by Ninie Hammon
But intellectual belief took up almost no space at all in her mind. Reality was the homeowner and belief in spooks just came by now and then and stayed overnight in the guest room.
Then she had watched the ceiling in her father’s house bleed. Bleed. Okay, sure, it was a hologram, but a pretty sophisticated one, one that could not possibly have been generated by any equipment that currently operated in the real world.
And the faces. The identical faces that had appeared out of nowhere and told them to go away.
That and the real readings on equipment she’d used during her whole career to cook the books, confirmed that there was indeed “something” to all the ghost sightings.
But it hadn’t been ghosts … spooks … that had gotten her firm and forever attention. The creatures that had attacked her and Stuart in Reece Tibbits’s house were not gossamer, translucent floating Casper-the-Ghosts, dressed in nineteenth century high fashion and taken to slamming doors and moving candlesticks in historic old homes.
That woman’s fingers had been real. Not filmy spirits. Real.
Real and cold … and Jolene suspected, very, very dead.
That had been reality still in the husk.
What was crossing the meadow toward them was just as real. Leading the charge was the man … the thing that Stuart had knocked down in Reece Tibbits’s house. And only a few steps behind him was the woman who had tried to strangle Jolene.
“What in the …?” Cotton Jackson was what passed for “pale as a ghost” for a black man. His face was the color of ashes.
They exchanged looks.
“What are … what do we do?” Cotton’s voice was a raspy whisper.
It was clear that they could escape from the things. They weren’t charging across the meadow like a herd of stampeding buffalo. They were just … coming. The three of them could leap into the car and get the hell outta Dodge.
Instinct propelled her forward to do just that, crying out as she moved toward the Lexus, “We have to get out of here!”
“And leave the bones?” Cotton asked.
“Of course, leave them.”
“We have to bury them,” Stuart said. “It’s the only way to appease the Jabberwock.”
“We don’t know that! It’s a guess, that’s all.” She gestured toward the approaching creatures. “Why would it send those … those things if we were ‘doing right by it’?”
“Maybe these creatures are … on their own,” Cotton offered, “have their own agenda.”
“The Jabberwock left that little girl alone after she gathered up the scattered bones.” Stuart’s voice was fierce and low. “You got a better idea to make the thing happy?”
The creatures had advanced halfway across the meadow by now, moving slowly, like lava sliding inexorably down the side of a volcano. Jolene looked at the ones she hadn’t seen at the Reece house.
There was an old woman. Jolene gasped when she recognized her. She had aged … Grace Tibbits! Reece’s mother. And there were two other women on either side of her Jolene didn’t know.
A pregnant girl Jolene knew had to be Becky Sue Potter.
A man with a harelip.
Others she did know. The faces from her father’s living room — Tungates, she couldn’t remember their names. Fifteen, twenty, maybe more, closing on where the three of them stood rooted to the ground firm as fence posts.
Suddenly, Stuart stepped back to where he’d been digging and grabbed the pick. He hefted it like a weapon, spread his feet wide apart.
Cotton Jackson didn’t move.
The closer the creatures got, the more detail it was possible to make out about them, and Jolene absolutely did not want to get a better look at them. They were so horrifying — it was almost overkill, like they’d come staggering off a movie set.
A stench wafted off them that made bile rise in the back of Jolene’s throat.
Bloated, blackened faces. Flesh … hanging off them. And there were bugs, too. Jolene couldn’t see them but she knew they were there. Like the ones that’d fallen off Reece’s Tibbits’s tongue.
She didn’t intend to whisper, but that was all the sound she could make. “I don’t think you can … how can you kill something, someone who’s already dead?”
Then Cotton took a couple of steps back and picked up the shovel, holding it like a baseball bat.
That was the extent of their weapons. Two men with digging tools. A couple dozen dead things. Not good odds. Jolene turned and ran around to the other side of the car, leapt behind the wheel. Stuart turned toward her when he heard the car door slam, didn’t question her decision to bail.
Terror was hijacking the body that had until just now belonged to Jolene Rutherford. Propelling her forward in a headlong, mindless rush. She was totally powerless to control it. But she could direct it, channel it to take her where she needed to go.
Jolene started the car, but didn’t turn back toward the highway. She pointed the nose of the red Lexus toward the field of flowers and slammed her foot down on the gas pedal.
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Malachi could feel Sam quaking at his side, pressed against him for …
Comfort, maybe. Certainly not for protection.
Any one of the creatures that now stood there in the gloom, rumbles of rage exuding from hoary throats, could rip the three of them apart without breaking a sweat. Perhaps it should have occurred to Malachi, the Marine, to come to the party armed. Wouldn’t have mattered, though. There was no weapon known to man that would protect them from what stood there, the group of them, fanned out in a semi-circle.
Sounds came from the group, but it was impossible to tell which individual was making them. The voices were childlike and yet as old as crones. Innocent and yet full of evil portent and intent. Sincere and mocking. All and none. Both at the same time.
Play with us.
We want to laugh.
Can you play games with us?
We want to have fun.
