Episode 12: The Other Queen

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Coach, the energy out there felt different.

What changed for the team today?

It was the new game day scratchers from the California Lottery.

Play is everything.

Those games sent the team's energy through the roof.

Are you saying it was the off-field play that made the difference on the field?

Hey, a little play makes your day, and today it made the game.

That's all for now.

Coach, one more question.

Play the new Los Angeles Chargers, San Francisco 49ers, and Los Angeles Rams Scratchers from the California Lottery.

A little play can make your day.

Please play responsibly.

Must be 18 years or older to purchase, play, or claim.

Old Gods of Appalachia is a horror anthology podcast and therefore may contain material not suitable for all audiences.

So, listener discretion is advised.

And in these woods, there are two queens.

You have learned some of the elder and her journey into the wilds, where she found blood and darkness, fire and shade, the songs of mothers, and the secrets of bears.

You bore witness when she pressed her ear to the chest of the mountain and heard the whispers that came from the inner dark and made the mistake of answering them.

You watched her walk the paths of darkest night and discover the corruption within her own soul.

You watched her face down her betrayer and

well,

you were left wondering, weren't you?

Her story is far from finished, family.

You'll hear it soon enough.

Just not right now.

The time has come to tell you of the younger queen.

For her story is of bone and shadow, pine and forest floor, of time lost and purpose found with a beginning hidden inside an ending.

You see,

it's thought the younger died in childbirth when she was about 12.

She and her babe were buried on the far side of the hill on the other side of the road, far from where any decent folk might go.

No one would ever say who the babe's daddy was because it would cost too much.

But his blood did things to the girl and the child best not discussed in the light of day,

nor in the black of night come to that.

Beneath the soil, the girl continued to age and grow as unnatural as a voiceless bird.

Near her 20th birthday, she crawled from her makeshift grave, the husk of the babe still latched to her breast, skin pale and flaking,

eyes alight with a malice and a hunger for vengeance.

See, there is not enough death in this world to let her heart truly know peace.

The earth that surrounds what was once her grave is devoid of life,

and every plant or tree that sprung from it is dead.

That place is watched by both grannies and haints with equal fear and trepidation.

Her half of the wood is dried and singing poplar, the wind always a soft song of burial.

The things that walk these woods are worse than dead.

Sometimes rotten things made of flesh, but other creatures born of the sinews of trees formed of tangled roots and mottled bark, forgotten bones long buried in the palace of the green, raised up and dressed in new raiments of vine and briar, leaves and shadow,

carefully crafted into the wondrous and horrible new forms to do the bidding of their dark mother,

their matriarch,

their monarch.

We call her

the dead queen.

A cold wind falls,

and so I follow.

No time to rest these weary balls.

I hear her

song,

and my heart goes hollow.

Best not to walk these boards alone

Best stick to the roads out of the shadow

Best get home

Best to leave them ghost alone

ghost alone

She has walked these hills like the shadow of a circling buzzard for generations.

If good daughter Dooley is wild overgrowth in the sticky scent of summer, her younger counterpart is the hulk of Black Mountain laid bare by winter, a naked skull fringed by an army of the life bereft.

And as there are legends of the elder sister in the plateau, the stories of the witchy woman in the woods, the ghost mother, the vengeful bride, the looks in your window for her baby,

abound across all of Appalachia.

Amongst the eastern band of the Cherokees, she might be mistaken for one of the raven mockers.

twisted witches that lay in the way of darkness prepared to steal away the livers and lives of the sick and the dying.

Why, over in Pikeville, Kentucky, they might tell you she's Miss Octavia Hatcher, who was buried alive and haunts the land her body sleeps in, hands all bloody from raking at the inside of her casket.

In the Cumberland Gap, they'd warn you of the pale and hungry mother, who wanders the hills like an old blind wolf.

and would eat you right up with all her mouths if you went too far into the wrong woods.

These yarns were spun to teach you to stay safe and mind common sense and most importantly your mama.

The stories that get lost though,

the ones hardly nobody ever lived to tell,

were often just blunt and simple warnings.

There is darkness here.

Fear it.

Trust those who can see through it and you might live to see the dawn.

