The Knowing Box Set EXTENDED EDITION: Exclusive New Material

by Ninie Hammon

  “Do you realize what you’ve done?” the redhead said. The fisherman was still screaming. He lay on his back where they’d left him, his head thrown back, shrieking at the top of his lungs. “Do you want to explain—?” The redheaded boy stopped and cast an annoyed glance at the fisherman. To the boy standing nearest the man, he said, “Shut him up.” The boy dutifully took a step toward the man and placed his foot on the man’s throat. With a jumping motion, like you’d crank a motorcycle, he shifted his weight to that foot, and the screaming ended abruptly in a strangled sound. The fisherman went limp.

  The redhead continued where he’d left off. “To explain why we didn’t find him—that we had to stop looking because we were all in jail?” His voice had risen in pitch and volume until he was yelling. The other boy said nothing, and the others fell silent with him. Then the redheaded boy shifted gears. Looking around, he said, “We have to make this all go away, clean up this mess. Get rid of the body.”

  “Just throw it in the river,” said a boy in a gray T-shirt that had a Hard Rock Cafe Memphis logo on the front.

  “Riiight.” The redheaded boy sneered. “So it can float downstream and bob up on shore somewhere missing both arms?”

  “How will anybody know we were the ones who did it?” said a dark-haired boy. The others were instantly arguing, yelling at each other, shoving. A brawl threatened to break out any second.

  “Stop it!” roared the redheaded boy as he separated two boys who’d balled their hands into fists and were about to start slugging it out. “We have to figure this out or…do you want to tell him?”

  The boys fell silent until one of them offered, “The guy said the water was deep here, with stumps and stuff on the bottom. We could use this rope”—he indicated the line that attached the johnboat to a scraggly bush on shore—“to tie the body to a stump down there, pile some rocks on it, maybe.”

  “And bury the arms in the sand,” said another.

  The redheaded boy considered, then nodded. Turning to the boy who liked to pull the wings off flies, he said. “You get to do the honors, Dumas. And you better tie him tight.”

  Becca watched in fascinated horror as the boys busied themselves cleaning up the carnage. One filled the fisherman’s minnow bucket in the river and used the water to wash the blood off the sand while the others wound the rope securely around the body and hauled it out into the water. It took several dives before the boy declared that the body wasn’t going anywhere.

  Then two of the boys lifted a rock the size of a Volkswagen—picked it up like it was made out of Styrofoam—and tossed it into the water over the spot where the body was submerged. They threw other big rocks in, too, rocks as big as washing machines, like little kids tossing pebbles into the water. One boy used his fist to smash a hole in the bottom of the boat near the motor in the back and then shoved it out into the river to float downstream until the weight of the motor pulled it under and sank it. Someone must have buried the arms, but Becca didn’t see who or where. When they were finished, the leader surveyed the riverbank, his red hair as stiff as the straw in a broom in a narrow strip from his forehead to his neck. Nothing remained to show that anybody’d ever been there.

  Satisfied, the boy nodded. “Come on,” he said.

  The other boys fell in beside him as he started down the riverbank—headed right to the spot where Becca was hiding in the crepe myrtle bush.

  ******

  2011

  In the beginning, jail wasn’t as bad as Becca feared it’d be. There were only a couple of other prisoners, and one of them was so drunk she did nothing but babble nonsense, sing golden oldies in an off-key soprano and cry about losing “Billy,” who was either her boyfriend or her bulldog.

  The other woman was a fat Hispanic woman who’d apparently been picked up for shoplifting, and it struck Becca that the woman could have stuffed a microwave down the front of her dress and nobody’d have noticed. You played the cards you were dealt, though, and did the best you could with whatever you had. That was what life was, doing the best you could.

  In Becca’s case, that had never, ever, been enough. She always came up short at the end of the day, but she never quit trying, either. And that was something. You got points for that, didn’t you?

