by Erica Waters
“Jesse’s in jail,” I say in a rush. “He’s being charged with your murder. It’s bad enough you’re dead, but now Jesse . . .” I shake my head. “Haven’t you hurt him enough?”
“I hurt him?” Jim says, disbelieving. “I never did anything to that boy. But he . . . Well, now, that’s another story.”
A wave of nausea smashes into me. “What did he do?”
Jim cocks his head at me, looking for all the world like a rangy bird. “It’ll be better for all of you if he goes to prison. One less thing for your mama to worry about. He’s only gonna bring her pain, but at least if he’s in jail, he can do it on someone else’s dime.”
“But he didn’t kill you,” I snarl. “He’s innocent.”
“Ain’t nobody innocent, Shady, least of all your brother. Sometimes the judgment that falls on us ain’t for the crime we did, but it’s owed us all the same.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
Jim rubs the back of his head. “I didn’t deserve that particular hammer that bashed in my brains, but I ducked plenty of ones before it. And there was gonna be another hammer, sometime, someday, so why not this one?” He smiles, showing a flash of tobacco-stained teeth.
“Just tell me who did it. Stop talking riddles and tell me who killed you.” He’d never protect Jesse like this and wouldn’t care about my feelings if Jesse were the murderer. There’s only one person he’d protect so fiercely. Kenneth.
Jim’s voice draws my attention back to him. “I got myself killed, girl, like we all do. Everybody wants to be a victim, but even if we’re victims, we’re the executioners, too. I’ve been putting the knots in my own hanging rope for a long, long while.”
That sounds like something someone else said to me recently—but who?
“What did you do?” I ask, my curiosity pushing the thought from my mind.
“You want me to confess my sins?” he says wryly. “Fine. I lied to you at the hospital that night. Your mama and I were together before your daddy died.”
“You what?” I should have known, but I guess I didn’t want to. Jesse was right, and Mama and Jim both lied to me. I shake my head. “I don’t know what Mama ever saw in you.”
“She saw somebody who’d pay mind to her instead of that goddamned fiddle in your hands.” He nods at Cedar. “You remember that, boy, if you’re starting up with this one here. She’s her daddy all the way through.”
Jim laughs bitterly. “Now put that fiddle down and go home, and leave me to my afterlife.”
“Not until you tell me,” I say, gritting my teeth. “I need to know who killed you.” My arms are aching from holding up the fiddle, and the music’s starting to sound shaky and shrill. Sweat beads at my temples. I don’t know how much longer I can keep this up. But Cedar’s thigh moves to touch my knee, making me feel a little more anchored to this realm.
Jim squats down until he’s nose to nose with me, his eyes boring into mine. I resist the impulse to cringe away.
“I’m dead, and it’s Jesse’s fault, and there ain’t nothing you can do about that. I don’t know where in God’s name you got that magic fiddle, but you better put it back where you found it, and leave dead men be.”
“Are you really going to do this to Daddy’s—to your best friend’s—family?” Another question creeps into my head like a dark fog, and before I can think, it’s out of my mouth. “Or—or were you glad Daddy died? So you could have Mama?” I’m as surprised by the question as Jim is, but I keep my gaze fixed on him, an anger that doesn’t even feel like mine radiating from me.
Jim looks rattled for the first time. “Glad he died? Me?” He leaps to his feet, looming over us, seeming bigger and darker than he ever was in life. “You want to talk about William dying, you go see your brother. Now drop that goddamned fiddle and leave me be,” he roars, lunging for my instrument.
Cedar throws himself in front of me, knocking the bow from my hand and bringing “Omie Wise” to a sudden end, cracking our connection right down the middle. Jim reels back, but Cedar kneels between us, his arms spread out to protect me.
Jim looks at me as if from the other side of an abyss, all impotent rage. And then he’s gone and there’s just the moonlight pouring through the window.
“Why’d you do that?” I yell.
“He was coming after you—I thought . . . I just acted. I’m sorry. Let’s get out of here, please,” Cedar says, his eyes wide with fear.
I start to stand, but then a cold, strong hand grips my wrist, and an eerily familiar voice rasps, “Pick up your fiddle. Play me a tune.” When I don’t move, the hand tightens its grip, each finger pressing a bruise into my skin. “Now.”
