The Fiends in the Furrows Read online

  Table of Contents

  Frontispiece

  Title Page

  Title II & Copyright

  Dedication

  Table of Contents

  Introduction

  Sire of the Hatchet

  Back Along the Old Track

  The Fruit

  The Jaws of Ouroboros

  The First Order of Whaleyville’s Divine Basilisk Handlers

  Pumpkin, Dear

  The Way of the Mother

  Leave the Night

  Revival

  Biographies

  Credits

  End

  INTRODUCTION

  What is Folk Horror? At its heart, this highly subjective subgenre of Horror is weird fiction firmly rooted in European pagan tradition—with superstition, folklore, belief, and modernity clashing in ill-omened and menacing ways.

  Historically, it has been exemplified in literature in the works of British writers such as M.R. James, Arthur Machen, Algernon Blackwood, Susan Cooper, and Robert Aickman, who successfully captured the persistent eeriness of English landscapes and the essence of ambiguity and occult unease, presented in ancient pagan imagery and motifs grafted to the paranoia of modern life.

  Onscreen, Folk Horror’s unholy trinity remains The Witchfinder General (1968), The Blood on Satan’s Claw (1971), and the canonical The Wicker Man (1973)—these movies eerily harnessed a spirit of their time, during a time of exemplary British Horror films. They continue to cast a long shadow in framing popular perceptions of both the possibilities and limitations of Folk Horror.

  Other movies, such as The Children of the Corn (1984), The Blair Witch Project (1999) and, more recently, Kill List (2011), The Witch (2015), and The Ritual (2017) have picked up some of the uncanny elements that were present in those earlier films, some with an American setting and spin, and with strikingly memorable, sometimes iconic visions of Folk Horror.

  The Fiends in the Furrows: An Anthology of Folk Horror attempts to bring more attention to the literary aspects of Folk Horror, both as an homage to its origins, as well as exploring less-traveled paths that might point toward new directions for it, as it continues to develop.

  In this collection of nine short stories, you’ll find Coy Hall’s haunting “Sire of the Hatchet” following a pair of hapless souls attempting to carry out their dreadful mission in a frightfully insular community.

  Sam Hicks delivers readers “Back Along the Old Track” into a brooding, multi-generational horror, while Lindsay King-Miller’s “The Fruit” stretches Folk Horror into the fecund fields of a monstrous orchard. Steve Toase hurls the reader into “The Jaws of Ouroboros” and a nightmare landscape of ravenous megaliths.

  Eric J. Guignard’s disarmingly folksy “The First Order of Whaleyville’s Divine Basilisk Handlers” serves up the first of several scaled menaces that slithered their way into our anthology, and a theme that organically arose around snake handling.

  Romey Petite’s unforgettable “Pumpkin, Dear” pursues a doomed farm couple through the growing seasons and back again, while Stephanie Ellis brings “The Way of the Mother” into a more classically Folk Horror posture, in a land of ghastly rituals and all-powerful god-monsters.

  Zachary Von Houser’s “Leave the Night” carries its protagonist into a deeply traditional Folk Horror nightmare, as a whiskey-addled protagonist keen to escape the city soon finds himself in over his head. Finally, S.T. Gibson’s “Revival” finds that old time religion venomously snaking its way back, to the peril of those who would dare to dance with vipers and tempt Fate, itself.

  Nosetouch Press is proud to feature these writers, and we hope that Horror fans who are looking for both traditional Folk Horror tales as well as ones that seek to clear and till new ground for it find these stories to be as horrifying and entertaining as we did.

  We’re looking forward to seeing how Folk Horror continues to grow and evolve as an offshoot of Horror, and hope The Fiends in the Furrows helps plant those sinister seeds where they can thrive.

  You reap what you sow,

  David T. Neal

  It looked more like a child.

  The mound drew him. Hutter stopped in the road so suddenly that his companion walked ten paces before noticing. The companion, too, then stopped and turned, but his eyes were glazed and tired rather than curious. He reminded Hutter of the hour, of their destination. His face was drawn and pinched, vitriolic.

