Wings to the Kingdom

by Cherie Priest

Page 13

 

  I left him then, wandering back to my car and taking another moment to scope the damage. I could hardly stand to look at it. It would have to wait until daylight, which—it occurred to me—was only another couple of hours away. Lu and Dave would arrive later still, and I was glad I had time to work on my story. “A skunk,” I’d told Malachi.

  It was as good an alibi as any.

  6

  The Displaced

  Daylight didn’t make my car look any better, but it gave me a better idea of the damage. Like so many aspects of the previous evening, it could have been worse. As Malachi had pointed out, and last night had demonstrated, the Nugget was still drivable. All the damage was cosmetic save the unbalanced headlight, and a few minutes rifling through the garage turned up a funny-shaped screwdriver that corrected that. My informal tweaking might not hold for long, but it would work for the time being.

  Harry’s response to my 8:00 A. M. phone call was predictably irate. At some point I actually set the phone down and poured myself some cereal while he raved, and when he finished I tried to smooth things over between bites of Wheaties.

  It hadn’t worked as well as I would have liked, but before we hung up I had badgered Harry into a definite maybe as far as coming up for a visit with my wayward brother was concerned. I don’t know if I’d sold him on the idea or not, but I’d held up my end of the bargain and tried.

  And now, I had other things to think about.

  I had an idea or two I wanted to chase before my aunt and uncle returned from their concert in Georgia, so I headed towards town and made for the library. I was going crazy wondering about the thing I’d seen at the Bend; it reminded me of something I’d seen or read a long time ago. I already knew who and what the thing at the Bend had to be, but I wanted some reinforcement for my theory.

  The dead are my children, the long-haired creature had said.

  He was a caretaker. A guardian. I remembered the way he’d faced me briefly, and how that eye I’d seen had burned such a catlike shade.

  I told the woman at the book desk that I wanted some books on local lore—preferably with ghost stories, or information on Appalachian cryptozoology. I probably should have stopped myself at “ghost stories,” but my unshakable impression that I was dealing with something other than a ghost made me tack on the rest.

  The librarian looked at me like I was insane; but I was accustomed to that, so it was easy to ignore.

  “Cryptozoology,” I repeated, prepared to explain.

  “I know what the word means, sweetheart,” she said. “And we’ve got a section with books like that up on the second floor. I don’t know if you’ll find anything as specific as ‘Appalachian cryptozoology,’ but there are plenty of books that talk about area hauntings. We’ve probably got a whole shelf of stuff dedicated to the Bell Witch alone. ”

  “The Bell Witch? She’s not exactly local. ”

  “It happened outside of Nashville, and that’s local enough for Chattanooga library classification. ”

  The librarian took a scrap of paper and jotted down a few Dewey numbers. “Check around here,” she said as she handed it to me.

  I thanked her, took the wide, carpeted stairs up a flight, and checked the rows of books against the scrawled note I held. I glanced down the aisles and saw practically no one; the place was deserted save for the odd homeless person napping in a chair, or the stray library worker shuffling along with a cartload of tomes to be shelved.

  I found the row the librarian had indicated and slid between the tall bookcases, tilting my head to the left to read the spines.

  The first shelf I spied was stuffed mostly with small-press products about mysterious happenings at Civil War battlefields in the greater Chattanooga area. I saw several titles about ghosts left by “The Battle Above the Clouds” on Lookout Mountain, and a couple more on the subject of Missionary Ridge or Cameron Hill. Half a dozen wanted to tell me about ghost regiments, lost troops, or spectral officers who had never relinquished command.

  Almost everything else was about the Bell Witch. Some people claim that the Blair Witch movies were based on the haunting of the Bell family. I couldn’t say if that’s true, but you’d be hard-pressed to find anyone in Tennessee who doesn’t know about how Andrew Jackson passed through Tennessee one time and swore until his dying day that he’d rather face the entire British army than spend one more night at the Bell farm, so I guess she may as well qualify as local legend. But I wasn’t interested in the unfortunate Bell family.

  I ran my finger along the musty lines of books until I caught the word I was hoping for.

  “Chickamauga. ”

  I slid the book free, even as I spotted another one right next to it with the same subject. I flipped to the back and scrolled my eyes along the helpful columns of words and numbers—Battle, Boynton, Cherokee, Repeating Rifles, Van Derveer—until I found what I really wanted.

  Green Eyes, (Old) Green Eyes. 33, 34, 35, 37–40.

