing his creed, and telling her to trust the Lord.
She cried herself to sleep.
But the next morning he was up and perfectly fine, painting over the church sign and waving to the dumbstruck folks leaning way out from their car windows as they passed.
That night’s service was packed, and he laid hands, drank more poison, and shook the snakes again, unafraid.
Leradelle was amazed. She had never seen the Holy Ghost’s power so evident in a man. It made her love Howby all the more ecstatically.
She told it all in a rush to Granny till she was out of breath, begged her to come with her to see him preach.
Granny did go. She sat quietly through all the hooting and hollering.
“Them old things ought not to be made a spectacle of like that,” she said to Leradelle later. “Your pokeweed Gospel man just better watch he don’t attract unwanted attention to himself.”
“From who, Granny?” Leradelle asked.
“From them that watch over Blackdark Hollow.”
Blackdark Hollow was a cleft in the hills out behind the church where a creek of the same name ran, shaded in perpetual evening by a dense mix of sweetgum, silver maple, and pin oak. Leradelle had splashed in that creek when she was a little girl. Mama had always warned her not to follow the water up through the dark cave nestled at the back of it. She’d told her it led up to the huge, twisted old Death Tree at the top of the hill, where they’d buried bushwhackers unmarked in the old days, and hung their bones from the branches to dissuade Confederate raiders. She’d told her it was haunted, and that the Rebel yell could be heard up there on windy nights.
Granny had told Leradelle her mama had told her only a half-truth. She’d said that those that crawled through the cave at Blackdark Hollow and come up to the anonymous boneyard could say the Lord’s Prayer backwards in the shade of that old tree and fire a silver bullet up at the moon.
“Why would somebody do that, Granny?”
“Oh, them that do come into an old power,” she smiled, and put her finger to the side of her nose to indicate she would say no more….
Pick up a bucket of Southern Fried Cthulhu here –
