The Horror Beneath Koble's Hollow (eBook)

Jedediah Smith (Autor)

eBook Download: EPUB

2025
140 Seiten
Publishdrive (Verlag)
979-8-9998079-3-9 (ISBN)

Infos

Miners in Koble's Hollow should be extracting coal from the seam below their isolated little Appalachian town. Though they have been digging furiously, no coal has been shipped off their mountain in years. Something else has been drawing them deep underground, something that needs their help to get out, something that has changed the people of Koble's Hollow into beings no longer human.

Professor Lincoln Davis, born and raised in the hills of West Virginia, has found success as an academic and activist in the large cities of the lowlands. But now a voice from his past is calling him back home for the first time in decades. Enough time has passed, or perhaps the voice has made an offer so beguiling, that he can't quite remember why he left in the first place. As he travels the miles toward home, though, his memories begin to return, and he starts to recall fleeing the hills at night and in secret when he was little more than a boy.  Before he reaches the end of the road, will he remember why he was running for his life from a place called Koble's Hollow?

Textauszug

Chapter 1

Linc and Brewster drove across the Potomac into Virginia early Saturday morning while the traffic was still light. Shortly after they left St. Mary’s peninsula by way of the Harry Nice bridge, Brewster noticed a boiled peanut roadside stand.

“Hey, do you want some breakfast?”

“Are you kidding? When I got you up an hour ago, you said you were too hungover to even walk to the car.”

“I was,” Brewster smiled, raising his Heineken can—his second—and jiggling it to show it was mostly empty. “Now I want peanuts. Cajun style!” He gave a laugh meant to sound evil.

“God! You’d puke,” Linc said. Looking at the stand as they whirred past, he added, “They’re not open anyway. It’s too early.”

“Damn right. It is too early. Especially for a Saturday. What is there worth getting up this early for?”

“Books. Last chance at some old, old books.”

“Humph,” Brewster grunted and shifted his bulky frame away from Linc so he could stare out the window and sulk.

They rolled past the little towns along 218 West, some of them scenic and charming, some marred by the sprawl of fast-food chains, cheap motels, and stop’n’shops typical of every American highway. But all of them, even as they angled inland away from the shore, felt like beach towns with boats in most of the driveways beside pickups decked out in racks for watersport gear. As they drove with their windows open, the two men could smell the fresh salt breeze blowing off the tidal Potomac, though living as close to the coast as they did, they took it for granted. It wasn’t until they had passed Fredericksburg and 218 had turned into US 17 that the communities and landscape started to feel like the rural South that Linc remembered. Nothing like Koble’s Hollow, though. Or “Holler,” which is how it always came out when spoken aloud. The place in the hills of West Virginia where they were headed was a step back into another century.

Koble’s Holler was dying. The local wags in Olcstowe put it down to the coal mines playing out, and the explanation always came with a smug little smile. More than seventy years after half the original inhabitants of Olcstowe split off from the town and moved eight miles upstream to mine the higher reaches of Cheat Mountain, those who had stayed behind finally had a chance to say, “I told you so.” Linc had grown up in Olcstowe and knew that bad feelings still ran deep over the breakup in a culture where people lived and died by the feud. Now, it looked like the down-landers were getting the final laugh since, like so many small towns that made their living by coal, lumber, or pulp, Koble’s Holler was turning ghost because the resources had run out.

Normally, Linc would not have paid much attention to a story that was all too common in Appalachia. Boarded up shops and abandoned houses had been regular sights for him all his life. As a boy, he had played in mill buildings whose collapsed roofs welcomed only swallows, and instead of having a jungle gym like city kids, he had climbed about on discarded mining equipment which was rusting back into the earth it had come from. But his relatives who still lived in the hills had relished the gossip about ever more meager coal shipments out of the Holler, relished it enough to send word of it to him all the way in Maryland where he worked in the history department at Lambeth University just outside of Waldorf.

Even then, it was not the demise of the Holler that interested him. Maybe his hometown’s prejudice had rubbed off on him, or maybe he had just been out of the hills too long, but he didn’t feel much sympathy for the people of Koble’s Holler. Growing up, he had visited the town only a couple of times and had disliked the sour, sanctimonious locals almost as much as they disliked outsiders. The church of their sect—cult really—preached a doctrine that imparted to them a knowing, holier-than-thou attitude, and their poverty made them all bony and bug-eyed in a way that frightened him as a child. No, it was not the town or its people, but word of one small shop that had drawn him away from his oceanside home and back up into the hills. Koble’s Holler, of all places, was said to have a rare books store according to a letter sent to him recently from his Aunt Hattie. As a professional historian and amateur collector of rare books and documents, he could not allow such a potential treasure trove of rare and one-of-a-kind literature to disappear with the town, to be thrown out, burned, or stored away where it might molder into ruin.

