by Ninie Hammon
Willie’s sons had buried him. Abby’s sisters and brother had claimed her body bag; her brother built a wooden coffin for it and they’d conducted a memorial service and laid Abby to rest in the family’s little cemetery.
After that, Mrs. Whittiker. Then Liam. Then Mrs. Whittiker’s grandson, Dylan Shaw. And two new ones today — Hayley Norman and Douglas Taylor.
Correction, one new one. Douglas Taylor’s body wasn’t there anymore. It was missing. Somebody had—
“Claire.” Sam heard the word come out of her mouth before she was aware of speaking it.
Of course. Who else would have broken into Bascum’s to take the child’s body?
“That’s who I was thinking,” Lester said. “What I can’t figure is why.”
“Because the poor woman is crazy with grief, that’s why,” Sam said.
“What would she do with it? Where would she take it?” Malachi said.
Sam heard Malachi ask the questions, but she didn’t process it. Her thoughts had bogged down when a single one of her own words hung on a nail in her head.
Crazy.
Sam shoved past Malachi and Lester in the doorway and started down the hallway to E.J.’s office and the phone. After a couple of steps, she was running. She picked up the receiver, put it to her ear and found that her hands were trembling and she had trouble dialing the number.
The phone rang and rang.
While it did, Malachi, Lester and Raylynn came into the office, were standing in the doorway when Sam’s own chirpy voice issued from the receiver.
“Hi, this is Sam Sheridan. Leave me your name, a brief message and your phone number and I’ll return your call as soon as I can.” Then she heard the clicking and whirring of the answering machine waiting for her to speak.
“Rusty’s home in bed, resting. He must not have heard the phone ring.”
He’d heard. A ringing telephone always woke him. He was the first one to it when there was an emergency call in the middle of the night.
Sam hung up and called again. And a third time.
Before she could call a fourth time, Malachi was beside her. He pushed the button on the phone, took the receiver out of her hand and replaced it in the cradle.
“We need to go find Rusty,” he said.
Chapter Thirty-Three
“It’s okay, sweetie pie. It won’t be long now. Try to be patient.”
Claire McFarland reached out and patted Dougie on the leg reassuringly. He was sound asleep, leaned up against the passenger side door. And that was the good news. She knew she’d be up all night with him, rocking him and singing to him while he whimpered in pain from that snake bite.
Dougie’s arm is as big around as a gallon milk jug, sticking straight out from his body, black and purple, his hand bigger than a catcher’s mitt with puncture wounds …
Claire yanked the steering wheel and the car pulled back onto the asphalt from the shoulder where it had drifted when the awful image blinded her and she couldn’t see the road.
The image was gone now, though, and Dougie was again asleep against the car door. And there was a shimmering halo of light around him, like she saw when she tiptoed into his room at night to watch him sleep, which she did every night, making sure he was sound asleep because he didn’t like it when he woke up and found her standing by his bedside. Just a boy, a little boy being grumpy with his mommy. A perfect little boy. He always was. Perfect. Absolutely perfect.
He was the most beautiful baby she had ever seen. Oh, she knew all mothers thought their infants were beautiful but Dougie really was. Everyone could see it. The people at the window in the hospital nursery there to look at other babies — they always ended up staring at Dougie. They couldn’t help gawking at the adorable bundle of chubby infant in the last bassinet on the left. He had a whole head of hair. A full head, she could comb it, black hair that lay like feathers on his forehead with a perfect face beneath it. Why, she’d stand at the nursery window and after a while everybody crowded around her, they always did, all the other parents and family members, elbowing her out of the way so they could catch a glimpse of the perfect baby lying there, his hair brushed to the side, with a smile on his face. Her baby was always smiling, even in his sleep, and his smile planted dimples in his cheeks so deep you could eat pudding out of them.
