by Ninie Hammon
“Becca, honey…” Theresa began.
“That’s what he said that day, and then he pulled the fisherman’s arms off.”
Theresa exchanged looks with Jack and Daniel, who appeared as bewildered as she was. Only Andi was unfazed.
“One of the demons did that, didn’t he,” Andi said, “and you watched him do it, and it was awful. In the visions, I watch what demons do.” A tremor went through her whole small body. “It’s awful, too.”
Becca seemed to come back from some faraway place then, and her eyes fastened on Jack. Her voice was still soft, but it was tremulous now, and it was clear it took an emotional effort to get the words out. “It was in the woods. You and Daniel found me with the Bad Kids. I can't see all of it. There's fog swirling around. I can hear DD barking but I can't see him. Do you remember?”
Jack shook his head. “No, Becca. I’m sorry.”
“I do,” said Daniel, and Becca turned to him. “They were going to take you with them—to the efreet, I guess. I don’t remember anything except how scared you looked.”
“I remember it crisp and clear--no fog--like the images are sealed in a crystal bubble. I hid in a crepe myrtle bush with Dougal Dog and watched the Bad Kids murder a fisherman. No reason. Jacob Dumas just tore his arms off. Then they tied his body down in the river and piled rocks on it.”
Though Becca was making sense now, Theresa still couldn’t figure how that connected to what they’d just found out about Chapman Whitworth.
“All these years, that man’s family never knew what happened to him.” She didn’t even realize she’d put her hands into her armpits, hunched her shoulders and was hugging her own self. “I never told a soul because it hurt too bad to talk about it. It was so painful I couldn’t bring it up. And I’ve been refusing for years to face other things I know are true because they terrify me.” She paused. “Me, me, me. It’s always about me.”
Both Jack and Daniel started to protest, but she waved them off.
“I understood it for the first time after I saw the hat floating in the river.” No one had any idea what she was talking about. But what she said next confirmed what Theresa and Bishop had long believed. “I’m the one who failed when we were twelve. I don’t know how or why, but I’ve been running away and hiding from that failure ever since. It’s my fault he’s come back. I have to stop him.”
“Sugar, we all gone have to—”
“You don’t know how!”
Becca looked from one to the other of them, all the way around the room. “Do you know what to do—any of you?” No one spoke. “I know that creature better than any other human being. I’ve been in his presence, heard his thoughts, smelled his…”
She took a deep, shaky breath and crossed the room to the hallway. From where she sat, Theresa could see her walk slower and slower as she neared the door of Bishop’s study, like she had to push her way through some invisible force trying to keep her away. Might be that force was her own self. Might be it wasn't. She stopped in front of the door. Stood there. Then she reached out and turned the knob.
When she spoke, she wasn’t talking to nobody Theresa could see. But maybe Becca could.
“I’m going to find out how to destroy you," she said.
Then Becca Hawkins stepped into Bishop’s study and closed the door behind her.
CHAPTER 50
2011
Epilogue
A voice came out of the shadows, and Billy Ray jumped in spite of himself.
“You clean up good for a country boy.”
Billy Ray pulled at the tie in the stiff collar around his neck.
“I’d a'stuck out like a dog in a duck parade if I’d shown up here looking normal. And you said you wanted discreet.”
“Indeed, I do.” Chapman Whitworth stepped out into the light and smiled, a shark smile that never reached his strange, light-green eyes. “Silent partners need to blend in so well they disappear altogether.”
“It’s good you should mention that ‘partner’ thing ’cause that’s what I’m here to talk about,” Billy Ray began. “I want to nail down exactly what it is I’m payin’ for before I hand over—”
Billy Ray began to rise in the air. His face went white and he looked down in horror as his feet lifted farther and farther off the floor.
“What the—?”
Then his body flew across the room and slammed into the wall so hard a picture nearby fell off and shattered.
Billy Ray’s eyes were so huge he looked like a baby owl. Then he began to rise off the floor again, and he looked around in terror, trying to see how it was done, find some way it was an illusion, some kind of trick.
