by Ninie Hammon
One of the women Jolene had run over was nearby and two of the children tore into her. Literally tore into her. Without making a sound, they attacked her with claws and fangs, ripping her apart. Maybe that was the most horrible part, that the whole thing happened in silence, not the snarling of animals who attack a prey, no screaming from a wounded animal, no sound of any kind except scuffling sounds as the creatures were torn apart and thrown to the ground, where the other children swarmed over them, ripping and …
One of the larger children launched itself at Reece Tibbits, who made no effort to fend it off. Some part of Stuart’s mind informed him that Reece likely couldn’t see the attack coming, given that he had no head. Reece staggered back, but didn’t go down. Another of the children joined the first, ripping and slashing at Reece’s body. It grabbed hold of Reece’s arm and slashed, pulling and clawing until the arm came off but the stump didn’t bleed. The woman who’d been strangling Stuart hadn’t bled, either.
The pregnant woman had made it to Cotton. He slammed the shovel down on the top of her head, a crushing blow, but she merely staggered back a step from the momentum of the shovel hitting her, not from any injury. The whole top of her head and front of her face was smashed in, but she lurched forward again, arms extend, and Cotton wasn’t quick enough to lift the shovel again for a second blow and she grabbed him around the throat. He dropped the shovel and grabbed her arms, trying to free himself, staggered back and tripped over the shovel, went down heavily on the ground with the woman on top of him.
Two of the children attacked the two grappling on the ground. One of them sliced claws across the woman’s back, opening up groves deep enough to have reached vital organs. There was no blood. The second bit into one of her arms, slashing with dagger teeth. Then the first child ripped through one of the woman’s arms, almost severing it, breaking her hold on Cotton’s neck. The other child grabbed the woman’s body and flung her backward onto the ground. And then they were all over her, clawing and biting and tearing and …
Stuart looked away. To Cotton, he croaked, “The bones!” Then he crawled to the spot beside the grave where Jolene lay, curled up in a ball, sobbing, crying, screaming, all and none of them.
“Jolene.” He shook her shoulder. “Help us. We have to get the bones into the grave.”
She uncurled enough to look at him and then turned her head toward the carnage, but he grabbed her chin and forced her face back to his.
“Don’t look that way, look at me, focus on me now and help me.”
He crawled toward the nearest leaf bag and Jolene got to her knees and picked up the one she’d dropped on the ground. Cotton helped Jolene lift it, and the three of them emptied the bones into the grave. They made an awful clacking sound when they hit the bottom, skulls and leg bones and arms and fingers and toes.
Words came back to him.
I was careful. Didn’t miss a single one. And the finger of a little two-year-old kid, why that ain’t very big at all.
Lily Topple had faithfully picked up every one of the bones the miners had scattered in the woods and Stuart was just as careful to empty into the hole every bone in the sack.
Cotton and Jolene did the same, tossing the empty leaf bags aside. The carnage was still going on around them. The sounds were not screaming, the sounds were the awful thwacking sounds of arms yanked off, sucking thuds as … he wouldn’t let himself look and he dragged even his thoughts away.
“Dirt,” he gasped, forcing the word out his swollen throat.
They crawled to the pile of dirt he had shoveled out of the hole and began shoving the dirt back in with their bare hands. The shovel was right there, but Stuart didn’t have the will to get it where Cotton had dropped it. To do so, he would have had to attend to what was happening, the battle, the war going on around them and he knew to do that was to lose his very tenuous grip on sanity.
They shoved the dirt into the hole, got behind the pile and pushed with all their strength. The bones vanished beneath the dirt. They piled it higher and higher on top of them, until they had filled all the hole. Then they shoved dirt up on top of it, making a mound of sorts, patting it in place with their hands.
At some point while they were working, the battle had ended. Stuart dared to glance in the direction of the meadow and saw carnage that would haunt the dark halls of his nightmares for the rest of his life. Not a single, complete body, nothing but parts, arms, heads …
As the children were … completing their task, they came one by one to stand around where Stuart and Cotton and Jolene knelt beside the mound of dirt. The growing cold of their nearness chilled Stuart to the bone.
And then it was done. The three looked at each other. All the children were gathered in a circle around them, monsters he couldn’t look at, even though their bodies had somehow … changed. The claws and dagger teeth were gone.
“They was the horriblest creatures ever was on the earth … They couldn’t help what they was. It weren’t their fault.” Jolene whispered the words Rose Topple had said to Cotton.
Somehow, Stuart managed to stagger to his feet. He put out his hand and helped Cotton stand, and then Jolene.
“Put the rocks on top.”
A few feet from the grave was a pile of rocks Stuart had dug out of the hole. He stepped to it, picked one up and fit it down tight on the loose dirt on the top of the grave. Jolene did the same, as did Cotton.
The encircling audience merely watched. He stole looks at them while he worked. Their eyes were sunken back in their horror faces and they didn’t look at him. He was glad. He didn’t want to make eye contact because he feared if he did he would somehow be able to feel the pain, horror, loneliness and anger these children had been feeling for two hundred years. He suspected to feel that was to die.
