The Knowing Box Set EXTENDED EDITION: Exclusive New Material

by Ninie Hammon

  Wasn't no response, so she stood where she was and listened hard as she could.

  Almost drowned out by the pounding of her heart was a small sound, a dog barkin', only muffled, like Biscuit was down in a well. But no demon wails. She sniffed the air. It was musty as always, smelled like old—crumblin' plaster, ancient dust, decayin' wallpaper. But no demon stink.

  Theresa had the knowing. She couldn’t see demons like Bishop and Andi and Becca could, but she could hear and smell 'em. And sometimes, not always, she could sense they was around even when there wasn't no reason a'tall to b'lieve that was the case. And right now, the alarm bell on that sense was going ding, ding, ding!

  Leaving the front door open behind her, she took a couple of steps down the hallway, where rooms with wide French doors or big oak ones opened on the left and right. She couldn’t wander 'round in the dark, though, so she set her purse and umbrella on the floor and took out her iPhone, wishin' she’d let Andi put that flashlight app on it the child had wanted to download. Still, when you tapped the digital clock, the screen turned to solid light, and that chased some of the shadows into the corners. She moved toward the sound of Biscuit barkin' in the back of the house.

  Apprehension grew in her chest with every step. The dark, the quiet, and now a smell she couldn’t identify replaced the old-house stink. It smelled…coppery, like wet pennies. She come to the door of the parlor, strange and foreboding in the shadowy, luminous glow from the cell phone screen. It looked like somethin' out of a black-and-white Frankenstein movie. She put her hand on the doorknob, tellin' herself she’d find Mr. Gerald and Miss Minnie cuddled together on the couch in there, candlelight makin' the room all cozy, as Mr. Gerald read some classic work of literature to Miss Minnie, who couldn't see well enough to read no more.

  That’s not what she found. Wasn't no flickerin' candles. Wasn't no light of any kind, only a vast expanse of black.

  It was a big room with a sixteen-foot ceiling, and the dark ate up the pale glow from her phone. The copper smell was strong here. She could almost tell…it was familiar, she’d smelled it before but couldn’t place where. She stood in the open doorway for a moment and swept the phone glow in arcs out into the room but it couldn’t penetrate the thick, tar-blackness enough to—was that somethin' there, somethin' on the sofa on the far side of the room? Someone asleep, maybe?

  She moved through the doorway to investigate and started across the room, but had taken only a few steps when her right foot hit somethin' slick, and she slipped. She tried to regain her balance, but her left foot connected with somethin' on the floor and she tripped over it, stumbled and went down hard on one knee. She reached out to keep herself from face-plantin' on the hardwood floor and ended up on her side, the breath temporarily knocked out of her. Her cell phone flew out of her hand and clattered on the hardwood floor face-side—light-side—down, slidin' across the floor and comin' to rest about fifteen feet away.

  Sucking in a gasp of air, then another, Theresa rolled over and got up on her hands and knees, her arthritis screamin' in protest. When she started to crawl toward her phone, her hand brushed somethin'—the thing she’d tripped over—and she reached out in the dark, feelin' around but couldn't lay hands on it. What she did find was that the floor was wet. Sticky wet. That’s why she’d slipped. And it smelled like…

  Copper. Pennies. Suddenly, she knew what smelled like pennies.

  She scrambled the last few feet to her phone and snatched it off the floor. The glass was cracked, but the light still shone, blindin' her for a moment. In its glow, she seen what was on her hands—seen the blood on her hands—for only an instant, then the light on her cell phone blinked and went out and the darkness rushed in all around her.

  ******

  Caverna County, Kentucky

  June 5,

  1985

  Bishop Washington’s head snapped up. Unease awoke in his belly, and he looked warily around, glanced over one shoulder and then the other. Something was out there in them trees. Nearby. He could sense it. He’d be able to see it, too, if it come to that. Bishop had the knowing.

  A dark cloud of foreboding settled around him, and his mouth suddenly felt like it was full of cotton balls. The evil he was sensing—it was bad—and the kids was in them woods with it, all three of them!

