Curse: The end has only just begun Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Part 1.Fog Lake

  Part 2. A way out

  Part 3. The rise of Amil Young

  Part 4. The sordid young life of Ali Jett

  Part 5. Fate

  Part 6. A common bond

  Part 7. The days of farewell

  Part 1. Taken away

  Part 2. A land forsaken

  Part 3. The crucifixion orchard

  Part 4. The challenge of Aphelianna

  Part 1. The Hall of Worship

  Part 2. The Ancient Forest

  Part 3. The Wishing Well

  Part 4. The Dead Atrium

  Part 5. The Great Carillon

  Part 6. Tyme’s Machine

  Part 7. The Eternal City

  Part 8. The End of Time

  Part 9. The Endless Library

  Chapter 4 - Revelations

  Acknowledgements

  About the author

  Other titles by Rich Hayden

  Curse

  Rich Hayden

  Kindle Edition

  Curse - Copyright 2016 - Rich Hayden

  This work is protected under United States copyright law. No part of this work may be reproduced without expressed written consent from the author.

  ISBN# 978-0-9963969-2-9

  Chapter 1 - Overture: The Exploits of Insignificant Lives

  Part 1.Fog Lake

  Time is eternal. Or, at the very least, it will endure beyond the expiration of everything else. The final force of the universe, to, at last, surrender to the command of sleep. The conquest of time is unrelenting and the path it cuts bores on with yield to none. In its wake, discovery and revelation arrive, carrying with them technology, advancement, and opportunity. The surge of these forces, however, do not run stride for stride along with time. No, they take a much more mercurial and meandering tumble down the hourglass.

  In the modern developed world, certain pleasurable aspects of everyday life are expected, if not entirely taken for granted. This truth rings nowhere with more volume and vigor than in America. But strife and the unrefined still linger in dark, forgotten corners and deep in the backwoods of the Home of the Brave. Many who occupy the cities and suburbs can scarcely imagine a life of even marginal inconvenience. Those who reside in more rural settings are equally deficient in the total comprehension of actual struggle, as they tend fields and raise livestock while lending attention to smart phones. But the rugged past, ill-fitted with all its hardships, lives on quietly.

  In order to discover such a woeful place, a traveler would need more than a map and an automobile. A sense of adventure and the willingness to absorb despondency are the tools necessary to complete such a curious journey. This is a road rarely traversed, as no one elects to vacation to surroundings more miserable than their own. The only souls that can testify to the condition of the spaces that time’s companions have forgotten are those that call such environs home.

  There is a shriveled mass of land which appears to hang meekly from the western portion of Virginia before dying off into the embrace of Kentucky. Across this land, crushed under the weight of the Appalachian Mountains, runs Route 460. Flanked by an abundance of chicory and the dark blue flowers that it produces, a drive down 460 can be quite beautiful, especially as the autumn warns of the winter scourge to come. Near the state line of the Old Dominion rests the remains of Fog Lake. Route 460 can deliver a visitor to the small town, but not a single sign or exit marker cares to point the way. Along that stretch of rural highway, not even faded glints from the past cast a remembrance to lost little Fog Lake.

  Like a ghost enwreathed in shadow, Fog Lake’s absorption into obscurity is near completion. This is not an entirely unfortunate twist of events, as all things must reach their end. After all, even milk, with all its life-giving properties, must at times be cast aside once all that was once sustenance has gone rotten. The town is inhabited only by those who have never left, and outsiders are most unwelcome within this living museum of disadvantage. The air that occupies the empty spaces of Fog Lake is warmed only by humidity. The seldom observed yeti of laughter, which echoes though the broken streets, is nothing more than a joy imposter. A fraud of authentic sensation conjured up by the likes of Pruno and homemade drugs.

