by Ninie Hammon
“My name is Moses Weiss,” he said. “Are you Cotton Jackson? I do surely hope so. These roads … and the map doesn’t … and when I stopped to ask …”
“Nobody was home,” Stuart said from behind Cotton.
“Precisely,” the man said. “I’m looking for Jolene—”
“Moses!” Jolene cried from the doorway into the hall. She hurried to the door as best she could, favoring her injured arm, to greet the old man. She started to hug him, but didn’t, seemed to think better of it.
“Please come in, Mr. Weiss,” Cotton said with as much of a flourish as he could muster.
“Oh, no, no, no, not Mr. Weiss. Oh dear no, call me Moses, please. I’m just plain Moses.”
Cotton nodded. “The house isn’t much … now. But I call it home.” To Stuart, he said, “Would you go get one of those folding stools from the camping gear?”
The old man stepped through the doorway, then stepped back out onto the porch. He repeated the procedure twice, saw the curious looks and said simply.
“I am a prisoner of my proclivities, I’m afraid. As I get older, I am less vigilant, and they have gained substantial ground. Too much effort to resist. Too much.”
Stuart returned with the folding stool, placed it at the table and sat in it himself, offering one of the three real chairs to the old man. As Moses took off the useless raincoat and hat and handed them to Cotton, Jolene bubbled with gratitude for him “coming all this way” in response to her call.
The man was small and stooped, his shoulders rounded. His white hair was thin and wispy and when he took off his hat, the static electricity made what little there was stand out in a halo around his head. He was wearing a leather apron under the raincoat. Odd. Like he’d leapt up from whatever he was doing — Jolene said he was a cobbler — and run out the door. After a few minutes in the old man’s presence, it wasn’t at all hard to imagine the old man doing just that. Cotton offered him coffee and he declined, for which Cotton was grateful because he only had the three mugs and he’d hate to have to wash one of them out for the guest.
Moses brushed off Jolene’s babbled gratitude and greetings, just sat in the offered chair across from Stuart and pointed to the bandage on Jolene’s shoulder.
“Cut yourself, did you?”
For an old man, his voice was strong and he spoke loud. Maybe that was because he was hard of hearing.
She looked to Stuart, who looked to Cotton, who handed the ball right back to Jolene. Let her decide what to tell the old man.
“Not a cut,” she said. “A gunshot wound.”
The old man didn’t blink. “Yes, just so.”
“I don’t think that’s the place to start, though, Moses,” she said, gently easing herself down into a chair. “It’s kind of a … I don’t know, a side issue. The important thing, the reason I called is—”
“Real ghosts, you said. If you don’t mind my saying, that’s quite a claim coming from you.” Before she could protest, he held up his hand. “I believe you, you know. What is it they say — even a blind squirrel gets a nut now and then. It was bound to happen. You shook so very many trees, my dear, you were bound to get hit with an acorn eventually.”
“That’s not how it happened, Moses. I didn’t come here looking for … spirits. I came looking for my father.”
And then they told him the story, condensing it as best they could, but it was quite a tale to tell and each of them contributed their parts.
The man asked no questions as they spoke. The same half smile remained on his lips and he nodded at certain points, looked compassionate or confused or whatever was appropriate at other points. He just soaked it all up with no effort to filter or clarify.
But his hands, his fingers began to … twitch. Not twitch, exactly. It started as a little wiggling motion, like a silly goodbye wave, in the fingers of his right hand. It wasn’t long before the other hand took up the motion. Cotton supposed it was an unconscious thing like drumming your fingers on a table because Moses appeared oblivious to the motion. But it was disconcerting to watch and Cotton could tell the other two were having as much trouble not staring at it as he was.
The telling, even as freeze-dried as they could make it, took more than an hour. By the time they were done, Moses had moved his hands together on the table and his fingers’ dancing motions were intertwined. Occasionally, he would clasp the fingers on one hand with the fingers on the other — and then his thumbs would spin around and around each other in a remarkable display of thumb twiddling. Then he’d let go and return to the fidgeting/twitching/wiggling/dancing fingers again.
