by Ninie Hammon
The car stopped — so abruptly, they all lurched forward, testimony to how fast the car’d been traveling.
Even before they settled back into their seats, there was another thump. It was sudden and loud and very real-world. No shapes-in-the-mist, ethereal quality to it. It came from the area of the trunk of the car and with the sound, Charlie felt the back of the car begin to lift up, while the front end began to point downward.
Her heart had been hammering a hole in her chest and now the beats blended into a single loud hum of horror. Terror grabbed hold of her belly and squeezed so tight she couldn’t get her breath. She shot Malachi a terrified look but it was so dark in the car she couldn’t see … Dark and cold. Cold! Yes, it was cold here, too. The back of the car rose higher. Her breath frosted when she gasped and she couldn’t hold onto the scream any longer.
“Stoooop it!”
The movement stopped. The dark shapes stopped spinning and faded back into the milky white. The car hung there with the back end high in the air. One second. Two. Then the front end began to lift, the back went downward, and the shocks engaged when the weight of the car again settled on them.
“What the—?” Harry began, but Malachi put his fingers to his lips and whispered harshly, “Shhhhh.”
Charlie strained to hear, but the whispers, the cries — all the sound had stopped.
The milk white outside the windows turned gray. It swirled, like wind rippling through wheat. The light grew. Charlie could make out Malachi’s face now and outside the car there were shapes … trees. The mist was thinning.
And then it was gone, like turning a blow dryer on the condensation on a bathroom mirror.
They could see out the car windows.
Charlie’s throat seized up or she would have shrieked this time.
There was no road in front of the car, just empty air.
She rolled down her window and stuck her head out. Beyond the car lay a jagged rip in the road. The front tire was an inch from the end of the pavement.
“Everybody get out of the car slowly,” Malachi said.
They eased open the doors and stepped out onto firm asphalt, then walked gingerly forward and looked off the edge of the “rip.” A hunk of asphalt twenty feet wide was missing from the road, had been torn away when the land beneath it collapsed, eaten away by the raging water of a flooded creek.
The front tires of the car rested just about as close as it was possible to get to the jagged edge of the asphalt.
“Anybody wanna tell me what just happened?” Roscoe asked. Charlie was sure his voice was less firm than he would have liked.
“It’s pretty clear what happened,” Malachi said.
His voice was level. He didn’t appear to be in the least rattled or troubled by what had just happened. She supposed it was the military training. Though he came home saddled with raging PTSD episodes that took him out of reality and dropped him back into a nightmare of his own making or his own remembrance, he was clearly here and present now. And also clearly not as shaken as the others were.
“The issue isn’t what, but how. Why, maybe, too. And all of those questions are getting worn very thin in my mind because I’ve been using them a lot lately.”
“Something picked up the car with us in it and very nearly—” Harry began.
“Would it have?” Roscoe wondered aloud. “Would it have dumped us over the edge or was it just trying to scare us?”
That was what you heard, in tales about the haints in Fearsome Hollow. That they were … not pranksters, that was too gentle and benign a word, but the stories did have a through-line of mischief that appeared to be just for effect.
“It was gonna do it,” Harry said. “It was gonna dump us in the creek until Charlie here rebuked it.”
Rebuke wasn’t a word you heard every day.
“You think that because I—?”
“Yes, ma’am, I absolutely do think it stopped because you told it to. Scolded it.”
“But why—?”
“Ahhhh, now see, there’s that threadbare word again,” Malachi said.
“I don’t think it was the mist,” she said. “I think it was something in the mist, something hidden by the mist. Something … other.”
That was a conversation stopper. No one else spoke.
Malachi got behind the wheel and piloted the car around the broken piece of asphalt, wouldn’t let anybody get back in until he was fifty feet beyond the cut. Then he returned the car to Charlie and as she prepared to put it in gear, Roscoe said they ought to take Frogtown Road out to Route 19, down it to Sword’s Creek Road that’d lead them back to Byrne Lane. Charlie didn’t know what difference it made, as long as they left Fearsome Hollow—
“You’re in my patch. Get out!”
