Episode 13: The Dark Earth at Night

Blurb
"Ricky held his pistol at the ready, fully prepared to act as the angel of mercy, but then the thing stepped fully into the moonlight, and all thoughts of heaven fled Ricky Lee Gibson." The Gibson family meets their fate.

Plot Synopsis
In 1927, one week before Caleb Gibson goes missing, something happens in the woods of the Tennessee Valley. In a place considered too dangerous by both human and haint alike, the Dead Queen has been bound for generations. Every seven years, agents of both the Green and the Inner Dark converge on her grave to keep her that way.

A thing that looks and mostly sounds like a young man appears in the middle of the wood. Under a cloak, he hides the fact that he has no skin, instead taking the skins from others and wearing them temporarily. He goes by the name of Skinned Tom. Along with him is a black mist in which floats a pair of green eyes, a mist that inspires cold and dread in all who come near it. Skinned Tom reflects on the previous binding, when his power had been drawn on in order to secure the binding. That time, he had come with a creature named Miss Lavinia who was naked and covered in blood. Lavinia is nowhere to be found when the time comes, so Old Green Eyes is sent instead.

With some difficulty, Tom arrives late to the place where Dorothy Sargeant and her sister-in-law Vergie have come from Virginia to work the binding. Dorothy tells him they have a problem; the Queen has already risen.

Back in Craw, Robert Gibson reflects on how he considers himself cursed. Generations of the men in the family have killed people, including him. Now, his grandson Caleb has gone missing. When Brunetta mentions that Caleb had seen a woman under the hawthorn tree, Robert directs the other men to get their guns. Big Jim takes off without them, and Ricky Lee goes after him. Frustrated that they won’t stay together, Robert follows.

Ricky Lee becomes lost in the woods in spite of how well he knows them. He is attacked by a massive, sick-looking doglike creature and killed.

Big Jim hears him scream and goes toward the sound, calling for both Ricky Lee and Caleb. He sees the ‘witchy woman’ his mother had warned him about in childhood, the Dead Queen. With her is Caleb, his eyes closed, and she holds her baby.

Unable to move or breathe now, Big Jim watches as she kisses Caleb’s forehead and sends him away. As the woman mouths a single, soundless word, Jim.

In the woods, Robert believes the Dead Queen has come for him because he didn’t face justice himself. The earth shakes beneath him, and he watches as the ground beneath his house cracks and the house itself sinks. He finds Brunetta in her house, terrified, and watches as everything they built crumbles. He pulls the girl into his arms and looks out the window, where he sees the Queen. Robert reflects on the woman he killed, accidentally, when she went poking around his still. Undead and warped creatures crawl from the earth and advance on the house as it sinks into the earth.