When the three storytellers had finally run out of steam, they fell silent. The old man said nothing. Just kept half-smiling and finger-diddling. Finally, Jolene asked, “Well?”
He shook his head, looked resigned. “I suppose you’ve asked me here to have a chat with one of the spirits. Yes?”
Jolene looked at the others and they all nodded.
Moses’s fingers stilled. He sat motionless for a time that got right up to the edge of uncomfortable and when he finally spoke it was in that loud, commanding voice, but in a tone of resigned sadness. Cotton felt compassion for the old man, though he didn’t know what for.
“Contrary to common wisdom, or myth, there aren’t ghosts floating around — they don’t even ‘float,’ by the way — everywhere you go. Imagine if every person who has ever died remained present as a spirit on the earth — they’d be jammed together so tight they couldn’t move. Only a very, very few spirits remain and those who do stay only for a very short time.”
“But what about haunted houses where the … I don’t know — the ghost of Aunt Matilda has been slamming doors and levitating vases for two hundred years?” Stuart asked.
“I’m describing ‘usual’ and ‘ordinary.’ There are always exceptions.”
“Tell us about the unusual, the … un-ordinary ones, then, because what we’re dealing with here isn’t likely to fit neatly into anybody’s definition of the way things normally happen,” Stuart said. “The spirits who stay, the few who hang around — what’s the reason they don’t … move on. To wherever it is ghosts go.”
Stuart sat back suddenly and rolled his eyes.
“Listen to me! I’m sitting here discussing ghosts and hauntings and … as if they were as real as—”
“They are real. The reason you don’t know that is because the number of people who are aware of their presence …” He cast a sideways glance at Jolene. “Who can really sense their essence is a number so small … oh, my … I’m seventy-three years old and I’ve met only two other people I was sure could see what I can see, and one of those was” — his face looked pained — “insane. Drove him quite mad, you see.”
The old man’s fingers began to dance again. Cotton thought the action resembled Irish folk dances, where the upper part of the dancers’ bodies remained totally immobile as they swayed and clipped and clopped merrily — from the waist down.
“I don’t know all the reasons why they stay. It’s not like there’s some kind of S’posta Book to tell you how things are supposed to operate in the spiritual realm. From my own experience …” He paused and his hand motion changed from dancing fingers to rubbing his hands together as if he were scrubbing them, as Pilot had washed his hands of Jesus’s blood. “Sometimes they have left something important unfinished, or they can’t find something precious to them, or they were interred in the wrong place or not at all or they died in some … horrific fashion. Sometimes they’re in the grip of a strong emotion — anger, fear, grief …”
“You feel what they feel, don’t you, Moses?” Jolene said softly.
“Oh my yes, indeed yes. Almost always … though sometimes not. Hard to say anything happens every time because each encounter is unique, as individual as the people, the spirits I meet.”
He stopped talking, seemed to become aware of his hands, looked up from them sheepishly and clasped them tightly together on the table in fr
ont of him.
“You haven’t told me why you want me to talk to these spirits—”
“We want to know what happened!” Stuart interrupted.
“Ask them where they are and who—” Cotton said.
Moses interrupted. “Oh, dear. So sorry. ‘Fraid I can’t help you with all that.”
Cotton and the others were confused.
“It isn’t up to me what spirits reveal. I can ask them questions, but often … either they don’t hear me or they don’t care to answer. It’s not like you can get a spirit to do something it doesn’t want to do. And sometimes, all I get is—” He stopped and a look of such horror took over his face that Cotton turned to look over his own shoulder, fearing the man was seeing some monstrous thing in the room behind him. “Is what they feel!” He shuddered. “Or memories, visions of how they died that …”
He stopped talking abruptly, as if he’d slammed some internal door on his thoughts. The other three didn’t know what to say. When the old man began speaking again, he sounded tired, as exhausted as the three of them felt.
“Please … select a … kind spirit. I’m a very old man and I should like very much to avoid as much conflict as possible.” He looked at Jolene. “How about your father?” He turned to Stuart. “Or we could begin with your wife.”
Clearly, the old man wasn’t expecting the blowback.
