He knocked to sell a Bible. She answered as a head on the stairs.
Harrodsburg, Kentucky. Abel Rusk, a traveling Bible salesman, makes the mistake of knocking at the narrow gray house at the head of Curry Avenue.
On the bottom step sits Ada Pike - sharp-tongued, bare, and nothing but a head. For twenty dollars, she wants to be carried upstairs.
Upstairs is a shelf of shallow cradles lined in faded cloth. In every cradle, a head. Every face is looking at him. And they are hungry in a way he doesn't understand until it's too late.
Woven through Abel's nightmare is the frontier confession of Asa Hite: the story of the Voss woman who came over the mountains with her mother's herbs, lost her daughter Ellen to fever, then dug up her own hearthstone and found it - a brow black as a wagon bed, horns going back into the blue clay, a mouth packed with dirt that spoke in her dead daughter's voice.
It told her it kept everything ever put down near it. Nothing it kept was ever lost.
She laid her daughter down in that mouth. The girl's head sat up on the stone, laughing. And when the light in her began to go thin, her mother worked a tooth out of her own mouth to feed it.
That was the first tooth.
HEAD OF THE HOUSE: The Darkness That Lingers in the Bluegrass is folk horror and Southern Gothic in the bloodline of Shirley Jackson and T. Kingfisher - a tale of old ballads sung by the dead - Barbara Allen, The Cruel Sister, The Miller's Daughter - teeth left as offerings, and a hunger under Kentucky clay that has been fed for two hundred years.
This is not a ghost story. This is what the folk were warning you about.
