Old Gods of Appalachia - Episode 40: The Well of Remembrance

Episode Date: August 4, 2022

Act II of Season Three comes to an end.CW: depiction/discussion of religious fundamentalism, gore, reference to death by monster, frank discussion of historical sex work, bodily injury and disability, apparent death by hanging, emotional trauma, endangerment of a child, historical depiction of disability used in a deceptive manner, death of family members.Written by Steve Shell and Cam CollinsNarrated by Steve ShellSound design by Steve ShellProduced and edited by Cam Collins and Steve ShellThe voice of Babylon: Cam CollinsIntro Music: “The Land Unknown (The Pound of Flesh Verses)” written and performed by Landon BloodOutro Music: "I Cannot Escape the Darkness" written and performed by Those Poor BastardsSeason Sponsor: Sucrebeillle – Visit sucreabeille.com and use the code LOVEGODS. Spend $25 anywhere in the store and add a dram of "Kitten Fart" to your cart and get that dram free.LEARN MORE ABOUT OLD GODS OF APPALACHIA: www.oldgodsofappalachia.comCOMPLETE YOUR SOCIAL MEDIA RITUAL:FacebookInstagramTwitterBlueskySUPPORT THE SHOW:Join us over at THE HOLLER to enjoy ad-free episodes, access exclusive storylines and more.Find t-shirts, hoodies, mugs, and other Old Gods merch at www.teepublic.com/stores/oldgodsofappalachia.Transcripts available on our website at www.oldgodsofappalachia.com/episodes.Support this show http://supporter.acast.com/old-gods-of-appalachia. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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is advice. El Calloway could not breathe. Her breath had hitched somewhere between her own memories and the words in her memo Sheila's diary and the breast she sought to draw came from the lungs of a little girl

who'd had every adult she'd ever trusted to care from her either die or turn into monsters. Actual things that wanted to gobble her up or tear her to pieces for reasons she'd never fully understand. Her mama was dead. Her daddy and uncle had been turned into creatures of fire and burnt flesh that shambled through the woods

to fetch her to the jaws of the unseen abominations that had torn up their house and befouled their land. She'd gotten away, though. She'd run and run until different monsters found her. And think the stars her mama's sisters had turned up to snatch her from the jaws of death. Now here she was. More than a decade later, staring into the three faces that had haunted her dreams since she was a child. the gray house matrons and watchdogs of the orphanage they called the home. Where she'd nearly been eaten alive by a thing masquerading as a preacher,

these women had brought him his prey, had kept watch over his flock so he'd have the tenderest of meat to fill his belly and make him strong, and if what she read in her memoir's diary was true, well, they were just as unnatural and as dangerous as their master. Oh, yes, we remember you quite well, cried the first of them. Mock's surprise blooming across her pretty face. It's been a while, but look at you. All grown, continued the second.

Her voice dripping with the sugary pride of a maiden aunt who hadn't seen you since you was knee-highed to a grasshopper, but we'd know you anywhere, Miss Sarah, crowed the third. Her eyes alight with the naked joy of a predator who had its prey worn down and cornered. As I said, the first began again. We didn't expect you at all.

The master was hoping for that nasty old bag, Marsha Walker, truth be told, said the second, smoothly finishing the thought of her sister, or that pretty Miss Heloise would have been best of all. A power for witch and a pretty knife, all wrought

in blood and bone, but finding you here is a lovely surprise, Sarah. Why don't you come off the porch so we can catch up? Women flashed glowing smiles that were far too full of teeth. The air around them seemed to shimmer and bend. Their shadows stretching into shapes that did not match the forms of the three lovely gray-clad women who stood on the walk below. The ladies themselves did not move.

