Poisoned Soil: A Supernatural Thriller Read online

  Copyright

  POISONED SOIL. Copyright ® 2012 by Tim Young. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote brief passages in a published review.

  POISONED SOIL is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons (living or dead), events or locations is entirely coincidental.

  First Edition

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available upon request

  ISBN-10: 0-9832717-1-2

  ISBN-13: 978-0-9832717-1-0

  Publisher Contact Information

  Harmony Publishing

  www.harmonypub.com

  Acknowledgements

  It’s one thing to write a novel; to conceive a story, discover the characters and let the words flow unfiltered and, at times, in disarray. It’s another thing to polish those words into a gripping, high quality novel. One in which readers can get happily lost without stumbling over mistakes in grammar, spelling and logic. My goal was to not only share a story with you, but to ensure the work was of the highest quality. To achieve that end, several kind and competent people poured over the manuscript and helped shape the final outcome of this novel. I owe them an enormous debt of gratitude.

  Sharon Landress Hasting edited the final manuscript, corrected punctuation, pointed out inconsistencies and offered valuable developmental insights. She was generous with her time, accurate in her work and a real pleasure to work with.

  After the editing round, I solicited a group of volunteer beta readers to assess the quality of the story, and to look closely for holes and inconsistencies. Amanda Higginbotham, Amelia McCain, Jill Perez, Eric Wagoner and my good friend, “Kupcake,” read the story with interest, suggested phrasings to improve the flow, corrected spelling errors and pointed out areas where a reader might be confused. Their generous feedback allowed me to make those subtle but important tweaks, like adding the final handful of spices to the sauce that, I hope, will allow readers to become absorbed by the story. So to my editor and beta readers, please accept my most sincere thanks.

  Finally, I owe the largest debt to my wife and ideal reader, Liz. She’s the one I hope to impress the most, and she’s the one I listen to most closely. Before sharing the manuscript with beta readers, Liz labored through the first draft and pointed out, shall we say...opportunities for improvement. On all points, she was right, and helped the story come to life. I love you, Liz!

  Prologue

  Baldev knelt on the damp, forest floor and wept with the knowledge that his remaining breaths were few. With tears in his eyes and rage in his heart, the Cherokee priest looked to the sky in disbelief. A flood of sorrow streamed down the crevices of his cheeks, weathered and red as the Georgia clay. He wiped his final tears, kissed the beads that hung from his neck, and prayed for the strength to do what he must. As he inhaled the sweet scent of pine that perfumed the forest, he rose to his feet.

  There, in the midst of a vast wilderness, he stood among the sickly beasts—all that remained of his people’s way of life. He surveyed the grief in the animals’ faces, mirror images of his own suffering, as he shook his head with fury and utter disillusionment that he alone was the last of the seventeen thousand Georgian Cherokees. The tribe’s livestock accepted their fates, just as the last of the Cherokee had, and stood prepared to surrender their flesh. Baldev vowed not to let their lives go to waste. Rather, he would sacrifice them in an enduring act of retribution against greed and oppression.

  Summoning the strength of a nation, he raised his walking stick; its razor-sharp root spikes protruding like gnarly hair over the deranged face he had carved for its head. Pointing it toward the summit, he commanded the animals to the top of Rabun Bald, a mountain possessed by fire-breathing demons, according to his tribe’s beliefs.

  Atop the mountain, Baldev summoned a witch, the Raven Mocker, to torment and shorten the animals’ lives. The Cherokee angel of death—most feared of all evil witches—appeared in the form of a shrieking raven and claimed the heart of each animal, adding their unused lifetimes to its own. As the witch tormented, Baldev mercifully sliced the throat of each animal and watched the blood pour out and stain a huge granite boulder, forever poisoning the soil. He murmured a prayer in reverence of the animals’ sacrifice as the putrid blackish fluid seeped into the Appalachian mountainside. There, it would wait with eternal patience to punish greed and oppression. To punish, any soul not of pure Cherokee heart, who dared cohabit the soil.

  For sixty years, no one occupied the mountainside and the evil lingered in the pitch-black soil.

