by Ninie Hammon
“True that,” Sam admitted.
“And you saw the mist coming,” Charlie told her. “I turned around and it was just there.”
“It was there … and nothing else was,” Malachi said, echoing the memories that had bloomed in Sam’s head. “It was so thick you couldn’t see—”
“Your hand in front of your face,” Charlie said.
“But you could still hear, and I heard you guys’ voices,” Sam said. “But they were soft, whispers.”
“Why would we have been whispering?” Malachi said. “But I did hear whispers. And a voice that didn’t sound like a girl’s.”
“I heard you, Malachi,” Charlie said. “Had to be you. I couldn’t hear what you were saying, but I followed you, calling out. But you never answered.”
“I’d forgotten about this, about all of it.”
Sam hadn’t even remembered they’d played together, certainly not that field trip, or hide-and-seek in the woods, and when she finally did, it was like she had to pry the memories loose to see them. They were bound up tight, didn’t want to let go. And wrapped around them was a fear she couldn’t explain.
She marveled at the wonder in her own voice. “I got lost in the woods, couldn’t see anything, followed your voices but couldn’t find you. I was scared.”
“Not just lost, but lost for a long time,” Malachi said.
“For hours,” Charlie said. “Wandering up and down the hills. I fell and skinned my knee, scratched my face … I was bawling and calling out and trying to hear somebody answer.”
“I was so scared, called until my throat was raw and my voice was hoarse. And as soon as I’d start crying, I’d hear you guys whispering again and it sounded like you were so close … just right there.”
All three fell silent.
“Anybody besides me putting all this together?” Malachi asked, his voice soft, maybe even airless.
Sam was and she didn’t like where it was leading.
“I wasn’t whispering,” she said.
“Neither was I,” Charlie said.
“Make that three,” Malachi said.
“I called out for you guys — ‘Charlie! Malachi! Where are you?’ as loud as I could yell. Over and over, but you never answered.”
“I never heard anybody call my name,” Charlie said.
“Make that three of a kind again,” said Malachi. “Beats two pairs, if we were playing poker.”
There was another silence.
“Sooooo …” Malachi said, “none of us whispered, but all of us heard whispers. All of us called out, but none of us ever heard our own name. And we were in an area … what? Surely smaller than a football field.”
“Then the old lady was just there. Came out of the mist,” Charlie said.
“Old lady?” Sam said.
“You don’t remember an old lady?”
“You do?”
“So do I,” said Malachi.
“What … she just appeared, burst full grown from an oak tree like Tecumseh?” Sam said.
“I saw you with the old lady,” Malachi said. “She grabbed you by the arm. And brave boy that I was, I leapt out of the bushes with a sword.”
“A sword?”
“Okay, a whip, like Indiana Jones.”
“Fail,” Sam and Charlie said at the same time.
“You didn’t leap out of the woods at all,” Charlie said. “She found you like she found me and Sam. You were just as lost.”
“I don’t remember any old lady,” Sam said. “You’re making that up.”
Charlie sat down then for the first time, “No, I’m not. I have not thought about that day in the past … do the math, twenty-five years? Not once until I saw that picture.”
“I hadn’t thought about it until five minutes ago,” said Sam.
“I’ve thought about it,” Malachi said and the two turned to look at him.
“You don’t remember what she said to us?” he asked, looking from one to the other. “About the town vanishing … you don’t remember?”
“You’re serious? You had a conversation with an old lady in the woods?”
“We had a conversation,” he said. “All three of us were there, in mist so thick it was like standing in milk.”
“I do not remember an old woman,” Sam said, adamant. “Who was she?”
“At the time, we didn’t know,” Malachi said. “But now I have a good guess.”
“You don’t think … we actually talked to the Gideon Witch?” Sam was incredulous.
“Well, she looked pretty witch-y to me.”
“Aw, come on. That’s just a story,” Sam said. “A myth, like the stories of the haints in Fearsome Hollow. Some little girl gets lost in the woods and comes home to find all the people in town … gone, vanished.”
“Makes a good story, though, and I do like a good story,” Charlie said. “And the little girl must have been like Tarzan, except instead of being raised by chimps in the jungle, she was raised by chipmunks in the woods.”
“Maybe she’s like the blue people of Troublesome Creek,” Malachi said. “Everybody thought they didn’t exist, even though lots of people claimed sightings over the years. Then lo and behold, it was true.”
As a matter of fact, Sam had been telling Rusty about the blue people a three-week lifetime ago, sitting on the porch looking at the stars on a spring evening. How there were rumors, stories, “myths” about people whose skin was as blue as an ink stain on a shirt living in the mountains around Troublesome Creek near Hazard. Then when Sam was a sophomore in high school, they “came out of the closet,” appeared. And a hematologist from the University of Kentucky figured out the mystery of their blue skin. Because of isolation and inbreeding, seven generations of the Fugate family had been suffering from a rare genetic disorder that was easily cured. Left untreated, it turned their skin blue.
“So you think the three of us really did meet the Gideon Witch when we were on a first-grade field trip?” Sam said.
