The Jabberwock

by Ninie Hammon

  It was still swaying.

  She’d been in the tub at least a half hour. Longer than that. Long enough for the water to get cold. Then dried her hair. So why was the receiver still moving if she’d dropped it before she even started running the bathwater?

  And the phone had rung!

  How could it have rung if it had been off the hook?

  The wave of fear washed back up onto the shore.

  It had rung! It had rung … hadn’t it?

  She thought it had, but even at the time she hadn’t been sure and now she had no idea if she’d imagined it or …

  Well, she had to have imagined it. Because off-the-hook phones didn’t—

  Why was it still swaying, the receiver turning like that guy who hung himself in Mr. Fischer’s English class? Loopy. She was getting loopy. The guy didn’t hang himself in Mr. Fischer’s class. He’d hanged himself in the book Mr. Fischer’d made them read. She couldn’t remember anymore the name of it, but she clearly remembered that one image from it: a dead man, hanging at the end of a rope, his body slowly spinning, facing the different points on a compass — north, then east, then south, then west. She’d always wondered what’d kept him spinning.

  But the rope hadn’t been an elastic extension phone line. And you could probably dangle the receiver on the end of one of those for three days and it’d keep twisting.

  The phone had rung.

  Maybe.

  This was nuts. She cinched the robe ties tight around her waist, marched down the hall, picked up the receiver where it dangled and put it to her ear. The line was dead. She pecked on the “thingy” — she’d never known what that disconnection bar was called — a time or two. Still no dial tone. It sounded dead, just like the phones sounded when they’d tried today to call out of the county.

  No, actually those phones had sounded unconnected or disconnected. This one had that hollow sound like the phone in the kitchen was off the hook, too.

  That thought grabbed hold of her guts and yanked them as tight inside her belly as the rope tie on her robe on the outside. Her thundering heart became a herd of stampeding buffalo. She—

  Stop it! Just stop it.

  She was tired, exhausted, had earned more than a few fried synapses.

  Replacing the receiver in its cradle, she wiped her hand off on her robe and headed toward the front of the house to peek in on Merrie before she collapsed in glorious catatonia in the back bedroom. It had a feather bed. The anticipation was delicious.

  She felt something sticky on the doorknob of Merrie’s bedroom door and wiped her hand again on her robe, pushing the door into the darkness of the room, lit now only by the saber of light from the hallway. She crossed to Merrie’s bed and stood for a moment, looking at the lump of a kid under the blanket. Sometimes she was … what was it the Brits said? Gobsmacked. Yes, gobsmacked by how much she adored that child. She smiled, and as she turned back toward the lighted hallway, she glanced down at the front of her robe.

  The smile drained off her face.

  There was something smeared across her robe. Something black. But she knew that in good light the smear wouldn’t be black. She knew exactly what color it would be. Red. Blood red.

  She pivoted back toward the bed, moving like she was encased in that clear stuff they found prehistoric bugs in — amber. She watched her hand glide through the air to the top edge of the blanket, saw her fingers grasp it and pull it down.

  All the oxygen was instantly sucked out of the room.

  Merrie wasn’t under the blanket on the top of the bed. The lump wasn’t a little girl. It was a pillow and a doll. A bloody doll.

  A voice spoke out of the shadows, a nightmare voice full of pebbles.

  “She ain’t there.”

  Charlie whirled toward the sound, unable to breathe or think.

  Then she watched in horrified amazement as the shape stepped … shambled out into the light. The figure was dressed in filthy, torn rags of clothing, a suit of scrubs from the Dollar General Store, but ripped, muddy and bloody. Her hair was a tangle with leaves and twigs. Looked like she’d been dragged through a mile of briars and brambles.

  Her face was skeletal, and much as Charlie tried, she could not picture what Abby Clayton had looked like when she first saw her, fuzzy blonde hair, face still raw from very recent adolescent acne. But beautiful. Beautiful with hope and love and joy and excitement. That girl was a person life had smiled on.

