The Ladies of Horror
Picture-Prompt Writing Challenge!
Shadows of the Old Line
by Kathleen McCluskey
The Tennessee sun roasted the ground into cracked gravel and dead grass. Jake wiped sweat from his brow, the metal detector whining as he swept it over the forgotten field. American Civil War buffs whispered about a Confederate regiment that vanished here in 1864. No graves, no records, they were just gone. That made it the perfect place to do some digging.
The detector beeped near a patch of scorched soil.
He dropped to one knee, brushing away the ash and pebbles until he uncovered them: a pair of wire rimmed glasses, half buried. The lenses were cracked, fused with grime and something…sticky. Red-brown. He touched the frame, and everything changed.
The sun darkened. Wind died. The air thickened.
Then he heard it.
Marching boots.
Jake bolted upright, his heart thudding. The field was shifting, shadows spilled across it like ink. Shapes emerged – figures in worn grey uniforms, arms dangling like broken limbs, jaws unhinged. One’s ribs jutted through rotting flesh. Another dragged one of his arms along like a plow.
Then the stench hit next. Burned gunpowder, bile and rot.
At their head stood a tall man in a Confederate colonel’s coat. Its insignias were barely visible through the blood and filth. His skin was grey and waxy, one side of his face had been eaten away to show the glistening bone. His hollow eyes leaked a thick, black fluid.
“You found my eyes,” he said. His voice was like grinding glass.
Jake stumbled backward, still clutching the glasses. “What the hell is this?”
The colonel stepped closer. “Battle of Spring Hill, November 1864. I led my men into the dark, following orders. We were to flank the Yanks. But we didn’t find the enemy. We found the gap.”
Jake turned to run, but the ground turned soft beneath him. Hundreds of skeletal hands clawed up from the earth, grabbing at his legs.
“They opened it with blood,” the colonel continued. His eyes flared with red light. “Some preacher from Georgia said we’d win the war if we made a sacrifice. Said God would favor the south.” He smiled, black goo dripped from his destroyed cheek. “But what we met was not God.”
Jake screamed as cold fingers dragged him to his knees.
“They took our eyes first,” the colonel rasped. “So we couldn’t tell what we saw. So we couldn’t describe the thing that waited beyond the veil. One by one, they plucked them…burned them in the pit, screaming prayers to something older than Hell.”
Jake’s fingers trembled as he looked at the glasses. The lenses pulsed, faint shapes twisting inside of them, faces screaming…burning.
The frames leapt to Jake’s face like a snake striking prey. They fused to his skin, metal sinking into flesh. The lenses burned white-hot, melting into his sockets. Jake shrieked, clawing at his face but his fingers blistered and peeled.
Flames poured from his eyes. Blood ran like tears down his face.
In the last agonizing seconds, visions poured through his mind. A pit filled with writhing limbs, an altar made of ribs and something massive that stirred in the shadows. It was horned and blind, whispering in ancient tongues.
The colonel leaned in. “Now you march with us, blind but never free.”
Jake’s eyeballs popped with a wet hiss. Smoke curled from the sockets. He fell forward onto the dirt, twitching, the glasses still glowing.
By sunset the field was quiet again.
All that remained were the broken glasses.
Waiting, waiting for the next set of eyes.
.
Fiction © Copyright Kathleen McCluskey
Image Copyright Rie Sheridan Rose
More from Kathleen McCluskey:
The Long Fall: Book 1: The Inception of Horror
Lucifer always cunning and intelligent challenges father to a battle of wits. Being the angel of light he casts a judgemental eye upon mankind. He begins a war with his fellow archangels and God. Michael, along with his siblings defend their home and mankind from their deranged brother. Broad swords and hand to hand combat drench heaven in blood. The four apocalyptic steeds are released, each having their own destructive power. Betrayal and lust are at biblical levels. Understand the very creation of evil and the consequenses that transpire in the first of THE LONG FALL series.
The Divine Darkness
