by Ninie Hammon
“You keep talkin’ ‘bout me like I ain’t here, boy, and I’m gonna snatch you bald-headed.” She looked down at her body. “Don’t you think you went a little overboard with the sunscreen?”
His wife approached then. Making her way down the hillside toward them with the girl behind her, she stopped short of the high-water mark of black mud that rose up on the hillside. She looked out over the lowering waters of the black lake that had taken from her everything she owned in the world.
The man spoke again, his face as solemn as hers.
“You owe me a hundred-and-fifty dollars,” he told Dobbs.
Dobbs just looked at him.
He nodded toward the ebbing black waters and smiled, showing his one perfect white tooth and the crooked one above it. “But seein’ as how you maybe lost the cash, I take plastic.”
“Copy.” The dispatcher maintained professional calm, but Brice could hear the wonder and horror in her voice. “Dispatch fire, rescue, all officers and emergency personnel to Turkey Neck Hollow.”
Then the radio was silent. There was no sound but the screech of the tires on the road as he careened around corners knowing he would meet no oncoming traffic.
When he rounded the last bend, his headlights reflected nothing back to him. Illuminated nothing. The light reached out into the darkness and broke like foaming surf over … nothing. There was only a black hole, a cave. But shiny black, motor-oil black.
His gasp pulled no air into his lungs.
No nightmare conjuring of imagination could have produced the absolute desolation that opened up in front of his cruiser. Everything … everything was gone. Erased. Wiped out and carried away by an oily monster that slimed every surface it touched with black goo.
No living being could possibly have survived contact with the creature. It was an instrument of instant devastation and destruction. All the horsemen of the Apocalypse riding in wild abandon down the mountainside.
He might have made some kind of sound, a grunt perhaps, some verbal expending of the emotion that had tied his gut into a knot from the moment he picked up the minion hair band out of the dirt. He had it in his pocket.
Then his headlights illuminated movement.
Someone was running! Racing down — not the road, there was no road anymore — through the mud toward the far end of the hollow.
Bailey staggered off through mud so sticky it sucked her shoes off her feet in half a dozen steps. It didn’t matter, she kept going barefoot, her heart in her throat. Now that she had been through it, survived it, she fully understood how little time there had been, how balanced on a knife’s edge living and dying had been. One fall, one wasted second, one balking child or hesitant parent and…
The others could be somewhere in this mess, washed down the hollow with the goo, their bodies deposited in puddles as the flood spread out on the meadow at the end of the valley. The image of the painting of Macy Cosgrove flashed through her mind but she banished it instantly.
It had not happened.
Macy had survived. She was alive, up on a muddy hillside with her family. They had stopped the “what hadn’t happened yet” from happening to her. Macy was safe.
But what about T.J. and Dobbs? They were old men, didn’t move fast … though, now that she thought about it, she suspected T.J. could move as fast as somebody half his age. He was lithe and agile. Not Dobbs, though. He was big and clumsy and she was sure the best he could muster would be to lumber forward like a mastodon. And that wasn’t fast enough.
The other houses, how many of them were occupied — two, three, half a dozen? What if they’d been unable to convince those people to leave? She had managed it by kidnapping two children and running off with them but T.J. and Dobbs wouldn’t have had that option. How had they persuaded … there’d been no time for talk!
She struggled forward as fast as she could toward what used to be a road that led down the hollow toward the meadow.
Suddenly, twin sabers of bright light stabbed through the darkness, followed by red and blue alternating flashes of light, bouncing off the shiny black surfaces of mud-slathered everything. She turned toward them, up the road that led back the way she and the others had come, where a dirt track had snaked up the other side of the hill to the dam and sludge lake at the top of the mountain. The dam that wasn’t there anymore, the lake that had now smeared its putrid ugliness over every surface for as far as the eye could see.
The saber lights drilled through the darkness, growing brighter and she stood staring, blinded so she had to squint and look away, as the white sheriff’s department cruiser roared down what was left of the road, then slowed to a crawl and made its way out across the muddy black wasteland toward her.
Brice! One part of her mind produced a snarky So he decided to come to the party after all. But the whole rest of her rejoiced at the sight of him and raced toward the car.
He had stopped and was about to open his car door, but she cried out, “No! We have to find the others.”
She ran around the front of the cruiser, grabbed the door handle but it slipped out of her muddy hand. A second try flung the door open and she slid into the seat beside him.
The look on his face. Maybe there was an artist somewhere talented enough to capture it, maybe the ghost of Sophia Watford herself, though you really didn’t want her painting your portrait. Disbelief paired with wonder and relief. With a side order of pure, stunned surprise.
And a pinch of revulsion.
It occurred to her then what she must look like. Smell like. But none of that mattered now.
“T.J. and Dobbs — they’re down the road. We have to find them.”
The terror in her voice was apparently contagious, because he put his foot on the accelerator and threw mud out behind the back tires, let off then, realizing he was driving on a substance resembling gorilla snot, and proceeded with caution and care.
Caution and care were not what Bailey had in mind.
“Go on! Hurry. They might be—”
Might be what? In truth, there was no need at all for haste. No peril anymore from which they could be rescued. Either they had made it or they hadn’t. They’d survived, or their bodies were lying in black goo in a meadow a mile down the valley.
