by Billy Coffey
“What’d you say?” she asked.
“This whole world, lady. Ain’t none of it real. All’s a dream.”
Lucy bent forward and fell into the kind of laughter so intense and all-encompassing that it’s rendered soundless. Taylor slowly drew his outstretched arms back to himself, vaguely aware that his hands had curled into fists.
“Are you kidding me?” Lucy asked. “You’re loopin’ crazy.”
“Why’s that?”
“Why?” She was upright now (her body, anyway, Taylor thought on her insides Lucy Seekins was stuck in a perpetual slouch), and her laughter had gone to calm. “Because.”
“No,” Taylor said. “Not good enough, lady. You think I’m wrong, prove it.”
“You think you’re right, prove it.”
She was having fun. Taylor couldn’t understand why that was so, but she was. And that she was in such a shiny mood in the midst of the spookiest wood in ten counties made him even more certain their meeting was no accident. It was meant to be.
“Do you know you’re in a dream when you’re dreaming?” he asked.
“No,” Lucy said, “but I know I’m awake now.”
Taylor snapped his fingers, making her at once flinch and giggle. “So you say. So everybody says. But how do you know?”
Lucy chortled again. “Because I’m sitting here talking to you.”
“But how do you know? You don’t. You only think you’re awake because you never supposed you ain’t.”
Lucy shook her head, but it wasn’t a hard shake. She smiled, but that grin was not solid. She ran a hand over her head and down the back, stopping when she felt no more hair.
“You’re wrong,” she said, and yet Taylor heard those words tinged with a weary sadness. It was as if Lucy had said that not because he was wrong but because no amount of wishing would make him right.
“Tell me what’s wrong about it,” he said. “Go on, because you cain’t. I know you cain’t, just as I know we were brung together. You tell me you’ve never once said you’re sure of what’s true and what’s false. Tell me you never felt a pain so deep and been in trouble so bad you swore it weren’t real. Confess that you never been deceived by what you feel and what you believe.” Taylor leaned in closer. “Tell me, lady, you never searched your heart and knowed there was something beyond, some other place that’s not here you know is home.”
Lucy sat staring at him as the Hollow’s weak puffs of breeze played with the remnants of her hair. Taylor, seeing her silence but not her thoughts, only took all of that as more doubt. He looked away toward Mattingly, this time with only his eyes. The town looked smaller that way, less dangerous, though he knew that was a lie. If he would ever find who had walked out of the Hollow—if he would ever find Her—he would need Lucy’s help. The only way she would help was if she believed. And the only way she would believe was if she saw. He did not begrudge Lucy for that. Sight always came first, faith trailed after. It had been true for him, and Taylor supposed it was true for all.
“I’ll show you, Lucy Seekins,” he said. “I’ll prove you I’m right. I know a special place. Charlie, he always wants to see it. Tells me all the time. But I tell’m nosir, Charlie, that place is holy and not for you. But I’ll show you, lady, just so you’ll know. Then you’ll see. Then you’ll believe.”
3
THE DEVIL WALKS IN MATTINGLY
A special editorial by Trevor Morgan, Editor and Publisher
For nearly three hundred years, the town of Mattingly has epitomized the ideal of Rockwellian charm. Our needs are basic, our wants few. Our children roam free in unspoiled wilderness and play upon streets both safe and clean. Danger and crime are nonexistent. Society as it exists on the evening news is a peculiar and foreign place. Those among us who must venture into that world for work or travel do so as outsiders whose hearts are continually bent toward home.
Perhaps it was arrogance that convinced us it would always be this way. Perhaps it was ignorance with which we believed we could venture into that bizarre otherness without that otherness venturing into us. Regardless, our fair town has now taken the full brunt of what it means to live in a violent age. Mattingly could not hide forever. The world has found us.
The coming days will no doubt bring much reflection regarding the crimes of Taylor Hathcock and Charles Givens. For now our fair hamlet must weather the numbing shock associated with their heinous acts.