When they had fit all the stones on the top of the grave, Stuart said, “Hand me the marker.”
The crude cross they had made was lying beside the empty leaf bags, and Jolene took a step toward it. There was a piece of something … he saw her shudder, then resolutely reach down and pick the marker up off the ground.
Stuart jabbed the pointed end of the marker into the dirt and shoved as hard as he could, then picked up a rock and hammered it in the rest of the way until it was stable.
The words on the marker. They hadn’t known when they were printing them yesterday, how very appropriate they were.
“May these children of God rest here in eternal peace.”
This, what they’d made here today, wouldn’t last. In a few months, not even a year, the dirt would settle, the marker topple. But Stuart vowed at that moment that he would return, if he was ever able to come back, that he would make for these children a resting place that would last centuries. But right now, this was all they had. It would have to be enough.
He straightened up from hammering the cross into the ground and looked at Jolene, then Cotton. They hadn’t planned beyond the grave and the marker, any more than to say they would “have some kind of service.”
What would that be?
Jolene was standing directly behind the cross, with Stuart on one side and Cotton on the other. She reached out and took their hands.
“Close your eyes,” she whispered. They closed their eyes.
Then she began to sing.
“Amazing grace, how sweet the sound, that saved a wretch like me …”
Stuart was shocked at the sound. She had an incredible voice, rich and strong, something lower than a soprano but not quite an alto. She reminded him of the women, and men, he’d seen stand on the fifty-yard line and sing the national anthem. Perfect pitch, voices loud enough to carry.
Cotton joined his voice to Jolene’s and the two of them sang the next stanza together. “I once was lost, but now am found. Was blind but now I see.”
Cotton’s was a rich baritone, thick and strong. Stuart was imagining it, of course, but it seemed that the sound of the two of them was the most beautiful music he had ever heard, the voices of ang
els. Stuart knew the song, of course, all four verses. His grandmother had seen to it that Stuart’s bum was on a pew in church every Sunday morning, Sunday evening and Wednesday for prayer meetings.
So he joined in. He didn’t really want to because their voices were so hauntingly beautiful, he was reluctant to spoil it with his own ordinary, garden variety voice. But he wouldn’t mess it up too bad — his throat was so swollen his voice was ragged, and he’d hardly be able to make any sound at all. He whisper/sang the words along with them, though, because this was something they all three had to do.
“Twas grace that taught my heart to fear, and grace my fear relieved. How precious did that grace appear, the hour I first believed.”
It wasn’t his imagination, the sounds did echo against the sides of the mountains, reverberated and repeated until it sounded like the Mormon Tabernacle Choir was standing around the grave of children dead two centuries, bearing them away — finally — into a peaceful eternity.
Stuart kept his eyes squeezed resolutely shut through the song, so he didn’t see the children … leave. But he did feel their presence diminish. The cold encircling them and the grave from the ring of children had felt like standing in a walk-in freezer.
He could actually feel the air warming, the temperature around them rising. As a warm summer breeze washed over him, he opened his eyes. The children were gone. Jolene’s eyes filled with tears and they spilled down her cheeks. Stuart reached out to pat her arm and his breath caught in his swollen throat. His gaze had strayed from her face to the meadow beyond.
And he saw two things that froze his blood.
The first was that the bodies — pieces of bodies — were gone. How they could have just disappeared, vanished like that? He didn’t know. But he couldn’t imagine how they’d gotten there in the first place, either.
The second thing he saw was a man striding through the field where once there had been wildflowers. The man was Shep Clayton, who’d been sitting in a 100-year-old shack all alone the day Stuart had arrived in Nowhere County. Stuart had been struck by the look on the man’s face that day, had thought at the time that here was a man who had looked into the abyss and the abyss had looked back. That man had a rifle raised to his shoulder, aimed at the three of them.
Chapter Thirty-Three
“Gabe, it’s not your fault.”
The monster stopped in its tracks, hesitated.
“You just wanted to fight back, to try to save your mother. The rest … just happened.”
The lights that had been glowing inside the bubbling blackness from which the creature had come, were growing dimmer. As they did, the creature shrank.
No less fearsome, horrible, dangerous. But it grew smaller, and somehow seemed to draw away from them, into some kind of hole in the universe, growing less and less, like a specter viewed through the wrong end of a telescope.
Malachi could feel the creature’s anger, the boiling rage, which wasn’t diminishing because of what he was saying. Something else was sucking the energy out of it — the absence of the children. They constituted the greater part of its power and something was happening to them on the other side of that hillside.
Its fiery eyes fixed on Malachi’s and dozens of images filled Malachi’s mind, as if blown into his head by an enormous storm. People, faces — dozens, hundreds, whirling around in a frenetic whirlwind. Feelings, too. Emotions. Like sparks off a blown transformer, emotions flashed off the creature. Hate, anger, sorrow, jealousy, resentment. Sparks of them connected to some circuit inside Malachi and he felt the emotions as if they were his own. He felt angry, then sorrowful, then jealous. The accumulated power of the emotional onslaught was staggering — and then he got it. The faces … the feelings were taken from those people.
