A Once-Told Tale: The Wolf Sisters Part Three

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Now all the easy hills

leave these dark valleys

For I can't stay now in the lands unknown

Den the easy hills up

I will walk so often

I can feel the winds now on your ghost.

Building a prison is a tricky thing.

When you seek to hold those too dangerous to be allowed amongst the rest of us, you do your very best to deny them contact with the sky,

to deny them purchase within the soil to deny them the blessed kiss of rain or river the damn that is to the dam must be shut away from all things good and green

but no builder's hand is ever perfect

no structure is ever truly impregnable So when our beloved mountains were raised to the exalted stars and then lowered to seal in the darkness that sleeps beneath, such security was sought.

And it's comforting to think that that potential portal was pressed shut, that every lock turned click closed for all eternity, and that every crack in each counted cornerstone was filled and sealed tight.

Comforting indeed, but

it's also a lie.

Along an ancient continental margin in the foothills,

Darkness had found ventilation from the time the old things first began dreaming.

Darkness had pushed up through the bedrock and into the black soil of what would one day be Baker's Gap, Tennessee.

Around 1902, before the railroads came and Baker's Gap, then called Rossville for the local landowner, was barely a town at all.

And there was a man who came to live in the place where the shadow pooled like creek water.

A stranger from somewhere not of these hills, from up north maybe, but nobody knows or remembers.

And slept in a snug little holler that was a sharp drop away from the brand new cut roads.

He came there to make a stead for himself,

to eventually send away for his family, but

that never happened.

But he kept to himself and cut timber and cleared the land that he claimed to have a deed to and tried not to go into town.

But in the dark of the night, he heard voices

and he heard songs that led him deeper into the trees where the earth grew black and rich.

He would wake some mornings just standing there,

barefoot toes clutching the rich loam,

his body shivering cold in the morning dew.

Some said he was actually a godly man and feared temptation, the temptation of women especially.

Some said he was born with a dead heart and never knew love.

But give the man a crumb of credit, he tried to stay away, but

after a time going into town could not be avoided.

And William, call me Bill Huff, made his first contact with the town of Rossville.

A nervous and an awkward man, he had no way with people in the light of day.

But at night,

with a drink or two in him and the song of the night on his lips,

it was like he was a different man altogether.

And it's said that he did yield to temptation and ended up at the local saloon in the company of a young lady.

It is said he did partake in her services.

It is also said that he paid in good coin.

and retreated to the woods with his supplies of the day and his good name that same night.

And after that one trip to town, and let's face it, sometimes it just takes that one trip, Mr.

Huff became a weekend regular at that parlor house, called on the same girl week after week, a raven-haired flare named Juanita,

who spoke of her home in the south as she moved atop him.

He brought her gifts.

carried himself like a suitor, made her feel like a queen.

He arrived one night, though, to be told Juanita hadn't been in her room when morning call came and that all of her things were gone.

Had he seen her?

Had he talked her into leaving?

But Bill Huff was confused and said he was there for his set appointment time and had no reason to think she had plans to leave.

Wouldn't she tell him her best customer?

And tempers flared, but Bill Huff seemed genuinely heartbroken.

So management believed him and

he went his way.

A month passed and Bill Hough was back in town

calling on the other parlor house that had opened on the far side of what passed for town where he met and became a regular of another young girl named Judith.

Now he would call on her in the exact same way with flowers and gifts just like a proper courtier before putting down his coin to sate what urged him.

And sure enough, several weeks in, one Saturday night, a confused and befuddled Bill Huff showed up to call on his favorite companion to find her gone,

her room stripped,

her person missing.

But this time the questions were harder for Mr.

Bill, as this was a different sort of parlor house run by a different sort of people, if you get my meaning.

Now it took three men to subdue him because it was said Bill fought like a demon before they dragged him back to the house in the deep little holler where he lived

and found both girls there dead.

Strangled.

Tucked into bed together as neat as you please.

The bed encircled with dead nettles and something that surely wasn't paint.

Now Juanita had been dead long enough to stink, but She looked as pretty and preserved as the day she came to work in Rossville.

Except for the necklace of bruises around her throat, Judith was much the same, still in her best working lingerie.

Her neck a shadow of purple and black where she died in the lover's clutch of Bill Huff.

The men strung Bill Huff up right there beside his house and buried him and the two women behind it.

The local papers, such as it was, screamed all about love triangles and the deviltry worked by women of ill repute, and the holler was renamed Lover's Clutch.