“No, you can’t talk to my father! He’s not dead!”
“Neither is my wife!”
“Oh, dear, I didn’t mean to offend.”
“The little girl, Rose Topple, you remember what Cotton told you about her?” Jolene said and the old man nodded. “Her father didn’t die … instantly. And we—”
“Oh, I see. How very interesting. So you don’t think the people who vanished are dead.”
“Some of them are,” she said. “Some of them must be. That’s who we wanted you—”
“I think we should go to the Potters’ house,” Cotton said. “It’s on Elkhorn Road, right off Danville Pike, only a couple of miles. And you could … talk to Amelia, Selma or Becky Sue. Yesterday afternoon when we came back here, the Potters’ house was … it’s old now. It was fine when we drove past it on the way to Fearsome Hollow.”
Cotton hadn’t pointed it out because it had hit him in the gut when he saw the ruin. Becky Sue Potter was pregnant. He’d seen her in Persimmon Ridge a couple of days before J-Day. She’d looked then like she could pop any day and that was more than two weeks ago.
“Then let’s go,” Stuart said and stood. “Every minute we wait … every minute …” He didn’t finish because he didn’t have to.
Chapter Twenty-Five
Duncan Norman had intended to shoot Malachi Tackett the instant he pulled the gun out of his pocket, had planned to shoot him down like a dog with no warning. But he found he couldn’t do that. As soon as Malachi turned to him, recognized Duncan’s intent, Duncan was seized with an overwhelming need to empty his rage out on the man before he killed him. He could not help exploding in a torrent of filthy words he had only heard but never used, never even thought, in his whole life.
But none of the words was vile enough. Nothing he said was hideous enough to convey what he was feeling, to make Malachi Tackett understand the magnitude of the horror he had perpetrated.
Images flashed through his mind as he spoke, of his poor child attacked by this tall, dark man, overpowered and raped. Raped. It was an ugly word but not nearly ugly enough for the deed it described. There was no word ugly enough, but Duncan stood there spewing out obscenities in an effort to find one.
He finally wound down, realized he was babbling, speaking without any meaning, not even condemning the man because he had ceased to make sense.
He stopped then, took in a deep breath. Since he had not shot Malachi on sight as he intended, he found himself prompted by long experience, by some tiny semblance of the man he once was, the man he had been until he saw the mangled body of his baby girl in the freezer drawer at Bascum’s.
She had no face. He had beat her so badly she …
But Duncan was a man of God, had been a man of God. He’d spent his whole life in that role and discovered he could not so easily shed it now, not even in such an extreme circumstance. He knew what he must do, what he had to do. The Reverend Duncan Norman was required by everything he was about to allow this … monster to make his peace with God. Not for the sake of Malachi’s soul. A man who’d done what he had done had no soul. Not for Malachi’s soul, but for his own.
He would give him to the count of ten. Ten seconds, that was all.
When Duncan began to count, Malachi spoke. Duncan found that he could only barely hear the man’s words through a great buzzing sound that had started up in his ears. In his head. A dozen cicadas. A hundred. A thousand.
Something about the blood on the car. Hayley’s blood, precious Hayley’s blood. On the hands of her murderer.
Now his finger began to apply pressure to the trigger and he was having trouble controlling the urge.
To the count of ten. That’s what he’d said. He was a man of his word.
Something about the handprint. Duncan wasn’t so stupid that he would glance away and give the man a chance to jump him. The man was a trained soldier. Duncan would not win a fight with him, and he didn’t intend to get into one.
Duncan heard Malachi’s words through the buzz. He said the bloody handprint on the car window wasn’t his.
Duncan paused at that. Just paused.
Then Malachi opened the door and placed his hand on the inside of the window, on the other side of the glass from the bloody shape on the outside of the window.
Malachi’s hand was larger than the bloody handprint.
Not just a little bit — way bigger, his fingers maybe an inch longer than the handprint of dried blood.
How could that be?
No.
