A hush fell over the room as Abigail Van Buren produced the black candle and held it up for all to see. It was about five inches long and as big around as Abigail’s withered wrist. It looked heavy and it appeared that Abigail was having problems holding it aloft.

“The answer lies here,” she said. Abigail looked every bit of her eighty-nine years, her dry skin tight on her bones and her eyes sunken to expose the skull underneath.

No one said anything, all eyes focused on the candle, something most folks in the small town of Bounty, Kentucky thought only existed in legend. But there it was, for all to see.

“You can’t be serious?” Thomas Jefferson, owner of one of the largest farms in the area, said. He was named, obviously, after the great patriot. Old age had robbed him of the hair on top of his head but blessed his ears with plenty.

Whispering rippled through the group of farmers and residents. They had gathered here, a town hall meeting called, in regards to the recent drought that had affected their crops last year and now this year, too. Bounty, famous for their sweet brand of tobacco, never met a crop that wasn’t profitable until the last two years. Now, however, they were in dire straits. Another year of drought and most of the farms would be bankrupt and the town would go under.

“I’m deadly serious,” Abigail said. She held the candle and raised it higher in the air. “You know the stories of the candle, and what we must do with it.”

“But those are folk tales,” Jason Smith, Jr. said. In his early thirties, Junior was running the family farm, taking it over from his elderly father, Jason Sr.

“They’re the truth, by God,” Abigail said. “I’m the oldest left in this town to have seen it with my own eyes, but your daddy will agree with me, ‘cause he was a boy the last time the candle was burned, Jason Jr.”

Jason Jr. said nothing. He folded his arms across his chest as his wife, a chubby girl from one county over, rubbed his shoulders. Junior’s dad was ill and unable to attend the meeting that night.

“This candle is the reason I’m here. It’s the why of what’s been happening. It’s a sign, just like the Town Tree dying,” Abigail said. The Town Tree, an honored and revered oak that grew in the middle of downtown Bounty, had withered and died over the last year. There had been talk of replacing it and an attempt had been made to dig it up, but the roots ran too deep and the wood was too tough to cut down, so the Town Tree was left alone.

Pastor Parsons stood up from behind the lectern, a stern look riding his face. His body creaked with age and, even though he was only just reaching his fifties, arthritis had taken its toll and started to hook his hands so that they resembled his nose.

“We will not hear of this superstition,” Pastor Parsons declared. “It is a blasphemy before the Lord.”

“Oh, hell, reverend,” Abigail said, her old lips smacking together like an ancient alligator gumming a pig. She called Pastor Parsons ‘reverend’ and he always took it personally, like she was mocking him. “We all know that what we’re doing is just taking care of God’s creation.”

“What you speak of, even if it were true, is an abomination to God!” Pastor Parsons wagged his finger at Abigail. He felt full of fire, like the old days, when hellfire and brimstone were the only sermons people wanted. Now they craved words on family, and counseling, and they wanted someone to affirm that they were really okay. It was enough to make a preacher like him puke.

“Our crops are failing and our families are suffering,” Abigail stated. She paid no mind to Pastor Parsons, bypassing a debate with him to get to the heart of the matter. “The answer lies here.” She shook the candle to emphasize her point.

“She’s right,” said Tabitha Daniels, wife of Arthur Daniels, the man who ran the only grocery store in town. Tabitha was just out of her twenties and pregnant with her third child, her belly just starting to show. Her words emboldened others. Gary Berry, another farmer, stood up.

“It’s true. I could live with one bad year, but I don’t think I can make it through another one,” Gary said. Gary was kind to a fault and that meant he had a wife, Jessie, that hen-pecked him, and two daughters, Peggy and Helen, that were fat and ran roughshod over him. But most folks liked Gary and they liked him a lot.

Another rumble ran through the assembled folks. Pastor Parsons banged the gavel on the lectern until it got quiet. He stared out over his flock, his hook nose dipping like a bird drinking water as he nodded his head.

“We cannot entertain such a notion,” he said. “God will not be mocked.”

“To hell with God,” Abigail cried. “We all have prayed and prayed and he ain’t done a darn thing to help us out.”

