Chapter Three: Something Old, Something New

## Blurb

Our holiday trilogy comes to a close as we witness two different joinings of souls for all eternity. Headphones recommended. You are not prepared, Family.

## Plot Synopsis

In Jacob County, Kentucky in 1935, Eli Mullins is getting married on Valentine’s Day. Eli is the eldest boy of a farmer named Joe Mullins, and his family has been fortunate in spite of the Great Depression, growing tobacco and working hard to expand the farm to be able to offer work to others. The family possesses an heirloom, a carved belt buckle made from antler. Eli will inherit it when he takes over the managing of the family from his father.

On an excursion to Louisville to sell their crop, he meets Effie Brandt, a secretary of a buyer. She has pale skin and silver-blonde hair, and grey eyes. He is enchanted from the moment he meets her.

He spends a few days spending time with her in Louisville before asking to court her. Given their distance, they send letters to one another when he isn’t able to come to town. He buys a small diamond ring and proposes to her a week before Christmas, and she accepts.

He brings her home to meet his family over Christmas, and there are mixed reactions. His father is impressed with Effie and thrilled about the marriage; his mother, Lois Mullins is unsure about the speed of their courtship and how little they know his fiancée. His grandmother, Granny Mullins is completely opposed, disliking Effie and her lack of traceable family.

Eli insists on marriage before spring planting, so Valentine’s Day is chosen as the date. Eli shoulders more duties around the farm when his father falls ill. The wedding is prepared by mail between Effie and Eli’s mother, and Effie invites two Aunties, Eustace and Esther. As Eli dresses for the wedding, his father presents the belt buckle to him.

As the wedding ceremony concludes, Effie reveals her true self as a Grey Lady and rips out Eli’s spine, taking the belt buckle. The three Ladies slaughter the wedding guests and take Eli’s truck into the mountains. They travel for three days, eventually on foot, to an old house at the end of Lonely Creek.

Inside the house, which is dilapidated and befouled, the Ladies take the belt buckle and place it on an altar with Nadine Rigg’s ring and the Barrow hair comb. From the upper corner of the rafters, The Thing Whose Name Sounds Like Horned Head, But Is Not, no longer attempting to disguise himself as human or animals, looks on, antlers broken. The Ladies call out to him, calling him Master, and he interrupts them as he transforms back to wholeness.

It has been 140 years since his crown was broken and he was cursed to wait for his acolytes to find its pieces. He speaks of the imperfections of the prison built to hold him and his kind, their different purposes, his being to find servants among men. He speaks of Daughter Dooley, The Witch Queen, the plan to return her to childhood and raise her to set his masters free, and recalls the day she rent his antlers.

On that day, the Witch Queen had trapped him in her wards and cut him off from the power Beneath, and they battled for hours, evenly matched in power. He reached into her heart and tried to call up visions of her mothers being burned at the stake, but she turned the vision to one of her mothers urging her on and taunting him. In a final push, enraged that he dare try and undo the woman that the woman in her life raised her to be, she shatters his crown.

The Grey Ladies continue to pray as the artifacts rejoin with Horned Head’s antlers, and his form is restored. Dropping to the ground in his stag form, the beast says that all debts will be repaid and no one is safe.

## Relevant Characters

* Eli Mullins
* The Gray Ladies
* The Thing Whose Name Sounds Like Horned Head, But Is Not