If you love old gods of Appalachia and want to help us keep the home fires burning, but maybe aren't comfortable with the monthly commitment, well, you can still support us via the ACAS supporter feature.

No gift too large, no gift too small.

Just click on the link in the show description, and you too can toss your tithe in the collection plate.

Feel free to go ahead and do that right about now.

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.

Running a business online?

Look legit and own your own brand with professional tools from GoDaddy.

Instantly build trust with your customers and boost your credibility with an email that matches your domain so people know you mean business.

There's never been a better time.

Just go to godaddy.com slash GDNow and choose from a wide variety of popular domains to find one that's right for you.

Pair that with a professional email that works for all your business needs from daily communications to to email marketing and everything in between.

That's a little price for a lot of credibility.

For a limited time, get a domain and matching professional email for just 99 cents a month for one year.

Go to go daddy.com slash GDNow and look legit with GoDaddy.

That's godaddy.com slash gdnow.

Again, go daddy.com slash gdnow.

There's never been a better time to choose the domain and email that's right for you.

New customer purchases only products auto-renew separately.

See terms on site.

Go daddy.com/slash GD Now.

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

So listener discretion is advised.

The bad death and resurrection of Annie Messer.

An interlude.

The flies on Carol Ann Avery's face shifted and waved like a mourner's veil.

The wind had set her to turning.

Cletus and Annie Messer arrived at the Avery place to find it ravaged by violence and unspeakable darkness.

The only sound outside the flies was the creaking of the branch as Carol Ann stared unseeingly down at the pair of them.

Annie Messer was stunned into blessed silence for a moment before tears filled her eyes and she babbled and cried.

Oh my Lord, Cletus.

I've never seen anything like this.

This poor family?

Oh my lord.

Where's Sarah?

We gotta find Sarah.

Oh my God.

You reckon we were to cut her down?

I mean, we have to cut her down, right?

It's the right thing to do.

We can't just leave her up there.

The ride from Barlow to Goshen Creek should have taken a couple of hours and a slow cart at best, but Annie Messer insisted on stopping once for prayer beside a particularly pretty waterfall and again to make water herself, and she never was a woman for traveling in a straight line to begin with but then

she started to swear they were being watched

which of course required them to stop for even more prayer

but she wasn't wrong though

Kalitas would have swore they were being followed but not followed exactly

tracked

hunted

he picked up on the sounds shortly after they left Barlow proper, and the first few times he turned his head, he expected to see men on horseback, or at least a cart like theirs, emerging from the woods as the ground spoke and thick branches bent and groaned as something massive pushed through them.

Every time they stopped and looked or even took cover in a bunch of trees to see if who or whatever would pass them,

there was nothing.

No one.

As they grew closer to Goshen Creek, Cletus went cold.

The voices had begun to speak again.

They told Cletus not to worry, that this was all part of their vision.

Bringing them the Avery girl would absolutely guarantee his family's safety.

Just bring her.

Bring her.

The voices almost howled with ecstasy now now that they stood here on the far side of the creek.

In the shadow of Pinky Avery's late wife, the air was barely breathable.

Where Carol Ann had emptied herself after departing her body, a dark stain marked the ground, and from that stain a cancerous black sludge spread.

It grew and spread like a fungus.

pungent and ripe with the smell of spoilt meat.

It climbed the trunks of nearby trees and had begun to creep up the steps of the Avery cabin.

The yard itself was a different sort of horror.

The ground was gouged and slashed.

In places it looked like things with great clawed feet had pushed off from the soft earth, leaving ragged craters filled with a putrid, bile-colored icker.

What's worse, tiny things swam in those pus-clouded depths.

And the thought of what might live in there made Cletus want to scream until his heart gave out.

The door to the cabin was in splinters.

The glass of the window panes lay in a thousand broken whimpers on the desecrated front room floor.

Piles of some sort of animal scat littered the floor and were smeared across the bare walls.

Blind, white things, too large to be called maggots, moved among that nightmare of filth and stench.

What furniture had been in the room was kindling now.

The down of pillows and blankets stuck matted with the foul waste to the walls and floor.

Something or someone had tore through this house and befouled it.

Someone or something had been looking for Sarah Avery.

Sarah Avery who made the voices practically salivate.

Sarah Avery who he wouldn't know if he saw her because her family never came to church and who never got saved nor baptized.

Sarah Avery, who was just a little girl, and thankfully, Sarah Avery,

who was not here.

Between the voices' rapturous approval of his presence here at the Avery homestead and the yammering of Annie Messer, who honestly could not shut up if you paid her good money, Cletus's head was about to bust.

But suddenly, Annie Messer's voice fell silent silent along with the voices that had been rattling inside of Cletus' thoughts.

The change was jarring, and Cletus spun to see what was going on.

