by Ninie Hammon
Blood began to drip from the ceiling in big globs that made sounds, splats like raindrops, on the floor.
“It’s not real.” Jolene’s voice was airless. “Hallucination, something. Not really happening.”
A man’s face appeared in the whiteness in the far corner.
A white blob appeared in the other corner, where an identical face appeared.
It wasn’t the same face, or even a mirror image of it. There were two almost-identical faces staring out into the room. One of them had blind eyes and the face from which the eyes stared sightlessly was expressionless, slack. The other’s eyes were searching frantically, the face a mask of fear and desperation.
And the blood drip, drip, dripped from the ceiling.
“It’s Roscoe and Harry,” Cotton gasped. “The Tungate brothers.”
The blank stare left the blind eyes then — Roscoe Tungate, Cotton thought. The one whose eyes were alive and searching was Roscoe. Harry’s eyes trained on Cotton, fixed him with a hostile stare. The stare sparked with emotion, a look like a flashing sword, rage and anger blazing in the eye sockets like the sparks off a welding torch.
“You don’t belong here!”
The voice wasn’t Cotton’s imagination. The others heard it, too. But it was neither Harry nor Roscoe’s voice. Cotton had gone fishing with the two of them several times, knew them well enough to tell them apart, which was something of an accomplishment with the Tungates. In fact, the voice didn’t really sound like anybody’s voice, any human’s. There was no inflection in it at all. Harry’s face looked enraged, Roscoe still didn’t appear to notice anything, was frantically looking for something. But the voice that spoke in the room was almost soothing.
No, not soothing. Simple.
Childlike.
“I don’t want to play with you,” the voice said. “Go away.”
Then the faces began to expand, grew bigger than the walls of the room around them, which was impossible but that’s what they did. The white faces loomed over them, getting closer and closer. Jolene and Cotton began to move backward but Stuart held their hands firm, and wouldn’t let them budge.
“What have you done with them?” Stuart called out, and for all his standing firm, there was an unmistakable quiver in his voice. He must have felt it, firmed it up, because there was no tremor in his voice when he spoke again. “Let them go!”
There was an explosion of sound that rattled the fillings in Cotton’s teeth, that slapped him backward with the percussion of an exploding stick of dynamite, that got inside his head somehow and echoed off the inside walls of his skull, the echoes not getting softer, as echoes did, but getting louder with every repetition, until the word was repeated again and again, words on top of words, a cacophony of sound, all speaking the same word.
“Nooooooo!”
Pete never locked his doors. Nobody in Nowhere County did.
He opened the back screen, turned the knob and shoved the back door inward and stepped through it into the kitchen, letting the screen bang shut behind him. He left Dog on the back porch. The dog’s mangy coat had so little identifiable fur it was amazing he was able to shed even a single hair of it, but in truth there was a slathering of black and gray hairs anywhere the animal touched so he was not allowed into the house on the furniture.
The animal usually curled up in a ball on the mat right in front of the door, so he’d be alerted if Pete decided he wanted to go somewhere. At some point, Dog had decided Pete was his human, and he appeared to be determined never to be more than three feet from Pete’s side.
He didn’t curl up on the mat today, though. He glared through the screen door into the kitchen and began to growl, a low, angry growl.
Pete froze.
Images from last night’s county meeting flashed instantly into his mind. Liam Montgomery was dead, shot down in a roomful of people and Pete’d lay odds not a single one of them saw who pulled the trigger. It wasn’t hard to figure out the most likely suspect, given that Viola Tackett had swooped in like a Blackhawk helicopter looking for wounded, and in less than a minute took over the county lock, stock and barrel.
She would be the law in Nowhere County from now on. Which meant, of course, that there would be no law at all in the county, just the foxes watching the henhouse. Wouldn’t be anarchy — but it would be a dictatorship, and he doubted Viola Tackett was planning on being a benevolent dictator.
So if … say somebody broke into Pete’s house and wanted to steal — what? Shoot, he didn’t own a single thing anybody would want — not even some big nice television. Even if he’d had one, there hadn’t been any reception since J-Day so why would anybody want it? Still, the dog was growling at something, most likely, from the sound of it, someone. And whatever happened between Pete and the intruder in the next few minutes would fall to Viola Tackett to judge the lawfulness or unlawfulness thereof.
That was not comforting.
“Anybody here?” he called out, and was impressed his voice wasn’t shaking. “You’re welcome to anything I got, but I’d appreciate it if you’d leave now ‘cause my dog is not a happy camper.”
Nothing but silence, full and heavy, came back to him from his words.
Dog continued to growl, a sound unlike any Pete had ever heard the dog make, not that he’d lay claim to knowing the subtle difference in dog language. His ears were laid back flat on his head, his eyes were open wide, the hair on his shoulders — his hackles — was standing on end and his teeth were bared in a vicious snarl.
Whoever was in the house would do well to exit by the front door because wasn’t no telling what that dog might do to whoever he caught. From the look of him, he wasn’t likely to jump up for an ear rub or roll over on his back for a belly rub.
“Whoever you are — you need to book it out of here. My dog looks in the mood to rip your leg off.”