  “Something crawled from the hillock,” Hutter whispered, cautious of his voice in the surrounding forest. It dawned on him that neither he nor his assistant had spoken in several hours. The road seemed nothing more than a vein in a vast body here, hidden once but now teased to the fore and blue. Was it days of travel that infected him? You’re seeing things, he thought.

  “Codswallop,” the companion, a rogue named Wolfric, said.

  Hutter placed his satchel on the dirt. He drew the hatchet from the twine at his waist and gripped a handle laced with carvings. He moved into the shadow of the overhanging trees. It was summer and the canopy was thick. The cool wind from the tree line felt anything but pleasant, however. The forest was alive with the chatter of insects and the stench of rotten vegetation.

  Wolfric, a nervous man without provocation, was at his side now, a dagger longer than his hand in his grip. “A highwayman?” he asked. God knows he’d feared such a happening for the entirety of the journey. As the companion of an executioner, Wolfric had a head full of stories. If there were a time when he believed all men were human, it had been before he made the acquaintance of Hutter. And with executioners, there was always the specter of revenge.

  “It looked more like a child,” Hutter said.

  “You need an axe for a child?” Wolfric, mercurial, now laughed.

  “It looked like a child.”

  “Why don’t we get on, then?”

  Hutter found himself being honest. “I don’t know,” he admitted. After all, the mound drew him. There was something magnetic in its pulse. With that, he stepped through a ditch and moved towards the mound. Wolfric remained on the road. Hutter mashed dead leaves, causing a racket. He stood out, a lumbering oaf with a blade, but he couldn’t help himself. The mound looked too small, too well shaped, to be natural. It stood only ten feet from the floor of the forest. If man-made, he surmised, thinking of his home in Saxony where there were similar mounds, then this was what his father called one of the old fairy doors. The ancestors of man, heathens of filth, erected mounds to worship devils. His father, a member of the Pietist sect of the Lutheran faith, was colorful in his hatred for pagans. Ours is a curious heritage, Hutter thought, stepping still closer. We reject it and admire it. From what he had heard on the coast, Indians across the sea built mounds, too. Cathedrals of filth, he thought, but everyone wants to see them.

  What had he seen crawl from the knoll? Was it more than a shadow show? A feeling with depth, akin to dread, spread inside. Now so close to the mound, he faced the real question. Could a tangle of roots scuttle forth like an infant?

  Hutter circled the mound, hatchet at the ready, but found nothing but leaves and lances of sunlight. Gnats swarmed his head every moment he stopped. He circled twice, but was cautious not to touch, let alone climb, the mound. The only smell was that of raw earth, pleasing rather than threatening.

  Wolfric stood on the road in sunlight, cupping his hand against his mouth, shouting things about the hour.

  A fetus of roots, Hutter thought. An abomination. God, how it appeared so clearly in his mind. “It’s nothing,” he called out. “Branches,” he said. “Shadows.” The words stuck in his throat. Hutter made his way again, still gripping the hatchet, toward the road, the only thoroughf
are to the village of his calling. His destination was a hamlet of the English called Strattonwick. His duty was that of an executioner.

  Suffering is holy.

  Strattonwick hung like a broken jaw above the generous floodplain, disjointed and cockeyed, almost strewn across two hillsides. The village possessed the symmetry of an unexpected heave, of something spewed. This was one of the old communal villages, everything shared by the inhabitants and everything owned by the local Earl. The people were more like employees than inhabitants of the estate. The plain abutted the branch of a dark river, and vegetables grew plentiful in the field’s rich soil. Men with beaten utensils moved between the rows, swatting insects that preyed on their sweat. A single road skirted the gardens, winding up the hillside on one end and disappearing into a forest on the other. The road was empty of traffic save for two bedraggled strangers on foot. The sun was nearly down, so shadows moved in the branches, deepening. The moon was faintly visible in the sky. Mosquitos and bats swarmed the slow-moving river. It was rumored in Strattonwick that a single wolf had somehow found its way into the forest again. Sometimes men listened for the predator, but it was never seen. The men in the gardens did see the travelers, and they stopped their work, standing erect and staring.