The crowd got pretty riled at that truth. A few stood and cursed Abigail, telling her to watch her mouth. Others agreed, Abigail giving voice to opinions that were not smiled upon in open public debate. Pastor Parsons banged the gavel again but to no avail this time; the fuse was lit and the debate was burning. It took nearly twenty minutes, but by the time the furor died down, the townsfolk of Bounty all turned their eyes to Abigail.

She smiled, her wrinkled face glowing and her tiny, dark eyes glittering with delight. The people wanted to know the story of the candle and she told it to them, as best she remembered. When she finished the story, she looked over the hushed crowd, her black eyes serious as terminal cancer.

“This is the only way to bring back our crops. If we don’t do it, we might as well pack up and move away.”

Another debate erupted after this as the townsfolk weighed the pros and cons of what Abigail had told them. When that debate finished, the town was still evenly split between those wanting to go forward and those that didn’t.

Pastor Parsons sat down. He had clearly lost the battle to control the events of the meeting, but he’d waded in with his opinions, arguing them fiercely. He would let God sort the rest out.

Abigail surveyed the crowd, the candle still gripped in her hands. “Think on it this way, people,” she said. “We can try it out. We can do the ritual and put the girl out there and if nothing happens, then at least we tried.”

These words united the crowd and even pleased Pastor Parsons. Convinced that God would win out, he bolted to his feet, held his hands out, and spoke to the crowd. “Let it be so!”

Satisfied, the crowd quieted until Tabitha raised her voice.

“Who’s going to do it? Who will be the sacrifice?”

“It should be Peggy Berry,” Abigail said. All eyes turned to Gary Berry and his wife.

And because he was so nice and his eldest daughter Peggy was such a pain to be around, Gary was convinced pretty quickly that his daughter should be the one to go.



An hour later, under Abigail’s guidance, they burst into the clearing in the Rolling Woods, where the sacrifice was to take place. Abigail pointed at the two rocks she’d spoken of and then rotated to her right and pointed out the entrance to the cave. A hush fell over the thirty or so townsfolk that had come out.

Winded from the hike, Abigail spoke. “Those are the rocks. There is the cave. Just as it was and has been for every generation.”

Pastor Parsons, who had come out with the group, said nothing. He stewed in his own private amusement that everyone was taking all this talk so seriously. They would see.

Gary stepped out of the crowd and measured the area with his right eye. Gary was a nice man but he was also a keen judge of vegetation. He stared at the rocks and then at the cave and nodded.

Gary summoned some of the men and put them to work using sticks and stones to clear the moss and overgrown weeds off the two rocks.

He and the men stepped back and looked at their work as Abigail walked over to the stones to inspect them. She pointed at the flat top on the rock on the right and the black streaks staining its sides.

“That’s where the past candles burned,” she said. Abigail then pointed at the larger rock and the rusty chains fastened to it, one for each wrist and ankle. “And that’s where Peggy’ll go.”

Everyone fell quiet as the gravity of what they were about to do settled into their bones like flood waters soaking the wood of a log cabin. All eyes turned to Gary, the one who had the final say because it was his daughter they were going to sacrifice.

“I reckon I ought to get back and bring Peggy on out,” Gary said. He nodded at his neighbors and headed out of the clearing.

Abigail turned and looked at Tabitha who was standing a few feet away. “I got a list of things you need to go fetch from my house. You’ll find ‘em in my chest-a-drawers upstairs in my bedroom. They’ll be in the bottom drawer. You bring ‘em back out here to me.”

Tabitha dipped her chin and walked over to join Gary as Abigail looked the crowd over.

“I’ll need three more women to help out,” she said. “The number has to be five.”

Abigail stared at the crowd, looking each one in the eye. A solemn silence filled the clearing as thick as cotton stuffed in an infected ear as three women stepped forward, ready to serve.

“We start at midnight,” she said.



Everyone left to go back to their homes, none quite believing that what was about to happen was really going to happen. They went to their houses and had their dinners and pretended that the whole evening had been a strange dream, or a funny story that Abigail had told them. Each of them assured themselves that when they woke up in the morning, things would be like they always had been. And with that, all of them turned in early, as if falling to sleep as quickly as possible would clear their consciences.

One did not sleep. He left with the others but was resolved that he would see what was happening in the woods. Pastor Parsons went back to his church, packed a sandwich, a flashlight, and his bible, and headed back to the clearing. He would see with his own eyes what a folly this all was.

At midnight, the five women gathered.

