First Sample Chapter

This is the sample first chapter for a new Horror work. Set it a crumbling Appalachian town, a young man desperate to make a difference in the world makes the best of a terrible situation. That man’s terrible decision sprawls out, drawing in an innocent woman trying to make her way in the world and out of the town she is terrified of dying in and a mysterious government agent serving multiple masters.

Part 1: Pythagoras' Cup

Leland Davis had only felt something like this once before, in his childhood, before everything had gotten off track and gone to ruin. His heart and belly were full, like they had been on a Thanksgiving a decade and a half ago. It had been his first Thanksgiving at the grownup's table. He wanted to alter the memory, to delude himself into thinking it had been an acknowledgment of his nascent manhood at the age of ten and not simple attrition. The children he had been counted amongst had all moved away with their parents, fleeing the town that served as the home of the Davis clan for generations.

Once his grandfather's table had been filled with laughing, loving adults while the rest of the house was filled with the peeling laughter and screaming of cousins and cousins delighted to be together on a day they normally had school. It hadn't mattered that they all went to school together and more often than not were at some cousins house. None could have known that would be the last Thanksgiving they would all be together, that by the next year, the same year that Leland was welcomed to the grown up's table, then just the table, a string of inevitable tragedies would eviscerate the family.

Maybe, Leland thought, that was the source of the thin band of anxiety tightening around his chest. Leland wasn't narcissistic enough to think that the universe punished his happiness, but maybe he was just superstitious enough to not press his luck much further without risking a lesson. Maybe this tiny thread of anxiety weaving itself through his being was just a gentle reminder from the universe about hubris. Leland knew that fable, well enough. Icarus and his wax wings. A less clever, or perhaps smarter man would have been content with the black eye and the strange story that he only told when he was well in his cups.

Not a less desperate man, though. Leland had been desperate more than half his life at this point. Having had grown up surviving largely on the largesse of a dwindling family and diminshing friend group, Leland knew what it was like to fill an empty stomach with food that existed only in dreams. He had watched his mother shrink down, knowing full well that she was skipping meals in order to feed him. Leland, in turn, had done the same, taking a few bites to rob the hunger of it's painful edge to see that his mother ate at least once a day.

He hated that feeling and had worked tirelessly to banish it. He had been as ruthless as his morality allowed, but found himself chipping away it until all the remained was the drive to provide for the people who had supported and loved him, that he in turn now loved and supported. Along the way, once that goal had first been visible, then achievable, another had appeared in the fires of his ambition: to punish the people that had destroyed his quiet little town that had once provided him with all he could need.

Once Harrenton had been a bustling mining town, proudly providing the energy that had powered the American industries that had won the Second World War and made America into a superpower, unrivaled in history in economic, industrial and military might. Those days were long gone. Harrenton now had more in common with the carved up, nearly skeletal carcass of the Thanksgiving turkey that occupied the center of the table. Except the turkey had been killed before being cleaned, gutted and carved. The town, once booming at nearly five thousand people, with hundreds of families. The mine had slowly shrank as automation increased and the digging extended deeper to get it. The backbreaking labor, coupled with the notion of rugged self-determination and self-reliance, admirable in theory, hadn't survived the economic needs of a mining company whose owner, once a lifelong resident, had sold it to a bigger company, that been absorbed, regurgitated and consumed again over a century until it's closure following a catastrophic accident that claimed the lives of a dozen men.

The doctors and lawyers in the town had sold their neighbors out, first out of a lack of common sense and then finally out of pure greed. Bankruptcy and addiction seemed to be all Harrenton's hard, cold ground could produce now.