I turn and see darkness in the shape of a man, a festering blackness without a face. This is what crawled out of the crack I made when my music stopped. A monster climbing out of a rent between worlds. I think it was his anger I felt before, his voice whispering that question about Jim being glad of Daddy’s death. But now the monster isn’t just in my head.
I open my mouth to scream, but no sound comes out.
“Shady,” Cedar says, backing away toward the door. “Shady, let’s go. Come on, let’s go.” But I can’t. I know what comes next. I know it with the dreadful certainty that usually only comes in dreams. In nightmares.
I didn’t know he could find me here, in the waking world.
It’s the shadow man who haunts my sleeping hours. He visited me in the hospital—the night Jesse beat up Kenneth. He stopped up my throat with his darkness. And it was his darkness I fell into after raising Sarah’s mom.
But this is different. Somehow, Daddy’s fiddle has given him shape, form, power. Instead of being paralyzed, my body is in his control, my limbs moving against my own will. I keep telling myself to move, to fight, to run, but nothing happens.
My throat closes up as I retrieve my fiddle from the floor. Will the music make him stronger? It must, or else why would he make me play? I need to stop him, need to get back control of my limbs and my fiddle. But no matter how hard I try to rip myself from his control, I can’t break free. I am twelve years old again, a phantom hand at my throat, my body turned traitor against me. Only this time it’s not a dream.
If I could scream, I could banish him, send him hurtling back into the darkness he oozed out of. But my voice is locked up tight, so this fiddle’s the only voice I have, and now it’s his weapon instead of mine. Tears burn at the corner of my eyes, the only outward sign of my struggle against the shadow man.
Cedar’s still beside me, pulling at my arm, but he seems as distant as if he’s in another house, on another block. He yells, but I can’t hear him. It’s just me and my fiddle facing down the darkness. And I’m not ready. I’m not prepared.
“Play,” the shadow man says. “Play.”
As if my hands aren’t mine anymore, I dive into “The Twa Sisters,” the song that started this whole business. The song that drew me into the woods and made me find this fiddle. Anguish and sorrow and regret flow from my strings.
I thought nothing could be worse than lying on my back in bed, helpless against the hideous shadows hovering overhead, but this is worse. To see the music that belonged to Daddy put in service of this monster, to see Daddy’s fiddle twisted to its evil purpose.
I glare at the shadow man, my nostrils flaring, my jaw clenched, but he only laughs. And then he swirls around me, making the whole world go dark.
My mind fills with fear, until every terror I’ve ever had is pressed inside, one against and atop the other, and my breath comes short, and sweat coats every inch of me, even though I’m freezing. But I can’t stop playing. Now “Anna Lee” pours from the fiddle, beautiful and haunting.
While I make music, the shadow man makes nightmares. The worst dreams in my memory, the ones that left me gasping, cold and shivering in my bed, play over and over in my mind. The wasps chasing me down the stairs, their stingers like fire. The dog leaping at my face. The old man in the jogging suit choking me a
cross a fence on a dusty road. The little dead girl in my ceiling gazing down at me with a face I can’t see, her white dress billowing around her legs. Being sucked into the Atlantic undertow and drowned. And, of course, the alligators.
Then my nightmares shift, mixing horribly with my daytime terrors: Daddy’s coffin. Jesse’s rages. Mama’s blank, tired face. Sarah turning her back on me forever. The dreams and the fears merge, forming nightmares my subconscious could never have dreamed up. Horrible, grotesque images flit behind my eyes, fast and merciless, seemingly endless.
Fear fills my whole being, until there’s nothing left.
And the shadow man grows and grows, spreading through the room, gaining substance and power from my fear. Wings brush the walls and flutter fitfully in my hair. Stingers scrape against my skin, leaving burning trails. I should pass out from pure terror and exhaustion; I should fall into darkness and disappear, but I can’t. The music has me rooted to the spot.
I don’t know how many songs I’ve played, how long this has gone on.
