by Nancy Holder
She’d always had a knack for dreams, but . . . she couldn’t recall dreaming in smells before.
Real-life pig stye stink rose to fill her nostrils, dispelling thoughts of early morning dreams. “Pee-yew,” she said in disgust, and decided she’d stirred the charcoal and ashes worm tonic quite well enough. She flipped the latch to the narrow gate blocking the small aisle between the dirt-floored pigpen and repeated, “Pee-yew.”
“Can’t be no worse than it ever is,” Lonnie said with all the airy assurance of someone who hadn’t done the pig-worming chore since Mollie had grown tall enough to carry the buckets. He jabbed at the hay, peering down at her through the square entry door in the floor. “You want to worry on something, think about the hay. I hope we’ve enough to last through the spring cutting.”
Mollie might have answered him—if outside, Ferd’s triumphant whooping hadn’t turned into a shout of protest, a warning that the furious sow had slipped by. If at that same instant right above her, Lonnie hadn’t made a surprised and alarmed noise of his own, shouting her name in warning as he fumbled the pitchfork.
She couldn’t say if time had slowed, or if it had sped up so fast that events slicked right past her, with her own part in them a thing of startling instinct and speed. She saw clear enough as Lonnie dropped the pitchfork through the loft door right above her, sending it stabbing down at her head just as the old sow charged in with the piglets, and by God didn’t that pig have blood in her eye. Slaver flew as she jabbed the air with her sharp tushes, rampaging right through her own squalling babies to squeeze into the aisle with Mollie as her target.
Shouting—pitchfork—squealing—charging—
Mollie snatched the pitchfork out of the air a hair’s breadth from her own head and whipped it at the enraged sow.
“Mollie Prater!” Lonnie gasped as the tines jabbed the ground directly before the infuriated pig; the reverberating handle whacked the sow hard on the nose, blocking her path. Stunned, the sow stopped short as Ferd ducked through the pig and boy-size door cut into the side of the barn, clambering barefoot over the pen slats to the main barn; she gave the world a sullen look and backed up until she reached open space again. Ferd took in the scene with a puzzled look on his rounded boy’s face, and Lonnie, crouched over the loft door, seemed to have lost most of his words, for all he could do was say, “Mollie Prater!” once more.
Mollie looked at her hands—her impossibly fast, incredibly coordinated, startlingly strong hands—and said the only thing she could. “ ‘Tain’t like I could throw it at her. She’s still got those babies to suck.”
* * *
Ethan Bentley stood in the open air of the train caboose platform, watching the twisting rails recede behind the train to be swallowed up by equally twisty hills. He considered it a wonder that the crews had even carved out a place to lay track, with so little room between these unending ridges for anything but deep, narrow gorges and watercourses. No wonder they chose to follow the curve of the hill itself, somewhere between top and bottom—until it reached those places where the hills crammed together and there was nowhere to go but over.
The hills themselves were thickly covered with spring-green trees, poplars and oak and evergreen hemlock—except where the bones of the mountains jutted out, rough granite with mica chips that sparkled in the bright sunshine. A view so different from the streets of New York City, it was a wonder Ethan’s eyes could take it in at all.
You have an assignment, the Council had told him—good news and bad. Good, because it meant he would finally fulfil his destiny, taking up the job for which he’d been trained instead of hanging around the dockyards of the city to keep track of the murky creatures who congregated there. Bad, because it meant leaving the city haunts he knew so well and plunging into this deep mountain world of which he knew nothing, and into which he could hardly hope to blend. And bad, because it meant a Slayer had died.
Assignment didn’t always mean the death of a Slayer; sometimes it meant the death of a Watcher—which was far more preferable. Watchers could be replaced. A Slayer with experience could not. As often as not the new Slayer hadn’t been identified or trained before the calling. In this case she lived in an area so remote that Ethan would be hard put to find her at all in the crumpled, winding hollers of Pike County, Kentucky; he’d certainly have no opportunity to study the situation, to introduce himself to the new Slayer, or to ease into an explanation of her calling. There would be no crowds into which he could blend, not Ethan Bentley from New York City. Already he was used to the wary glances, the quick assessment, the challenge of the slightly edged question, “You’re not from around here, are you?”