Malachi had nothing to say to them. What were he and Sam and Charlie supposed to do, ask the monsters to count to one hundred while they ran off into the woods and crouched down behind a mulberry bush?
He understood then that the Jabberwock was … the creatures within it were, indeed, children. And children want what they can’t have. These children wanted life and the childhood that was stolen from them. They wanted the horror of their deaths erased. They wanted … the Jabberwock just wanted, a communal desire that was unfathomable in its intensity.
When three little kids came running up into the woods, playing hide-and-seek all those years ago, the Jabberwock was drawn to them, came so close it could almost touch. He and Sam and Charlie had heard the children within it whispering to each other in the mist. The Jabberwock had basked in Sam’s giggles, Charlie’s bubbling laughter and Malachi’s carefree vitality, warmed itself on their life like sitting in front of a crackling fire.
The witch had warned them, “You hadn’t ought to have come, making it want.” She’d told them, “Don’t you come back here, all three of you …”
But they had come back! The three of them returned on the night of graduation. And the Jabberwock had drawn near again. Sam had seen the mist swirling around the car, had heard the voices. The Jabberwock had wanted what the little kids playing hide-and-seek in the woods all those years ago had had, but graduation night, in an instinctive understanding, it wanted even more. It wanted the comfort, caring, touch, and tenderness it had seen between him and Sam. The essence of life.
The Jabberwock should have taken them that night. Malachi had no idea why it didn’t, but after that, the chance was gone. It waited. Years passed. The aching want the three of them had kindled within the Jabberwock began to sour, turned blacker and blacker. Somewhere within the creature made of children was one with a heart of unspeakable rage. It was in charge of the Jabberwock now, calling the shots. That rage wanted only one thing — to kill … to stab the knife in again and again and again.
There was nothing he, Sam nor Charlie could do that would satisfy the hunger of the Jabberwock now … except die.
The creatures began to advance on them. He held Sam close. Her hair smelled like strawberries.
“… thirteen, fourteen, fifteen …” She was counting unconsciously.
“Close your eyes,” he whispered.
“… sixteen, seventeen.”
She finished and burrowed her face into his chest.
Seventeen.
Malachi moved before he willed his muscles to carry him. He spun around, yanked open the car door and leaned into the vehicle.
A rumbling, growling sound erupted from the monsters. There was a sensation of taking in a breath before the charge. Malachi had seconds. Only seconds.
Malachi had been holding Sam tight to his chest, cradling her there, and Charlie was huddled up against her on the other side.
He told her to close her eyes and Sam—
Malachi suddenly let go of his grip, turned and yanked open the door of the car.
What in the …?
The movement provoked a communal reaction among the creatures, an as-one growl that rumbled in more than a dozen ragged throats. A pride of hungry lions, they tensed to leap forward.
How unutterably foolish they had been to think they could beat this creature. Sam didn’t want to die! Rusty needed her.
Please, no …
Malachi was back now. He didn’t put his arm around her but took her hand in his.
“Grab hands!” he commanded.
Sam snatched Charlie’s hand and squeezed.
The nearest creature was only a dozen feet away now, looking at Sam, focused on her. She could smell it, a hoary scent of decaying flesh and rotting clothing.
Run! all Sam’s instincts screamed.
But they were backed up against the car, surrounded. There was nowhere to run. The creature slowly drew back its arm to strike, to slash off her face as it had slashed off the face of the hitchhiker. It tensed and she cringed away, squeezing her eyes tight shut.
Rusty, she whispered, without making a sound.
“We’re going to play a game,” Malachi called out in a loud, powerful voice, milliseconds before the creature struck.
He lifted his free hand and Sam saw that he had a piece of paper in it.
“Red Rover, Red Rover, let …” he read from the sheet, “… Jonah Aaron Whitt come over.”
The front bumper of the red Lexus with Jolene Rutherford at the wheel slammed into Reece Tibbits like a bowling ball plowing into the front pin. The impact threw the body up into the air and it landed with a shuddering, sickening thud on the hood and crashed headfirst through the windshield.
Jolene screamed and kept driving, blind now, the half of Reece’s body not inside the car blocking all but a small part of the bottom of the windshield that she had to hunker over the steering wheel to see through.
Wet sounds, thunking — as the car plowed through the group of … things behind Reece. Maybe the first was Grace Tibbits, or maybe his wife. The body didn’t fly up into the air. From what Jolene could see, it was knocked backward and disappeared below the level of the hood, and she felt the front of the car lurch as the wheels thumped over it.
She mowed down others behind it, the car bumped and lurched like she was driving over potholes. Through her small space of unobstructed view through the windshield right in front of her, she saw a face for an instant before the headlight and grill connected with the body and knocked it off its feet.
It was the girl she believed must have been Becky Sue Potter. The pregnant girl. In something like slow motion, she saw the impact, watched the car strike the front of her body, the bulging belly. The girl’s face remained blank, utterly expressionless, eyes un-focused, a mannequin on legs, then disappeared beneath the left front tire.
Then there was a grinding, hammering thump, the world exploded around her, and Jolene flew forward. She hadn’t paused to put on a seatbelt when she leapt into the car, but Stuart must have turned the driver’s side airbag back on because it deployed with a whooshing sound … no, actually that was the sound of the air rushing out of it as it collapsed in front of her.