“How do you…put me down,” he whined, his gravelly voice whimpering like a frightened child. “Put me down…please.” Billy Ray suddenly dropped in a heap on the floor.
“A deal’s a deal, Billy Ray, and you can’t back out now.” Whitworth laughed, a dark parody of the real thing. It had an ugly, sinister edge to it. “Didn’t your mama ever warn you not to make a pact with the devil?”
He stood over where Billy Ray lay cowering on the floor.
“I’ll walk you through this—use little bitty words so I don’t have to draw you a picture with your crayons. You get clemency, a pardon. You don’t have to spend the next decade walking a tightrope, sucking up to a parole officer. And in exchange, I get certain ‘contributions’ to the Whitworth for President campaign.”
“You gonna use my money to buy the White House.”
It was a statement, not a question, but Whitworth answered it anyway. “No, I’m going to use it to buy an army.”
“What do you need an army for?”
Whitworth leaned toward him and spoke softly. “To start a war.”
EXTENDED MATERIAL
The Deceiving
SCENE #1
WHAT HAPPENED TO ISAAC WASHINGTON?
Daniel turned from Jack and looked at Theresa. “You were there that summer. You knew us and the other guys on the team. You must have seen something going on. What was it?”
“They was lots of things goin’ on that year, starting on Valentine’s Day,” she said. “But I can’t tell you much ’bout nothin’. I might have been smack up there in the middle of it all…but for a year, maybe two after that Valentine’s Day, I wasn’t worth shootin’.”
“What happened on Valentine’s Day?” Daniel asked.
“Why, that was the day the world come crashin’ down ’round my head,” Theresa said, “and I liked to never dug my way back out.”
The two men were silent, waiting for her to continue.
“My Isaac went missing on Valentine’s Day,” Theresa said, and tears sprang into her eyes. “Ain’t nobody seen him since.” She looked at Jack, “Shoot, for six months I wouldn’t even admit he was gone, tole myself all kinda stories about where he’d run off to and how he’d come home all apologizin’, sayin’ he’s sorry he made us worry.”
She looked from Jack to Daniel. “Either one of you boys remember Isaac?”
Jack did. The image of a tall, broad-shouldered young man with Bishop’s strength and Theresa’s kind eyes. He could hear the sound of his laughter—rich and full, and recall how he could throw a pitch so fast it’d burn right through the leather of a catcher’s mitt.
Jack remembered something else, too, and the pit of his stomach was suddenly hollow. Whatever it was that had happened to Isaac…it had been Jack’s fault. He was absolutely certain. The memory suddenly blossomed so crisp and clear in his mind it was like he was watching a movie on an IMAX screen.
Becca is standing with her hands on her hips. She looks first at Daniel, then at Jack, incredulous.
“Why on earth would you want to do a thing like that?” she asks.
“Don’t make such a big deal out of it,” Jack says. But in his own mind it is a very big deal. Booze had turned his father into a monster. No, that wasn’t exactly true. Booze had simply set a caged monster free. Either way, the result was the
same and Jack had pledged to himself before he was in first grade that alcohol would never pass his lips. And yet here he is, trying to explain to Becca why he and Daniel intend to “go out drinking” Saturday night.
“Come on Becca,” Daniel says. “It’s not like we’re going to get drunk or anything. We just want to see what it’s like.”
“There must be something cool about it or why would everybody do it?” Jack says.
“It’s sure not the taste,” Daniel made a face. “I tried a beer once and it tasted like yak pee.”
Becca burst out laughing. “Yak pee?”
“What Daniel means is that beer tastes like monkey vomit,” Jack says.
“Elephant sweat.”
“Orangutan snot.”
“Which is probably why people throw up after they drink,” Becca says. “If it tastes that bad going down, it probably tastes a whole lot worse coming back up. Doesn’t sound like fun to me.”
“People throw up when they get drunk,” Jack explains patiently. “We’re not going to get drunk. We’re just going to taste it. But we can’t very well do that at my house.”