No, these people weren’t used to outsiders. The rails and ties unwinding behind him made fresh track, a train route less than a year old and laid in place to haul the precious bituminous coal of southeastern Kentucky. It was 1886, and the world had come to Pike County.
The world, and Ethan Bentley.
* * *
Mollie churned milk to butter, sitting on the steps of the cabin and listening to Lonnie talk of coal towns, and how joining up with one seemed the certain sure way for a fellow to put a mark on the world. Why putting a mark on the world had to be important, she didn’t know; she’d never wanted or expected anything more from her life than seemed likely to come her way—a good husband in Harly, a family to raise, the chance to look down the holler and take in the beauty of it, green and ripe and full of life. Or in winter, with the frost sparking hard off the trees and the day’s sun come to melt it away, bringing enough warmth that most days were just as easy outdoors as in and with only a handful of snows each year.
“I could work my way up to a boss spot,” Lonnie was saying, though her daddy just grunted a response, and not any kind of happy-sounding grunt, either. Lonnie must have taken a good hint to change the subject, but she wished, listening, that he hadn’t thought to tell about the barn that morning. Or that he hadn’t stretched the tale so tall, for surely what she heard wasn’t really the way it had happened. She’d been lucky, that’s all—not so fast as he described it, nor so calm-headed and deliberate. Not so oddly—
Cra-ack!
Mollie looked at the broken butter churn handle in dismay. It had been new-made.
But the jagged ends of the ash wood handle were good and broke. Some hidden flaw in the grain, no doubt. She sighed, set it aside, and examined the gash it had made on her palm, blotting the blood on her apron corner so she could hunt for splinters, ignoring the funny feeling that crept along her spine, the one that said the handle had been perfectly fine, inside and out.
Her mommy came onto the porch, wiping her hands on her own apron after she set down a basket of laundry. “Take these out for hangin’,” she told Mollie, and then tsked loudly over the broken churn handle. “What’s happened here?”
“Must’ve been crooket inside,” Mollie said, picking out a last splinter and scowling at her hand.
“Pour you a little turpentine over that,” Lila Prater said, tilting over Mollie’s shoulder to have a good look. “Wouldn’t want it to come up bad, not with the wedding so close.”
Mollie nodded. “Maybe Lonnie’ll bind that handle back together long enough to finish this batch.”
“I suspect so,” Lila said, looking up the long lane leading from the cart road by the creek that ran down the center of the holler. “Here’s Adalee, Mollie. She’ll keep you company.”
Mollie raised her head to discover her best girlfriend coming up the road, heavy with the burden of a sack and the baby within her besides. Mollie waved a hand in greeting and gathered up the laundry basket to meet Adalee by the clothesline. “Aren’t you looking fine,” she said, admiring Adalee’s plumping belly.
“Won’t be me everyone’s looking at come next Saturday,” Adalee said, grinning a sly grin. She held the sack out. “I brung you something. For your wedding chest.”
Mollie took the sack, untying it to discover a set of pretty white bedsheets, th
e linen fine woven and the top edge finished with Adalee’s lacy tatting. She gasped with delight, and barely stopped herself from pulling the top sheet free so she could see it all at once. “No,” she said, “I’ll keep it specially clean until the night of the wedding.”
“Won’t Harly like you on these sheets,” Adalee said, conspiracy in her tone. “Him and his fine long legs and good broad shoulders.” “Adalee!” Mollie said, trying for a scandalized tone and hitting only a giggle. “You’ve been looking at my Harly!”
“I look where I please,” Adalee said airily, taking the sack from Mollie to close it up tight again. “There’s herbs in there, too, so those sheets’ll be pretty-scented when you first use them.”
