by Ninie Hammon
*
Maggie never heard them coming. Everything was muffled, muted by the darkness in her head that had grown, ballooned. Now, it was black around her vision, like she was looking through a tunnel, and Sadie’s voice sounded like she was down in a well.
Sadie had already grown too tired to walk, and Maggie had just picked her up to carry her when the little girl suddenly wiggled out of her arms, dropped her filthy pink blankie in the dirt, and went running back down the road the way they’d come. Maggie had no idea what Sadie could have seen that—
Then she turned and there they were. Mr. Carter and Mr. Grayson were coming around the last bend in the road. Mr. Carter knelt down on one knee, set a rifle on the ground beside him and held out his arms, and Sadie crashed joyfully into him. But Mr. Grayson reached down and snatched her out of Mr. Carter’s arms and covered her with kisses, tickling her and laughing, and then she started to laugh, too, and squealed, “Daddy!” Mr. Carter stayed where he was, kneeled in the dirt, and watched them.
For a few minutes, nobody paid any attention to Maggie. She stood where she was, her heart hammering so hard in her chest it made her T-shirt move in the front with every beat.
They hadn’t understood before, and they wouldn’t now. They’d stop her, or try to, and she couldn’t let them do that.
*
Carter stood up slowly and looked at Maggie. He’d never seen a kid so forlorn. No, more than that. Frightened, too. Seriously scared. He took a couple of steps toward her, and she backed up a step, like she might actually turn and bolt into the woods. Then she fixed her eyes on Sadie and instead of running, she began walking slowly toward them.
Grayson noticed her when she was about twenty feet away. Carter saw his face harden and knew he had every right to be furious with the little girl. She had, after all, taken his daughter and run off into the woods with her. He steeled himself for Grayson to unload on the kid, but his brother didn’t do that. Instead, he looked at her for a long moment then wordlessly handed Sadie to Carter and got down on one knee in the dirt, so when Maggie got there, they’d be eyeball-to-eyeball.
*
When Grayson saw Maggie walking slowly toward them, he felt anger well up in his throat. This waif from who-knows-where had shown up at his house, charmed his wife, mother and brother, then kidnapped his daughter! There was something wrong with the kid, seriously wrong with her, and he didn’t intend to let her anywhere near his family again. If the sheriff couldn’t find out where she belonged, they’d have to find a foster family for her. He was through.
Then he looked into her eyes. The terror there was a beating, living, palpable thing. He’d only once before in his life seen a little girl so afraid. And five seconds later, he had shot her.
All the anger and recrimination turned to vapor and floated away. Maybe her fear was irrational—bogeyman, bad-dream stuff—but it was absolutely real to her, and it had been so powerful it had driven her out alone into the woods. He hadn’t been able to comfort a terrified Nguyen, but he could be tender to this frightened little girl.
“Maggie, honey, I won’t hurt you,” he said. “Nobody’s mad at you. We’ve been so worried about you and Sadie. Come here and let’s talk about it.”
Maggie approached, and as soon as she opened her mouth it was clear she was not afraid of him and Carter. Well, maybe she was, but she was more afraid of whatever internal monster stalked her.
“We can’t stop now,” she cried, her voice shaking. “It’s coming! We have to get Sadie away, or it will swallow her whole. We have to go, go—”
“Up,” Grayson finished for her. “I know, that’s what you said. But honey, you had a bad dream, that’s all, a horrible nightmare. It’s daylight now. Everything’s fine. It wasn’t real.”
“Yes, it was real—it is real!”
“What’s real?” Carter asked. “What are you so afraid of?”
She took a deep breath, clamped her teeth together like she was trying to calm herself.
“There’s no time for talking now. The black monster is coming. He’s going to roar down and gobble Sadie up, swallow her whole, and everybody else in the hollow, too.”
The color faded out of Grayson’s world, and for a moment he felt himself falling away, felt the cool morning air begin to turn jungle hot. But he fought it, shook his head, and the flashback faded into a vivid memory instead. The walking blackout he’d suffered leaving Nguyen’s village. In it, there was darkness, but the darkness moved, was a living thing with evil intent, a black monster rushing toward Sadie as she played in the dirt outside his mother’s house.
