The Folks Read online

  THE FOLKS

  By Ray Garton

  A Macabre Ink Production

  Macabre Ink is an imprint of Crossroad Press

  Digital Edition published by Crossroad Press

  Smashwords edition published at Smashwords by Crossroad Press

  Digital Edition Copyright © 2018 Ray Garton

  Cover by Kealan Patrick Burke

  LICENSE NOTES

  This eBook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This eBook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each person you share it with. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then you should return to the vendor of your choice and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

  Meet the Author

  Ray Garton has been writing novels, novellas, short stories, and essays for more than 30 years. His work spans the genres of horror, crime, suspense, and even comedy. Live Girls was nominated for the Bram Stoker Award in 1988, and Garton received the Grand Master of Horror Award at the 2006 World Horror Convention. He lives in northern California with his wife Dawn, where he is at work on a new novel.

  BIBLIOGRAPHY

  NOVELS AND NOVELLAS

  411

  Bestial

  Biofire

  Crawlers

  Crucifax

  Dark Channel

  Darklings

  Live Girls

  Lot Lizards

  Loveless

  Night Life

  Meds

  Murder Was My Alibi

  Ravenous

  Scissors

  Seductions

  Serpent Girl

  Sex and Violence in Hollywood

  Shackled

  The Folks

  The Folks 2

  The Loveliest Dead

  The Man in the Palace Theater

  The New Neighbor

  Trade Secrets

  Trailer Park Noir

  Vortex

  Zombie Love

  COLLECTIONS

  Methods of Madness

  'Nids And Other Stories

  Pieces of Hate

  Slivers of Bone

  The Disappeared and Other Stories

  The Girl in the Basement and Other Stories

  Wailing and Gnashing of Teeth

  DISCOVER CROSSROAD PRESS

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  For Dawn…

  Table of Contents

  One

  Two

  Three

  Four

  Five

  Six

  Seven

  Eight

  Nine

  Ten

  Afterword

  One

  On the morning of a day when thoughts turn to the dead rising from their graves, I stood by while one of the dead was put into hers. Carla Firth. I had dated her once last spring, just before I dropped out of college. It had been a terrible date, but only because we had nothing in common, nothing to talk about. She was a pretty blonde, funny, and she never hesitated to look me in the eye, never turned quickly away from my face. A nice girl. Of course, she had to be to go out with me. She was a political science major and all she could talk about was the upcoming presidential election. She was a Republican and thought George W. Bush would not only win, but would be one of the best presidents the country’s ever had. She and a few other students had attended the Republican convention in Philadelphia back in July. Her best friend, a chubby Korean girl named Lisa, had been on the news the night before. She’d tearfully told the reporter that the last time she saw Carla, she was still riding on the high she’d gotten from the convention. But on that rainy October morning, she was riding in a black metal box with brass handles, down into the ground. Her body torn and mangled by someone, her pretty face mutilated. Happy Halloween.

  The sky was the color of rotting teeth and an indifferent drizzle pattered on all the black umbrellas around the open grave. Someone—I think it was Carla’s mother—wailed, and the sound seemed to hover over the gathering even after she stopped.

  It had been quiet until then. The sound went through me like steel. The withering sobs that followed were almost worse. My signal to leave. I have never been able to tolerate the sound of crying. Even if I know better, I am always certain that I’m the cause.

  Everyone called it simply The Village but its real name was Pinecrest. It was halfway up Mt. Crag and overlooked the town of the same name below. The Granite River ran by at the foot of the mountain, and the bridge that crossed it and led into the town of Mount Crag sometimes flooded in the winter. When that happened, many of the college students on the hill—mostly those who were there against their will, put there by parents who thought a Christian education would do them some good—were cut off from their supply of beer, liquor, and cigarettes.

  The town of Mount Crag was a greeting card. The sidewalks were always clean, lawns and hedges were always neat and green. The old Methodist church in the center of town was over a hundred years old, white with a steeple and a bell that rang at six in the morning, noon, six in the evening, and midnight. There was a Safeway on one side of town, and a locally-owned market called Shop-Rite on the other. The diner was owned by Carrie Lodge, single mother of two boys, Keith and Evan, eight and ten respectively. It was called the Pantry Shelf, but everyone referred to it simply as the diner.

  It had taken a while for me to muster the courage to go into the diner the first time. I was pretty sure I would not be welcome. People do not want to see me while they’re eating. But Carrie made me feel welcome. I’d been eating breakfast and dinner there since Grandma stopped talking to me, and we had gotten to know each other pretty well.

