The South Will Rise Again (2 page)

The shrills became even pitcher, as the ghoulish thing sunk its ravenous teeth on the man’s throat, tearing away a mouthful of dripping wet flesh. Cries ceased as, finally, death prevailed on will, and the poor survivor left this maddened world for the other.

May the Almighty have mercy of his soul.

Aghast by the hellish sight of that cannibal fiend, he screamed. Yet, only a mournful and cold moan escaped from his harsh lungs.

What’s was that? Me?

That auditory effect was more akin to howling hounds than the speech of a child of God. Maybe his throat had been seared by the scorching fires of battle. Perhaps his vocal chords had been damaged beyond repair, turning him into a mute witness of man’s cruelty.

His dire thoughts were scattered away by an unexpected hailing.

“
As you were, soldier,” uttered the munching demon.

The monster was able to talk.

The survivor staggered backward, surprised by that chilling hiss, followed by those awful gulping sounds.

The milky-eyed creature raised its bloody muzzle toward him. “Aye, mate, do not expect speech to return so quickly. It takes time. And patience. And practice.”

Then returned its interest to the gory entrails.

The brave soldier left out another moan, then looked down at his uniform; that shredded rag punctured by hollows and desiccated body fluids. There was a large gaping hole where his heart used to be.

Forgotten memories flooded his misty brain at once, and he finally left hold of the weapon and fell on his knees.

How had he been so foolish? How had he deluded himself believing he had survived the onslaught? He had not felt the thumping rhythm of his beating heart inside the chest from the very moment he had opened his eyes on that cursed battlefield.

As he reached down, into his mangy uniform, to touch with living (unliving?) hand what now he knew to be forever gone, he heard the raspy voice of the cannibal fiend speaking again.

“
Welcome back to the living, soldier.”

He raised his own milky-white irises toward what was once General Arthur Ernest Mitchell of the 113th cavalry regiment of the Confederate army.

His own general.

In Life.

And Death.

Again, the ghoulish monster spoke.

“
We won!”

From

SPIRITS AND THOUGHT FORMS

Tales from Prosperity Glades

by

Jeffrey Kosh

Masks.

This book is about masks.

Hey, wait a minute, that’s not what’s on the cover! I’m sure you’re yelling that, right now. No, I didn’t cheat; I promise. This collection of short stories are all set in that creepy town of Prosperity Glades, and all of them are about spirits … and thought forms.

Yet, it is also about masks. The masks we wear each day, those that other employ to hide their true feelings, and most of all, those that spirits wear to lure us into their clutches.

Spirits, by their nature, are formless beings; in a way they are just memes. Each spirit represents something about human nature and human wishes. By the way, spirits are wishes made into flesh - or almost flesh. The term ‘spirit’ itself, refers to an entity that is incorporeal, not a being made of matter, although, in almost all cultural traditions and folklore, they are tied to the physical world and many are able to assume a material form.

Spirits appear in different forms and types, and all human culture has a belief system incorporating them. In a way they are already … thought forms.

In animistic cultures, spirits are present everywhere; in living and unliving matter. Items, constructions, even raw rock, are infused with spiritual or lifelike properties. Some Native American belief assign spirits only to living things; other believed that all of creation has a spiritual counterpart. As such, they can often inhabit totems, fetishes, and mostly charms and magical items. These kinds of spirits - also present in Shinto, Japan’s main religion - are thought as an ‘animating force’, akin to the human soul. Where Frankenstein’s creation life force did came from? Who is the individual settling in the mortal shell? It's the sum of all his parts; a mosaic of souls melting into an imperfect whole, like the Echo character in ‘Dollhouse’? Or it's the animating force of the brain; the mind of one of the deceased, in this case, like in Kenneth Branagh’s rendition, it must be Professor Krempe. Or is this something different: a being snatched out of its dimension, and infused inside a golem made of flesh. Yet, the creature has no clues about itself; it just exists and doesn’t seem to experience flashbacks as Echo does in many instances. It doesn’t remember a past life as a living being. Nope, it is rather like a Buddhist reincarnation; no memories, no regrets, just traits and déjà vu.

