The Wormwood Mason

Erza trudged up the muddy two-wheel track leading to the Vane cabin, making sure to cover his bound notebook under his slicker to keep it dry. The rough path was greasy with the steady drizzle of rain that had arrived at Wormwood the same day as he had. He had despaired of driving the last quarter-mile to the cabin immediately upon seeing the conditions from the two-lane, shoulder-less county road that passed by the homestead. When choosing his rental car, he had emphasized economy over practicality. He regretted, not the first time on this expedition, that he had not rented something with four-wheel drive for a trek into the heart of Appalachia.

Windless, the humid air had taken on a greasy feel, adding to the weight of the mud that clung to his hiking books as he stepped onto the roughshod and rickety porch of the cabin, more shanty than home. Rusted corrugated sheets had been patchworked on the structure to keep the elements out, or the rot within — either might have been true, or both. The gossip they swapped down at the cafe in Wormwood strongly suggested that it might be both. Knowing by firsthand experience how outsiders were treated in these hills left Ezra suspecting that the townsfolk might be embellishing things a smidge. Silas Vane had lived on this land for most of his seventy-odd years but he was no less the outsider than Ezra. Silas was quite likely more an outsider than Ezra if one were to believe the gossip shared in town.

The porch groaned as Ezra’s weight came to rest on the weathered planks and he took a deep breath as he quickly rehearsed what he would say if Silas actually opened the door to him. There was no guarantee that he would, if what the folks down at the cafe said were even remotely reliable.

As he gathered his thoughts, Ezra tried to look through the greasy, soot-covered windows, but the interior was too dark and the panes too dirty for his eyes to penetrate the gloom within. Listening to the light rain tap on the metal roof and siding, Ezra could swear he hear the faint sound of a fiddle playing a tuneless ambling song somewhere out in the hills. An absurdity, in this kind of weather — there was no other home within acres of the cabin and no one with any kind sense would fiddle out in the rain. He wrote it off as an auditory hallucination borne of the rain hitting some debris in a makeshift rubbish heap down a nearby ravine.

As he gathered up the courage to knock, Ezra stopped as the door swung open. He let his fist drop to his side. “Mr. Vane?” he asked and quickly added. “I’m Ezra Kane, a visiting folklorist from Miskotonic University up in Ma—”

Silas Vane grunted. “Talk American, boy. I dinn’t understand a word you just said. Whatchoo want?”

Thrusting out his hand in an offer to shake. “My name’s Ezra, and I am collecting stories in Wormwood.”

Silas looked at the proffered hand, but did not take it up. “This ain’t no Wormwood. You done taken a wrong turn, boy.” He started to close the door.

Ezra spoke quickly. “I came to get your version of the stories they tell me about Rowena Vane, your brother’s widow.” Silas paused, door held ajar. “Some of their gossip makes you out to be an outright villain. I’d like to get your perspective, and maybe go so far as to clear the record on what happened to Rowena.”

“She died in the old mineshaft out back. Tol’ her not to mess ’round in thar. Weren’t safe. But she did, an’ now she’s dead. End o’ tale.” Silas resumed closing the door.

“Was it true that she was pregnant with your unborn child?” The door stopped again.

“They sayin’ that now, are they?”

“Some are. Was she?”

“Hell. Well, c’mon in, boy. Seems we need t’ have ourselfs a gab.”

He opened the door and gestured for Ezra to enter. The air in the room was filled with an earthy, malty scent that he couldn’t place. The interior was sparsely finished with a potbelly stove, a rough-framed bed with an ancient spring mattress from well before Ezra’s birth that sagged in the middle. Near the stove was a small, merely functional dining table with two uneven-looking and wobbly wooden chairs. It was obvious which Silas favored based on the wear marks both in the seat of the chair and on the table place where it sat. The other seat looked sticky from the same airborne grease, soot and disuse.

The door squealed on rusty hinges as Silas closed it.

“I don’ git many visitors, son, as they might have told. You can have the other chair or the bed, but that chairs a bit dodgy some. Still,” he said shrugging and didn’t finish the thought. Ezra chose the chair. While it did not look completely stable, he seemed less likely to get tetanus via his derriere.