Mollie gave herself a rare moment of anticipation, of herself and Harly in their own little cabin. Harly who loved her, who held her hand as though it were a thing made of china instead of work-calloused toughness. Harly with his shy grin, and who made up for the lack of a certain intuitive spark with his persistent determination. Harly, who knew what he wanted—and that want was Mollie.
Then she turned to the laundry, heaving the first of her father’s water-heavy shirts over the fraying line. “Wisht I thought laundry would feel less of a chore in my own household—but I’m looking forward to it anyway.”
Adelee grinned; Mollie heard it in her voice as she settled onto an old stump, awkward with the new shape of her body. “It’ll get just as old,” she said, but then she swapped subjects altogether, becoming more somber. “Mollie, you hear of the christening at the head of Dry Creek Holler?”
Mollie glanced over her shoulder to see the worried wrinkle that drew Adalee’s fine brows together. They were much alike, she and Adelee—honey brown hair with summer sunshine streaks and amber brown eyes, both petite of figure and feature. Mollie had better teeth; Adalee had a straighter nose, and they’d both spent much time facing opposite corners in church Bible teachings when they were younger—though the somber Preacher Peavey hadn’t ever convinced them that giggling was a sin.
He’d have liked the look on Adalee’s face now. “It was for one of the west edge Meades,” Adalee said. “You know, that woman what keeps losing her babies before they’re born? This time she had herself a live one, a real pretty little girl. Way I heard it, you never saw a man so proud as hers.”
“Must’ve been a right nice christening, then,” Mollie observed, twitching the wrinkle out of one of Lila’s aprons and moving on to hang Lonnie’s britches and frowning her puzzlement at Adalee’s somber expression.
“That’s what makes it so sad,” Adalee said. “So purely awful.” She took a deep breath. “This . . . thing done come down from the hill, squallin’ something fierce, and it stirred them folks up like a pot full of trouble. And it kilt the Meade man, and a Peavey from down near Poor Bottom.”
“It killed them?” Mollie’s hands, full of clothespins and wet cloth, dropped to waist level, and she twisted to look at her friend. “What do you mean, thing? Some nasty spring bear, or a wolf?”
“I surely don’t. I mean it was a man-beast, a thing. I hear its eyes were tore out and weeping vile slime and it still come at them folks like it could see every bit of ’em.”
“I never! You’re fibbing me!” Mollie turned back to the laundry line with an indignant jut of jaw.
“Cross my heart, I ain’t,” Adalee said, and the earnest note of her voice made Mollie hesitate as she jammed a second pin down on a kitchen rag. “I’m telling it just like I heard it. It ought to have been the biggest, happiest day of those folks’ lives, and it done turned into the worst. They’re laying out the bodies even now, and you can go see for yourself if you don’t believe me.”
“Seein’ dead people don’t prove a thing,” Mollie said, having regained some of her composure.
“It’ll prove something when you see what’s left of ’em,” Adalee said promptly. “It surely will.”
Mollie pulled another shirt from the basket and snapped it briskly to straighten the sleeves, pretending to be unaffected by Adalee’s words . . . but somewhere along the way, Mollie’s head and her heart had turned back to the fading edges of dawn dreams that had been all screams and roaring and fear.
* * *
The scent of sorrow on the wind is as sweet as the blood that will follow. Trailing the scent down from the ridge to the crinkle of a holler, the spectral entity soaks up communal grief such as only a funeral brings. He feels the demon’s hunger as well, melded as they are—but the demon has learned quickly. From sorrow or joy, from whatever intensity of emotion the humans have emitted to betray themselves, the specter wants more. The demon might feed on his tidbits of flesh, but the specter feeds on that which he failed to allow himself in life.
So the blind demon chases the gathering, knocking over the corpse in its coffin with barely a notice. The demon harries young and old, guided by the specter until that which was once a man has supped his fill on the torment of others.
At that the demon kills swiftly and skillfully, two instead of one after his unusually long pursuit. He unfolds his gruesomely long sixth finger to prepare his feast for eating.