I’m surrounded by my own terrors, my nightmares made flesh. But I’m already awake, so there’s no hope of rescue. He will keep me here until I die. That’s what he wants from me—I see that now. All along, he’s been trying to kill me. He couldn’t kill me in my dreams, so he used the fiddle to lure me into danger. He’s greedy for my death, but I don’t know why.
When a banjo starts playing, I think it’s another nightmare come to get me, a dream I must have forgotten about in the crowd of lurking monsters. At first it’s faint as my breath, like it’s coming from another room in the house. But then it gets louder, more insistent, demanding to be heard. Soon, the banjo’s tempo matches mine, but where my music feels forced, drawn out of me like blood from a vein, this music is alive in the way only bluegrass can be, the notes bright as sunshine.
Sarah.
As the music fills the room, overpowering my fiddle, slices of moonlight break through the darkness, like sunlight between the slats of a blind. I catch glimpses of Sarah, sitting cross-legged across from me with the head of the banjo resting in her lap, hair flopping over her eyes, bare fingers dancing over the strings. My heart gives a rebellious thump against the shadow man’s prison walls.
As if she hears it, Sarah looks up and locks eyes with me. Her eyes seem black and glittering and . . . powerful. Normally, Sarah breaks eye contact after a few seconds, but now she’s staring into me, like she’s searching inside my body for the real Shady, shackled up somewhere inside this automaton playing a fiddle.
Her eyes are worried but filled with something I haven’t seen there before. Excitement? Triumph? I don’t know. They shine out at me, and all I can think is that I have no idea who she is, or what she might become. But I’m certain the darkness is no match for her.
And then she starts singing. Sarah Woolf is singing. She doesn’t have an amazing voice, but it’s hers and she’s using it. I feel the darkness breaking up around me, like a tree’s being pulled up by its roots in a storm, and the darkness is breaking away into clumps, crumbling into nothing.
A guitar joins her, and then two other voices—Cedar and Orlando. I didn’t even realize I was playing it, but they’re all singing “Shady Grove.” As the words wrap around me, I feel my daddy’s presence here, too, all the love he had for me pressed into these syllables and notes.
The shadow man snarls and clutches at me, but his fingers are only vapor when they touch my skin, his strength is almost gone. He lets out a frustrated roar and falls back, shrinking to his usual shape. Moonlight floods the room again.
Finally, unbelievably, my fingers stop moving, and the fiddle falls into my lap, mute for the first time in what feels like a million years. It must have been hours, if Cedar had time to get Sarah and Orlando here.
The shadow man swirls away, like water down a drain, back into the hole my music made. And then there’s Sarah, her banjo, her voice, her eyes. The whole world—all the worlds—narrow to a girl-shaped form made of bluegrass.
She finishes the song with a flourish and holds my gaze. I can’t look away, not because I’m trapped again, but because my heart won’t let me. I feel like I’ve been born again, like I finally know what my Baptist relatives are always going on about. I’ve been saved by a girl with a banjo, baptized in her song.
And then she’s holding me, so close I can feel her heartbeat against my own skin. She has her arms wrapped around me like she just rescued me from the edge of a cliff, and she’s afraid if she lets go I’ll plunge down into the abyss, which maybe isn’t that far from the truth. So I cling to her, too, burying my face in her neck.
I’m shaking, my whole body racked with chills. Sarah chafes my arms, as if to warm me with her own energy. “It’s all right,” she murmurs into my hair. “It’s all right.”
Finally, she pulls back and looks at me, studies my face, my shoulders, my arms. She gasps when she turns over my left hand. My fingertips are dripping blood. The shadow man’s hold made me rip right through my calluses. “Oh, Shady,” she whispers.
“I’ll go get my truck,” Cedar says, running from the room.
Orlando kneels beside me, fear and worry in his eyes. “Let’s get you home,” he says, and his voice is the gentle one I know, not the hard, brittle one he’s been using all week.
When Cedar gets back, he and Sarah lift me to my feet. Cedar pulls me to his side and helps me down the stairs and out of the house, taking half my weight. He settles me into the cab and goes around to his side, talking to Orlando.
I turn to Sarah, who lingers beside my open door. “I thought . . . I thought you’d never talk to me again.”