They blinked. One after the other. and their eyes showed black and glassy like the skin of something from the bottom of the sea that would never see the light of the sky. Before her eyes, Bell could see their pretty faces begin to shift subtly, taken on the sharp predatory angles

of things more adapted to hunt by the light of the moon. Bell did not answer them, but instead turned to the door from Maw's house and tried to open it, it was locked. More than locked. The knob wouldn't budge at all in her hand. She looked back over her shoulder at the three women. They still had not moved.

They waited at the edge of the second concrete slab where Belle had stood when she'd recited the incantation that allowed her entry. The wards. Her mamma's wards weren't letting them get any closer, but strangely they didn't seem to be trying to get any closer. She'd seen haints and boogers and things test the boundaries of witches by sniffing, prodding, even tasted where wards had been laid.

But these three just stood there, watching her frantically try to open the door at the charm school. Come on, I'm sorry for threatening to tear you down house. Just let me back in, she muttered. Again and again, she twisted the knob with all her mind. and when that didn't work, she threw her full weight into the door, which did not budge at all. It was like ramming your shoulder into a brick wall, and she tried to call to mind the litany of names and qualities that had unlocked the door the first time, but in her rapidly rise in panic they fled from her mind.

Oh my, came the voice of the first. Having trouble, dear, crooned the second. This is just awkward, said the third, locked out of your own granny's house. What kind of which are you anyway, Sarah Avery? Didn't your mama teach you any better? We thought you had walker blood, but I guess we'll have to spill some and find out for ourselves. But before anyone was able to find out anything,

a tremor shook the backroads of Turticket, and the mountain itself shivered. Bell looked up and saw that the house was shaped. Shudders from an upper window rattled, shook loose, and crashed to the yard below. The glass and the main window shattered as it was pulled inward as if by a great sucking breath, and the porch beneath Bell's feet began to crack and crumble. The rocking chairs fell to pieces, disintegrated into a mulch and pulp and slipped through the widening crevices of the porch floor.

The quaking of the earth grew stronger. As Miss Sheila's charm school from well-instructed lady began to collapse in on itself and sink into. Sheila Walker's house did not go quietly into that good night. Boards broke, stone and concrete shattered, and the earth gnashed its teeth and gave a great groaning rumble. Miss Sheila's charm school for well-instructed ladies, its mistress gone, its secrets pass.

on, gave itself over to the way of all things, and returned to the dust from whence it was raised. Billows of smoke and debris filled the air as the great house collapsed into the mountainside. And Bill Calloway used the cover it provided to do the one thing she'd excelled at her whole life. She ran. She pounded past Harper's and old Patty's place, according to the diary. Sheila had sold her aunt's house to one of the girls and opened the charm school a few lots down the road. She had written about not wanting to be reminded of Patience Carson's murder nor of any of the other horrors that took place under her roof. Bell reached the end of the lane and looked for Melvin's truck.

He had parked in the shade right at the edge of the narrow track. She should be able to see him by now or hear him. Surely Melvin would come running when he heard the commotion back at the charm school. She listened for the sound of the truck's engine, or Melvin's voice calling for her, but neither one came. She called out for him and looked up and down the road, and her blood froze when she finally spotted the truck. It sat 30 yards from where it had been parked

and had been spun out into the road as if it had been struck. The rear left tire was shredded. The passenger side door was gone, and the windscreen was cracked as if the driver's head had been slammed into it hard. And there was blood. Not a whole lot. There was blood. Melvin! Bell cried.

Melvin, where are you? She rushed to either side of the road, looking into the ditches and the weeds for some sign of him, and she called his name over and over, but there was no answer. He looked down the crack road that led toward the main drag of Ternicott, West Virginia, and then back the way she came. The sound of the collapsing house still rolled like low thunder in her ears, and she knew those women wouldn't be far behind her. Dark clouds had rolled in overhead, and she could smell rain on the air.

