Blown Away (Nowhere, USA Book 6)

by Ninie Hammon

  She finishes the last bit at sunset and goes to bed, curled up in a ball on the floor where her bed had been, in the empty house where she’d lived with her family all around her, with the town all around her, until …

  The next morning, she walks around the stand of woods, checkin’ to make sure there is no area she has neglected to search.

  Nope. She has them all.

  She sits down, gathering herself for what comes next, on the bottom step of the house where the Finneys lived. It’s so close to the Carthage Oak it is in the shade all day long. It will be a long, hard haul, carrying the duffle bags she has filled with bones up the mountainside. She had best get to it.

  Rose’s mama Lily had told her where she took the pile of bones and what happened after she done it. And what she did then — because the Jabberwock told her to. Rose hadn’t never told anybody about any of that.

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  Moses got lost five minutes after he left Cotton Jackson’s house.

  And so he drove down one winding mountain road after another. For half an hour or five hours or ten minutes — he didn’t know. There were no road signs, or they were so full of bullet holes they were unreadable. Why would you use a road sign for target practice? And even if there had been signs, Jolene had laid out for him a different route back to Nashville than the way he’d come. She’d said it was the best way to go and he hadn’t argued with her because he didn’t want to spend the time arguing. He wanted to leave. Had to leave. Had to get out of there, away from that house, those people.

  The imperative to flee now, now, now was thrumming so loud in his head he had trouble concentrating on what she’d said. On his way to Nower County, he had taken Interstate 65 North to near Bowling Green, then some parkway east, he couldn’t remember the name of it — Nunn something. He’d gotten confused on it because it’d just ended in some place called Somerset and he’d had to find another road to another place called London and from there took another parkway, the Rogers parkway, he thought, east into the Kentucky mountains.

  Jolene had said it would be less confusing if he merely went back to London — he’d told her he was sure he could find that, but he had been bluffing, he wasn’t sure at all — and then take Interstate 75 from London due south to Knoxville. Straight line, can’t get lost. And then Interstate 40 due west from Knoxville to Nashville. He’d find his way home once he got to Tennessee. Or maybe he wouldn’t. He didn’t care a fig about that. All he wanted was out of Nower County. All he wanted was to cross the county line … and forget it all! He could wander aimlessly around after that, he didn’t care, just so long as he couldn’t remember …

  Feeeeeed, he says again.

  It says again.

  The rage washes over him in a tide that carries him away through the night, through a darkness of mind where no light ever shines. Rage and hatred.

  The hatred is a pure black thing that is so tangled up with the rage that they are almost the same thing.

  The Moses who is not Moses hates the people, loathes them, despises them. Wants to rip them apart with his bare hands and feed on them.

  Feed.

  We will not be hungry, he says in unison with the other voices. Never be hungry again.

  Moses realized that he had crossed the center line and was driving on the wrong side of the road. The images had filled his head, momentarily blinding him. No traffic, though, no cars on the road. Empty. No one there, all gone, vanished. He pulled back to the right side and concentrated as hard as he could on keeping the car where it should be. On the winding mountain roads a single mistake, a jerk of the wheel, could send him through a guardrail and off into nothing.

  Maybe that’s what he should do. Not much effort. A little jerk, close his eyes. It would be over quick. And then it would truly be all over. All the spirits, all the dead people and their pain. All over.

  Perhaps he should end it. Definitely something he ought to give serious consideration, yes, just so. But not until he got the monster out of his head, not until he was just Moses Weiss, only Moses Weiss, the man who talked to dead people … and not the being inside the pure evil thing, looking out its eyes, wanting death, blood, to feed.

  So he drove.

  And drove.