  Then, in the spring of 1898, a hardscrabble family of six in search of a plot to call home, veered north off Warwoman Creek and claimed a clearing on Rabun Bald. The father, Samuel Dixon, had come to Rabun County in 1867 at the age of two when his own father, a wool sorter from Bradford, England, came to southern Appalachia for its warmer weather and land to farm. It pleased Samuel to find a homesite just as peaceful as the one his brother Joshua had settled on nearby Rainey Mountain. He knelt and dug into the richest, blackest soil his lily-white hands had ever touched.

  While Samuel harvested lumber to construct a small cabin, his wife, Sarah, and their four children tended to the small flock of sheep that Samuel’s father had bequeathed him, as they planted the few herb and vegetable seeds they had.

  They never got the chance to harvest a crop.

  The first ominous sign appeared within days on three-year-old Rachel’s hands. As Sarah examined the first few itchy bumps, she attributed them to poison ivy while she soothed her daughter’s skin with the marshmallow root she carried for such ailments. Later that evening, a solitary, black bead of blood ran from Rachel’s left nostril. Her mother wiped it away with her apron, only to unleash a river of blood from Rachel’s nose. As she mirrored her mother’s panic, Rachel’s mouth opened wide to reveal a pool of blackish blood. Sarah’s concern turned into panic as, one by one, each family member was afflicted with the same symptoms. By then, pus-spewing black ulcers covered Rachel’s body—all but her head—and converged like summer freckles, cloaking the child in a suffocating suit of death. As the full moon crept over the evening horizon, Rachel lay dead in her mother’s arms and black ulcers smothered everyone.

  Distraught and hysterical, Sarah huddled the dying children under the roof of the cabin as the wind whipped through the unfinished walls. Nausea and fever took grip and enveloped the family in a nightmarish state. The woods seemed to come alive as frigid winds howled from the top of Rabun Bald, as if an angry God demanded repentant sacrifice. Samuel stood wide-eyed, his double-barreled shotgun in hand as he searched the darkness for a demon he could extinguish. A demon he could understand.

  As the forest soil exhaled its deadly breath, Samuel’s fever escalated to a state of panicked desperation. He gathered his stricken family and demanded they leave the cursed ground and follow the moon’s light to refuge. They left Rachel’s body behind and blindly stumbled through the mountain’s dark shadows, all the while saying prayers aloud for salvation. Samuel came to a sudden halt and held out the palm of his hand to silence the others. He tilted his head as he began to hear the hushed whispers that taunted him from mere feet away, yet hidden in the darkness out of sight.

  “D-E-A-T-H” was the long, drawn-out whisper that Samuel heard whistle through his ears. “D-E-A-T-H.”

  Samuel realized they had strayed into a thicket of soaring cathedral pines, to
ps towering over him as if they were ancient, disapproving gods. The canopy swayed fiercely, intoxicating and terrifying Samuel with strobing glimpses of darkness and moon-drenched shadows. His eyes grew wide, pupils the size of marbles taking in the dim light as he jerked right, then left, spinning out of control. As a wailing wind tossed pine needles at his head like darts in the blackness, the forest spirits possessed him, pushing his fear over the edge and commanding that he pull the trigger on the evil spirits that besieged him. Absent of conscious thought, he blindly obeyed. He turned to the four dark figures lurking, stalking and poised for attack, and watched his smoking barrels obliterate them.

  The spirits quieted and smothered the winds, allowing an eerie calm to blanket the forest. The canopy opened and invited the moon to shine its light on the forest floor. Samuel’s panic subsided as he stared at the moon, which now seemed a tranquil beacon of hope. He traced its searchlight from the heavens to an object five times his own height: a tremendous granite outcropping overhanging a natural spring. The boulder’s weathered wrinkles reflected the moonlight throughout the pine cathedral.