Or then again,

maybe not.

Kraw, Tennessee, is not a place you will find on any map.

It was never a town, a village, or any form of recognized locality for which you would find a charter filed away in a courthouse somewhere.

But Kraw was a home.

For Big Jim Gibson and his family, it was the second chance.

See, the Gibsons were no strangers to putting down roots and having to dig them back up again.

Because when your family ain't nobody, and you and your kin had done some time in the penitentiary,

finding work amongst the God-fearing people of Isaac, West Virginia was just more trouble than it's worth.

Every prospect that Jim, his daddy Robert, and his little brother Ricky Lee ever had just dried up and blew away.

Hell, Jim missed the first four years of his little boy's life while he was locked up.

He wasn't going back inside.

When you live someplace where an honest living ain't an option,

sometimes you just have to move on.

It was Ricky Lee who set out for East Tennessee first.

Found himself a job laying track with Lock Railroad.

Started sending money back home.

Once Big Jim saw there was money to be made working for the L side of the B and L Combine and the Checkered pass weren't an issue, why he joined his younger brother.

Within a year they'd made enough to buy a middle and little patch of scrub land in the middle of nowhere between the Tennessee and North Carolina line.

The new homestead sat at the top of a modest hill.

There were blackberry bushes on one side and a pond down and around t'other.

And some nights the thick sweetness of the air and the songs of the frogs down down by the pond made it seem like a little patch of heaven.

Now, the soil wasn't as rich as it could be, and the trees left standing were ugly old things, jutting up out of the earth like the clutching fingers of a corpse.

It wasn't much.

When they were done with it, it would be theirs.

And thus the Gibson family had given it a name.

Big Jim had painted that name as half a joke on an old plank of wood posted up at the bottom of the hill.

Welcome to Crawl.

Because you see, this is where they finally stuck.

This may not have been the brothers' first mistake,

but it would be their last.

There's power in a name, family.

Believe it and no.

Little Caleb Gibson hadn't had many friends.

He'd not gone to school in town back in Isaac, and his health had kept him from being as robust an outdoorsman as Big Jim would have liked, but he was a good boy.

And his daddy and his uncle and his papa and his mommy loved him.

They told him stories of how proud the Gibson boys had stood for the Union during the war, how brave his great papa had been even when they had to take his leg.

Gibson men were tough.

And Gibson men were brave.

That was documentabul, his daddy would tell him when he tucked him in, tickling his boy's ribs with each part of the word.

They told him stories that would keep him safe, too.

Stories of the woolly boogers that would carry him off if he went to bed without saying his prayers.

Long ago stories about a giant looking for his big toe.

And of the witch woman who might come in the night and try to carry off little boys who were out of bed after the lights done put out.

It's a delicate balance to teach a boy to be both brave enough and scared enough to live in the world at 10 years old.

It's a balance that can sometimes go all kinds of wrong.

The first time Caleb saw the woman in the woods, he had in fact been out of bed after lights out.

just like his mommy had told him not to.

He'd had a dream that they'd had chickens and cows cows on their land, that this new homestead had blossomed into the farm his daddy always talked about having, and he was convinced he'd heard them clucking and mooing and carrying on outside.

So he snuck down the stairs of the tall pinewood house and peered out the front door.

Now there were no chickens nor cows, of course, and the lot was silent and still.

And Caleb got a little bit scared of how quiet it were if he was honest.

See, there's something about living out away from town in the deep part of the night.

That part that can't rightly call itself morning, but is deep in the blue-black of a time that is best spent sleeping, so you don't see what passes by your window in the gloom.

And he was about to turn and slip back into the house when he saw her.

She was standing right on the edge of the property line,

right by that one big tree that his papa had said was a hawthorn tree and thus bad luck to cut down

she wasn't that tall of a woman and she was pale

ghostly so

her hair hung in tatters about her face sticks and leaves matted all in it he could see that from the porch

She was staring at his papa's house like she was trying to burn a hole in it with her mind.

Papa wasn't even in that house yet.

Papa was sleeping in the downstairs room on a cot because Daddy and Uncle Ricky were still putting the roof on that house.

