“Look,” Clemson said with a gasp, grabbing hold of Larry’s arm.
Larry jumped and turned around to where Clemson had nodded. Larry stared wide-eyed into the dark fringe of woods that came up within thirty yards of Abigail’s back porch and caught a glimpse of something moving in the moonlight.
“What is it?” Alvin said, pressing himself close up against Larry’s side.
“Hush up,” Clemson said hissing. But it was too late. Whoever it was had heard them. Larry couldn’t make out the face, hut when the figure stopped he could feel it staring through the darkness, right at him.
“Shit, I’m getting out of here.”
But Larry took hold of Clemson’s arm before the other boy could turn around. The dark figure stood there for another moment, frozen, and then turned and hurried back into the woods.
“Let’s go,” Larry said.
The four boys stopped to catch their breath at the old schoolhouse. Alvin, panting loudly from the run back, looked over at Larry. “Who was it?” Alvin said with a gasp, his voice squeaking on the final syllable.
Larry shook his head. “Don’t know.”
“Who you think it could’ve been?” Alvin said, this time appealing to Clemson. But none of the hoys was able to answer Alvin’s question. Clemson stood up and looked back in the direction they had come from. “Whoever it was,” he said, “he come for him.”
“Who?”
“Why, Abigail’s orphan. What d’you think he was a-standing at that window for, way he was? He was waiting. Waiting for what we seen a-sneaking up through old Abigail’s backyard. And that candle, bet it was some kind of signal. I knowed it from the first. Something ain’t right about it. No, sir. Ain’t right at all.”
The other boys, except for Larry, nodded their agreement. They sat there quietly, the silence interrupted only by Alvin’s heavy breathing. Clemson stood up. “Reckon we best be getting on back home.” The other boys got up, but Larry remained a moment longer on the ground with his legs crossed, his face in a frown, his eyes fixed on the darkness.
Back in his room, Larry rearranged the covers. He got into bed and closed his eyes, but immediately he opened them again.
As he stared at the wall, Larry remembered an old woman’s voice speaking to him from long ago. “You got you a worsest nightmare, too,” it whispered. “Just a-waiting for you at the top of that old ladder.”
It was a voice he had heard years before, when he was eight. The voice of the old black woman, Hattie.
Like every other child in Lucerne, Larry had been aware of Hattie for as long as he could remember, though what stood out most vividly in his mind was the famous suitcase she carried around, even if only for a journey of a few feet. It was alleged to be full of what Hattie called her secrets, strange concoctions to ward off evil dreams and “hants,” plus an old pair of reading glasses and a mysterious Bible that had belonged to her daddy. According to Hattie, when she put on these glasses and opened the Bible, she could read things in it that no one else even suspected were there.
Larry had even heard the story of how Hattie had come by her strange powers.
Over a century before, in the days of slavery, the first Randolph patriarch had four of his runaway slaves brought into the woods in the middle of the night, to a place called the snake well. There he ordered a rope to be tied around each of their ankles, then lowered them, one by one, into the well. Their screams, according to the legend, could be heard as far as five miles away in the slave quarters of the Randolph plantation.
At sunrise the four slaves were hauled back up. Three were dead. One, an old man, was alive. Afterward this slave was found to possess a strange gift. By asking a single question, he could divine at once the exact way in which a man would die, although not the moment of death. His single question was, “Tell your worstest nightmare.” Fingertips on the speaker’s eyelids, the old man would sink deep into a trance in which, according to legend, he was able to see beyond the point of maximum terror, where the dreamer had always awakened before. Here, behind the last door—the door that the dreamer was never able to open himself—the old man could behold the secret of his death.
At first people flocked to the old man to ask how they would die. But as the accuracy of his powers became apparent, people began avoiding him. He died at the age of a hundred and three, living in absolute solitude except for the child that had been born to him in his ninety-sixth year. This girl was with him on his deathbed, at which time the old man whispered into her ear the way in which she was to die. By fire. Then putting his hands on her eyes, he passed on to her the power that had come to him in the bottom of the well.
The girl’s name was Hattie.
