MULCH: The First Thrilling Novella from Maniacal Books

By Alex Mac

Strange happenings are a foot on a dark and isolated farm located in the heart of St. Mary's County Maryland. With a farmer and his family battling a terrifying new creature can they endure and protect the farm that is their very livelihood with their lives or even their sanity intact? Venture through this dark inaugural short story from Maniacal

• Language: English
• Publisher: Maniacal Books
• Release date: May 24, 2021
• ISBN: 9781087882109

Book preview

Dedication

To Mom and Dad:

Thanks for everything.

You’ve done just fine.

copyright

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

Copyright © 2021 By Maniacal Books

All rights reserved.

Published in the United States by Mac's Books Publishing

A Black Owned Indie Publishing Company

www.maniacalbooks.com

www.mcsbooks.com

Jacket Design by Fiverr: Rebecacovers

Edited by: Kate Schaeffer

ISBN 978-1-5011-7321-9 (paperback)

ISBN 978-1-4767-4660-9 (ebook)

Chapters

Chapters

One                                                                         4

Two                                                                        24

Three                                                                     53

Four                                                                       64

Five                                                                        75

Six                                                                          84

Seven                                                                    98

Eight                                                                     116

Nine                                                                      122

About the Author                                              131

One

Abrisk, biting November wind blows through the vast, wide-open rolls of rural acreage under a southern Maryland sky. Below a blanket of twinkling dots sweeping across the black vacuum, a substantially sized tobacco farm settles. The numerous acres of tobacco leaves sway in buoyant unison to the breezes’ chilly tune with just as many rows of tall cornstalks obliging behind them. Squatting upon a small hill a hundred yards north of the fields, staunchly overseeing its property, is a three-storied structure of dingy-white siding and bricks. The wall’s faded white, proof that it has seen better days, as it sits on its decades old, withered throne. The roof holds a gruesome old scar, cracked right in the middle of the structure. The gash leers above the front door. The long humid days and chill soggy nights have eroded the crack and now the roof droops down into the face of the house.        

Sloping down at an extreme angle, the disfigurement ends right in the middle of the two large upstairs windows that peer out from opposite ends of the top floor of the house. Many visitors have declared it seems to make the house appear to hold the juvenile smile of a devious child. The owner, Roddy, never set out to fix this garish sight simply because, Goddam house looks pissed off when you drive by it.

Roddy, who is now the current patriarch of the premises, is the plump-yet-sturdy-built hardworking head of the well-renowned and generations-old McLendon family farm. Aging gracefully into his early forties, he keeps an immaculate low-fade haircut that descends from the short spirally coils that point up and outward from his head. Slight strings of grey blend in agreeably with the dignified black mane of his receding hairline and spill into his fully-grown beard. He lays inside the home, stretched back in what he calls his ‘greatest family heirloom’: a very worn and weary La-Z-Boy. The fabric wears copious amounts of tears, and stains litter the exhausted piece of furniture.

The farmer and father of twins currently serenades his dimly-lit yet warm and tightly-furnished living room with snores that have been described by his wife as sounding like a hungry grizzly bear crossed with a wounded pig’s squeal. Dispersed between the brazen wails and choked breaths sounds the annoyingly rigid and contemptuous Monday night football announcers. Enthusiastic proclamations, First down! and, The ball came loose! blare out of a flat screen TV perched above his fireplace. The announcers emote every action of the game with such emphasis one would think that who wins or loses would decide the fate of the entire known-universe . Misty, that poor farmer’s wife who has to endure these Monday night concerts, shambles into the room clutching her housecoat tightly across her chest. The small golden LV letters splattered across her robe shimmer elegantly against the fireplace’s flickering embers. She blends the final touches of facial cream she applies in her nightly routines. The newly-washed sheen from the cream accentuates the vibrant brown of her skin, giving her a golden glow in the fireplaces’ light.

RODDY, PLEASE. Go to bed.

She shakes her husband, trying to escort him off to bed, only to be answered with another injured-piggy cry of a snore. Good Christ, she exhales, defeated. Misty pulls her housecoat tighter around her body and makes her way around the sofa to turn off the TV.

Roddy, come ooon, she nudges the side of the chair, You need to make an appointment with that doctor, nobody can stand it when you sleep on your back.

Her pleading is only answered with a sharp, choked inhale and an equally sharp fart that ripples into the seat cushion.

 Oh my God Roddy, Misty repels incredulously, only to be  answered by a raspy gargle this time.

       Deciding to change her tactics while simultaneously defending herself from the stench maniacally wafting its way closer to her covered nostrils, she finds a notebook binder on the small table next to the La-Z-Boy and decides maybe hitting him a little with the sharp edge of the notebook will finally wake him. As she narrows in on her target and raises the notebook higher above her head than it needs to be, she suddenly hears a faint sound, like the vibration of a plane climbing higher into a distant patch of sky. At first, she can’t truly figure out if maybe she is hearing things. Maybe a plane was passing over the house, she reasons. This, in turn, soothes her curiosity, but only for a glancing moment; because she soon realizes that the disruption is getting louder and louder. So much so, that the windows rattle with a constant hum. About twenty feet away, she can hear the dishes in the adjoining kitchen’s cabinets rattle with a jubilant violence that could wake the comatose. Even the cabinet doors start to bang violently.

Now with the whole house shaking in a deafening noise of what seems like the inside of a 747 passenger jet engine flying at full blast, she shrieks and stumbles as the ground rumbles underneath her feet. She clings onto the side of the sofa and gives into a forceful panic she hasn’t felt since her first haunted mansion trip on some Halloween of her yesteryears.

Momma what’s going on? her daughter yells as she hurls from the darkness of the hallway leading to the living room. Misty can barely hear her daughter amidst the booming wave of thunder penetrating the house from the open darkness outside. After a few stumbles, her daughter has to cling to the wall by pressing her full body onto like the spinning ride in her favorite fair that comes to town every spring.

Shem baby, get over here! Misty yells with a terrified shrill. I think we’re in a hurricane or something. Where’s your brother? Misty asks, trying to get a command of her fear and rather conjure from the depths of her memory the family disaster plans they had advertised as infomercials all over TV in the early 2000’s.

Shem, finally maneuvering her way to her mother shouts, I don’t know!

After several terrifying seconds, Misty’s son stumbles into the living room wearing a hilariously mixed expression of panic and terror. His Rossi RB22 LR bolt-action rifle with attached scope is cocked and held across his body at the ready.

Momma, what’s happening? Clem asks with an excited yet calm demeanor, but his wide, bugged-out eyes reveal his adrenaline is pumping at full throttle.

At that moment, this event is brought to its petrifying crescendo as a loud crunching thud can be heard outside the back of the house, followed by a lurching wave of energy that seems to knock the house and its inhabitants off its axis. The whole room surges from a wave of energy that erupted from somewhere around the back of the house, knocking everything to the ground, including the spooked family.

And finally. Stillness. No one is sure just how long the event lasted. It might have been seconds, maybe minutes; but to the McLendon’s, it felt like a hellish eternity. The three of them stand there in shaken silence. Clem braces himself in the doorway of the room. His mother and twin sister huddle together across the room. A single turned over lamp is all that