  This creature was none of those things. She was bleeding or had bled out of every orifice of her body. Small streams of blood, not gushing, but surely the accumulated blood loss …

  Bloody tears streamed down her filthy cheeks. Her ears were bleeding, as was her nose, and the crotch of the scrub pants was a wet, black stain.

  She’d suffered some kind of stroke or brain bleed or something because the left side of her face wasn’t lined up properly with the other side. She was clearly missing teeth, but maybe she had been before, too, and Charlie just hadn’t noticed. Her voice was the sound of chains dragged across a metal floor. Cold and ragged and fearful in every way. The strip of light that sliced into the room from the hallway lit the fire of rage on her face. Sparkled in her eyes.

  The left side of her body didn’t appear to be affected by the stroke or whatever’d happened in her brain. She held the rifle firmly, finger on the trigger.

  It took several gasps before Charlie had enough air to speak.

  “Where’s Merrie? What have you done with my baby?”

  “Ain’t ‘bout where she is. It’s ‘bout where she ain’t and she ain’t where she’s supposed to be.” Abby took another shuffling step farther into the light. “Just like I ain’t where I’m supposed to be — up Lexington with my boy.”

  “What have you done with—?”

  “Shut up!”

  The words rode a spray of blood out the creature’s mouth.

  “Ain’t for you to be talkin’. You listen. You brung that monster down on us. Ain’t no use denying it. I heard them whispering, the voices, saying the Jabberwock come to Nowhere County to play kiddie games with you and them others and have fun.”

  “What on earth are you talking—?”

  “I said for you to shut your filthy witch’s mouth!

  Abby advanced another step.

  “But you got yourself a sword, one of them ‘vorpal blades’ and you gonna use it on him. You gonna go looking for him in the woods behind that mirror thing where he hides. You gonna find him and kill him. Cut off his head — snicker snack — hold it up for everybody to see. Then everything’ll go back to the way it’s supposed to be and I can go get to my baby.”

  “Where is my little girl?”

  Charlie was glad to see there was neither fear no pleading in her voice. It was made of pure, cold steel and the power of it unsettled Abby just a bit.

  “Don’t matter where she’s at.”

  “Tell me what you did with my daughter.” Charlie advanced a step, with no firm plan of what she was going to do, though she was aware that her fingers had formed unconsciously into claws.

  “Wouldn’t do that, I’s you. I done planned for that part, you jumping me to get the gun and me too weak to fight back. That’s why I done what I done, so you couldn’t stop me by takin’ my gun, so you’d have to do what I say. You don’t and your little girl’s gonna die.”

  Charlie started to take another step.

  “I hid the key. Somewhere you’ll never find it. Even if you get my gun, even if you kill me, without that key, you can’t get that door open in time and yore little girl’s gonna suffocate.”

  Charlie was so staggered by the words her mind cartwheeled, fired random thoughts with no meaningful connections.

  “I put her in the kiln.”

  Charlie screamed, shrieked, wailed … without making a sound because sound required air and she couldn’t breathe.

  “Locked her up tight in there and hid the key. You best do what I tell you real quick, or she’s gonna die i
n there.”

  Charlie’s mind was processing as fast as she could. Merrie was … in the kiln. Locked inside it.

  “No, you couldn’t—”

  “Could and did. My mama come here lotsa times when I’s a kid, watchin’ your mama make them pots and ashtrays and such. A cup that wouldn’t sit flat on the table was all Mama made, but she told me all about your mama’s art stuff. About the kiln and how it had to be airtight. How it was locked up, but your mama kept the key on a nail behind the door so she could get to it when she needed it. It was right there, when I felt around for it. Just like she said.”

  “You put my baby in the kiln and closed the door?” The magnitude of the horror was staggering.

  “Didn’t just close it. Locked it. She never made a peep. I come in the window, carried her out the back door and she never even wiggled.”

  It was incredible that the woman before her was even able to stand. How had Abby carried Merrie — that child was a little chunk — and …? But how had Abby gotten here?

  She’d climbed the mountain!

  “Put her down real careful like on a piece of brand new carpet that was a layin’ on top of a stack of carpet rolls on the floor.”