Hattie’s little shack was near the Allatoona, only a hundred or so yards from the river’s edge. Larry had been by it many times on his way fishing, both alone and with his dad. The property belonged to Lou Anne’s invalid aunt, Beulah, who charged Hattie five dollars a month for the privilege of living in the rundown shanty.
The incident began inauspiciously enough. Larry’s dad had dropped him off at his Great-aunt Beulah’s house, where for the obligatory fifteen minutes before fishing Larry managed to endure Beulah’s suffocating bedroom as the cranky old woman listed her most recent ailments.
Toward evening, Larry was walking back to Beulah’s when he noticed Hattie standing at the door to her shack. She waved him over.
Inside the shack Larry looked around and saw there was only one chair in the place, the creaky rocker Hattie was sitting in. Not wanting to be impolite, Larry said nothing and sat on the floor.
“Come closer, honey,” Hattie said. Shaking her head, she said with a grin, “My, my, you such a pretty child. There was a pretty child once I used to tell my stories to. You ain’t never seen a prettier little girl, honey, than she was.” She leaned back in her rocker.
Larry, unsure what to say, smiled and shrugged. Outside it was just getting dark. Then just as Larry was about to say that he had to be getting back, Hattie whispered, “I reckon there’s a question you be wanting to ask old Hattie. Ain’t that so?” Surprised, Larry shook his head. “No. Not really.”
She stopped rocking and leaned forward. “I knew your momma long time ago. I know you, too. Ain’t a day goes by, old Hattie ain’t thought of you, honey. Not a day.”
“Me?”
“So you sure you ain’t got a question for old Hattie, hon?”
Larry frowned, looking down at the floor. Then he looked at her and at the old suitcase that sat next to the rocker.
“Reckon you done heard about the suitcase. Maybe you done heard some other stories, too? Ain’t that so?”
Larry nodded. Then, screwing up his courage, he asked, “Are they true? Those stories about the things you can do?”
Hattie had looked down at him, then laughed. “There’s so many stories, hon, reckon some of them bound to be true.
Larrv hesitated, then said, “I mean, can you see ghosts and things?”
Hattie squinted hard down at him, no longer smiling. Then she rocked back and forth slowly and said, “Reckon that kind of depends on what you want to call a ghost. Who knows? Maybe you done seen one yourself.”
Larry laughed nervously. “I sure think I’d remember if I had.”
But Hattie didn’t laugh. “What make you so sure, honey?” She pursed her lips. Then, leaning over to the other side of her creaking old rocker, she spat a wad of chewing tobacco into her brass spittoon. “In your dreams, you ever seen a dead man?” Hattie had stopped rocking. She looked down at Larry, her eyes hard and piercing, as if she could see right through him, into the most secret parts of his mind. “You ever see a dead boy? A dead white boy?”
Larry stared up at her, his mouth open. There were chill bumps all over the back of his neck. He waited a second. Then, without saying a word, he nodded.
Then Hattie started r
ocking again, a flicker of a smile on her lips. “You tell Hattie about it.”
And Larry told her. Just three weeks before, Lester Eubanks had been shot in a hunting accident. Larry and the rest of his class had gone to Tommy Lee Anderson’s funeral parlor to view Lester’s body. That same night Larry had seen the boy in a dream. His face and voice had been exactly the way Larry remembered them when he was alive. He had come up to the window of Larry’s bedroom and kept talking and tapping on the screen. “Nobody wants to play with me anymore, Larry. And just because I’m dead.” Larry had awakened in a cold sweat, and without even waiting to check the window had gone running to his parents’ bedroom, where he remained the rest of the night.
“That dead white boy, what you think he was?”
“I guess it was just a dream,” Larry answered. “That’s what my mom told me, anyway, that he was really only inside my head.”
“That dead white boy, he seem like he was inside your head? Or he seem like he was out a-scratching at the window?”
Squirming uncomfortably, Larry sat up. But before he could say anything, Hattie went on. “If that boy be dead, how could he be a-scratching at that window of yours? Less he was a ghost?”
“I don’t know.”
