by Ninie Hammon
Merrie was curled up asleep in the wingback chair, had conked out like somebody’d taken out her batteries. Rusty wasn’t asleep, but he was upstairs in his room reading. His bedroom had bunkbeds. Charlie didn’t know why, since Rusty was Sam’s only child, but they’d installed an exhausted Toby in the bottom bunk with a comic book and told him he didn’t have to go to sleep, could stay up as long as he wanted — knowing he’d pass out in five minutes.
A brief explanation and a few veiled references had painted a pretty accurate picture of what’d happened at Howie Witherspoon’s house, but Malachi connected the rest of the dots.
“I sent Toby away, told him to wait in his father’s car while I disposed of his father’s body. I thought about burying it in the compost heap behind the garage.” He paused. “Toby was right. That’s where his father buried his mother, but Howie was too lazy to dig the grave deep enough to … it’s bad back there. So I wrapped Howie’s body in a tarp and put it in the garage and I’ll figure out something to do with it tomorrow. And with the dog.”
“The dog?” Sam asked.
“Howie killed Custard, his wife’s dog. I promised Toby I’d bury the body.”
“Now what?” Sam asked.
“Now, I need to take Howie’s car back to his house.” He looked at Sam. “And I need you to drop me off on Main Street in the Ridge so I can walk to the Nower House.”
“Why there?”
“My mother stole it from Nower. She’s living there now.”
“Just like that,” Sam said. It wasn’t a question.
“Just like that. I told her I would come by for supper. I’ll get one of my brothers to run me back out to the Middle of Nowhere, send Raylynn home a little early. Judd’ll be there by four.” A hint of a smile darted out to capture his face. “Once a dairy farmer, always a dairy farmer.”
“And then …?” Sam asked.
Malachi turned apologetically to Charlie.
“I’m so sorry, Charlie. Now, you’re right back in the frying pan. I’d bought you out until Toby came along. And I couldn’t—”
She held up her hand. “Of course you couldn’t.”
Sam’s phone rang and they all exchanged an apprehensive look.
How could the simple ringing of a telephone sound so ominous? Of course, it wasn’t the sound. It was the context. The craziness, the understanding that nobody was getting calls anymore from people trying to sell them magazine subscriptions or an extended warranty on the family Buick. In the new normal of life in Nowhere County, no telephone call was likely to be innocuous.
“I’ll get it, Mom,” Rusty called from upstairs and the ringing stopped.
“There is only one way any of this ends well,” Malachi said. “We have to get out of here, out of this county, back to the world where there are cops and jails … and execution chambers.”
“And rabies vaccines.”
Rusty came to the head of the stairs and told his mother, “I thought it’d be Douglas, but it’s Mrs. Jackson. She wants to talk to you.”
Sam went into the kitchen and picked up the downstairs extension, leaving Malachi and Charlie waiting in the living room. Malachi leaned back in the chair and closed his eyes. Charlie picked up her cup from the saucer on the coffee table and glanced at the bowl of seashells on the table beside it. The phone conversation was brief, then Sam returned.
“Thelma Jackson really wanted to talk to you,” Sam told Charlie, and sat down beside her on the sofa. “She called your mother’s number and when you didn’t answer, she called me. She wants to talk about what you said at the meeting — the part about all of us putting our heads together to figure this thing out.”
“At least one person was listening,” Charlie said.
“I told her to come by the clinic in the morning.” She looked for and got approval from Charlie and Malachi.
“Is there something specific she wants to tell us?” Charlie asked. She set her cup down and picked up a seashell out of the bowl, turned it over absentmindedly as she spoke.
“She didn't say … did you know that besides teaching history, Thelma was a genealogy buff?”
She and Malachi shook their heads.
“Apparently, she’s spent years tracing the ancestry of Nowhere people. She said we might be interested in what she found out about Gideon.”
They all stiffened at the word.
“She said there’d been a village of settlers in that same spot by the waterfall in Fearsome Hollow back in the late 1700s.”
“Seriously?” Charlie dropped the shell back into the bowl and picked up another one.
“Other people vanished there, too?” Malachi asked. “Before Gideon?”
Sam shrugged. “I guess we’ll find out tomorrow.” Charlie watched her try to connect the dots. “Gideon vanished in 1895 — a hundred years ago.” She stopped. “In fact, I hadn’t thought about it, but it was early summer … it could have been a hundred years ago to the day.” She rolled with it. “And if this other village was there in the late 1700s … that could have been 1795. A hundred years before that.” Sam’s face lit up. “You don’t suppose that every hundred years—”
“No, I don’t,” Malachi said. His voice was flat.
“But maybe—”
“Maybe what happened to Gideon and this other village are connected in some way,” he said. “I don’t know about that. But I don’t think what’s happening right now is about some every-hundred-years timing.”
“If it’s not happening now because it’s a hundred years since the last time it happened — why is it happening now?” Sam asked.