She jerked around, looking to see who had spoken. “Did you hear that?”
Malachi was in the front on the passenger side, fishing around for his seatbelt in the cracks of the cushion and he had frozen at the words.
“Hear what?” Roscoe asked.
“I didn’t hear nothing,” said Harry.
“The wind,” Malachi said, fastening his belt. “Buckle up.” He looked at Charlie when he spoke again. “Let’s get out of this patch and back to the rest of the world.”
The agony in E.J.’s leg made it hard to concentrate on anything else. Until Judd told him about his granddaughters. The pain seemed to dial down after that.
He knew the little girls. E.J.’d performed complicated bowel surgery on Doreen’s cocker spaniel, Benji, and for a couple of months, she’d brought the girls with her when she brought the dog in for weekly follow-up appointments. The girls reminded E.J. of the children he had seen in Scotland. During his brief marriage, he and his soon-to-be not-wife had traveled there to see the Highlands.
It was a stereotype that Scottish children had rosy cheeks. But stereotypes were stereotypes for a reason, and it seemed that everywhere he looked there were little girls with bright blue eyes, pigtails, braids and cheeks so red you’d swear they were chapped and in desperate need of lotion. Lovely, delicate children. They’d made him want children of his own. They’d touched his heart.
Julie and Michelle Shepperson were like that. Whenever he saw Benji on the appointment list he smiled, looked forward to the little girls’ inquisitiveness, had shown them and explained the function of every piece of equipment in the exam room.
Julie had delicate features and big brown eyes. Michelle had pixie features, too, with a little turned-up nose and blue eyes… and yes, both of the children had rosy cheeks. He was certain that by now, Julie was bemoaning that fact. Teetering on the brink of teenager-dom as she was, she would likely spend the next decade hiding the roses under a layer of makeup. But maybe rosy cheeks went the way of baby fat during adolescence. He didn’t know, but did know that when he ran into Doreen and the girls coming out of Foodtown right after Christmas, Julie had had earphones in her ears and her brand new iPod dangling around her neck, singing along with some song he wouldn’t likely recognize if he heard it and the lyrics of which were unquestionably inappropriate for a not-yet thirteen-year-old child.
Julie and Michelle.
The brief image he had gotten of Buster … He had glanced back when the dog bit into his leg, cast a look over his shoulder that couldn’t have lasted a second but that burned an image into his brain as permanent as a brand on a cow.
The dog’s eyes were glazed. Its white fur was splotched with blood. The goose’s and whatever other animals it had killed. And E.J.’s blood. He saw his own blood squirt out onto the dog’s snout, a frozen second that lasted a lifetime, as the rabid beast sunk his teeth into E.J.’s leg. The mad dog.
E.J. is fascinated by Wanda Jablonski’s curls. She is seated two rows ahead of him and one row over, right in the shaft of sunlight shining into the freshman lab class, the one right after lunch that he only manages not to sleep through by concentrating on Wanda’s hair. Wanda is no beauty queen, but she does have the most bea
utiful hair he has ever seen. A pale blonde, the color of Marilyn Monroe’s hair, a blonde so pale there is almost no color at all. It hangs down to the middle of her back in long ringlets that—
“… you hear the question, Mr. Hamilton?”
He was zoning, and Dr. Hildenbrand had caught him.
“Yes sir. I mean, no sir, I didn’t hear—”
“I was instructing the class what to do if they chanced to wake up some morning and see a bat on their ceiling.”
“A bat on the ceiling, sir?”
“A bat. Yes. Ugly little creatures that fly around eating insects and not running into walls because they have sonar. What should you do, Mr. Hamilton, in that circumstance?”