  He had dropped Jack Carpenter, Daniel Burke, and Becca Hawkins off on a logging road right after first light, watched the dew that was still on the leaves fall on them like rain when they set out through the trees. Then he’d driven several miles farther north. He’d promised to return to the logging road right after lunch to pick ’em up.

  Freezing where he crouched on one knee, Bishop listened with a sense that didn’t have nothing to do with hearing. Whatever was out there, it wasn’t where them kids was. Couldn’t be. It was around here real close by, or he couldn’t have sensed it.

  The skin on his arms pebbled with gooseflesh.

  Bishop stood, a giant of a man, six feet seven inches and working up to three hundred pounds, with shoulders so broad that Theresa’d had to work a seamstress’s magic to get his shirts to fit over ’em and around his barrel chest. His skin was as black as the feather of a raven and his face broad, with strong features softened by wide-set, chocolate-drop eyes that even at forty were already sunk in a web of deep smile wrinkles.

  Using his thumb to wipe the dirt off the blade of his pocket knife, he flipped it closed, stuffed it in the pocket of his overalls and put the ginseng plant he’d just hollowed gently out of the ground into the cloth knapsack Theresa’d made out of one of his threadbare T-shirts. Ginseng was a wily rascal, hid from you in the shadows. He’d tracked down this patch of it, watching where water trickled out of the rocks, searching out wet ground in the shade of trees or finding it snuggled up beside rock outcrops on the hillside. There was more here to harvest—though you had to be careful, always had to leave some so it could grow back. But he didn’t care about the ginseng now as he set out through the trees back to the road, didn’t care about nothin’ but findin’ them kids and gettin’ 'em out of these woods!

  Jack and Daniel. Just saplings, budding branches of the men they’d grow up to be—tall and strong and good. Like his Isaac.

  The pain of that thought planted daggers in his chest that hurt so bad it was hard to draw in a breath. He couldn’t imagine how his sweet Theresa was standing up under it, the not knowing. The boy had been gone more than five months—one hundred fifteen days to be exact—and he didn’t need no calendar to tell him that. On every one of them mornings, waking dropped another boulder of time on his chest, and he sometimes felt like he was bein’ crushed under the weight of it. Where was he?

  Just twenty years old, Isaac had vanished like smoke from a dying campfire on Valentine’s Day and nobody—nobody—had seen or heard from him since. Bishop was beginnin’ to learn how to wall off the pain of the boy’s absence, but Theresa couldn’t. She radiated hurt like the side of a stove radiated heat into a room.

  When Bishop got to his rusted red pickup, he reached in through the open driver’s side window and tossed the cloth bag into the passenger seat beside the baseball cap Becca’d forgot. It was a spare all-stars hat she wore sometimes to keep the hair that hung almost to her waist out of her eyes. She was a beautiful child, fragile, hair the color of corn silk and big sea-green eyes. She’d be a heartthrob one day—shoot, she already had Jack and Daniel following her around like puppy dogs.

  It was Becca that Bishop was worried about. Like Bishop, Becca knew. If she was to happen across whatever was out there in them woods, she’d be able to see it. And it would know she’d seen. The sense of evil had been growing on him as he’d rushed through the woods, and now he feared he’d been wrong about it at first. What if it wasn’t nearby, wasn’t close? What if it was so powerful that he could feel it even when it was a long way off? He shivered. He needed to get to that logging road quick and then lay on the horn, keep honkin’ til them kids come runnin’.

  H
e fished the keys out of the pocket opposite the one where he’d stuffed his knife. The truck’s old suspension groaned when he got in behind the wheel. He put the key in the ignition and turned it. Nothing happened. He tried again. Not even the grind of the starter—just silence. His old truck had finally given up the ghost or the battery was dead. Either way, he wouldn’t be showin’ up at that logging road to pick up the kids after lunch.

  Right now, they was out there alone with whatever evil creature haunted these woods. And wasn’t a thing Bishop could do to help ’em.

