Goldhorn

This is an older little folk horror tale I wrote for a prompt. I've forgotten the prompt but still have the story. I have a place for a reworked version of this in Steeltown Dreaming, including a spin-off novella centered in Goldhorn that I think will make a pretty cool companion piece to SD. There's actually quite a few companion pieces that can be born out of SD, but that's a post for another time. 

    Ain’t many folks knows where Goldhorn was. You can search the old Flamborough maps and you won’t find it. Don’t exist no more. I suppose that’s for the better. I was just a young girl when it happened, thirteen and three quarters. I was a farmhand for the Budneys and got paid fair enough I suppose. Gerry was an okay boss. Everyone liked Gerry well enough. Course, everyone knew him just as much as they knew Amelia, and everybody knew Amelia. She was always old, Amelia was. You listen to the old folks and they’ll tell you she come from one of the founding families of Goldhorn, and the richest. A hundred and fifty-eight is when she died.

    Well, that’s when we put her in the ground, anyway.

    You see, the way it happened was this. Ol’ Gerry was keen on doing Amelia proud by raising livestock and tilling the land. Never knew what Gerry saw in Amelia. She was sixty years his senior, more wrinkled than a goat’s balls. Word was Gerry had his eyes set on the old bird’s money. I suppose that’s true. He was a young man when they got wed, young and healthy and strapping strong. Weren’t too many folks in Goldhorn even though it had three churches, one Anglican, one Catholic, and one Baptist.

    In all that time Amelia was alive strange things happened in and around the town of Goldhorn. They say the moon’s horns is a sign of the devil because that’s when his disciples perform black magic and other wicked things. Didn’t matter whether it was springtime or autumn or dead of winter, that crescent moon spelled trouble. Children from the neighboring towns would go missing. Twelve children from Romulus went missing last season. Folks said it was a band of witches that dwelt in the nearby woods, but nobody never did find no witches there.   

    Wasn’t until Gerry reached his ninety-third birthday and got the notion in his head that Amelia would outlive him and probably most everyone else in Goldhorn. I recall him muttering to himself while milking the cows that he didn’t work all his life to die without nothing. He’d get Amelia’s money one way or t’other. Least he could live out the rest of his short days the way he wanted, he’d tell himself. Whenever I’d ask Gerry what in Sam Hill he was going on about, he’d tell me to mind my own business and get the cows fed.

    Then in the winter of 1947, my cousin, Alice, gave birth to a little girl. She named her Annabelle. It was on a night when the moon’s horns hung bright and sharp as day surrounded by Hyades and Pleiades. She was a strong little baby, Annabelle was, strong like her mother, healthy skin, bright green eyes that’d make the hills of Ireland jealous.

    Poor Alice never did get over it when baby Annabelle disappeared. We must’ve turned Goldhorn upside down and inside out looking for her but couldn’t find her anywhere. Poor, poor Alice didn’t know how to go on what with her child being snatched away, so she threw herself in the icy Emerald Lake on a clear and crisp Saturday morning. Young Billy Fischer saw her do it an’ he didn’t know what to do except tell the first person he saw which happened to be Mr. Rutland. Old man Rutland got Dan Acker who in turn got Mrs. Kimbal to call the authorities. 'Course, everyone knew how Mrs. Kimbal likes to gossip. Word got to me long before it got to the police chief in Ancaster, about a half hour east of here. Poor Alice. I ain’t never seen such a sadder face than hers. The ice-cold water made her look as if her soul had been pulled out of her chest.

    Her husband, Jeb, shot his own head clean off with a hunting rifle after we fished her out of the water.  

    We never did find baby Annabelle.

    ’Twas the following Saturday evening that Gerry gathered me and a few of the other farm boys together in the barn long after night fell. He looked rough as hell and gave us all hard liquor, told us he wouldn’t tell us what he had to say unless we’d drink it up. He didn’t have to tell us twice.

    “Amelia’s got to do with it,” he said. “She took the baby, and God knows how many others.”

    “If this is your idea of a joke t'ain't funny,” I said.

    He didn’t flinch, didn’t snap, didn’t do nothing except sit there shivering like he was left out in the cold too long. “I’ve lived out most of my days. Lord knows how many I’ve got left. What I’ve seen, what I know, it ain’t like anything you boys have dreamed on a wicked night.”