“That dead white boy, hon, he just come slipping down that old ladder. That ladder Jacob seen.”
“You mean Jacob’s ladder? In the Bible?”
Hattie nodded. “Old Jacob had him a dream. And in that dream, he seen him a ladder. And what you think he see going up and down that ladder?”
“Angels,” Larry said, remembering the story from Miss Amelia’s Sunday school class.
Hattie looked at him, and to his surprise, burst into laughter, rocking back and forth. “Reckon the white widow ladies over at the Methodist church be telling you all about them angels? You believe in them, hon,” Hattie whispered, more than a trace of mockery in her voice, “you believe in them angels the white widow ladies always going on about?”
Yes, they’re in the Bible, Larry thought. But somehow, with Hattie’s eyes on him, he couldn’t say it. All he could do was remember the goofy-looking pictures of them in his illustrated Bible, with huge floppy wings sprouting from their backs, and long blond hair so that he could never decide if they were supposed to be boys or girls. “I’m not sure,” he whispered, looking down. “Maybe. . . .”
Larry could now smell the strong odor of whiskey on Hattie’s breath. “Reckon there’s something the white widow ladies done forgot to tell you about that ladder,” looking to either side, then scooting the rocking chair closer. “Bible say, Jacob was afraid, mighty afraid. He seen them things on that ladder, he get chill bumps all up and down his spine. Cause what he seen coming down, they wasn’t like nothing they be telling you in no Sunday school.”
“What d’you mean?”
Hattie grinnned. “Why, it was one of them things you catch out of the corner of your eye, only it’s getting to be evening, and when you go to look around, it’s gone. Like that dead white boy was gone when you went back to look. And how you think he got there, hon?” She whispered. “Why, he come down that ladder, same ladder as Jacob seen, same ladder as always been there, always will be, too. Only when we sees it, we’s afraid the way old Jacob was, and we says to ourselves, ‘Ain t no ladder, ain’t nothing coming down it, neither.’ We says, ‘Them dreams, why, there ain’t nothing to them. They’s just our ‘magination, just some old collards I done et too much of last night.’”
Hattie took another drink and stood up. “Hattie’s going to tell you a story, honey. Come here to Hattie,” the old woman whispered, holding out her gnarled hand to him. Larry stood up and walked slowly to where she was standing, right next to the wood-burning stove. “You give Hattie your hand.” Larry hesitated, then, swallowing hard and looking at the glowing door of the stove, he placed his hand into hers. She rubbed it gently with her other hand and then, to Larry’s astonishment, she tightened her grip, holding it with a strength he wouldn’t have imagined in her. “You promise Hattie, she whispered, her breath now reeking of whiskey.
“Promise what?”
Hattie looked from Larry back to the stove and pulled his hand toward the glowing door, holding it so close that he could feel the heat of the fire clear through to the bone. “Promise Hattie you won’t never whisper a word of what she’s going to tell you.”
Larry nodded, staring at the glowing door. “I promise.”
“Say: If I ever tell on Hattie, let my hand be burnt clean off, let the fire of Hattie’s stove eat it clean through to the bone. Say it.”
And Larry said it. Hattie moved his hand away from the heat but still held on to it as hard as she could. “You listen good to what Hattie’s going to tell you. You listen and you remember. You remember when Hattie’s gone. You burn this here story into your heart.”
Hattie let go of Larry’s hand and went back to the rocking chair. She waved for Larry to come to her. He rubbed his hand and went uneasily back to the spot where he had been sitting. “Sit down by Hattie and listen.”
Hattie’s eyes were closed as she whispered the first words of the story: “Long, long time ago there was a man.” At first, as Hattie told her tale, Larry automatically pictured the people in it the way he always imagined characters from the Bible. When Hattie first spoke of a man called Simon, Larry imagined him wearing a long robe and turban, with sandals on his feet, his face half hidden by a long, flowing beard.
But then, as the story unfolded further, Hattie came to speak of the crazy man who came in the middle of the night to take the girl away. Hattie told him where she had been taken.
“The snake well?” Larry asked in wonderment. “But that’s. . . that’s here.”