* * *
Mollie didn’t tell the tale to Harly, and she didn’t tell of her uneasy nights. Just nerves, he’d say to that, and most likely be right. As for Adalee . . . “You got to make allowances for a woman with child,” he’d said more than once, especially after learning how Adalee had sent her smitten husband walking down the holler after dark, hunting out a neighbor with a bit of sweet pawpaw butter left over from the previous fall.
“Just got to chink the logs,” Harly said now, his voice full of pride and pulling Mollie back from her thoughts to the here of things on side of the hill and the new home perched there. Her new home. Logs all of the same size neatly dovetailed and debarked, a couple shuttered windows in front to take in the rising sun as it peeked over the top of the opposing ridge. Mollie could well imagine flowers lining the front of the house, some pansies and maybe some hollyhocks at the corners.
“It’s beautiful,” she said. “It’s just purely beautiful. Can’t hardly believe you done this all by yourself.”
“Not all of it, you know that,” Harly said, but he ducked his head at her pleasure and reached out to take her hand. They stood there that way a moment, long enough for Mollie to realize he’d taken the hand she’d cut only the day before, and she felt no pain of it. To remember her astonishment that morning when she’d opened her eyes and discovered not a gash, but healing pink skin. Pink, with a last splinter working its way out.
She’d always been quicker’n most anyone to heal up a cut. But this—
This went beyond quick. Way beyond.
Thinking of it, she almost missed the way Harly turned away from both her and the cabin, even while holding to her hand. “What is it?” she asked him.
“I been thinking,” he said, and still wouldn’t look at her. “So many men’re headed toward Black Creek. Spend the week there, come back for the weekend . . . it’s a new kind of living, Mollie. They got a company store with special prices for the men, and the kinda goods might elsewise take us years to collect. Things that could make life easier for you, like one of those special clothes washing tubs . . . glass for the windows . . .”
Mollie stood stunned. “Why, Harly,” she said, and lost her words. Finally she managed to blurt, “is that what you want? To leave this place? To spend your time in the dark underground of those mines?”
Harly’s fingers fumbled on her smaller hand; he said nothing.
Mollie felt her throat grow tight. She hadn’t thought of him as a man with strong intent, with a drive for other than what he had. She’d thought of him as easily content—maybe too easily content, but there were so many worse things a man could be. . . . “Harly, should we have our babies, you’ll miss all their growing up. You’ll miss me—”
His hand tightened hard enough to choke off her words; he turned and looked at her for the first time, his dark hazel eyes e
arnest. “It’s you I’m thinking of, Mollie Prater. What with your own brother talking about heading for the mines an’ all . . . I wasn’t sure it would suit you to be up here in this small place of ours, watching him bring in fine things for his own.”
“Nonsense,” Mollie said. “He don’t even have his own yet, and when he does they’re welcome to what he can give him. This is what we talked about together. This kind of living, like what was good enough for my folks and yours. Are you changed on that?”
Harly’s face was all relief. “No, ma’am, I ain’t. I don’t care for the idea of being down in those mines, and I don’t care for the thought of leavin’ you here alone of the week. But it seemed right to offer it to you.”
She shook her head. “I reckon to make a marriage right, we ought to live it each in the same place.”
He grinned, tugging her onward. “I’m for that,” he said. “Just as everyday as it gets, you and me. Say, come around back, I’ll show you what I got started of the garden.”
Mollie looked at her hand, suddenly just as alarmed as she’d been moments ago. Pink, healing flesh; not even prodding it brought out pain. This sudden healing fit was as far from everyday as Harly would ever imagine.
She curled her fingers around her palm and followed Harly out to the garden.
* * *
Pikeville wanted Ethan no more than Ethan wanted Pikeville. “Don’t swagger,” his superiors had warned him. “You won’t be on the docks now.”
Ethan had never thought to miss the stink of fish and humanity. Or the occasional reek of demon, providing him with such ample training and research grounds—A Complete Guidebook to the Dock and Pier Demons of Northeastern Harbors, his pet project while waiting for assignment. “Don’t swagger,” they’d said all right. “And don’t neglect your studies in favor of compiling a guidebook for which only you see the need.”