“Why not?” Charlie said. “We were seven, so that would have been 1970. When did Gideon become a ghost town?”
“About 1900, no, a few years before that,” Sam said.
“In … 1895, maybe,” Malachi said, in an odd tone of voice.
“So she’d have been old as dirt, but it is possible,” Charlie said. “If she lived up in the woods somewhere nearby … and suddenly there’s all this commotion, school busses and shrieking children.”
“So she came to have a look-see, and ran into the three of us in the woods,” Sam suggested.
“No, she found the three of us in the mist,” Charlie said. “It was so thick, I put my hand up and I really couldn’t see it right there in front of my face. I never would have found my way back … and then she was there.”
Charlie reached into her purse again and pulled out a rock, round and brown and ugly, but on the other side were crystals.
“And she gave me this.”
When Sam saw it, she gasped.
“I have one just like that,” she cried. “I never knew where I got it. I just thought it was pretty, so I kept it. It’s in a bowl with a bunch of seashells from the time we went to Florida.” She reached out and took the rock from Charlie, turned it over in her hand. “I’d be willing to bet if I brought my rock and put it with this one, it’d fit. It’s a geode, broken in half.”
“And the halves broken in half,” Malachi said. “Quarters.”
“Seriously. You have a rock like this, too?”
“Had one. It was in my pack when the Humvee hit that IED.”
He got a faraway look in his eyes and Sam was suddenly sorry she’d asked. He had come back to them while they were talking about the picture. His eyes had come to life, he was present, there. But at the mention of his rock, she watched the shutters slam shut on all the windows in his soul, the doors bang closed, the latches whack into place.
Malachi Tackett had left the building.
Chapter Fifteen
Charli
e watched Malachi withdraw into himself, reminded her of a turtle retracting its head and legs into the shell and closing up the bottom. Clearly, there was some awful memory associated with that rock — not as they’d gotten it when they were children, but since then, something to do with fighting and blood and soldiers and war.
She reached out instinctively to grab him, to bring him back. Scrambling, she said, “Malachi, you seem to remember this day better than Sam and I do. What did that woman say to us?”
She shot a glance at Sam, who took the handoff like she’d been a football star instead of basketball.
“You were standing there while she was yelling at Charlie. What’d she say?”
“She wasn’t yelling,” he said softly. And Charlie was gratified to see that Malachi was fighting his way back. That he didn’t want to stay where some terrible memory had taken him.
“Not yelling? Sure seemed like yelling to me — didn’t it to you, Sam?”
“I’m still not sure I even saw a woman.”
“It was yelling in intensity,” Malachi said and they watched the light begin to grow in his eyes, like his soul had a dimmer switch and he was carefully dialing it back up. “She was intense, so maybe on the receiving end it felt like yelling.”
“But she wasn’t angry,” Sam said, and there was recognition in her eyes like she’d just figured that part out. “I do remember her! Butt ugly. Breath that’d gag a maggot. I remember.” Sam was thrilled. “I actually saw the Gideon Witch. How cool is that! She was intense, alright, but I think you’re right, Malachi — she wasn’t mad.”
“Maybe not …” Charlie struggled to call up the images. “In fact, it sounded more like … pleading than yelling.”
“She didn’t want you to forget,” Malachi said. “That’s what the rocks were about. Not forgetting.”
And then Charlie did remember.
The old woman smells like wood smoke and old dirt, like clothes that have needed washing so long they are stiff. Her breath over the stumps of her rotten teeth smells worse than Badger’s breath, and his doggie breath is the worst.
“You hadn’t ought to have come up here like you done,” she says. “It lets me and mine be because we done right by it, but now it’s marked you.”
Charlie has no idea what the woman is talking about, cuts a glance at Malachi and Sam, who don’t look like they know either. She wants to ask the woman to let go of her arm, but she is too frightened to speak.
“I run away! Got my nose all outa joint cause I got blamed when it was my little brother broke the jar. So I run away! Ten years old and I run off into the woods crying, wasn’t watching where I’s going and got lost and it got dark and …”
The old woman hasn’t been looking at her, but she does now.
“… when I come back, they’s all gone. Nary a soul left in all of Gideon. Wasn’t nothing but the houses. No furniture. No clothes in the chifforobe or food in the kitchen. No cooking pots, no washtub. A mirror on the wall … that's all, and the pegs my Daddy'd put in the wall by the door to hang coats on. Wasn't no coats, though. Everything was gone.”
She finally lets go of Charlie’s arm, and Charlie wants to rub where it’s sore from her squeezing, but she doesn’t, is afraid if she does the woman will grab her again. Maybe Charlie should run away while she has a chance. But run where? Back out there into the mist to get lost again? At least here, she’s with Malachi and Sam.
An ancient drawstring bag hangs around the old woman’s neck from a leather thong. With filthy fingers, she pulls open the bag and drops the contents out into the palm of her hand. It’s a rock, and when she nudges the rock with her finger it falls apart and you can see it’s one rock that’d been broken apart and had been stuck back together again.
“They was still there. Them people was still in Gideon for a time, you just couldn’t see them, that’s all. This here rock proves it.”