And the darkness that soaked the soil there drank up the death that tread on it.

Now legend says if you come on a new moon and walk backwards into the clutch and turn around real quick, you can still see Bill choking the life out of Juanita while Judy watches him terrified from the door of his house.

Which still stands there.

Why, it's the biggest building in that three-quarter circle of buildings still standing in the clutch to this day.

Now, those with the true gift can't help but see the dead sometimes.

But to live in that house,

haunted by death, built on a wellspring of hunger and oblivion,

well, that might change a person, might it not, family?

When Nesme Yimenez first came to Baker's Gap

and moved into the house that the woman that helped her come and had been living in, the voices and visitations weren't scary at first.

She was a bruja in her blood, and she knew that it was sometimes her burden to see the restless dead.

But when she brought her own blood there,

her Dolores,

her cousin, she said,

and she had watch him fall in with Juba Walker,

The women who walked the clutch at night began to tell her different things,

as did the voice that came from beneath the earth.

We'll come back to that, though, family.

Melvin Blevins was a man of simple means.

He had grown up in these mountains, had raised a family in these mountains, rightly believed he would one day die in these mountains.

And he'd made choices in his life that had brought that belief closer to reality more than a few times.

He'd worked in doghole mines in Virginia, cut timber with outlaw groups in Tennessee,

but then he met his Clara.

Everything changed.

He'd never loved someone so much as he did this tiny little ball of sunshine and he knowed she was too good for him.

Didn't care.

Counted himself lucky.

And Clara bore him two girls, Irene and Vera.

Now, Irene married a boy respectable like over in Cumberland and moved off, but her little sister Vera was far from the marrying kind.

Wild as a bobcat and bitter as a preacher's wife, Vera ran off from home and never looked back.

He'd heard from time to time that she'd been selling what God gave her all over East Tennessee and up to West Virginia and back.

He'd gone looking for her a few times in the houses up by Esau or over in Kewanee.

Never found her, though.

I found girls that knew her.

Told him that Vera had got in with a house up in Keystone, West Virginia when she first ran away and got treated real rough.

It was bad.

And from that point, she was determined just to make it on her own.

Now, Melvin tried to tell himself that she was gone and he'd probably never see her again.

But then word came that she was back in Bakers Gap and working at that house out in the Big Valley.

Pleasant evenings.

He made himself stay away.

He knew if she wanted to see her family, she knew how to get home.

Then a boy come.

Middle of the night, boy come running, told him Vera was hurt, hurt real bad, and asking for him.

And he rode out as fast as he could, but

she was gone before he got there.

Turns out the house she left in West Virginia in the part of Keystone called Ash Bottom didn't take kindly to losing its girls.

Vera hadn't been working at Pleasant Evenings at all.

She'd been sent there to hide.

How that man got in the house was a mystery to all involved.

He did not, however,

get out.

The owner of the house, Miss Walker, had offered to let him have what was left of the man who took Vera's life,

but there wasn't much left in that shoebox, so he declined.

Miss Walker, he couldn't call her Marcy then, he can't now, had been kind and gracious, and not at all what he expected.

She paid for Vera's funeral, offered to pay him and his wife a handsome sum for their loss, but

he declined.

She told him Vera had come on the run from Ash Bottom and the houses up there were rough.

Sometimes it was said they were actually company-owned.

Vera had come across one of her other sisters on the West Virginia-Virginia line, and she'd helped her get to pleasant evenings, knowing she'd be safe there.

Or so everybody thought.

Melvin had never forgotten Marcy Walker's kindness, and so a month to the day that they buried Vera, He showed up and volunteered to help around the house in any way he could in terms of keeping the girls safe.

At around 6'6 and 330 some odd pounds, Melvin was a force.

And he did just as he intended, doing his best to make sure no one else's little girl or boy ended up like his Vera.

He saw how Marcy Walker treated her girls and boys, too.

Saw how she adapted when the house had to change after that railroad man thing.

He would march into hell and back for that woman.

Thought his wife would too.

Out here, family comes in many forms.

So here Melvin stood in the dirt outside the Rising Creek Baptist Church, waiting on that good-for-nothing drunk Larry Sizemore to show up and get his.

He'd hung a lantern on the hook by the church door and stood in the thin circle of light by the steps.

Now, Larry had beat on his wife Sadie and their little boy Dennis for too long, and if there was anyone he was almost willing to let these women take, it'd be Larry.