Rows of beautiful homes and neighborhoods, filled with laughing, loving people had slowly devolved into dilapidated structures that lay abandoned, some for decades. The vibrant, loving people, once the best that the Appalachian people could offer, had become old, broken and tired. The people had become addicted to the things the people they trusted not just with their health, but the health of their children and their children's children. Crime had skyrocketed, not that the police were ever much bothered to do anything about it. By the time Harrenton had gotten bad, it's tax base had withered to almost nonexistence. It's municipality dissolved and absorbed back in to the county as a whole. Once there had been a dozen police officers, truly invested in protecting and serving their neighbors and kin. Now a single sheriff's deputy made a single patrol down the main street of town once a day before driving back onto the interstate and going about more business.

Leland felt that he was trying to avenge a dream that had never been his, but could have been. Even now, he wondered, how many days would there be like this? His mother's health was failing and Harrenton hadn't had a birthrate in five years. Most of the people that remained were long past the age where another mouth to feed was a good idea. His class had been the last to graduate from Harrenton High School, with their three teachers. Leland felt that it must have been a misguided sense of mercy to allow one more class to move through the halls instead of shipping them an hour and a half away to a real school.

"Fuck, that was good," Sam Welsley said with a belch, drawing a glare from Greg Barron, seated across the table, "Sorry, that was really good, Ma."

Leland's mother beamed, "Thanks, honey. Do you want more? There's too much."

His mother had always been kind and generous, almost to a fault. Leland suspected that all she had wanted was to be the matriarch of a large family, like her mother had been. It had been that kindness and generosity that had lead to the first event that laid the foundation for Leland's own reputation.

"Anyone want that last little bit of stuffing?" Tom Sullivan, a man Leland considered a brother, asked.

"Weren't you gonna bring Reba a plate, Winona? I don't know why she didn't come over with y'all," his mother asked.

Judith Davis, who genuinely loved to be called mother or any derivative of it, asked. Whenever there had been enough to go around, she had seen to it that not just her son, but the boys, then men he was close to were taken care of. She had opened their modest, crumbling home to them. They, himself, Sam, Tom and Greg, had been more days here than they had at their own homes. Tom and Greg would be permanent additions to the household by the time they were driving. Tom and Greg were the reason why Leland hated the misconception of the quote 'Blood is thicker than water'.

That feeling had been steadily built up as his family had vanished from his life, either into the ground or to another town, city or state. When Leland had first heard the entire phrase, the blood of the covenant is thicker than the water of the womb, he had been furious at all of the betrayals that had he had witnessed and experienced because of the misconception. Family had abandoned him; his friends, his brothers had not. Leland also understood that the quote largely spoke of the bond between men who had been to battle together and only one man at this table had seen battle: Greg. Sam, as much as he tried to be hard ass and a man of action, was a spoiled manchild that others would think was engaging in poverty tourism, though Leland knew the truth. Tom was too gentle and kind to be capable of meaningful malice; his parents had taught him kindness with a belt. Tom was the son his mother deserved. Genuinely good, unlike him.

He and Greg were cut from the same cloth, but opposite sides of the coin. Leland was conniving and manipulative whereas Greg had always been a big and strong and good with his hands. There had been but one time in their youth when they had used their talents, but Greg had been wild. Leland and his mother had taken Greg to enlist in the Marines on the morning of his eighteenth birthday and again to the bus station when he had shipped out. The battles he had seen, real, terrible warfare, had changed him, tempered him. In their youth, Sam's lack of couth would have drawn a verbal rebuke at the least. Now a glare sufficed.

Winona's eyes slowly opened in response to his mother's question, answering an unanswered question Leland had been debating. Her voice, slow and dreamy eventually answered, "She's studying...I think," before nodding off, her plate of food cold and mostly untouched.

Leland sometimes wondered how much longer humanity would remain in this limbo of being able to save lives, but not the quality of those lives. The car accident that had claimed her father's life, caused by the medicines the doctor's gave him for his agonizing back, had set his athletic, lively daughter on a darker path. It seemed a cruel joke for this cracked parody of Winona to live in her place.

"She's almost done," his mother continued, ignoring her pilled out state as polite manners declared, "Isn't she?"

