Appalachian Grandpa- The Bone Collector- Part 3

Part 1-https://vocal.media/horror/appalachian-grandpa-the-bone-collector-part-1

Part 2-https://vocal.media/horror/appalachian-grandpa-the-bone-collector-part-2

We set out around two, hoping to time it so we could arrive before sunset.

Grandpa claimed he wanted to channel the dying day into the sealing magic.

I just nodded, hoping to see what he was talking about.

Grandpa had woken me up that morning way earlier than I had wanted. I could see the light was still soft, not the middle of the morning light I was expecting. Grandpa was shaking me frantically, telling me we needed to get ready, and I had tried to wave him off. I had stayed up late, Glimmer's story having taken longer than expected, and I had only managed a few hours of sleep before Grandpa shook me awake.

"I'm tired, Grandpa. Lemme get a few more hours."

"We may not have a few more hours, boy. It's gone for now, but it could be back anytime. We need to be gone when it is."

I sat up in bed, not having to ask what he meant, "It found the house?"

"Come out to the yard and see for yourself."

When I stepped onto the porch, I saw what he was talking about. The yard glistered with bones, long trails that had been left behind by something big, and more of those angry-looking shapes were left around the house. They looked different from the one I had disturbed. These were bristly, agitated, looking more like something you spray paint on the side of someone's house when you want to scare them. There were corpses in the yard, birds, squirrels, and small animals of various sizes. They had been pulped like so much raw fruit and left behind after their bones had been taken.

"We've got to get ready," Grandpa said, "When this thing comes back, I want to be long gone."

It was around two when we got everything together, and that was when I finally got a good look at this thing.

As we walk through the woods now, I kind of wish I hadn't. I really wish I had seen this thing cold when we did whatever we were going to do tonight. I'm not sure I still have the nerve with the image of this creature knocking around inside my head. However large I had imagined it was, it didn't do it justice. This creature is far worse than anything I could have imagined, and the thought that it might be, even now, stalking us through the woods makes my skin crawl.

We were heading out the front when Grandpa suddenly yanked me back inside by the strap of my backpack. I got a little angry, turning around to ask him just what the hell was wrong with him, but he was already pushing me down and telling me to be as quiet as possible. I started to ask what he had seen, but suddenly the light outside was blocked out. Something moved in front of the big front window on the porch, and I turned to see this giant pale monstrosity as it slithered by.

Its torso and head were vaguely equine, and its arms were like an odd combination of spider legs and human hands with too many fingers. It had four arms, pulling itself along with great suffering pulls, and its hands ended what might have been fifteen pale white fingers. Its bottom half was more like a walrus, a bulbous end with a wide fin, and I couldn't imagine how it didn't churn up the ground with each struggling yank of its bulbous body. There was flesh on its bones, some of them, and it looked pieced together from too many different bones to make sense of. The mouth and fingers might have been delicate avian bones, the bulk of it might have been bear or horse bones, and its mouth was filled with a collection of too many teeth to make sense of.

When it turned its head, and I was captured by those sunken black pits of eyes an instant before I could get below the edge of the window.

Those eyes had seen me, and I had seen too much in them.

The house shuddered as it slammed into the front porch, and Grandpa took my arm as he yelled for me to follow him out the back. It sounded like the hell beast was destroying the porch as we came onto the back steps, and Grandpa took them two at a time as we ran for the woods. The forest's canopy was its home, but it suddenly seemed much safer than the false safety of the house. I started to ask Grandpa why his wards hadn't kept the creature away, but he shushed me and led me deeper into the sea of green.

We had been walking for about an hour when he finally answered my question.

"I assume that the spell only fooled it for so long. It was the equivalent of a distraction, after all, and this creature is older than even I am."

I kept listening for something huge following us, but the usual sounds of the forest were all I could hear. That was comforting since I knew that the forest dwellers didn't like this thing any more than I did. As long as I could hear the sounds of squirrels and birds, all was well.

