by Hank Early
A few minutes later, I let out a long sigh of relief when the men came around the corner. Both of them were smoking now. And laughing. I watched them, sure they were headed for the Durango, but they surprised me. Instead of returning to their truck, they turned and headed toward my shed. I was parked maybe five yards away. One of them was bound to see my truck.
As they approached, I could hear their voices through the open window.
“Jeb don’t care for his friend, neither, that blind joker, Rufus something or another.” That was Argent. I’d recognize that slow, willfully uneducated drawl anywhere.
“Traffic accident,” Hub said. “That’s the way to do it.”
“There’s lots of ways to do it,” Argent said. “The secret is doing it clean. Jeb don’t like to rush shit. Besides, that’s too impersonal for Jeb.”
“Impersonal?”
Argent grunted. “Most people don’t know, but Jeb’s not immune to getting his hands dirty. Especially with the real assholes like this one.”
“Well, shit. He needs to get on it, then. I’m just saying. If you want somebody gone, get ’em gone. Don’t make an ordeal about it. Where the fuck is he anyway? I mean at this hour?”
“Probably at the African Queen’s hut down in Atlanta.”
I squeezed the steering wheel so hard, my knuckles turned white.
“Shit, you can’t tell me you wouldn’t hit that, Sheriff.”
“Of course I’d hit it, but that don’t mean I’d date it.”
“I’d date it,” Hub said, “as long as she let me hit it whenever I wanted.”
“Open that shed door and shut up,” Argent said, shining his flashlight at the shed.
Hub yanked the shed door open much too hard, nearly pulling it off its hinges. Argent shined the light in. “I’d kill to find something illegal in here,” he said.
“You could plant something,” Hub suggested. “Wouldn’t be much to it.”
Argent didn’t respond but instead waved the flashlight around, looking into the shed.
“You hear me, Sheriff?”
“I heard you. Listen, do you really think you’re going to come up with a way to deal with this asshole that Jeb ain’t already thought of?”
Hub shrugged. “Just trying to help.”
“You wanna help? Just do what you’re told, and don’t try to be smart. You ain’t smart, okay?”
“Whatever.”
“Shut it back.”
Hub slammed the shed door and said, “You reckon that woman really heard a shot from up here?”
“I doubt it. She was so drunk she wouldn’t know a fart from a gunshot. Let’s go. He’s probably neck deep in dark meat right about now.”
They walked to the Durango and pulled out of the yard and onto the gravel road. A few minutes later, their taillights were gone and the sound of their engine had nearly faded away. I wiped sweat off my brow and cranked the truck. I put it in reverse as Goose licked my hand on the gearshift. I patted his head, and he smiled that open-mouthed smile some dogs have. He seemed to intuitively know we’d dodged a bullet.
* * *
I drove over to Ghost Creek Mountain, where I’d grown up and where my father’s original church had been. I took the long way to the hidden meadow in order to avoid the church, but not because of the bad memories. Well, not only because of the bad memories. The main reason was that I wanted to stay as far away from Rufus as possible.
Because of Rufus’s blindness, he’d learned to recognize the sounds of vehicles. He was never surprised when I showed up at the old church to pay him a visit. “I recognized the sound of your truck,” he’d say. So I didn’t want to pass too close to his place at the risk of him wanting to know why I was in the area, especially considering I’d dropped him off just a short time ago. Then I’d either have to tell him about my present clusterfuck or lie, and I’d never been much good at lying to my friends.
I went up the backside of the mountain, following an old logging road overgrown with weeds. Twice I stopped the truck to move fallen branches out of the road, and once I came to a complete stop, not sure I could go any farther because the road was so narrow. On one side of the road was a creek and on the other a sheer drop. Fifty feet of free fall that ended in a field of boulders and green moss.
I ended up putting two tires in the creek and working my gear shift to gain purchase until the road widened. From there, the drive mostly went straight up. I switched to second and then first, then prayed my truck wouldn’t flip. Hell, there was a moment or two when I felt like I’d gone nearly perpendicular to the pull of gravity, and I was sure the dead man was going to fly off the back of the truck and down the mountain. But he didn’t, and I eventually eased over the last rise and into the hidden meadow where Daddy had once tried to plant tomatoes and okra. There was no sign of any gardening now, just a flat stretch of tall grass waving darkly in the night breeze. The meadow was broken by a half dozen scattered trees. I aimed the nose of my truck toward the largest of these, a massive oak whose branches seemed to overspread the whole field.
Once parked, I took a look around. Dark woods surrounded me on three sides. As far as I knew, nobody came up this way anymore. This land was owned by the power company but protected from exploitation by some government regulations. I had a hard time keeping up. The important thing was it would be a long time before anybody came up here to do any serious digging.
I got right to work, breaking a sweat despite the cool air. My hip started to hurt nearly immediately, but I pushed through the pain, my mind already obsessed with what had happened and what I was going to do about it.