Bell cursed under her breath as she began to run toward the open mall of the town square. In the broken remains of what had been known as the charm school, the gray ladies collected themselves. They had suspected the Walker Girls' house would do something dramatic on its way out. It was like her, but they'd hoped to get a chance to paw through its bones before it was all gone. They had waited decades to get their hands on whatever secrets that deceitful little trollop had squirled away after she'd managed to hurt their master so. If not for little Miss High and mighty Sheila Walker, their master would be the rain and darkness of this world. He had been well on his way to regain his health and his power, and then he had to go and take the form of a man. Men were weak.

He had underestimated that weakness, and it had infected him. and brought him low. They should have never left his side. They should have taken him to the cattle they were herding instead of the other way around. He'd been so sure about the girl being cowed into loyalty. He'd begun to trust her. When she spoke, he had begun to listen. They should have slaughtered her on the spot.

The master had been growing impatient for some time. They knew they could feel him reaching out to the parts of himself, lost and scattered to the world. And they could feel the rage that filled him when those searches were fruitless. And they did what they could to soothe him, to ease his mind and to fill his belly. If nothing else, the one good that had come of the whole Walker disaster, he had turned away from all others, and he depended on them. his guardians, his nurses, his daughters,

and only them. Now that last one wasn't untrue if you thought about it. He was their father. Their master had pulled their minds screaming from the inner dark and poured them into the will and bodies of mortal women who had made their dark compacts with him. Once that ritual was complete, he turned them loose to eat the minds,

souls of those vessels. And he'd had his other thralls bind them into the hearts of dead and rotting trees until seven moons had passed, and then with great ceremony he had birthed them into the world. Each of them knew they weren't exactly what he'd hoped for, but he kept them close, giving them their shared mind and their new life in service to him. They were his daughters in more than blood. and they would burn alive in the fires of a thousand suns or freeze at the bottom of the deepest lake in winter before they'd fail him.

They did not have names. Not as such. But they had their own thoughts, their own ways, and their own dark gifts. They shared the ability to shift and twist their shapes to deceive the eyes of the sheep that walk this world. and they often crafted themselves to look like sisters, but no two of them were the same. The first spoke in the voice of a sweet young thing,

but it was a voice that was dragged through a mouth of a thousand or more teeth, guarding a throat that was a hungering void that could not ever be filled. She was faster than the other two, and stronger than any man would ever be. She would eat anything she killed And leave not a scrap of bone or gristle The second spoke with a voice that would have wrenched the sin from a hard man's soul If she'd ever sung in church

She was tall And bore herself with an authority that would bend the will of even the boldest men Her luminous eyes and full lips drew many into her heart Her many, many arms. When the second shed the skin she normally wore in this world, she moved like a curtain of flesh and tentacles, wrapping her prey in a shroud of meat and hooked teeth until she was bored with them. The voice of the last was rattling branches against a bedroom window.

The warning bray of the old crone and the old stories where someone ended up cursory. for not respecting their elders or heeding some archaic superstition. The face she showed the world was usually that of a do-eyed young widow or a surprisingly attractive spinster. But behind that appealing mask, she was a horror of rot and bones. As fond as her siblings of disemboweling and suffocating those who dared defy them, the last preferred raking talons caked in. filth and a mall that was more beak than mouth.

She loved nothing more than to tear into some screaming little man and not stop until she'd eaten his heart and shit it right out there in front of him. Her contempt for the soft and guileless livestock that populated this world was matched only by that of her father. And that father waited for them even now. Deep in a house that was not a house. at the end of a place that was not a place. In the house at the end of lonely, he bided his time,

waiting for the final pieces of his crown to be brought home. That was the ultimate goal for certain, but if they could bring him one of the walker get to drain, a hole. Well, that would be a feather in their cap, for sure, yes, it would. A dash of vengeance to add savor to the meat, and so the gray ladies. set out toward the heart of tourniquet to catch a little girl who had eluded them for the past decade.