But hell, if he could knock some sense into him, well, that's a good time for everybody.

Slung over Melvin's shoulder was a leather bag holding things he had kept in a box under his bed since Vera passed.

He hadn't been able to stand looking at him till now.

Now it was getting late enough that Melvin was starting to worry that Larry turned yellow and decided not to come.

When out of nowhere, the other big man came shuffling into sight and fell into Melvin's arms, blood spilling down the front of Larry's freshly torn throat.

Melvin gasped and let the bulk of Larry Sizemore sink to the ground, wiping his now bloody hands on his overalls and the ground to get them dry.

He kept his back to the church steps and looked out into the darkness.

He reached into his shirt and pulled out the medicine pouch Marcy Walker had made for him the Christmas before.

She told him it could protect him from the spooky things that she and her family dealt with.

Now, Melvin had not believed in witches or magic and haints until that business with the railroad and the local magistrate.

But now he believed sure enough.

And he heard the sounds of paws and claws on the road and in the brush.

The panting growls of a pack of wolves that were all around him.

And then the sickly sounds of bones and flesh rearranging itself.

And a woman's voice came from the darkness.

Mr.

Blevins,

Mr.

Blevins, you a good man.

Why are you out here trying to fight like one of these bad boys?

Hmm?

You going to try to get us to kill you?

She laughed and Melvin recognized the rich laughter of the dark, dark-skinned woman he'd only seen at the dry goods store a few times.

Her accent spoke of faraway places he didn't know, and she'd always seemed nice enough.

She stepped into the lantern light naked and shiny.

Her whole body greased.

Her curves catching the light and sending it cascading over her like a dark ocean.

Let us have the old drunk's body, Mr.

Blevins.

No harm needs to come to you.

You just step away unless you thought you was drawing us away from our home place so them girls from out at the gap can get in here and mess with our things.

Oh, Melvin.

Are you a decoy, Mr.

Blevins?

Well, I guess I'm something like that, Miss Darla.

Melvin remembered the woman's name from somewhere in his mind.

So, uh, y'all weren't supposed to get here till me and Larry were...

Well, uh,

huh.

You're early.

So I guess we got some time to kill.

Melvin's hand went to the medicine bag around his neck.

We have things to kill, all right, Mr.

Blevins.

Said Darla as her body cracked and writhed and broke until she was no longer a woman, but a lean black wolf.

Two other wolves padded into view, one larger and one smaller than Miss Darla.

The smaller was a sandy brown and its muzzle was smeared in gore.

Larry's last dance partner, he guessed.

From the other side of the church came three more smaller red wolves.

They looked scrawnier and less impressive than the three alpha predators across the way, but just as eager.

Melvin was willing to bet that these were the three women from the woods, the ones who couldn't change on their own.

Melvin had a plan for them.

The other three, well, that would be harder.

But the three lesser wolves, he wasn't too worried, even as the pack began to circle him.

I'm warning y'all, Melvin growled.

Miss Walker,

she done taught me some tricks.

She done give me some things to take care of the likes of y'all.

Y'all better just go on home now.

The wolves growled and snapped.

It sounded almost like laughter.

Then one of the three smaller red wolves made a pass at his legs, and Melvin, clutching that medicine bag, was suddenly swift enough to avoid it.

Then the second, and then the third.

Oh, they're playing with me, Melvin thought.

Well, let's see how they like getting played with.

Melvin smooched the air and called, Come on, puppies.

Come on.

Come on, now, dogs.

What y'all got?

And the littlest of the three red wolves took the bait and rushed to attack Melvin.

The pack tensed and then froze as Melvin sprung high into the air, landing on the small wolf with all of its weight.

And before it could do anything but squeak, he produced from his pocket a small, hand-carved comb,

clearly made of bone.

And with it, he began to gently comb the wolf's fur, like a proud daddy on Sunday morning giving his wife a helping hand.

And just like that, the wolf went limp.

One moment its eyes and jaws were wide, the next it was slack unto death, and began to shift back into a lovely naked girl, pale as starlight, body greased and a fowl rendered fat, sleeping like a baby.

The pack seemed to take a second to process what it was seeing, but before they could react, Melva had run the enchanted comb across the scruffs of the other two smaller wolves who quickly went limp and fell to the ground, reverting slowly to their original shapes.

Huh, Miss Walker's other sister give Vera a set of these combs and vanity goods that Miss Ellie makes.