The world spun and her mind blipped out a random thought: teenagers did that. She’d read it somewhere. Kids stole cars and ran them into walls for the thrill of being saved by the airbag.
What followed was an odd silence that wasn’t silence. It was muffled sound, and Jolene could hear it, could smell the strange aroma of the airbag deployment. Looking out the cleared windshield now, she could see what had stopped the car. She’d run headlong into one of the stumps obscured by the tall grass, though she wouldn’t have noticed it if it’d been painted florescent yellow and flashing with strobe lights.
The impact had dislodged Reece Tibbits’s body, must have sent it flying across the hood because she could see it in the tall grass and flowers off to the left. It was sitting upright, had been caught by a sapling, like he had decided to sit down and lean back against the little tree.
It would have looked like he was just resting there for a bit, maybe, except the body leaned against the tree had no head.
No. Head.
Time slowed then.
It took Jolene an enormous amount of time, a century, a geologic epoch to turn her gaze to the right. Reece Tibbits’s head had been ripped off and now rested on the passenger side seat of Stuart McClintock’s rented red Lexus.
No blood. There was no blood. Somehow that insane factoid registered in Jolene’s consciousness.
Then the eyes on the severed head opened and looked sightlessly at her.
Jolene screamed, wailed soundlessly. Fumbling for the door handle, she finally grasped it and pulled and then fell out of the car into the grass. She scrambled to her feet and ran faster than it was humanly possible to run, crossing the distance back to the cemetery where Cotton and Stuart stood armed with digging tools to fight off monsters. Stuart held out his arms to her and she crashed into him, almost knocking him off his feet. He let her slide off his body to the ground before he took a grip once again on the pick. She twisted around to look back the way she’d come.
They were still coming. All of them. Even the one with no head.
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Malachi gripped Sam’s hand tight and took a step away from her, extended their arms so their clasped hands hung down between them. A shudder went through the creatures in front of them, like the quaking of tall grass when some behemoth creature stomps through a field.
The thought that had propelled Malachi to the car had been like a meteor streaking across the black velvet of a night sky. He’d glanced at the paper in the car on the way to Fearsome Hollow, and the words came back to him as he stood there, Sam’s whispered “seventeen” echoing in his mind.
The words noted in a diary more than two hundred years ago. “Mary Whitt was a white woman who’d been held captive by Indians for twenty-five years. She was a Quaker and they built a town called Carthage beside the waterfall on Troublesome Creek. Then the Indians come, kilt the men, carried off the women, and burned everything to the ground.”
The words hadn’t caused an itch in his mind when he first heard them, but they did now.
Kilt the men. Carried off the women.
What had happened to the children?
They’d been left behind. For which Mary Whitt begged their forgiveness when she listed their names in the Carthage Bible in Shakertown in 1825.
“Please, please forgive us.”
Seventeen children.
Seventeen spirits standing before them, whose only claim to the humanity they all so desperately wanted, was on the piece of paper Malachi held in his hand. Their names.
An unnatural stillness replaced the throbbing tension of only moments before. It was a quivering in the air that was almost palpable.
Malachi repeated softly, “Red Rover, Red Rover, let Jonah Aaron Whitt come over.” He gestured with his chin to his hand clasped to S
am’s, held out. Waiting.
Nothing. No motion of any kind. Utter stillness. But the tension in the air grew, the sense of some great struggle happening on some plane you could perceive but couldn’t see.
Then a creature on the far left began to move forward. You couldn’t say the creatures walked. They had limbs and a gait that was a movement like walking but which didn’t actually propel their bodies forward. This being moved across the space between them in something like a glide.
As it moved toward them, it shrank. Not withered, just got smaller, more condensed. Malachi realized then that the creatures were both spirit and substance existing at the same time in the same place. An utter impossibility. For all their deadly claws and teeth, they were ephemeral beings as well, with features as insubstantial as the mirage that glittered on the county line.
By the time the creature reached Malachi, it had become a little boy. A horror of a little boy, but a child nonetheless. It … he had brown hair, a tangle of it that hung down past his shoulders. His face was a ruin. He smelled … of death. He merely stood in front of Malachi, colorless eyes that appeared blind peered up into Malachi’s face.
Malachi let go of Sam’s hand and extended his hand to the child. The creature, the boy, moved sightless eyes toward it, slowly reached up and took it, then turned to face the crowd. The shock of cold flesh on Malachi’s was a jolt to his system, to his whole being, but he managed not to cringe away. Neither did Sam, when she reached out and took the boy’s other hand.
The four of them stood now — Malachi, Sam, Charlie and Jonah Whitt, facing the sixteen other creatures. Malachi held up the paper to find another name, but before he had a chance to speak, a sound came from beside him and he looked down to see that the boy’s face was turned up to his. He heard a small voice, a whisper, though he didn’t see the child speak. And perhaps the voice was only in his mind. The voice was without inflection, robotic. But within the lack of inflection lay a depth of feeling it was impossible to miss. A longing, yearning ache in two simple syllables.