They glided through all the old saloons in parlor houses, darker shadows in the deepening twilight. Dawson's and the black diamonds stood reasonably intact and were easily searched. Their doors had been locked and barred, but that was no obstacle for the ladies. Other parlors had caved in and burned out over the years, and they took a little more care sniffing around these. but it soon became apparent that their quarry hadn't sought refuge in these dried-up husks. The ladies were thorough. They searched almost every misbegotten hole, but finally there was but one option left.

They stood in the northernmost part of the square, staring at the squat brick building with its banded iron door, and the single word painted in white block, letters over it. Babylon. She's not going to like what she finds in there, no, sir. She might find him, but I think that's unlikely. That door is locked and sealed, so we cannot go in after her.

Oh, no. This is not our master's purview. No, it's not. We did leave a tribute, though. So we have observed the proper forms. Ladies, I think we should depart. There's no more for us here. Yes, let us go before we overstay our welcome.

With that, the gray ladies, the feared and dread servants of the thing whose name sounds like horned head but is not, cast one last shuddering glance over their collective shoulder at the cursed face of Babylon, and then retired to the south to attend their master. Bill Calloway raced through Ternicot on a tidal wave of panic. The creatures from her memo's past, hell from her past, were here. They weren't blurry childhood nightmares or tenuous half-buried memories. They weren't things she thought she saw out of the corner of her eye when she started to drift off to sleep.

No, they were here, and they were real, and she was terrified. And yet, all her years of training and rational, pursuits like animal husbandry, mathematics, and teaching youngans how to read, pushed back against that naked fear. There was always a way out of this. Problems had solutions, and she just had to find this one, and Belle had always been able to find her way out of even the darkest places, barlow when it was burning.

The home and the beast that stalked it. That time down by the, river with her cousin June and the thing that had hunted them the summer before she'd come to the gap. She'd gotten through all of that by not letting fear and panic run the show. Bell had not ventured into any of the other parlor houses or hotels or saloons in search of a hiding place. The whole looked either boarded up or unsafe and she knew she didn't have time to waste on trial and error. She needed to find a place that looked both accessible and stable enough that it wouldn't fall down around her the second she stepped inside.

She ran due north, where the company buildings had been constructed of brick and mortar and seemed to have better stood the test of time. She found the first three doors she tried locked and was about to head back the way she come when a door at the end of the street blew open as if a gust of wind had caught it. There'd been no gust of wind. The air in tourniquet was thick and still as the grave. Bell stared at the door, waiting to see if someone or something would emerge from the darkness that lay behind it,

ready to run at the first sign of trouble. The door swung idly shut as if still caught by that non-existent breeze and then bounced more gently open again. Inviting. As if it were trying. its hardest to seem innocuous. She was torn. Surely this was a terrible idea,

but the sound of approaching voices left her little choice, and so Belle Calloway ducked through the black door of the building called Babylon and pulled it quietly shut behind her. The foyer that she stepped into

was like many of its time. A small antechamber where a man of imposing stature might check your credentials and patchy down, Now, money might change hands for VIP privileges, and at the end of it all, a second door would be opened and passage would be granted to the festivities that lay within. Upon entering the chamber, one was confronted with a finely paneled wall covered in plaques and ancient portraiture. Two cheap reproduction portraits of Barrow and Locks founding fathers hung side by side in ludicrously gilded frames to denote the dual sponsorship of the estate. establishment, Elias P. Barrow's dark and beady eyes glared out from under heavy brows,

as if daring visitors to his companies funded den of iniquity to put one toe out of line. While the conked eyebrow and wry half-smile of Jameson Locke seemed to include patrons in some private joke that they wouldn't truly understand until they were inside. and there was no doorkeeper at Babylon today. The second door stood open and Bell passed through it into the main gallery to behold its wonders. Walking with her hands extended in front of her, she still nearly stumbled as she made her way into the pitch-dark room.

It was different from the flat, dead air in the streets of tourniquet. The room smelled like roses that had been left to rust. A sweet metallic scent that was both pleasant and awful at the same time, like funeral blooms left too long and stagnant water. Bell didn't know who or what might take up residence in a place like this, but if she was lucky, the place was as dead and empty as those blooms, and she could find a place to hide and think. She knew she could figure out what to do next.