And yet that these two men killed and maimed with evil in their hearts is not the issue. What burden we must now bear is the intent behind those acts. The town of Mattingly should fear less what happened on its quiet streets only last night than the motive that could drive two men to rob a town of its innocence.
Dare it be asked if that motive was the result of deeper ills that reside not only in the hearts of Taylor Hathcock and Charles Givens but in us all? Can it be said that even in the midst of such wickedness, there is a divine hand?
Such were the questions this writer considered while gazing upon the lifeless body of Charles Earl Givens. Such was the feeling of dread when our sheriff stated that Charles Earl believed his accomplice to be none other than Lucifer himself. Such was the notion of judgment when our own imminently respected doctor pronounced that death as the result of fear—fear of the very man who may still lurk within Mattingly’s boundaries.
The citizens will make their own determination. And yet in the mind of one who has kept a hand to the faint pulse of our town for over a decade, there can be no doubt that not all is as it appears. For are not all offenders alike, each burdened with debts we cannot repay? Are there any who could stand in front of that great Judge without the downcast eyes and crestfallen face of the guilty?
Dare it be asked if Taylor Hathcock’s and Charlie Givens’s actions are the punishment for our own collective failures? Did our own evils invite this end upon us, knowingly or otherwise?
Perhaps. If that is the case, then we must fear the coming days. One can only hope our elected sheriff can rise to the occasion. For now we may all say the worst period in Mattingly’s history began on a Saturday night at a beloved citizen’s place of business, but we have yet to know where it will end.
It was the same all over town. Everyone clamored for their own copy of the Gazette, drawn by the blaring front page headline (TWO DEAD, ONE SOUGHT IN GAS STATION ROBBERY) and an article that took up most of the first two pages. But it was Trevor’s editorial that stirred them all, and in places many had gone to great lengths to leave quiet.
Some read for answers, wanting to understand the incomprehensible. Others sought to reinforce rumors that had already spread. A few simply wanted copies to tuck away as keepsakes, hoping they would be able to take them out again on some far-off day as a reminder that, even in this, people found a way to move on.
Trevor Morgan spent that Sunday afternoon cleaning his tiny apartment above the Gazette and trying to decide the best place to display the Pulitzer that would surely come.
Hollis Devereaux shouted both the front page story and the editorial to Edith from the quiet of their front porch. He was tired from the long trip they’d taken to the hill country after church. He was more tired once the reading was done. Edith wondered aloud what sin could bring such evil to their town. Hollis kept silent. He thought long of Jenny.
Mayor Jim Wallis remained inside his spacious house on Maple Street the entire afternoon. He meant to throw his nephew’s article away as soon as he read it—Trevor had gone overboard before, but Big Jim thought this was a whole new level of blather—but found he couldn’t. The newspaper remained open on his lap a long while. Big Jim had long comforted himself in the belief that one had to wallow in the muck from time to time in order to be a good politician—for the good of the town, he’d always told himself. Those words rang hollow now. There were so many things to be ashamed of, not the least of which was that sorry business with the strip mall seven years before.
And high in the hills of a forgotten corner of wilderness kn
own as Crawford’s Gap, a fugitive wanted for three counts of attempted murder returned from his morning walk to find manna for his wandering soul. Waiting on the steps of the abandoned one-room cabin he’d claimed for himself were two jars of Jenny’s finest peach moonshine, courtesy of Hollis Devereaux. He reached for the copy of the Gazette wedged between the jars first.
Justus sat upon those steps and read long. By the time he was finished with half a jar and all the newspaper, he was sure of two things. One was that his days of hiding had come to a merciful end. The other was that Jake Barnett was no man to save his town.
4
Taylor said, “Hush now, this holler’s no place for noisemakers,” but Lucy didn’t want to hush. She wanted to keep asking questions, lining them up in neat rows one right after the other, if only to hear the sound of her own voice. Skulking through the Hollow was something she didn’t care to do in silence, even if it was the middle of the day and even if she was with Taylor. Because Lucy saw nothing move from among the trees and heard nothing scurry from the brambles and dead grass, but she still felt eyes on her. She thought Taylor felt them too. It was the way he kept the shotgun balanced in one hand and his flint knife ready in the other.
