by Ninie Hammon
Then the words Rose Topple had said to Cotton rang in her ears.
“Mama knew she couldn’t miss a single one, and the finger bone of a two-year-old ain’t very big at all.”
She slowed down, clamped her jaws together and struggled to calm her racing heart. She had to be just as careful as Lily Topple had been. She had to get them all, couldn’t miss a single one. If a ten-year-old child had seined them out of the carpet of leaves/twigs/rocks and dirt on a forest floor, there was no excuse for her missing any of them laid out in front of her, glowing that eerie white in the flashlight beam.
She didn’t fill the final bag Cotton gave her because there were only a few bones left. Once she’d slipped them into the bag, she slowly ran the flashlight beam around the darkened chamber, making sure there was not a single …
At first she thought it was a rock, one of those Lily had used to seal up the opening of the tree. Her flashlight beam passed slowly over it and then she jerked the beam back. Reaching out with hands that at some point had started to tremble violently, she picked up the little white rock, that was no rock at all but a small skull. A baby’s skull. Couldn’t have been more than six months old. She turned it over in her hand, marveling at how small it was. Then she forced herself to put it into the sack and keep looking. Starting at the back wall, she raked her fingers across the flashlight-lit floor in even, overlapping rows. Just like Lily Topple had done. She performed the operation twice before she was convinced she had covered every square inch of the interior of the hole in the tree. There were no bones left. This time, she didn’t back out of the hole, but crawled out — forward into the sunlight.
“This is the last of them,” she said, panting. Cotton took the bag and turned away.
Getting to her feet, she dusted the dirt off her knees and removed her gloves.
The hum of static was louder than when she’d gone into the cave. So was the whispering, louder and … more urgent. And the sparkling cascade of twinkling light in front of the tree was so brilliant she couldn’t look at it.
She squinted as her eyes adjusted after the darkened interior of the hole in the tree. Then she saw that Cotton had been removing the bones from the sacks and placing them in neat piles on the ground. Skulls, long bones, short bones, all arranged in kind.
“Seventeen,” he said, his voice foggy. “Seventeen skulls.”
“So the cave on the mountainside was the burial chamber for seventeen people.”
“Maybe …”
There was something he wasn’t saying. She took a couple of steps and stood beside him.
“Do you see—?” he began.
And she did then. She hadn’t noticed it in her haste to gather up the bones but there was no avoiding the reality of it now.
“So small … they’re all … children.”
Seventeen of them. Seventeen little kids.
“Why would they only bury their children in the cave? Why a separate place for them? Where’d they bury the grownups?”
And as soon as she asked the question, the answer fluttered on black bat wings in the back of her mind, a moth getting closer and closer to the candle flame.
The Jabberwock had told Lily Topple not to put them “back there.” Jolene, Stuart and Cotton had talked about that, and hadn’t come up with a reasonable explanation for why the Jabberwock wouldn’t want the bones to be buried in their original grave.
The reality knocked Jolene’s legs out from under her and she sank down onto her knees beside the bones.
The Jabberwock didn’t want the bones put back in the cave because it wasn’t a grave site.
The children hadn’t been buried in that cave … they had died there.
Chapter Twenty-Four
The sparkling, glittering brilliance was everywhere, but it didn’t light the world. It was beyond Sam, all around her, encircling her — but out there where Sam Sheridan was. Not in here, though. In here, it was dark.
The sound of the flies is a maddening hum. It is the only sound Grace Biddle hears now. It never stops. Never goes away. Flies drawn to the piles of feces in the corners of the cave. Not just corners anymore, though. It started out that way. Silas said the girls should go on one side of the cave and the boys on the other, though it is so dark here, so many of them … but they know they should.
That was back when something mattered.
Grace reaches out her tongue to her dried lips, licks across them. The dribble of water down the back wall of the cave is all there is. You have to lick it off the rock. Her tongue is raw from licking and it’s not enough, not for all of them.
Even though there are fewer now. Fewer every day.
She lets herself know for a few moments that the awful stench is not just where the children have used the toilet in the corners. They only did that for a couple of days, anyway, because after that they didn’t eat so nobody had to go … No, the stench is more than that.
Matthew Mullins was first. He was only eight months old. He got hungry, started to cry that first night but there was nothing Lydia could do for him except rock him, try to get him to suck on his thumb.
The baby had cried until he was so exhausted he fell asleep. The others slept too, in bits and snatches, that first night. Grace and Hope had and huddled together up against the cool of the rock in a little alcove near the back of the cave. In the beginning they did, the first couple of nights, before Grace lost track of time.
In the beginning, while they’d still believed someone would come.
But when Matthew died — he was the first — they put his little body there in the alcove. The cave ceiling was high enough to stand, for everybody except Ezra Southwick, who was the tallest. He had to bend his head over to keep from bumping it. The others could stand, but they had all knelt that day and said prayers for Matthew, who looked like a doll asleep, just lying there.
Sarah Lancaster had had to make Lydia let go of him, almost had to pry the baby out of her arms. She kept crying that she had promised her mother she’d look after him, take care of him.