She describes a trail that ran beside her house into the woods, the one she had taken the afternoon she ran away.
“I did love me rocks something fierce and my daddy was always getting pretty ones for me out of the creek when he went fishing. It was three days after everybody vanished. I’s near crazy, hungry, scared to death all by myself, wandering around. And I come down that trail and one of the pieces of this here rock was laying in the dirt. It hadn’t been there the day before.”
She tells Charlie that she came back the next day, and there was another piece in the same spot. And another one the third day. Three pieces. But no more. She went back every day for a month looking for the final piece and found nothing.
“They’s gone by then,” she says. “My family, mama and my brothers and sisters and my daddy — all them people had been there for a few days, but then … it took them.”
She looks from Charlie to Sam and Malachi, who look as scared as Charlie feels.
“Its time’s coming. Won’t be long now. You three shouldn’t a come up here, running around, laughing and having fun, giggling and the like. Making it want. Don’t you never come back.”
She gets down in their faces.
“Can you remember that?”
They don’t reply, just look at her.
She shakes her head, looks down at the rocks in the palm of her hand and seems to make a decision. Grabbing Charlie’s hand this time, she turns it over and drops one of the rocks into it. She does the same with Sam and Malachi.
“These here are to remind you, so you don’t forget. Years can take away your memories, but ever time you see these rocks, you remember: Don’t you never come back here again. Not all three of you. Hear?”
And while they’re standing there gaping at her, she turns and is gone, vanishes in the mist. The three don’t even have time to be surprised because the mist sort of … goes with her. It doesn’t flow back up the mountain. It’s like fog clearing.
It clears and the three of them are standing beside the oak tree where Charlie had been when the mist came.
When Charlie finished the story, they sat together in silence. She turned the rock over and over in her hand. A memory rock.
“I saw the picture, remembered that day and I had to wonder.” Charlie was fumbling for words now. “I mean … is there some connection?” She didn’t have to say “to the Jabberwock” for them to know what she was talking about. “I mean, Gideon vanished.”
“Did it really?” Malachi said.
“How could that be a hoax?” Sam asked. “The ghost town is still there. At least I guess, it’s not like I’ve been out to Fearsome Hollow to check.”
“Just because there are abandoned buildings doesn’t mean the people in them vanished in a puff of smoke overnight,” Malachi points out, “and left a ten-year-old kid alone in the woods. There are abandoned coal camps all over these mountains.”
“Gideon’s not like the others, though,” Charlie said. Coal camps were built by the mining companies to house the miners who dug the black rock out of the ground. The structures were slapped together quick and cheap. “The buildings in coal camps started falling apart when there were still people living in them, miners were constantly having to fix leaking roofs and …”
“And yet Gideon is still there more than a hundred years later,” Sam said, understanding. “The buildings are crumbling, but I bet they’re in no worse shape now than they were when they were built. How can that be?”
“It’s almost like time there … is different.” Now it’s Malachi who’s struggling to find words. “Doesn’t work right in Gideon.”
Charlie felt the bottom drop out of her stomach.
“It didn’t the day we were there, either.” She looked from one to the other before she continued. “We all agree we were lost in the mist for hours — right?”
“Yeah,” Malachi said.
“Absolutely. It seemed like we were gone forever.”
“Actually, we weren’t even gone the length of a single song.”
“What are you’re talking about?” Sam asked.
/>
“When I saw you below me, staring at the mist coming down the mountainside, I had turned to look at you because of the song. Cotton-Eyed Joe. The band was playing it and it was one of my all-time favorite songs and I wanted to hear it.”
Suddenly, Charlie didn’t seem to have enough air to keep talking, the implications of what she was proposing were becoming frighteningly clear.
“… you wanted to hear it, and …?” Sam prodded.
“When she left us standing beside that oak tree, I could hear the music again and the band was just wrapping up a song. Cotton-Eyed Joe.”
“They played it twice. I don’t get your point.”
“I do,” Malachi said. “They only played it one time … and we left and came back during that one time.
“But we were gone for—” Sam began, sputtering.
“Think about it,” Malachi said. “Reason it out. If we had been gone as long as we all remember being gone, wandering around lost, calling out — they’d have missed us.”
Sam got it.
“If we hadn’t been there when they started counting noses to load up the buses, they’d have sent out the Royal Canadian Mounted Police with bloodhounds to find us.”
“We made it back to school in time for me to catch the school bus home,” Malachi said. “Or my mother would have been the lead bloodhound.”
“How can that be? How can—?”
Charlie didn’t finish. At that moment the door opened and in strode two peas in a pod. Didn’t knock. Apparently, Raylynn had told the Tungate brothers where to find them and from the looks on their faces, whatever they’d come to say couldn’t wait.
“Abner’s gone,” Roscoe said. Or maybe it was Harry. Charlie never could keep the two of them straight.
“Abner …?”
“Abner Riley,” said the other Tungate, and she thought he was the butcher, which would make the first one Harry. “Lives up Fearsome Hollow.”
Fearsome Hollow.
“It ain’t just that he’s gone,” said Roscoe. “It’s how he’s gone.”