No one answered. Charlie reached out to return the shell to the bowl and that’s when she saw it. She picked it up and turned it over in her hand, then spoke softly.
“In fiction, the story starts with an ‘inciting’ incident. Something happens that changes the normal status quo.”
Sam continued the thought. “So Nowhere County was chugging along, all of us Nowhere people doing our nowhere things and then suddenly, bam! — the Jabberwock. What changed?”
Charlie held out the piece of a geode in the palm of her hand.
“This is the rock the witch gave you, isn’t it?” she asked Sam.
Sam smiled. “Yeah, it’s been in the shell bowl all these years.”
“The witch gave us the rocks for a reason, so we wouldn’t forget her warning not to come back,” Charlie said. “Remember? She said we shouldn’t have gone into the woods, that we had made it want.”
“No, it wasn’t just, ‘don’t come back,’” Sam corrected. “She said don’t come back all three of you.”
Her words kicked the breath out of them. Their eyes grew wide, looking from one to the other.
“Abby told me the night she … she told me she had talked to the Jabberwock. And I just wrote it off that she was crazy, blew off what she said. But what if she really did talk to it?”
“What did the Jabberwock tell her?” Malachi wanted to know.
Charlie closed her eyes and tried to remember.
Cotton came in with boxes of pizza. Even cold, the smell was mouth-watering. But Jolene feared if she tried to eat a piece she’d dump the pepperoni and sausage in her lap. Her hands still hadn’t stopped shaking. She reached up involuntarily and touched what she was certain must be bruises on her neck. She hadn’t been able to face a mirror yet, didn’t want to see the fingerprint marks on her skin.
One look at her and Stuart’s faces and Cotton set the pizza down on the card table in his kitchen without opening the boxes.
“Appears the two of you had all the fun today. Want to talk about it before or after we eat?”
“After,” Stuart said. “Or I won’t eat.”
Jolene nodded. She hadn’t eaten anything since a huge breakfast in a Waffle House just outside Lexington this morning.
She sat there for an instant, stunned by the reality of it, of all that had happened in a single day. This morning had been a lifetime ago.
; Food. Nourishment would help. She reached out with trembling fingers and picked up a slice of pizza.
Since neither she nor Stuart were particularly talkative, Cotton carried the conversational ball for most of the meal. He said he had found several boxes of his wife’s genealogical records in the storage unit.
“She kept the most recent stuff at home — what’s in storage is from a couple of years ago. I’ll go through it later tonight.” He cast a look at Stuart. “I’ll have plenty of time.”
“And that means?” Jolene said between bites. Once she started on the pizza she realized that she was ravenous. And as she ate, she settled, her nerves calmed. She stopped shaking.
Stuart said a single word. “Nightmares.”
They’d told her about the bad dreams.
“You two plan to stay up all night — not even try to go to sleep?”
The two of them said yes at the same time with the perfect unison of a Greek chorus.
“Suit yourselves, but count me out. I’ve had more drama in my life today than … than ever. I will sleep like the dead.”
They exchanged another look, but didn’t challenge her.
Once Cotton finished eating, he wanted to hear what had happened, and the retelling of it stole Jolene’s appetite so that she slid her last unfinished piece back into the box.
“Was it Reece Tibbits, the guy you saw blow up the road?” Cotton asked Stuart.
“What we saw was …” Stuart looked at Jolene for support and she tossed the look right back at him.
“Don’t ask me!” She shivered involuntarily. “I have no idea what we saw. Was it a man? A real man? A live man … with bugs dropping out of his mouth? Ashy gray skin, blue lips, cold touch …”
“Are you saying they were—”
Jolene didn’t mean to shout, but that’s how it came out: “If you even whisper the word zombie, I will scream and scream and scream until I go crazy and drive you crazy with me!”
Silence flowed into the room after her outburst.
“They weren’t holograms,” Stuart inserted quietly. “That much we know. Beyond that …”
Jolene felt all the energy and life suddenly drain out of her, water out a hole in a bucket.
“You fellas can stay up and dig through all the cans of worms we opened up today if that’s what you’re determined to do,” she said. “But I’m fried. I need my beauty sleep. I have to get up early in the morning.”
“Early … to do what?” Cotton said.
“I want to get back out to Reece Tibbits’s house first thing.”
“Back?” Cotton was incredulous.
“Of course back.” She cut her eyes to Stuart. “What with one thing and another we were in a bit of a hurry to get out of there this afternoon — ran off and left the equipment. Remember? All the data from today at my father’s house, the readings on those machines — that’s the proof that’ll bring the teeming hordes to Nowhere County. We can’t just leave it sitting there.”
She looked from one to the other.
“You don’t have to go with me, I’ll—”
“We’re in this together,” Stuart said.
Jolene tried not to look relieved. She’d been bluffing. She couldn’t possibly go back to that house alone.