"So, why didn't it come and get us in our sleep?" I asked, not wanting an answer but wanting to hear someone talking.

"Well, the wards on the trees aren't the only bit of misdirection that I have. The house is in a blind, that's what I've always called it, and it sort of stops things like the Bone Collector from finding us. It helps confuse things like the Welder Gheist too. Otherwise, I would probably have been found years ago."

We crunched through the woods, the sun beginning its slow descent as we made our way for the stream. Grandpa seemed to move my intuition, taking paths and trails randomly as his natural compass led him towards the stream. The pack I wore was heavy as it cut into my shoulders, and the sweat trickling down my face was beginning to attract gnats. Grandpa never seemed to feel his own pack, and as we walked along, I realized that my anxiety might be weighing me down more than the pack.

"So, Gramps, how are we gonna seal this thing up?"

"Well," Grandpa said, "most of the work is going to be done by the stream itself. It's an old stream, a place that's important to people long gone from here. The candles and herbs we have will help strengthen the location, and I think if we can lure it into the mid around the banks, we can trap it."

"And you're sure about this?" I hedged, stepping around the arm of a spruce as I followed behind him.

"Of course, I've done things like this before. It's a simple sealing spell, nothing more."

"But," but that's where I floundered. Why was I pressing him so hard? I had never doubted Grandpa in these matters. I had always understood that he knew more than I did, and if he said it would be okay, then it would be okay.

Glimmer's story wouldn't leave me so easily, though, and I felt ashamed in my doubt as Grandpa kept his eyes ahead.

It seemed Grandpa could read my mind, "Glimmer told you my story."

It wasn't a question.

"Yeah," I said after a pregnant silence, "not all of it, but she told me that you didn't seal the Bone Collector away last time."

Grandpa didn't turn around, but I could see him nod to the woods, "She's right; I didn't seal him away. I tried, but I was young and only half trained. It was an event that led me to grow, but it was definitely one of the scariest times of my life."

I followed behind him, waiting for his story to begin and realizing that he would make me ask him to tell it. He was ashamed of the story, ashamed of the lie, and he wouldn't tell it unless I asked. I had never had to wheedle a story out of Grandpa, but it seemed that this one would take some doing. As we walked, the forest buzzing around us with a thousand voices; I couldn't take it anymore.

"Will you tell me the story, Grandpa?"

The only reply was the sound of him crunching along, and I thought for a moment that he wouldn't respond to me.

"Are you sure you wanna hear it? I'm not sure it will help your nerve when we do what must be done tonight."

"I do," I said, realizing that this was the most important story of them all.

This was not some cherry-picked Grandpa story. This was not a story that might make Grandpa seem brave or overly competent. This was a raw Grandpa tale, something that he might not have shared with anyone else. He had shared some of it with Glimmer, someone I was beginning to believe he had been more than friends with, but not all. I could very well be the first to hear about this particular skirmish, and I wondered how right Grandpa might be.

How might this story change my outlook for tonight's activities?

"It all began with a man I hadn't seen since Grandma died. They had been friends of a sort, and now he was hoping that he could get my help in sealing away something dangerous, something that could be very bad for his church and the people in it."

The man was Reverend Tucker, and he had a nasty something in the graveyard behind the church.

He found me one afternoon as I slumped against the wall of the local rotgut dispensary. I was drunk as a lord, watching the street light as it winked on and off and thinking again of the lights that had taken my friends. The blinking light reminded me of them, and I was too tanked to do much more than sit and stare. When someone stepped in front of the light, I blinked and looked up into the unforgiving face of Reverend Tucker. By my guess, he was between forty and sixty and had that look of someone who will look forty until he dies. He had lifted me up by the shirt front, drawing me to eye level as he told me how much my Grandmother would have been ashamed to see me like this.

"She had wanted better for you than this, boy. She always doted on you, and it would kill her all over again to see you in such a state."

