by Ninie Hammon
“Yeah, it was you, alright. You done somethin’. Well, you got to un-do it. Whatever it was, you got to make it go away because I gotta go get my baby.”
“This isn’t Mrs. McClintock’s fault,” Liam told Abby and placed his hand on her shoulder. Abby slapped it away, her eyes narrowed in anger.
“Well, whatever you done ain’t gonna stop me!” She spit the words at Charlie. “I ain’t gonna stand here jawin’. I’m gonna go get my baby. I got to nurse him because he’s hungry.” She patted a small bulge in the hip pocket of her jeans. “I got promises to keep and long’s I’m breathin’ I ain’t gonna break them. If I gotta walk, I’ll walk. I’ll hitch a ride. I stick my thumb out, somebody’ll pick me up.”
She took a couple of steps before Sam grabbed her arm.
“You can’t, Abby. You’re still shaking. You can barely stand up. You haven’t recovered from … if you try to go through there …”
Sam looked like she’d lost the juice to complete the statement they all knew she was trying to make.
“You’ll wind up in the bus shelter,” said Malachi Tackett. “You won’t step through that mirage to the other side like the rock did. You’ll appear in the Middle of Nowhere.” He paused. “Sick as a dog.”
“That’s crazy! It ain’t right … something’s not … I’m gonna go get my boy.” She started back toward the mirage.
“Wait, Abby,” Sam said. “Let me go first.” And before anybody could stop her, Sam stepped forward and walked into her own reflection in the mirage.
And vanished.
Chapter Twenty
It was dark, but the dark was light and that didn’t make sense but it was true. The dark was shining, illuminating the emptiness like a candle in a well. The sound was overwhelming, maddening, deafening, horrifying, felt like it was drilling into her ears, her nose, into any opening into her body and would explode out of it from the inside.
It was like static but not, more the one-note tone of a phone when you picked up the receiver — overlaid by a ragged edge of jittery sound.
Standing in the road, she had felt the warm spring sunshine on her face. Then the darkness.
Now her face was in shadow. Both the sunshine and the dark were gone and she was suddenly more desperately sick than she had ever been in her life. Her eyes flew open, she saw a smear of reality … asphalt, someone standing in front of her … Pete Rutherford and his dog … and then she was vomiting.
She vomited more ferociously than she thought it was possible for the human body to eject stomach contents. It exploded out her mouth and her nose, tore through her throat with such force and violence it scraped the tissue raw.
The pain of the nausea in her guts was indescribable, a horror sensation that only emptying herself out would relieve, and she joined forces with her internal organs in an effort to throw up everything … everything, couldn’t get the vomit out fast enough, gasped and heaved and gasped and was aware of nothing but the sick feeling and the pressure to relieve it.
And the sound of someone beside her, a girl on the bench, sobbing, whimpering, “I can’t see. Help me, I can’t hear.”
When the van marked Dr. Elijah Hamilton, DVM, pulled back into the parking lot twenty minutes later, Sam was still shaky, didn’t trust herself to stand. Those who’d been with her at the county line piled out of the vehicle and Charlie rushed to her side, concern and relief fighting for purchase on her face.
“You’re … are you …?”
Sam couldn’t help noting who didn’t approach or ask if she was alright, showed no concern at all. So let it be written, so let it be done.
Liam had Abby by the arm, holding her upright but restraining her, too, and she struggled weakly to get free.
“Lemme go. I ain’t done nothing. Let me go get my baby.”
“Case you ain’t been payin’ attention, missy, tryin’ to go get your baby’s only gonna land you right back here.” Viola Tackett called them as she saw them. “And if I’s to guess, I’d say you’ll likely to be in worse shape than you was the first time you showed up.”
Abby lost it. She leaned her head back, closed her eyes and screamed, “What’s happening?”
“Yes, please … what’s happening? Where’s my car?”