There was always the Wild Turkey option, but as enticing as that sounded, it felt like a betrayal somehow. Not of my values or my own life, but rather of the man I was about to bury. Joe. He’d come to find me. Me. God knew why exactly, except he’d already tried with Argent and had obviously been turned away. If I just buried him and returned to my drunken fog, what kind of man would I be? How long would I remain haunted by the questions his presence in my life posed? Did I know him from some dark place in my past? Hell, did I even know myself, for that matter?
The other option was to take his case. It was something I’d done hundreds of times in the past, but I’d rarely taken on a case with this little information. Or for a dead client.
A phone number, a bookmark, and a letter scribbled on a piece of folded paper.
It was a mystery. Who knew where it started or how I was involved? I only knew, for better or worse, that I was a part of it now, that the dead man’s mystery and my own had become intertwined.
6
While I was burying the body, unbeknownst to me, Rufus was dealing with his own crisis. He had not slept in three days, and now he sat alone in the sanctuary of the old Holy Flame, his hands clasped together in what might have appeared a prayerful posture to someone who didn’t know that Rufus had been an atheist for years. The position of his hands might have been an unconscious nod to his religious past. He certainly wasn’t aware they were clasped together under his chin.
He was aware of the shaking that wracked his body. He was also aware he was acting like a child, like the same kid who’d been too scared to go into his mother’s room after she screamed about the “witch” because he thought he’d see what his mother saw, and then he’d never be able to stop seeing it.
He hadn’t been completely wrong about that. When he was a child, his mother had explained her nightly terrors with mountain folklore as colorful as it was ignorant. According to her, she was simply getting “rode by the witch.”
“Once she finds you, she don’t never let you go,” his mother used to tell him on those rare occasions her breathing was slow enough to allow her to talk.
Each time he heard her scream out during the night, he came to her (after an elaborate ritual to “psych himself up,” which included saying the Lord’s prayer and turning on her light the second he flung the door open) and sat at her bedside, a towel in his hand, ready
to wipe more sweat from her brow. Usually she wouldn’t talk. Usually she was breathing too hard, gasping and crying, squeezing his hands until they hurt. But sometimes she lay awake and told him what she’d seen, how it happened.
“She starts at the foot of the bed,” his mother would tell him. “She’s a little twisted thing. Her back’s all … it’s all buckled up like maybe it stunted her growth some. She’s got missing teeth, and her voice is always a whisper, but I can hear it loud like she’s right in my ear. It don’t take long for her to start creeping.”
“Creeping?” he’d said.
“That’s right. Creeping up to my chest. She gets there and just sits and talks to me. I can’t move. No matter what. I just have to listen to her. And feel her. I can’t close my eyes. That’s the worst of it. I can’t even look away. And one of these days, I know she’s going to kill me. She promised me she would.”
“I’m sorry, Mama.”
“Pshaw. That ain’t the worst.”
Rufus remembered thinking how could it be worse?
“The worst is when she told me who she was.”
“The witch?”
“Yeah, the witch. She said she was Madeline.”
“Who?”
“Your aunt Madeline. She died when she was eight or so. I was supposed to be watching her out at Backslide Gap, and I got distracted, got to daydreaming about some boy, not your father, and when I checked to see where she was, she was standing over on the side of the gap, near the swinging bridge. I screamed at her, but that just made her laugh. She wasn’t never right in the head and sometimes took to laughing the minute other folks took to being serious. I got mad at her because I was fifteen and, Lord, I thought I was the queen of the holler and I didn’t need nor want to be looking after some little brat who didn’t even have the sense to know when her sister was getting on to her. Oh, Lord forgive me.”
Rufus wiped her brow with the towel and kissed her forehead. He’d always been the good son. At least until he couldn’t do it anymore. Maybe that was why he’d found the witch too. Maybe it was punishment. Hell, it was definitely punishment.
“I told her she was a stupid little kid and that made her laugh even harder. So hard, I guess she lost her balance. She fell all the way to the bottom. Took your grandfather half the day and night to get down there to her body. He said she hit a rock at the bottom, twisted her up real bad.”
“It’s just a bad dream,” Rufus remembered telling her.
She sat up and grabbed his chin with one hand. “No. Never say that. Dreams end. This never ends. It comes back over and over again. And I swear I’m wide awake. She’s here in the room with me when it happens.”
That was the first time his mother had ever told him about “getting rode by the witch,” but it wasn’t the first time he’d come to comfort her in the middle of the night. He did what he always did. He waited for her to make room for him and he crawled into the bed next to her.
He wished someone were here to do the same for him now. But it was just him, though the tingling on his scalp made it clear he wouldn’t be alone for long.
* * *
The tingling had returned a few days ago. He’d been without it for at least twenty years now. Since being blind, he hadn’t had a single visit from his “witch.” But before he’d lost his sight, the tingling was always the sign. She was coming again.
Even though he knew by now that the real, scientific name for what his mother had dealt with was sleep paralysis, it was no comfort to Rufus. Maybe it had been once, right up until he’d experienced it himself. Then he realized his mother’s term had been better, and all the scientific knowledge in the world couldn’t alleviate the terror that came with being rode by the witch.
Like his mother’s witch, Rufus’s was also female, but unlike his mother’s, she didn’t show her face. Rufus thought of her simply as the shadow girl, because she had no features and in many ways appeared to be no more substantial than a shadow.