  I scared Carrie’s boys at first, but we soon became friends, too. Most kids are initially scared of me, but their fears are much easier to allay than the ones hiding behind the smiles of the perfectly controlled adults. All I have to do with kids is tell them how it happened. I tell them about waking up in the hospital afterward, seeing my new face for the first time months later. I tell it like a story, and by the time I’m done, they’re smiling and I’m a hero for surviving it all. Even the ones who cry the first time they see me are fine with it after that, once they understand it.

  Adults, on the other hand, see my face and know perfectly well what happened without being told, and yet they see only themselves, because they know it could happen to them. Or to a spouse, a child, a lover. What would I do? they wonder, and the thought is as plain on their faces as their forced, rigid smiles.

  When I first came to Pinecrest to live with Grandma, I used to get stared at a lot.

  Even laughed at. B
ut I found if I introduced myself to everyone I met, staring and laughing became harder to do because suddenly I had a name and I was a person, not just a hideous pink face made up of mangled strips of scar tissue. I had no hair on the left side of my head, so I took extra care to keep what I had left neatly trimmed and combed. Always dressed as well as I could, tried to present myself well. I had a lot to make up for.

  The people of Mount Crag referred to the people of Pinecrest as “them Christian folks on the mountain.” It was noncommittal, but most of them disliked the Christians and their college intensely. Even many of the Christians who lived in Mount Crag kept their distance from those on the mountain. The students of the College of the Hand of God put on various revivals and programs in town every year for extra credit. Few ever showed up. Some of the students roamed Mount Crag day after day, handing out literature and trying to convert the townspeople. It wasn’t an easy job because nobody was interested.

  I attended Hand of God for almost one year. Out of the blue, Grandma received a letter from the president of the college, Dr. Elijah Morton, saying that an anonymous benefactor had set up a college fund for me, and I was to begin the next semester.

  Grandma was thrilled, of course, because she thought I would finally see the light and accept Jesus Christ as my personal lord and savior. I had been hearing that for so long, it did not mean anything anymore. It sounded like “New and Improved,” or “Money Back Guarantee.” Meant nothing.

  I knew it had to be one of the Bollingers. Who else could it be? I sure didn’t have any rich relatives, and if it was one of my relatives, then it had to be a scam. Maybe it was something the Bollingers did regularly, although I had never heard anything about it.

  The family had dwindled over the decades, and what was left of the Bollingers lived on the opposite side of Mt. Crag from the town. Their odd house was a series of blocky structures that crawled up the mountain between jutting shelves of gray rock.

  I had seen it only from a distance. It was enormous and looked as old as the mountain, yet it was still innovative in its bizarre combination of organic and art deco architecture. It stood out boldly from the trees and rocks, all sharp corners and graceful lines, and yet, at certain angles—and the angles never seemed to be exactly the same twice—it dissolved like a mirage to become more trees and rocks, just another part of the mountain. There were other houses up there that had been lived in, at one time or another, by some of the Bollingers, all of them huge and ominous, but long empty, rotting under twisted, smothering vines and entered only by the wild animals that made the mountain their home. Only the gigantic structure on the other side of the mountain remained occupied and maintained. It was the only one that looked alive.

  No one was sure how many Bollingers lived there. A woman named Amanda Bollinger was occasionally dropped off in the middle of town by a long, old, shiny, black limousine that smacked of wartime Germany. Or The Addams Family. I don’t know that much about old cars. There, she would spend the day wandering the sidewalks, shopping, having coffee, a light lunch. No one knew how she fit into the once massive—but still rich and powerful—family, and she wasn’t talking. She came into the diner sometimes while I was seated at the counter with my coffee and cigarettes. Always said hello, even knew my name—I had no idea how at the time—and sometimes we exchanged pleasant small talk. She always wore dull, colorless clothes that hung loosely on her, with her dark hair in a bun at the back of her head. Somewhat plain but with unblemished, creamy skin and a friendly smile. She cheerfully greeted everyone, but never went beyond small talk, like the weather, the election, the fact that there seemed to be fewer wolves howling around the mountain these days, that sort of thing. Later in the afternoon, that long, mean-looking car with its toothy chrome grill would come pick her up again and drive her away.

  Most of the students at Hand of God were from wealthy families. The tuition was exorbitant, and included none of the many expenses that come with moving someplace new to go to school full time. The small percentage of students who did not come from money attended on scholarships and loans. Some of them were downright poor. You could always tell which students they were—the ones in the humiliating clothes who sat separately from everyone else in the cafeteria. I always sat with them. They were more fun. And far more accepting.

  If my tuition indeed came from the Bollingers, what on earth had possessed them to send me to college? Except for my occasional empty exchanges with Amanda in the diner, I had never known or even met any of them. Had the decision to send me to Hand of God been a random one? Or had they been watching me, looking into my life with invisible eyes? It kind of gave me the creeps. But for Grandma’s sake, I didn’t question it.