Thought they might come in handy.

Rest of y'all need a little bit of grooming?

I can make you real pretty.

Come on now.

The big black wolf was Miss Darla, narrowed her eyes and growled at the other two who sped off into the night in the direction of the clutch.

Miss Darla bared her fangs like nightmares and prepared to charge Melvin, but found herself looking into a fine silver mirror.

It too was carved bone,

and the reflection she saw there made her quivering lips drop.

In Melvin's hand, the mirror began to quake and emit a pale blue light.

It grew terrible cold in his hand and he dropped it and the big wolf looked down into the reflection, mesmerized as a single human hand.

black as night reached up out of the mirror, and Melvin stood stunned as the opening of the mirror seemed to stretch wide as a whole ass-grown woman climbed from its inky depths.

Melvin could see that it had the same shape and silhouette as Miss Darla,

but he could see no features, no three dimensions, if you will.

It was like the woman's shadow had stepped from the mirror.

Miss Darla had already changed her shape and stood facing her shadow as if looking in a full-length mirror.

Tears streaming down her face as the shadow started to fill out, started to take her form.

And if a shadow takes your full form, there can only be one of you and many times there ain't gonna be none of you.

Before there were two identical women standing in the parking lot of Rising Creek Baptist, the shadow woman pulled Darla into an embrace.

There was a dim pulse of blue light as the shadow woman passed through Miss Darla and vanished.

Darla uttered a surprise

before her eyes rolled back into her head and she collapsed.

Melvin stood looking awkwardly at the circle of naked, greased-up women around him before coming to himself and bolting off after the two wolves that had headed into the darkness and toward the sisters in the clutch.

In the clutch, the wolf woman thing glared at Ellie and Marcy as the howls of two of her sisters sounded in the distance.

At first, Marcy thought the woman was trying to transform to attack them.

But on closer inspection, she could see the creature was actively fighting against the change.

I wanted to be upright and in my full mind to meet you, sisters, she growled, her breath coming in harsher and harsher pants, her muscles straining against the change, her eyes pleading with something, her body slick with a rotten-smelling layer of grease at her feet or paws or whatever.

The soil itself was trying to latch on to her, writhing up over her feet, up her calves like tendrils of shadow.

Sister, you done wrongs yourself, Marcy said.

It's hard enough to take another thing's shape, but I'm not sure what you are now.

Oh, honey, the things in the earth have tricked you.

You need to let us help you.

Surely you can smell the rot here, honey.

Just tell me what you've done.

The thing's voice changed.

Switching back and forth between Spanish and English, it told the sisters of a suitor that had come and brought her gifts and brought her candies, and she barely wanted to make him pay, but the rules were the rules, and then he took her away and brought her here.

And then, and then the creature's voice shifted again, and this time to a younger thing's petulant whine.

I told him I wasn't living in no shack out here in the backwater, he'd have to do better.

But he got

mad, he got real mad, and he, and he, and he, and the voice shifted a third time.

I brought her here,

I brought her here,

my Dolores,

my girl,

my

daughter.

She cannot know I am her mommy.

She cannot know my shame.

So I give her to my mother, tell her that's her mommy, but she wants to come.

She wants to come and work, so I say I am her cousin.

And they

take her and they kill her.

They strangle her and bury her here.

They,

honey, Marcy began.

Dolores Jimenez is good.

She's in Arkansas.

Her and the baby are fine.

No!

The creature wailed.

They tell me the truth.

They tell me.

They tell me.

Marcy and Ellie locked eyes, and Ellie nodded.

Before the creature could say another word or even move, which seemed kind of doubtful, but you never can be sure, Marcy raised her walking stick with both hands and stabbed it into the earth in front of the creature.

By the bones of the hills that birthed us, by the mother's blood and newest moon, by the water that runs and the fire that burns, by that which loves above the earth, not below,

I bind you.

I make you safe.

I make you whole.

I make you and name you Nesme Yimenez.

Light burst from Marcy's staff and slammed the wolf creature to its knees.

It keened and cried, bound under the immense gift and will of Marcy Walker.

Ellie moved fast.

She saw the creature's feet.

The black tangles and splatters of the fungus and shadow and waste that coated the garden were being driven back by the light of the binding.

So she drew Welling Wound back out and went to work cutting the ropes of black gore, binding the creature to the tainted soil until nothing but clean earth remained.