She just needed a minute to think, and Bell was six steps into the... the main gallery. When the darkness began to recede, as a gentle violet illumination flared from wall sconces and behind veiled corners of the room, Bell's eyes were not stung by the light. As it rose gradually and gently revealing an elegant and well-appointed entertaining space. Against the back wall was a large, intricately. carved mahogany bar lined with plush, cushioned oak stools, tall bottles of what she assumed was liquor.

Their faded labels, one of the few signs of the passage of time in Babylon, adorned the back wall and the rich polished black wood bar top. Tables spiraled outward from this centerpiece like any gentleman's club of the day, richly draped in fine linens and surrounded by leather upholstered chairs and benches. Upon closer inspection though, Bell noted that each table was outfitted with shackles and chains on one side as if the dining companion who might be seated there would not have the option of excusing themselves to the powder room. Some tables had sideboards pulled alongside them, upon which lay instruments that looked almost surgical in nature. Blades, tombs, Thin needles and spikes were neatly arranged on fluffy towels.

Most were polished and clean. Others were. As she surveyed the room, other grim table settings caught her eyes here and there, a cattle harness. Barbed wire. What for all the world looked like a cook and spit large enough to hold a grown man? What was this place? The more she looked, the more bell became.

certain she did not want to know. Pass the tables toward the center of the room, she discovered what was clearly the house's main attraction. The floor opened up at its center, and the room descended in seven circular rows, forming a small amphitheater. Each row was laden with plush pillows and cushions, and there were carved wooden boxes filled with objects

intended for the use of the spectators, Bell imagined. Some had plainer purposes than others, but the intent of each was fairly clear upon inspection. Bell rubbed wearily at her eyes. Her head had begun to feel heavy, and she had to fight to keep her eyelids open. It had been a long day, and the strange, violet light of the place

made her feel as if she were half asleep. She made her feel, her way down to the last row of seats right by the edge of what would have been the main stage. She imagined the arena filled with the leering forms of the beings who would derive pleasure from such a place. This feels like some sort of awful dream, she said aloud, surprising herself. She was even more surprised when a voice, soft and lovely answered her. To enter Babylon and know her delights is to leave the waking world.

To leave the world of men altogether. Belle nearly jumped out of her skin. Hello? Who's there? You have entered Babylon without proper tribute. Are you an interloper or are you an offering? Belle spun around, looking for the source of the voice and stumbled, she caught herself and realized she'd crossed from the audience onto the stage.

the voice came again. An offering then. You stand upon the precipice of the well of remembrance. Your choices are to proceed forward and hope to gain egress, or to be meat upon the flame to feed those who serve. Either way, you will serve to enrich your bettus. Flames quietly blossomed beneath two of the man-sized rotissaries on the floor above. The spits slowly began to turn.

and the violet light receded to the outer reaches of the room, leaving it lit only by those sinister cook fires that felt like a spotlight on bell. Her head swam with confusion. Wait, I'm to do what? You stand upon the precipice of the well of remembrance. If you complete your journey across the stage to the door and find what is on the other side, you may go. As if on cue, an insistent pounding began on the,

door that stood at the other end of the walkway crossing the stage, something large and heavy shook the wood in its frame. And if I don't? You stand upon the precipice of the well of remembrance. You will proceed. Now. Whatever was on the other side of the door continued to unleash its fury against the stout wood and bell jumped, stumbling fully onto the stage.