The chair groaned under Ezra’s weight, causing him to question the decision. Silas sat down across from him.

“So what tall tales they be tellin’ down in Wormwood ’bout me?” he asked.

Ezra pulled out his notebook and ballpoint pen and flipped to the pages he had dogeared for the occasion.

“I heard several bits of gossip, but they are hardly in agreement,” he said as he scanned his notes. “The general story is that your older brother left his new bride in your care when he was drafted and deployed to Vietnam. While Rowena lived here, she developed a good relationship with most of the folks in Wormwood and became popular, somewhat easing tensions between the Vane family and the rest of Wormwood.”

“Ayep. She was quite the town’s princess.”

“From what folks said, your father was a belligerent who mined ‘bone coal’ and regularly got into drunken fights with the townsfolk. Your mother had a reputation for being a bit of a hexer, although people reluctantly visited her for healing when they needed it. Your family was not well-loved.”

“Yep, mam used to dabble in a bit of the granny magic. Don’ know I’d call what she done as hexing — more ‘working the signs’, the way she’d have it.

“And then Rowena arrived.”

Silas nodded and sucked at his teeth to fill the empty space between them.

“But any goodwill Rowena brought the Vane family when she arrived evaporated with the accident. Some blame you.” Silas nodded. “And some say something more sinister than an accident was at the heart of her death.”

Silas snorted in derision. “More sinister… Them fools don’t know squat.”

Ezra continued. “And some say that her belly was beginning to show the curve of pregnancy long after her husband went off too, and died in ‘Nam. Those who spoke of it mentioned that she was just showing around eight months after he was deployed, and about three months after he died.”

“Is that so? Surprised they noticed atall.”

“They way they figured it, the timing was too long after he was deployed to be his and they naturally assumed…”

Silas laughed without any humor in the sound. “An’ they forget that she was their little darlin’, is that right? Had to be her husband’s pervert brother, not some townie, innit right? I ‘spect that’s way they tell it, she was all Miss Innocence an’ light?”

“Well, that seemed to be the consensus amongst those who suspect you’re the father of her unborn.”

“I ‘spect it were. Those always flapping their gums who know least.”

Ezra shudder from the damp air. Silas pushed back the chair and stood up. “Where’s me manners? I ain’t used to guests and nows you taken to chill. Let me go grab some wood from the bin out back and get you a fire to warm up. Takin’ on a chill myself, truth be tol’.”

Silas wrapped an oiled duster over his shoulders. “Just make yerself at home while I grab some tinder. Won’t take but a minute.”

Ezra got up and paced the small cabin to warm up until Silas came back. Something about the darkened room seemed cooler than the outside and he wondered if the cabin ever truly warmed up. The furnishings were sparse, and Silas was obvious not much of a reader, if he could read at all. The only book in the whole cabin was an old family bible sitting on an end-table by the bed.

Ezra lifted up the cover. Folks around the area would use the fly sheets to record their family trees and he thought there might be some interesting leads for him to pursue if Silas was less than forthcoming about the fate of Rowena and her unborn child. Sometimes it only took a name to—

He scrunched up his face. “Odd…,” he said aloud. The space where Silas’s brother’s name would be was blackened and burned, as was the place where Rowena’s name would normally have been.

“Wuz odd?” asked Silas, returning with a bundle of wood. “Everything in odd in this neck of the woods.”

Ezra let the cover of the bible fall, scrambling for a deflection from his snooping. “Odd that it is colder inside than outside your cabin. Any idea why?” He winced at his weak response.

“Prolly the cellar. It be connected with the mine and sometimes the air’s just right for a draft to rise up through the boards. Y’git used to it on the main, y’live here as long as I have.”

He lit the potbelly stove with a flint and steel, which took to the flame right away and filled the cabin with a warm glow, chasing away most of the shadows, while making sharper ones in their place. “I suppose them idjits in Wormwood also have that I murdered Miss Rowena and her unborn child conceived in sin to hide that said sin. That how they tell it?”

One shelf over the bed seemed to have stubborn shadows that refused to leave. Impossible, Ezra thought. And yet, the shadows seemed to gather in that corner of the room. On the shadowy shelf near his head, the only thing upon it was a mason jar filled with a dark amber, swirling fluid that seemed to force away the stove light into other parts of the cabin.