  CHAPTER 2

  Caverna County, Kentucky

  June 5,

  1985

  Twelve-year-old Becca Hawkins had made it all the way to the east branch of the Big Puddle River and found nothing. After Bishop dropped them off at the logging road, she, Jack and Daniel had split up to cover more ground, and she wondered if they’d been luckier than she, had found any of the elusive ginseng plants that grew wild in the Kentucky woods.

  She reached down to the brown mutt that stood beside her and scratched him behind one ear. If only dogs could smell ginseng. Not a bad idea, actually. Surely, she could teach McDougal—aka McDoo, McD, Dougie, Dougal Dog and DD—how to do it. He might be a mutt from the animal shelter, but he was smart. First, however, she had to get her hands on some ginseng. Wouldn’t take but a little piece. The Three Musketeers—she, Jack and Daniel—had already agreed among themselves that they’d force Bishop to take whatever they made from selling the plants to fix up his rattley-bang old truck that wheezed and chuffed and blew black smoke out the tailpipe.

  Becca’s stomach grumbled. She’d only had a piece of cold cornbread and a glass of orange juice before she left the house to go to Daniel’s to meet Bishop, and now she was regretting that she’d let Jack and Daniel carry the picka-nick basket—which didn’t look a thing like the ones Yogi Bear and Boo-Boo spent their lives trying to steal from visitors to Jellystone National Park. Yes, the “basket” was a little heavy, and it was quite gallant of them to refuse to allow her to carry it, but there were peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwiches in it and—

  McDougal’s ears stood up, and he looked upriver. Then she heard voices. A lone fisherman in a johnboat was floating in the lazy water. He was leaned back, with his hat pulled down over his face, asleep, and the voices were coming from the woods near him. As they drew closer, Becca felt a chill, like ice water had dripped on the back of her neck and was sliding slowly down between her shoulder blades. McDougal whined. The hair on his back and shoulders stood on end. He let out two timid barks before she put her finger to her lips and shushed him.

  If there was one command she could count on DD to obey it was “hush”—or he’d have been dead long ago. Her father didn’t like dogs, and she couldn’t have kept Dougie “out of sight, out of mind” if the dog hadn’t learned quick to be quiet. McDougal rubbed against her leg and began to tremble. Becca was suddenly aware of how alone she was. Jack and Daniel couldn’t possibly hear if she called out.

  But that’s not why her heart began to pound so fast she couldn’t detect the individual beats and only felt a ragged hum in her chest. There was something wrong with the voices.

  Hide.

  She moved before she even formed the thought to do it. A shagbark elm tree with crepe myrtle bushes crowded around its base stood on the riverbank about thirty feet from the water. She ran to it, slid in between the limbs of the bushes and crawled as deep into the interior as she could. Then she called out quietly to the dog and spread the limbs so he could join her. She snuggled him up close to her side and put her arm around him. Out through the tangle of leaves, she saw the fisherman stir and sit up at the sound of people crashing through the woods, voices yelling.

  Now she was sure. Something was definitely wrong with the voices. Becca knew what it was, too, that sound like chains dragged across a metal floor or the high squeal of the wood-chipper that ripped into her ears at the sawmill. A little squeak of fear slipped out between her lips, even though she had her jaws clenched tight shut, the tiny mewl of a kitten whose eyes weren’t open yet, looking for its mother. McDoo wasn’t trembling anymore, he was vibrating, making a strange sound deep in his throat that was a cross between a growl and a whine. She put her finger to her lips and the sound stopped, but she could feel the dog’s heart hammering in his chest as if he’d come running to her from all the way across a field.

  She wanted to squeeze her eyes shut so she wouldn’t have to see, had prayed often that God would strike her blind so she couldn’t. But it was God, after all, who had made her so she could see. That’s what Theresa and Bishop Washington said.

  A group of boys about her age exploded out of the woods like a pack of snarling dogs, burst through the trees and ran down toward the riverbank near the fisherman, doffing T-shirts as they approached the river, obviously intent on a swim. But they weren’t cheerful, laughing boys having fun. They were yelling—snarling—at each other, all of them. A couple were fighting, shoving and hitting and then falling to the ground in a tangle of arms and legs and growls. Yes, growls. She recognized the boys as members of Jack and Daniel’s all-star baseball team, but she didn’t know their names. Besides, it wasn’t the boys she was looking at.