  Carpet. Her mother had carpeted her bedroom a couple of years ago, said the hardwood was too cold on her feet. Had she stored the leftover carpet in the kiln?

  “I didn’t want to wake her up and her start pitchin’ a fit.” She paused and the menace in her voice was chilling. “She’d a woke up … it’d a got ugly. But that carpet was soft as a bed and you’s right, that littlun sleeps like the dead. Which is what she’s gonna be if you don’t get her out of there ‘fore she breathes up all the air.”

  All the air.

  How much was there?

  How much breathable air was in the kiln? Charlie had no idea. It was a big kiln, but it wasn’t empty. Her mother had used it for storage after she closed up her pottery shop, put all her art supplies in it. And there was other stuff in it, too, seemed like. It’d been years since Charlie’d been inside, but she knew there were boxes, big boxes sitting everywhere. Shoot, the Christmas tree decorations were even stored in it.

  “I’m thinking an hour — no, more like an hour and a half. Hard to know because that kiln was jammed full of all kind of stuff. Wasn’t hardly no place to lay her down, but she ain’t big as a miner, so she wouldn’t use up as much air. Outside’d probably be two hours, but I surely would not count on that.”

  This was a coal mining community. Everybody knew the “math of life,” the formula that determined what happened after a mine cave-in — whether there was enough air in the tunnel to last until rescue came.

  Abby recited it: “One cubic yard of air will last one miner one hour. That’s the onliest reason my daddy learned the multiplication tables.” Height, width and length multiplied together and divided by twenty-seven. “The ‘divided by twenty-seven’ part’s the hardest, so you change it to thirty and you’s close enough. Take the zeroes off the end of it and the other number and you’s just dividin’ by three. Ain’t hard. Anybody can do that.”

  Charlie finally found her voice.

  “You can’t possibly be serious, you’d leave a little girl closed up in—”

  “Would and did. She ain’t been in there more than five minutes. You still got lotsa time.”

  Charlie looked at her watch. It was 2:51 a.m. Abby had locked Merrie in the kiln at 2:45, then. In an hour, it would be 3:45. In an hour and a half, it would be 4:15 a.m. In two hours, it would be 4:45.

  “It don’t take but what? Twenty minutes to get from here to the county line? Round trip’s forty minutes and you got sixty — maybe ninety. You take me, use that Vorpal Sword on the monster and make him let us go—”

  “I will not leave my baby—”

  “I left my baby. Left him up there in the hospital waiting for his mama to come nurse him. But I’m comin’ now. Half an hour from now I’m gonna be on my way to Lexington to get him.”

  On her way how? Was she planning to walk? In her condition? Hitch a ride? Wasn’t a whole lot of traffic in the middle of the night on a desolate mountain road. Then Charlie knew. Abby planned to kill her and take her car.

  “Ever second you spend standin’ here jawin’ your girl’s usin’ up air in that kiln. We need to git.”

  Charlie surrendered. A clock was ticking. She’d think of something.

  “Okay.”

  “Keys is in your mama’s car. I done checked. I checked everything. Climbin’ that mountain, I had lotsa time to plan what I’s gonna do.”

  Chapter Thirty

  Malachi was impressed that Sam could keep the old car on the road. But she obviously knew the car like a best friend and the road just as well. She anticipated the curves, watched for lights around bends, slowed just a bit before the whoop-de-dos so that flying up into the air and banging back down didn’t send them off into a ditch.

  As the day’d worn on, he’d been more and more surprised at his own reaction to the insanity, the craziness that he might just wake up tomorrow morning in some Veteran’s Hospital somewhere to discover was all an allergic response to some drug.

  He’d felt calm and centered and understood that was because the situation put him back into his element, the emotional space where he felt most comfortable. He functioned well “doing the necessary” and there’d been a lot of that today. And he’d felt the coiled spring inside him begin to uncoil, not all the way, but enough to allow him more rational thought than he’d had since he got home at Christmas. He was enormously grateful for that, because it was with a clear head that he’d decided he would very likely have to kill Abby Clayton. He hated that, but it would be “doing the necessary.” He wouldn’t have left that decision up to Liam, even if Liam’d been there to come with them. But it’d be nice to be packing the deputy’s sidearm.