“Mrs. Taylor … calm down. There’s nothing wrong with your baby. Almost all babies are born with their heads misshapen. It happens when they come down the birth canal, that’s why the bones in a baby’s skull are not solid yet. In a few months, he’ll look perfectly normal. His head won’t be pointed, the back of his skull won’t be flat anymore. And if his facial features are still smashed in — they won’t be, but if they are — you’ll need to consult a plastic surgeon.”
The voices of memory were replaced by a gentle buzzing in Claire’s head, like a swarm of bees disturbed on its hive, and it seemed to fill her whole head so she had trouble concentrating. The buzzing was sound but the sound had substance, too, like a curtain. It hung in her mind and she couldn’t see through it, couldn’t see what lay behind it and that was a good thing because she didn’t need to see it. It would only upset her to see what was back there in the dark, lurking in the dark, and she needed to stay calm. When she got upset, it upset Dougie.
It had always been like that, from the moment when she held her baby in her arms nursing him, her body nourishing the body of her child, it was at that instant they were bonded together closer than any mother and her son had ever been.
“I’m sorry, Mrs. Taylor, but you have inverted nipples, making it hard for your baby to latch on and suck. You can keep trying, but clearly your baby is not getting sufficient nourishment. He’ll do just fine on formula …”
Bat wings fluttered in her head, beating behind her eyes, and she reached over and tenderly touched the sleeping child leaned against the door. Her baby. Her son. A strong, healthy boy who looked like he belonged on television commercials, advertising athletic shoes or breakfast cereal.
“The inhaler will open up his airways so he can breathe, but his asthma is severe …”
A born leader, all his teachers said so. A brilliant student, but well-rounded. Not some bookworm who spent all his time studying, Dougie enjoyed sports and music, sang in the choir, played the trumpet in the band.
“… sorry Mrs. Taylor, but he doesn’t have the breath support to sing, or play an instrument. And have you thought about tutoring in math and science? We have an after-school program …”
The buzzing in her head kicked up a notch in volume, drowning out the voices, the images, granting her peace in which she could concentrate on what she had to do because everything in her world, everything that mattered — Dougie! — was depending on her. She glanced over at him, encased in a shimmering golden glow. Like an angel. Yes, that was it. Her Dougie was a true angel, a perfect being who depended on his mother to look after him and she would not, would never, let him down.
“Mommy’s got this, sugar, so you just sleep on. Mommy’s going to make everything all better.”
It was so simple, she was surprised she hadn’t figured it out sooner. Wished she had because she could have saved Dougie that miserable time at that place, that horrible place, could have saved herself all that worry. Not that she begrudged precious Dougie one second of the time she’d spent upset. Or the time she would have to spend tonight, rocking him, singing to him, giving him baby aspirin crushed up and put in orange juice in his sippy cup. But if she’d realized sooner what she had to do to heal her baby, she’d never have let them take him to that awful place, put her baby in a drawer! She’d have wrapped him up warm in a blanket and grabbed that Sheridan boy, the useless excuse for a human, and hauled him off to make it right.
As soon as she made that monstrous creature give back to Dougie the perfection he’d stolen, she would lay down the law. Douglas Taylor would never again be allowed to play with Rusty Sheridan. A kid like that didn’t deserve a true, loyal boy like Dougie
for a friend.
The sun sparkled off the metal of the sign in the morning sunshine. “Beaufort County 2 miles.”
Chapter Thirty-Four
No one spoke as Jolene drove her van along the winding roads through the mountains to Fearsome Hollow. Stuart tried to distract himself by looking out the windows at the vistas and thought as he had when he first arrived, that Nowhere County, Kentucky was one of the most beautiful places he’d ever seen. Well, except for what people had done to deface it.
Poverty spoke its hopelessness differently here than in the ghetto where Stuart had grown up. Not trash on the streets, needles and condoms, prostitutes on every corner and every wall slathered with graffiti.
Here it was something else.