Even in the dim light, Grace could see the baby’s face clearly. It was pale. His eyes, sunken in his head, had been blue, such a bright blue. When they laid him in the alcove in the back of the cave and prayed for him, that first one, she had tried not to look at how sunken his eyes were. Because even with his shadowed eyes, he’d looked like he was just asleep. Beautiful.
And then he wasn’t beautiful. Then he had … his body had swelled up. His skin had …
The stink was so bad, they all would have vomited, except they had had nothing to eat so they couldn’t throw up. They didn’t know then that the stink would get worse and worse, as one after another …
Grace wasn’t hungry anymore, though. At first, it was such a pain in her belly, she couldn’t straighten up. Some of the children ate dirt, but it made them sick.
Esther was the next one after Matthew. She had just turned two years old — her three brothers sang happy birthday to her. Then Hannah Whitt, who was three.
Grace wondered why the little ones went first.
After that …
Grace can’t think. Doesn’t matter. Nothing matters.
It had already stopped mattering when Ezra went crazy. Even weak as he was, he attacked David, hit him, punched his face, would have killed him if he’d been able.
Fighting happened after that. Other bad things, too.
It didn’t matter.
Grace turns her head with an effort and looks out across the bodies lying on the floor of the cave in the shafts of sunlight streaming in around the rock. She doesn’t know for sure who is still alive — is only sure if they’ve been dead a long time because … the flies know.
They crawl across her face, try to crawl up her nose and at first she waved them away. Too many now. Everywhere.
She doesn’t try anymore. It doesn’t matter.
Her eye falls on the swollen body stretching the fabric of the dress made out of a blue flower sack. The one that m
atches her own. Mama liked to dress them alike, liked that when she did, nobody could tell which was which.
Grace closes her eyes. Wants it to be over soon.
Stuart had never in his life been happier to see anybody than he was to see Cotton Jackson and Jolene Rutherford. He had managed to keep his mind focused on digging, just digging, didn’t let it stray out there into the growing certainty, confirmed by the skin-crawling sensation at the base of his skull, that he was being watched.
Watched.
So why just … watched?
The whoever-they-were out there in the woods the last time they’d come to Gideon hadn’t just watched. They had opened fire, totally without warning, a barrage of gunfire intended to kill all three of them, would have, too, if the storm hadn’t masked their escape. They owed their lives to the sudden rain that obscured them from the view of the killers in the woods.
Killers in the woods. Stuart almost burped out a bleat of laughter. Listen to yourself, man, he chided himself. Killers in the woods. Burying bones that some little kid picked up in the woods a hundred years ago and stuffed into the hole in a tree.
But the absurdity didn’t track anymore. To expect “normal reality” really was absurd now. Stuart had … walked through the Looking Glass on Saturday when the road blew up in front of his car. And every minute of the time since then had been filled with one impossibility stacked up on another. He wouldn’t allow himself to think that what they were doing was nonsensical, wouldn’t work, because to believe that was to accept that he would never see his wife and daughter again and he flat out would not accept that, would never accept that, would keep looking and looking and …
The emotion of his thoughts, the anger and frustration and … yeah, fear … propelled Stuart McClintock past the point of exhaustion. Oh, he was in good shape. The go-to-the-gym-every-morning-before-work kind of good shape of a former athlete, who had not juiced to bulk up and was therefore not experiencing the awful side effects some of his teammates were struggling with.
No, he was just a big, strong man, who was angry and scared.
Stuart didn’t even realize how exhausted he was, and hadn’t attended to how much he had accomplished until he heard the sound of the car on the road and looked up through the sweat stinging his eyes to see his rented red Lexus turn off the highway and up into the cemetery where he was working.
He dropped the shovel and walked to where Cotton parked. The old man and Jolene got out of the car and the two of them looked around, then seemed to relax.
“There was all kinda weird stuff in town — lights and static,” Jolene said, “but I guess all the weird stuff stayed there.”
“And the bones …?” Stuart asked.
“They were just where Rose Topple told me they’d be,” Cotton said.
Until that moment, Stuart hadn’t really believed they’d find anything in that hollow tree.
“There are seventeen—” Jolene said.
“Seventeen?” Stuart was surprised. “I didn’t expect there’d be that many people.”
“Not ‘people.’ Seventeen children.”
That didn’t compute and he looked questioningly at her.
“Children. No grownups.”
“Unless they were pygmies,” Cotton said, “these are not adult skeletons.”
“So these Quakers … what? Only buried their kids in the cave? Why—?”
“Jolene doesn’t think that was a burial cave.”
“I don’t think the Quakers put their dead children in that cave. I think …”
She couldn’t seem to get the words out, looked to Cotton to finish the sentence.
“They weren’t buried there. They died there.”
That totally did not compute.
“Are you saying … what are you saying?”
“It’s the only thing that makes sense,” Jolene said and it was clear she and Cotton had talked about it on the way back to the cemetery. “Remember how Rose Topple said she saw … scratches on the walls of the cave?”