  Significant time passed, though he wasn’t able to measure it, didn’t have a watch. The shadows of the mountains all around him lengthened, and the pools of darkness under the trees grew blacker. Rabbit Run Road. A sign, an actual readable sign said he was on Rabbit Run Road. Not good. Oh, dear, no, not good at all. He had already been on Rabbit Run Road! Of course he had. He knew he had because the road actually had a sign and none of the other roads had signs. He was going in circles. That understanding yanked the knot in his belly tighter. He was a mouse in a maze, going around and around, desperate to find a way out. But all the roads looked the same. How did the people who lived here find their way when the roads were all the same and there were no signs?

  But there were no people in Nowhere County, lost or otherwise. They’d all vanished.

  He kept driving, turned off Rabbit Run Road as soon as he could onto some other road that had no name. He turned right off that road onto one that did have a sign dangling sideways on a pole.

  Ravel Witch Hwy.

  The bullets had blasted some of the letters off the sign. Maybe a C before “ravel.” Cravel? Or a G. Gravel. Yes, probably Gravel. Gravel Witch Highway. Only there was definitely a missing letter in front of witch. Totally obliterated, gone. A guess — Kwitch? Pwitch? Switch. S, yes. Gravel Switch made sense. Except it didn’t because what was a Gravel Switch?

  His mind was ping-ponging and he couldn’t seem to grab hold of it, force it to be still, to think, to concentrate. He was going in circles and he’d never get out of here if he kept doing that and he had to get away. Away. Away. Had to cross the county line and have the memories wiped away.

  He began to cry.

  At some point, he switched on his headlights. It was dangerous to drive as fast as he was driving on these mountain roads at night! But he met no cars, passed no cars.

  All the people here had vanished, you see. Right, vanished. The Jabberwock. No! If he thought about that he would go insane.

  But maybe he already had gone insane.

  Suddenly, his headlights illuminated a sign that he thought said, “Crawford County, one mile.” Hard to tell with all the bullet holes. He hadn’t been on this road before, though — he didn’t think. Maybe … maybe escape wasn’t far. Sweet joy rose up in his chest. He remembered noticing the Welcome to Nower County sign when he drove through, saw how someone had used red paint to add letters, an H and an E, making Nower County NowHerE County and he’d smiled at that.

  He smiled now, too, as he saw the back of a sign come into view on the other side of the road that might very well say “Welcome to Nower County” on the front. Not far, only a little way and then it would be gone, all over. Stuart and Cotton had promised that he would remember absolutely nothing about what had happened here as soon as he crossed the county line. Mere seconds now and the knot of terror in his belly would untie itself, though he supposed that when it did he’d wonder, “What was I so anxious about?” That broadened his smile and he reached down and patted the piece of paper affixed with surgical tape to the center of the steering wheel.

  Closer. Closer.

  As his car flew past the sign, Moses fell into a black nothingness that sparkled like black glitter. He could see in the blackness as if it were light. Black light. He heard a sound … no, he didn’t hear it. Hearing happened in your ears, not in your toes and your knees and your elbows — your whole body. A sound like static invaded every cell, a mighty, fuzzy, buzzing sound filled up his whole being, so loud-but-not-loud it loosened his teeth.

  The dark and the sound ate up his world and Moses Weiss and his car vanished off the road as if it had never been there at all.

  Chapter Thirty-Five

  What could Cotton say to entice Rose Topple to open u
p and tell him the rest of her mother’s secrets?

  He had spent the drive from his home on Chimney Rock Pike through Persimmon Ridge on Wiley Road, then up Route 15 to Carlisle in Beaufort County and the Aspen Grove Nursing Home trying to figure that out. He found himself knocking on the door jamb of her open door, looking at the shriveled old woman in the bed, still clueless. So much was riding on the information locked in the old woman’s head and if he couldn’t unlock it …

  “Come on in and sit yourself down and next time you come you best give them the twenty-four-hours notice they want or they ain’t gonna let you in the door. They love to turn folks away. It’s a power thing; they shove you around to show you that they in charge and you ain’t.”

  Cotton crossed the room and sat in the chair she’d indicated.