“I’m afraid I’m going to bail on you again,” Cotton said. “I know the Tibbits place is where all the cool kids go, but I’ve got a hot date.”
“With whom?” she asked.
“The Witch of Gideon.”
Chapter Thirty-Six
“Abby told Thelma Jackson that the Jabberwock had ‘whispered in her ear’ — I remember now,” Sam said. “Thelma was there when Abby came through that last time. She said Abby told her the Jabberwock told her ‘the whole story.’”
“Abby’s mind was gone,” Charlie said. “She was babbling, but she did say that the Jabberwock was … my pet.”
That’s why Abby had come for Charlie, why she had pretended to lock Merrie in the kiln — would have locked her in there if she could have. The others might not believe that, but Charlie did. Charlie had felt the hatred in the crazy eyes of the monster who’d been standing in the shadows of her little girl’s bedroom holding a rifle. The others might grant her grace, might have told themselves that it had been a bluff all along, that Abby had never intended to harm the child. Charlie knew different. In her heart of hearts, she believed that Abby Clayton fully intended to pick Merrie up, carry her out into the backyard and lock her in an airless kiln. Would have done it if she could have. She only hid the little girl under the bed because by then Abby’d lost so much blood she was too weak to do what she’d intended to do.
Yes, Abby Clayton had been insane, had sustained brain damage courtesy of three rides on the Jabberwock. But in Charlie’s mind, that didn’t buy her out. No amount of mental instability was justification for smothering to death a three-year-old child.
Charlie didn’t realize her thoughts must have been written on her face until Sam reached out and touched her hand. “I know you don’t want to think about it.”
“It’s asking a lot,” Malachi said gently. “But could you … would you try to remember all the details?”
“Okay,” she said, shaky. “Give me a second.”
Then she reached back down into the heart of darkness, found her way along shadowed corridors in her mind until she came to the door deep in the blackest corner of her soul. She turned the doorknob and went inside.
A monster steps out of the shadows of Merrie’s bedroom. She is a creature from all the horror movies, a spawn of hell — dirty, cut, bleeding, her face a mask of rage.
The eyes. Charlie can’t tell the color, but even in the dim light, they radiate a hatred that is bottomless and unknowable. There is nothing, absolutely nothing that this creature won’t do, no horror of which she is incapable. She had gone out there beyond all the boundaries of humanity and become a creature of the purest evil.
Charlie tries but can’t 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 with hope and love and joy and excitement. That girl was a person life had smiled on.
This creature is none of those things. She is bleeding or has bled out of every orifice of her body. Small streams of blood, not gushing, but surely the accumulated blood loss …
Bloody tears stream down her filthy cheeks. Her ears are bleeding, as is her nose, and the crotch of the scrub pants is a wet, black stain.
She’d suffered some kind of stroke or brain bleed or something because the left side of her face isn’t lined up properly with the other side. Her voice is the sound of chains dragged across a metal floor. Cold and ragged and fearful in every way. The strip of light that slices into the room from the hallway lights the fire of rage on her face. Sparkles in her eyes.
The left side of her body doesn’t appear to be affected by the stroke or whatever has happened in her brain. She holds the rifle firmly, finger on the trigger.
It takes several gasps before Charlie has 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 takes 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 ride 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 advances another step.
“But you got yourself a sword, one o
f 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 heard herself repeat the words she’d said to Abby, demanding to know what Abby had done with Merrie, and she suddenly felt so nauseated she had to swallow rapidly to keep from throwing up.
The room had grayed out around her while she’d talked, but it snapped back into focus now and she was grateful for the smell of warm coffee and the faint strawberry scent of Sam’s hair, noticed how it hung over her shoulders in cascades of red.
“Charlie …?” Sam asked.
“I’m okay.” She shook it off, the skeins of the nightmare images clinging to her like a spiderweb when you run through one in the woods.
“So Abby said the Jabberwock came here to ‘play kiddie games’ with you, that you were going to ‘have fun together’ — is that right?” Malachi asked. “She said those words?”
“Uh huh.”
“That matches, it fits what the Jabberwock wrote on your blackboard. ‘Stay here and play with me.’” Malachi paused and she could see the tumblers clicking into place. “So we were right about the game part, that this whole thing is some kind of game. But we were wrong about the Jabberwock ‘grabbing random people’ to play it. The Jabberwock told Abby he came here specifically for you. To play with you.”
“And Thelma Jackson said Abby told her the Jabberwock would stay here until it ‘got what it wanted,’” Sam said.
Charlie felt goosebumps spread out all over her body.
“The Jabberwock was looking for you specifically, Charlie,” Malachi said, “but he took the whole county because he had to catch all the fish in the sea to get the one he wanted.”
“Not just me,” Charlie corrected. “He may have been ‘the witch’s’ pet,’ but Abby said he came here to play ‘with you and them others.’ And I think we know who those others are.”