Moonlight flooded from the opening in the trees above them. It was full and bright and carried itself merrily across the sky. The light from it was more than enough for the women to see by.

Abigail bade them to take off their clothes and they did, all of them standing naked in the gleaming moonlight in a matter of seconds, their clothes tossed into a pile out of the way.

Abigail took the bag full of items for the ceremony and handed them out, one by one, to each of the women. They all stepped into the black robes given them and then the masks made of deer skulls. Abigail hung a wooden whistle around their necks and spoke to them as she made her way from one to the next.

“This here is all the stuff that we need, passed down generation to generation,” she said.

“This is witchcraft!” Tabitha declared. The other women murmured.

Abigail slipped her robe over her head and laughed. “What we’re about to do is older than that, honey.” She placed the deer skull over her head and covered her face. Abigail then put the whistle around her neck. “We got to do this in the proper order, just like we been doing. We can’t stray from the path set out by our ancestors.”

Hidden behind some bushes, Pastor Parsons stifled a giggle. He knew that watching these women take their clothes off was sinful, but he never looked away. This was turning out to be quite the night, he thought to himself.

His thoughts were interrupted as Gary Berry crashed through the woods and entered the clearing, Peggy in tow. Peggy was a shade under eighteen and fat as a hog. She huffed and puffed, out of breath and angry as she caught up with her father. She fussed at him, coming near to cussing him, when she saw the five women standing there, dressed in black robes and wearing deer skulls. Peggy stopped in her tracks and looked at Gary.

“What’s happening, Daddy?”

Gary’s face flushed and he looked away from Peggy.

“Take her to the rock,” Abigail said.

Gary looked at Peggy and hesitated. As much as she bugged all hell out of him, she was still his daughter.

“Do it!” Abigail cried.

Gary grabbed Peggy by her arms and spun her around. She screamed, scared by the look in her father’s eyes. She begged and pleaded for him to let her go, but Gary’s grip was tight and true and before he blinked twice, he had Peggy by the rock with the chains.

Peggy didn’t know what was going on, but she could sense it was no good. She slapped Gary across the face and kept screaming. Gary, too nice to hit his daughter, recoiled and cried out. Abigail and the others swooped in, as much by instinct as by desire. It was as if the memory of what must be done was encoded in their bones and muscles and they reacted without thinking. The women tossed their bodies on Peggy until she was helpless.

Abigail put the chains on and snapped them shut.

Silence struck the area. The moon shone down as the women stepped back and away from Peggy, their faces grave beneath their masks. Gary stood to the side, uncertain and almost as scared as his daughter.

“What do you want me to do now?” he asked.

“Go home,” Abigail said. “Pray that things go right, and know that you are a hero.”

Gary stared at Peggy, her face wet and bright from the tears reflecting in the moonlight.

“Please, Daddy,” she said.

Gary turned his face away and walked towards the town. When he reached the edge of the clearing Peggy screamed his name and Gary ran, fleeing into the woods.

Abigail faced the other women and told them to make a semi-circle around Peggy and the rock. In her hand she held the candle.

“We begin,” she whispered. “Repeat what I say.”

Abigail started the ceremony. Her words, foreign to her ears and to the others, started quiet but rose to a fever pitch, echoed by the four women in the semi-circle with her. At first, the words stumbled from Abigail’s tongue and so with the others, but as the ritual picked up steam, they all adapted to the speech, their mouths and voices remembering what their minds did not. It came easy to them after a few minutes, and they were in full swing, their voices ringing and crying out.

Abigail had told them, back in town, how the original settlers of Bounty had one day come across a creature out in these woods, and how it spoke to them and made them promises. They made a pact with it, one that would last until there were no more people in the area. The God of the Cave, as they came to know the creature, would give them perfect crops, every year, as long as the townspeople fed it, once a generation, with the body of one young girl. They obliged the creature and had done so for many, many years and never had a crop fail. But modern times had come, Abigail told them, and with it came forgetfulness and arrogance. People nowadays thought they were smarter than their ancestors, Abigail had said. They saw how smart they were, though, when the crops had failed two years running now. The only way to reverse it was to feed the God.

So there they were, chanting the words that Abigail’s grandmother had written down for her to pass on, the five women caught up in the moment, fully immersing themselves in the ceremony. Even Peggy, the victim and sacrificial lamb, was hypnotized by what was going on around her. She had stopped crying and watched, fascinated.