“Or at mine,” Daniel puts in.
He and Daniel have it all set up. Daniel will be spending the night at Jack’s house, which is certainly testimony to the fact that Daniel’s parents are almost completely oblivious to his whole existence. It’s no secret that Jack’s father is a violent drunk. What minister—what father—allows his son to spend the night in an environment like that?
“When my father starts seriously throwing them back, he doesn’t know or care where I am,” Jack says, “so we’ll sneak out then, ride my bike here—” he anticipates the question and answers before she asks—“the tire won’t be flat, I’ll make sure of that. I’ll park it behind the barn and we’ll go in the back door.”
Jack had sneaked one of his father’s empty whisky bottles out of the trash a couple of weeks ago and has been stealing a little out of every bottle his father drinks ever since—not enough that he’ll notice, just a little. Jack’s bourbon bottle’s full, so they’re ready. Now, all he has to do is get Becca on board. Her father spared no expense on anything—from the mansion he lived in to the bike Becca rode—and Billy Ray Hawkins has the only heated barn in Caverna County. It’s February, some nights the temperature drops to below zero.
“We won’t hurt anything, mess anything up. What’s to mess up in a barn? We’ll just sit out there in the hay and try it, see what it’s like. Then we’ll get on the bike and go home. What do you say?”
Becca sighs and Jack knows they’ve won. Not that there was any doubt, really. He knew Becca’d never be able to refuse their combined efforts at persuasion.
The evening goes according to plan right up to the point where the two of them are sitting on a haystack in the barn, holding their noses so they can choke down shot glasses of one-hundred-proof Kentucky bourbon. Not the good stuff—Jim Beam or Maker’s Mark. Jack’s father drinks Old Grand Dad or Bourbon Deluxe. Though they don’t know much, the boys do know that you shouldn’t drink on an empty stomach—so Daniel had filched several slices of bread before he left his house and stuck them down in his coat pocket. The bread is smashed and lint-covered, but the boys pop hunks of it into their mouths between shots.
They haven’t drunk much at all—maybe four or five shots each—when the world goes wonky on them. Jack gets up to go outside to relieve himself and he has trouble standing. He staggers a little and Daniel bursts out laughing. Then it strikes Jack as funny, too, and before he knows it, he’s back on the floor again, rolling around in the hay, laughing hysterically. Now that they’ve started laughing, they can’t seem to stop.
“My lips are numb,” Daniel says. “Are yours?”
Jack nods.
“Rats. Guess we’ll have to skip the kiss goodnight.”
Jack almost wets himself.
They figure out that they’ve gone too far, of course, and stop drinking immediately, but it’s too late by then. They sit side by side in the hay, alternating between hysterical laughter and deep, profound discussions—though later Jack can’t remember the subject of any of them.
At some point, Jack opens his eyes and realizes he has dozed off. Daniel is asleep on the hay beside him, but when he tries to rouse him, Daniel remains as flaccid as a rag doll. It dawns on Jack slowly that he’ll never get Daniel on the back of his bicycle and pedal all the way home. Shoot, he probably couldn’t make it home by himself even without Daniel on the back. They can’t walk home—it’s too cold and too far and they’re both so unsteady on their feet they’d fall down and then lie there until they froze to death. And they have to get back. Daniel’s father is picking him up at Jack’s promptly at nine in the morning to go to church.
Jack tries unsuccessfully to wake Daniel again, then has an absolutely brilliant idea. He’ll call Isaac Washington and ask him to come get them and take them home! Becca has often described how she climbs out a window with a broken latch in the laundry room of her house in an effort to stay “out of sight, out of mind” when her father’s home. The laundry room’s next to the kitchen and there’s a phone on the kitchen wall.