Maggie’s voice came as if from a great distance.
“The monster’s grinning now, smiling black on the mountain. But any minute it’s going to….” She took another breath and then she was pleading. “Please, not precious Sadie! You can’t let it get her. We have to take her and run!”
She reached out and grabbed Carter’s hand and actually tried to drag him up the road with her.
“Honey, you’re not making any sense,” Carter said, standing his ground. “There is no monster!”
“Yes, there is,” Grayson said.
Maggie dropped Carter’s hand and stared at Grayson, astonished.
Grayson had to concentrate to keep his voice from shaking.
“Did you hear what she said? The black smile on the mountain. She’s talking about the dam. The black water behind it—that’s the monster.” He turned from Carter to Maggie. “Isn’t it Maggie—that’s what you’re afraid of.”
“The monster’s behind the smile,” she said, getting more agitated by the minute. “It’s coming. We have to go!”
Grayson got to his feet, struggling to make sense out of something that made no sense at all. What he’d seen that day outside Yan Ling…Maggie had seen the same thing night before last in a nightmare. What had it been? A shared…premonition.
He felt chill bumps pebble his arms.
“She’s afraid the dam’s going to burst,” he told Carter. “She’s afraid that any second we’re all going to drown.”
As Grayson turned and squatted down again in front of Maggie, he heard a noise behind them. He looked over his shoulder and saw an old red pickup coming slowly up the hill.
“Maggie,” Grayson began. “I understand you’re afraid of the dam. I don’t blame you. I am, too, sometimes. But it’s not going anywhere. It’s been there a long time, and it’s strong, tough.”
Was he trying to convince Maggie or himself?
He reached out and took her hand. “We’ll be fine. I promise.”
The pickup pulled up beside them and stopped, belching a cloud of dust from the road and gray smoke from the exhaust. At the wheel was a woman somewhere between sixty-five and five hundred years old. Her face was cratered with deep wrinkles, her eyes sunk into hollows spider-webbed with sagging flesh. The cheery smile she flashed them was missing teeth, and the ones left were little more than stumps, blackened, like the remnants of a forest after a fire.
“Hidy. I’m Edna Turpin,” she said. “You folks out for a Sunday morning walk, trying to get up high so’s you can see the fog? It’s a doozy, ain’t it?”
She didn’t seem a bit put off by the men’s appearances—dirty and unshaven, their hair tousled. But they probably looked like most of the men she saw every day.
Then she got a good look at Sadie in Carter’s arms, and she actually gasped. “Oh, my goodness, I ain’t never in all my days seen a little girl any purdier than that ’un. Them eyes and that sweet angel face and blond hair like her daddy’s.” Sadie instantly cringed away from Edna, deep into Carter’s arms, and stuck her thumb soundly in her mouth.
Edna turned to Grayson, who’d taken Maggie’s hand. “And that there littl’un is—”
Maggie yanked her hand out of Grayson’s and screamed, “No.” He could see she was dangerously close to complete hysteria. “It’s not okay and we’re not okay and it’s gonna eat us all up if we don’t run!”
&n
bsp; Then she burst into tears.
The three adults exchanged a look.
Grayson got to his feet and spoke in a low voice to Carter. “She is going to go off like C-4 if we try to take her home right now. I think the only thing we can do is humor her.”
“You mean take her and go up?”
“Yep. Take her up to the dam and show her it’s fine, that there’s no black monster lurking behind it. I don’t think she’ll ever calm down if we don’t.”
But that wasn’t the only reason Grayson wanted to go take a look at that dam. It was the bogeyman in his closet, too.
“Are you suggesting the four of us walk all the—?”
“No, I’m hoping we can hitch a ride.” He held out his arms to Sadie. “I’ll take her.” He felt his throat tighten when she leaned away from Carter, her arms outstretched toward him. “You try to calm Maggie while the angel child and I have a little talk with our new friend Edna in the pickup truck.”