  Wolfric sneered at Hutter. How he hated his fellow man. Hutter adjusted his satchel and kept his pace. Instinctively, he touched the hatchet at his waist. He understood men like this, petty and defensive folk who talked honor and dishonor while grubbing in the earth, and who watched all strangers like they were wolves in a nursery. “Chin up,” he told Wolfric. “We’ll be leaving the richer.”

  “I’d like to smash them all with the back end of an axe.” His face went red as blood, and the veins of hard drinking emerged along his nose.

  Hutter shook his head. Unlike Wolfric, he accepted his place in the world. Maybe it was because his father, too, had been an executioner. As a boy, he’d learned how men treated those in the dishonorable trades. His own sons would face the same looks one day. Wolfric claimed higher descent, though this was dubious. His family, too, was scum, his father a mercenary.

  Three men emerged from the gardens and walked to the road. Each of the men held a hoe as if it were a cudgel, and each tried to ignore the insects at their shoulders. Occasionally, a hand went up in defense, but it was an act begrudged. Hutter stopped Wolfric, observing a custom he’d learned as a journeyman. From his satchel, he retrieved the papers that identified him as a master in the trade. The men, though they certainly could not read, would demand to see papers. Then they would make a show of letting their eyes linger, full of consternation, on what appeared to be meaningless curls and tangles. Custom transcended education.

  When the two groups met at the base of an incline, all was silent save for the chorus of frogs on the shore and the drone of insects in the woods. The men smelled of oxen feces. “We’re here for the girl,” Hutter said. He offered the papers, pressed with the signature of his father, the man to whom, so many years ago, he’d apprenticed.

  There was not an elder among the workers. All three of the men were youthful, the age of new fathers. The man who’d accepted the papers stepped closer, separating himself. He had a dirt-scarred face and a bulbous nose. He was balding, save for a shock of blond hair at the crown of his head. He spoke with the gait of an imbecile. He was not one to be mocked, though. He was thick in the shoulders and possessed hands like granite. He looked like he could tear a man’s arm out by the roots. “They’re waiting,” he said. “You go ask for Master Croft. You show him this.”

  Hutter took back the papers and nodded. The men turned towards the field, and they whispered to one another. Sentinels, he thought.

  “And that’s the best of them,” Wolfric said. “The spokesman.”

  “I notice you waited till he was gone to say that.”

  “I’m only a fool when I drink,” he said.

  Hutter and Wolfric walked up the hillside. This branch of the forest road ended with a smattering of thatched-roof hovels and stone chimneys. Women and children and old men moved about the structures and a series of roiling cauldrons. Oxen moved about with relative freedom, like pet dogs. A fenced sty kept pigs at bay. The only building with any multi-generational permanence was the Strattonwick church house, built with cut planks and fortified with river stones. Still, even this structure was barren, lacking ornamentation. The church was squat and grey and sturdy, and it stood beside a stall of milking cows.

  An elder waited at the door of the church, looking pensive. Despite the evening heat, he wore the heavy brown coat of a Puritan. Beneath his hat, his grey hair was cut like a bowl, another mark of his inclination. He was an austere man, judging by the look on his face. He glanced up, revealing a grizzled visage, scarred by a sword thrust at his cheek. One of his hands was missing, and the skin at his wrist was slick and shining. He was once a soldier, Hutter surmised.

  “We’re looking for Master Croft,” Hutter said. Wolfric, tense, stood silently at his side.

  “I’m Croft,” the old man said. He reached out and accepted the papers offered. With a succinct, educated manner, he scanned the document. He covered Hutter and Wolfric with a quick look, too, stopping a moment on the exposed hatchet at Hutter’s waist and the dagger at Wolfric’s. “Very well,” he said. “Master Hutter, welcome. And your companion?”

  “Wolfric Blum, my assistant.”

  “Master Blum,” Croft said. “I’m Israel Croft, the pastor here in Strattonwick. The schoolteacher and magistrate for Lord Allingham, likewise. This is my mission,” he said, almost defensively. Then he drank in the smoky, putrid air of the village. Godly intentions, he seemed to say, were nothing to be embarrassed about.