  Becca gawked in horror and revulsion and was afraid she was going to be sick. That many! Six! She had only seen three in her whole life! And each time, the sight had knocked a hole in her belly so she couldn’t eat for a week and had given her nightmares that attacked her with hideous monsters until lack of sleep had painted dark, hollow circles under her eyes.

  Six!

  Six demons.

  All the fisherman in the johnboat saw was a gang of rowdy boys that had interrupted his nap.

  “Hey,” he called out to them. “Hush up that racket now. You think fish is deaf?” Then he must have figured out the boys’ intention. “You can’t swim here!”

  From her vantage point hidden in the crepe myrtle bush, Becca shook her head slowly back and forth.

  Oh, don’t. Don’t draw their attention.

  The boys had stopped on the riverbank near the stump where the fisherman’s boat was tied up.

  “You own this river?” one of them sneered at him.

  “It’s deep out there in the middle,” the fisherman continued. “There’s a trench must go down thirty feet or more. Rocks and dead trees on the bottom to get hung up on.”

  “Butt out, old man,” said one of the others as he pulled a blue University of Kentucky T-shirt off over his head.

  “We’ll swim anywhere we want to swim,” said another boy, a kid with his red hair cut in a Mohawk. There was a clear edge of menace in his voice.

  But the fisherman wouldn’t let it go.

  “Go on over to Troll’s Hole where all the other kids swim. Get away from here!”

  It happened fast. One minute, the fisherman was in his boat right off the riverbank and the boys were on the shore, and the next minute three of them had waded out to the boat, yanked the fisherman out of it and dragged him up onto the sand. The man was big, with a fat belly sticking out in front like he was pregnant, and must have weighed more than any two of the boys combined.

  “Hey, what do you think you’re doing?” he sputtered when the boys dropped him on his back in front of them. “You can’t—”

  “Oh yes, we can,” cried one of the boys, the redheaded one.

  Then another one of the boys kicked the fisherman and the big man howled in pain. That excited them, and they fell on him in a frenzy of blows, with the man crying out and trying to ward them off with his hands.

  “Stop!” he wailed, frightened now. “That hurts. Leave me alone!”

  But it was like watching a school of piranha. They fed on each other’s violence and anger, and the more the man cried out, the harder they punched and kicked him.

  Then one of them, the blond one, could be heard above the others. “Ever pull the wings off a fly?” And before anyone could say another word, he placed one foot on the
fisherman’s chest, grabbed both his wrists and ripped the man’s arms off.

  ******

  Hendersonville, Indiana

  September 22,

  2011

  Thirty-eight-year-old Becca Hawkins opened her eyes to darkness so absolute she had to reach up and feel her eyelids to be sure they weren’t still closed. She was lying on lumps of something, and one of the somethings was poking into her back at such a painful angle it might have been what woke her. Or not. She’d once walked barefoot across shards of glass from a window she’d broken to get into a garage, and if that wouldn’t wake you up, what would? She hadn’t felt a thing. At the time anyway. She’d felt it later, though. Still felt it when she relived it. That was the horror of flashbacks and night terrors, you didn’t just remember pain, you felt it all over again, like you did the first time. That’s why she screamed. Who wouldn’t scream walking barefoot across broken glass?

  Of course, the woman in the bunk next to hers at the shelter had complained that Becca was keeping her awake—disturbing everybody, as a matter of fact—so they’d kicked her out on the street, where she’d had to walk up and down the sidewalk in front of the soup kitchen until it opened at daylight, afraid if she sat still she’d freeze to death. But even that, even walking in the rags of a coat in the bitter cold, her nose running and then freezing on her upper lip, even that was better than reliving the bottoms of both feet cut open with glass stuck so deep it took an emergency room doctor an hour to find all the shards and thirty-two stitches to close the wounds.

  She shut her eyes, hoping that the lumpy, leather-stink place was a flashback, and she really was on the army cot in the little room off the kitchen where the cook had said she could sleep until she made enough money to get her own place. Right. Like she’d ever be able to get her own place!