  Then they’d brought in the prostitute. Long before Becca saw her, she felt the wave of cold that flowed out from her, frozen lava from a volcano of ice. The frigid air instantly slathered the floor and walls and cell bars with frost—not white frost but ugly dark-red crystals, a color frost could never be but was. The air was so cold it hurt to breathe, felt like those bloody crystals were forming in her nose and throat and lungs, cutting her open so she bled, her warm blood instantly frozen into more jagged red crystals. The cold bit into her flesh and chilled her to the bone, and it would have done the same thing if she’d been wearing an Eskimo parka of sealskin and polar bear hide instead of just a T-shirt and jeans. This was cold from the other, and it knew no boundaries, was as inexorable and unstoppable as a rising tide.

  What the prostitute really looked like to other people, Becca didn’t know. She never saw people the way others did. She’d caught a glimpse of dirty dark hair and squinty, too-small eyes. But as soon as Becca spotted what was attached to the woman’s chest, all the woman’s features changed.

  Her eyes opened up and became deep, dark pools with no color at all—just the black irises and no eyelids—like a lizard. Her nose melted and ran down off her face so nothing was left behind but two wet holes that oozed green goo to drip down her lip. Her teeth sharpened, razor edge, and her fingers grew claws.

  And some part of Becca had always known that wasn’t real. People’s features changing—that wasn’t really happening. She understood that what she perceived was not objective reality. Maybe the demons had some power to distort the reality that Becca saw. Or maybe—and this had always been a scary thought—maybe what she saw was reality, a manifestation of what the person had become in response to the evil inside them. Maybe the rest, the veneer, was illusion.

  Becca wanted to run—that’s why she couldn’t be locked up, what the officer didn’t understand—she had to be able to run because the others could always sense her, could feel Becca’s knowing.

  “What have we here?” said the thing sucking the life from the helpless woman. Its voice was gravel grinding under a truck tire.

  Becca sat on the floor in the corner of her cell, squashed up tight against the concrete block wall, her eyes squeezed shut.

  “Oh, juicy,” it said, its voice changing to a high shriek like the cry of gulls at the beach. “Come talk to us, Miss Pretty.”

  Becca felt her eyes opening. She hated that, hated that she had to look and couldn’t close her eyes and stick her fingers into her ears and chant “I can’t hear you!” She had to see. If you could see, you had to see. That’s the way it was.

  It was a creature of slime, the filth at the bottom of a sewer pipe, with many hairy black legs, like a mutant spider.

  “You do see me,” it said from a great maw of a mouth that opened up across its whole chest. “Can I come and play with you? Be with you? Be inside you?”

  Becca cried, “No!” in spite of herself, even though she knew it was wrong, oh so very wrong to engage a demon. She wailed the word as loud as she could, and it came out a strangled whisper.

  “You know who I am and where I come from, and you know I can have you if I want.”

  It couldn’t, of course, but that was small comfort to Becca now, locked in here with it, unable to get away.

  It began to jeer and laugh at her, its slime running all over the woman it was attached to, and Becca watched because she had to. She cringed back into herself, into the smallest crevice in her mind. Tried to prepare for the onslaught of dirty, black evil that would so paralyze and suffocate her that she would die, die, die a thousand times only to come back again and again to suffer more.

  Now, he would come, the Monster Other would come. He would know where
she was, and he would slither dark and stinking into her mind and steal every lovely thing from it until it was a wasteland, utterly bereft of goodness and beauty. She would look at it and speak to it. The touch of pure evil would feel slick and smooth, like the belly of a spider.

  ******

  2011

  Theresa cowered in the profound dark that was somehow not lit at all by the red glow above, the glow that was dripping down the walls.

  “You’re early this evening, Mrs. Washington,” said a voice from behind her. “I was just finishing up.”

  The voice.

  She was utterly paralyzed by the sound. It was more than mesmerizing, stronger than hypnotic. It was pure evil, wrapped in a pleasant baritone, honey poured over shards of broken glass, so totally other that the foreign sound took Theresa’s breath away.