Stuart felt the bottom drop out of his stomach.
“Solves the mystery of why the Jabberwock didn’t want Lily to put the bones back where the miners found them,” Cotton said.
“Remember it said, ‘No, not there!’ It didn’t want to be buried in the spot where they … died.”
“You don’t think these bones were the accumulated dead of the settlement … or the children of the settlement? You think they … died in there?” Stuart couldn’t get his mind around the concept. “Died of what?”
“Rose said the settlement of Quakers, jitter dancers, had been wiped out by Indians,” Cotton said. “So we’re thinking maybe—”
“Say you’re a Quaker,” Jolene said. “You don’t believe in violence. You won’t fight. In an Indian raid, what would you do—?”
“You’d hide your children to protect them,” Cotton said.
“And if the whole village was wiped out—”
“Nobody’d hide their kids somewhere they couldn’t get out of!”
“I’m not saying I’ve got it all figured out.” Cotton let out a breath before he continued. “I’m sure whoever hid them didn’t intend for it to go down the way it did. But for some reason … I think the Quakers believed somebody would survive to free the children, but something happened and … I don’t know. I just believe that live children were sealed up in that cave.”
“And died there.” Jolene’s voice was haunted.
They all stood silent. Stuart was shaken to the core by horror. Seventeen little kids had … died. Thirst. Starvation. They had been sealed up together and died.
“Which certainly makes a case for why their spirits were so disturbed!” Jolene said. “These kids were the Haints of Fearsome Hollow. Spirits of the children who died unspeakably horrible deaths here. It fits.” She turned to Cotton. “You’ve heard the stories — people heard little kids crying in the woods. These children haunted this hollow for a hundred years after they died.”
“And then, when the miners scattered their bones …” Stuart’s thought processes stopped there. “How?”
“The ‘why’ makes sense, but the how …” Jolene shook her head. “You got me, pal, I couldn’t tell ya. Not ‘how did the spirits stay here for a century?’ That’s not uncommon in the ghostly circles I travel in. But how did they somehow get the power to … to take everything? Take it where? What happened to the people who vanished, what physically happened to them? They were gone, along with everything inside the houses, when Lily came back the next morning — vanished overnight.”
“And a hundred years later, overnight the whole county …” Cotton let it go.
“Maybe it has something to do with time,” Jolene said. “I don’t know how, but clearly the Jabberwock has the power to … somehow control time. It aged those houses.”
Stuart thought about the old house where he and Jolene had taken her equipment, the one that had been just like all the others — until it wasn’t. The one belonging to the man who had blown a hole in the road. He opened his mouth to point out that the most recent of the Jabberwock’s victims must still be physically present somewhere, because they had come …
That’s what he’d started to say. But he couldn’t find his voice. He had glanced over Cotton’s shoulder into the meadow where butterflies chased each other from one beautiful wildflower to another. He saw what was slowly crossing the meadow toward the cemetery, scattering the butterflies and the bees.
People. Or not. Maybe not people. At least, not anymore. The other two saw the look on his face and turned to see. Jolene opened her mouth in a scream, but she seemed unable to propel the sound out of her mouth.
Stuart didn’t know who the people were, but he suspected Jolene and Cotton knew. He did recognize the one in front, though, striding in a strangely gangly gate through the tall grass and flowers.
He definitely recognized that man. He was wearing the same tee shirt and bib overalls he’d been wearing the day he blew
a hole in the road.
Reece Tibbits.
Chapter Twenty-Five
Fish had been among the first people to arrive on Main Street. He’d milled around as more and more people came walking up from where they’d filled every parking space in front of every building on the street, and he was sure for several blocks beyond it in both directions.
He kept his eyes down, kept moving, was afraid if he stood still for very long he would start shaking and then somebody’d notice it and point it out and before long his instructions to “go unnoticed” would be totally blown.
Pete had told him to look around the group for “leaders,” people others would instinctively follow. He was supposed to call out to them, as soon as the shooting started — shooting! Seriously, shooting! He shook his head, focused on finding people who would help him herd the crowd to safety.
The first person who might possibly fit that description came down the street slowly, seemed as intent on not being noticed as Fish. He looked familiar, but it took Fish a moment to place him.
Sebastian Nower. Not in a pressed suit, clean dress shirt, creases in his pants you could cut a finger on, and every hair in place. His rumpled suit accentuated his slat-thin frame, sharp elbows and shoulders. His skin was sallow, and hollow cheeks indented his face above a fleshless chin that resembled the knob of a femur. Though he could not hide the signature attribute of the Nower family, an Adam’s apple more prominent than his nose, this man looked like a derelict.
No, the politically correct term to use now was homeless person.
And Sebastian might right now be just as homeless as Fish. Maybe more so, if there were degrees of homelessness. Of course, Fish had been at it for a while, knew the ropes, where you could find shelter and maybe a bite to eat. Might be Sebastian Nower was too proud to go begging to his neighbors, hadn’t had a solid meal since Viola evicted him on Monday.