And then,

out out of nowhere

there were ghosts

to a bearer of a true gift seeing the dead it's always a shock

but to see two different ghosts walk out of the body of a living woman

well that wasn't something you see every day so the walker sisters were taken back a moment

First, the long-haired ghost of a young woman praying for all she was worth in Spanish,

eyes cast heavenward.

Second, the lithe, blonde young woman who had grown up harder than just about anyone in attendance, cussing and spitting and yelling at somebody they couldn't see until both women faded into witchlight and dust.

And then what was left of Nesme Yimenez?

It was apparently the mother of young Dolores, not a cousin at all.

A brujah with the true gift, living with ghosts and eating and bathing in darkness that come from beneath until the only tongue she could speak was vengeance and murder in the mouth of wolves.

Her eyes were racked with pain as her body was warped and distorted in this in-between shape she knew she was dying.

Consumed by her own tainted workings.

Please, she seemed to plead as her body started to contort.

Marcy nodded and Ellie stepped back as her sister released the binding and watched as the lost mother of Dolores and grandmother to young Joaquin crumbled to dust and fur

and bones.

A short while later, a breathless and very much alive, Melvin Blevins rode into the clutch with his horse and wagon.

the wagon bearing the weight of two sleeping wolves he'd found on his way to the clutch.

They were headed this way out for blood, but I found them passed out just like the others, but they didn't change none.

They got a taste for it.

They'll likely stay this way, said Ellie.

Did the comb and mirror work out okay?

Just like you said, Miss Walker.

Call me Ellie, Melvin.

I feel like we're family now if you're using my workings.

That's fine.

Miss Ellie.

Yes, ma'am.

Marcy Walker sat exhausted exhausted on the edge of the cart and looked out over the homestead of the clutch.

What to do with this place now?

The dawn would cleanse a lot of what was still here if there wasn't a witch or ghost for them to latch on to.

Maybe this place could know some peace.

Might just be best to let the woods take it.

Let the green cleanse it.

Yeah,

that feels right.

Let there be green.

There is a curse upon my

everywhere

and I

cannot escape.

Well, hey there, family.

Well, that wraps up our little trilogy here on the Wolf Sisters.

I want to thank everybody who came out for all three weekends that we did live on Discord.

That was phenomenal.

I had the best time getting to know some of y'all and answering questions with Cam and just sharing fellowship and holding space.

And really, if we look at numbers, we reached more people in the first two nights of the Discord events than we would have at our live shows in Marion.

And I know that's not the same thing.

I know it's not.

But it did my heart good to see that many gathered in the name of the old gods and in the name of this show.

It really, really did.

I really super appreciate y'all.

And I want to continue to thank you for your generosity on the Threadless store and on Patreon and folks that have just randomly PayPaled us money.

Two out of the three of us are still unemployed.

And

Lord knows when that can be rectified with, this is me gesturing vaguely to the world around me with all this going on.

But we thank you all and we appreciate you.

And if you have to step back on your Patreon pledge, family, believe me, we know where you're coming from but we do appreciate you you you are helping pay rent and you are helping keep utilities on for some people and that means so much to us as a family and we love you all so much for it if you'd like to become a patron on patreon and get access to build mama a coffin and some other unique programming we have there and to get all your episodes a little bit early and some other unique content uh go on over to patreon.com slash old gods of appalachia you too can unlock the mysteries of the earth and of the water and of the wind and of the fire and of the fell and of the holy and all the things that spiral around my bathtub.

When I'm trying to sit in a bubble bath that smells like sandalwood and jasmine and think about evil creepy stuff.

Yeah, it helps us out.

And you can also follow us on Facebook and Instagram as old gods of Appalachia.

On Twitter, you can tweet into the void with us at old gods pod.

The threadless store is oldgods of appalachia.threadless.com.

Family, come hang out with us in the fellowship hall on Facebook.

If you like old people's social media, we have good things being shared in there.

We have more exciting stuff to come, family.

This little

season two, this little trilogy was just some special, unique programming based off of the live shows.

And we really hope you've enjoyed it.

Season two is coming.

There is so much creepy stuff going on in season two.

If you heard me alluding to the railroad man and the local magistrate, that might turn up in season two.

You never know.

Season two is going to jump all over time, so it's going to be interesting.

We love you.

We appreciate you, family, and we'll see you real soon.

But I've always

breakfasted down

to

me

for

I cannot

escape

darkness.