  “Look at me,” the voice said. And Theresa felt her body and head turning toward the sound. Only she wasn’t doin’ the turning. She fought against it, tried to resist, but her pitiful little effort meant nothin’ at all. She suspected—no, she was sure—that if she could somehow have kept her head still, her neck would have snapped from the pressure.

  What slid into view when she turned was impossible. The red glow came from the corner of the room up near the ceiling. It radiated in undulating waves from a man, distorting him the way heat waves in the desert warp the horizon. He hung there, suspended, dressed in a business suit, tie straight, pants creased. His hair, the color of a ten-penny nail, come down to a widow’s peak on his forehead and it was combed neat and tidy. Well, what hair there was. Much of it on the right side had been burned off and a jagged piece of scar snaked down across his face like red barbed wire. His eyes was an odd shade of light green under a prominent brow and thick black eyebrows.

  She was no more surprised that a man hung suspended in the air than she was by who the man was. Chapman Whitworth. He was the man who’d summoned a monster demon when Jack, Daniel and Becca were twelve years old, more than a quarter of a century ago. The man who just last week the president had nominated for a vacant seat on the United States Supreme Court.

  “Do you think you can stand against me?” Whitworth asked. “Seriously? You and your ragtag lackeys—is that what you think? Because if you do”—his voice changed then, became the voice of an elderly black woman with a soft Southern drawl—“you got a whole heap more thinks a’comin’, missy-girl.”

  It felt like he’d slapped her.

  “You will pay—each of you—for opposing me.” Then the voice ceased to be mesmerizing and hypnotic. It turned raw and guttural, so harsh and jagged her ears might bleed from hearing it. “I will not take your lives…I will destroy them.”

  Theresa’s thoughts scattered, random, leaves hit by a breeze.

  Don’t let me cry.

  Reckon anybody ever died from being afraid?

  I wish Bishop was here.

  His strong presence would have changed everything. She was certainly a poor second choice to stand up to a demon. Bishop spoke his last words to a demon before it killed him. And he could see the monstrous thing, not just the man form it was living in. Jack said Bishop’s voice had sounded strong and firm.

  Help me!

  “We will beat you,” Theresa said. “Just like we did the last time.”

  Where did that come from? Theresa had absolutely not formed them words in her mind or pushed them out of her mouth. Not in a steady voice—she was shaking like a half-froze hummingbird. The thought, the intent, the words, the will to say them—none of it had come from Theresa. And that was both the most comfortin’ and most frightenin’ thing that had ever happened to her.

  The red glow grew so suddenly intense that she could have seen it clearly with her eyes closed. Something formed around the man, a red shape, a monster face twisted with anger and hatred. Like Andi’d seen that day they all found out the war wasn’t over yet, that their battle against the monster demon that possessed Chapman Whitworth was only beginning. The hideous face grew, became more solid loomed above—

  Light suddenly flooded the room, along with the sound of music—literally The Sound of Music—blaring from stereo speakers brought to life by returning electricity. The glare struck Theresa blind, staggered her like a blow. She squinted through a forest of eyelashes, but her mind refused to put them flashing images into anything that made any sense.

  Red everywhere. Blood! On the furniture, the floor. All over her own hands and arms and clothing. Miss Minnie lay on the floor a few feet away, covered in blood. Mr. Gerald lay sprawled spread-eagled by the door—she’d tripped over his foot. An ax was stuck in his chest like a lumberjack had left it in a tree stump.

  She screamed again, tried to scoot toward the door she could see now. But her way out was blocked. A man dressed in black sweatpants and a black hoodie was standing in the doorway.

  “What are you doing here?” Whitworth roared at the man, who was staring into the room with a look of…surprise, maybe? Or fear. Whitworth spoke in his own voice, a human voice. She turned to see him standing in the corner of the room, where an instant before he’d been suspended near the ceiling. The red light was gone; Whitworth looked normal, though he still seemed almost to be outlined in red Magic Marker.

  The man made a move to come into the room, had one foot lifted.

  “Stay out of here, fool,” Whitworth said. “I told you to turn the electricity back on and then wait in the car. Go!”