  “Suffering is holy,” Wolfric observed.

  Israel Croft could send a man to hell with his glance, and he let it linger on Wolfric.

  Jesus, Hutter thought. Croft was fire and brimstone.

  “Come into the church,” Croft finally said. “You can sleep here, but nowhere else. I cannot invite you to my home, you understand. It would be dishonorable. It wouldn’t be proper. And there’s no inn.”

  “Indeed, it wouldn’t,” Hutter said. He did his best to pretend the rebuke had no impact.

  The three men walked into the open church. It was musty and hot, dark from a lack of windows.

  “I’ll introduce you to the quarry in the morning,” Croft said. “We’ll pay you to interrogate her. Then, of course, we’ll pay for what follows.”

  “That’s understood,” Hutter said.

  With that, Croft began showing the executioners around his meager church. When it was too dark to see, he lit a precious candle and extended the flame with his quivering hand. He promised to pray for their souls. That, too, would be part of their pay. He offered the men the “Harlot Pews” at the back of the church for sleeping. He personally brought the executioners two bowls of gruel when the night was full.

  I saw it, too.

  In the complete darkness of the church, stretched on the hard, wooden pews, Hutter tried to sleep, but his mind kept wandering to the mound he’d spied earlier in the day. He turned from shoulder to shoulder, rustling the blanket draped across his legs. Fear, of which he was not proud, grew in his heart. He thought of his own sons, boys who complained of things in the dark. Shameful, he thought, for a man to feel this way.

  Wolfric, in the pew directly ahead, stirred, too. His voice, when it came out of the darkness, was not unwelcome. From what he asked, it was clear he, too, was thinking of the mound.

  “What’d you see today?” he asked. The two men had not spoken for hours, and now this.

  Hutter turned the question over in his mind. “You’re wanting honesty.”

  “I am.” Wolfric had to be deep in thought to be so solemn. Something ate at him.

  The image had not left Hutter’s thoughts. He knew it well. “Tree roots shaped like an infant, like bones arranged in a skeleton. It moved from the mound.”

  “It crawled, di
dn’t it?” Wolfric asked.

  “It crawled out of the mound. I saw it no more, though.”

  Wolfric breathed deeply. For several minutes, he said nothing. Wind, the front of a budding thunderstorm, moved through the plank walls, trembling the wood and whistling through stone. The change of air made the cows outside the wall stir and complain. Hutter was prepared to let the matter drop, and to try for sleep again.

  “I saw it, too,” Wolfric said.

  This was not the stability Hutter had sought when answering the question. He wanted to be rebuked for his childishness. He had no desire for affirmation. “On the mound?” The wind became something physical in his mind then and he started with every sigh the storm caused in the darkness.

  “After. It was following us along the road, crawling in the trees.”

  “Watching us? Why?” Hutter had been careful not to touch the mound, and he said as much.

  Wolfric did not offer an answer. Neither he nor Hutter dared say what was on their mind.

  She drowned the child in earth.

  “Witchcraft,” Israel Croft said. “Witches are the Devil’s soldiers, and this girl is no less.” The Puritan led the executioners through Strattonwick. He was no stranger to having a captive audience, and he treated Hutter and Wolfric as such. He couldn’t help but to preach, even in response to simple questions. He prattled on about witches.

  The villagers were up with the morning sun, surveying the damage of a quick thunderstorm that had rushed through prior to dawn. The sky was clear now and the air was muggy, thick. Birds made racket as they flew down to the river. When the executioners passed, the villagers looked away, lest they be tainted. It was a ritual these people had learned from their parents. The gesture, in their minds at least, somehow inoculated them against dishonor. Not even poor folk, not even the rogues who hauled human shit to the gardens or carried squawking chickens by their feet to the slaughter, felt akin to Hutter and Wolfric. They were as good as outlaws. No one bothered to greet the men who had arrived with the sole intention of doing Strattonwick’s dirty work.