The question came from the girl who’d been sitting beside Sam. Hayley Norman, a morbidly obese teenager, fifteen or sixteen, the daughter of the Reverend Duncan Norman. When she’d arrived, she’d been blind and deaf, but that only lasted a couple of minutes, and she had been babbling about her car ever since she’d regained her sight and hearing.
The asphalt beneath Sam’s shoes was wet where Pete Rutherford had rinsed it off, but the smell of vomit lingered.
“Try to leave the county and you wind up here … somehow,” offered Liam. “Doesn’t appear to matter where you cross the county line.” They had obviously talked in the van about what had happened to them, compared notes, still he looked around for confirmation he didn’t need. It was obvious the people standing around him had not all been in the same place when … whatever happened happened. The only common thread that sewed their circumstances together was the county line.
There’d obviously been discussion of the why on the way back, too. There were no limits to the possibilities because it was impossible. Sam figured it was most likely some absurdly rare meteorological phenomena related to the freak storm that had blown through the county last night.
“This is crazy,” Abby shrieked. “I gotta gooo. My Cody’s waiting for me to come get him.” She turned to Charlie, not angry anymore, pleading. “Make it go away, this Jabberwock. I’m begging you. Make it go away, please.”
“Where’s my car?” Hayley asked, still disoriented. “My mother doesn’t know I took it. I was gonna be back before …”
“They’s gonna be other people here,” Pete Rutherford said. “If … whatever this is … if this Jabberwock thing keeps happening, people are going to keep showing up here. I’d say it ain’t gonna be long before they’s a considerable number of sick, hurtin’ people in this parking lot.”
“What’s the population of Nower County?” Charlie asked. Nobody answered. She looked around. “You mean nobody knows how many people live here?”
“I suspect it’d be more accurate to say nobody cares,” Viola said.
“It’s not as simple as it sounds.” Sam tried to explain. “Nower doesn’t have county government, no incorporated towns, so our numbers get lumped in with the surrounding counties in statistics. The circuit judge has jurisdiction in four counties and Nower’s one of them. I work for the state health department in Nower, Beaufort and Drayton Counties. Our Congressional District is six counties … you see?”
“A guess, then,” Charlie said. “An estimate.”
“Two thousand people,” E.J. said.
“It’s more than that,” Pete said. “More like three thousand … maybe thirty-five hundred.”
“Thirty-five hundred people in Nower County!” Viola scoffed. “What rocks is all them people hidin’ under? If they’s even a thousand people live here I’m my own grandpa.”
“The tax rolls aren’t accurate because so many people don’t pay taxes,” Liam said. “But last time I looked, there was four tho—”
“Don’t nobody but me care what’s happenin’?” Abby cried, looking from one to the other. “It don’t matter how many of us they is, can’t none of us leave and” — she turned on Charlie — “it’s her fault. Somebody make her fix it!”
“Pete’s right,” Liam said, ignoring the outburst and trying to circle the conversation back to Pete’s concern. Liam was trying to sound official, hard to do with the front of his shirt stiff from dried blood and a dribble still edging down his lip from his left nostril. “We need to report this.”
“To …?” Viola Tackett asked.
“The State Police Post in—”
“I don’t think you can call out of the county,” E.J. said. “I called Jeb Pruitt in Twig early this morning and got
through fine. But then I tried to call Lexington, three or four different numbers — where we order antibiotics, places like that, and got nothing, not even a busy signal.”
“Local people, then. We need to warn—”
“How?” Pete Rutherford asked. There was no radio station in Nowhere County.
“We need to tell people not to—”
“Not to what?” Viola said. “Not to try to leave the county?” She bleated a chuckle. “Run that up the flagpole and see how many folks you can get to salute.” She shook her finger at an imaginary somebody, “‘Ya’ll need to stay home now, because if you don’t, you’ll wind up puking your guts out at the Dollar General Store.’ Who you think’s gonna believe a thing like that?”
“I still think we have to try,” Sam said, speaking for the first time, her normally deep voice an octave lower because she was hoarse. “A phone tree. We could spread the word that way. Edith Wilkerson’s got a big prayer circle and we could …” Even as she said it, she realized it would be sticking a finger in the dike. “It’s just that after going through …” She actually shuddered. “There are people in this county — old, sick — who might not survive the Jabberwock.”