  Samuel’s eyes fell to the spring at the base of the boulder, where four lifeless bodies lay, covered with black blisters and spewing blood into the cursed soil. Samuel loomed over them, mouth agape, staring at what remained of his family in the darkness. In a trance, Samuel stood still, unaware that his hands—or something else—had repositioned the choke of the shotgun just beneath his chin. He submitted to the soil’s final command and pressed his thumb down on the trigger. As Samuel’s body collapsed and draped over Sarah’s, the echo from the shotgun faded and the evil crept back into the soil through the blood of its victims.

  Baldev nodded in approval of the sacrifice.

  Chapter 1

  Ozzie jerked his head up in the darkness, his adolescent shaggy black hair standing on end. It wasn’t the rain dripping on his head that had woken him so violently. By now, he had adjusted to sleeping through rain and oppressive heat. No, he had heard something. A drawn-out menacing moan from far below, a monster slugging its way up the mountainside, getting closer to Ozzie by the moment. He was sure he had heard it, but for now, the forest remained calm.

  As the clouds began to clear, a wedge of moonlight shone through a rip in the shack’s roof and landed on the dirt floor. Ozzie stared at the dust particles as they danced in the beam of light between the floor and the ceiling. Other than soft snoring from the three bodies that surrounded him, the forest was eerily quiet.

  Until a deep, haunting whisper rose to him through the trees.

  “Beware, my boy. I’m coming for you.”

  Ozzie bolted straight up, deadly still.

  “I’m coming, little Ozzie. Coming to eat you. And then I’m going to eat your entire family too, put you all in my black, evil belly!”

  Ozzie froze momentarily before he tugged at his brother. “Felipe! Wake up!”

  Felipe rolled away from Ozzie. He never woke when Ozzie heard the monster coming. Other nights the monster had spared him, passing by just close enough that Ozzie could smell its breath––breath that stank like exhaust from an old rusty muffler. But this time it taunted Ozzie, called him out by name!

  “I’m getting closer now, little one.”

  “Mom,” Ozzie whispered before raising his voice. “MOM!”

  “What is it, Felipe...Ozzie?” Isabella responded, voice deep and groggy with sleep.

  “The monster’s coming up the mountain! MOM!”

  “Ozzie,” Isabella said with her eyes closed, “It’s no monster. They’re just bringing us breakfast as they do every day. You know how you love your breakfast, Ozzie.”

  That was true. Even if it was just the same sloppy gruel every day, Ozzie looked forward to it. It was all that he had ever known, although his mother had shown him how to forage for some wild foods, mainly mushrooms and wild berries. But it didn’t matter, as Ozzie had little room to explore. An electric fence three times his height kept his family, and countless others, imprisoned.

  Isabella pulled Ozzie close to her and snuggled him. Ozzie’s fear had caused his voice to escalate steadily until he let out a high-pitched, juvenile squeal.

  “But mom, it said it’s going to eat me...eat all of us!”

  “What the hell is going on? The sun’s not even up yet!”

  “Nothing, Eduardo,” Isabella said to Ozzie’s father. “Ozzie just got a little scared, that’s all.”

  Eduardo stood and stared firmly at Ozzie, furious that he had been woken.

  “Dammit, Ozzie, you’re not the only one who sleeps in here, you know. We all have to sleep together. You’re almost grown now, and it’s time you start acting like it! Now, go back to sleep!”

  Eduardo didn’t have the patience or the tact of a mother. With all they had been through, being held captive on this foreign land for so long, it was a wonder he had any patience left at all. As with most fathers, he felt it was his role to make sure his son grew up to become a leader—the protector and provider that Eduardo felt that he should have been.

  “Shhh! Listen, mom...it’s coming!” Ozzie said, being careful to keep his voice low.

  “I don’t hear anything, Ozzie.”

  Eduardo went back to sleep under their leaky roof as Isabella sat with Ozzie and listened carefully. Ozzie had a remarkable sense of hearing, nature’s way of compensating for his extremely poor eyesight, Isabella reasoned.

  Finally, Isabella heard the faint sound of the dilapidated old farm truck, Ozzie’s enraged monster, grow louder, moaning along and grinding its teeth as it made its way up the makeshift mountain road. A road that existed on no map, to a destination that virtually no one knew existed.