She found herself no longer in a musty old shut up parlor house. and tourniquette. She wasn't even in the great state of West Virginia. Bell stared around her in horror. She stood on a gravel road in Goshen Creek, Kentucky. Just outside the

Barlow town limits. The smell of coal and burning flesh filled her nostrils as she heard the dragging of unsteady steps on the gravel behind her. This couldn't be real. She knew it couldn't be. She was grown, but she looked out. She wasn't wearing.

her sensible shoes she'd chosen for this god-forsaken air and her feet were small and bare and dirty the feet not of a grown woman but a child and she heard that awful rattling breath behind her a sound that could still wrench her out of sleep soaked in sweat in the night and she turned to find the thing that was not daddy standing six feet away hey shh Sugar pup? It sure is good to see you. You're not my daddy, and you never were. You're not even real.

Oh, I was your daddy, darling. Came the familiar voice of Pinky Avery. I was for a good hour or so, even after they shoved hot ashes and about a quarter ton of coal down my gullet. The fire and smoke at me up from the inside. It's one burning orange eye. Let me see what a mistake I made Bringing an ungrateful little brat like you into this world

Worked my life away and burned up in that old mine to provide for you and that heartland of a mother You think I wanted to die like this? You think I liked going into the belly of that goddamn mountain for you You just spoiled little The thing was But she ducked and ran as hard as she could the gravel of the road biting into her feet Sarah Avery you get back here You get back here and take you

You're punish me, young lady! Her ten feet before she fell, as the pounding sound came again, seeming to shake the hole. She lost her balance and tumbled forward towards the unforgiving weeds when the world spun again. She was sitting on a fence post.

Outside the company's store, she could see the miners coming off the day shift riding in on the carts from the mine up and around the mountain. She saw her on the car. Eddie waving at her from one of them and she waved back with a grin. Oh, she loved it when Uncle Eddie got back to town before her daddy. He'd always buy her candy before Mama or Daddy was there to say no. She loved her Uncle Eddie.

She never had a pap-a-all. But she had Uncle Eddie and that was better. As the cart came closer, she could see her uncle still waving at her and smiling and burning. Uncle Eddie was on fire. None of the other men on the cart with him seemed to notice, but Edgar Avery was engulfed in flames. His hair was gone, and his eyes and face were melting into a charred and blackened mass. I did it for you, sir! He called through the flames and the stench of his cooking flesh.

Look at what you did, sweetie! He cried, pointing at his ruined features as the cart came to a stop. And he stood and lurched toward her, the flames growing higher as he moved. Bell sat transfixed. Unable to move herself as her beloved uncle lumbered slowly towards her, his features melting more with every step. I said, run, girl! Uncle Eddie cried and stomped his foot so hard that the whole world.

Shell fell off the fence post and stood up for old house in Barlow. It was morning somehow. Her feet were wet with dew from walking from the Calloway's house to her own. Her mama hung from the tree in their front yard. Of all the images that haunted Belle Calloway, this one came the most often. Her mama, dead and blue and hanging in the tree out front, she did not, she did not suddenly come to life to berate her daughter

for being a bad child. Whatever power was doing this somehow seemed to know that just putting her back in this moment was worse than anything else it could have chosen to do. She stood there in that silent with her mother for a long and felt the sadness swallow her. She might have stayed there forever lost in the memory. If two massive shapes hadn't burst from the woods like untowls,

she couldn't quite see them except as a weird distortion in the air but she could hear them and she could feel their breath bell bolted toward the side of the house but a third creature dropped from a tree and forced her on to the porch they circled her

snarling snapping their long tongues which would become visible for just a moment before they whipped them back inches from her face haunting sound came again And her back was to the cabin door as the dogs closed in, and the pounding came again. And she heard the things that were not daddy nor Uncle Eddie calling for her by her old name, and her mama hummed silently in the tree swinging in a slight breeze, and the pounding came again. Now from the cabin door, and the old wooden frame splintered at the force of the blows,

and she heard someone calling her name, her chosen name, from the golden name. The other side of the door as it exploded, and she fell to her knees between the beasts that had been sent to hunt her and the thing coming through the door, and from what she could see, it was huge. And then someone or something grabbed both her arms and pulled her through the door of her childhood home, and everything went dark and quiet. Where was she now? The home?