I like to think at the Creature as something which never lived, never experienced our reality, it was just snagged from its world and placed inside human flesh, and by effect, it acts as an infant, yet with a higher ability for understanding its surroundings.

Spirits are also thought as ‘Guiding Forces’, directing everything, from creation to destruction, from weather to the movement of the stars. Chinese ancestry worship claims that family heritage spirits protect and aid the descendants of each family with which they are associated, but can also hamper the family’s progresses if they become angry as result of perceived slights.

Or spirits can be thought as ‘Higher Powers’ or divinities, and I know this is a touchy argument. In many cultures - Judaic-Christian included - all noncorporeal beings are spirits, even the most omnipotent of gods. Angels, Demons, Valkyries, the Courtesans of Celestial Bureaucracy; they are all servants of a Higher Power, and that being is itself a spirit. They often behave like that. The Lord of Old Testament made a pact with Abraham’s people …

Plato, the Greek philosopher, envisioned a Realm of Ideals: a place containing the perfect archetype of everything existing in our physical world. Something like an infinite Universal Genetic Library, where archetypes are stored to be used as originals from where all copies belong. The same did Carl Jung, describing spirits from the Universal Unconscious.

Here comes the ‘Thought Form’.

Modern occult scholars describe a "thought form" as a kind of "artificial spirit" created by the power of the human mind. A thought form can range in complexity from a simple emotional impression to a fully sentient and aware being, and in power from a minor servitor spirit to a deity. Some beliefs say all spirits are thought forms, created and sustained by human belief. This certainly fits with spirits drawing strength from mortal worship and veneration. And this is my vision of spiritual beings. They are ‘memoid’ creatures, like David Brin imagined them in his Uplift universe. Formless, archetypal creatures caused by emotions and beliefs. The haunted house becomes haunted if all people in town swap stories about its ghosts. The well becomes cursed if everyone in a range of a few miles believes it to be as such. They feed emotional essence to a spot, and it becomes that thing; holy or unholy.

And they wear masks.

Yes, they do. They assume the guise we want them to. They become the thing we worship … or dread.

The Veiled Queen, Nemesis, the Smiling Monster, the Dying Road, and the Cloaked Man.

They all wear masks.

They use these masks to cloak their true nature, often too ugly to behold. The Veiled Queen is just a big lump of unearthly matter. Nemesis hides inside a human host.

These five tales are all about masks, and thought forms, too. And all take place in Prosperity Glades, because - as you should already know, if you have read my novel ‘Feeding the Urge’ - there’s a weak spot between our world and the spiritual one, right in the middle of Grassy Swamp. And spirits - and thought forms - do thrive here.

Each one of these stories happened in Prosperity’s bloody past: from 1647 to our times. As if visiting my beloved town with a time machine, you get the opportunity to meet old familiar faces (some before their eventual demise) and new acquaintances.

You’ve heard about the Breed Mother in ‘Feeding the Urge’. And you can bet you already know that ax-wielding maniac in ‘Kamp Koko by Night’. Dr. Henry Hart and his terrific t-shirt collection returns in ‘I Will Get Her’.

So, forgive my long rant and let’s return to Prosperity.

Yet beware, once there … avoid making wishes.

They can come true and take form.

(1984)

Craig was waiting in the dark, alert for every sound coming from his parent’s room.

But none came, just the night creaks of wood adjusting itself. Nevertheless, he was afraid dad - or mom, mostly - would peek in to check the lights were off and he was safely sleeping. And he wasn’t. No, not tonight. Tonight he had to face his own fears to show his peers he wasn’t a wuss.

He was startled by a loud crack coming out of the half-open window, and a pale, white glow shone suddenly on the glass, casting longer shadows behind him. His heart raced fast as a silhouette grew larger on the windowsill.

They had kept their word; they had come for him.

Matt’s flashlight brightened Craig’s already bleached face, causing his eyes to shrink in distress.

“
Eleven-ten,” Matt whispered, excited. “Time to go!”