  What I found on the noted pages was mostly sensationalistic and unhelpful. It didn’t tell me anything new, anyway. I was already aware that Green Eyes hung out at the battlefield and that he’d been known to chase trespassers out of the park. The book offered me nothing in the way of proper speculation, so I set it aside and reached for the next one.

  Better. The next book suggested that the first sightings of Green Eyes took place in the days after the battle. Scouts sent from the government to assess the cleanup situation reported seeing a tall creature with glowing green eyes roaming among the unburied dead. More contemporary reports indicated that he’d caused at least two automobile accidents in the park during the 1970s, each time having emerged from the fog to startle unsuspecting drivers—both of whom wrecked into the same tree, if the stories were to be believed.

  I noted that the reports did not declare that the drivers had been chased from the grounds; they said only that they’d seen the creature, who had turned and vanished back into the trees. I wondered if these sightings had taken place at night or during the day. Old police reports might tell me, if I could get my hands on them. It might be important.

  But I was sure I was missing a detail I’d heard before in passing. As I turned countless pages I read a dozen different theories, some more plausible than others. According to one source he was the spirit animal of a lost regiment nicknamed “The Tigers” and another put forth a rather fanciful tearjerker about a Confederate widow with a pair of emerald earrings. “Even now she climbs the Wilder Tower and watches from the windows for her husband’s return,” I read aloud. I couldn’t keep from adding my own follow-up commentary: “Somehow I doubt it. ” I didn’t know much about the battlefield, but I was fairly certain that the Wilder Tower and the rest of the monuments had not been erected until years and years after the war took place.

  I was beginning to wonder if I’d made up the elusive detail in order to fit my encounter when I found a third, older book that featured a chapter on Chickamauga. Civil War Ghosts of the American South was published in 1968, and it encouraged me by referring to the postwar Green Eyes sightings as “The first European sightings. ” It went on to assert that the Cherokees seemed to already know of the creature’s existence.

  Old Green Eyes has been described in various ways by many different witnesses. Some say that he had a face like an ape and enormous canine teeth, while others have said that he looked like an ordinary man except for his significant height and his glowing gaze. Many have suggested that he was wearing a cloak, or that he had a head of very long hair…but everyone seems to agree upon his luminescent green eyes.

  I stopped. That was it. That was him.

  Well really, who else could it have been?

  The dead are my children.

  A more rational, disinterested observer might have said that I was merely succumbing to the insistent suggestion of the last few weeks and their strange events. Everyone who was int
erested in ghosts had Chickamauga on the brain, and in local thinking “Chickamauga” went hand in hand with “Old Green Eyes. ”

  My hypothetical disinterested observer would have made a good point, but I would have dismissed it anyway.

  I sat down on the hard Berber-carpeted floor and crossed my legs, pulling down a couple more books and scanning for more information. The more I read, the more convinced of my guess I became.

  Many people believed that Green Eyes was not a ghost. The more reliable accounts almost never told of meeting him as a spiritual sighting, but a decidedly physical one. He was something solid, but something different. He was something tall, they all agreed, and either had very long hair or was covered in it.

  Yes, yes, yes. All of these things. And I’d seen him. I’d seen Green Eyes.

  So what was he doing away from the battlefield? Why Moccasin Bend, of all places?

  I dragged Civil War Ghosts of the American South into my lap again and reread the pertinent passages. “The Cherokee Indians seemed unsurprised to hear of the creature roaming the battlefield. ”

  I sat still, thinking. Moccasin Bend. I wanted to think it had more significance than being merely a mental-health facility and a snaky twist in the river, but nothing came to mind. Downstairs, there were computers with Internet access. I shelved the books I didn’t want, then brought the three or four I did want with me to the first floor.

  I opened a search window and tried a few word combinations, just to see what would turn up. Mostly I got a bunch of boring. org sites about the state facility there; but on a whim I entered “Moccasin Bend” and “Cherokee. ”

  I clicked a couple of links and was skeptical of what I found. I reminded myself that not everything on the Web is true, and kept clicking. A third and a fourth link all revealed similar information. I looked at the site addresses and poked around for signs of a hoax, but I couldn’t find any.

  That didn’t mean I believed a word of it.

  Even if it explained rather neatly what Green Eyes might be doing there, it was still the sort of thing that even Ed Wood would think twice about.

  Behind me I heard the buzz of a wheelchair and I turned, hoping to see Karl, but instead an older woman went zipping by with a bagful of books hanging off her chair. But my desire to consult Karl had been sparked. If I remembered correctly, he was part Native American himself. Even if he wasn’t Cherokee, he might know whether the online articles were true or not.