In the orchard with Elder Henry? She took a breath and tasted dust and ash and rot. The air smelled stale, Tarniquet. Eyes trailed up to see the enormous thing that had come through the door to get her and that had snatched her from all the horrors of Babylon so it could have her, and she heard its low voice rumble. Miss Bell? Miss Bell, are you okay, darling?

Melvin? Bell broke then. She broke and she cried and she wailed and Melvin Blevins wrapped her up in the only type of hugs he ever learned how to give, which is to stay warm and bare-like and safe. And he shushed her and he comforted her and rocked her in his arms until she calmed. Where are we? What was that place? Where have you been?

Well, I was taking a little snooze in my truck while I was waiting on you, and these three little old ladies come up and ask if I could help them move some furniture, and the next thing I'd do'd something hit my truck like a freight train to woke up out back of here in this black building. It's all fenced in. I'm betting there's some extra hoodoo want it to keep people in here, but anyway, I heard you screaming and crying and carrying on, so I did my best to get this here door down. It took me a minute, but I got her, doesn't it? None. Melvin? Bell said softly. Yes, Miss Bell. Take me home, please.

I got to find us attire, ma'am, and I'll be right glad to. A few days after Bill Callaway returned to Baker's Gap, she collected the various items she'd fetched from her memo's house, including the old diary, and deposited them on the porch of the walker's, house when she knew her aunt Marcy would be out shoring. She would eventually speak with Marcy about everything that had happened. But not just yet. Not until she'd made her own peace with what she'd been through. When she returned to her own tidy little house, she picked up the phone

and had Daisy connected her other aunt up in Esau County. Hey, Aunt Ellie, I'm fine. I got back the other day. Yeah, it was something all right. Listen, I'll tell you all about it later, but when I was in Mammau's downstairs room, I found a set of them bone combs you made when you were living up there. I thought you'd like to have them. I'd be happy to put them in the mail for you if you like. Oh, sure, I can send them to a friend if you prefer. Let me get a pencil and you can give me the address.

Hang on. All right, shoot. Mm-hmm. Okay, I got it. let me read this back to you. I'm sending this to Mr. J.T. Fields, 226 Street, Paradise, Virginia. Is that right on, Ellie? There is a curse upon my...

Hey there, family. Oh, come on now. That's not really a cliffhanger. Not exactly. It was just a little taste of what might be up the road in Act 3 of Season 3 of Old Gods of Appalachian. And just a heads up, our beloved mistress of the song. slow and poison dagger, Cam Collins, we'll be steering the ship on that arc,

so buckle up my buttercups. Now, we're going to take a small break like we do between acts, and we'll be back to begin Act 3 on Thursday, August 25th. We will return on August 25th. You got me? Good.

Because y'all want to take a second to thank everybody who helped out with the Appalachian flood relief fundraiser. All told, y'all helped to put together around $10,000 in flood relief via our matching partnership with T. Public, and that money was then donated directly to mutual aid organizations on both sides of the Virginia and Kentucky line to help folks recover from the horrific flooding that has ravaged our home place in the past week or so.

I can't tell y'all how broken my heart is for Appalachia right now. I really don't have a way to put that into words. We have links to mutual aid groups all over our Twitter especially, so if you want to give, you can find plenty of folks there to give to. completing your social media ritual and following us on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram will help you stay in the know as we find more places to help out.

We have family, both blood and chosen, who have lost people, places, and things to the floodwaters in both eastern Kentucky and southwestern Virginia, and our hearts are with them. All right? Please help out if you can. And this is your ever so often reminder that old gods of Appalach is a production of deep nerd media

distributed by Rusty Quill. Today's story was written and performed by Steve Shell and Cam Collins as the voice of Babylon. Our intro music is by our brother Land and Blood, and our outro music is by those poor bastards. Talk to you soon, family. Talk to you real soon.