The Crone House

By Victor Allen

We all have our gifts of Providence and sisters are more than happy to flaunt those that God gave them to their siblings. Some gifts can open doors to unspeakable things; some can lock them away. But no gift is without cost. Pretty baubles can turn to raging beasts and the benign can turn deadly. The Crone House, one of twenty stories in A-Sides.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Victor Allen
• Release date: Dec 2, 2018
• ISBN: 9780463920350

Victor Allen

Born in North Carolina in 1961, Victor Allen has lived a charmed, black and white, and almost disreputable life. Turned down by the military at age seventeen because of a bad heart (We would take, his recruiter told him, the women and children before we would take you), he spent a wasted year at NCSU, where he augmented his scant college funds by working part-time as a stripper (what the heck? Everybody looks good when they're eighteen), a pastime he quickly gave up one night when he discovered -to his mortification- his divorced, middle-aged mother sitting in the audience. Giving NCSU the good old college miss, he satisfied his adventurous spirit and wanderlust by moving out West in his late teens, first to Colorado and later, Wyoming, and working in the construction trades. Uprooted from his small town upbringing and thrust into a world of real Cowboys and Indians, oil field roughnecks, biker gangs and pool sharks, he spent his youth travelling the country, following the work, settling at various times in Texas, Alabama, South Carolina, Florida, Colorado, and Wyoming. Along the way he met a myriad of interesting people including Hollywood, a young, Native American man, so called because he wore his sunglasses all the time, even at night; Cinderella K from Owensville, Missouri (the nice laundry lady who turned his shorts into pinkies); Lori P., the Colorado snake lady and her pet boa constrictor, Amanda; the pool hustler par excellence, Johnny M.; TJ, Moon, and Roundman, good folks, but bikers, all; his little blond girlfriend, Lisa; Maureen, the very funny lady from London with the very proper English accent, who he met while living outside of Shaw Air Force Base in Sumter, SC, and her daughter, Marie, with her practically incomprehensible cockney twang; the ever bubbly Samantha from FLA; and all the (well, never mind). :-). Plus way too many others too numerous to list. He has weathered gunfire, barroom brawls (I didn't get this crooked nose and all these scars on my face from kissin), a three-day mechanical breakdown in the heart of the Louisiana bayous, drunken riots- complete with car burnings and overturnings, Budweiser, bonfires and shootin' irons (it was all in good fun, though,)- ; a hundred year blizzard, floods, two direct lightning strikes, a hurricane which sent a tree crashing through his roof, and an unnerving late night encounter with a man who subsequently proved to be a murderer, surviving it all with a rather uncom...

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The Crone House

By

Victor Allen

Copyright © 2014

All Rights Reserved

I’m just an average guy with a regular job, neither a journalist nor a scrivener, but I wanted to tell you about this. This thing that shouldn’t be, but somehow is.

I’ve lived in Camden all my working life, and for that long, as I drove to home and work, I wondered about the derelict old house roosting like a broody hen at the center of a cluster of empty lots. I could see it on my left as I drove in, my right as I drove back, some half a mile away from the overpass. One didn’t have to be a real estate mogul to notice the depressions in the middle of the vacant lots -now splashed with new grass- where homes had once stood, those homes obviously having been torn down, their occupants scattered to the four winds or moved on to more promising enterprises. All but the one.

Some houses reveal their bad intent by a flaw in their character that can be detected by the eye, but not seen. The Crone House was like that. It stood alone, seemingly purposefully so, encapsulated like a diseased organ by its four foot barrier of thorny weeds, seedy, brittle grass, and chain link fence set one hundred twenty feet equidistant from each of its four ragged sides. It was a wooden structure, two stories, and not so long abandoned that it was