“You can get diseases from them, you know,” Brewster said, cracking open another beer.

“From what?”

“Old books. Full of mold and dust and parasites. Give you skin diseases. The hillbillies up there can make you sick too.” He took a sip from his can, then corrected himself. “They’re mainly brain-scrambled from inbreeding, though, so not contagious. And meth. Maybe pellagra, from bad diet, not diseases.” He paused. “Yeah, probably diseases too.”

“So glad I brought you.”

“Why did you bring me?”

“Long drive. I need someone to keep me awake. And you’re my buddy, it’s your job.”

“You sure it’s not childhood fears coming back to you?” he asked, grinning through the beer foam in his mustache.

“What are you talking about?” Linc truly had no idea what Brewster was referring to.

“You told me those stories. About the Kobbies stealing kids. Looking through bedroom windows at night.”

“Oh, that stuff. No, not real. I mean, people go missing in those hill towns all the time, but between the stills, then the meth labs, and just wanting to get the hell out, there have always been plenty of reasons for people to disappear from my town. And the missing were mostly adults, young men really, not kids.”

“Wow. That’s disappointing. I was kind of hoping for some Hansel-and-Gretel-eating witch stuff.”

“Nope. Just local color. Urban myths, or rural myths, I guess. Blame your problems on some bogeyman in the next town. Koble’s Holler and Olcstowe always had some kind of rivalry. I don’t know why. Goes way back. I’d ask my grandpa about it, and he’d get very mysterious and say, ‘Never you mind.’ All part of creating the suspension of disbelief. A standard device in oral folk tradition.”

Brewster belched. “It’s Saturday, Professor. Lose the lecture. I’m sick of giving them, and I don’t wanna hear them. Weekends, I’m just another good ol’ boy.”

“Then why the German beer? Where’s the Rolling Rock, Gomer?”

“Down the sewer where it belongs.”

With the Blue Ridge Mountains rising in a misty line before them, they drove at an effortless sixty-five through the low hills and shallow valleys of Virginia. The hickory and ash trees were already lush with new spring leaves of a light, tender green which would soon darken into their summer hues. Once US 66 had taken them over the Ridge, they dropped into the Shenandoah Valley with its chestnut and red oak forests on the slopes and a mix of maples and yellow poplar farther down.

Linc had hoped Brewster would take the wheel of his little Plymouth Neon for part of the trip so he could grade some history papers, but his friend’s steady guzzling of beers had put the kibosh on that. Brewster seemed to have no interest in making use of the time himself. He just drank and watched the scenery go by, having brought along no paperwork or student essays to grade or whatever the hell his students turned in as homework in the engineering classes he taught at the university. Friendships across departments were unusual, and Linc did not actually cross the division far enough to talk to Brewster about the subject he taught.

And his friend was right. Saturdays, especially when taking an out-of-town excursion, were days to forget about all the pressures at Lambeth. Throughout the week, Linc’s responsibilities demanded all his time, day and night. And most weekends too. As the faculty advisor for the students’ environmental action group, he followed them to rallies and demonstrations and sit-ins at the Virginia State Capitol as they worked to reduce the destruction caused by coal mining in the Appalachian Mountains. If that weren’t exhausting enough, the students and other environmentalists often pushed him to speak, usually as the keynote speaker since he, unlike most of the coastal activists, had actually grown up in the mountains, in a mining town, the son of mining folk. This gave him a credibility the others lacked. So, he had become the poster boy for opposing a recent push for the most damaging type of mining, mountaintop removal. It had not made him popular back home in the hills.

“What do you think you’re going to find in this hick town anyway? First edition Dickens?”

“You’d be surprised.” He reached into his shirt pocket to draw out his aunt’s letter about the store. He was going to read a section to Brewster but had to grab the wheel again with both hands to maneuver around a slow truck.

“Would I? Why would there be anything there but crap? Danielle Steel would be high literature for these people.”

“Don’t be classist.”

“Thank you, Karl Marx. Really, what makes you think there’s going to be anything of value there?”

“Depends on how you define ‘value,’” Linc said, earning a snort from Brewster. But Linc continued, “No, wait. Hard times, that’s why. Families start to sell off their heirlooms to buy lard or flour. So, the seller hands out a few bucks for a century-old family Bible or a World...

Produkt-Details

• Erscheint lt. Verlag: 25.11.2025
• Sprache: englisch
• Themenwelt: Literatur ► Krimi / Thriller / Horror ► Horror
• Themenwelt: Literatur ► Romane / Erzählungen
• Schlagworte: Chase • cosmic horror • Evil Dead • Extraterrestrial • forest horror • Lovecraft • monsters
• ISBN-13: 979-8-9998079-3-9 / 9798999807939