by Ninie Hammon
Charlie turns around to see what Sam might be looking at.
Mist.
It flows down the mountainside as fast as an avalanche, white like snow and almost as thick. Charlie doesn’t have time to do anything before the mist is on her, all around her, erasing the world.
Then the memory was gone. It flashed through Charlie’s mind like a comet, bright and shining and then gone.
What was that about?
She turned the picture over in her hand to see if anything was written on the back. Nothing.
It seemed somehow odd that she didn’t remember playing with Sam and Malachi when they were children, but maybe they didn’t play together at all, maybe it was just the luck of the draw, the alphabet, that had put them together that one time and never again.
The luck of the alphabet. She smiled. Well, duh. Charlie thought of a writer’s mind like a gigantic attic, where everything she’d ever seen or thought or imagined or experienced was tucked away somewhere, for use whenever she happened to stumble upon it.
She turned the picture back over and tried to see what might be in the background of it. It was just the dilapidated wooden porch steps in front of a shack. One of the falling-down structures in the ghost town. Maybe every group of three kids got their pictures taken together in front of it.
She glanced up to see that Merrie had abandoned the task of picking up the spilled paper and had something in her hand.
“Where’d you get that?”
“Finded it here. It’s shiny.”
Merrie held out a rock to Charlie and what looked like a lump of ugly rock was actually a geode. Charlie had taken geology the lone year she was in college. Flunked it, but still she’d learned that much. It was a small piece that’d been broken off a pretty good-sized geode.
What was a geode doing in a box of school keepsakes? Was it Mallory’s? Where did she get it? This was coal country and geodes were rare here. She’d been to Colorado once, wandered around touristy rock stores where all sorts of gemstones, geodes, crystals, and polished granite were on sale, but this one wasn’t grand enough to be sold in a store. She didn’t think it was Mallory’s. It belonged to Charlie. She didn’t know how she knew that, but she did. She was almost certain this was the rock that the old woman she had remembered had given to her. What old woman? Where?
Then she turned the picture back over, examined it. The three children were not really smiling. They were doing that thing kids do when you tell them, “Smile for the camera.” So they pull back the corners of their mouths because they’ve been told to.
Charlie got up from where she was seated and went to the window, let the bright sunlight fall on the picture so she could study it. Nope, those kids definitely were not smiling. They were looking into the camera with fake smiles stuck like name tags on their faces. But their eyes. The looks in their eyes. They looked frightened.
Frightened? Oh, come on. That was just her imagination. How could you tell a smiling kid was frightened just from a picture?
Where had Charlie gotten the picture?
Little moths of memories fluttered around the light in the attic of her mind. They had been on a school bus with a teacher. She couldn’t recall the woman’s name but she wasn’t Charlie’s teacher. She couldn’t even remember if she and Sam and Malachi had been in the same classroom, but she didn’t think so. Not Malachi, anyway. She and Sam had been in the same classroom often as children, had become besties — friends in later elementary school, like third, fourth and fifth grades — and had sat together during recess with their dolls, playing “babies.” But this picture was taken when they were much younger. Where had they been taken in a school bus where somebody was making butter in a churn, somebody else was making thread on a loom?
Some kind of “pioneer demonstration,” some place that had been set up with people demonstrating traditional mountain crafts. There had been music! She remembered now. A fiddle and a banjo, classic instruments like a dulcimer and a mandolin, and an old man with a beard had been playing the spoons, tapping his foot and spitting his tobacco juice on the ground. Folk music. Bluegrass music. And dancing. That was vague, but weren’t there cloggers? Or was she remembering the county fair, which had stopped being a fair when she was in fourth or fifth grade, but they always had cloggers there and bluegrass music.
Another image comets through her mind and then is gone.
Fingers wrapped tight around her upper arm. Bad breath in her face. The old woman is shaking her.
Even now, standing in the dust-mote-speckled beam of sunlight streaming in the window, Charlie felt a cold chill wash over her. She’d been scared to death of the woman. The woman had given her a rock.
She stood for a moment longer, then strode across the paper still spilled on the floor and unlatched the door to the attic.
“Come on, doodle bug,” she said to Merrie. “We’re going for a ride.”
Chapter Eleven
When Harry Tungate tore out down the road away from Abner Riley’s house, he had no destination in mind. He wasn’t going to anywhere. He was going away from … from that whatever it was.
Roscoe.
Of course, Roscoe.
They were identical twins who had changed some as they’d grown older. Get the two of them together, though, and it was obvious.
They never been close by most people’s definition of close because they didn’t have to be. Ordinary brothers spent time with each other, maybe went out and did things together, talked on the phone, things like that.
Harry and Roscoe probably didn’t talk more than once or twice a month. And since neither of them was a chitchat kind of man, when they did talk there was a reason. Harry needed Roscoe’s help to move a chifforobe. Roscoe wanted Harry to fix a broke-down car. Harry was better at mechanical things than Roscoe.