And Hattie nodded. “Yes, hon, it’s here. Out in them woods.”
At that moment, everything went topsy-turvy in Larry’s mind, as if he had just learned that Abraham and Isaac had lived a little way out of town, on one of the dirt roads around Lucerne, or that David had fought Goliath down by the Allatoona River, or that the foot of Jacob’s ladder rested on the floor of his own tree house.
“Why you think I done picked you out to tell all them secrets to? Why you think Hattie picked you out and not some other white boy?”
“I don’t know.”
She leaned closer to him. “‘Cause one day something’s going to come down that ladder for you, honey. You’ll be a-praying for it to be some old nightmare, but it won’t be. Cause there won’t be no waking from it.”
Larry swallowed hard. “What’s it going to be?”
Hattie looked up and stared out the window of the little shack, at the dark woods all behind it. “Even Hattie don’t know what shape it’ll come round as this time.”
She looked at Larry. “And won’t be no power in the world can stop it. Except one…”
Hattie stared into Larry’s eyes and then grabbed him by both shoulders and pulled him toward her. “What he don’t never look for. What he don’t know nothing about.” Then, easing her grip on him a little, she said, “You love your momma? You love your daddy?”
“Yeah. Of course,” Larry said.
Hattie shook her head. “You think what you be feeling is love, honey? It ain’t. You know why? Cause you ain’t got to give up nothing for it. There’s a love in this world, just a speck of it here and there, that ain’t like that. A hard love. Harder than anything else in this whole world. Cause you got to give up everything for it. Sometimes even your own life. Do you understand?”
Larry didn’t move.
“And that’s what you’ll be called on to do, honey. You going to have to love somebody so much that there won’t be nothing you won’t do. Won’t be nothing. Cause what’ll be coming down that old ladder for you, it’s going to ask for everything. And you’re going to have to give it everything.” Hattie whispered. “And that’s why Hattie done told you everything
she knows. So’s when that moment comes, you’ll be strong and ready and you won’t be afraid of nothing. Even your worstest nightmare. Do you hear my words?”
“Yes,” Larry said softly. He looked down for a moment, his head dizzied at the old woman’s words. He went to say, “When is it going—” But Hattie put her hand over his mouth and shook her head. “Hush, I done said all I could.”
Larry got up off the floor and went to the door of the shack. He stopped and turned around.
“You say good-bye to old Hattie now.”
He had said good-bye, then walked back to his Great-aunt Beulah’s.
He did not see Hattie again. Nearly two weeks after Hattie told him the story, there was a fire in her shack, apparently caused by the wood-burning stove. When they found her body, she was sitting in her rocking chair, her whiskey bottle clutched in her gnarled hands.
Larry lay there, still unable to sleep. Outside his window a limb knocked against the side of the house. Startled, he turned around and looked out into the night.
What would it be, he suddenly found himself wondering, if it ever came? His worst nightmare?
A shadow moved across the yard next door. Larry watched the shadow then realized it was just that of a branch. Turning back around, he stared up at the ceiling.
Yet if Larry had to guess at what it would be, the answer was simple.
The well.
12
When Charlie came to, he was lying flat on his back, staring up at the moon. The clouds were moving across it fast, the way children scurry past a house if they think it’s haunted, anxious to get somewhere else. He felt the pain and, jerking himself up onto his elbow, Charlie put his hand on the top of his head. There was a big knot and some dried blood.
“Shit,” he mumbled, then got up on his feet and looked around, trying to figure out where he was in the middle of the night and what he was doing there. He blinked at the lattice only two yards in front of him and at the dark windows of the house. It was Aura Lee’s. And then some of it came back to him: He had been down in the crawlspace, trying to find Hank. And he must have hit his head on something. Charlie peered down at the grass, remembering the flashlight he had taken with him into the crawl space. But it wasn’t anywhere. He must have dropped it inside, he figured. He walked over to the opening in the lattice and squatted down. He peered in. There was no use looking for it now. He stood up again and looked around him. Then a question occurred to him: How had he gotten out?
Deliver Us From Evil Page 8