The strength and power of the creature was what it had taken into itself from the people it had absorbed.
Nothing good, though. No laughter or joy. The creature sought only evil, sucking all the darkness from the people of Gideon a hundred years ago. But it didn’t stop there. It had continued to absorb negative energy. The mist in Fearsome Hollow fed on the darkness around it. Was that why so many people in Nowhere County were depressed? Was that why they hated Nowhere County, wanted to leave, had no love or loyalty in their hearts for it?
Or was it the other way around? Had the people simply turned sour on their own, lost interest in the place when the businesses went belly-up, the schools closed and people moved away — and the Jabberwock had merely fed on those emotions, growing meaner and stronger.
Was the Jabberwock the cause or the effect?
Malachi didn’t know. What he did know was that he’d be a fool to think that the creature before him, consumed by rage and hatred, could be talked out of it by sympathizing with the young man whose darkness had been the seed of it all, the boy who had died and left the children sealed in the cave.
He literally felt the motion in his arm when the hands on his watch began to whirl furiously.
Something was happening to time. It was passing too fast. Or too slow. Static, that awful sound they’d each heard when the Jabberwock kidnapped them out of their lives and their world two weeks ago suddenly roared around them now, rumbled and buzzed and—
Music.
Singing.
The static was instantly silenced.
Malachi looked around, and realized he wasn’t imagining it. Sam and Charlie heard it, too.
“Amazing grace, how sweet the sound, that saved a wretch like me. I once was lost but now I’m found, was blind but now I see …”
A huge chorus was singing, hundreds of voices in perfect harmony, the sounds reverberating off the mountain tops.
Every word seemed to hit the creature like a drop of acid and it writhed from the impact.
But its tremendous power seemed to grow more intense as its form grew smaller. Even as it shrank, it was still a monster capable of ripping them apart. And it was preparing to do just that. It hunkered before them, the lion in a crouch, tensing to jump.
The music grew louder. Where could it possibly be coming from?
“Through many dangers, toils and snares we have already come. Twas grace that brought us safe thus far and grace will lead us home.”
A roar, a bellow of pure hatred, erupted from the creature. It tilted its head back and … screamed. An animal cry that was somehow human, too.
Then it settled, turned its fiery gaze on the three of them and hunkered down again.
They had one, maybe two seconds to live.
Sam suddenly whispered urgently, “Join hands.” Charlie and Malachi complied. It would be good to hold on in death, bound together.
The Alphabet Gang.
The Breakfast Club.
The three of them standing together on the brink of eternity, no weapons. Utterly defenseless.
Or were they?
Nothing stood between the mighty Jabberwock and the three of them — they had brought to Fearsome Hollow nothing to fight with. Except each other.
Something held the monster back. Could it be that their bond to each other was protecting them? The creature’s rage grew brighter even as it shrank. And then the darkness bubbling in the air settled around the creature like a cloak. Mist shrouded it and it sank back into the darkness.
Hoary words formed in all their heads.
This isn’t over. I’m not done—
“… once was lost, but now am found, was blind, but now I …”
At the final word in the last chorus — “see” — the creature was gobbled up by its own boiling blackness and withdrew into the mist. The mist rose up off the ground and retreated into the trees.
And vanished.
Shep was as horrified as Claude, struck speechless, wanted to cut and run just like Claude had done.
It was Shep’s dread, not Abby’s. And once he let it loose, it grew bigger and turned into fear. Finally, for the first time since he’d seen his house all changed and life as he knew it gone forever, Shepherd C
layton was afraid. Terrified. So scared he couldn’t breathe, even.
And he cried out, like a little kid calling for Mama in the midnight dark.
Abby!
Not with the voice that come out his mouth but inside his head.
But Abby didn’t come.
He cried out again, terror and anguish welling up from his soul.
Abbbbbby!
Abby was gone, wasn’t in Shep’s head no more.
But there was something in his head still, it just wasn’t Abby no more.
What was there inside Shep had lost all resemblance to the sweet girl Shep’d thought glowed like them fiber optic cables when she was sitting beside baby Cody’s bassinet in the hospital. Wasn’t no trace of the girl who’d put Earl up to telling Shep she had a crush on him when they was in junior high school, the teasing woman who had told him his head would fall off if he wasn’t careful, the voice he had picked out of the whispers in their house when he come home and everything was gone.
That voice had been sweet Abby, the sound of her talking reminding him of little bells ringing. He had noticed when he stopped hearing that sound when she spoke in his head. It had been gone a right smart while, but the voice had still been Abby, just with a different sound, that’s all. But still Abby.
Now, he didn’t have nothing.
He didn’t have Abby in his head, closer than his own skin, directing his every move, and he didn’t have the real Abby with the striking blue eyes looking up at him. He just had … the presence in his mind.
And the presence was all rage and anger and hatred. Nothing kind and sweet and loving like his Abby’d been. The rage that filled Shep’s whole being was as overwhelming as being washed away by a flash flood.
It was the Jabberwock, of course.
And a horrible thought occurred to him that maybe … maybe it had been the Jabberwock all along, maybe it hadn’t never been Abby there, just this angry creature.