Shouldn’t have said that. If the guy had a gun, he might shoot Dog and the thought of something bad happening to the animal planted a stab of fear in Pete’s gut.
Nobody answered. Dog continued to growl.
Wasn’t nothing for it but to go on in the house and make nice with whoever it was who’d decided to rob an old man who didn’t have nothing, a man who lived — literally, as it turned out — in the Middle of Nowhere.
Pete advanced slowly across the kitchen, straining to hear any sound of movement from the house. He heard nothing.
But the nothing was a funny kind of nothing. It was the kind of nothing that was like the perfect temperature and the blue sky and the phony stars. It wasn’t natural, normal. It was oppressive, heavy silence, like he’d walked into King Tut’s tomb and the dude in the crypt was not happy about it.
He had a sudden desire to call out, “Olly olly oxen free!” A kid’s game. Why had a thing like that popped into his head?
Advancing into the living room, the silence got more oppressive with every step, and outside on the porch, Dog didn’t let up on his ominous growl.
It took considerable effort to force himself to search the house, but there was nothing else for it. Dog was growling at something, but after a thorough inspection of every room — under beds and in closets included — Pete could find nobody.
Against his hard and fast rule, Pete went back to the door and opened it to allow Dog into the house, follow him to see what he was growling at. But the dog wouldn’t set foot through the door. Pete called, cajoled, even went to the fridge and got out a piece of the last chicken Pete had cooked on the grill.
Zip.
The dog could not be enticed to come into the house. Neither did he stop growling.
This was exceedingly weird.
Pete decided to search the house again, not looking for anybody this time but for some indication, any indication at all, that somebody had trespassed on his abode, looking for anything out of place that would indicate somebody’d been here.
He found what he was looking for in the living room.
He might not even have notic
ed it if he hadn’t stopped in front of the map to think, figure out what he ought to—
There were stickpins in the map. Stickpins Pete hadn’t put there.
Chapter Thirteen
And then it was gone.
Everything.
The artificial darkness, the sense of oppression, the white blobs of protoplasm, the bloody ceiling — everything disappeared in the blink of an eye.
Jolene, Cotton and Stuart stood in the living room of Pete Rutherford’s house, the only indication of their shared experience the lighter in Jolene’s hand. She was holding it out in front of her with the flame turned up to its full two-inch height. Her hand began to tremble and she let go of the wheel and the flame when out.
Then Stuart let out the breath he hadn’t even realized he’d been holding. The others did the same thing, at the same time — all noticed it, and managed to summon a communal sense of the humorousness of the act and they all visibly relaxed.
“Sooooo,” Stuart said, surprised at the tremor in his voice. “Am I the only one who just had an out-of-body experience complete with visuals?”
“That’d be a no,” Cotton said, his voice no more firm than Stuart’s.
“And I wasn’t smoking nothing!” Jolene’s voice was as trembly as her hand. Then she turned and rushed to her equipment, looking at dials and measurements, meters and gadgetry.
“The ceiling did bleed, right?” Cotton said.
“Yup,” Stuart said.
“And the Tungate brothers showed—”
“I heard you call the faces ‘Tungate,’” Stuart said. “What—?”
“Roscoe and Harry Tungate, they’re identical twins. Harry is a farmer who lives in Solomon Hollow and Roscoe is the butcher at Foodtown.”
“So it wasn’t the same face, two images?”
“Nope, two people. The one who appeared to be … the one who gave us the evil eye was Roscoe. Harry just looked—”
“Holy crap.” Jolene’s voice was breathy. “I never in a million years would have orchestrated something like this. It’s too outrageous, too over-the-top. The electromagnetic field—”
“No mayonnaise words, remember,” Cotton said and Jolene smiled like she knew what that meant. Stuart was clueless and they noticed.
“It’s a thing Southerners … or maybe just Nowhere People say,” Jolene said. “From some old story … I don’t even know why. It just means speak in simple words.”
“No words with more letters in them than ‘mayonnaise,’” Cotton finished.
“Fine, no mayonnaise words. These instruments show a phenomenal psychic event. Like … say you’re used to studying the results of firecrackers popping. Day in, day out, that’s what you see — different firecracker events. But if you’re really lucky, once every decade or so, you get to see a stick of dynamite.” She stopped, took a breath. “This” — she made a gesture that included everything around them — “was what they dropped out of the Enola Gay on Hiroshima.”
“So you’re saying we didn’t imagine what we saw.”
“Yeah, that’s what I’m saying. Can’t write it off as group hysteria, a shared hallucination, something we cooked up in our heads that wasn’t really reflected in an observable phenomenon in the real world.”
“What we saw … it was real?” Cotton asked.
“Define real?”
“Real!”
“The images we saw — the faces, the bleeding ceiling — they were real images.” She turned to the equipment. “I’ve got measurements of them here. But there wasn’t real blood.”
“Meaning?”
“If any one of us had been willing to do so at the time, and I sure as Jackson wouldn’t have volunteered, we could have stepped forward and touched the blood dripping down the walls. Blood we all could see. But if I’d touched it, there would have been no actual blood on my fingers.”
