by Ninie Hammon
Neither of them asked the question out loud, but it was implied, printed in flashing LED lights on the silence.
Now what?
Stuart glanced up at the Big Dipper and remembered pointing it out to Merrie on the deck of their house in Clarendon Hills. A lifetime ago. Two.
“You can’t leave, you know,” Cotton said. “Can’t go back to Lexington or get a motel room in Richmond. Wouldn’t want you to come driving in here tomorrow morning intent on doing what we already did today.” Cotton offered the scraps of a smile. “Living in Groundhog Day is exhausting.”
“Then where—?”
“You’re welcome to stay at my house,” Cotton said. “It ain’t much, but I’ve accumulated the rudiments of existence over the last couple of weeks. I got a storage unit in Lexington where I keep my camping gear and I hauled a bunch of it here — sleeping bags, basic cooking utensils, that kind of thing. The cots feel like they’re lined with rocks.” He paused. “There’d be cookies baking in the oven five minutes after we walked into the house if Thelma were home to bake them.”
Stuart wondered how many times it would take for the impossible to slam into him like a wrecking ball before he would no longer be surprised by it.
“A cot’s fine,” he said. “I don’t think I’ll be doing a lot of sleeping.”
But he was wrong.
After a supper of bologna sandwiches in Cotton’s kitchen, eaten in a dead silence that bespoke their preoccupations, Stuart settled himself down on a cot and tried to get comfortable. Cotton Jackson deserved a truth-in-advertising award. The cot did feel like it was lined with rocks. He didn’t think he would get a wink of sleep, tossing and turning in discomfort, but he fell asleep instantly. And he dreamed.
He’s walking through fog or mist so thick he can see nothing, absolutely nothing. It seems like he has been walking for a very long time. Hours. Days maybe. Never getting anywhere. Never leaving anywhere. Just there in the mist walking.
Then he hears the cries.
Someone’s calling his name.
“Stuart, Stuart, where are you?”
It’s Charlie!
“I’m here, right here,” he calls out. Except he doesn’t. He opens his mouth but no words will come out. Only a scream, a high-pitched cry that sounds like ripping sheets. A sound like the man on the road, Reece Tibbits, made before he disappeared. He clamps his hand over his mouth to stop the screaming but it goes on and on, and he’s afraid Charlie is still calling for him but he can’t hear her above the noise he’s making.
He grits his teeth together with every ounce of strength he possesses, and still the sound comes from his throat, but it’s not loud now, muffled by his closed mouth.
“Stuart, where are you? I can’t find you.”
He can hear Charlie’s voice, much closer now and he almost responds to her, but knows if he opens his mouth he will only be able to scream. So he waves his hands around in the mist in front of him, the way you feel around for the wall when you’re in a dark, unfamiliar room. Feels and makes grunting sounds of stifled screams, and listens for Charlie to call—
“Daddy! I’m scared, Daddy. Help me!”
Merrie.
He loses it then, opens his mouth and forms words on the howling scream, a distorted ghastly sound that he means to say, I’m coming, honey, but which just garbles the words and sounds so terrifying even to his own ears that he is sure it would scare little Merrie to death.
“Daddy, please, come get me. Dadeeeeee—”
Her cry is cut off abruptly. Like the scream of the man in the road.
“Merrie! Merrie.” He thinks the words in his head but doesn’t say them, because he is only barely able to hold his jaw shut to keep from screaming himself. He tries to run—
He stumbles over something in front of him. Bangs into it and tumbles to the ground. He rolls over, feeling the bruises on his shins and looks at the thing he tripped over. It is an oblong box made of wood, about four feet long and two feet wide and ten inches deep. He examines it. There is no lid, no clasp, no hinges, nothing but a box — but it is not a solid block of wood because he can see the seams where it is put together.
Suddenly, a stench emanates from the box that is so foul he falls back in dismay. A smell so unutterably gross he’s afraid he will vomit and if he does he will choke to death with his mouth clamped shut to muffle his screams. Except he isn’t screaming anymore. The sound that was forcing its way up out of him is gone.