Pastor Parsons also watched from the bushes, appalled at the satanic thing he was witnessing. His disproval faded quickly, however, when first Abigail and then the rest in turn, whipped off their robes and danced, naked, back and forth in the semi-circle around Peggy. Their naked bodies aroused him and the deer skulls they wore made the act seem even more forbidden.

Each woman took the whistles to their lips and blew on them in unison, the words dripping from their lips changing to musical notes played by the whistles. The eerie melody bled out from underneath the deer skull masks, as if old nature gods were dancing through the forest, singing songs.

All at once, the dancing and whistling stopped.

Abigail placed the candle on the rock next to Peggy and stepped back. She spoke another foreign word and the candle sparked. Flame licked at the wick, long and tall and thick, orange and blue in color.

The women fell back in reverence. Abigail faced them.

“It’s done.”

Their trance dissolved, the women took off the deer skulls and placed them in the bag that Tabitha had brought. They changed into their own clothing as Abigail gathered the robes and whistles and put them with the skulls.

Quietly, the women crept from the clearing. They did not look at each other for they each felt a measure of shame from their actions. But they were all elated, as well, a primal part of them pleased by what they’d done. Only Abigail spared a glance back at Peggy.

“Thank you,” she smiled. She disappeared into the woods with the others.

Peggy cried out for them to help her, to come back, to make this stop. She was greeted with silence. Her cries turned to whimpers after a few moments, and then they too died away to sobs and then to nothing.

In the bushes, Pastor Parsons listened closely as an unnatural silence fell over the clearing.

A low moan rose from the cave. At the sound, both Pastor Parsons and Peggy wet themselves.

The moan echoed off the walls of the cave, drifting out into the clearing, louder and closer. Pastor Parsons fell back on his rear. He had been kneeling and now he was sitting, his eyes staring out through the leaves in the bush he was hiding behind.

Another moan blasted from the cave entrance like a fog horn. It was closer again, and with it came a god-awful stench, the mingling of burning human hair and feces. Pastor Parsons stuck his head into the bush to see the entrance to the cave better. He saw something stir there, something move against the darkness and then emerge suddenly into the moonlight of the clearing. His blood froze in his veins.

Peggy saw what came from the cave and screamed. She pulled and bucked against the chains, trying to free herself but to no avail. So she kept screaming because she didn’t know what else to do.

The God of the Cave stood nearly six feet tall but was hunched over, his skin pasty white and dripping with a gooey, clear substance. The God had two long legs that bunched under him like a frog and two short stumps for arms. He staggered on the two legs because of the large mound of tissue that grew on his back between his shoulder blades. The tissue was the size of two small boys placed side by side in a fetal position and was about two feet deep. This mound was covered with warts and bumps of various shapes and sizes. One in the middle, at the very top of the hump, was shaped like a purple crescent moon. The God had three eyes, two that sat just like a man’s and one off center to the right. They blinked in unison and each was a different color: one red, one blue, and the one off center was white. He had a nose just like any other man’s but it sat on top of a mouth that was the shape of a slit and took up most of the space on the God’s face. His torso, legs, and arms were skinny, almost emaciated, with his ribs poking through the skin obscenely.

The God leaned back and sniffed the air, the scent of the candle drawing him towards the screaming Peggy, its three eyes staring at her with unnatural hunger. The Thing bent down and suddenly galloped over to Peggy, snorting and cawing as he did, the moan that came from the cave blasting from the slit it had for a mouth.

Pastor Parsons watched in horror, frozen to his spot. He recognized that moan. It was not the sound of an animal or even of a human. It was the same rumble that his own belly made when he was hungry. The moan was a hunger pang.

The moon shone down brightly, illuminating the whole clearing, making it very easy for Pastor Parsons to see what happened next. Peggy, however, looked up at the glittering stars high in the cloudless sky and then shut her eyes.

The God stopped in front of Peggy and sniffed the air. The candle had burned fast, the wax melting quickly, so that only about an inch of it remained. The slit for a mouth opened and a long, glistening tentacle slithered out. It was as big around as a grown man’s arm and seemed to have no end to its length. It pulsed like an artery and had barbs running parallel to each other down each side of the tentacle. The tentacle rubbed over Peggy’s body, ripping her clothes off and leaving them in tatters at her feet, coating Peggy’s body in the same substance that Pastor Parsons could now see oozed from the pores of the God’s body.