  I did not find Jesus at the College of the Hand of God. They talked about him a lot, had a lot of pictures of him hanging around, even had him out in front of the administration building on a twelve-foot cross, but I never saw any sign of him there. I had some good teachers, got a good education while I was there, if you don’t count the creationist science classes. Unfortunately, it came with mandatory church attendance once a week and prayer meetings three times a week. On top of that, the reading material I could bring on campus was subject to restrictions. I had started reading for pleasure—and to forget my pain—during my long hospital stays. I had read everything I could get my hands on, and had not shed the habit since. But for bringing the wrong kind of books on campus, I could be subject to fines, or even expulsion. Science fiction, horror, mystery, anything even vaguely sexual—they were all prohibited. I might have been able to put up with the stiff rules and endless preaching—not just in church and prayer meetings, but in daily life as well, because I was seen as a troubled soul to be saved, and was adopted by many as a “project”—if it had not been for all the unsolicited explanations for what had happened to me. They started slowly at first. Once from the professor of my Bible class, again from one of the campus nurses, and from a couple of smiling, expensively-dressed students.

  “It was God’s will.”

  Referring, of course, to my face. At first, I was able to tell myself they weren’t thinking, didn’t realize exactly what they were saying. But after a while, I began to wonder why the hell they didn’t realize exactly what they were saying. Weren’t their mouths attached to their brains? Then one day, it became too much.

  Pastor Knotts asked me to choose and read a passage of scripture in church before the congregation. It was a little honor now and then bestowed upon carefully selected students. So I picked out a couple of verses from the book of Matthew, and after I’d read them, I turned to leave the dais. Pastor Knotts grabbed my arm and pulled me back to the pulpit, put his arm around my shoulders.

  “I’d like to introduce to our congregation today an extraordinary young man, and an exemplary student at Hand of God,” Pastor Knotts said in his even, perfectly modulated voice. He sounded like a game show announcer giving a dramatic reading of a newspaper’s obituaries. “His name is Andy Sayers and he comes into our loving fold after much hardship and pain.”

  I wanted to run from the building and never show my face there again. I wanted to strangle Knotts. I wanted to strangle myself. He went on and on and on, and his words melted together into a kind of psychedelic blur of humiliating sound, until he said:

  “—of course, that it was God’s will.” Knotts turned to me with a long-toothed smile, reached out his hand, and I automatically shook it. “I would like to welcome you here to our mountain, Andy, and I want you to know—”

  “Wait a second,” I said, frowning. “Did…did you just say that this—” I pointed to my face. “—that what happened to my face, did you just say that was… God’s will?”

  His smile faltered as he dropped my hand, stumbled over a few words. “Well, uh, ahem, er, we all know the Bible promises that all things work together for—”

  “You really believe that God wanted this to happen to me?”

  The smile was gone and his posture became stiffer than
usual—which I, until that moment, had thought to be physically impossible. “As Christians, Andrew, we believe that God has a purpose in everything he—”

  I raised my voice. “Yes or no, do you believe this was God’s will?”

  His already creased face wrinkled even more and took on the look of a soft, rotting apple collapsing in on itself. His jaw clenched and he said, “Yes, we do believe that it was God’s will, Andrew. Of course we do.”

  I spread my arms beseechingly and shouted, “Then why the fuck do you worship the sick bastard?”

  Grandma’s wail began the instant I said the word “fuck” and did not die out until shortly after I finished my question. I started across the dais, but stopped and turned back to him as a murmur grew into noisy chatter from the congregation. “I’ve been here almost a year!” I shouted. “Why the hell are you welcoming me now?”

  Grandma let loose another long one as I went out a side door, down a hall and out the back. No more church for me. And no more College of the Hand of God. I sent President Morton a letter of thanks to be forwarded to my benefactor, and a letter explaining that I would not be returning to my classes. I did it all very quickly, before they could kick me out.

  Grandma hasn’t spoken to me since.

  Mt. Crag was blanketed by a thick forest of green, punctuated by great craggy shelves of stone that jutted from its sides, hence its name. A year ago, a fire had swept over the north face of the mountain, the college side, but had been under control just as everyone in Pinecrest was getting ready to evacuate. It had left the ground and naked tree trunks black as night. For days after the last flames were extinguished, tendrils of smoke had risen slowly, like lazy ghosts, from that side of the mountain. Smoke hovered in the summer sky over the Village and the town for what seemed like an unnaturally long time, as if it had no intention of dissipating. Driving up the mountain was like driving through some nightmare landscape that had been created for a horror movie. Ever since the fire, people had been complaining about how ugly it was, how beautiful it used to be. But somehow, it had always looked that way to me, even before the fire.