  The spring began to recoil itself as they turned off Danville Pike onto Barber’s Mill Road and headed down it to the home of Sylvia Ryan, Charlie’s mother. As soon as Sam squealed into the driveway, he grabbed her forearm and squeezed, probably so tight it hurt but that was okay.

  “We agreed. You stay here.”

  “I didn’t agree to anything. But it doesn’t matter. She’s not here. Sam’s mother’s car was parked in the driveway when I brought her home. Now it’s gone.”

  “I said, stay here.”

  She didn’t argue with him, but neither did she make any move to get out of the vehicle.

  “Kill the lights.”

  She killed the lights.

  He got out of the car, careful not to close the door with a sound that could be heard. Then he Groucho-walked to the side of the house next to the front door and flattened himself up against it. Exposing as little of his body as possible, he peeked carefully around the frame of the window, but the interior of the room was dark and he could see nothing but shapes and shadows.

  His plan, such as it was, was to jump Abby the moment he saw her. Take advantage of surprise and the fact that she couldn’t move fast. Crash down on her instantly before she had time to shoot. But if she saw him coming, if he couldn’t surprise her, Plan B was to trick her, somehow, to get that one moment of inattention, and dive for the rifle.

  It was surprisingly hard to deliver a lethal wound to a moving target with any weapon, no matter how NYPD Blue made it appear. She’d be firing a .22. It was for hunting squirrels and it’d be hard to kill a man with a single shot from a .22. Could be done, if you hit a vital organ, but he’d be moving fast and the odds were on his side that even if she shot him, he’d survive the wound — at least long enough to take her out.

  He went around the house to the back, ducking under the windows so he couldn’t be seen. The gate to the backyard fence was standing ajar. The back door was unlocked. He was tempted to call out for Charlie, but there went his element of surprise, so he eased the screen open just enough to squeeze through. The spring on every screen door on the planet squeaked when you opened it all the way, e
ven if you slathered it in WD-40. He crossed the dark kitchen and ventured into the hallway. He smelled flowers, some kind of flowered perfume, soap or bubble bath maybe. He checked the rooms systematically, cleared them one by one, and found what he was looking for but hoping not to find in the room on the front of the house. The window was up and there was blood on the window sill. Instead of a little girl in the bed, there was a doll — with blood on it. Blood on the floor, too, drips that lead out the front door. He followed the drips out the door and ran to the car.

  “They’re gone. There was a bloody doll lying in the little girl’s bed.”

  “Merrie!” Sam sucked in a gasp. “Abby thinks Charlie can kill the Jabberwock. What’s she going to do to Charlie and Merrie when she finds out different?”

  “Let’s hope we get there before she does.”

  Instead of putting the car in reverse, Sam opened her door and leapt out of the car, flinging “Wait!” over her shoulder as she raced into the house. She returned in seconds, carrying a bundle that she tossed into the front seat.

  “What’s—?”

  “A bluff.”

  Chapter Thirty-One

  It was all Charlie could do to keep from screaming. She wanted to leap across the car and grab the madwoman by the throat, choke her, force her to tell what she’d done with the key.

  Merrie was locked in the kiln.

  The kiln!

  She would die if Charlie couldn’t get her out before the air ran out.

  Somewhere inside she did scream, she shrieked, though she made no audible sound. She wailed in terror and impotent rage, wailed at the top of her psychic lungs. But she remained silent.

  And when she finished screaming she grabbed hold of her emotions and grasped them in an iron-claw grip. If she panicked, Merrie would die. If this woman killed Charlie, Merrie would die.

  She had to think of something, some way to get this crazy monster to tell her what she had done with the key.

  But how?

  The tatters of her mind blew in circles, like the black flanks of starlings that cavorted over the trees, thousands of them, turning in unison, diving and soaring back and forth across the invisible Beaufort County border. Her thoughts were those starlings. They were dark, thousands and thousands of them, too many to pick out any one of them to think.