He doesn’t want to get near the box because it smells so bad. Then the smell becomes a color. The stench flows out into the mist, coloring it a putrid green, flowing out into it like a drop of ink into water until all around him is green and the smell is so bad he—
The top of the box begins to lift up. A lid there he had not seen is rising up off the rest of the box, pushed up by something inside. The stink increases by a factor of ten when the lid is lifted and Stuart turns aside and vomits violently, projectile vomiting, his stomach ejecting the contents with such force it comes out his nose and mouth, chokes and gags—
Except it doesn’t. He’s vomiting, but nothing at all comes out even though he heaves and heaves. He finally gets his breath back from not-vomiting and turns back toward the box. The lid is lying beside it and green smell-fog is foaming up out of it.
He should want to get away from the box, as far as he can get, but he doesn’t. He wants to see what is in the box, has to see what’s in it. He gets to his knees and crawls the few feet to the box and looks inside, where the green stench is so thick he can see nothing.
And then the stench is gone. What was making it is not. It is a decaying corpse, horrifying beyond any description, blisters on the skin, beetles crawling out the eye sockets. All that is identifiable is the hair. The curly black hair. On the little body in the box.
The eyes pop open and death is in their depths. Now, Stuart wants to scream but can’t, sits frozen as the eyes look at him, and the mouth that is only held together by dangling decaying tissue opens and sound comes out.
“Daddy.”
Then Stuart screams.
Someone was hollering, making a horror sound that jarred Stuart out of sleep so suddenly he sat before he even realized he was awake and came close to tumbling out of the cot onto the floor. The real-world scream that dragged him out of the depths of the green-fog horror sounded remarkably like his own dream screaming had sounded. He staggered to his feet, tried to run toward the sound and banged painfully into something—
He lurched into the hallway and threw open the door to Cotton’s bedroom. He lay on the floor in a sleeping bag, tossing and turning, moaning now instead of screaming. He knelt on the floor and grabbed his shoulders, shook him hard.
“Cotton! Wake. Up.”
His eyes popped open but he continued to thrash around for a moment before Stuart could see recognition and understanding dawn on his features. Then he sagged back into the sleeping bag panting.
Stuart sat down on the floor beside him.
“I don’t know what you were dreaming …” He stopped, started again, his voice softer. “But I think I was dreaming the same thing.
“I shoulda told you about the nightmares,” Cotton said, hanging his head. “Shoulda warned you.”
“You have had—?”
“Started the first night I slept in this house. Four or five days ago they stopped. I thought maybe it was because I didn’t leave the county during that time. I’d been going out every day, trying to get somebody to listen to me, but by then I’d given up. Tonight … I had another one. the worse one yet.”
“What did you dream about?”
Cotton didn’t answer at once. Finally said, “Dead bodies, I don’t want to talk—”
“That’s what I dreamed about, too,” Stuart said.
“I think I know why the dreams stopped and then started again.”
Stuart thought he did, too, but he let Cotton say it.
“I think they stopped because I quit trying
to do something about the missing people.”
“And they started again when you met me because—”
“We’re trying to figure it out.
Stuart absorbed that. Whatever was going on here, it wasn’t some random, mindless force that had … had done whatever it was that captured a county full of people. The thing Shep called the "Jabberwock" took action in response to what he and Cotton had done. Cause and effect.
Why Jabberwock? Where did the name come from? Who knew? He let it go.
He got to his feet and extended his hand down to Cotton.
“How about you make a pot of coffee.”
Cotton took his hand and pulled himself up.
“You got it. Strong enough to trot a mouse across … because I am not going back to sleep.”
“Copy that!”
Chapter Thirty-Three
Toby Witherspoon’s father was covered in blood, but the boy wasn’t supposed to see. It was all over him, his clothes were soaked, his hands. And he was hurt! His mouth was smashed and bleeding, maybe teeth were broken. Toby wanted to ask him what had happened, but he couldn’t. Toby wasn’t supposed to see. He wasn’t supposed to be awake.