I pulled away from him and asked what the hell he wanted?

I hadn't been serious about my lessons in a long while, but that didn't mean I had forgotten them. I continued my studies, reading over Grandma's old books whenever I had the chance. Lately, I had found myself with more time than usual since all my friends were dead, and I had decided to be ready the next time something came my way. I didn't have Grandma to fall back on anymore, and it would be down to me next time.

"We have a problem, and unfortunately, you're the only one who might be able to help me. I need you to sobber up and come with me. We'll get you some coffee in the rectory once we get there, but I need your expertise, and I need it to be coherent."

I thought about getting indignant, but there was really no sense arguing with him. He was right, and I felt a deep sense of shame at how I had acted. My Grandma would have been ashamed of me if she could see me like this. How many times had she lost more, done worse, and still kept her head? She didn't give up, and neither could I. I would be no sort of man if I did, and as I rubbed my head and apologized to the old holy man, I went with him to see what had taken up residence in his church.

Turned out that the graveyard was where my predecessor had sealed the Bone Collector last time.

The Old Zion Graveyard was part of the Zion's Peak Methodist Church, and it was where Reverend Tucker had preached until they had built him a shiny new church closer to town. The house of worship had been experiencing a soft move for the last two years, but Tucker had discovered something awful the last time he'd gone to the old church. Something had wrecked the graveyard and drug a furrow through the worship hall.

"It was like a tree had fallen through the building and then simply slithered away. I wasn't sure what to make of it, and then I remembered what your grandmother told me once. Do you remember when she exorcized that thing out of my house? Well, she told me that I had to keep an eye on Zion Peak because it contained a very dark secret, a secret she had hoped to never face again. That's when she told me that, in her own youth, she had sealed that monster inside the cemetery. It had escaped its old resting place and killed sixteen people before she found it. She had tracked it to the cemetery and had found it desecrating corpses for their bones. She had sealed it in the old Wainright Crypt, warding the vault in seals so that no one would disturb it and release the horrors that lay below. Well, it turned out that people would be the least of her worries. The spirit was released when a tree fell on the crypt during a wind storm, and now it's running rampant."

The Bone Collector had killed thirteen so far, several of them children, and Reverend Tucker asked me to stop its reign of terror before others took notice.

I tracked it for a week, following its trail of destruction as I prepared to put it back to ground again. When I wasn't tracking it, I was devouring everything I could about the creature, reading over all of Grandma's old journals and notes on the creature buried below the graveyard. I learned its name, what it was capable of, and the warding spells that would put it back to sleep. I finally managed to track it to an old gravel pit, a recent hotspot for missing persons, and I assembled the things I would need to get the job done."

I went to the pit around sunset. Grandma's notes had been clear that a spell cast around the end of day and the beginning of night would be full of power and might give me the edge to seal the Bone Collector away. I set up my circle and practiced the chants I would need. I cut my palm and sent out my intent, drawing the creature to me, and as the sun set and the darkness began to move across the land, I heard it dragging itself out of one of the deep tunnels in the pit. He was munching on whatever poor miner he had found and began to drag itself toward me. I spoke the words, drawing him into the trap I had set for him, and as he passed onto the trigger, I prepared to close the teeth on him. I threw out the last of it, spilling all my intent and desire, but when I opened my eyes, I saw it towering over me with a look of bemusement stretched across that boney face.

It had felt my warding, heard my intent, and found me wanting.

As I stared at the creature, I felt confident I was about to be its latest victim.

We stopped for a moment, Grandpa checking his barrings, and that's when I realized something the story had stopped me from recognizing.

The forest was dead silent around us.

The bird, the animals, even the bugs had gone silent, and I could hear the faintest of draggings as something came closer and closer to us.

When the trees burst apart and the Bone Collector loomed over us, I was pretty sure I would never get to hear the end of Grandpa's story.

Not unless his bones could talk after he had finished stripping them down and adding us to his form.