It had taken only a phone call and a couple of terse sentences to plan the fishing trip that had sent them across the county line on J-Day, looking to find their cousin who was supposed to bring the beer.
And both of them had married good women, had been good husbands so they’d been close to their wives. They’d also buried their wives within two years of each other. Roscoe’s wife, Miriam, had died of ALS and he’d got a hospital bed and moved it into his living room so he and his daughters could care for her at home until she died.
What others might take for a lack of closeness was exactly the opposite. Harry and Roscoe didn’t have to see each other, talk to each other, do things together to be close. They just were. If people knew how close they actually were, they might be creeped out by it.
When they were kids they could finish each other’s sentences as soon as they could talk, and had developed their own twin language that baffled and infuriated their parents. The experts would tell you that in any twin relationship, one is the dominant twin and the other the follower. Well in fifty-six years of breathing air on the planet, neither Roscoe nor Harry had ever given an inch to the other. They were both dominant, and it would have caused explosive disagreements, each determined to be the big gun and be right, except they didn’t disagree. What one thought, the other did, too. They got in each other’s faces sometimes about how to do whatever it was they’d decided to do, but neither Harry nor Roscoe came out on top of all the disputes. They were evenly matched.
And though neither of them had ever even admitted it to each other, there were times when they knew the other’s thoughts. Oh, not just knew that Roscoe would say this because that’s just how Roscoe was. Or because that’s what Harry would have said so of course it was what Roscoe’d say.
More than that.
Harry hit his thumb with a hammer building a back porch and Roscoe knew it. Felt it. Called Bea while it was still throbbing to tell her she’d ought to put ice on it. Harry had “heard” Roscoe tell the Jentry brothers to leave him alone when they were bullying him in the eighth grade and Harry had come running down the hall from the gym in his shorts to defend his brother.
It happe
ned so often, and in so many different ways, it was a silent communication they both took for granted and never questioned. So when Harry pulled his truck to a stop in the driveway of Roscoe’s house on Burnt Stump Road, he knew Roscoe’d be on the porch waiting for him.
Didn’t take but a couple of sentences to tell the story because Roscoe’d felt Harry’s fear.
“It breathed?” Roscoe said.
“Yeah, it breathed!”
“How you know you wasn’t hallucinating or something?”
“You know I wasn’t.” Yeah, Roscoe knew.
“Well, then, I guess we’d best go see what’s happened to Abner.”
“I ain’t going back there.”
He knew Roscoe wouldn’t either.
“Then what …?”
“We got to tell somebody.” Harry was only just now able to speak without his voice shaking. “Liam, I guess. Or … I don’t know.”
“Tell him Abner’s missing? That’s all?”
“Depends.”
“On what?”
“On who we tell.”
Without consulting, Roscoe went around to the passenger door of Harry’s truck and got in.
“Yeah,” Harry said, in response to a question Roscoe didn’t ask. “They’ll be in the Middle of Nowhere.”
The oldest of Grace Tibbits’s three children, Reece, had married young and stupid and now spent his days working in his woodshop so he wouldn’t have to listen to his wimpy wife’s incessant whining. His mama had warned him, but he wouldn’t listen.
Maybe his mother had been the reason he’d picked Cissy, maybe there was some stupid rebellious streak in him and he went looking for his mother’s polar opposite.
Well, he’d found her. What an idiot.
At fifty-five, Reece was gruff but not callous, a decent tough-guy who would tell a man he was going to beat the crap out of him before he did it, then he’d hold out a hand to help the guy up off the ground when he was done.
The most remarkable thing about Reece was that there was nothing remarkable about him at all. And he liked that, was proud of being “ordinary.” Average height, average weight, easily forgettable face. Sometimes he thought he’d missed his calling — should have made a career out of holding up liquor stores because nobody would have been able to pick him out of a lineup. Well — except for the lightning bolt of pure white hair that extended through his black hair from his brow line to his collar.
His mother was a strong woman, she was a Proverbs 31 woman, the one described in Scripture as the perfect wife. When he’d first heard that in church he’d thought what a shame it was his father had been killed at sea instead of enjoying a life alongside his mother. Verse 28 of that chapter had stuck with him all these years … “and her children shall rise up and call her blessed.”
He’d never in his life met another woman, another human being, as … as everything as his mother. Bright, funny, strong, gentle, loving …
Crap, the list went on forever. He’d thought about it ever since she had announced on Super Bowl Sunday that she would be going to Carlisle twice a week for dialysis.
Said it like, “Hand me the mashed potatoes.”
The whole family had gathered to watch the San Diego Chargers kick the butts of the San Francisco 49ers — which they didn’t, by the way — and he and his little brother, his sisters and assorted in-laws and grandchildren were dumbstruck. His mother had never mentioned to them that she had anything wrong with her kidneys. And suddenly there she was saying she had to use a machine because her kidneys were, her words, “shriveled up and useless.”
Reece changed after that, his outlook did anyway. He had taken for granted his whole life how amazing his mother was, like every other oldest son on the planet. And because she was so strong, he never put her and “mortality” in the same paragraph.