  Every morning, the lethargic sun rises over Fog Lake. A dense haze descends from the peaks above and suffocates the whole of the village. For a moment, this ephemeral blanket feels like a blessing, as it shields from vision all the collapsing barns and untended fields. It buries the decay of the town and hides the slow drowning of scattered trailer homes that are giving in to the unsettled will of the earth. The fog obscures the weathered face of Fog Lake High School and the crumbling foundation upon which it sits. It hides the overabundance of bars and all the despair that they bring, and the great, thick cloud momentarily dulls the image of all the businesses fallen into dereliction.

  But the fog is merely a cloak. For every day it lifts, and returns to view the dirt paths and crooked streets fitted with rusted lampposts and faded signs. It brings back to a half-life all the misery of a typical day in Fog Lake. As the swirl rises from the stagnant pool from which the town receives its name, it reveals a damp bed that plays perpetual host to a mosquito orgy. As the humid cloud ushers in the day, it rises with the grace of a fat, arthritic hag as she lifts her heft from a misplaced and beleaguered porch sofa. Toothless, and bent by a life of ill-value, she stares sideways at the girls who push strollers with their teenaged hands. She watches the men as they stagger to work, still sickened by the previous night’s boozing. She hears the backfiring of pickup trucks and the obnoxious squeal of fan belts and chokes on the exhaust exhaled from outdated engines. In disgust, she turns away and dissipates into the sky, leaving Fog Lake to rot under the condemning glare of the sun.

  As time has cruelly scrubbed its eraser over the town, only paltry value remains. It feels as though Fog Lake is nothing more than a forgotten postcard of Americana from yesteryear. Most of the rail lines, once roaring proud, have been shut down. The few that have managed to cling to existence do so only with the merits of outdated and faulty equipment. A small collection of mines are still operational, but there is more money to be found in crime than from coal. Merchant shops have been turned into seedy strip clubs, and construction equipment rots at the very site of the last job when the money ran out. These mechanized behemoths dot the land like industrial headstones, lost in the shadows of buildings unfinished and over roads never to be completed.

  It was within this dying testament to a bitter way of life that Amil Young was born. His father ran into the woods one winter’s night, never to return to the world of man. Absorbed into blowing snow and sharpened ice, he ran, nearly naked and wild eyed. His flight from the earth was blamed on madness, but such an affliction fails to explain the absence of a body. After the presumed death of his father, Amil’s mother suffered a failure of the mind. Her mental discord sprang from a much less mysterious well, as methamphetamine sunk its hooks into her. Disinterested in childcare, she gave her only son over to his grandparents at three years of age. If thoughts of reconciliation were buried somewhere deep inside of Amil’s mother, the drugs paid no mind, as death entertained no detour en route to claim the savaged remains of Raylene Young. In the end, it all made little difference to the orphaned boy.

  He never truly knew his parents, and once he was old enough to craft a shaky understanding of them, his feelings were without affection. A blind man gazing upon blank paper, the child was bereft of the arousal of sympathy for his departed creators. Any compassion that he might come to find was eroded away by the name with which he had been branded. At times, he was
reminded that the name once belonged to an ancestor of his who fought bravely in the Civil War. Amil was unimpressed. He tired of the stories early on, as his uncommon name earned him taunts from classmates.

  Like most youths born into a small and moribund village, Amil landed himself into trouble as a boy. He smoked his first cigarette at nine and drank regularly by the age of sixteen. Amil was on a first name basis with the small police force, for all the wrong reasons, before he squirmed his way through the eighth grade. Thanks to his sharp tongue and the boldness that testosterone brings, he was quick to court a situation that could earn him a black eye. He wrecked three cars before he earned his license and managed to impregnate a girl just barely fifteen, but already a mother. The damned girl, overwhelmed by the needs of her own equally foredoomed child, suffered a miscarriage.

