Black Static #78/#79 Double Issue (Spring 2021)

By TTA Press

The 78/79 double issue has new modern horror fiction by Rhonda Pressley Veit, Neil Williamson, Jo Kaplan, Alexander Glass, Zandra Renwick, Stephen Bacon, Tyler Keevil, Ashley Stokes, Jess Hyslop, and Mike Buckley. The cover art is by Richard Wagner.

UPLAND WILDLIFE
RHONDA PRESSLEY VEIT

DELIVERY
TYLER KEEVIL

OF WRATH
ZANDRA RENWICK

THE GREAT WEST GATE
ALEXANDER GLASS

SUBTEMPLE
ASHLEY STOKES

MOON-BOY
JESS HYSLOP

THE UNDULATING
STEPHEN BACON

THESE BIRDHOUSES ARE EMPTY NOW
JO KAPLAN

THIRTY-TWO TUMBLING TEETH
NEIL WILLIAMSON

A PHANTASMAGORICAL BESTIARY OF THE LA BREA TAR PITS
MIKE BUCKLEY

• Language: English
• Publisher: TTA Press
• Release date: Jun 28, 2021
• ISBN: 9781005308582

TTA Press

TTA Press is the publisher of the magazines Interzone (science fiction/fantasy) and Black Static (horror/dark fantasy), the Crimewave anthology series, TTA Novellas, plus the occasional story collection and novel.

Book preview

UPLAND WILDLIFE

RHONDA PRESSLEY VEIT

Maybe someday – a nice fall day, neither too warm nor too cool, the sky in Carolina blue, the trees in their mustards and umbers – you’ll find yourself lost on a narrow road in the southern mountains, looking for something you can’t find. You might become uneasy. Where is it? Where am I? The road winds and undulates. You’ve been driving for a long time. Wherever you are is certainly remote. But look, there’s a sign up ahead, you have arrived. Now you are somewhere.

Welcome to Normal Valley, home of 250 Good Normal People, the sign says. 250, more or less. Good and normal, more or less. You motor past more signs, for the cinder block town hall crouching by the road, the tiny post office, a few churches obscured by trees. Here and there cows and goats graze bottomland pastures intersected by a stream, which roughly follows the road and is full of mountain trout – browns and brooks that are wily, wary, not easily caught. To see the private residences, you’ll have to slow down and look up. Look carefully. We are on the mountains, the peaked roofs of our houses perched on wooded hillsides overlooking the valley.

We are orchardists, cattlemen, lumbermen, tree farmers. We are predominantly Methodists and Baptists. We are also the worshipers on the dais in the Temple of the Signs, hands withered from rattlesnake bites. The ones who survive the bites carry their snakes to and from the church in vented wooden boxes. The ones who don’t are buried in the churchyard, their holiness journey complete. The sign for the Temple is modest, uninviting – you might pass without noticing it.

There’s a sign for north carolina apples, jelly, cider – hard and soft, and another up the road for Lucille’s Famous Apple Butter. The sign says nothing about the thing Lucille is locally famous for: her delinquent twin girls, who’ve been arrested for vandalism, arson, assorted underage devilry. The twins are famous for being their bad and weird selves. Lucille is famous for not treating them right. There’s a sign for Christmas trees: cut your own, Fresh Fraser Fir. The sign itself is a minor tongue-twister, a little gift for desperately bored children in the back seat of a minivan, who so need the miracle of Santa and the tree and the distraction of the tree’s description: say it three times fast.

Our sign says Horseback Rides. A large red arrow, crudely painted, directs the traveler up a steep dirt road to our stable, invisible from the valley floor. The road switchbacks between the trees and rides like a washboard. You could make it to the stable in a minivan but you’d complain about the trip: how you constantly bottomed out, how you’ll need an alignment, what the dealer might charge to fix the oil pan or the exhaust. My father will say, Ah, well, glad you made it. In winter you wouldn’t have. In winter, we plan ahead. In deep snow or deep mud, if travel is unavoidable, we take a mule to the valley. My father takes down the Horseback Rides sign on November 1st, which, he always points out, is in some parts of the world the Day of the Dead. He may or may not repaint the sign over the winter. He doesn’t paint it often, only when it’s so faded it’s illegible, because, he says, these stupid tourists like shit rustic. He says the word rustic with deep disdain.