“So if this isn’t real, then we’re really not talking, right?” she asked. “What about when I dream? Does that mean I’m dreaming that I’m dreaming? If I’m dreaming, why am I hungry? People don’t dream that they’re hungry. Or thirsty. Or tired. And why do I have to be quiet? Is there something out here you’re trying to hide from? Is it that thing that was in the field last night?”
Just noise at first, a barrier to keep that sense of a Watchful Someone (or—and this notion felt both truer and worse—a Watchful Something) away. And yet Lucy found the more she asked, the more she really did want to know. Taylor’s answers might provide some levity to an otherwise frightening situation. It was like asking a child why the sky was blue just so you could hear an answer that was sweet and innocent in an almost sad way.
But Taylor hushed her and said the time for prattling was over, that Lucy would just have to see for herself. He spoke this with an air of confidence that still did not sway her, though it wasn’t for lack of wanting.
“Tell me you never felt a pain so deep and been in trouble so bad you swore it weren’t real,” he’d said.
“Confess that you never been deceived by what you feel and what you believe.
“Tell me, lady, you never searched your heart and knowed there was something beyond, some other place that’s not here you know is home.”
LucyLucLu had not been able to answer any of those while sitting on that rotten old log and staring out over the valley. She had been too busy remembering. Remembering how she’d faced herself in her bathroom mirror after her father had gone and how she could have sworn it all hadn’t happened, of how she’d been convinced of Johnny Adkins’s love until he’d said that had all been in her mind. She thought of where her mother was.
And yet as Taylor led her on through that dark and lonely wood, Lucy knew the proof he had for his dream was likely no more mysterious than an ordinary thing he’d twisted into something magical. Some ancient pictogram carved into a rock, she thought. Or a tree trunk shaped like a gnome.
She hummed a tune (Taylor said nothing to this, though Lucy believed he listened along just fine) as he led her through miles of trees. He stopped at a field where large gray boulders lay scattered like headstones of giants. Beyond stood a stand of oaks so thick that Lucy doubted she and Taylor could even squeeze through. Taylor stepped among them nonetheless with a grace she thought unnatural, his body bobbing and bending without effort, his graying ponytail free. He paused just inside the tree line and offered a hand. Lucy stepped over the exposed roots and under low-hanging limbs, relishing the strength in Taylor’s calloused fingers. At his touch she felt her heaviness leave and the eyes upon her gaze elsewhere. The woods opened ahead. Shafts of light, filtered into a pale orange by the gray trees, fell upon the forest floor.
Taylor stopped here and looked at her. “I’ve brought none to this place. Until now, I’ve only come alone. Do you understand?”
Lucy nodded, hearing what Taylor had said but also what he’d meant. Perhaps it was the way the sunlight played at the edges of his dark eyes, or maybe it was simply the strain of the long walk bearing down on her legs and lungs. Whatever it was, in that moment Lucy saw a tenderness to this man that surprised her. And she decided that whether Taylor was about to show her primeval doodles or funny-shaped trees, she would show him tenderness in return.
They walked over a slow rise and found a path bordered on both sides by lines of laid stones. Taylor reached for Lucy’s hand and led her down its middle, cautioning her not to step beyond the rocks. She was about to ask why when the trail ended at the crest of a small grove. Thick layers of decaying vines grew from the limestone walls surrounding it. In the back of the grove stood a lone withering bush, naked but for the tiny red berries that grew upon it.
Taylor looked to the right and let go of Lucy’s hand. All feeling left her when she followed his eyes.
At the far edge of the grove stood a hole as wide as a car was long. Its opening was a seamless circle, blacker than any starless night, with a circumference so crisp it gave the illusion of sharpness at it edges. That impossibility registered in Lucy’s mind just before the other, more obvious one.
The hole was not in the ground, it was in the air.