  “I ain’t gone ask what I can do for you. I didn’t fall off a hay truck yesterday, you know. You come here to talk about Mama.”

  “I’ve spent the past half hour trying to think what I could say to talk you into telling me the rest of what you know.”

  “What’d you come up with.”

  “Nothing. Either you’ll tell me or you won’t. All I can do is ask.”

  “So ask.”

  “Why did the Jabberwock leave your mother alone? It took the whole town, but then let one little girl live there … for years. You said it was because she ‘done right by it.’ You said the Jabberwock talked to your mother. I want to know … I need to know what it said to her.”

  “Need to know?”

  Cotton lost it then.

  “I’m trying to save the lives of thousands of people, so yes, I need to know!” He knew he’d stepped in it then. Her whole face closed up, like she’d slammed doors and locked windows. He tried to backtrack. “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to …” He took a breath, looked at her expressionless face. Then he just let it out. “Look, I’m too tired and too scared to be polite! A whole county full of people has vanished just like Gideon did a hundred years ago. If I can’t figure out something to do, some way to … I don’t know, talk to the Jabberwock or deal with it or … I don’t know what!” He drew in a ragged breath and tried to speak more softly. “All I do know is that unless I do something, Stuart’s wife and little girl, Charlie and Merrie — she’s just three years old, and Jolene’s father, Pete — who’s got terminal cancer and if she doesn’t get to him quick … and my wife, Thelma — they’re all going to die.” The last words rode a sob out of his throat. He couldn’t help it and he dropped his chin and looked at the floor.

  “You can’t do nothing even if I told you. They’s too many of ‘em.”

  “They?”

  “They, it, the Jabberwock, don’t matter what name you use, it’s too big and mean and angry. It ain’t gonna let them people go, no more’n it let my mama’s people go. She begged and pleaded with it, but by then it was too late and they was all eat up to feed the dark, the black thing. It didn’t take her, though. After what she done, it left her be.”

  “What did she do?”

  Cotton held his breath. She said nothing, just looked at him.

  Maybe her mind really was gone. Maybe she was refusing to tell him because she didn’t remember what her mother’d said.

  Perhaps she saw the skepticism on his face, because a crooked smile formed in the layers of wrinkles on her face.

  “I remember it all, every detail” — she tapped an arthritis-gnarled finger on her temple — “in case you’s worried I forgot.” She let out a sigh. “All right, then. I’ll tell you, but like I said, it ain’t gonna do you no good to know.”

  Then she told him that her mother, a ten-year-old child, had scoured the forest floor for weeks, months, picking up the bones the miners had scattered there after the mining company man said they were the bones of the jitter dancers.

  She told him what her mother had done with the bones.

  Then she told him about her mother’s confrontation with the Jabberwock.

  “It was the terrible-est thing she ever did see,” Rose said, and a shudder went through her frail old body. “Ever time she told me about it, and she told me about it over and over and … and ever time, she got scared again like it’d just happened.

  It takes Lily two trips to haul all the bones up to the spot on the mountainside where the miners had located the entrance to the burial cave where they’d found the bones. The opening wasn’t very big, had been covered by a single large rock, but the miners had to dig through brush that had grown up around it. Wouldn’t nobody have known the cave was there, covered up like it was, though once you found it, rolling the big rock away wasn’t no problem because it was round. The bones had just been laid out on the floor, or that’s what Lily had heard. Skeletons — some of them with ratty clothes still clinging to the bones. Little skeletons, which fell apart, of course, when the miners gathered up the bones and put them in duffle bags.

  All that remains for Lily to do now is to put the bones back where they came from. Somebody’d buried them people in that cave and the miners had … what was it … a big word … desecrated. Yes, they’d desecrated the grave by gathering all the bones up and hauling them down the mountain in duffle bags.