“I guess … get a broom maybe and sweep it off—”
“Wrong! What you should do, Mr. Hamilton, is haul your worthless butt to the nearest emergency room and get them to administer the rabies anti-venom. Bats have little tiny teeth, surely you’ve noticed.” The professor had never particularly liked E.J. and E.J.’s inattention had just put a gigantic “kick me” sign on his own back and handed Dr. Hildenbrand a cowboy boot.
“Yes sir, I have seen how small a bat’s—”
“That bat on your ceiling could have bitten you in the night, and because the puncture wounds would be so small, you might not even have noticed them.”
“I suppose that’s true, sir.”
“And given the likelihood that any given bat you happen to run across in the wild is likely to be rabid, it would behoove you to take the prudent precautions, is that not true?”
“Yes sir.” E.J. does not tell him about his allergic reaction to the first of the two shots he’d been given.
“Why don’t you describe for the benefit of your fellow students, exactly what will happen to you if you fail to take the necessary, prudent precautions. If you blow it off, go on about your day, go to the game that night, get drunk afterwards and” — he glances at Wanda Jablonski — “indulge your hormone-driven proclivities.”
“The first dose of the vaccine should be administered within the first twenty-four hours after exposure,” E.J. says.
“But what if you feel fine?”
“The incubation period can be a few days … or a few months.”
“Incubation period?”
The professor is making fun of him. He can sense his fellow students withdrawing from the confrontation. They don’t want to be caught in a crossfire so they all became potted plants.
“The time between when you are exposed to the virus and when you show symptoms of the disease.”
“And what happens after you show symptoms?”
“… you … die. It’s almost a hundred percent fatal.”
“And between those first symptoms and when you succumb, what will happen to you?”
E.J. wracks his brain, has to get the symptoms right and in the right order.
“First, there will be a tingling, prickling or itching feeling around the bite area. Then … maybe flu-like symptoms. A fever, headache, muscle aches, nausea, tiredness.”
“And after that?”
“Anxiety. Confusion. Agitation. Hallucinations. Paralysis. In most cases a … fear of water—”
“Hence the name, hydrophobia.”
“Which is followed two to ten days after the onset of symptoms by delirium, coma and death.”
“Ah, yes. A coma. Not terribly unlike your natural state, is it, Mr. Hamilton?”
Bottom line reality check here: E.J. had taken only two of the required three rabies shots. And that had been more than a decade ago. He had never taken a booster. He had no vaccination-conferred immunity to the disease, had always balanced the risk he was taking with the risk of a massive allergic reaction.
And in a normal world, where the universe functioned in a predictable fashion, that would not be a death sentence. Yes, he was allergic to the vaccine and forced to take not only the whole four-shot regime given to people who’d not been vaccinated, but an additional shot called RIG, rabies immune globulin, he would be one sick puppy. Would need to check into the hospital because he was sure an allergic reaction of that magnitude would put him into anaphylactic shock.
But an allergic reaction was treatable. Anaphylactic shock was treatable. A shot of epinephrine and he had a greater than ninety-five percent chance of survival.
Buster’s bite was not treatable.
It was not survivable.
Without the intervention of the vaccine — the first dose of it administered in the next twenty-four hours … riiiight — E.J. would die of rabies.
But he had longer to live than the two little girls who any minute now might come waltzing up the lane … into the jaws of a monstrous beast that would tear them apart as surely as it had dismembered that goose.
Chapter Twenty-Four
Fish had to do it. He had to do it now and he had to do it right. He couldn’t screw this up.
He had staggered away from Martha Whittiker’s house back to the basement of the Methodist church, and was clutching the bottle of whiskey he’d stolen, planning to get as blind drunk as it was possible to get, given that he was so alcohol-saturated drunkenness often totally eluded him.
He’d unscrewed the lid before it hit him.
The process of getting back across the Ridge to the basement of the Methodist church undetected, and it was hot outside, had resulted in and necessitated some small bit of sobering up. He had managed to make it behind fences and bushes, no stagger-walking down open sidewalks, in large part because he was like the potted plant that sat beside the door that you never noticed until your lack of attention had turned it into a black stump. Folks just didn’t notice Fish.