Though Jack makes it into the house through the window without mishap, his feet get tangled up and he trips over a small metal trashcan the housekeeper uses for the lint she cleans out of the trap in the dryer. It seems to make an awful racket. Jack freezes. Waits. Nothing happens. Slowly, he relaxes. The kitchen is lit by the splash of the lights on the driveway through the windows. Jack tiptoes across the room, past puddles of blackness where the kitchen opens through archways into the den, the dining room and the hallway. He stumbles against a chair in the breakfast nook but grabs it before it can make more than a little scratching sound. It takes him three tries to get the number right.
“Isaac? Is that you?”
“Jack? Why are you calling so late? Is something wrong?”
“Nope, nothing’s wrong. Everything’s just peachy.”
“Jack…?”
“But I need a teeny, tiny little favor.”
“You sound…Jack, are you drunk?”
“No. I’m not drunk. Just a little tipsy is all.” Jack can’t stifle a giggle.
“You’re drunk. Where are you?”
“Daniel and I went out into the barn behind Becca’s house and had a little whisky, that’s all.”
“You’re calling from Billy Ray Hawkins’ house?”
“S’okay, s’okay…he doesn’t know I’m here.”
“Jack, you’ve got to get out of there. Do you have any idea how dangerous that man—?”
“Me and Daniel rode my bike here. But I don’t think we could ride it back to my house. Can you…come get us? Please?”
“I’ll be there as fast as I can. Now, hang up the phone and get out of that house!”
“Don’t tell anybody where you’re going.”
“I won’t.”
“Promise?”
“I promise I won’t tell a soul where I’m going.”
This time, the memory didn’t vanish instantly with a little sparkle like a soap bubble. It merely began to fade. Jack recalled staggering back out to the barn after the call, sitting down in the hay beside Daniel. He must have fallen asleep. Neither of them woke until mid-morning. Daniel got into a pot-load of trouble for not being at Jack’s when his father showed up to fetch him, but he’d cited the awful stomach virus he’d come down with as the cause, and his non-stop vomiting added validity to the story.
Through the shadowy veil of memory, Jack watched the Ford station wagon with Daniel lying in the back seat pull out of his driveway, could almost feel the skull-cracked headache throbbing in his own temples as he went to the phone and called to find out why Isaac had never shown up. The images faded to almost nothing with the sound of Bishop’s voice, telling Jack the sheriff had found Isaac’s wrecked car at the bottom of Scott’s Ridge.
Apparently, Isaac had kept his promise. He hadn’t told a soul where he was going
. And for the next twenty-six years, Jack never told a soul about that night either.
“Jack, you all right, Sugar?” Theresa’s voice blew away the final tatters and snips of memory. “You don’t look good. Did you remember somethin’—somethin’ about Isaac, maybe.”
Jack looked into her loving brown eyes. After more than a quarter of a century, it was time for him to tell the truth.
He took a deep breath, opened his mouth and spoke.
“No,” he said. “Sorry, I don’t remember anything. Nothing at all.”
*****
1985
Billy Ray released the pressure of his finger on the trigger of the double-barrel shotgun and stood absolutely still, watching from the dark of the hallway as the drunk nigger kid hung up the telephone and made his way to the laundry room to climb back out the window he’d climbed in. He coulda' just walked out the back door he was standing beside and let it lock behind him, but he was either too stupid or too drunk to figure that out. Probably both.
Billy Ray smiled. That fool nigger didn’t know how close he’d come to getting his head blown off—breaking in here makin’ more noise than a herd of buffalo. Billy Ray’d come quietly down the stairs with the shotgun he kept by his bedside, prepared to drop the “burglar” in his tracks. Then he’d heard a voice from the kitchen—“Isaac, is that you?”—and he’d eased silently through the darkness to the hallway where he could watch and listen.
It was that Carpenter kid, the nigger who was always sniffin’ around his Becca. He’d told her a hundred times he didn’t want her associatin’ with nigger scum, but ’parently she hadn’t been payin’ proper attention. He’d have to tell her again, he supposed, make sure he was real plain this time so’s she didn’t misunderstand, use his fists and his belt to get his point across. His smile broadened. Or maybe she’d listen better if he was to explain it with the bedside lamp on. He liked the lamp on. He liked to see.