“
Take off that darn light from my face, dumb-ass!” Craig protested, at the same time reaching for his sneakers. Then went for the window and fully raised it upward, causing a breeze of warm Floridian night air to invade quickly his cooled room as an enemy waiting for the right moment to launch an attack. Yet, the chill he felt inside his stomach seemed unaffected by the change in temperature; it was still there, more, it had expanded to his innards.

‘
I’m gonna do it. No matter what,’ he thought.

“
C’mon, Craig! We don’t have all the night for this,” Matt whispered again from the tree branch he was perched on, this time a little bit louder, causing Craig’s heart to stop, fearful that would wake up his parents.

“
Shut up! Wanna put me in trouble?” Craig sibilated back. “I’m coming.”

Matt nodded with a guilty face, then switched off the torchlight and began backtracking on the branch.

“
Whassup? Sissy ain’t comin’?”

That was David’s voice coming from below in an ushered, but still too loud tone. He was seated on his bright yellow bike, wearing black matching pants and t-shirt who made him look like a ninja.

“
I’m coming. And stop calling me like that,” rebuked Craig, sliding out of the room and jumping on the tree. He was shivering, yet it wasn’t the climb he was afraid of, but his destination.

Kamp Koko.

The Camp of Death.

That summer camp had been abandoned by 1978, when its owner and a kid were found dead, killed by a yet unknown assailant. But stories had circulated in town about the truth behind that double murder. Some asserted that Russell Floyd, the owner and manager of the camp, had killed the seven-year-old boy. The same people swore that Floyd was a pervert, who liked to torture and kill kids, except he had limited the killings on runaways, until then. Mrs. Wilson, an old spinster and grocery seller down at the Chicken Farm on Lakeview Parkway, was sure as hell that one of the runaways he had murdered and (yuck!) eaten had a father who was looking for him and had carried his revenge on Floyd. Some said this unnamed guy had infiltrated the staff by getting hired as a gardener or janitor. Other said it was a camp counselor who had taken into his own hands the duty to payback Floyd with some of his medicine. Anyway, it was not what had happened before 1978 which scared Craig Turner, but everything which had happened after.

Many people had disappeared down there; mostly backpackers and campers. And kids.

A lot of kids.

Or so the stories said.

****

Craig Wales was the new kid in town, having moved from New Hampshire three months ago, and being the new kid at Ethan Hall Elementary School in Prosperity wasn’t easy. He had been picked up immediately by local bullies, yet Craig wasn’t a wuss and had been able to strike the right contacts, which had allowed him to get out of their list. Matt Fenwick and David Reese were the right fifth-graders to stick with.

Matt was tall and big for his age, although he didn’t use his brawn as the rest of the local jocks; always daring and adventurous, he was scared only by Mrs. Wilkins, the math teacher.

By contrast, David Reese was the sly one; always ready for a joke and with a lanky figure which had gained him the nickname of ‘Storky Dave’. Funny, at times, it could easily overstep and get on your nerves with his constant puns and pranks. However, they were respected back at school, mostly due to their upbringing. They were part of Prosperity’s heritage nobility; the one made by reputability, more than old money.

Both lived in the Laketown neighborhood, where Craig had moved in, and their families had been in Prosperity Glades by almost a century. Friendship had come by accident, when Porter Phyllis, a local punk, had targeted Craig for money, ambushing him halfway from home on Mimosa Lane. Porter was a petty kind of bully; a bottom feeder, not one of those which usually hijacked younger kids in a pack. He was a lone prowler striking out of West Bend. Nonetheless, being fourteen year-old, even if rangy-looking and not very muscular, he could still be a threat to a chubby ten-year like Craig. Luckily, Matt and Storky Dave couldn’t stand this jackal and had rescued him from the vermin by reminding Porter his last severe beating and humiliation at the Jackson Reservoir last summer. In that instance, Matt had kicked the shit out of this bastard after his failed attempt at extorting money from Storky while he was catching frogs. He hadn’t see Matt coming, and still bore a scar on his left cheek to mark the encounter.