Winona's head bobbing forward might have been construed as a nod, if the backward motion hadn't been so jerky, "Jus 'bout," her eyes fluttered open again for a moment. She had once had of shiny jade, but they better matched the drab military green of the battered ammo case he kept in his bedroom.

Leland's mother smiled brightly. Once upon a time, when Leland and Reba had been about thirteen and didn't know themselves better than they knew one another, they had attempted a relationship, in the way you did at that age. His mother had doted on Reba and Winona, especially after breast cancer had taken their mother from them. A flicker of a memory flashed, his mother answering Reba's panicked cry from the bathroom, time passing and a trip to the store (really a Dollar General on it's last legs) and Reba going back to her house afterward. His mother had been disappointed their break up, citing how happy they looked together. His mother had always been a hopeless romantic until Leland politely, but firmly told her after his twenty-first birthday that grandkids, if they came at all, would be a long way off. Just another regret to add to the list, but Leland couldn't fathom bringing another life into the world, even if that drive had been something he truly felt.

"Is she gonna walk for her graduation?" his mother asked before looking over at him, "I had to drag you kicking and screaming to your high school graduation."

"I don't think so," Leland answered gently, "One of the benefits of an online college is you don't have to do that whole song and dance. That and I think the actual campus is in like, Oregon or somewhere out there."

He knew exactly where it was, but giving too much information might been seen as encouraging her to look into it and to see if it's possible.

"Oh," she shrugged, "We should do something for her when she graduates."

"If she wants it, sure," Leland answered, giving it even odds. Leland made a show of glancing noticing the clock on the stove, "I should get going. Want to give Reba her plate before it gets too cold and I wanna stop by the shop and make sure we're ready for tomorrow."

His mother smiled. She knew his social battery was about depleted. Leland, Greg and Tom had arrived earlier in the morning to help her prepare the dinner and she knew that Winona grated on his nerves, especially in her current state. Leland rose and his mother did as well. Greg, too, rose, because of propriety and circumstances (it was, after all, a special occasion) before his mother swatted at him with a sheepish grin.

"You're too polite sometimes, Greggy," she said before ambling over to give her son a hug.

Leland didn't know how much he needed that hug in that moment and found himself hugging her tighter than he had in some time.

"I'm so, so proud of you, Lee," she said, a warm, proud smile stretching across her tired face and filling her eyes, "All of you."

"Thanks, Ma," he said, releasing her and retrieving the two Tupperware containers from the microwave, "You still wanna go Christmas shopping tomorrow, yeah?" he asked her.

She nodded and her face shifted to the expression she always wore when she felt she was being a burden, "I just need someone to drive me."

"Tom," Leland said, "You mind?"

"Not at all," he answered genuinely.

"Great," Leland replied, "Be careful, yeah. Greg, you mind catching a ride back to the house with Sam?"

"Sure you don't need help at the shop?"
"Yeah," Leland shrugged, "Shouldn't take long."

The looked at one another for a moment before Gregg nodded, "Sure, but I'm driving."

"It's my truck, though," Sam objected.

Leland was already at the door and went through it with a "Love you," to his mother before he got caught up in that brewing nonsense between Greg and Sam.

It was a ten minute drive to Reba's house. It had been their parents' but attrition had brought it into Reba's possession. Her red, battered Civic was in the gravel in front of her house. That thing had been dying since Reba's dad bought it and fixed it up for her. He supposed the sentimentality of it being the last thing he had bought and done for her before dying was what kept it running and Reba's. He walked up the creaking steps and knocked, knowing full well that it was a formality that wasn't expected of him, just like she could walk into his or his mother's house without knocking, but always did, usually in search of her sister.

"Hey, food," he said when she opened the door, holding out the Tupperware for her. He could smell something cooking.

"Hey," she said with a warm smile, "Thanks. You wanna come in? The green bean casserole is almost done."