Here, trailer houses clung to the mountainsides like bird daubers’ mud nests on a rock face. Clinging precariously there, affixed by satellite-dish stick pins. Yards with no grass, broken toys, rusty swing sets, appliances on the porch, car carcasses in various states of decay, and even the houses that had not been aged by the strange phenomena that had gobbled up the people looked unutterably old and tired.
It rained hard, a white sheet of water, then it stopped. The swollen clouds promised more downpours as they wound through hollows where the mountainsides came down to the road, leaving room enough only for the road, maybe a railroad track and always a creek.
They turned off Pebble Bottom Road onto Byrne Lane, then onto Rooster Run Road and then off that onto a smaller, bumpier thoroughfare Cotton said was Zebulon Road.
“Welcome to Fearsome Hollow,” Jolene said. “Come for the mists, stay for the monsters.”
They were entering into a crack between two mountains that rose up around the road, and Stuart could see patches of mist ahead clinging to the treetops. Jolene answered the question he didn’t ask.
“Only here in Fearsome Hollow. It’s the only place in the county there’s mist like this.”
“Oh, mists hang over the creeks everywhere in the early morning,” Cotton said. “But they burn off before ten o’clock. Here, though … there’s a mist somewhere in Fearsome Hollow all day long, and not just hanging over the creeks.”
Stuart looked apprehensively up into the trees where the mist clung like tatters of spiders’ webs.
The clouds hung low over the mountaintops, gray storm clouds not tethered to the trees like the mist. Lightening flashed inside the clouds and the low rumble of thunder accompanied them up the road, reminding Stuart of the slow rattle of drums in a funeral cortege.
He shivered.
Rounding a bend, the ghost town of Gideon leapt out of the shadows around the trees. It could have been a movie set for some old Western, except there was no saloon with doors hanging ajar, squeaking in a prairie wind. The buildings stood like gray gravestones beneath a dreary sky the same color.
“I can’t figure out why these buildings are still standing,” Jolene said. “Coal camps were built of such shoddy materials the houses sometimes collapsed while there were still people living in them.”
“I used to wonder the same thing,” Cotton said. “Now …”
“Now what?”
“Now … I think the buildings have been kept upright. I think whatever force is here … it wants this town to stay here. Wants people to see it. And remember.”
They pulled the van to a halt near an ancient tree that stood in the center of town, and Stuart got out and gawked at it.
"Now that is some serious tree-ege," he said, craning his neck to look up into the canopy of leaves. "I've never seen a California redwood, but this baby's got to be a kissing cousin."
"It's called the Carthage Oak. I'm sure it's the biggest tree in the county – though not in the whole state, I wouldn't think. There's some virgin timber in the Daniel Boone National Forest that could probably give it a run for its money."
Jolene killed the engine and thunder rumbled menacingly around them.
“It was a dark and stormy night …” she said, but even she didn’t smile at the reference. “As we were driving I made a decision. I’m not going to crank the EMS meter and the EVP recorders and—”
“Mayonnaise words,” Cotton said.
“Okay, the equipment that detects the presence of paranormal activity. I figure that’s a given, and I only have so much battery power. I’m going to plug it all into the …” She stopped herself. “The thingamabob that is supposed to disrupt and disperse that kind of energy.”
“The ghost-zapper.”
“Riiiiight.”
Thunder rumbled again and a couple of fat raindrops splatted down on the windshield.
Stuart looked around. “The thing, the Jabberwock, the spiritual force is in the mist, right? That’s what we think, anyway.”
“Yeah, so—”
“There’s no such thing as mist in the rain, is there? You can’t have fog in the middle of a storm, right?”
Jolene shrugged. Cotton didn’t appear to have heard the question, was scanning the world all around, his eyes searching and fearful.
“Let’s do this and get the hell outta Dodge.”
Rusty lay in the dark of the car trunk, trying not to imagine that he was suffocating. He knew it was just his imagination, that he was having trouble breathing because he was scared and who wouldn’t be scared when a crazy woman with a gun hauls you out of bed and kidnaps you!