Carter picked up the rifle he’d set down on the road, went to Maggie and knelt beside her. Grayson explained to the old woman as simply as he could what their problem was, then asked if she could possibly give them a lift to the dam.
“Them poor little things been lost in the woods for a day and a night a’runnin’ from that little girl’s nightmare monster?” Edna shook her head. “Well, get yourselves in this here truck, and we’ll give this young’un a peek under the bed so she can see for herself there ain’t no monster hidin’ underneath of it!”
Grayson turned to Maggie. “Come on, sugar. We’re going up!”
* * *
Nelson Warren clambered easily down the back of the dam to the pipe sticking like a straw out of a chocolate milkshake. He wasn’t merely fit, he thought to himself with pride. He was agile. Not bad for a man in his fifties. Not bad at all.
When he got to the pipe, he peered in but could only see a few feet before the tube gave way to absolute darkness. A claustrophobic man wouldn’t have been able to pull this off, he thought. There was no room in there to turn around. He would have to crawl down the pipe, set the dynamite, then back out the way he’d crawled in.
For just a moment, the yawning black hole stared balefully at him with malicious intent, beckoning him to come on in and stay for a while. For a long while.
He didn’t have to do this. He could get back in his car and—well, actually, he did have to do it now. To turn around at this point would not be a rational decision but a reaction to fear. Give in to fear even once, and it would become your master. Nelson Warren was his own master.
He set the bag on the floor of the pipe, opened it and took out the miner’s helmet with a light on the front. He switched it on, took a deep breath of fresh morning air, then crawled into the pipe and began to shove the bag ahead of him into the darkness beyond.
* * *
Piper sat on the side of Marian’s bed, holding her hand. The old woman’s breathing was labored, but she was resting better now that Piper had given her another too-early dose of pain medication. Her eyes were open, but Piper wasn’t sure she knew where she was or what was going on around her.
Then Marian’s gaze shifted to Piper’s face, and the look was as tender as a caress. Piper’s throat ached with unshed tears.
“I been having the strangest dreams,” Marian said. “Not bad, strange. I can’t remember much about ’em, ’cept there was light and the music was…everywhere. It wasn’t like you could just hear it. You could feel it like a warm blanket and smell it, the smell of the air after a spring storm.”
Piper didn’t trust herself to speak so she squeezed the old woman’s hand, the skin fragile as tissue paper. She felt tears stream down her cheeks and reached up with the other hand to wipe them away.
“Tears ain’t a bad thing. They’re the truth your heart speaks.”
“You need anything? Can I get—?”
“You don’t really b’lieve Grayson could do a thing like that, do you?”
This time, Piper didn’t speak because this was a conversation she absolutely did not want to have right now.
“You honestly think he could shoot your little brother.”
Grayson?
“You don’t understand. There was red mud—”
“Piper, honey, things on the outside’ll deceive you, trick you and confuse you. You got to look inside, down deep in your soul where truth is, where you know the man you married. Could he a-done a thing like that?”
Piper was silent. What was the truth? Could Grayson have ambushed Zeke? Suddenly, it was as clear as spring water.
“No, he couldn’t,” she whispered softly, ashamed she’d ever even considered the possibility.
Marian made an approving “mmmm” sound. The matter was settled.
“They ain’t found them girls or they’d be back by now.”
It wasn’t a question, but Piper couldn’t stifle a little sob in reply.
“Bless your heart. Pain comes off you in waves like heat off a pot-bellied stove.”
“I’m so scared.”
“God don’t much like scared. Scared says to him, ‘You ain’t big enough or strong enough to handle what’s goin’ on in my life.’ And them words smell like sulfur ’cause they come direct from the pit of hell.”
“But what if—?”
“What-ifs will wear you plum out, child. Them little lost girls ain’t escaped the notice of the Almighty.”
“It’s not just Maggie and Sadie. I’m afraid—”
“For Grayson and Carter? ’Cause of Riley?”
“How did you know?”