  The man vanished out of the doorway.

  Whitworth turned his attention back to Theresa, but her mind had gone to a place where even a demon from Hell couldn’t call her back. Reality had finally elbowed its way into her consciousness. The old couple she loved, that she’d looked after all these years—sweet Miss Minnie and gentle Mr. Gerald—had been hacked to death.

  And suddenly, Whitworth was standing in front of her, though she didn’t never see him take a step. His feet wasn’t touching the floor.

  Then the ax in Mr. Gerald’s chest moved, wiggled slightly and pulled out of the bloody chest with a distinct smuck sound. It moved through the air like a kid’s helium balloon on a string 'til it was there beside Whitworth.

  He was gonna kill her after all, bury the blade in her like he’d done in Mr. Gerald. Theresa lifted her arm up above her head and cringed away from the blow.

  Whitworth kicked her leg, not to hurt her but a nudge to get her attention. She opened the eyes she’d squeezed shut and looked up at him, his scarred face clear in the light from the pole lamp beside the chair. Mr. Gerald’s chair, where he sat and read the sports page of the Cincinnati Inquirer every morning after breakfast.

  “Take it,” he said and nodded to the ax. When she didn’t move, he spoke again, an edge of threat in his voice. “I said take it.”

  She reached up a trembling hand and took the ax by the bloody handle, then sat unmoving, holding the ax in front of her.

  “…every mountain, ford every stream, follow every rainbow…” Julie Andrews’s voice filled the room, almost drowning out the sound of faraway barking.

  “Have a nice rest of your day,” Whitworth said.

  She felt herself being flung forward and her head connected with the oak floor and the world was gone.

  CHAPTER 5

  2011

  On the other side of Webster County from the old house where Theresa Washington lay unconscious on a blood-splattered floor, Daniel Burke stepped out of the lounge onto the polished floor of the lobby of the Cincinnati Centurion Hotel.

  He was not in the best possible frame of mind. He was speaking tonight at the Tri-State Ministerial Association Pastors’ Conference in the hotel’s Emerald Ballroom, and late in the afternoon, he’d gotten a voice mail asking him to show up an hour early for a preconference gathering. But when he got to the hotel—no gathering. The conference registration desk wasn’t even set up, so he’d cooled his heels in the lounge, using his phone to make notes on his message for Sunday.

  Now, there was a silver-haired wo
man working behind a table bearing the sign “TSMA Register Here.” He slipped his phone into the breast pocket of his jacket as she handed him a blank nametag and a pen. He filled out the tag and stuck it to the pocket over his phone. He’d give it half an hour before it fell off.

  When the woman read it, she recognized him. “You look just like you do on TV,” she said.

  Daniel was a handsome man with a friendly, square-jawed face, kind brown eyes and hair the same chestnut-brown as his daughter, Andi. His six-foot frame was trim and three-times-a-week-in-the-gym fit. He waited patiently while the woman oohed about his church building—“It looks like a coliseum!”—and aahed about his congregation—“How do you know anybody with twenty-five-thousand people?” And as soon as she paused to take a breath, Daniel excused himself and crossed the lobby to the bank of elevators.

  The one on the far right in the set of three was sitting with the door open, a young woman dressed all in red—blouse, skirt and shoes—inside. She smiled broadly at Daniel, like they were old friends, and as soon as he stepped in, she pushed the Close Door button even though there was a man making purposefully for the elevator, obviously intent on getting on. Wherever the woman was going, she was in a hurry to get there.

  Daniel pressed fourteen for the Emerald Ballroom and settled back to stare at the lighted numbers as elevator courtesy required. The number four had just lit up when the woman pushed the emergency stop button, and the elevator halted with a jerk. What followed was the oddest few minutes of Daniel Burke’s life.

  The woman was tiny, barely five feet tall, with long blonde hair and a single diamond stud in her left nostril. Daniel turned to look at her, preparing to ask why she’d stopped the elevator, but the words died on his lips. She was gawking at him like she was the one who was surprised. And not only surprised, but frightened.