  Maybe if she does that, the Jabberwock won’t be mad anymore — if that’s what had made it mad in the first place. Maybe then the Jabberwock will let the people go. At least, that’s what she’d thought when she first started gathering up the bones. But as time wore on, Lily came to believe there wasn’t nobody left to release. She could sense deep inside her that everyone — her family and all the others, all the people in town, was dead.

  Then collecting the bones became about Lily herself. She couldn’t leave Gideon, had never ventured more than a mile away from her home in her whole life, had no idea what was out there beyond the mountains. Her only contact with that world had been with the mining company officials — evil men, all of them, who treated the miners like slaves. She would not go out into that world where she would be less than human. She would die if she ever left Gideon, wither up as surely as the blossom of a rose plucked from a bush.

  But to stay here, she would have to make her peace with the Jabberwock, or he’d eventually get around to taking her just like he had taken all the others. Doing right by the bones, puttin’ ‘em back in the grave, is the only way she can think to do that.

  Once she has hauled both duffle bags full of bones up to the cave, she sits down on a rock next to the big one that’d been used to seal up the entrance, catching her breath.

  She notices then how quiet it is. There are no birds singing in the trees, no cicadas in the bushes. The wind has stopped, and it begins to feel airless. She is frightened. But then, she has been frightened for so long she no longer really recalls what it feels like not to be afraid.

  Afraid and alone.

  It is getting late. She must get back to town, back to the safety of the houses before dark when the mists come, because it is in the mist that the haints cry out.

  She picks up the smaller of the two duffle bags and steps toward the shadows of the entrance to the small cave. When she looks inside, she notices there are scratches all over the walls.

  Suddenly, a voice cries out in the forest behind her. The voice isn’t human, maybe once was but not anymore. The voice cries a word, a single anguished sound.

  “No!”

  Lily freezes, whirls around.

  And there is a chorus of sounds from the nearby trees where a mist has gathered, voices, all them hideous and inhuman, all the more terrible by how almost-human they are.

  No, don’t.

  Not there.

  Don’t put us back there!

  Lily drops the duffle bag full of bones and starts to run back toward town, but the mist blocks her path, carrying with it voices, a dozen voices — more. All crying out in mournful misery.

  She collapses to her knees, clamps her hands over her ears and sobs as shadows begin to swirl around her, faster and faster, their passage stirring up a win
d that ruffles her hair.

  She squeezes her eyes shut and begins to scream, to shriek, but the other voices are so loud she can’t even hear her own.

  Then it all stops. She keeps screaming but there is no other sound and her voice falters. Everything is quiet and still. Her hair settles back around her face when the wind dies. But it is only the movement that has stopped. The presence is still there. All around her. Waiting for her to open her eyes.

  Finally she does, she sees them, what they are, and their voices speak to her without sound about hunger and terror and death. About clawing the walls trying to get out.

  They are glad she has gathered them, brought them all back together, but she must not leave them here. They tell her where the bones must go, and she works with an energy she thought was totally spent to do as they direct.

  She completes the task on her knees by the light of a full moon, her fingers raw from digging, bruised and scraped from making it fit. She will have to haul rocks from Troublesome Creek tomorrow to finish it, might take two days. But she has done what she was told to do and now she sits back and takes a deep, exhausted breath. Lily lifts her face toward the black velvet sky and the dark shadows that had swirled around her are there, part of the night now, and they no longer frighten her. She knows she has done them right. She knows that she can stay here, the Jabberwock will not harm her. No, more than that — she’ll be protected.

  The Jabberwock will take care of Lily Topple.

  Cotton didn’t even realize he had gotten to his feet and approached the old woman’s bed as she told the tale, drawn there by the visions she painted in his head. Now, he stood beside Rose Topple, looking down at her. When her focus returned to the room, she looked up into his eyes.

  “They was the horriblest creatures ever was on the earth, but my mama done right and they looked after her.” She shook her head. “They couldn’t help what they was. It weren’t their fault.”