  Amil couldn’t summon much interest for school, as the routines and formalities grated against his restless mind. The lack of resources made keeping his attention a near impossible task for the strained faculty, whose own interest in education was pitiably thin. After long years of watching children drop out and spiral into oblivion, apathy became the lesson of the day. But Amil did manage to earn his diploma, a feat relatively uncommon in Fog Lake. He may have been something of a malcontent, bred into him from genetics and branded onto him from environment, but brighter than most. The tests he took were aced without the benefit of study, and he regularly received an impressive GPA. The boy, however, found no value in his achievements, as his intelligence was a jagged instrument. An iron chisel employed to disfigure the materials set before it. More weapon than tool, his mind was unfit for the regulations of higher learning.

  Born trash, shackled to a bleak existence during his formative years, the crafty youth used his smarts to get by and avoid the biggest of troubles. Like most teens, he overindulged when it came to alcohol, but the days of headaches and vomiting that followed would serve to end this poisonous relationship. He was a bit perplexed by those that consumed drugs. Amil would enjoy the occasional puff from a stale joint here and there, but he knew the end game of narcotics. His earliest memories gave to him the intolerable rendering of his mother as walking death. To emulate her miserable existence would be tantamount to tribute for the woman who made him an orphan. A witness to the decay and premature decline of his friends and neighbors, he found no use for pills and pipes. But a young man needs money, and so he wasn’t above the peddling of such substances when the task could earn him a few dollars. After his close call with parenthood, Amil proceeded with more caution when pursuing the harlots of his hamlet, but it would take a rather nasty introduction to gonorrhea before he embraced the magic of cheap condoms.

  He was still a boy by most evaluations, a child forced to grow up quick and mature, lest he sink under the same quicksand as his parents. He knew his opportunities would be few and fleeting, and this reality was made no more poignant than one night in late spring, which, initially, felt much the same as any other.

  Around the age of sixteen, he was spending time at the home of a schoolmate, Maggie Dufrane. Her name rang in his ears with comedic irony. Dufrane sounded French to him, and it conjured up images of Paris. The majestic city seemed so exotic and refined, mysterious and gilded with adventure. Plain Maggie, with her acne and gapped teeth, represented to Amil all that Fog Lake could do to things magnificent and elegant.

  It was a school night and the clock had spun past one in the morning as Amil sat slumped in the basement with Maggie and a few others. Those that populated the dank room weren’t really friends. They were more or less a collection of people who shared a mutual tolerance. Maggie’s mother was asleep upstairs. Twitching in her bed, she had been beaten into unconsciousness by sleeping pills. With her interference impossible, the teens blithely sat around passing cheap whiskey and old cigarettes.

  The scene was the same as the night before and the one that had preceded it. The day to come would see a tired reprise of this stale act. Amil knew that all too well. As he sat in discomfort inside the grip of a lawn chair with algae clinging to the bands, he leaned his head against the dull paneling upon the wall, and studied the room.

  Amil didn’t know the kid in the Confederate flag t-shirt who was making out with a girl. She had the soft face of a child, and appeared mildly high. Robbie was there, the token twenty-something creep who hangs out with teenagers. He was entertaining two fat sluts, ripe fruit dangling from the crooked tree of adolescence. John Meyers was there, too. He was failing to play some country-trash ballad on a guitar with four strings. Finally, there was lonely Maggie. She was mired in her usual desperation. Her agony rose as the hours wound on, and became visible once two other boys left the hazy basement. As Amil viewed, and was then disgusted by the pathetic lot, he felt like a prisoner. He could leave the basement, but there was no more freedom to be found outside. Not in the middle of the night, anyway. Unchained, free to roam, only to find the bars of disadvantage set to all sides. But he knew that parole would arrive one day, and until then, he would find his solace on the baseball diamond.

  Like many American boys, Amil fell in love with baseball early on in life. He was then introduced to the cruelty of reality and became distracted. He warmed to cold girls and discovered the allure of poor behavior, but the siren call of the game always tugged at him. For lack of other things to do, and for want of no more nights spent in Maggie’s basement of sorrows, he decided to try out for the school’s floundering team.