Toby was only eight years old and his bedtime was nine o’clock. But in the summertime it wasn’t even dark outside at nine o’clock. And that wasn’t fair! Going to bed when it was still light outside. Okay, it was technically dark but that was just the mountain’s shadow. The sun hadn’t yet set out there on the flat and the sky didn’t have no stars in it at nine o’clock, was still just a dark blue, not black yet.
Of course, ever since J-Day, the stars weren’t right anyway, even when the sky was black.
Toby backed up from that thought, went another way in his mind because to consider that what had happened to Nowhere County was of such magnitude that it was even able to change the stars in the sky, was to admit to a force and power that Toby Witherspoon could not conceive. Besides, he had worse problems than the Milky Way and the Big Dipper, problems right here in his own house to concern himself with.
He’d been obedient, had gotten ready for bed even though there was nobody here to enforce the nine o’clock bedtime rule, a rule that was … cataclysmically unfair. He liked the word cataclysmic. He’d learned it from the National Geographic show on television about a huge volcano that blew up, and made an effort to use the word in any conversation where he could insert it. Toby was what the other kids called a nerd and his mother had graciously called a bookworm. He read everything he could get his hands on — history books, the Bible, the Farmer’s Almanac. His mind was a dusty attic full of all manner of random useless pieces of information — like the Prophets of Baal were consumed in a fire from God … and broccoli, cabbage and cauliflower were vegetables that’d survive a light frost.
His thoughts almost universally centered on his mother, Edna Witherspoon. About how badly his father treated her. And about where she was, why she didn’t come home, what had happened to her.
Toby didn’t want his mind to go there, but it was pulled there like those magnets in science class where Mr. Robertson flipped the switch on that great big battery and the pile of metal shavings was drawn all the way across the table to the magnet.
His worries about his mother were those little metal shavings. They were everywhere, so fine you couldn’t see the individual grains, but when the whole pile was snapped instantly to the magnet, you could see them all. Her jacket in the closet, her house shoes still sticking out from under the bed. The drip of catsup on the kitchen floor that was still there two days after he spilled it because she wasn’t there to wipe it up. His clothes in a wrinkled pile in the laundry room, not stacked neatly in the drawers of his dresser. Even his own face in the mirror. Especially when the mirror was fogged right after he took a shower, he could see his mother’s features stamped on his own face. She wasn’t beautiful, but she had blonde hair that didn’t come out of a box and so did Toby. And she had large blue eyes framed by dark brows and Toby inherited eyes just like hers. Her mouth, too, the way her bottom lip stuck out a little bit, like maybe she was pouting. Toby’s did, too.
Her perfume — the smell still lingered on her clothes hanging in the closet and sometimes when he was so lonely he couldn’t stand it anymore, when it hurt too bad to breathe, he would go into her closet and stand among her shirts and dresses hanging down all around him and pretend she was just gone into the Ridge to the grocery store. She’d be right back.
Except she wouldn’t.
And not because she was kept away by the Jabberwock, no matter what his father said. He had told people she had gone shopping with her sister on J-Day and everybody believed him and went on about their business as if there were no possibility that his father might be lying. Lying because he had … done something. Toby didn’t know what, wasn’t sure he even wanted to know what, but he did know that his mother had not gone anywhere before J-Day. He had seen her that day, talked to her that day. Of course, when his father gave him that look and said, “Why son, you must be mistaken. Your mother went to Lexington shopping with your Aunt Wanda, don’t you remember?” he had sense enough to agree, nod his head up and down in a “yes sir” like a good little bobblehead doll. But it wasn’t true, not any of it.
Toby had gotten into his pajamas, dug them out of a pile of clean clothes on the floor in front of the dryer, not folded up neat in his dresser drawer. But he never had any intention of going to bed. How could he do that, just go to bed, go to sleep, when he was all by himself in the house and he was so scared?