Annie was staring at a spot just beyond the corner of the cabin, where something massive and nothing at all seemed to compete to occupy the same space at the same time.

Cletus squinted hard at it.

It was like his eyes wanted to see whatever it was that Annie was staring at, but his mind wouldn't let him.

Light bent and shimmered and refused to show the shape of whatever was staring Annie Messer down.

From behind him, the ground squelched and thrummed as something heavy dropped from the branches of a nearby tree.

Cletus turned as quick as he could to see what was there, to see what had followed them over a too-long wagon ride for most of a day without ever once being seen.

But before he truly understood what was happening, the voices in his head, no, a singular voice this time,

the voice in his head, had growled a word louder than any whisper it had ever used to speak to him, and it felt like his head was indeed split open as he screamed and clenched his eyes and fell back to the ground.

And when he opened them,

he wished he'd been born blind.

What had dropped from the tree, what had followed and stalked them all day,

and what had had apparently just charged him with the might and speed of a draft horse lay sprawled on the ground, fully visible.

Cletus saw it.

He wished to God he hadn't, but

what can you do?

If you had to compare it to anything, it might have been a dog or maybe a wolf, except its hide was

strangely hairless,

its skin a pale blue and visibly soft like that of a drowned child.

It had at least six legs and the tangle of limbs on its lower half, each one ending in thick black claws that seemed to retract like a cat's.

Well, they'd have to, he thought.

There's no way it could walk otherwise.

Then he looked closer at its legs.

Each limb was covered in eyes.

Brown with bloodshot whites,

green with scarlet blobs floating around the iris, milky white and sightless orbs that seemed to pant like open mouths,

and a pair of scarlet ones that smoldered and throbbed a sick blood-clot brown.

His body was thick and broad like a boar.

His head was that of a hairless wolf or

something wolf-like but with not marishly wronged tusks growing from the underside of its jaws.

Its ears were wide and bat-like.

Its brow held three eyes, two that looked black and empty, and one like a burning golden sun in the center of its forehead.

Its maw was an endless valley of blades and spires, some that looked like teeth, and others like cruelly sharpened stones.

Its tongue hung from its limp jaws, long and black and forked, smoke or steam rising from where the viscous rope met the cooling rotten air.

Its breathing was ragged but was beginning to steady.

And before Cletus could react, the thing was on its feet, tongue retracted behind that cave-in of a mouth, and it was staring at him.

The tip of the tongue now scenting the air like a snake, that center eye locked on his face.

And again, the solitary voice in Cletus' head spoke a word he did not understand, but was clearly a command.

The low thing in front of him cowered.

It is a dog, he thought.

It's one of their dogs, and

I think it just got told.

Without warning, the thing leapt past Cletus and into the woods, its body vanishing back into the shimmer of unsight that seemed to be its natural state.

He turned to see if Annie Messer had seen it too, and remembered she had been staring in the opposite direction.

She stood, rooted in the same spot where he'd left her.

So he called her name, but she didn't answer.

He called again and began to walk towards her and realized that she was shaking, twitching, seizing as if she were having a fit, but she did not fall over.

And as Cletus got closer, he saw why.

From a blur at the the edge of the cabin an impossibly long black tongue issued forth from seemingly nowhere and had latched onto Annie Messer's eyes and face.

Its tongue was in fact forth

and each point was lodged deep and working deeper into Annie Messer's eye sockets.

There was a sound like frying eggs.

If Annie was screaming, Cletus could not hear her.

Her hair began to smolder and her body began to wilt, the smell of rot and sickness growing thicker.

And suddenly, without warning, this second thing flickered into being.

It was twice the size and thickness and height of its kin.

This one stood on its four back legs and held up the other two as if in prayer, and then it roared and snapped its head and all six legs to the earth, pulling and retracting its tongue at the same movement whiplashing Annie face first into the swamp of the yard her neck and spine audibly shattering with the sound of a tree fall in winter

the thing lowered its head and leaned in to tear into Annie's corpse when Cletus yelled The word that came from his mouth was not a word he understood or that his mouth even knew how to properly shape, but the message was communicated

He stood between the monster and its meal and held out a single hand and the word came again, lower,

more threatening this time.

And the larger thing considered him, deadly tongue tentatively slithering forward, then retracting as if sensing something foul.

And in the distance, its companion's cry gave notice.

It gave Cletus one last look up and down and then leapt into the woods beneath a cloak of bending light.

Cletus went to Annie's body then and turned her over.

Her face was a ruin, ripped from forehead to cheekbone.

Her eye sockets had been cooked dry and cauterized by the digging tips of the thing's tongue.

Her neck and spine had been shattered into a bag of bloody gravel.

Cletus had had enough.

If those things were their dogs, what was he?