But folks would notice Martha Whittiker. She had such a squeaky little voice it was almost cartoonish, was so sweet sugar wouldn’t melt in her mouth, patting people on the arm and saying, “Bless your heart!” When she started sharing her tale of woe about how Fish had knocked her unconscious and stolen her booze, there would be an outcry of some sort.
The severity of it would depend on the degree to which she had been injured and how penitent Fish became.
His whole way of life was dependent on the goodwill of other people. They provided shelter, a meager amount of sustenance, afforded him the life he had chosen.
If he were seen as dangerous …
And what if she … what? Pressed charges for assault? With whom? As he had already worked out in his head, the lack of a functioning judiciary, coupled with all-but-nonexistent law enforcement, would make punishment for any crime unlikely. Impossible, really.
But folks being wary of him was sufficient punishment, would destroy his whole world.
He had to go back, had to throw himself on her mercy, and ask her to forgive him.
And he would have to … gulp … return what he had stolen from her. That was the hardest part of all, of course. He didn’t mind humbling himself before grandmotherly Martha Whittiker, but the Maker’s Mark! He would never see the like again. Not an exaggeration. It might be the only bottle in the whole county and giving it up was a sacrifice he’d make only for self-preservation.
He went to her front door, just walked down the sidewalk to her door and lifted his hand to knock and promptly chickened out. Or was drowning from the mouthwatering nearness of the bottle of Maker’s he carried and had been rendered temporarily unable to speak.
He turned, went back down the porch steps and forced himself to go down the driveway to the kitchen door, pausing only to peek in the garage apartment window to be sure her grandson hadn’t come around. He hadn’t even moved.
Fish wouldn’t have to knock on the back door. He’d left it unlocked. He could just crack it open an inch or two and call out her name, shout his apology before she ever looked on his face.
Yes, that was a better plan.
He stood on the stoop in front of the kitchen door, turned the handle and opened the door only about two inches.
“Mrs. Whittiker. It’s me, Fis
h, and I have come to beg your forgiveness for the terrible way I treated you when last I was here.”
He expected to hear the pat, pat, pat of her rapid footsteps into the kitchen to fling the door open and start yelling at him.
He heard nothing but silence.
“Mrs. Whittiker?”
Nothing.
He pushed the door inward enough to peer around it.
“Mrs. Whiiiiitiker?”
Then he stepped into the kitchen, and when he did he saw Mrs. Whittiker. She was lying right where he’d left her. The puddle of blood spread out around her was considerably bigger than it’d been then, but she hadn’t moved.
She was still unconscious.
No, she wasn’t. She wasn’t unconscious. She was …
He had killed her. He literally staggered backward at the sight of her body, dropped to his knees and let the grocery sack slip out of his numb fingers, overcome by remorse and sorrow. No! Noooo! He couldn’t … he wouldn’t … but he had. Oh dear holy God he had not just hurt this woman, he had taken her life.
Poor Martha Whittiker would never see another sunrise, would never laugh that squeaky little laugh, wouldn’t bake cookies or knit sweaters or … He had stolen all her tomorrows.
He didn’t realize he was sobbing until he felt the tears wet on his cheeks, and then he gave in to them, put his head in his hands and bawled like a baby.
He had killed her.
Just like he had killed—
No! He slammed that door shut so hard the bang must surely have been an audible sound in the room. The door was buried deep in the darkest pit of Holmes Fischer’s being, hidden in forever-night, and he was no longer aware of the bright kitchen as he planted his back against the nightmare door, braced his feet, held it closed with every bit of strength he possessed. What lay on the other side of that door was madness. To see it, to know it, to remember it was to shatter his mind, his psyche … his soul. He drank to forget what was behind that door, to blur the memories, erase the pain and the terror.