“I need to call in,” Liam said. The sheriff was likely out of the county, fishing. He went fishing every weekend at Lake Cumberland. But maybe the other deputies were at home. Liam’s radio was in his cruiser, so he started toward the Dollar Store. “I’ll borrow a phone.”
“Use my office,” E.J. said. “There are two lines. Anybody else who wants to call …?”
Viola turned to Malachi. “Call Neb. Tell him to come get us.”
Sam knew what she meant was to call the Martins, who lived at the bottom of the ridge, give them a message. The Tacketts didn’t have a telephone.
Abby rushed to Sam and grabbed her hands.
“Please, you got to help me. I got to get up Lexington. My Cody’s waitin’ for me. Will you take me?” Abby gestured toward Sam’s car, the only one parked in front of the store, though there were now a dozen people in the parking lot. “You still got a car. You could take me. I’ll pay you.” She looked around, disoriented, only just now missing the purse she must have left in her truck. “I ain’t got no money now, but I’m good for it. You know I am. Just … please …” The desperation in her voice was heartbreaking. “Please help me.”
“Abby, we don’t know what’s going on or how long it will last, but we do know that right now, you can’t cross the county line or you’ll just end up here, sick.” The girl was devastated and Sam fought for something to say that would make her feel better. “Nobody knows what it is, why it is. It just appeared and I’m sure it’s going to disappear the same way — poof, not there anymore. Then life can go right back to normal.”
“You think it’s just gonna go away?”
How would Sam know? In truth, Sam did not think it was going to go away, though she had absolutely nothing to base that belief on, no empirical data to support it. Of course, she couldn’t tell poor Abby Clayton that. “Sure I do. We’ll wake up tomorrow morning and it’ll—”
“Tomorrow!” Abby couldn’t have sounded more horrified if Sam had suggested she build an altar to Satan right there in the parking lot and sacrifice her baby son on it. “I can’t wait until tomorrow to get my baby!”
She looked into Abby’s faded-blue eyes, focused on capturing her attention.
“Look at me Abby. Listen. I will help you. I promise I will. But right now helping you means not letting you go running off into the Jabberwock—”
“The Jabberwock. The Jabberwock. Stop calling it that!”
“—and making yourself sick. Are you listening to me? Do you understand what I’m saying to you?”
“Onliest thing I understand is I ain’t there and my baby needs me.” She looked down at the front of her shirt where a wet spot had appeared. “See there! See what I mean. I been pumping so there’d be extra for when I come home. But they done used that up by now and it’s time to feed him. I’m supposed to be there — right now! — nursing my baby.”
“I will take you to Lexington myself, okay? I will drive you to the hospital and go in with you and help you gather up your baby’s things. Just as soon as it’s possible to leave. But it’s not possible right now.”
Abby said nothing, just looked daggers at Charlie. Then she shook her head and made some kind of sound, like a baby rabbit run over by a hay baler. She sat down, right there in the middle of the parking lot, put her head in her hands and started to cry.
Holmes Fischer was standing nearby, looking worn and desperately in need of a drink. He looked at Abby and announced to everybody and nobody:
“Anybody given any thought to the other side — out there beyond the Jabberwock? The people who are expecting us.” Abby looked up when he said that. “When Abby here doesn’t show up at the hospital. When Hayley doesn’t show up at” — he turned to the teenager who’d just regained her sight — “where was it you said you were going?”
The girl looked like he’d kicked her in the belly with a pointed-toe cowboy boot.
“I wasn’t going nowhere! I just borrowed my mother’s car to … go for a ride, that’s all.”
Fish blew her off.
“Well, whatever. The point is that somebody out there is bound to start wondering what happened to us.” He smiled down at Abby. “And come looking for us.”
The hope that bloomed on Abby Clayton’s face was as bright as her smile had been a hundred years ago when she’d been buying a package of onesies in the Dollar General Store.