They rounded a curve and Brice’s headlights illuminated a tree on the right side of the road. It stood sentinel there on the stark landscape, black goo rising up on its trunk, the only thing that had not been washed away.
As they neared it, Bailey saw people climbing down out of the branches of the tree! Her eyes devoured one, then another — there he was!
T.J. had just let go of a low limb and dropped to the muddy earth, catching himself with a hand on the tree trunk when he slipped. She flung the door open and jumped out. He wiped his hand off on his pants and she realized he was clean just in time to abort her intended bear hug. But when she crossed into the headlights where he could see her, he grabbed her in a hug of his own.
“Dobbs,” he said, and they both looked down the road into the darkness.
With Bailey in the front seat and T.J. in back, Brice headed slowly down the not-road toward where the hollow opened out into a meadow. Through the buzzing in his ears, he could hear the distant symphony of sirens he had summoned, their wailing growing louder by the moment.
There were no landmarks, nothing recognizable that granted special recognition. It was like driving down through the spout used to pour motor oil into your car. Everything in every direction was shiny black.
“Maybe wasn’t nobody living in the houses down this way,” T.J. said. “Or maybe he knocked and they wasn’t nobody home, they was visiting family or went to a movie or something.”
Maybe Dobbs had just kept driving, out around the bend where the creek and road hugged the side of the mountain and the hollow emptied into a meadow.
Maybe he was fine, just fine. Safe.
Brice saw him catch himself then, and he stopped launching maybes out into the air and fell silent.
No one else in the car spoke. They inched along with him operating the searchlight on the top of the cruiser, gliding it along the bottom of the mountainside, illuminating black lumps of unidentifiable nothing slimed with goo.
“There!” Bailey pointed, and Brice moved the beam forward slightly. Up above the black smear of the flood, there were people in the woods! They were beginning to make their way downward. Dobbs was unmistakable, a big man whose white t-shirt stuck out like a beacon above his blackened pants, trailing a small band of survivors behind him.
Brice didn’t have to look at T.J. to see the smile on his face, could almost feel it, the warmth from it would have melted the frost off a windowpane. He was chuckling softly.
The sheriff drove around what was probably the foundation of a house, and toward the base of the incline.
The wailing of sirens was close now, screaming into the night. If not for Bailey’s painting, they would have had the grisly task of digging more than a dozen bodies out of the goo.
Dobbs called out, “We’ll need a stretcher here. Could be Granny’s hurt, but she for sure can’t walk even if she’s not hurt.”
T.J. and Bailey got out and joined Dobbs in the glare of the cruiser’s headlights. The sirens were upon them now, and other lights were appearing at the bottom of the hollow, red and blue bubble-gum lights that reflected off the slick black walls of the hollow above.
The sheriff got out to direct the efforts of the would-be rescuers, heard Dobbs comment on how lovely Bailey looked tonight and he remembered. He fished in his pocket until he found it, then held out to her the broken minion hair band he’d found in the dirt above the dam.
“Maybe you could Super Glue it.” She took it, but said nothing. Then he walked away, left the three of them there alone together, talking among themselves.
Chapter Thirty-One
T.J. watched Bailey’s efforts to guide Dobbs and the sheriff as they moved the heavy chifforobe first one direction and then another. Her face was flushed — August heat in an un-air-conditioned house, even one with fourteen-foot ceilings, would do that to you. Dobbs had offered to get her a couple of window units, but she’d told him she was fine.
And she looked fine. Better than T.J.’d ever seen her, though he understood the “Bailey Donahue” he saw before him was a shadow of someone else she had once been, someone happy. She never talked about her past and he never asked. But he seen her, the way she looked at Macy the day they’d had that celebration picnic in the park. It was a mother look if ever there was one. Yearning in it that’d break your heart.
But she never said, and he never asked.
Course, the look Macy’s father had given Bailey that day was a father look, too — a father bear protectin’ his cubs. All the rest had saluted the explanation Sheriff McGreggor had run up the flagpole the night of the flood. Lame as it was, T.J. gave the sheriff points for creativity. Brice had hauled out the same cock-and-bull story for Fletch, who’d been there to celebrate that day, too, looking thin and weak but getting around good. Brice had described how Bailey’d been at the dock when that Derrick Osbourne fella come in to gas up the houseboat the day he bought the chair, overheard him braggin’ to his buddies about the “big bang” he was gonna make in Turkey Neck Hollow, talking crazy-like, about the itsy bitsy spider and how he’d ‘wash the spider out.’ She hadn’t paid it no mind, of course, had just moved to Kavanaugh County and didn’t even know where Turkey Neck Hollow was. But after Osbourne shot Fletch and run off, she’d mentioned the conversation to T.J. and Dobbs and they’d come up with the crazy notion Osbourne was gonna blow up the dam.
Fletch’d swallowed the tale. Of course, there were folks a whole lot quicker on the uptake than Fletch.
Seth Cosgrove had seen through it like it was cling wrap.