Peggy pushed herself against the rock, trying to get away from the Thing, keeping her eyes shut tight. But there was no escape. Peggy was the sacrifice, the food to feed the God of the Cave. She could go nowhere and there was no recourse. Her only hope was Pastor Parsons, and he was too lost in his own sudden lack of faith in Jesus and too scared by the horror that unfolded before him to even move, much less be a hero.

The tentacle slithered over Peggy’s naked body as if tasting her flesh and then arced high up in the air and slammed into Peggy’s mouth. The tentacle bashed Peggy’s teeth out, pushing them down her throat as the barbs dug in, biting into the sensitive flesh inside her mouth and propelling the tentacle along as it burrowed its way past her tonsils and down her throat. Peggy’s face split open at the mouth as the thick tentacle pressed further and further inside her, the corners of her mouth ripping open and tearing back almost to the hinge of her jaw.

The God feasted. The end of the tentacle opened up and sucked everything inside of Peggy up through it and into the God’s stomach. Peggy’s body shook as the God ate, vacuuming up her insides. The God ate and sucked and drained Peggy from the inside out.

When it finished, all that was left of Peggy was a sagging suit of fatty flesh. The God slurped its tentacle out of her as her remains slapped wetly to the ground at the foot of the rock. The God stumbled back, the tentacle sliding back into his mouth, and he howled at the sky with great joy and satisfaction.

The warts on the creature’s hump pulsed and blistered as it staggered back to the cave, full of Peggy and ready to sleep. The warts burst and released a purple spray into the air, the wind catching it and carrying it away. The spray smelled of roses and freshly tilled earth and more and more of it poured from the warts in the hump until the air was thick with it. Where the spray hit, new vegetation burst into life. The God lurched towards the cave and left behind a path of sprouting trees and grass.

Pastor Parsons, shivering alone behind the bush and watching everything as it unfolded, felt his bowels release as the smell of the spray hit his nose. He voided himself and fell to the ground, a seizure shaking his body, wracking his joints and bones, bending them backwards and twisting him up until he was literally tied into knots. Pastor Parsons died there that night, deserted by a god that did not care for him and killed by a different god and the holy spray from its back.

When the God reached the cave, it went inside and crawled deeply into the earth, its back spraying the entire time. The tunnels of the cave spread out and ran underneath the entire Bounty area. The purple spray soaked the ground and then drained upwards, seeding the soil and enriching it. When the God reached its resting place, directly beneath the center of Bounty, the purple crescent in the hump in its back split open and a long, wooden tentacle grew out of it, piercing the top of the cave and drilling its way up, up until it broke through the soil and into open air. The wooden tentacle then pulled itself free of the God’s hump and slithered up and disappeared.

The God’s hump sealed itself, the warts still spraying the cave, and the God fell asleep, satisfied.

In the place where the Town Tree had stood, withered and dead, the tree that erupted from the God’s hump sprang up, pushing the Town Tree over and supplanting it. In the morning, its branches would spread out and purple flowers would grow, soaking in the sun’s rays. It would grow bigger and stronger every year, a symbol of the pact between town and God.



When morning came, Abigail and Tabitha journeyed to the clearing and found the fatty remains of Peggy. They scraped them up and gathered them into Tupperware bowls, sealing them shut and placing them into a bag they’d brought with them. When they were done, when every scrap of fat was preserved, Abigail pointed at the burnt out remains of the candle sitting on the smaller rock.

“We’ll take Peggy’s fat and melt it down and make a new candle, just like my mother made that one,” Abigail said. “And when the time comes, you’ll teach your children what I taught you so the town can prosper.”

Tabitha nodded, accepting her fate, and the two women walked from the clearing, never to return again in all their years of life.



No one ever found Pastor Parsons body. A rumor spread that he’d left town, angry at his heathen flock.

No one missed him.



The next summer, the tobacco crop grew stronger and sweeter than ever before. Good times came back to the town of Bounty, Kentucky, and everyone rejoiced.

But sometimes, in the deepest, darkest parts of the night, when a person cannot run from the truths of their lives — when that truth stares a person right in the eye and holds him or her in its thrall — the people of Bounty remembered what they’d done, what price they’d paid for their comfort, and that they would be forever haunted by it.