“Ya think? Ya think somebody’ll come?”
Sam quickly put a smile on her own face that fit there like a stick-on name tag. Somewhere deep inside, the Essential Sam didn’t believe for a minute the Jabberwock could be beaten that easily.
Chapter Twenty-One
In a reasonable world — which this had ceased to be the moment they’d all fallen off into black light — Sheriff’s Deputy Liam Montgomery would have stepped in and organized all that came after the trip to the county line. He was, after all, a sworn-in law enforcement officer. But a uniform did not a police officer make. Liam was still mildly disoriented. His nose had never completely stopped bleeding, and it quickly became clear to Charlie that he didn’t have a whole lot of experience — as a police officer or anything else.
Liam had called in to the sheriff’s department to confirm that Sheriff Mason had, indeed, gone fishing in Lake Cumberland yesterday, which left Liam and Senior Deputy Skeet Phillips on the hook for policing. Phillips was nowhere to be found. The sheriff’s department operated out of a little office in the Ridge, the only one of the handful of communities in the county that was formally incorporated into a town, though it had been unincorporated at some time in the past and Charlie didn’t know when or why. Maybe there hadn’t been a why. Maybe it had just been a process of decay, like a shoelace gradually coming untied so that it gets looser and looser until the shoe finally comes off altogether. It wasn’t likely there’d been an official un-incorporating ceremony, complete with a bottle of champagne to shatter over the bow of the not-a-legal-town-anymore to christen it. It was more likely it just happened when nobody was looking and by the time they did notice it didn’t matter anymore because they didn’t care.
Charlie had taken Merrie on a little tour of the county when she’d first arrived early yesterday morning. An excuse for nostalgia. Coming here for the last time seemed to mandate a survey of her past, her “heritage.” The old man who owned the strawberry patch where she used to go with her mother to pick baskets full of berries the size of ping-pong balls had come back to Nower County to live after the First World War and her mother had asked him why he’d returned. He’d said the one thing in life they can’t take away from you is where you’re from.
“You can lose your house, you can lose your family, you can lose a bet, you can lose your job, or your driver’s license or your mind or your will to live or the card that tells you the date
of your next dentist’s appointment,” he’d said, “but you can’t never lose where you’re from. That’s yours for permanent, for always.”
But as time went by, Charlie had come to think of where she was from as less a thing she couldn’t lose and more something she couldn’t get rid of. Like gum on her shoe, the little nowhere place in the Kentucky mountains would always stick to her. It had in some ways defined her, she knew, though she couldn’t have articulated how that was. After she left, it became merely an empty spot in her mind where she never went, the reality of it a “nowhere” populated by people trapped by circumstances. Charlie didn’t know anybody who’d actually moved to Nower County on purpose.
No, that wasn’t true. There had been the Amish family named — what else? — Yoder who had stayed on after they’d built her mother’s kiln.
Sylvia Ryan had transformed the two-car garage on their shallow three-acre lot at the base of the mountain into an art studio when Charlie was in elementary school, and no car ever saw the inside of it again. One whole side was nothing but shelves, built at right angles to the wall with walk space between; they were the residence of all manner of pots, bowls, vases, cups, ashtrays -– just about anything you could make out of clay — that her mother sold in shops all over the eastern part of Kentucky, West Virginia and Tennessee. The other side of the garage was home to a potter’s wheel and to long tables with benches where she conducted classes to teach others how to make an ashtray. Taking a “ceramics” class from Mrs. Ryan — particularly since there was no charge for the class and supplies were furnished — was enough of a curiosity that probably half the women in the county had eventually shown up to take advantage of it.
Most of the “students” had no idea that making a pot or a bowl or an ashtray required so many steps and that the end products had to be fired in her mother’s kiln.
Charlie remembered construction of the kiln because the outside structure that sat in the back yard beside the garage door was built by a crew of Amish stone masons from Pennsylvania and they were an oddity her friends actually came to her house to see.