Guess you couldn’t blame the man for takin’ a dislike to Bailey. He’d watched her snatch up his baby son and run off with him, after all, and that’d put a bad taste in anybody’s mouth. But it was her connection to Macy that’d really got under his skin. How’d she get his little girl to run away with her like she done? Questioning Macy only produced a smile and an enigmatic, “She was my friend.” The fact that what Bailey done had saved the lives of his entire family had somehow got lost in the weeds in his head. He looked daggers at her whenever he seen her and the sheriff’d advised Bailey to give the man a wide berth.
Seth had pointedly looked the other way when T.J. waved at him in town this morning on his way to help with the chifforobe, which T.J.’d got out of moving by complaining he was too old, to which Dobbs had said they were the same age. And then he’d laid claim to a bad back, to which Dobbs burst out laughing. Then he’d said Dobbs and the sheriff was plenty and T.J.’d just get in the way. Dobbs had rolled his eyes then, give up and kept on shovin’.
T.J. didn’t really mind helping, of course, just wiggled out of it to irritate Dobbs.
When they finally had it where Bailey wanted, the four adjourned to the kitchen where Bailey provided lemonade and chocolate chip cookies.
“They’re homemade.” She waved a chunk of cookie dough in a wrapper around like a baseball bat. “I cut them off this thing and cooked them. That makes them homemade.”
There was laughter among them, soft as blossoms falling off a dogwood tree, no sharp edges nowhere. They’d done what they’d done and a dozen people was alive that would have died if he had “minded his own business,” as Bailey had told him to do, back in Before. Yeah, his life’d been chopped in two again with an axe. Into Before, which seemed a lifetime ago instead of only a month, and After, which was whatever come next.
They didn’t speak of it, though. To do so was to bring up the why of it all, the painting, and any time the conversation got into the same UPS Delivery Zone as that, Bailey paled and that haunted look come into her eyes that T.J. was so familiar with.
He’d seen it before.
Only once was the painting mentioned — the day of the flood, just before dawn when they’d brought Bailey home. They had all three waited for her to shower. T.J.’d carried out the clothes she’d been wearing and dumped them into the garbage barrel behind the house. Dobbs had sat on the porch swing — Bailey could hose the mud off it later — eating nuked-up pizza that had sat untouched on the kitchen counter after they went runnin’ off to Turkey Neck Hollow.
Bailey had come downstairs, her hair still wet, and looked T.J. square in the eye.
“If it weren’t for you, I would be dead right now and so would a dozen other people,” she’d said. When he had lifted his hands to protest, she’d plowed right over him. “Thank you for giving me my life back.” And she had hugged him hard and kissed him on the cheek.
Then she’d turned toward the closed door of her studio.
“When I get up tomorrow, I’m going to burn them both.” She didn’t have to tell them both what. She’d turned back and a steel thread of determination hardened her voice. “And I’m not ever going to paint anything like that again!”
Now, he watched Sparky work his magic, wagging his tail and looking pathetic so Bailey’d give him another dog biscuit out of the jar of them she kept for him on the counter.
She shooed them out after that and went back to “rearranging her furniture,” saying the Watford House, when she got through with it, would be “restored to its former glory … except with Ikea furniture.”
He walked down the steps with Dobbs and the sheriff. Dobbs had parked in the driveway the brand new, shiny, all-the-bells-and-whistles black Jeep he’d bought to replace the one that’d been washed away. He’d also replaced what the Turkey Neck Hollow “refugees” had lost in the flood, only they didn’t know it. He’d set up a fund administered by the sheriff’s department as an “anonymous benefactor” — swearing Brice to absolute secrecy — to pay for housing and the essentials to get the three displaced families back on their feet again.
The three men stopped beside Brice’s cruiser at the curb.
“We got
to stay nearby, all of us. Stick close.” He looked at the sheriff, a man he didn’t think needed any encouragement to stick close to Bailey. “They’s things you don’t know, Brice. About my mama.”
“You said the picture of Bailey was the last thing she painted before she committed suicide, right?”
“They’s more.”
He looked at Dobbs, who nodded.
“I b’lieve my mama killed herself because of the picture of a fire she painted, a horrible house fire that killed a whole family. Three days later, she hung herself with a piece of extension cord from a barn rafter.”
Dobbs put in, “And it was during those three days that she painted the picture of Bailey.”
“Didn’t you say she destroyed all the pictures she painted? Then why not that one?”
“I don’t know. I know she always destroyed the pictures after whatever it was they’d predicted happened. Somebody would fall off a roof or get run over by a truck. Then after my daddy went to work at the mill the next day, she’d go out to the chicken house where she’d hid the painting, break it up into nothing but pieces of canvas and sticks of wood. She’d pour gasoline over the pile, and strike a match. She always stood there the whole time, ‘til there wasn’t no trace left of the painting.”
“There were times, though, that his mama painted something awful and it seemed like nothing happened. We’d wait and wait, wondering. At first, we thought that not everything she painted came true.”
“But when you seen my mama paint one of them things, you knew she lived it. That it really happened … somewhere.”
“We finally decided that whatever she painted did happen, but not always where we knew about it. Possum Run Hollow in the fifties was about as isolated as the far side of the moon.”