“Well, boy, is it?”

Ezra forced his attention back to Silas. “Well,” he hesitated, trying not to look to the shelf and the strange mason jar swimming in shadow. “Not exactly. At least, no one openly says you murdered them. But nearly all suggest it a strong possibility that you might have had a hand in both her pregnancy and death.”

“If they were to bother to open them gossiping eyes a wee wider, they might stumble on the truth of the matter. But folks’ll see what folks’ll wanna see and they saw a horny goat sharing a cabin with their darlin’, an’ not them forests for all th’ trees.”

They both returned to the table to sit opposite each other.

“So, you’re saying you didn’t have anything to do with either the pregnancy or her death?”

Ezra gave Silas a hard, serious look in the eyes, hoping to rattle the man into confessing his crimes of rape and familicide. Silas stared right back, not showing the least amount of being bothered by Ezra’s glare.

“Well, it depends on how y’count such things, I ‘spect,” Silas began. “Not having anything to do with either’s a tall order. The mine belonging to me alone makes me involved, donnit? But I can account for the child not being my brood, I can say that much. A’least as far as I know. Rowena had her ways, y’know.”

That tuneless fiddling drifted through the cabin, so faint as to be nearly drowned out by the patter of rain on the corrugated steel roof. But tantalizing in its proximity, distracting Ezra and drawing his eyes back to the mason jar on the shelf buried in the gloaming that filled corner of the room.

“What ways were those?” Ezra asked, distracted by the faint song and the jar.

Silas smiled for the first time since Ezra had met him. It was a smile of this country, full of crags, sharp angles and stained teeth. “I see she be calling ye. Is that right, Mr. University man?”

Ezra’s attention snapped back to Silas. “What?”

“Yer eyes keep going to that little keepsake I have on th’ shelf. Y’ken hear her song, can’tcha?”

The ambling fiddle song increased in intensity at the mention, then faded away.

“Thars where I keep her and her brat. ‘Twernt my child, I promise you that much, boy. She weren’t quite th’ innocent princess townsfolk made her out to be, turns out. But ’twas easier to make me a monster than ’twas easy to admit she’d thralled them. My guess her child was fathered by that pretty preacher we had ’round here. Lord knows we saw enough of the two frolicking after Jed went off to war. Bible study, pffffttt.” Silas spat on the wood floor of his cabin.

“An even he were the victim as much as I. She had plans for that child, I promise you, plan no folk would like to hear.”

“That mason jar is her and her unborn?”

“Yar. Mam weren’t the only dabbler in th’ working of signs ’round here.” Silas put another piece of firewood in the potbelly, which did little to chase off the chill of the room.

“Mam din’t have a daughter to pass on her arts, ‘least not one to make it out of her womb alive, so she taught her most useful skills to me as a, whatchacallit, surr’gate daughter. Not the stuff o’ deep roots an’ that, just y’basic healing arts in case someone drew bad spirits or bad luck.”

“What’s that to do with Rowena?” aske Ezra.

“Well, mam din’t get to tellin’ ol’ Grim, ‘Hey wait, I needs to hide me books’ afore he took her wherever ol’ Grim takes folks when they go otherside. So, them books was just sittin’ in mam’s workingspace in the cellar and I started going through them after. Dark things, some, so I set it aside, not thinking much about it and not ready t’let her go by giving them to flame.”

“So, the rumors were true, your mother was a hexer?”

“I ‘spect that might be what they call someone with her knowledge. I only knew ’bout the granny magic.”

Silas looked up at the mason jar. “Twern’t just her though, hungry for them books. Miss Rowena wandered down into mam’s workingspace whilst I was out hunting varmint an’ she took to them darker books right off. Got obsessed with opening doors that wern’t doors down in the mine and tried to get me to help her. Said the right door could bring Jed back.”

‘She was going to uses hexes to bring her husband back from the dead?”

“Wern’t no hexes, but deep roots magic, son.”

Ezra realized his eyes were back on the mason jar on the shelf, the music infecting his ear.