Hovering not six inches above the dead forest floor upon some unseen axis, as though the hole had not been made out of the Hollow, but the Hollow had been made around the hole. It was a wonder or an abomination, Lucy couldn’t decide which and wouldn’t contemplate either for long, as a part of her knew to do so was to court madness.
She left Taylor’s side and slowly made her way forward and around, easing aside the void. The circle shrank to a thin vertical line, then to nothing at all. She moved on behind it, putting the hole between herself and Taylor. The hole was gone. So, too, was he. Lucy continued left and Taylor reappeared, smiling as though he’d just said the sky was blue because God had paint left over from coloring the mountains, and that answer, however sweet and innocent it was, had been right. She stepped around the circle again, and Lucy was almost not surprised to see the reverse of what she’d seen before—the nothing first, followed by the thin vertical line, and then the hole’s wide, black maw.
Her mouth felt as dry as winter leaves. “What is this?”
“My testimony,” Taylor said. “Proof that all I say is so. Now you tell me this, Lucy Seekins, you being so smart and sure: How could this be in a world that’s real?”
The Hole called to Lucy in words she felt more than heard. It stood regal, almost aloof, as if the world around it were something less than itself. She took three steps and reached for its tarry surface, as clear and still as glass. Taylor ran forward and took hold of her.
“No,” he said. “Never do that, lady. It’s holy, you ain’t. There’s animals in this wood, but they keep clear. Birds too. No beating heart dares go near, because it’s all unclean. But hazard a look here, and let your eyes see.”
Taylor bent Lucy low at the Hole’s mouth. Her body felt charged, like being consumed by a small yet steady shock, and the matted bits of her hair pulled toward the opening. Yet there was no buzzing sound of electricity from there, nor a husky wind as would come from a cave. There was only silence.
Silence and possibility.
“Here, lady.” Taylor pointed to where a plain impression of a shoe bottom had been made in the dirt. He pointed to another. Then another. They rose and followed the tracks through the grove and to the path, where they had mixed with their own. “Found them yesterday. Tracked them too. All the way to the rusty gate.”
Lucy stared at Taylor first, then back to the Hole. “You mean someone came out of there?”
Taylor nodded. “I don’t know who it was, or what. But I know it’s here to show me where She is.”
�
�She who?”
“Not yet,” Taylor said. “I brought you here so you may believe, lady. I aim to know your answer.”
She looked to the Hole again. Felt its tug. And though Lucy Seekins had never believed in anything, in that moment she found faith enough.
“Yes,” she said.
“You’ll swear your aid?”
She kept her eyes to the mouth
(so black)
and nodded.
“Then I need you to get back to town,” Taylor said. “I cain’t go there. Won’t. You got to find Charlie. Now look here at these prints.” He traced the lines in the dirt with his fingers. “You see how the treads are wavy-like, like a wide W? You look for one wearin’ sneakers that match these tracks. You find him and meet me back at the gate. If you can’t find’m or Charlie, you gotta look for Her yourself. She’ll not be hard to find, I expect. Ask folk, they’ll know her. Ask them where Kate Griffith is.”
Lucy’s eyes flashed. “Who?”
“Kate Griffith. But be wary, lady. She’s a trickster. Trust her words and be charmed by her acts at your own peril, or you’ll find your own end.”
“What do you mean?” Lucy asked.
“I mean she has murder in her heart. I know that well. Because she once killed a boy, and she near killed me.”
5
Our own copy of the Gazette waited when we arrived home. I wanted to leave it in the box (wanted to let it rot there, actually), but I pulled over at the end of the lane nonetheless. There would be no avoiding whatever Trevor wrote. It would be echoed and ruminated upon by the whole town in the coming days and in my presence especially, as the people of Mattingly considered me a voice of calm reason to balance Trevor’s hyper assertions. But more than that, I pulled over because I didn’t want Kate to know how much I feared doing so. The way she reached her hand through the window and into the box—like the rolled-up paper inside was a bleeding animal—made me think she felt much the same.