There is no sign for my mother’s marijuana operation, which is strictly a word-of-mouth business, for locals. She sells organic herbs, crystals, and Purple Kush to those who need assistance, with one thing or another. She recommends Zig Zag rolling papers, single wide, unbleached and unflavored. She explains to customers how to meditate with lithium quartz when they’re stressed. ‘Stressed’ is when you no longer feel normal, she explains. She sells white sage smudge sticks to cleanse the crystals. She sells abalone shells, firewalls in which the smoldering bundles of sage rest while releasing their cleansing smoke.

One fall day, late in the afternoon, moments before we were to close and lock the gate near the winding road through Normal Valley, a big group from Georgia arrived. Two men, two women, a mouthy grade-school boy and two adolescent girls. They were Bulldog fans sporting red and black fan gear and south Georgia accents, and my father regarded them with immediate suspicion. Despite his own occasional indulgence in televised college football, he considered all hardcore football fans zealots, not unlike the snake-handling congregants at the Temple of the Signs. These were people whose judgement could not be trusted.

We stood at the horse barn watching the Georgia fans bump up our dirt drive in a huge Lincoln Navigator a startling shade of red, in fact the reddest automobile I’d ever seen. The front license plate bore the power ‘G’ logo of the University of Georgia in a black oval. The aura of the car was oddly cosmic – a red planet with a power ‘G’ moon; it was like Mercury had arrived on our mountain, hot as balls and bearing bad news. My father, who’d been repairing a girth, stopped and stared at the Navigator as it crawled, protective of its suspension, over the ruts in our drive. We could see the red-capped heads sway in the front seat, the little boy bounce in the middle row between two plump women who gestured and laughed. The torsos swayed in imperfect unison, as if they’d been touched by the spirit at a revival.

My father sighed and stubbed out his cigarette in a bucket of sand. "Ahhh, shit, he said. Look comin’ here."

My mother, carrying water buckets, emerged from the back of the barn. Lord, look at that car! she said. This was the early aughts; in that time and place an enormous SUV was still something of an oddity.

Dog-dick red, my father said. Only an asshole would drive a car that color. Jilly, go get your brother and sister. This group is gonna need all hands on deck.

Seven, by my count, my mother said. She hustled to return the buckets to the horse stalls.

Yep, my father said. This late in the damn day.

It’s good money, Des. A group that size.

Yep, my father agreed. But we’ll earn it.

The Navigator paused for a moment at the top of the drive. Through the windshield we could see the men in front assessing the place, the mirth in their eyes when they removed their sunglasses. Between them, a bejeweled, manicured finger pointed from the back seat. Park there. And so they did, squarely in front of the hitching post, a dead giveaway that these people had no idea that a hitching post was a parking spot for mules and horses, not cars, certainly not planets bearing red- and black-clad aliens, whom we could only, inevitably, come to regard as invasive species.

*

The timber rattlesnake is a predator native to these mountains, and to stumble across a large adult in its own territory is a natural stress test for the human heart. I say its territory because a timber rattler doesn’t make the trek over hill and dale to the county courthouse to check the survey. It knows where it lives, what it owns. If humans establish residence on, say, eleven forested acres on the side of a mountain in North Carolina, and share a property line with a national forest, odds are decent they share the land with timber rattlers.

The timber rattler is generally a good neighbor. It keeps to itself, would prefer not to be bothered. It tirelessly eliminates rodents you won’t miss: the chipmunks that eat your mother’s bulbs, the squirrels destined to invade your attic, the mice thieving meals from the feed room in the horse barn. The rattlesnake is an ambush predator, lying in wait, its gray back and dark chevrons merging perfectly with leaf litter and the shadows of trees, who are its keepers and confidantes. As the back end of its body tapers to rattles, its color also tapers, darkening to black. It looks like a fat cinder, as if it survived an ordeal of fire, scorched but unconsumed.

I say stumble across a timber rattler in the wild because that’s the only way you’ll meet one. It doesn’t want to meet you. In winter, it has a den in which to hibernate with like-minded friends. In summer it migrates from the den, basks, hunts. It is busy. Every two or three years it has a late summer rendezvous for sex, which, among timber rattlers, is a slow-burn encounter, dominated by touching. They lie against one another, skin to skin. They may lie there for days. His head rubs against her body, over her back. Between them they have nine feet of muscle, six hundred ribs, all that unbroken surface area for contact. They bend and weave. His tail curls beneath her. She won’t ovulate until the following spring but she carries his semen inside her all winter, like a memory. She carries it back to the den. It is inside her, viable, while she hibernates. It is in her dreams. It waits and waits.