    “Go on, Gerry,” I said, “You’ve got us all here. Now what is it?” I could always talk to Gerry bold like that. Any of the boys talked to him that way he'd smack them good. But me, he didn't mind my lip. I always said what I said and didn't never take it back.

    He grabbed the nearest bottle of liquor and gulped it down before he opened his mouth again. What he had to say made our blood curdle like soured milk.

    He told us in all his years of being wed to Amelia, he never knew there was a secret room in her mansion. He stumbled on it by accident, and said he’d found an altar made of white stone, carved in the image of a large deer with too many eyes, big black round eyes with no whites to them. It had horns spiraling out of its head in every direction and surrounded by drapes of white and gold and dried blood. He broke down real bitter like when he told us he saw Annabelle stuck on the horns.

    “She’s cursed this town,” he said, “She aims to bring something real bad into this world. She’s going to bring something from another world to walk this land and bind us all to its wicked skin an’ she’s aiming to do it on the next wet moon.”

    We didn’t want to believe him but we knew it was true. How else had old Amelia Budney lived so damned long? She outlived her first husband, her children, all her friends, the first generation of settlers in Goldhorn—and by God, if she had her way, she’d outlive us all.

    “She’s been waiting for this moment,” Gerry said. “She’s been waiting a hundred and fifty years to call this demon up and set it free like a wild bull. She’s got to be stopped before it makes the whole earth sick with its wicked flesh.”

    We all set together to make sure Amelia’s dark designs wouldn’t come to fruition. The very next night we dowsed the Budney mansion in oil while Amelia slept. Gerry had fixed up some kind of sleeping concoction to ensure she wouldn’t wake up. We lit our torches and threw them into the windows and watched as the house went up in a bright orange ball of fire.

    Gerry was just as surprised as the rest of us when they found Amelia’s charred body still lying peaceful like in her bed. Mr. Tremblay of Tremblay and Sons Funeral Home had a devil of a time making her look presentable, replacing the missing skin on her face with wax and powdered makeup.

    The whole town turned up for the funeral. What a mighty terrible accident, they said. Some whispered that it was an act of God on account of her defying death all these years. Father Jaeger performed the mass, said that a saint of God had been called up.

    Well, by Moses’s staff, what happened next none of us expected.

    Soon as Father Jaeger raised the host in the act of consecration, Amelia Budney rose up from her coffin and looked at us. The wax and the powdered makeup Mr. Tremblay had applied fell from her face like stones from a cliff. Whatever real skin was left twisted and contorted into such a shape that she didn’t look human. Horns came out of her neck and her head and her sides like she was weaving a spider’s web. My God, the screams that day…

    I never knew a human being could move as fast as Amelia did when she jumped out of that coffin. Then again, I’m not altogether sure she was human at all. She aimed straight for poor Gerry, white as a ghost that Gerry, poor fella. She put her hands on his face and ripped it clean off like a napkin.

    By the time the men reached for their rifles Amelia had torn Gerry’s body into shreds of bloodied meat and bone. They shot her a dozen times well after she’d stopped moving. Ain’t none of us knew what to do after that.

    Father Jaeger ordered us to pick up Amelia and put her back into the coffin. Joe Teal got his ax and cut Amelia’s horns so’s she could fit back inside the box. Frank Mitchell ran home to fetch a big lock and chain to wrap around the coffin so’s she couldn’t get out again. The priest said she couldn’t be buried in the church cemetery as that was reserved only for baptized folks, and it was clear as day Amelia Budney had aligned herself with some devil magic.      

    We dug a deep grave for her somewhere in the woods. I ain’t never worked so hard and fast in my life, digging that hole deep enough so’s she couldn’t climb out. Before we was finished digging we heard her scratching inside the coffin, hissing and screaming and growling like a rabid wolf, calling for Goldhorn to curse us. We dropped that damn coffin into the earth and covered it up quick as rain before the sun set.

    We didn’t hear Amelia’s howling and scratching no more.

    Folks moved away soon after that. We ain’t spoken of that day since. The town of Goldhorn don’t exist no more. It’s been overrun with trees and bush and nature, hiding the wicked place from the rest of the civilized world. They say if you ever find yourself in the vicinity of where Goldhorn used to be, you can find strange horns coming up from the earth, twisted and gnarled, in the very place where Amelia Budney is buried. If you listen real good, you can still hear her scratching at the coffin, hissing and screaming for vengeance when she rises again.