“Okay, okay, let me get this straight in my head,” Cotton said. “Some … something is able to create images—”
“Not just images,” Stuart added. “Feelings, too, and smells—”
“Think of it as a hologram … on steroids. It looks real.” She stopped. “The image of Princess Leia that Luke saw when he pushed the disc into R2D2. Like that. The image is really there. But the image itself isn’t real.”
“Okay, so …”
“The readings on all these machines are recorded. There’s a record of it all!”
Stuart stopped because he noticed that Cotton wasn’t standing with him in front of Jolene’s equipment. He had walked over to the map and was staring up at it.
“So is that real?” he asked and pointed to the stickpins in the map. Stuart had placed black stickpins on letters in the map. Now, there were red stickpins there, too.
The three exchanged a look, then Stuart picked up another handful of black stickpins — placed them at intervals across the map, spelling out his name.
“Now what?” Cotton said.
“Now we pack up my equipment and put it back in the van and then …”
“Then we wait for somebody on the other end of the stickpin telegraph to respond,” Stuart said.
Once the equipment was loaded, they went into the living room and sat down on the floor to wait. One hour. Two. They didn’t say much, each trying in their own way to wrap their minds around what was happening. Each considering their own personal “now what?”
Finally Stuart got to his feet.
“I think it’s time to call this one. Apparently, the line’s gone dead.” He paused, then pushed forward with an effort. “And I have an idea.”
“So do I,” Cotton said.
“I have lots of ideas. Dozens. Hundreds.” Jolene reached up her hand and Stuart pulled her to her feet. “But I don’t know where to start.”
Cotton nodded toward Stuart. “You got the ball, run with it.”
“I think we ought to take the equipment out to Reece Tibbits’s house,” Stuart said.
“That was one of my ideas,” Jolene said. “I’d be very interested to know what kind of readings we’d get in a hundred-year-old house.”
Cotton nodded.
“Sounds like a plan,” he said, “but you don’t need me to pull it off. I’m going to Lexington.” He looked at Stuart. “Maybe you don’t know this — Jolene does — but this isn’t the first instance of ‘vanishing people’ in the county’s history.”
He told Stuart about a little town called Gideon beside a waterfall in a place called “Fearsome Hollow” that supposedly became a ghost town overnight about a century ago — just stories, a myth. Cotton said he’d considered the possibility of some connection in the very beginning, had gone out there, wandered around, found nothing.
“But we saw people, identifiable people from Nowhere County who have vanished — at least holograms of them. And that got me thinking. My wife was a history teacher, genealogy nut, did all kinda research. There’s boxes full of it in our storage unit. I’m thinking now I’d like to see if she dug up anything about the people who lived in Gideon.”
“Hate for you to miss the show, Cotton.” Stuart turned toward Jolene. “If we’re going to do this, let’s get after it before I lose my nerve.”
His voice was firm and that was good because something inside Stuart McClintock needed to be! The whole rest of his body was quaking like Jell-O. He was glad Jolene didn’t appear to be a football fan and hadn’t “recognized him.” He just hoped she couldn’t see how utterly terrified the big-shot football star was.
Pete stood staring at the stickpins. Why in the name of common sense would somebody break into his house and leave without stealing anything? And technically, he couldn’t say nobody broke in given that the door wasn’t locked. But that was neither here nor there. Somebody had been in here and the only evidence of their presence was stickpins in his map.
Random stickpins.
That was something as nutty as the Jabberwock itself.
The Jabberwock.
Dog was still standi
ng at the screen door, growling.
Pete felt a chill start down the back of his neck, felt like somebody’d poured ice water down his shirt collar and he could feel it sliding slowly along his back bone, dripping from one vertebrate to the next.
Maybe hadn’t nobody been in his house. Least not nobody from here, some live human being walking around right now in Nowhere County. Maybe the somebody who’d put the stickpins …
And the more he looked at them … them stickpins wasn’t random, neither. They was all lined up across the map, not in no straight line like blackbirds sitting on a clothesline. But close.
Didn’t take but a minute to figure out. Them stickpins was each stuck into a letter of the alphabet in some word. If you started at the far left, the west side, and went across, the letters spelled out: “Are you there.”
When he seen it, he took a step back, sucked in a gasp.
He looked around then, like maybe there was somebody in the room with him. Somebody maybe Dog could see but he couldn’t.
Wasn’t nobody there.
Dog was still growling.
Pete went to the box of stickpins sitting beside the map and picked up a handful. Sorting them out, he used only red stickpins.
Starting below the row of black stickpins on the map, he put red ones in letters of the alphabet, going from left to right, all the way to the Crawford County line on the east.
Then he stepped back, looked at what he had done — “Who are you?”
Dog suddenly shut up.
It was abrupt, like turning off a spigot.
Pete turned and went through the kitchen to the back door. He found the dog curled up in his usual place on the back porch rug, nodding off to sleep, like he didn’t have a care in the world.
Whatever it was that had upset the dog wasn’t upsetting him anymore. Whatever … thing had been in the house was gone now.
Shaking his head, Pete went back into the living room. When he saw the map, he couldn’t breathe. It felt like a wrecking ball had just slammed into his chest.