“I would have come if you’d asked,” Sarah says gently. “I’ll always come.” She looks like she’s daring anyone to say otherwise. She means it.
Sarah holds my gaze, but I can’t tell what she’s feeling. Her eyes search mine. Finally, she says, “I forgive you. For what happened at my house. And . . .” She lowers her voice so only I can hear. “And for Cedar. He’s—he’s a really good guy.”
I stare at her. It sounds like she’s giving me her blessing to be with Cedar. Does she think I want her to hand me over to him? I need to make her see how much I still feel for her, that even though I like Cedar, she’s the one I want. The one I’ve always wanted.
I probably shouldn’t be thinking about my love life after what just happened—actually, no, I should. The shadow man feeds on my grief and my fear, but he can’t touch what I feel for Sarah. She just proved that to all of us. “About Cedar,” I say, but she cuts me off.
“Not tonight. You’ve been through enough. We’ll talk tomorrow, okay?” She turns away and calls for Orlando to follow her. Frustration and disappointment fill my chest as I watch her walk away. I almost call after her, but what’s the point?
After how she fought for me against the shadow man, how she clung to me once he was gone—I thought this was going to be another chance for her and me, but just like that, the brief opening is gone, vanished. My mind spins and sputters like tires stuck in mud.
Cedar climbs in next to me and starts to drive. He’s so still, tense and silent. After everything I put him through tonight, at least he didn’t overhear the exchange Sarah and I just had. At least I don’t think he did. I can’t think too hard about it. Exhaustion hits, and all I can do is gaze out the window at the construction site. It looks forlorn, half formed. Not a place anyone would want to die or haunt. I almost feel bad for whoever moves in here. Their brand-new house will already be haunted.
“Bye, Jim,” I whisper as we pull away and speed into the humid Florida night.
Cedar doesn’t say anything about Jim or the shadow man. He grips the steering wheel even harder than he did on the ride over, darting worried glances at me every few minutes the entire ride home.
When we near my home, I don’t ask him to drop me at the end of the road like the last two times he’s driven me; I don’t think he would anyway. But when we pull up to the trailer, I winc
e as the headlights hit the siding, more out of habit than any real embarrassment. Going up against an evil darkness that wants to trap you inside every nightmare you’ve ever had has a way of putting things in perspective.
Cedar’s eyes glance over the trailer, but he doesn’t look surprised or dismayed or resigned. It’s like he doesn’t see it. He jumps out of the truck and comes around to my side, helping me down from the cab. I’m weak and aching and hollow-feeling. When he pulls me into a tight hug, I rest into his chest, laying my head against his neck and breathing in the salt-sweat smell of him. I wish he could come inside and spend the night. I’m afraid to go to sleep.
But he helps me to the trailer steps, kisses my forehead, and starts toward his truck.
“Thank you,” I say, and he turns back around. “Thank you for helping me—for coming with me and for calling for Sarah and Orlando. For keeping me safe. If y’all hadn’t come . . .” The thought is too horrible to finish.
Cedar looks troubled and exhausted in the glare from the front porch light, but he gives me a small smile. “You’re welcome, Shady. I’m just glad you’re all right.”
“What did you see, while it was happening, while he was . . . hurting me?” I ask.
Cedar shakes his head. “Not much—mostly shadows moving around. But you were frozen and you looked so scared. And I could feel him—his darkness, his evil.” Cedar shivers. “I can’t imagine what you went through.” He takes a few steps toward me and cups my cheek. “Get some rest,” he says. He kisses me lightly on the lips and then watches me thoughtfully as I unlock the door and disappear inside.
Mama has been waiting up for me, so I don’t have a chance to hide the state I’m in. She takes one look at me and sends me to bed, saying we’ll deal with it tomorrow. The sight of her face sends a stab of anger to my stomach. After everything else Jim said, their affair should hardly matter, but what if it matters more than all the rest? It seems to be the main cause of the rift between Jim and Jesse, the thing that led to their troubled relationship. I still don’t think Jesse killed Jim, but all that anger he held against Jim is what led us here. It’s why Jesse was the primary suspect, why he’s sitting in jail right now. I can’t help but wonder how different things would be if the affair had never happened at all.