"I would actually love to, but I gotta get going. Just wanted to swing by with the rest Thanksgiving for you."

"Oh, okay. How's your mom doing?"

"She's alright. Winona's over there, Sam's probably gonna drop her off later. Well, Greg, since he'll be driving."

"Sweet, that means Sam won't be staying over."

"Couldn'ta planned it better if I tried," he gave her a smile. He knew and understood why she didn't particularly care for Sam and didn't blame her.

Relationships had inertia, too.

Leland turned to leave, but paused, "She asked, and I know the answer is probably not, but graduation? You gonna do all that bullshit?"

"You think I can afford to fly out to California to spend all day sitting in an auditorium and walk across some stage? Or that I'd want?"

"Fair enough; figured I'd ask. Be good," Leland said with a wave over his shoulder as he walked back to his car.

Twenty minutes of traversing rotted streets and decaying buildings that picked the outline of the dying Harrenton, West Virginia and Leland found himself in the quasi-abandoned last ditch effort to jump start the economy of the town: a strip mall. None of it's original inhabitants remained, the building had never even achieved half it's maximum occupancy. It was how Leland had been able to purchase the building and the lot for the price of mid-line luxury car. The building would have never saved the town. Nail salons, payday loans, pawn shops and a dollar store simply couldn't. It had been a joke from the very beginning.

What it housed now wouldn't do it either. Leland hadn't even bothered with a sign for his legitimate business, which was more of a hobby than anything else. He had always loved building and taking apart computers and decided to monetize that thing he had. Not that he needed the money, more like something to do. But the tens of thousands of computer equipment was chaff compared to the prize. The drugs he had in the building were more of a necessity for his true plan than anything else. He didn't even consider himself a drug dealer in truth. He'd been involved in the trade for less than a month, selling what little extra he had to the people in town that had become hopelessly addicted on the advice of their physician, or because there had been so much of it that at one point there had been more opioids in Harrenton than there was coal. Which, for a coal mining town, was not a good sign.

No, in truth none of that mattered. The computer shop, the pills, hell, the entire goddamn building could go up in flames and it wouldn't register as a setback, so long as he was able to retrieve the most precious thing he possessed from it. The very thing that would not only set up generation wealth for the family that he had chosen, but also bring down a torrent of wrath and ruin that would make Sodom and Gomorrah look like a momentary outburst.

Maybe he was flying too close to the sun, Leland thought was he unlocked a serious of doors that first let him into the building, then deeper into it, around to the former pawn shop with it's steel barred cage that had once held, or really hoped to hold, a surplus of expensive goods. There hadn't been a surplus of anything other than Oxy in Harrenton for quite a while.

But now it did. Oh, how that miserly old shit Wexton would bemoan the wealth his former shop held.

He grabbed a mortar and pestle from a counter and a half empty pharmaceutical bottle of Oxy. He shook two pills into it, ground them fine and mixed them into the still warm mashed potatoes, then opened the smaller container full of gravy and doused the fluffy, opiate laced mound. Extracting the keys for the door from his pocket and he unlocked it and opened it. The door hinge grated and the figure in the corner, chained to the painted brick wall shifted drowsily. Leland set the container on the ground and retrieved a broom handle.

The figure's too wide eyes stared blankly at him for a moment. It's empty mockery of a face obscured by the darkness as Leland pushed the container forward until it was just in reach.

"Eat," Leland said.

The light returned to it's swirling galaxy eyes, casting it's inhuman face in a pale glow. They stared at him and Leland resisted the urge to look away. No, it was more powerful than that, it was instinctual need to be as far from this thing as possible. Even now, after capturing and subduing it, looking at it for two long made his heart pump ice water through his veins and his soul to ache.

It wouldn't be for much longer, one way or the other. The retribution that would come from this thing's kin would be apopalyptic to whoever was caught with it. Leland just needed a few more days and then...

And then he would be done with the Fae.