His mother would never have left Toby alone. Not even during the daytime, much less at night. He was eight years old and tried to act tough, but the truth was that he was afraid of the dark and as soon as it started getting dark outside he wanted to cry, wanted his father to come home though he never wanted his father, never wanted to be anywhere near him, but when it got dark outside, Toby was so scared he wanted his father to come home because his father was better than nothing.
He didn’t know where his father had gone, only knew that it was to meet somebody named Hayley but he wasn’t supposed to know that. He’d overheard the name on the phone. He hadn’t been trying to eavesdrop, he really hadn’t, just heard the phone ring and picked up the one in the upstairs hallway at the same time his father answered it downstairs. Then, he couldn’t hang it back up because it would make a clicking sound when he did and his father would know he’d been listening and he’d get in trouble so he just stood there with the receiver in his hand while his father talked, waited until after his father hung up to put it back in place.
His father had been mad at the Hayley person on the other end of the line, who might have been the fat girl who had taught his Vacation Bible School class a couple of years ago but he didn’t know for sure. The Hayley person didn’t appear to know that his father was mad, either, didn’t recognize that hard edge in his voice that said you needed to make yourself scarce quick. She just blew through it. Toby had learned better. So had his mother.
“Hayley! Why are you calling me? I told you not to call me. What if Toby’d picked up the phone?”
“I’d have pretended it was a wrong number, or asked to speak to his mother and he’d have told me she—”
“I don’t want you talking to Toby about his mother!”
“I wouldn’t … why …? What’s wrong with you?”
His father’d said there wasn’t anything wrong with him but wanted to know what was wrong with her, if Sam somebody had agreed to fix it. But she wouldn’t tell him on the phone, said her mother might catch her talking and he said he wanted to meet her, that he’d call her back and tell her where.
Toby’d come into the kitchen later as his father’d said “Scott’s Ridge” into the phone and then hung up. He said he was going out right after that, so it must have been to meet the person on the phone. Toby had whined, a little. He knew it wouldn’t do any good, would only make things worse but he couldn’t help it.
“I don�
�t … like to be here by myself. Please, don’t go—”
His father had grabbed him by the upper arm, squeezed so tight it hurt and yanked Toby up so he could lean over and talk right into his face.
“Afraid of the Boogeyman, are you? Crybaby! Well, if you keep whining, I’ll give you a reason to cry.”
He had let go of Toby’s arm, shoved the boy away, and left.
Dressed in his pajamas, Toby sat down to wait by the front window for his father to come home. Didn’t leave the lights on in the living room like he wanted to because he’d get into trouble for wasting electricity. As soon as his father pulled into the driveway — he couldn’t put the car in the garage because the ski boat was in there — Toby would bolt like a rabbit up the stairs and hop into bed and pretend to be asleep when his father came in.
Finally, car lights turned off the highway onto the lane where Toby’s house was one of three houses. Two of them had been deserted for years, the third was old man Hayes who was almost deaf and could barely see, who always kept his lights on all night long. Toby waited until he could hear the crunch of the tires on the gravel driveway, was ready to run upstairs as soon as his father stepped out—
But when he saw his father, he froze. What had happened to him? When he started toward the house, limping that strange way he did because of his bad knee, the motion sensor light over the front of the garage came on and Toby got a good look at his father’s face. His face looked like …
Like Toby’s mother’s face had looked that time when she accused his father of seeing a “prosecute.” She couldn't go out of the house for a month, told people she had the flu.
Toby turned and bolted out of the room and up the stairs, wondering who had beat his father like his father beat his mother … and wishing he could have been there to watch.
Chapter Thirty-Four
Charlie drove home from the Ridge with Merrie sleeping soundly in the back seat, strapped in, not in a car seat. The car seat had been in the airport rental that vanished on J-Day. As her headlights reached out like twin light sabers into the darkness, Charlie realized that she had started crying again. Well, maybe not crying, not like she had done as she knelt beside the body of the young man who had been trying so hard to do his job. She wasn’t making any noise at all now, but her shoulders were shaking and tears were streaming out of her eyes, down her cheek and dripping off her jaw.