Each visit began the same way. Rufus would see the door to the barn where he’d once lived blown open by the wind (at the time, he’d occupied a barn belonging to a local farmer on the east side of the county), and the shadow girl would slip inside. At first, she only stood at the door, seemingly watching Rufus. Rufus couldn’t close his eyes while she was there, and he couldn’t move. Sometimes he felt like he couldn’t breathe, but then all at once his breath would return. The shadow girl never moved beyond the edge of his doorway, but that didn’t make it any less frightening. Hell, in some ways, Rufus wanted her to move. He wanted to get a better look at the shadow, to see her face.
This all began during a particularly turbulent time in Rufus’s life. He’d just left the church in rather dramatic fashion and shortly thereafter found himself working for a man he simultaneously admired and loathed. He was trying to figure out who he wanted to be and what he believed.
The shadow girl didn’t help.
But he kept it under control in the early days. She came often, but she always kept her distance. The episodes were harrowing but didn’t threaten his sanity. At least not at first.
The shadow girl drew ever closer, but she never revealed her face. It hardly mattered. Rufus soon figured out who his “witch” was. Her name was Harriet Duncan, “Harry,” as she had been known at the school. Ironically, she’d killed herself in much the same way his aunt had died. The difference was that Harriet had meant to do it. She’d jumped from the top of Two Indian Falls on purpose. Her body had been swept away by the river and never found, but she was dead. Rufus had watched her make the leap. And he’d done nothing to stop it.
What he’d done after she was gone had been even worse.
7
I ended up taking the car down to the cornfield known as the Devil’s Valley. It was the perfect place to hide something you didn’t want found because of the high stalks of corn that grew as far as the eye could see. I drove around the outskirts of the huge cornfield before finding a small opening in the corn large enough to drive the car between. When the gap narrowed, I kept on driving, plowing over corn, digging deeper and deeper, until I decided it was far enough. I parked the car and got out. The dark morning was already too hot, the air charged somehow with something more than just the threat of the impending sunrise. There was a heaviness in it that made me feel the weight of the past on the present as a tangible thing. I wiped sweat from my brow and looked around. Just eight months ago, I’d been chased by an entity known as Old Nathaniel through these same rows. I’d been sure at the time that he was just a regular man wearing an old burlap sack, but had discovered the truth wasn’t so simple.
He’d actually killed me with his own bare hands a few miles from here on the banks of the Blackclaw River. I’d been dead somewhere between seven and ten minutes, depending on who you talked to. According to Mary, who had waited by my side, trying to revive me, it was ten, maybe more, but if you asked medical experts, they’d tell you it couldn’t have been more than seven. More than seven wasn’t possible. Fifty-three years on this earth had taught me that a lot of things that “weren’t possible” seemed to happen anyway. I’d seen men manipulate whole communities with nothing but raw conviction and a pretty voice. I’d seen lightning pulled from the sky because of the depravity of belief, and I’d watched my father defy death—at least for a little while.
This cornfield had a way of hiding the truth, like it had hidden Old Nathaniel, and the place out in the center where the skulls of his victims were. Maybe it would do the same for this car. At least until I figured out more about the dead man named Joe, and why he’d been in my front yard.
It took me a full twenty minutes to get back out to the road. Once there, I turned south and started home toward the Fingers, looming in the distance. About an hour later, I thumbed a ride from two nearly mute middle-aged men who made me think of the Hill Brothers, except these men seemed more benign, less desperate.
The men said they were cousins from South Carolina, but other than that
offered little explanation for why they were in the middle of rural North Georgia. I didn’t blame them. There were some things that just didn’t bear explaining.
* * *
Finally free of the man and his car, I decided to call Mary.
“Better, actually,” she said when I asked about her nephew, Andrew.
“That’s great!” I had to resist the urge to ask her if that meant she would be coming home soon.
“Yeah, he’s far from out of the woods, but the last round of tests showed the disease isn’t as far along as the doctors had thought.”
“What does that mean?” I asked.
She was silent.
“Mary?”
“Sorry. It’s just … well, it’s good news, but it’s the kind of good news that only puts the bad news off. Forget it. Can we talk about something else?”
“Sure. I’m sorry.”
“Something else, okay?”
“Okay. I miss you.”
“I miss you too. Oh! I just remembered. My brother is supposed to be getting a week off from work soon. When he does, I’m coming back to stay with you. For the whole week.”
“What about your work?”
“They won’t know unless I tell them, and I’m not going to tell them.”
“When?”
“That’s the thing. I don’t know. It could be next week or a month from now.”
“Let me know as soon as you find out.”
“Nah.”
“What?”
“I thought I might just show up. Surprise you.”
“Oh, please don’t do that.”
“It will be great. Can you imagine how you’ll feel when you see me standing at your door?”
“I guess,” I said. This was one of the few things I didn’t like about Mary. She loved to build a moment up, to make it better than it would be otherwise. One of the ways she did this was with the element of surprise, something that didn’t bother me except when it came to my relationships. I hated not knowing what to expect.