Her dialysis had been a wake-up call. And because he was a carpenter, set his own hours, he’d insisted on driving her to every one of her dialysis appointments.
Which had put the two of them in the car together when they crossed over into Beaufort County, or tried to, on Jabberwock Day.
He had been so sick when he came around and found himself at the bus shelter. Sam Sheridan had said that the phenomenon or whatever it was affected everybody differently, and he was one of the unfortunate few who was debilitated by vomiting and migraine-like headaches for the whole rest of that day and into the night. Hadn’t even realized his mother’d stayed at the Dollar Store parking lot to help out until Cissy whined about having to go pick her up the next morning.
The implications of the Jabberwock were slow to sink in with Reece. Whatever it was, it’d go away, be gone by tomorrow. Tuesday at the latest. It had appeared out of nowhere and it would vanish back into the nowhere just as quickly.
But it didn’t. And now it was killing his mother.
There was nothing wrong with her! Okay, she’d done irreparable damage to her kidneys with Ibuprofen years ago. Called it “vitamin I,” just like all the other runners did. Took it religiously every day and sometimes more often than that so she could run her daily five-mile route and compete in 5K and 10K races. Nobody knew then, or at least nobody had said at the time, that constant use of that kind of anti-inflammatory drug could have dangerous side effects.
She’d explained all that to him and his sisters during the stupid Indiana Jones halftime show after she’d made the dialysis announcement. Said she’d had no idea she had a problem until a routine physical had turned up a dangerously high creatinine level in her blood. By then, she was already in stage two kidney disease and after another couple of decades, her kidneys almost completely ceased functioning
He had brought up the possibility of a kidney transplant and his mother almost bit his head off just for suggesting it. If he thought she was going to take a kidney from one of her healthy children just so she didn’t have to drive to Carlisle twice a week, he had a whole bunch of other thinks coming!
Other than the time out of her life she spent hooked up to the machine — and she used it to read, was teaching herself Mandarin Chinese, for crying out loud — she was as healthy as she had ever been. She said dialysis “scrubbed her blood and hung it out on the line to dry in the sun.”
With dialysis, his mother led a normal life. Without it, she would die.
The Jabberwock had built a wall around the county — nobody in or out — and that wall was killing his mother.
The Jabberwock was killing his mother.
And Reece Tibbits flat out would not allow that to happen, not as long as he had breath in his body.
He’d been surprised and disappointed by the reactions of everybody else — who seemed to be content to hang out here in Nowhere County for a couple of weeks or months or however long it was until the Jabberwock thing blew back out again as strangely as it had blown in. All those people — they didn’t have any skin in the game. The ones sucking on the government welfare check teat never went anywhere anyway, might be a few of them up in the hollows somewhere who didn’t even know yet they couldn’t leave because they hadn’t tried.
Even folks he respected — Sam Sheridan and Deputy Montgomery, the veterinarian, E.J. Hamilton. All they did was talk about it. They wanted to understand it, figure out how it got here and why.
Nobody said anything about doing something about it. Nobody was talking about getting rid of the thing.
When he brought up the subject, people looked at him like he was crazy. He hadn’t lost his mind. All he had lost was sleep — probably hadn’t slept more than a couple of hours a night since they’d hauled him home and put him to bed on J-Day.
How could he sleep once he figured out the Jabberwock was lethal? How could anybody?
And all that missed sleep had dulled his thinking, he’d grant that. It’d made him irritable and a little paranoid, too — he recognized those things in rare moments of clarity, but wouldn’t acknowledge any permanent changes in his ability to think and reason.
C
ertainly nothing that dulled his ability to plan because he had planned, had figured out how to fight back. Today — tomorrow at the latest — he and that Jabberwock were going to lock horns. He was going to kick its butt the way the Chargers hadn’t kicked the 49ers’ butts and send it back where it came from! His mother was getting sicker by the day.
He would not let his mother die!
Chapter Twelve
The wound had been an excuse to go to the clinic and Malachi told himself that as long as he knew it was an excuse, as long as he didn’t engage in self-deception, believe his own lie, he’d be fine. The loonies in the rubber rooms who had aluminum foil in their hats were running from reality. Malachi did not number among those so afflicted.
He knew that he’d come to the clinic because it was only when he was actively involved in dealing with the catastrophe that had struck the county two weeks ago, helping — even if all he did was hose vomit off into the creek — he could ease out from under the weight he carried, set it aside. Part of it was just being needed. He was part of the solution here. He could do something about the carnage, actually help those who were suffering. He didn’t have to stand there with chains on his uniform — his orders and his duty — keeping him from even trying to help.
And Malachi was able to relax in the company of the “home folks.” He didn’t share battle memories with them, hadn’t been standing beside them, looking at the unthinkable so that it was forever afterward painful to make full eye contact. Looks there were too knowing.
Sam stepped away from him and took off her gloves just as there was a knock at the door and Charlie opened it just enough to stick her head inside.