Was he anything better or more than a monster leading innocent men and women and, good lord, now children to death and damnation?

What had he become?

Well, he was done.

That's what he'd become.

With effort, he loaded Annie's shattered body onto the cart, shocked to find that their mule was just standing idly there as if nothing had happened.

He settled everything up and headed back along the road to Barlow, saying a prayer for Sarah Avery that those things never found her and that their paths would never ever cross.

When Cletus made it back to the schoolhouse, it was late afternoon.

The sun came dazzling through the leaves of the trees, and it was peaceful and quiet and gentle.

Cletus almost took an easy breath, but then he saw tracks in the schoolyard.

His heart jumped, thinking he was looking at six-legged tracks with unnatural claw marks, but he looked closer, he counted only four.

But until today, he would have said these were the most fearsome tracks he'd ever seen, because they would mean that the largest bear ever to walk these hills walked right into the yard of the schoolhouse.

He saw no sign of a bear, though.

and proceeded to unload Annie's corpse into the one place she'd ever known happiness, where it could await the same fate destined for the rest of Barlow, a baptism of vengeance and fire and dust.

As Cletus settled Annie in the back of the room, the voices, who had been constant in a steady hum since they saw the tracks outside, kept repeating the same phrase over and over.

First you rise, then you clean her.

Prepare her for the fire.

First you rise, then you clean.

Prepare her for the fire.

Cletus laughed.

For the first time in years, he laughed a real, hard-belly laugh that shook him to the bones.

Your dog killed her.

Clean her yourself, you goddamn hanks.

He winced, expecting punishment.

Expecting the black lung to rise and choke him for his defiance to undo the seven years given him, but

nothing came.

The voices repeated the phrase three more times and then faded from Cletus' mind.

Cletus shrugged it off and set to closing up the school and heading off to find his wife and family to finally get them the hell out of Barlow.

And in his rush, he never noticed the sleeping form of a young girl in a far corner, completely exhausted and covered by shadows in a picnic blanket taken from Miss Annie's desk.

An hour later, Annie Messer rose.

She'd heard the instructions given her before the messenger had left, taking the voices with him.

She led herself by sound and sight now, for blessed darkness be her eyes now, praise.

And she found the bucket of water she'd brought in from the well that morning, along with a clean rag beside it.

She made her way over to Sarah Avery's sleeping body.

She'd need to be cleaned up.

She'd need to be comforted.

She needed to be ready.

Annie hummed as she worked, washing the mud and dirt from between Sarah's toes and off her feet and legs and arms and shoulders

and from her lovely young face, picking out briars and bits of weeds from her hair.

Humming and humming

until she felt the girl's stir start to rouse.

She knew it wouldn't be long now.

How are we, family?

It's good to see y'all.

Looks like we're learning some things after all.

Found out how those boys got up and done what they did.

Found out how Cletus Garvin got there.

And now we found out what happened to poor Miss Annie.

Only a few more things to learn before our time in Barlow comes to an end, but don't you worry.

We got a little bit to go.

We're not ready to go home just yet.

Old Gods of Appalachia is a production of Deep Nerd Media.

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

The voice of Miss Annie was Allison Mullins.

Today's outro music is by those poor bastards.

Family, have you truly found your way home yet?

Are you following us through the darkness on Facebook and Instagram as Old Gods of Appalachia?

Are you tweeting into the void to us at Old God's Pod?

Are you following us, family?

Are you following us truly and closely?

And family, let me ask you a question.

Have you been to the fellowship hall?

Have you found the coffee by the window that's not really a window?

And the food that's by the alternate wall that's neither alternate nor a wall?

We even installed extra seating on the patio.

We just don't suggest sitting out there after the sun gone down.

I am, of course, talking about the fellowship hall group for Old Gods of Appalachia on Facebook.

I know that's old person social media, but hey, things move a little bit slowly in the mountains.

What can we say?

If you're a Facebook user, please come find us.

Our numbers swelled to over 400 members just this past week, and it grows by the day.

We have discussions, we answer questions, sometimes there are contests and

some fun offers thrown up in there first before anybody else sees them.

That's the Old Gods of Appalachia Fellowship Hall group.

over on Facebook.

And family, if you would truly like a closer walk with the the old gods that sleep beneath, consider forsaking some of your own worldly wealth and becoming a patron on our Patreon where we can unlock the secrets of the universe and provide you with apparel and treasures and gifts and exclusive, exclusive bonus, sometimes personalized material.

Consider joining us, family, www.patreon.com slash old gods of Appalachia.

There's more exciting stuff coming up on Patreon very soon.

We're almost set to announce our exclusive patrons-only storyline.

Episodes of a special subset of the show that will be exclusive to patrons of $10

and up.

Think about it: www.patreon.com/slash old gods of Appalachia.

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?