It was kidnapping. That’s what she’d done. And he’d seen lots of television shows where people who’d been kidnapped were thrown into the trunk of a car and none of them ever suffocated. A car trunk wasn’t airtight, he knew that. If he could just calm down enough to concentrate, he was sure he’d be able to smell the exhaust of the car. Not that car exhaust was a good thing. It was a very bad thing. But the point was that if he could smell the exhaust, it meant the trunk wasn’t airtight, so there was air in there and he wasn’t going to suffocate.
“Get a grip,” he said out loud. Whispered.
It took all his concentration to wrap his will around his panic and keep it from expanding until it filled him completely up. Panic never ended well. Not one time in any story he’d ever heard or movie or television show or real life — not once was it a good thing for the person in danger to panic. Panicked people did stupid things … that got them killed.
His heart ricocheted like a bullet fired into the rocks at the thought of getting killed and he had to grab hold again and yank tight.
He wasn’t in danger of getting killed. Mrs. McFarland wasn’t going to kill him.
She wasn’t, was she? Why would she—?
Stop it.
He had no idea why she had done what she had done, but it made logical sense that if she had wanted Rusty dead she would have shot him as he lay asleep in his bed. She didn’t go to all the trouble to stick him in the trunk of the car and drive him somewhere just to kill him when she got there.
She was crazy, that was all. He’d always believed that and this certainly proved he’d been right. The woman was certifiable, needed to be locked up somewhere and probably would be after pulling this stunt. He couldn’t imagine what she intended to do with him, but he knew it was futile to try to figure out what a crazy person was going to do.
He couldn’t control what she did or didn’t do but he could control what he did. That’s what his mom always said. He had to concentrate on what he could do, what he would do when they got wherever it was they were going.
So what could he do?
Well, for one thing, he could stop being a schmuck and playing by the rules. Be respectful to your elders. That rule probably didn’t apply anymore when your elders were crazier than an outhouse rat. Mrs. McFarland was bigger than Rusty, but not much. A little taller, certainly heavier, probably had him by fifty pounds. But he was a strong twelve-year-old boy and she was fat and old and no way could she overpower him if he fought back.
He had to have a plan, though. Suddenly, he felt the car begin to slow.
A plan. A plan!
The element of s
urprise. That’s what he had going for him. That was all the plan he could come up with before the car rolled to a stop and he heard the front door open and close.
Surprise.
Chapter Thirty-Five
Cotton and Stuart stood next to the open sliding door on the passenger side of the van, getting soaked while Jolene fiddled with the equipment. The few splats of raindrops on the roof of the van when they’d stopped had ratcheted into rain. Not a monsoon, but a cold, drenching rain.
Then the rain stopped. Just … stopped. Like a spigot had been turned off.
The two men exchanged a look, putting out their hands like little kids as they looked at the sky, expecting drops to fall that didn’t.
A strange, keening cry filled up the sudden silence left by the stilled raindrops. It seemed to come from everywhere and nowhere at the same time. Not one voice, but multiple voices, blended like a choir so the finger-nails-on-a-blackboard sound was magnified.
They all froze, looked around for the source of the sound but saw nothing but the dilapidated gray buildings, slick with rain. And shadows.
Why where there so many shadows? Shadows were formed when something stood in front of the sun. But there was no sunshine. There was only the diffuse light of the overcast sky, which wasn’t nearly bright enough to cast a shadow.
There were shadows around all the buildings, though. Deep, dark black ones. Had they been there before?
Cotton made a sound, something like a cry or a groan and when Stuart looked at him, all he could do was point. At first, Stuart couldn’t tell what he was pointing at. He seemed to be gesturing at the treetops in the forest behind the buildings … where it was raining. You could see the rain pouring down on the branches, watch them hitch and sway from the impacts of the individual raindrops.