  Scrawny and aged beyond his years from the toll taken by hard country, he was downright anemic with the stick. However, he more than made up for this lack of batting prowess on the pitcher’s mound. He had a knack for something complex that could conjure up jealously in nearly anyone: Amil excelled at tossing a baseball. He quickly became the star of his school’s motley varsity team, and, with that recognition, the insults that his name garnered slowly dwindled away.

  He tortured opposing hitters and frustrated the coaches of rival programs. Fog Lake was viewed as something of a welcome mat for other schools. They were nothing more than inbred practice dummies, crude stones used by others to sharpen their knives. When Amil pitched, something anomalous took place: they all became something more. For all his efforts, the team never really went anywhere, as they usually lost the games that their ace pitcher didn’t start. It wasn’t all that strange for the Fog Lake Badgers to lose on the days that he did pitch. After all, the defense behind him had an annoying habit of lobbing the ball all over the yard.

  It didn’t matter. Fog Lake had never won a regional championship before, so missing the playoffs wasn’t too big a deal. What did matter, what was important, was that someone from Fog Lake could eclipse the performances of anyone else around. The air still stunk, the mosquitoes continued to bite, and the home field still resembled a wasteland, but during the games in which Amil played, the stands were a little fuller, the bars a little emptier, and life, faded and scarred as it may have been, was just a tiny bit brighter.

  Rival schools attempted to seduce Amil to pitch for them by the time he reached the 11th grade, but, ever stubborn, he would hear none of it. Drab and virulent as it was, he would rather pitch for his hometown Badgers and win five games a year than play for the schools that painted his whole village as a bunch of incorrigible drunks. For the most part, this disparaging sentiment was correct, Amil knew that much, but he wouldn’t give those other folks the satisfaction. Maybe it was the hick in him, the absence of a proper role model, or the poverty that stalked him like a shadow. Whatever the causes, a selfish streak was harbored within him, with a deep desire to prove others wrong by doing things the hard way. After all, he was one of them, an anonymous lowlife from Fog Lake. At least, for a little while longer.

  Part 2. A way out

  It wasn’t often that an outsider would trip across the border into Fog Lake. There was no earthly reason to visit such a place, and few knew of its existence. But on a warm spring day, Fog Lake is where Ron Jacks found himself. His ancient
grandmother had recently passed away, and it was Ron who was burdened with the task of sorting out all the garbage she disguised as possessions. He wasn’t the only family Emilia Jacks had left, he was simply the only one who cared enough to go back and see that she received a proper burial.

  It was an odd experience. He knew his roots were sunk in Appalachia, but he never would have guessed that the soil they grew among could have been so bitten. As he walked down Center Street toward the dilapidated wreck of his grandmother’s home, Ron felt as though he were traveling back in time to some forgotten era of ignorance and lawlessness. It wasn’t a Wild-West feel that he sensed. A rough yet romantic image of life lived in harder times. This was something far different, something truly sad that spoke of devolution and illness. Fog Lake, it seemed, was the cradle of misery.

  The morning air was peppered with country music that sailed out from the open garage of an old body shop. It was a sharp and discordant crackle, as a stereo long past its expiration purged itself of the tunes. During his journey, Ron’s nose was treated to a bouquet of exhaust, and that foul odor given off by the overgrowth of damp weeds. He looked up from the crippled sidewalk that challenged his step and set his eyes on the peaks which towered in the distance. It was a strange vision. The mountains appeared so majestic and strong, and yet at their feet lay their ill-begotten child. Gangly and suffering unspeakable torments of disease, this tortured offspring seemed to beg for the mercy of euthanasia.

  At thirty-five, Ron had always been a jovial fellow, his sense of humor proportionate to his ample waist-line. But his senses cautioned him not to engage the locals. He wasn’t one of them, and every black-eyed citizen of Fog Lake could smell his foreign stench. The glances they gave him were of suspicion and impatience, so Ron figured it better to keep to himself and handle his business with a quiet urgency.