Caleb watched the strange woman for a minute.

He yawned real big, and when he opened his eyes, she was gone.

Caleb crept back up to the loft that he slept in and did not sleep again that night.

First thing the next morning, Caleb went straight to his mama and asked her about the witchy woman from the old stories.

Would she really come and lead you into the woods and give you to the devil if she caught you up after bedtime?

He told her about his dream and coming downstairs and seeing a scary woman at the edge of the property.

His mama gave him a look for being out of bed, and that look would have probably turned into a smack if she hadn't seen how scared her baby was.

Now, honey, Brunetta Gibson began, the witchy woman only comes when you've been real bad.

I don't think you've been real bad, have you?

I bet you was just dreaming one big dream.

You probably never come down them steps last night.

Now you just be a good boy and mind your daddy, and I don't think you have to worry about no witchy woman coming to take you.

Caleb smiled and felt a little better.

and went out to start his day.

Oh, and that day was a good day.

He played in the yard and let the warm September afternoon wash into a cool fall evening.

That time of the year when you can feel summer stretch your bones and start to get out of the way for changing leaves and cool mornings.

He helped his daddy stack firewood and they hung the door on Papa's new house.

Daddy said Paul and Ricky would be able to move in later in the week.

They were doing it.

They were making themselves a real home at last.

A week after Pepaw and Ricky moved into their shared house, Caleb saw the woman again.

He'd been stirred from his sleeping by a ruckus in the side yard.

Caleb had laid in the dark for a while and listened, and he could hear what sounded like dogs barking and growling and getting into things, so again he crept down the stairs.

This time he stepped out on the porch to look for them dongs.

But before he saw a hiding her hair of the canine variety, he looked to the hawthorn tree and there she was,

whisper pale and corpse skinny, like a scarecrow working the hoodow.

She was looking from Papa's house

back to their house, back and forth like she was trying to decide which door to knock on first.

Her eyes like undug wells, bottomless pits under the crabgrass scraggle of her matted hair.

And then she turned her head back toward the porch, and Caleb's heart nearly stopped.

He ducked low, hustling back through the front door and tiptoed his way to the kitchen so he could see the yard from there.

He wanted to wake his daddy, get him to scare this strange woman and her dogs away, started to call out, but then he remembered.

Gibson men are tough.

Gibson men are brave.

He made it to the kitchen window and looked out.

And there were, in fact, two dogs sniffing around and playing with each other in his yard.

Now, Caleb didn't like dogs.

Sorry, y'all.

He'd been scared of dogs since he got spooked by a stray he found in the woods behind their old house when he was little.

Dogs made him nervous in the daylight and on a good day, but these dogs.

These dogs were

wrong.

Caleb couldn't tell you how, but something in their movement and in the wet, growling sound of their barks, it was just

wrong.

These dogs seemed to ripple as they moved, their bodies scrawny and more than half starved, loping across in jerky twitches and starts and stops, and they nipped and bit at each other.

And Caleb swore he saw one of them tear a mouthful off the other, but just watching the two animals play or whatever it was they were doing made Caleb feel sick to his stomach.

And he looked up from the dogs to find the pale woman staring straight at him through the kitchen window.

She had not moved,

but Caleb could feel the weight of her regard like an icy wet blanket against him.

He thought he could almost smell her damp, rotten breath.

She raised a hand in a gesture that was almost, but not quite,

like a greeting.

And the two dogs

collapsed.

One second they were wrestling in the yard.

The next they dissolved into nothing like they'd been made of moonlight and mud, and they just melted silently back into the earth.

The next morning after breakfast, A hurried and argumentative affair in which he was not permitted to leave the table till his bread and preserves were all gone, Caleb went out to the spot where he'd seen the dogs and found proof he had not been dreaming.

Right where the dogs had vanished was a slick of rotten leaves and what looked like old roots pulped up and ground into the dirt.

The smell of rot and rancid meat hung about the spot as if something had died there days ago and only just this morning had been hauled away.

He found himself a stick in the yard and did what all little boys will do when confronted with the mess and poked at the slimy pile of rot,

finding an animal's jawbone,

some old rotten busted teeth,

and a single dead eye.