  Boom! Pow! Belch! The truck sputtered and backfired, the sound bouncing off the mountainside like cannon fire in a brick alleyway, as the black monster crept closer still. Ozzie had never seen it before and didn’t want to see it. Always it came under cover of darkness, and every detainee knew to keep away until it left. Most just learned to sleep right through it. Ozzie never could, but as long as his mother was beside him, protecting him, the monster uttered not a word.

  The truck inched forward in stops and starts, belching and grinding its way along the circular road, skulking ever closer to Ozzie’s encampment. Ozzie dug into Isabella’s side, bracing himself for the worst as the sound closed in on him. But then, as Isabella had assured him, the truck completed its rounds and slithered back down the mountainside. Ozzie cozied close to his mother as the sound of his monster slowly faded, and he drifted back asleep.

  As his eyes fell shut the wind whispered down the Georgia mountainside, “I’ll be back for you, Ozzie.”

  ***

  Ozzie climbed out of bed two hours after sunrise and staggered to the food drop. When he found nothing, he just stared dumbfounded and listened intently to see if the truck was coming back. He heard nothing, so he began exploring. Fifty yards away Ozzie found a cluster of oyster mushrooms spiraling up an oak tree. Starving, he ripped a mushroom off the tree and devoured it.

  “Mornin’ sweetie.”

  “Mom! I didn’t hear you coming.”

  Ozzie walked over and rested his head on his mother’s shoulder as he soaked up the warmth of her love. Eduardo’s right; he’s growing up so fast, Isabella thought. Practically full grown now but still so innocent...so naïve!

  The sticky September air was deliciously humid, permeated with the sweet smell of anise. Together, Ozzie and his mother walked on the damp ground, sidestepping the three-foot high buckeye trees that had sprung up like root suckers and merged with other vegetation to create a dense forest understory.

  Boom! Pow! Belch! Ozzie stopped suddenly and turned his head down the mountain in the direction of a faint sound.

  “That’s strange for them to come at this time,” Isabella mumbled as her grin drained into a concerned frown. Ozzie picked up on the change in her demeanor and facial expression and moved closer. Isabella wondered if Eduardo was up and she g
lanced back home.

  Home.

  She couldn’t believe that’s what she called this ramshackle place where she was forced to sleep on the ground, without even a blanket to lie on. Just hard ground, so dusty when it was hot and dry, and so bone-chillingly cold when it was wet. Isabella got through most days by daydreaming about what had been, and what she feared in her heart would never be again.

  Born near the ocean, she had lived with her parents and six brothers and sisters on a hacienda. Everyone knew and revered her parents, and that meant they would respect Isabella one day, too, since her Spanish ancestors had been there for centuries. To Isabella’s eyes, their hacienda was paradise and had everything a body could want. Sun-bathed sloping grounds that yielded bushels of grapes and berries. Land overflowing with food: potatoes, tomatoes, beans and peppers. Rolling hills, oak filled forests, beaches, and an ocean to cool off in or to gaze over.

  It was on a nearby farm that she first saw Eduardo with his thick black hair and bulging shoulder muscles. He grew up among five brothers, having no trouble putting them in their place when they needed it, and defending them anytime someone other than he wanted to tussle with them. Isabella knew right away that he was her soul mate. Their courtship was brief as they were eager to have their own family. Steeped in tradition, they wanted nothing more than to live simply and freely, just as their parents and grandparents had done for centuries. Their dreams began to come true as first Felipe was born and then, shortly thereafter, her beloved Ozzie. Life was unfolding just the way nature intended.

  And in an instant their freedom was taken from them.

  Her face burned with bitterness and rage as she replayed the night they were captured. She could still conjure the disgusting smell of the sweaty, armed men and their trained dogs that had surrounded and jolted them awake in the middle of the night. A man brandishing a knife held Felipe and Ozzie to the ground while three others cornered Isabella and Eduardo. Then the man grabbed Ozzie, merely a baby then, and flung him and Felipe into the back of a covered truck. Flung them! The men knew that Isabella and Eduardo would put up little resistance boarding the truck to protect their babies.