“I’m dyin’, sugar, I ain’t deaf. You think I slept through them gunshots? Or Riley hollerin’? He ain’t gonna hurt nobody. He’s a little runt of a thing, and my boys is big, strapping men. They’s fine. If they wasn’t, I’d know it.” She let her breath out in a sigh, and her gaze shifted to the window. “But I ain’t never gonna see either one of ’em again, not in this life.”
“Why, of course you will.”
“Naw.” She looked back full in Piper’s face. “I’m gonna go on home direc’ly. Just in a little bit. The veil ’tween me and glory’s so thin I can see the light comin’ through.”
It seemed to take great effort to lift her right hand off the sheet, but she placed it on top of Piper’s and patted softly.
“You rest easy, sweetie. Right now the sun’s shining in both them little girls’ faces, the wind’s blowing they hair and Sadie’s a’laughin’.”
Chapter 30
Sadie leaned out the cab window of the old red pickup truck and giggled at the wind in her face. Maggie sat in the truck bed beside Carter, with strands of hair escaped from her braids dancing in the wind like a candle flame.
Grayson was glad Edna was a chatterbox, prattling on about everything and nothing and all things in between. Her babble saved him from having to make conversation, and he didn’t feel up to chitchat. He felt now that battle-weary exhaustion that had become everyday normal in ’Nam. Not only in his body, but also in his mind and his soul. He wanted nothing so much as to sit in a dim room alone and think of absolutely nothing for a long, long time.
The wind in her eyes made Sadie squint, and before Grayson knew it, she’d closed her eyes altogether and lay with her cheek on her arm that dangled out the window. The universal lullaby—going for a ride—had put her to sleep. He eased her over into his lap, then stretched her out on the seat between him and Edna. She stirred, popped her thumb in her mouth, sighed and was out again. He snuggled her dirty pink blanket around her, loving her so much at that moment it was almost as painful as grief.
When they reached the ugly brown strip-mine scab where the top of Chicken Gizzard Mountain used to be, Grayson gazed out over Sadler Hollow below. It looked like a bowl full of milk. Strawman Road followed the top of the ridge, then curved right and descended into Cricket Hollow on the other side of the mountain. Right before the curve, a no-name mining road angled off to the left and followed the edge of the ridge towar
d the top of Sadler Hollow, where the black slurry dam stretched between Chicken Gizzard Mountain and Naked Turtle Mountain, holding back an impoundment of coal mine wastewater in a stagnant, black pool. The behemoth pile of coal debris that was Impoundment Dam No. 1 lay less than half a mile up the valley to the east, where it imprisoned a far bigger lake filled with equally black, equally dead water.
Edna turned down the mining road, which was even bumpier than the main road because it was traversed by huge coal trucks and massive pieces of equipment. The bumps didn’t awaken Sadie, and Grayson thought the child was probably so tired she might sleep the rest of the day.
The old woman stopped on the top of the flat ridge, well back from the edge above the dam, where a thirty-foot strip of bare dirt sloped sharply down from the ridge to a lakeshore piled high with jagged rocks and boulders as big as cars, jammed together in a jumble where they’d landed when a bulldozer shoved them off the side of the ridge.
When Grayson started to lift Sadie into his arms, Edna whispered. “Ya’ll go on down and have your look-see. I’ll stay up here with the littl’un.”
He nodded thanks, got out, locked his door and closed it quietly behind him. Edna got out and eased her door shut, then leaned back against the warm hood of the truck, shading her eyes from the bright morning sun.
Carter and Maggie climbed down out of the back of the pickup. Maggie’s eyes were wide and wondering. She looked out over the panorama of valley stretched out below as if the image were registering for the first time, then nodded her head slowly and uttered a single, awed word: “Fog.”
Grayson took her hand.
“Let’s go take a close-up look at a monster.”
She said nothing, merely walked between him and Carter toward the black lake. Grayson was careful to keep Maggie away from the front edge of the ridge that curved back from the dam. It wasn’t a drop-off, a sheer cliff like the dam, but on the Chicken Gizzard side, at least, the slope was so steep you wouldn’t survive a tumble down it. The incline on the Naked Turtle side wasn’t nearly as severe, but you’d still have to be a mountain goat to make it down alive.