Caleb got sick right there and then ran in the house to get his mama.

And when she followed him back outside to check that spot on the ground, she found nothing but Caleb sick on the grass.

Between the bad dreams and painting the side yard with his breakfast, Brunetta was beginning to worry her son might be coming down with something.

So she scooped her little man up and carried him up to his bed where he'd spend the rest of that last day.

Later that night,

While Brunetta Gibson dozed in the rocking chair at his bedside, Caleb woke and sat bolt upright in bed.

He was aware of himself, but

at the same time, he was sure this was a dream.

It had to be.

He wasn't doing this.

He wasn't telling his body to sit up or try to get out of bed.

Well, he tried to wake his mama, see if she was dreaming too.

All the same, he swung his legs over the edge and put his breeches on and

Then his shirt tied up his shoes on the first try.

So this had to be a dream because Caleb Gibson was still learning the trick of tying them shoes.

And then with every bit of care he'd taken before,

he crept down the stairs and went out into the yard.

There were no dogs this time.

Just that eerie silence that made everything so much worse.

But she was there.

like a chunk of the moon in the shape of a dead woman standing vigil by the hawthorn tree.

His dream double backflipped itself into nightmare territory as he found himself walking right up to her, try as he might to stop his feet, to turn around and run back to the house where he belonged.

Close up.

She was a horror.

Her clothes were old and rotted, like she'd been buried in them.

The bones of her near-skeletal face pushed against her skin like dull knives through cheesecloth.

She was all angles and wrong-bent joints rank with the stench of fever and sweat-soaked bandages.

She breathed heavily,

but did not speak.

She held out one hand.

Caleb, to his growing horror, watched as his body betrayed him further, his left hand reaching out to take her right one

and followed her

into the dark woods.

There is a curse upon my every

waking breath,

and

I cannot escape

the darling.

Well, hey there, family.

Welcome to your first full episode in our first steps into season two of Old Gods Vapalacha in the Pines.

Welcome to Crawl, Tennessee, where you have been introduced to the other queen.

Now, I know y'all want to know what happens to little Caleb as he wanders into the woods with the old witchy woman.

A lot of stories just end that way.

Y'all know how we do things around here.

And y'all know that's not what's happening here.

So we'll

go further into the woods next time around.

And family, I would be remiss in in my duties if I did not ask you to make sure that you complete your social media ritual.

In fact, why don't you head on over to oldgodsofappalachia.com where you can follow us on Facebook, Instagram, tweet into the void with us on Twitter at Old GodsPod.

Join the Discord server, which has blown up and is now like...

Over a thousand plus people, I don't know, a zillion people are on our Discord.

It's kind of quiet sometimes, but I feel like it's just blown up in the past little bit.

And as always, if you wish to cast your lot with us, if you wish your name to be written on the roll, family,

join us on Patreon, patreon.com slash old gods of Appalachia.

We have opened a bunch of new upper tiers that have benefits that range from having a character named after somebody in your family or something you come up with, to getting to playtest our new role-playing game that will be coming in the new year, to other varied and sundry things, both material and immaterial, patreon.com slash old gods of Appalachia.

Oh, and by the way, if you pledge $10 or more a month, you get access to 17 episodes of Build Mama a Coffin, along with other fantastic digital exclusives.

It's really a good bang-for-your-buck scenario in terms of content.

Family, we love you and we treasure you, and we just want to remind you that Old Gods of Appalachia is a production of deep nerd media.

Today's story was written and performed by Steve Schell.

Our intro music is by Landon Blood, and our outro music, once again, is by those poor bastards.

See you soon, Pam.

Coach, the energy out there felt different.

What changed for the team today?

It was the new game, Day Scratches from the California Lottery.

Play is everything.

Those games sent the team's energy through the roof.

Are you saying it was the off-field play that made the difference on the field?

Hey, a little play makes your day, and today it made the game.

That's all for now.

Coach, one more question.

Play the new Los Angeles Chargers, San Francisco 49ers, and Los Angeles Rams Scratchers from the California Lottery.

A little play can make your day.

Please play responsibly, must be 18 years or older to purchase, play, or claim.