You could be lucky or unlucky in your stumbling. If you’re lucky, you stumble too near, hear the rattle, and are sufficiently warned, not bitten. Or your horse steps on the snake and takes the venom in your stead. The horse probably won’t die, but it will suffer, and it’s entirely possible it will be lame for life. (Of course, horses have always suffered for humans and always will: that is their lot in life. Timber rattlers care nothing for horses or their suffering, or for yours.) If you’re really lucky you’ll round a bend on a remote mountain road – maybe it’s an old logging road, on a mountain you can’t name, maybe you can’t even see the peak for the canopy – and find a gravid female basking in the middle of it. She is huge, heavy, stretched out to her full length. Her black tail lifts, as if to warn you, but stands down when you stop in your tracks. She is not impatient. She’s in no hurry to leave. You stand there, your heart pounding, your momentum arrested, until she decides she can no longer tolerate your company. Later in the day she’ll bear live children and hover nearby as they go forth into the world. She can’t protect them from skunks and owls. She can’t teach them all she has learned. In the evening twilight, she’ll lie beside a log and wait for what passes by: a young cottontail, a delicious mouthful, a scream in its throat.

If you’re unlucky, you step on a timber rattler at the base of a tree. You’re miles from home. You’d hoped to provide for the family, you were just going to climb up to your deer stand, but now you’re envenomated. Perhaps you’re doomed. The snake would’ve warned you if he’d had time. He was watching, not for you, but for squirrels. That whole nest of tanagers near your deer stand. The tree – his tree – is a smorgasbord of delicious mouthfuls. Now your calf bleeds and swells and throbs. Now his ribs are broken. Both of you are broken, in so many ways.

Finally, you could encounter a timber rattler in church, in which case both you and the snake are unlucky. From the Gospel of Mark: 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. This is the word of the god of the Temple of the Signs. It’s almost impossible, though, to make a Pentecostal out of a timber rattler. He has his own gods, in rock outcroppings and the root balls of fallen trees, and he likes the gods of Appalachia, stern and unforgiving as they may be. He likes his privacy. He rattles, over and over, trying to tell the serpent handlers. To warn them.

Carl Linnaeus was the first to give the timber rattlesnake a name, to write it in a book. Crotalus horridus. The timber rattler is uninterested in Linnaeus, Latin, or books, for that matter. But of all the words men read and speak and believe, of all the lies and preposterous bullshit, these two words – Crotalus horridus – have the ring of truth.

*

The two men in the front seat of the Navigator were brothers, vacationing with their wives and families. They’d done everything a traveler ought to do in western North Carolina. They’d been tubing on the French Broad, that wide-backed, good-dog of a river. They’d trudged through the Biltmore, suspected it was haunted. They’d gone to a trout farm and plucked rainbows out of traces, with spin reels and canned corn. They’d gone gem mining, the fruits of which had become gaudy Tiger Eye chokers for their wives, and dangling amethyst earrings for the older teenage girl, one Ryleigh Grace.

The younger girl, Rebecca, had dredged up a sapphire, now set in a bracelet she constantly fingered and couldn’t stop staring at. Rebecca was slight, pretty, and looked remarkably like my little sister Miriam, or rather, a more domesticated version of her. She came across as shy and private – not unlike Miriam – and yet easy to read. One could guess that Rebecca’s secrets were the typical woes girls her age penned into pastel journals: unrequited crushes, superficial slights. Miriam’s secrets were darker. Had Miriam kept a journal, it would’ve been bound in vellum, its contents savage.

Rebecca’s father was the quieter of the two brothers. He put his hand on top of her head. Rebecca, here, is my baby, he said to my father. You got something gentle and little enough for my gentle little girl?

His brother hooked a thumb at him. And something big and fat enough for his big fat ass? he asked. He belly-laughed – literally held a hand over his own ample stomach – as if his amusement, so great, pained him.