Duncan shook his head. Backed up from the idea with every fiber of who he was, every molecule of his existence. The idea was too horrible to contemplate. That he’d been wrong! No. No! He had found the man responsible for his precious baby’s death. He had! The right man. He hadn’t made some horrific mistake. He had found the monster and was about to inflict upon him the wrath of a righteous God. It was not possible that the man before him was not the murderer. Because if Malachi Tackett hadn’t killed Hayley, who …?
No.
He felt a mindless black horror well up in his chest, swell inside him, like one of those Navy dinghies when you pull the cord. So hideous — growing bigger and bigger until his soul couldn’t contain it and it tore free, gushed out of his innermost being like the putrid pus of a cancerous sore.
Noooo!
It was too horrifying, too—
Something fundamental split apart inside Duncan Norman in that instant. Who he was tore asunder as surely as the veil in the temple had ripped when Christ died. From the bottom to the top, and the veil fell away. When it did, Duncan Norman could see.
He could see Malachi Tackett change.
As Duncan watched in stupefied horror, Malachi became on the outside the demon he was on the inside. Duncan had heard of such things. He’d seen other Pentecostal ministers expel demons from members of their congregations. Though he’d never personally had such an experience, Duncan did believe people could be possessed.
But this wasn’t possession. The man who was Malachi Tackett hadn’t been possessed by a demon. There was no man. Malachi Tackett was a demon.
God had removed the veil from Duncan Norman’s eyes so he could see reality. Before him was a demon, a hideous monster who served the Father of Lies. A devil who knew nothing but trickery and deceit. A creature who had brought with him from the bowels of hell the power to distort reality — to change the shape of a smear of blood or the shape of a man’s hand.
A demon whose only reason for existence was to “steal, kill and destroy.” This creature had raped, had planted his seed — the devil’s git — inside Duncan’s precio
us daughter. This demon had murdered, butchered Hayley and now it would kill Duncan, too. He couldn’t stop a demon with a mere bullet. When Duncan squeezed the trigger, the demon would only laugh at him. The monster had been waiting for this moment, eager to see the look on Duncan’s face, hungry to gloat on a mere mortal’s helplessness. Duncan could empty the gun, fire every one of the bullets in the chamber and they would have no effect. It would take far greater force than a bullet to harm an emissary of Satan.
Duncan’s virgin daughter had been raped, impregnated and then murdered by a demon. And Duncan was powerless to avenge her death. Now the beast would rise and strike down Duncan, too, beat him until his body was unrecognizable just like Hayley’s. And no one would ever know that a demon walked the earth in the form of Malachi Tackett, who would rape and kill at will with nobody to stop him.
Unless …
Duncan’s heart had been frozen in his chest but now it rumbled back to life. It hammered, pulsing in the veins of his temples with every beat. Perhaps there was a force strong enough …
Could Duncan …?
He could. He would. It would be a small price to pay for a full measure of vengeance, retribution and justice.
But he would have to trick the devil himself.
Still … the God of the universe was on Duncan’s side.
Duncan suddenly drew his hand back and threw the pistol as far as he could across the parking lot. Malachi was between him and a scenic little footpath that meandered through the woods to the overlook, so Duncan took off running toward the trees that stretched out to the cliff that ran the length of the whole north side of Ironwood Mountain. On the other side of those woods, the mountain terminated in a drop-off — jagged and rugged, not as clean a cliff face as the Scott’s Ridge Overlook. Duncan had to get there before the demon caught up with him.
He prayed for the help of Almighty God — and ran!
Chapter Twenty-Six
Cotton said the Potters’ house was only a couple of miles down the road. Jolene didn’t know the people and she’d been in no shape last night to notice a new “old house.” But when they pulled up in front of the place, she did remember it. It had been a red-brick house, set back from the road beyond a big yard, that had an old-fashioned walking bridge over the creek out front. You didn’t see many of those anymore but they used to be standard equipment for houses built on the other side of a creek that could flood in a heartbeat with a spring rain. The bridges were fastened between big trees on either side of the creek banks, and spanned the distance with plank flooring and side railings fashioned out of rope like the fisherman’s nets on shrimp boats in the Gulf of Mexico she’d seen when she’d been filming a haunted house in southern Louisiana.