He turned back to Silas. “So, was it this dark deep roots magic that killed her?”

“Nope.”

“Did you kill her.”

“Nope.”

Ezra started to ask what did, fighting the urge to look to the mason jar that refused all light, but Silas answered before he could open his mouth.

“Simple stupidity killed th’ girl, though she ne’er could seem to accept that.”

That broke the spell the jar had on Ezra.

“What do you mean?”

“She slipped an’ fell into some standing water in the mine, hunting for the best place to find her damned door. Hit her head on the way down and drowned.”

“She… drowned?”

“Yep. I told her that the mine were no place to be traipsing around in flats, that there were slick spot on account of the debris and water that got inside. But, like ne’er, she din’t listen. ‘Twas a spell afore I found her, but her noggin was cracked wide, plain as day. Din’t take a smart university feller like you to tell what done killed her.”

“So… just an accident? While hunting for the right place to do dark magic to bring back her husband from the dead?”

“Ayep.”

“And the unborn child?”

“Necessary key to open th’ door. The spell called for infant blood, and she was all too happy to make some available for the spell. After all, what’s nine month compared to a lifetime without your beau?”

The jar started to sing again.

“So what’s with that jar?” Ezra walked over to the shelf to look closer, attempting to see within the swirling darkness contained by the jar.

“‘Tis a haint trap. As I tol’ you, she ne’er quite accepted it were due to her stupidity she died. She was a vain woman about her intelligence, she was. She found all manner of reasons to blame me for her accident. She were dead, but not gone. She took to following me around an’ nagging me about how I owed her an’ how it were my fault she were dead.”

Ezra picked up the mason jar, watching light bend away from it. No matter what angle he held it, all light refused to come close to the contents.

“So I set up a trap for her haint and, aside from a little song here an’ there, I can live in peace from her these past fifty years. But she’s got to be angry trapped in there, lemme tell you. I should bury the damned thing afore som—”

The jar vibrated in Ezra’s hand just enough to make him fumble and drop the jar. It shattered into hundreds of pieces as the smell of moonshine wafted from the floorboards where it fell.

“—one… breaks… the damn thing.”

The winds picked up outside and started to howl.

Ezra looked as Silas, shock in his eyes.

“I didn’t… I mean… It wasn’t…”

Silas just sighed.

“Well, shit,” Silas said.

~3000 words; ~3.5hrs writing time

Post Mortem

By way of explanation: the mason jar filled with moonshine that did not reflect light, but pushed light away was a form of a “spirit trap”. In this case, rather than capturing the evil someone committed after they are dead, Silas used his mother’s tomes to find a way to trap his sister-in-law’s “haint” or “haunt”, which is semantically the same as a troublesome ghost or spirit.

This tale is a response to the AI prompt from last week, asking for Appalachian Gothic (with Cosmic Horror elements, which was converted to Eldritch Horror, a parallel theme), a genre of fiction I have never attempted to explore and wasn’t quite sure how to approach it. The idea intrigued me as I dug into researching it and discovered it was probably a good fit for me.

I exceeded my target word count by 1000+ words with this one, but I suspected it was gonna get longer for all the territory covered by dialog. The story evolved as I got into it and what you see above is dramatically different than what I had envisioned when I started writing. Because the story still feels constrained by keeping with 3000 words, I hesitated culling out much to fall in line with my target of 2000 words for an upper limit.

In the original version, Silas was an evil shit who did all of the things he was accused of. After a spell of writing, however, I started to realize he was just misunderstood and the young bride, while doing morally questionable things to realize her plans, was still madly in love with her dead husband. She’s desperate to get him back, even if it involves infanticide of the preacher-man’s spawn.

I had planned more blood and gore initially. Mayhem. But I realize in retrospect that would have been very B-type horror. Not that this story is much above pulp, but that was the fun in writing it. I ultimately decided I wanted to avoid gross-out horror.

I could have gone on for several thousand more pages talking about what happens after the “haint trap” breaks, but if felt good to leave things unresolved and let the reader’s mind wander.

Please let me know your impressions and thoughts in the comments. Worth my time to write? Or an awful slog and I need to work on these skills a bit more before I’m allowed to post again.