Shut the hell up, Bob, Rebecca’s father said. He feinted a punch, which only made Bob laugh harder. Rebecca’s father smiled gamely. It was instantly obvious that this brother, who turned out to be Roy, had been laughing at Bob’s jokes his entire life. Roy was the obliging, adoring, put-upon younger sibling. Now in middle age, Bob had a thick head of salty brown hair, and Roy was bald. Bob had the rambunctious boy, Bo, the bossier wife, that Navigator. Roy had a thin goatee, swallow tattoos, aviator sunglasses. He looked like an idea of toughness, and the whole getup paled beside Bob, who – like the Navigator – had his own atmosphere. Rebecca squirmed out of Roy’s grip and joined Bo and Ryleigh Grace.

I got it all, my father said. If you’re under three hundred, able to climb on, and can fit your ass between the horn and cantle, I got something that can carry you.

Bob and Roy and their wives all nodded and laughed. Their laughter said oh yes perfect we approve, thank you kindly, but their eyes – the wives glancing nervously at Miriam and Morris, already tacking up horses – said they had no idea that the horn and cantle were the front and back of a saddle. Their eyes said If we don’t know, how on earth will we know if we fit? What if we can’t climb on? How to communicate with these strange people on the side of this strange mountain? We might as well talk to the horses!

This one is for her, Morris called out. He pointed at Rebecca. He held the reins to a small red horse, a cinnamon gentleman and the kindest animal we owned.

Look at him, Rebecca, Roy said. Ain’t he pretty.

Rebecca had the good sense to look pleased. She twirled that bracelet around her wrist, fingering the stone like a talisman, as if my mother had told her to meditate on it.

Morris gestured at the hitching post. I’d bring him to you but I got nowhere to tie him over there.

Morris, my mother murmured. She didn’t want him to insult the customers, but her warnings had no teeth. Morris had outgrown all warnings. He said and did as he pleased.

Those big mules will take you fellas, my father said. And we have good horses for the rest of your crew. Morris and Jilly and I will be your guides. If you’re pregnant or intoxicated you can’t ride. If you have a heart condition you can’t ride. If you can’t balance yourself you can’t ride. No one under six. And finally, do not go off the trail. He turned, looked pointedly at Bob. "Particularly now, so late in the day."

Bob looked at his watch. Y’all must go to bed early up here!

No, my dears, my father sighed. He’d explained this a thousand times; flatlanders tried his patience. The sun goes to bed early up here. The trail gets dark quick when the sun drops behind the mountains. Anyway, as I was saying. You hear about Eric Rudolph, the Olympic Park bomber?

The men looked at each other, nodded, some part of them clearly wondering if my father was crazy.

Rudolph hid from the law in these mountains for five years. If he’d been smarter, he coulda disappeared forever. I’d hate to see the Bulldogs lose their biggest fans on my watch. I try not to run that kind of operation, you know? Stay on the trail.

The Bulldog reference lifted their spirits. The adults lined up by the mounting blocks; Morris and I would leg up the kids. Bo, the youngest of the group, was also the pushiest. He had desires and they would be known. They would be announced at full volume so that, should Morris and I fail to deliver, his parents over at the mounting blocks would hear him roar.

That gray one is mine! Bo shouted, pointing to the pony Miriam had already saddled up for him.

The pony was in fact Miriam’s, though she was twelve now and shooting up like a weed, as my mother said. Because Miriam had outgrown him, the pony had been relegated to the riding herd. We had a little shtick we did with the pony. Now who should ride this dappled good boy? Why, he’s special – one of our best! His rider must be juuuust right! Not too big, for he’s just a pony, and not too small, for he has a lot of heart! We have to choose carefully! The pony would stand there placidly, like the sword in the stone awaiting the chosen one.

With kids like Bo, though, we didn’t bother, because we knew from experience that this prince from the plains of Georgia would deliver his own performance. It would not be the shy delight of a child amazed he’d been chosen to ride such an animal. He would – and did – simply claim it. The pony, meanwhile, was an apt mount. He had a high tolerance for ineptitude. He was gentle, protective of the timid. And yet he was not above clotheslining a rough-handed rider under low-hanging tree limbs, or attempting to scrape him off against a fence.

You called it, little brother, Morris said. He passed Cinnamon’s reins to me and waved Bo over to the gray pony.

Miriam gazed skeptically at the boy and stroked the pony’s face. She whispered to the pony, something I couldn’t hear.

Morris picked up Bo by his armpits and put him in the saddle, where he immediately kicked both heels into the pony’s ribs.

The pony started, lifted his head, pinned his ears, and looked disapprovingly back at Bo.

What are you doing? Miriam said. "You don’t kick him